The 7 Churches of Revelation, Part 2

This morning I am going to pick up where I left off last week in a talk, the sermon I gave on the subject of the Church in the book of Revelation, and finish up. I want to tie up a few loose ends, and then I have a PowerPoint presentation that deals with the continuation of the story of the Church. It fits in with this weekend with Pentecost as well that I think you will find to be helpful. You have not seen this before. I gave this material. The PowerPoint was part of my class on early Church history that I taught this week at the Ambassador Bible Center down in Cincinnati. As I had mentioned last week, I had also about a 2.5 hour session with a group of 15 pastors who have been going through three 10-day training sessions since January at the home office. They just completed their last and third and last training session that is part of a pastoral training program that is full-blown now within Church Ministerial Services. I had a session on Tuesday morning with them where we were going through Revelation 2 and 3 and talking about the teaching from the Bible regarding the Church, the story of the Church, Church eras and everything. We had a very interesting discussion. As I mentioned, talking to a group of ministers is a challenge for me. It is easier to talk to a group of students. The ministers were setting in on the class that I gave. They had about 9 hours with me on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I'm sure they were tired of listening to me by the time they got done with all of that. A small symposium with a group of your peers, regardless of how many years they've been in the ministry, is something that keeps you on your toes.

Those hands start going up real quick. They want to know, where are you going with this? What are you saying? What is this? What do you mean here? Particularly on this subject. As I found, with everyone that I talked to, member minister alike, everybody has an opinion about the Church teaching on Church eras, Revelation 2 and 3, the messages to the churches.

It's an interesting subject in the Church these days. It is a subject that we do need to flesh out more and more within the Church. Because the material that we have on it, at least in the official statements of the Church, has been quite sparse.

I showed the ministers, and I didn't show this with you last time, but let me just pull out some of this. This will all be familiar. In years past, going back to the worldwide Church of God, our teaching on Revelation 2 and 3 and the subject of the Church history was pretty well defined by quite a bit of literature that we had on the subject.

This particular booklet called, The True History of the True Church, for those of you that have been around the Church for a long time, you will remember this booklet. This was written in 1959 by Herman L. Hay, a legendary name in the Church, evangelist, kind of the Church historian, one of the original students in Ambassador College in 1948. He died here about three years ago, I believe. Dr. Hay wrote this book called, A True History of the True Church. It was kind of the Church's answer at that time to a larger book that had been written by an elder of the Church of God Seventh Day, a man by the name of A. N. Duggar, who Mr. Armstrong had had contact with back in the 1930s in that era.

Mr. Duggar had written a book called, A True History of the True Church. No, he wrote, A True History of the Church of God. So then we wrote this booklet, A True History of the True Church, to counteract some of the errors that we thought were in Mr. Duggar's book and to present our understanding of the story of the Church in this particular booklet. And what was laid out in this booklet was the story of the Church down through the ages from a perspective of the historical or prophetic progression of the Church from 31 A.D.

down to the present time. And it presented the subject more or less from a perspective of the Church story in Revelation 2 and 3 as telling the story of the Church in progressive eras historically. And the Ephesians was the first apostolic era, and the Laodicean era would be the last era of the Church prior to the coming of Jesus Christ. And we also had, in our correspondence course at that time, five whole lessons, beginning with lesson 49, going through lesson 53 of what was, I think, a 58 lesson correspondence course at that time, on this whole subject.

And each course went into it in great detail from the Bible and from history and presented a great deal of material. So five whole lessons went through it at that point. That was quite a correspondence course. How many of you went through that course at that time? I don't have to raise my hand because I went through it, too. It covered everything virtually from A to Z in terms of doctrine and teaching of the Church. And much of which has, you know, been... I don't know, I'd better not say too much here, but it was...

let's just say it was a very well done and foundational course of instruction on the Bible. I can remember my mother going through that before she ever went to church. And she was probably up to lesson 24-25 before she realized at that time to call a minister because those lessons dealt with the Holy Days and particularly the Sabbath and made a direct appeal on the Sabbath.

And that was after about two years of intense study and it laid a groundwork. And then I would run into her or barge in on her on a Saturday afternoon up in one of the second floor bedrooms of our home. I'd find her up there with her Bible and a correspondence course and her notebook. And she was busily writing things out. And I remember one day kind of barging in on her as a 10-year-old would do and those, you know...

And I saw her just writing. I said, Mom, what are you doing? I looked and looked at her desk and she would, you know... And I thought, are you writing out the Bible? Because she was writing out the question and the answers from the Scripture and she filled notebook after notebook on that. And it was a very effective way of learning and it helped her to learn the truth.

But in these four to five lessons, we went through the story in a larger detail, marching through the story of church history to tell the story of the church. Now, I mentioned last week that in the early 1980s, it appears, that when a class at Ambassador College on church history was being taught, Mr. Armstrong instructed the elder, the evangelist minister at the time, I think it was Ron Kelly, who was teaching the class, to not emphasize the teaching on church errors, but to tell the story of the church and to go through the history of the church, but do not emphasize the errors so much that that subject needed to be re-studied and evaluated.

And this was in the early 1980s when Mr. Armstrong gave some instructions regarding that class. I have that in writing and some of the men who were even on the class this week, they remember that being taught that way. And so, at least in the 1982, 83, 84, when the class was being taught at Ambassador College, it was not emphasizing the errors so much. And by errors, I mean that as we would go through history and look and try to find the church, especially after we leave the Bible, the book of Acts, and we read from various histories about various groups of people called either the Nazarenes or Paulicians or Waldensians or Ebeanites.

These are various groups that you will encounter down through the Dark Ages, down through the Middle Ages, down through Elizabethan England and all. You will find various groups who are at various times keeping doctrines that are very similar to what we believe. They were challenging the church at that time with the Catholic Church. You have to understand that after you leave the first and second century period, the church that you read about, when you pick up a book on church history, you are reading about essentially what became the Catholic Church.

