The Love of the Truth Abhors the 10 Great Heresies

Today, we're going to be covering the second part of a sermon that I gave two weeks ago. You might ask why this topic struck me when I was going over a study on biblical topics. It's important to realize the love of the truth is so essential. It is something that sometimes we don't talk about that much. We take it for granted. But before God, He has called us. He has revealed these wonderful truths. But it's not only accepting and developing these truths, it's also knowing the lies that have substituted these truths. And to me, that's quite personal. You might never have had an experience like that.

Now, some maybe who have come from divorced parents when you're a child, you go through a trauma. Something that you confided kind of broke apart. Well, in my case, it was as a young child living in Cuba. Basically, the lifestyle wasn't that different from the U.S. It was a prosperous nation. It had the highest standard of living in Latin America at that time. And so, you're living a normal life. And then they had this revolution. They overthrew the president and Fidel Castro took over.

And it was just a matter of weeks and things changed dramatically. And he kept saying that he was going to establish democratic structures, that democracy was still going to be established. And guess what? It was a lie. And about six months, once he had consolidated the power, took over the army, took over the press, took over basically all the economic structures, then he said, no, I am a communist and we are establishing communist rule.

And of course, everybody was shocked. But that was my first experience of suffering what is a big lie. Because the whole country was deceived. And up to this day, there are people that are trying to flee because of the consequences of a broken bankrupt system, but with this tight control over the people. And so, of course, I don't think anybody likes to be lied to. But especially when you've gone through a trauma in life where you see the consequences of what is called the big lie.

And of course, you can go back in time, maybe to World War II, and the big lie that Adolf Hitler told the people, that many believed. They thought he was a type of a messiah. He was going to bring peace to the world. They believed until he started invading and eventually wanted to conquer the entire world.

Along with Japan, other allies, Italy, they had planned to dominate the entire world. And so that was a big lie. And historians estimate around 50 million people perished during that time. Civilians and soldiers. And so we live in the midst of many lies as well. And God has opened our eyes to his wonderful truths in the Bible. And it's important never to take it for granted because many people eventually walk away from the truth that has been revealed. And just as somebody can open a person's mind and reveal these truths, if a person turns away from it and doesn't want to follow it, that truth will be eventually just dissipated and it will disappear in the person's mind.

I'll never forget as a young student at Ambassador College up here in Pasadena that we had a minister that was one of the respected. He had a top position. And years later, he left the church. And there was another person that met him at a convention. He was working now for a company. And they had these salesmen all get together at a convention. And they saw him and they couldn't believe it. The fellow had a big cigar in his mouth and could just be as worldly in this conversation as ever. He lost the truth. He went back, as the Bible says, that the dog goes back to its vomit and the sow goes back into its muddy and trash-filled place.

It can happen. So we should never take it for granted that because we knew the truth and because we're following the truth, there's no guarantee that we will stay in the truth. So let's look, first of all, at some scriptures. We're going to go into, I mentioned, the first great heresy. And this happened in the second century after the time of Christ where the Sabbath was changed over to Sunday.

And I covered a lot of that material. I want to just cover it briefly before going to the second great heresy, according to the Bible, because these are part of God's commandments that have been twisted. They have been changed by man. People have been deceived. And they have not opened their eyes to the truth. And God has been merciful with us and has opened our eyes to it. Why is it so important to follow God's truths?

It is because it deals with God's will. It's such an important concept of following God's will. Will in the dictionary is defined as carrying out a desire or a command. Oh, I'm going to follow my dad's will. He wants me to do certain things to carry out, or my mother's will, or my boss's will.

And in the Bible, we have God's will, which shows his desires and his commands that if we're following him, he expects us to carry out. For instance, when we made our vow at baptism, it was to put his will first in our lives. And that is based on obedience. Nobody forced us. This isn't some communist system that takes you and just forces you. And with pistols there on your head, if you don't follow them, you can die.

No, this isn't the way God operates. He wants us to do it willingly. To come to the conviction on our own, and then to follow it. Notice the first and greatest commandment of the ten is mentioned in Matthew 22, verse 36. Matthew 22, verse 36.

Jesus Christ was answering a question about which was the greatest of the commandments.