And if you want to try to find anything about what we would call the true church identified by the title of this booklet, you are going to have to look quite deeper into books that are perhaps not always mainstream or much, much older on the story. And you will find you will have to look for groups that are basically labeled in history heretical groups and groups that were very small and were persecuted.

There is a story, you know, one of the crusades of the Middle Ages was actually a crusade sent up into the Alps of Europe to exterminate Christian groups who had deviated from the Orthodox Catholic teaching. A lot of people don't realize that. When you think of crusades, you think of them going off to the Holy Land to liberate that from the Muslims and Islam at that time. Well, there were several crusades and there was one that was sent even against a group of people called the Albigensians, who, when you study into the teachings of these groups, you will find that in some cases, the Sabbath is connected with them. There is some evidence that some of them were keeping the Sabbath in the Holy Days.

They challenged the teaching about infant baptism. They would not look at the Pope as the infallible vicar of Christ. They did not worship Mary. And various other teachings and doctrines that obviously you begin to see that these people had something that's very similar to us. And in some cases, these groups even had some very vigorous works of preaching the gospel. And we've looked at these groups and we can see a thread running from the first century all the way down to our modern time.

When you look at these groups, you can find evidence that say maybe they were the Church of God, or maybe among them were members that we would say were true members of the true Church. There are several things that we have to admit. I came to several years ago that the histories that we find from these peoples, you have to remember, were written by those who won.

And when history is written by the winners, the winners tell it from their point of view. And the writings and even the original writings of the losers are burned. They were burned in that period of time. They were thrown out. And what was written about them was from the perspective of the winners. And you will find, especially from the period of the Dark Ages, the early years, the Middle Ages, they were labeled quite harshly as heretics. The Catholic Church, when they would exterminate these groups, not only killing them, but they would want to burn and exterminate and wipe out any record of what they taught, because the Church looked upon that as heretical.

And they didn't want those teachings floating out anywhere else and creating more problems. They'd have to come back in with another crusade and kill another group of people. And so they thought that those writings sent people to hell, and so they burned them. They exterminate them. And what they wrote about those groups, we have to understand, is somewhat biased. And so when you find histories, even old histories, written about these groups, you have to have sift and sort to try to get the correct picture.

We should understand this very clearly from what has happened in our own history, because 12, 13 years ago when the writings of Mr. Armstrong were overturned within the Church, the worldwide Church of God, those writings were not only labeled as heretical, but in many cases they were burned, or destroyed, and looked upon as heretical.

And we see the same pattern in our own time, because the inheritors, or those who, if you will, won, didn't want any record of that being kept, and they didn't want it being promulgated. And other groups have taken them to court on that to raise those writings from the ruins, to borrow a phrase. But that doesn't deny the fact that the writings were looked at as heretical.

I find it somewhat hypocritical that the inheritors of the worldwide legacy... Well, better not say that. I don't want to go too far in some of my personal comments on that. But they made money off of it eventually, so that speaks for itself, I suppose. So, looking at this whole subject, as we look at it today, and as we have written on it, let me just draw your attention to what we have written on it in our booklet, The Book of Revelation Unveiled.

If you guys have a copy of this and any of our booklets that are this big, get them and hold on to them, because we're going to have to downsize these booklets. A postage increase took place a few weeks ago, and mailing something like this size anymore went up about 80%. So, Scott Ashley is going to be busy over the next year or more, reformatting this booklet and any of our other booklets this size down to a smaller booklet this size, because this didn't go up quite as much, correct? Scott? Anything bigger than a letter. Anything bigger than a letter.

Well, anyway, our booklets are going to have to be downsized to this, so it's not as expensive, and we're not going to be in the business of printing booklets this size any longer. So, he's going to have to redo these Middle Eastern booklets and others just because of costs. The postage costs, we're going to get hit with probably $600,000 in increase in postal expenses just this year alone because of what they did.

So, when we put another two cents on our stamps right now to finish up the old stamps we've got, that may not seem quite as bad, but the church is going to be hit several hundred thousand dollars in our postage. That's the cost of doing business. Anyway, in this booklet we wrote about the church, and the one statement that we have, we took from a book entitled, The Revelation of Jesus Christ by John Walford, who is a theologian, writes a great deal on prophecy.

And let me just read one paragraph about this particular point of the church. It says, he wrote, Many expositors believe that in addition to the obvious implication of these messages, the seven churches represent the chronological development of church history viewed spiritually. They note that Ephesus seems to be characteristic of the apostolic period in general, and that the progression of evil climaxing in Laodicea seems to indicate the final state of apostasy of the church. The order of the messages to the churches seems to be divinely selected to give prophetically the main movement of church history. We looked at that, and we put that into the booklet when we were going over the draft of the booklet several years ago, and we thought that was a good summation of the subject that was general enough in a booklet like this to go out to the general public.

Keep in mind that we were not writing five lessons in a booklet for the church. We were writing a booklet for the general public, and we didn't need to go into all the detail on this. I think we need to go further with that, and I think we do need to have some material that takes the subject of church history and what Revelation 2 and 3 are saying, and expand that today, and just resources are the limiting factor in that time and the attention to that. But after discussing it in this class this week, thinking about it and some of the other discussions in time, perhaps we will be able to focus and put this as a priority, and expand this somewhat so that we have a more definitive teaching and statement on the subject of the church.

And that is clear as to what the United Church of God teaches on this subject of church eras, church history, the prophetic teaching of the church from the book of Revelation and all. Let me just say that some eyebrows were no doubt raised last week with some of my comments, I am not against and nor is the church against or teaching against church eras, and the teaching of what we have from Revelation 2 and 3 from the first century all the way down to this time.

I think that there is a flow, that is a prophetic flow in those two chapters, as well as other segments of Revelation that take us through the story of the church, and there is lesson for it. And if the details and the criterion of the messages and what is mentioned of those individual churches, there are several ways to look at that.

First of all, we do know, and I have always understood and taught, that we should understand Revelation 2 and 3 as written to seven churches that did historically exist in Asia Minor in the first century. There were seven literal churches in seven cities from Ephesus to Laodicea. They were on a mail route, so the letter began first at Ephesus and ended up at Laodicea. Those seven churches were picked for a reason, a divine reason. There were many other churches of God in the whole area, and many others that could have been picked, but there were seven that were singled out.

When you look at those messages, they seem to move from a progression from very specific down to general. Let's just go ahead and open it up there to Revelation 2. Let me quickly mention this because I do want to move on to another presentation here. There are specific references and markers in the first few messages that are not found in, let's say, the last three messages. If you look at the first four messages to the church at Ephesus, in verse 6, there is a group mentioned here called the Nicolaitans whose deeds I hate Christ says. They also said that you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not and have found them liars in verse 2.

That seems to be a reference to the first period of the church, the apostolic period, where we had apostles, multiple apostles, and then others springing up upon their death, making various claims. But you have a specific reference to a group of people called the Nicolaitans and their teachings. If you go down to the message of Smyrna beginning in verse 8, then in this there is mentioned those who say they are Jews and are not, and there is also a reference to a tribulation of ten days in verse 10.

Those are specific markers. In the message to the church at Pergamos, there is a reference to the throne of Satan. And I gave a Bible study several months back on that, showing how the connection to the altar of Zeus that existed there and what that meant. But there's also a specific reference to those who hold the doctrine of Balaam in verse 14. And again, the Nicolaitans in verse 15. So again, specific markers. Down in the message to the church at Thyatira, verse 20, there is a reference to a woman named Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. All of these are specific things that either the people in that city would have known, or a very good case can be made through history of teachings and teachers that would refer and connect to these particular periods as the church moved through various phases, as the church as we can see it and discern it through that period of time.

But when you come down to chapter 3, and the beginning with the message of Sardis, and you have the message to Philadelphia and the message to Laodicea, they get more general. So the messages move from a specific to a general teaching, to the point where when you come down to the message to Laodicea, it is a very general. There are not specific markers.

Now, there are some pointed things that are said, but in terms of wrapping a personality, wrapping an organizational name on any of those, it gets rather difficult, even from a historical perspective, to do so. And the message is not any less clear to these three churches, but they are more general in terms of some of the markers and the references to situations.

It's just a trait to notice. What I have come to understand and what I tell it, I think we need to recognize, is when we look at Revelation 2 and 3, we need to understand a proper emphasis on how we treat this. I'm not so sure that today we need a whole booklet and five lessons of a study course to go through a historical prophetic study of the church through history.

We might need five lessons to just fully flesh out the message that Christ is giving to the church just in these two chapters alone, and there's enough there for us to spend a whole lifetime of mining, gleaning from the Scriptures of exactly what is the message that Christ has for the church, whether it's in the first century, the twelfth century, or the twenty-first century.

And if we take that approach of looking at what Christ is saying to the church today and what we have the advantage of understanding as we look from the twenty-first century back to the first century and understand the historical development of not only the true church, but more importantly, the false church that is identified in the book of Revelation, we have at our disposal a great deal of understanding that we should hold on to and teach and understand that lifts the whole subject beyond trying to figure out whether a group of people in Armenia in the eighth century or in the Italian Alps in the fourteenth century were the church.

My feeling is that among any of those groups that you can study in history, if we had the full knowledge, you would find members of the true church existing there. To say and to take and say a whole group of people or a whole period of time is an era or the church of a specific message here in Revelation, we just don't have enough history.

The history of this whole subject is kind of in clumps. You'll find a clump here, you'll find a clump here, you'll find a clump here, you'll find a clump there, but you will not always find all the connecting data to draw it all together.

What you call in history the missing link or evolution, whatever you want to do. You don't always find that. You can find the Sabbath in many different ways. You can find teachings of even about the Holy Days, especially when you come down to 17th, 18th century England and America. You will find Sabbath keepers and you're on ground.

You know, Jim Franks did a number of years ago a whole study when he lived up in New England of the Sabbath keeping people of the original colonists there in New England, in the area of New Jersey and Rhode Island and Massachusetts. And he fleshed, he went into the old churches and gathered out the records, the information, and made a very interesting presentation there. We can make a connection of where the church began in America in its early days. And we can see a progression from the East Coast then historically through Michigan and the Adventist movement and into Oregon and where Mr.

Armstrong came in contact with people in that period of time. We have a lot of information to kind of sort through from that period of time. You look at various markers. Again, the Sabbath is a big one. But not all Sabbath keepers necessarily would be individuals we would say would be in the church if that's all that we have about them.

It's certainly an interesting marker to begin with. But just as we see today as there are a number of Sabbath keeping groups, Seventh-day Baptist, Church of God Seventh-day Adventist, we recognize that we would not necessarily feel the affinity with them as members of the Church of God that would cause us to say they are the true Church of God. As we would make a determination, the Adventist or fine people, but in most cases the only thing we have in connection with them is the Sabbath.

They don't keep the Holy Days. They're Trinitarians. They keep Christmas. They do a lot of things doctrinally that are not ours. They're fine people, but they're kind of like Baptists that meet on Saturday in some cases. And that's it.

Because of that, we have a greater affinity than we do a Baptist that meets on Sunday. I've learned in working with the Adventists that we went from in Indianapolis, I've learned to appreciate that much of it. One of them made a comment to me a few years ago because in Indianapolis, in our building there, we met up. The Adventists meet on Saturday morning. We meet on Saturday afternoon. The number of years when we first moved there, they had a Baptist church that met there on Sunday. And three different groups using the same hall can be a challenge.