Matthew 22, verse 36. Okay, here it is. One of them, a lawyer, asked him, Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment, based on putting God's will first in a person's life. It means to do it with all your heart, all your strength, and all your dedication. That is a quote from Deuteronomy 6.5. So Christ was quoting the Bible when he said this in Deuteronomy 6.5. I don't have to turn there. And then let's go to John chapter 4 to see that Christ said he was following the will of the Father. He gave us an example. He was doing God's will. In John chapter 4, verse 34, Jesus said to them, My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to finish his work. That was his desire. That was his conviction to follow the will of him who sent him and finish his work. That summarizes Jesus Christ's life. Notice in chapter 5 and verse 30, Jesus said, I can of myself do nothing as I hear. I judge, and my judgment is righteous, because I do not seek my own will, but the will of the Father who sent me. Another scripture, the following chapter, chapter 6, verse 38, it says, For I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. One last scripture in John 26, verse 44. Let's skip that one and go to Matthew 7, verse 21. Jesus said, Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied, talking about preaching in your name, cast out demons in your name, and done many wonders in your name. And then I will declare to them, I never knew you, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness, you who disrespect my Father's commandments. That's what he is saying. Doing the will of the Father. In chapter 12 of Matthew, verse 50, again, good verses to define what carrying out the will of God means. Matthew 12, verse 50. It says, For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother. So those that are doing the will of God, the Father, and at that time, his own family, Mother and others, they weren't following him. They weren't his disciples. And so it makes perfect sense that following God's will means loving the truth and abhorring or detesting the lies, the false teachings that we have around us.

In 1 John, chapter 3, verse 22, 1 John, chapter 3, verse 22, this is a key verse to know what the will of the Father is. 1 John 3, chapter 22 says, And whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do those things that are pleasing in his sight. Do those things that are according to his will. It's a desire of God that we do these things. And part of it has to do with keeping his commandments. And so the first great heresy that we face is when you eliminate the fourth commandment and say, nothing's happened here. We're still good in God's eyes. We're still following God's will. But you're keeping the first day of the week instead of the seventh day. And that is the great heresy that appeared in the second century. We know from the Book of Acts and throughout the Bible that the apostles kept the Sabbath day. There is actually no debate found in the New Testament about people starting to change from the Sabbath to Sunday. There's no controversy involved there. Can you imagine if all of a sudden they started keeping the first day of the week? What would the Jews have said? These are all heretics! They're breaking the commandments of God. They never accused the church of not keeping the Sabbath day or of changing it. Now, we do have that controversy about circumcision and the laws of purification, whether the Gentiles needed to submit themselves to circumcision and then under the purification laws. And that was clear that they were not required to do so. And so they allowed the Gentiles to come in, but the Sabbath day is still the fourth commandment for the Jews as well as the Gentiles. There wasn't a division or else you would have had the entire New Testament about this controversy. Now you have to change God's holy day of the Sabbath to the first day of the week. And I think anybody that looks at it objectively and just reads the Scriptures would know that the Sabbath is kept throughout the Old Testament. And the New Testament. And there's no church history that the apostles ever changed that or kept Sunday. Let's go to a Scripture in Hebrews 4. This is just one of many Scriptures that mentions about the Sabbath day remaining as the day of rest. In Hebrews 4, verses 9-10, it says here, There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. Now the word rest here has to do with Sabbath, the term Sabaton in the Greek. The Bible in basic English translates it as such. So that there is still a Sabbath keeping, the term Sabatismos is used here, for the people of God. For the man who comes into his rest has had rest from his works as God did from his. Saying here to the Christians at that time, a letter written to them, and saying there is still a Sabbath keeping for the people of God. David Stern, in his Jewish New Testament commentary, brings out, Christians often assume that the New Testament does not require God's people to observe the Sabbath, and go on to claim that Sunday has replaced Saturday as the Church's day of worship. But this passage, and in particular verse 9, shows that the Sabbath observance is expected of believers. And as verse 10 explains, Sabbath keeping expected of God's people consists in resting from one's own works. As God did from his, it consists in trusting and being faithful to God. It's following God's will.

Now, from the historical documents, as far as the historians have been able to assess, the Sabbath was changed to Sunday in Rome around 134 AD. That was a key date because that's the second Jewish rebellion against the Romans, the Bar-Kopta rebellion. And basically, Rome said, we are done with the Jews. And basically, conquered that area again and expelled all the Jews, and changed Jerusalem to what would become a Roman city. And so, at Rome, there was this pressure to separate from the Jewish Christian communities that were still around that entire Mediterranean area. And it was the historian Samuel Bakayoki that documented this change very carefully. He wrote a book called From Sabbath to Sunday.