You've got to give and take. And to be honest with you, the biggest problems we had were with the Sunday group. We got along fine with the Adventist group. We worked well together. We gave and take on the various issues of space, time, and everything. But whenever there was a complaint, either against us or against the owners of the building, it came from them. The Adventist elders made a comment to me one time. He said, you know, there's a certain affinity between Sabbath keepers that's just not there with those that keep Sunday. And it was an accurate, astute observation.

There is... I mean, I have more of an affinity with an Adventist, at least on the point of the Sabbath. That's where it kind of begins and ends. Because I like to drink coffee and I like to eat meat. And they don't, you know, in most of their circles. But you just understand that as you look back through history, you look at a group here or there, we don't always have enough knowledge.

And when you say, as we would say very clearly, or try to say very dogmatically in some of these cases, an era began here and an era ended there, with a date and a group and a person. We don't always know that. We don't have, again, enough information. You can't say that one era necessarily began here or the phase of the church ended over here.

Look at our own time. We've divided our last 60 years, our last century into various eras. You have the Depression era. The Depression, World War II era. Okay? That's the 30s and into the 40s, right? We talk about the 50s. We talk about the era of the 1960s. When did the 60s begin and end? Did it begin on January 1, 1960, and end on December 31, 1969? I don't think so. I think my personal, as I look at the period of the 60s, I say that the 60s began November 21, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, and it ended with Watergate in 1974.

Because when you look at the social trends and certain things, that's how I would define it based on what I read from others who look at the same situation. It's not clear-cut. So if you say the 60s or the 70s is a modern era of time and social development, it's not defined as neatly as we would like it even in our own day. So to try to define church eras, church periods, times with the knowledge available to us, it can get rather iffy. The emphasis is on the teaching that Christ gave to the church in these chapters. And there's enough information there to put us all on the edge of our seat, trying to understand what Christ is saying to the church. Remember, Revelation begins with it is a revelation of Jesus Christ to His churches of the things that must shortly come to pass. So the message is set in the day of the Lord, the whole book of Revelation, and it begins right into the churches that it goes to the churches, seven of them, as representative churches because of their characteristics, what was in their cities, such as Pergamos or Laodicea with the lukewarm water system that they had there, that these cities and these churches were picked because they had characteristics that all the churches at all times, whether it's in the first century, the 12th century, or the 21st century, needed to understand. And we can find today people who are on fire with an Ephesian love, sitting right next to people who are as lukewarm as anything that you'd want to spit out of your mouth, as described by the Laodicean message, right in the same congregation. Always has been that way. And what we need to realize is that we can be calling ourselves Christians, or members of the church of God, and our works can be as dead as anything said about the Sardis church. The message is spiritual, and it is very real, and it is very practical to define us, to instruct us, especially in this age and in this period. And we need to move away from the mistakes we made in the past of trying to define the church by an organization, by a person so much, and an era, because that has led to judging, that has led to division, and we are reaping the fruits of that in the last 10 to 15 years. And groups that wanted to say that you're Laodicean, I'm Laodicean, we're Philadelphian, such and such as Sardis, and you're going to the lake of fire, if you're not here with us, that is unchristian, that is wrong, that is ungodly, and that divides the church of God and the body of Christ more than it does anything else. So we've got to be honest, we've got to be realistic, but we've got to put our nose back in this book, and we need to read what Christ is saying to the church. In the message to the Laodicean church, which is a message for all members of the church, He is saying to them specifically, they had a problem with listening to Christ. Sometimes, I think we have emphasized too much the lukewarm aspect of it.

The lukewarm matter was a symptom of not listening to Christ. He's standing there knocking at the door. He says, if you open, I'll come in and I'll dwell with you. And the message is to the church, from Christ, and it's every message and every bit of the teaching is to the church to wake up, to get on fire, to do the work, to do the works of righteousness, to preach the gospel, and to listen to what Christ is saying to the church.

That's the biggest challenge that you and I have every morning we get up, and every night when we go to bed. When we come to church, when we decide where we're going to go for the Feast of Tabernacles, when we decide how we're going to emphasize the Holy Days, the teachings of the church, it is what is Christ telling us? Is He living His life over within us?

Is He dwelling with us? Is He walking alongside us? Are we talking about the Scriptures? Are we speaking of the Scriptures when we rise up and when we sit down, when we come in, when we go out? So the Christ can kind of walk up beside us, as He did to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and begin to teach us and work with us by His Holy Spirit. And then we take Him into our home, because He's already in our hearts and He's in our lives, and His Spirit is motivating us and giving us the passion and a zeal for the Word of God, for the truth of God.

That's the first love. The first love builds on this excitement about God and about Christ and what He's doing and the truth and the knowledge and feeding on that and making that the emphasis in our life. That's the first love that we have to always make sure is priority, not just get back to it. We don't need to let it go. And if we recognize that we let it go, then we do need to get it back.

That's part of what it means to have that, to regain that first love, those first works, which was the message to the Church at Ephesus. There's a lifetime of teaching and instruction here that we should understand and develop in our life as we move along from the lessons of not just these seven messages to the Church, but throughout the whole book.

I'm not going to take the time. I was going to talk about chapter 12, but I'll just mention, if you want a timeline, it takes the Church from its beginning at the beginning of the Church to the end of the age. Revelation 12 is that chapter that does that. I gave a sermon some months back on this here. But it begins with the birth of Christ and the beginning of the Church in the first few verses, and there's a direct-arrow timeline in chapter 12 that goes all the way to the time of the end.

In verse 17, you find out the two specific markers that mark the Church that is persecuted by the dragon, and it is that they keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ. The Church is identified, and these people who are going to the offspring of the woman are identified as those who keep the commandments of God. They have a respect for the law of God, respect for the Old Testament, know how to handle it, how it works and fits together with the testimony of Jesus Christ. In other words, the Church of God understands how to put the Old Testament and the New Testament together for instruction in righteousness, reproof and correction, as Paul said to Timothy.

The whole Bible. And, you know, there's a lot we could talk about there, but I won't go further into that. But chapter 12 begins with that particular point right there. We are going to be keeping Pentecost here with the advent of sundown tonight. I want to go back and... I do want to go back into Church history here for a little bit. And maybe Bob Hancock can douse the lights at this point.

And I want to bring up on the screen some slides and take us through a little bit of Church history, connecting it to Pentecost, to draw us a lesson here on something that... a story from history and the Bible that some of us may not have been able to focus on in the past. I want to talk about a time when the Church first fled. Okay?

The Bible talks about the woman fleeing into the wilderness here in chapter 12 of Revelation. And there is teaching in regard to... from Christ's own words about those who are in Judea. When you see the armies surround Jerusalem... Remember in Matthew 24, he said, you see the armies surround Jerusalem, those of you that are in Judea flee to the mountains, as a place of refuge and safety from a time of great trouble.

Let's look at a period when the Church first fled. Oops!

How did that get up there?

Just kind of slipped in on my... you know how bugs can get in computers there, so... For those of you that didn't see my email, this is Ella Catherine. Meet Ella Catherine McNeely. We got her to open her eyes just for a few... a minute or two on Thursday evening, and I got this one picture snapped right there, so... She's as cute as a button, and I'm looking forward to more... much more time with her, so... Okay, we better get back to business here.

Okay. This is Jerusalem in the first century. This is a stylistic representation of the city of Jerusalem. You would have the Kidron Valley over here, and the... either... this would probably be the Tyropion Valley, and it's not exactly to scale, but right here is the Temple Complex, as it existed during this time in the city of Jerusalem in the first century.

And it was in this Temple Complex that the... and in this... which was in the city of Jerusalem... this is a scale model of the city of Jerusalem that used to be in the Holy Land Hotel in Jerusalem. They were moving it even two years ago when we were there, and it's probably in a different location by now, but it was always a tourist attraction to understand a little bit about how the city looked during that period of time.

But the... people would come to Jerusalem normally en masse three times during the year. Remember Deuteronomy 16? It talks about the three seasons when you would go to keep the feasts of God in the spring, during the Passover in 11 Bread, in the summer. The second season, which is Pentecost right now, and then the third, which is the fall. During those seasons, those three great festival pilgrimages, people would come into the city, and the population of Jerusalem would swell by many, many thousands, and you see people as pilgrims coming up to the Temple and marching up to it in their various ways here.

This is probably from a... what would be a... maybe a southward view of the time, as they would see it, but it would show people coming up to the Temple. And this is about as good a representation of what the Temple looked like at that time. And the priests out here in the outer courtyard, and the various buildings around the Temple here, this is the Temple proper, and you would go in through that door into the sanctuary, and then the Holy of Holies was back in here, but then there was the great altar out here, and you see the smoke going up from it.

This is where the focus of the whole nation was. This is where the focus of... and really, in one sense, the Church was, because keep in mind, in Acts 2, we read that they were here on the day of Pentecost in 31 A.D. and meeting in probably one of these outer buildings around the Temple. They were renting space. They had a...or at least a space marked off for their own use.

But they were in the Temple, it says, on the day of Pentecost, when the miracles of that day in the first sermon by Peter were given. And this is where they were. They identified with this building. We find references to it. Even the Apostle Paul on one occasion comes back and makes sacrifices at the Temple. Years after the events, of course, of Christ's death, that rendered everything connected with this Temple obsolete. Keep in mind that with Christ's death, this whole Temple had no meaning in terms of God and His ultimate plan.

When Christ died, the veil in the Temple that separated the Holy of Holies from the outer area right here, that veil, that curtain, was rent supernaturally in two at the moment of Christ's death. So everything connected with this, in a sense, became obsolete. But the Church was here on Pentecost, and it was still a focal point. It still had a legacy. It was part of their heritage and obviously their culture. Even though it's like today, we truly become citizens of the Kingdom of God. But we live in our various countries, and we have our histories and our culture that still define our days and our seasons so much. On 9-11, when they crashed into the Pentagon, and we heard reports that probably the White House and or the Capitol Building were going to be targets of that plane that went down in the field in Pennsylvania, we all had visceral reactions to those buildings being attacked in that way.

And had something gone into the White House, that would have really, in a sense, ripped our cultural fabric as a people to have seen that symbol of our country attacked. So I just use that as an example of how a church member of the first century still would be looking at this building in a very deep respect and awe, even though they knew that they did not have to keep sacrifices in the same way, and the rituals and the priesthood had been superseded.

That was probably a more gradual dawning of understanding through the years, and it didn't just happen overnight. But I would expect that culturally that took some time to probably sink in. The book of Hebrews wasn't written for several years later, after the events of the Pentecost during this time. So there was a connection to this building. Now, this is the inner part of the temple with the priests going in.

This is the priest who had to be a priest to go in here. The Levites and the priests mingled out in the outer court, and this is where the great altar of burnt offerings were given. Levites did not go into the building so much as the priests would go. And it was only the high priest that could go behind this veil, and he only went there once a year on the Day of Atonement. So, just to keep in mind the positioning here.