And he says in this book, two contemporary historians named Sosamen around 440 AD, and Socrates, these are two historians, church historians at that time, for 39 AD, confirmed the innocent, the first, Decreto, who was the Pope in Rome around that time of 440 AD. Socrates writes here in the fifth century, quote, that although almost all churches throughout the world celebrate the sacred mysteries on the Sabbath of every week, it means church services, yet the Christians of Alexandria and at Rome, on account of some ancient tradition, have ceased to do this. So even in the fifth century, there was still this focus that Rome had changed to Sunday worship, also Alexandria, which was very influenced by Rome, but that the rest of the churches still kept the Sabbath, and many also kept Sunday more as a tradition. But the Sabbath was still the Sabbath. The other historian, Sosamyn, describes basically the same thing. He lived at the same time as Socrates, and he says, while the people of Constantinople, that's the area of Byzantium, which is Turkey today, while the people of Constantinople and almost everywhere assembled together on the Sabbath, as well as on the first day of the week, such a custom is never observed at Rome or at Alexandria. They gave up the Sabbath. Now it was completely Sunday. Now, it took several centuries for the whole transition to be changed. Bacchiolchi says, in the light of this cumulative evidence, it appears that the Church of Rome played a key role in early Christianity in emptying the Sabbath of its theological significance and in urging the abandonment of its observance. And the Catholic Church is very open that says, on the Pope's authority, we changed the Sabbath day to Sunday. There are four key dates I wanted to share with you in the 300s regarding the Sabbath, because this is when basically the Sabbath was discarded, and after the 300s or the 4th century, basically the Sunday worship was imposed upon the people of the Roman Empire. The first key date is AD 321. That's when the Emperor Constantine declared Sunday, the day of the sun, as the official day of rest in the Roman Empire. So now you have Constantine that says, with the Catholic Church, we're going to keep Sunday, and this is something that is extended through the entirety of the Roman Empire. So he made this decree in 321 AD. He called it resting on the venerable day of the sun. And this wasn't a suggestion. Remember, the Roman Empire was not a democracy. It was a dictatorship, and it was the Emperor who set the rules up. They did have a bit of a Senate, but they were there for consultation. Basically, when the Roman Empire with the first Caesar Augustus, he took control, and the following emperors just gained more and more power. So to us, it's important because you see that it wasn't based on biblical teaching at all. It was an imposition by the Emperor upon the Roman Empire, the citizens there. The second one, four years later, Constantine is the one that invites the Catholic bishops. He didn't call Jewish Christian bishops at that time, or Sabbath-keeping bishops. You can tell by the list in the Council of Nicaea that there isn't one Jewish Christian name, which was very different than the Greek and Latin names that are there. In 325, Constantine presides over the First Council of Nicaea, and here they adopt Easter Sunday instead of the Christian Passover. They change the calendar to accommodate a date for the Easter Sunday that has nothing to do with the biblical calibrations that we see, but is no longer on the first month, on the 14th day. They change that.

Sunday is accepted as a Catholic day of rest throughout the Empire. The gig is up. As far as Christians keeping the Sabbath day, you better flee because your possessions are going to be taken over. You're going to be hounded. You are now the heretic for keeping the Sabbath day. And Sunday keepers, they are the good citizens. They are the ones that have the backing of the Catholic Church. The third key date in this fourth century is 364 AD. The Council of Laodicea in 364 AD. And here, again, Catholic bishops give out a decree. And this is rule number 29 that becomes official for the Catholic Church. It says, Christians must not Judaize by resting on the Sabbath. So I guess Christ would have been in deep trouble because he rested on the Sabbath. But they call it Judaize now. By resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day. So if you're a Sabbath keeper in the Roman Empire, they obligated you to either work or they knew you were a heretic. You were not keeping Sunday. And it says, rather honoring the Lord's day. And if they can, resting then as Christians. You see, the Sunday has never been a strict ban on resting. And that has been the case of the Catholic Church. They suggest you do it. You rest. But you know, Catholics, they go to ballgames. They do all kinds of things and many of them go to work.

It never had the sanctity of the Sabbath day.

And it goes on to say, but if any shall be found to be Judaizers, which means keepers of the Sabbath, let them be anathema from Christ. You're going to be branded as a heretic. You're going to be expelled from the churches. And that's the way tradition changed. So that when we were born, guess what? People are keeping Sunday instead of the Sabbath day. They're not keeping the fourth commandment. You remember that moment in your life when you realized you were keeping the wrong day. And that you'd been lied to. It's a deceit. The fourth commandment has not changed. It was written with the very finger of God. And as I mentioned before in Isaiah 66, the last verses there of Isaiah, it says that when Christ comes back, people will come to worship Him from Sabbath to Sabbath. Not from Sunday to Sunday. Sunday is the heresy, not the Sabbath day.