But the story that I want to tell you is a story that is connected with this inner part of the temple sanctuary. And we want to fast forward to about the year 66 AD. This is a full 35 years after the events of Acts 2 and the beginning of the church and that period of time. The Jews have begun to revolt against their Roman overlords. Judea is a province of the Roman Empire ruled by a Roman governor. Pilate was in the city of Jerusalem. Herod was over the entire region. The Jews never did like that arrangement. And during the period of the mid-60s, they began to agitate in rebellion. And they began to openly attack the Roman institutions of Jerusalem and Judea at that time.

So that the Roman Empire, the emperor, who was at the time Vespasian, had to begin to send in more troops. He had to do a troop surge, if you will, to deal with these pesky people. They were pesky then, they're pesky now over there. And so the Roman government had to come in with a troop surge. And they began to bring in more troops. And the Jews didn't back down. They continued to operate on a grill of tactics.

They were agitating for independence. There were messianic figures. There were people among the Jewish community rising up. This is not the church necessarily, but among the Jews who were trying to promote a following after themselves, to be the ones to restore the kingdom to Israel in the glory of the Davidic throne and all of the stories from a human perspective.

And whenever that is attempted, it never works unless it is according to God and His plan. But this was taking place at this time. And at the time of Pentecost, the priests were going into the temple. And there is an interesting story that I want to give you from a Jewish historian of the first century, Josephus. How many of you know who Josephus was? Go ahead, raise your hands. Real high. Okay. All right. Some of you don't know who Josephus was. This is a trick question I always ask the kids at the Ambassador Bible Center.

More hands went up this year than the last two years. The last two years, virtually nobody raised their hand. Josephus at one time... Josephus was a first century Jewish historian. He was actually, during this period of time of the rebellion, he was a Jewish general. But he was captured by the Romans. He was taken to Rome after the city of Jerusalem fell.

And he wrote a very famous history of the Jews that has come down to us to this day. And it is really one of our primary sources from this period about Jerusalem, the buildings, the temple, and everything else. I remember in 1971 when I was at the dig in Jerusalem, the professor Benjamin Mazar, the Israeli director of the dig, symbolically at least. But he was digging in Jerusalem with Josephus in one hand and a pick and ax in the other.

Because they would read Josephus to try to understand what the city was like in the first century and where to dig and what they would expect to find. So, Josephus has certain controversies about him, but he is by and large a reliable source of information of the history of Israel and the Jews of the first century and these Roman wars at this particular time. He has a section in Book 6, Chapter 3, of his history of the destruction of Jerusalem that tells a story that we should understand from this period of time at Pentecost in 66 AD.

Let me read a couple of paragraphs from Josephus about that. First of all, he begins to talk about the deceivers that arose. He said, Besides these, a few days after the feast, on the 21st day of the month, Artemisius, or I.R., a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared. He begins to describe certain natural or supernatural type phenomenon that began to appear. He said, There were signs in the sky, and he said that the events at the time and what subsequently developed, looking back on it, there is credibility that enough people saw it that these things did happen.

He said, And so there were UFO type objects of men in their armor and legions of soldiers up in the clouds that were perceived by people surrounding the various cities around Jerusalem. And then he says this, So Josephus records that on the night of Pentecost in 66 A.D., the priests were in the temple in this room, the ground began to shake, they heard a great noise like thunder or machines or what you can imagine a great noise, and then they heard as a great multitude of voice saying loudly, distinctly, let us remove hints from here.

Now, this story spread. This story got out. It wasn't kept within the group of priests. They didn't know what they were really hearing. It began to be noised about through the city, through the city streets and the markets, over, subsequently from this time forward for a period of time.

History tells us at this point that there were, and Josephus records this as well, that there were a group of people who heeded that message. The Roman troops were surging in, but they had not surrounded the city. And there is reason to believe this as being an accurate story. Someone asked me the other day, they raised their hand, how reliable is Josephus?

Well, as I said, sometimes Josephus is discredited a lot by modern historians, but as I've looked into it, to the degree that I've looked into it, I'm not convinced that their reasons for discounting Josephus are accurate. And Josephus was a first-century, first-hand primary source. He was relating what he had heard from others who had heard it. So it's a lot closer than a 20th-century historian was. And given the times, given the subsequent events, because Jerusalem was surrounded, and the city was cut off, Josephus goes on to talk about those years leading up from 67 to 70 AD.

Those were horrendous times. The people starved. Some of the mothers even ate their own children. They were horrendous stories from that period of time, before the city finally fell to the Roman soldiers in 70 AD and the temple was destroyed.

But before that happened, there were a group of people who heard this voice and they listened to it, and they fled. These people were more than about 100% convinced these were members of the Church of God, as we read about in the book of Acts. And these people got out of there. Now, where did they go? This is what happened eventually. They were spared this. These people remembered what sermons they had heard, quoting from the words of Christ from Luke 21, Matthew 24, when you see. And keep in mind these people were looking at this time and expecting Christ to return. They did look at those prophecies, and that Christ's return is going to happen in their day.

And again, I'm going to talk about this tomorrow, but Peter's sermon on the first day in Acts 2, he felt that they were living in the days of Joel. And all this was going to lead up to the return of Christ, at least in those first few years, first couple of decades, anyway. At least the first couple of decades. And they lived with that expectation. And so when they began to see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, Roman armies, they remembered what Christ said. And what did Christ say? Those who are in Judea do what? Flea to the mountains, he said. Flea to the mountains. If you had either heard your minister, who had heard Christ, say that, and you'd heard that since you were 12 years old, and now you were 66 AD, and you were with your family of 5 or 10 in Jerusalem, and you knew the Roman soldiers were surging in, and that this was going to be a problem, and you'd heard about this voice in the temple, which you still looked at, what would you do? I was going to say, you still looked at it, and there was certain respect, and it was still a part of, you know, you didn't look anyplace else, in one sense. And things were happening around you. What would you do?

What would you just say? Well, I don't know. I've got a pension due in about two years.