And the fourth key date in that fourth century, which are the 300s, in 381 AD. That is a date that a person should have memorized and branded because it was such a key date. Constantine established it. Then the keeping of Sunday in the Council of Nicaea, first great Catholic Council. They upheld it and changed also from Passover to Easter Sunday. And then they had this decree because there were still Sabbath-keeping Christians in 364, where they had to have a ban against Sabbath keepers in the Empire. But 381 is when an emperor that is not known that well, Theodosius, Emperor Theodosius, he was the one that said, no more debate, the Catholic Church is right, and the whole Empire is going to be converted to Catholicism. And there are not going to be any pagans anymore, no more Sabbath keepers. And he shut the door to any discussion because there was still a bit of discussion and debate. But here, 381, he declared the Catholic Church as the official and only church recognized by the Roman Empire. He proclaims Catholicism as the official church of the Roman Empire, no more debates over doctrine, the disobedient will be persecuted upon pain of death. The Inquisition truly begins then. And the Sabbath keepers have to hide or flee from the Empire. So it wasn't that they won the debate, it was that debate was shut down and persecution began. Unfortunately, throughout church history, many times conversions were not done voluntarily, but at the point of a spear or a sword, the crusaders and all of these crusades and all of these persecutions took place. So yes, they won, but it doesn't mean they were right, or else they could have reasoned and argued about the point instead of using war to impose their will. And this takes us to the second great heresy. Certainly, by all accounts, the Sabbath is the first great and greatest heresy of all. And we do consider that eventually, when the end time really comes and surges up, and Satan is going to be cast down, and there's going to be that three and a half year period, that Sunday will be imposed, and it will be a type of a mark of the beast. Now, we don't know exactly all that the mark of the beast will entail, but from the Bible it does tell us that that leader will force the changing of times, and that has to do with establishing his own calendar instead, and this will be at the point of a sword. So Sabbath keepers can, again, just like in the fourth century, be forced into persecution. And how much are you going to love the truth? Or will you just go along with the crowd? It can happen again. We have to be ready for that. Now, the second great heresy was not about the Sabbath day, but it was about the Holy Days, because that is in a category apart. They could have changed the Sabbath, but kept the biblical Holy Days, but they didn't. They changed both. And so the second great heresy are the Christian holidays. The term holiday, if you look it up in the dictionary, is just a watered-down version of the term Holy Days. And the holiday is just what the Catholic Church established to substitute God's Holy Days. As I mentioned in the announcements, we still keep God's Holy Days. Now, we're considered heretics for that, because we should be keeping Christmas and Easter and Halloween and all of these other feasts that came to substitute God's Holy Days. And so that is also a motive for persecution in the future.

Let's look in the Bible and see whether the Christians in the New Testament were keeping these Holy Days. In 1 Corinthians chapter 5, 1 Corinthians chapter 5, and verse 6, Paul is writing to the Corinthian brethren, and he says, Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. So he's telling them the Passover's coming, the Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread, prepare yourselves spiritually for it. And he says, let us keep the feast. There was no Holy Days apart from these in the Bible at the time. There wasn't such a thing as Easter Sunday. That was established by the church at Rome to change and get away from the biblical Holy Days. Notice in Acts 18, in all his travels throughout the Mediterranean area, in Acts 18, verse 21, He says, after he returns to Antioch, he says, but he took leave of them, saying, I must by all means keep this coming feast in Jerusalem. But I will return again to you, God willing. And he sailed from Ephesus. And when he had landed at Caesarea and gone up and greeted the church, he went down to Antioch. So he wanted to be at that feast probably since it was a time of travel and from the book of Acts, it was basically the time of Pentecost, that he wanted to be there with a brethren. So there wasn't any other type of feasts being kept at that time. Notice chapter 20 of the book of Acts, verse 6. Luke is relating. He says, but we sailed away from Philippi after the days of unleavened bread, and in five days joined them at Troas, where we stayed seven days. So he's mentioning the days of unleavened bread. They had just mentioned the Passover before and the Feast of Trumpets. I mentioned Corinthians with Passover days of unleavened bread are repeated here. And also in verse 16, it says, For Paul had decided to sail past Ephesus so that he would not have to spend time in Asia, which is Turkey, for he was hurrying to be at Jerusalem, if possible, on the day of Pentecost. Now, would Luke have been writing this if this had been all abolished and no holy days were being kept? Because he wrote this decades afterwards. And they were still keeping Pentecost. They were keeping the Passover, keeping unleavened bread, keeping atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles.