I've got a plot of land I've got to sell. What would you do? Well, there was a group of members who said, we've got to get out of here. We'd better listen to this. This is what has been told all these years.

And they left. Now, where did they go? Okay. Where did they flee?

They fled to a place called Pella, which is right here. They went from Jerusalem, down here, northeast, about 60 to 70 miles, across the Jordan River.

This blue line marks the Jordan River, into what is now Jordan, to the city of Pella.

This city, named Philadelphia, right here is modern-day Ammon. At that time, Ammon was called Philadelphia.

And you've got another, it's almost equidistant, about 60 miles up to Pella from Ammon.

But these members got on their camels and their donkeys and carts, whatever they could carry with them, and they walked.

And they rode, but most of them probably walked, probably a couple of days, or three at the most, maybe over to Pella.

And there they set up shop. Now, we know about them from a bit of the history that has come down to us from, not necessarily, Josephus does mention them, but one of the early church historians, Eusebius, wrote about them.

And what we do know about them, from the histories that were gathered, is rather interesting.

They were called Nazarenes in history. In the Encyclopedia Britannica, there's an article called Nazarenes.

This is the old 11th edition, not the one you may have on your shelves today or would buy today. This is a version of the Encyclopedia Britannica written a hundred years ago, which is a very good scholarly set.

They have an article called the Nazarenes, and here's what they say about them. Let me read it to you.

They were an obscure Jewish Christian sect, existing at the time of Epiphanius.

This was about 370, so this was written two or three hundred years later. But what they say about them is interesting and rather accurate.

They were a Jewish Christian sect. It's important to remember.

In the Decapolis near Pella, here it says, According to the authorities, they dated their settlement in Pella from the time of the flight of the Jewish Christians from Jerusalem immediately before the siege in 70 AD.

They are characterized as neither more nor less than Jews, pure and simple, by one writer.

But he says that they recognized the New Covenant as well as the Old.

In other words, they recognized the New Testament as well as the Old Testament.

They believed in the resurrection and in the one God and his Son Jesus Christ.

Jewish Christians. This writer cannot say whether their Christological views were identical with those of Serenthas who was a heretic and his school of which they differed at all from his own.

But Jerome was a church father from the fifth century.

Jerome says that they believed in Christ, the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary.

Do you believe in Christ, the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary?

You don't know?

You do.

You believe in Christ, the Son of God?

I'm listening to some of the things that... their beliefs.

See how many of them you identify with?

They believed in Christ, the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, who suffered under Pontius Pilate and rose again.

Another one.

He also adds that, quote, desiring to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither the one nor the other.

They desire to be both Jews and Christians, but they're neither one nor the other because the Jews don't accept them because they accept Christ.

And the Christians don't accept them by this time of this writing. You know why?

Why?

Yeah, they keep the Holy Days. They keep the Sabbath. They keep things that are Jewish.

You ever been called Jewish because you keep the Sabbath?

Holy Days?

I was 15 years old when I was first called a Jew by one of my teachers, my study hall teacher, when I gave her my pass to go to the Feast of Tabernacles.

And she said, I'd learned after that, don't put down Feast of Tabernacles on there. Just say church meeting or whatever.

But she looked at that, she says, I didn't know you were a Jew. She kind of spit that word out at me.

I said, I'm not. Just give me my pink slip back so I can go sit down. Go sit down.

Didn't want to get into a theological discussion. You know, when you're 15, you just don't do those things.

But this is what they were teaching. This is what they believed.

They were neither...they desired to be both Jews and Christians. They are neither the one nor the other.

Going on, it says, they used the Aramaic version of the Gospel according to Matthew, which we used to, which they called the Gospel to the Hebrews, because it was written to the Jews.

But while adhering as far as possible to the Mosaic economy as regarded circumcision, Sabbaths, foods, and the like, they did not refuse to recognize the apostolicity of Paul or the rights of heathen Christians.

In other words, they accepted Gentiles into the church. They looked at Paul as an authoritative apostle. These facts, taken along with the name and the geographical position of the sect, lead to the conclusion that the Nazarenes of the 4th century are, in spite of someone else's writings, to be identified with a group called the Ebionites.

So, here we have a pretty good description of what these people were like.

They were called Nazarenes because in Acts 24 verse 5, you will read where the church members were called Nazarenes, because they followed Jesus of Nazareth.

People want to call us today Armstrongites today because we follow a man.

It's kind of in the same vein of them calling the members Nazarenes then because they followed the man from Nazarene.

Just one of the most typical things that happened.

So, we know from the history that these members went there and they held on to the truth.

That's the point to remember. They got out of town, they listened to this voice, regardless, they took it as the voice of God, and they avoided that period of time they lived to tell the story, to have the story written about them.

They did not die of the destruction of Jerusalem.

And it's the subsequent story of these people that is interesting because 70 AD, 75 AD, 90 AD come and go. The century turns 100, 101, 105, 110, 120.

The kids that went with their parents, Tapella, grow up, marry, have their own kids.

30, 40, 50 years go by. There is still an attraction for Jerusalem. They established a community here. This is the modern side of Tapella today.

I took these pictures when we were there, Dr. Feasts, two years ago.

This is from a hill looking down over the ruins of what was Tapella.

Now, this is the Jordan Valley over here, and these hills in the far distance, that's Israel today, modern state of Israel, Judea in the first century.

So, this picture at least shows you a little bit of the idea that these were hills.

Not necessarily mountains, not by our definition of a mountain, and even not as big as these mountains over here back in the state of Israel.

But when the people in Pella did flee, they at least fled to the hills.

Maybe not quite the distinction of a mountain, but we can argue over the actual meaning there. But they got out, and they even went to a hilly area there in Pella.

These are some of the ruins that have been excavated there in recent years.

This is an ancient temple that stood there for a number of years.

There's just a little village there, a lot of sheep, and a little bit of a... I guess it's kind of a rest house. These are the steps of that rest house here that kind of looks out. You see the hills, and there's that temple down in here.

This is where we had church services two years ago. We're going to have church services there again this year.

We're going to go back to Pella for one day and have another service there.

But this is the group of members from the church that were keeping the feast in Jordan two years ago.

And we got out early one morning, went to Pella, had a service there. This is Corey Erickson, who was an elder in Minneapolis. He coordinates the site.

He used to manage the Ambassador Foundation's affairs in Jordan years ago and still has contacts.

And because of him, we still have these contacts. They have a feast there.

These are some of the members.

This is me giving a little bit of the same information just before the start of the service that morning. Again, you're just looking out over. You see the buildings down here and the excavated areas of the old city and what it looked like there.

It was a unique place to have a service during the Feast of Tabernacles.

I told the members then that probably we were the biggest members of the Church of God to meet in Pella since the first century.

I think I was safe with saying that. I don't know that we were the only ones since then, but we were there for a while.

Going back to the time of the first century, there's a little bit of additional information that we have about these people.

I said that the years went by. Many of them wanted to go back to Jerusalem. They wanted to go home.

The story that we have is from Edward Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Follow the Roman Empire. His 15th chapter is a very good chapter on Church history, and it tells the story of these people that went to Pella.

He tells of what happened to them through the decades. Essentially, they held on to the truth.

But there was a group of them that wanted to go back to Jerusalem because it was home.

It's not that they were completely cut off. They had news of what was going on over the years, and they knew that the temple had been destroyed.

But there was this yearning that gets into people to go back home.

And what happened from the story we know, eventually there was a split in this group.

Those that wanted to go back elected their own leader, who happened to be a Gentile.

They went back to Jerusalem.

In order to even get into the city limits of Jerusalem, and this was about the year 130-135, what had happened was, in the meantime, there was another Jewish rebellion.

The Emperor Hadrian sent in another surge of Roman troops, and in 135 he completely leveled the city of Jerusalem, and left no stone virtually on top of the other, a pile of rubble.

And he not only did that, but he left behind a cohort of Roman soldiers to guard the city so that the Jews could not even get back into the city.

He was tired of their... the Jews were kind of the Shiites of their day, to the Romans.

They were troublesome, nettlesome. They were vicious in their nationalism and in their faith, and they were willing to die for their faith.

He destroyed the city. He built a pagan temple on the site of the Temple Mount.

He dedicated it to Jupiter, called it Aelia Capitolina.

And he would not even let the Jews come back into the city limits. That's how far he went. He imposed attacks upon the Jews, even.

But these members of this group that had gone to Pella, some of them wanted to go back.

And they did go back, and they had to set up a shop outside of Jerusalem.

But because their desire was so strong to get back into the city and even go up and worship, you know, in their own way on the Mount, the site of the ancient temple, the second temple, Gibbon tells us that they compromised their belief. They renounced anything Jewish.

This is from his 15th chapter. They kept, they quit keeping the Sabbath. They quit keeping the Holy Days.

They began to adopt the Sunday and the other ideas that were already extant within what was, what you would call the church at that time in the second century. They compromised their belief in order to get back into even the city itself and near what was to them something from the past.

And the history tells us that they then, from that point on, merged into the Gentile church, lost the faith.

Those who stayed in Pella, these people called Nazareans, I'm reading from a source that actually traces them for a few hundred years into the story, they held on. They eventually migrated off into other areas, but segments of them held on to the faith once delivered.

Those that went back, went back virtually to this, nothing, and they abandoned their faith.

Now, when we look at this, let's turn over to the book of Acts here in conclusion, chapter 7.

This is Stephen's address, and begin in verse 44.

Stephen worked the whole story of Israel down to the time of the teaching of the tabernacle.

In verse 44, he said, our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness, and he's speaking to a group of Jewish leaders. As he appointed, instructing Moses to make it according to the pattern that he had seen.

Which our fathers, having received it in turn, also brought with Joshua into the land possessed by the Gentiles, whom God drove out before the face of our fathers until the days of David, found favor before God, and then asked to find a dwelling for the God of Jacob.

The Solomon built him a house, the first temple.

However, the Most High, and this is where Stephen really gave the punch line and delivered the one line that got him killed in stone.

He said, however, the Most High does not dwell in temples made with hands.

As the prophet says, Heaven is my throne, Earth is my footstool, what house will you build for me, says the Lord?

Or what is the place of my rest? Has my hand not made? All these things.

Stephen, very early, and keep in mind, this was in the decade of the 30s AD, very shortly after the beginning of the church when he gave this very insightful sermon.

And he brought it down to the message that the temple didn't matter.

God doesn't dwell in temples made with hands. He dwells in us. He dwells by the Holy Spirit in us.

And that's the message of Pentecost.

As God poured out the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, on the day of Pentecost, and the church began, the church is the temple, the spiritual body of Christ.

The temple made with hands is superseded. It doesn't matter anymore in reality.

The book of Hebrews goes through and shows all that and the why's and wherefore's of it.

A group of people a few years later wanted to go back to that temple, and to do so they had to abandon their faith.

God moves on. God had already moved beyond Jerusalem.

He'd moved beyond the temple.

And His work was beginning within the church, and the church had a work to do.

So there's a lot of lessons we can draw. I'll save some more, perhaps, for my sermon tomorrow morning on the day of Pentecost.

But I thought this would be interesting to walk us through a little bit of the time when the church first fled, and some obvious lessons to draw from that, and putting it all into perspective, and the story of the church, it all fits with the day of Pentecost.

So I'll end it right there, and we'll pick up tomorrow on the day of Pentecost.