So we see the New Testament Church was keeping these holy days as well as the Sabbath. Notice a document that's very important. In the second century, Polycrates was one of the bishops in that area of Turkey. He was a bishop at Ephesus. And the church historian, Eusebius, wrote around 326 AD. He says about this period back in the 150s, 160s, He says, So he says this controversy between Rome and the area of Asia Minor, which is today Turkey, they had a dispute because the churches in Asia Minor have been keeping the Passover, have been keeping the days of unleavened bread. They were still keeping the holy days where Rome was not doing so. So what happened? He says, See, they didn't change with the times. They loved the truth of God. They knew which laws had been commanded by God. One of those had to do with the holy days of following God's will.

Then he said, Polycrates himself in a letter which he addressed to Victor, which was the bishop of Rome and the church of Rome, set forth in the following words the tradition which had come down to him. Now we have a church document, historically accurate, that mentions that all of these churches that the apostle John and the apostle Paul had established were keeping, at that time, 160 to 170 AD, they were keeping the holy days. But the church in Rome was not. He goes, this is what Polycrates wrote to Victor, the Catholic bishop of Rome. He says, We're still keeping the Passover on the 14th. He says, Among these are Philip, one of the twelve apostles, who fell asleep in Hierapolis. And moreover, John, who was both a witness and a teacher, who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord, he fell asleep at Ephesus. And Polycarp in Smyrna, close to Ephesus, who was a bishop and martyr. All these observed the 14th day of the Passover, according to the Gospel, deviating in no respect but following the rule of faith.

And then he says, So here we have eight generations of people from the time of John the apostle. He had educated and trained these men. Now, Polycrates is this eighth generation.

And my relatives always observed the day when the people put away the leaven. Well, that's the day of the Passover, when we basically put away because the first day of unleavened bread is going to come that evening. And I don't know about you, but I know we're running around, taking the leaven away on the 14th because it is the 15th where the first day of unleavened bread begins. He says, He says, Therefore, brethren, who have lived sixty-five years in the Lord, and have met with the brethren throughout the world, and have gone through every holy scripture, am not affrighted or frightened by the terrifying words that came from the Bishop of Rome, threatening them with being disfellowshipped because they kept Passover. For those greater than I have said, we ought to obey God rather than man. That's always been the answer. When people say, why do you do this? Why don't you follow these church authorities? Why don't you follow the tradition? Because we have to obey God instead of man. Now, if man is writing, and it's in the scriptures, and it is correct, and it is the truth, we will keep it. We are open to examination. We are just committed to following faithfully what God's word says. I could mention the bishops who were present, whom I summoned at your desire, whose names should I write them would constitute a great multitude. So it's not just a couple of churches that are keeping their Passover, a great multitude. And they, beholding my liftfulness, gave their consent to the letter, putting their names down, knowing that I did not bear my gray hairs in vain, but have always governed my life by the Lord Jesus. And then, what did Pope Victor do? When he received the letter, he excommunicated. He disfellowshipped all the churches in Asia, because they dare to defy the bishop of Rome. Pope Victor tried to cut off from the common unity, the poliquities, and others for taking this stance, but later reversed his decision after Irenaeus and others rebuked Victor. So there was this pushback at that time. He was not the pope yet. So they said, this is wrong, what you have done, and he had to backtrack on that. So it is clear, brethren, that we are keeping the right feast days, as evidenced by this document. I always like the quote by a historian in Britain, very famous. His name is Henry Chadwick. He wrote the book, The Early Church. I don't know if anybody has that little book, The Early Church. I have a little paperback, and it is one of the finest books on church history. Henry Chadwick was a famous Oxford, Cambridge teacher. And this is what he says about that dispute between the bishop in Rome and the bishop in Ephesus, the poliquities. He says, it is clear there can be little doubt that the quarto deciments, which means the keepers of the fourteenth day of the first month for Passover, that the quarto deciments were right in thinking that they had preserved the most ancient and apostolic custom. So here, Henry Chadwick, a Protestant, but he admits these people were doing the right thing. They were keeping the right days at that time.

And he has this sarcastic comment. He says, they had become heretics simply by being behind the times. See, well, he admitted it wasn't because they were wrong biblically. It wasn't because they were following the apostolic tradition, but all of these things that the Catholic Church was changing in Rome, they refused to do so, and they became heretics. So that's a powerful statement that we are following the right teachings of God. So, brethren, this is the message about loving the truth, but also abhorring the great heresies among us. So, God willing, in this series, I'll be covering eight more of these great heresies. Have a wonderful Sabbath.