Rediscover Your Christian Roots: Jesus to John, Part 3

There has been a request if you could receive printed copies or people want to print copies of the slides. Most of the material, I mean the pictures are in a public domain. The few that aren't I bought. So as long as you're not going to post them on the Internet, or sell them in any ways, you know, I can make a copy for you. So, yeah, we'll make a copy. After lunch, people have a copy of the press video.

Okay. After lunch, they'll have copies of the slides. You can make notes beside each slide. Okay. So. There were a couple questions here. I'm going to touch on some of them. Some of them we'll touch on later. Can you speak to the value of human life in Roman culture versus the Jewish and Christian? The Romans would say they valued human life, but in practicality they did not.

Only if it benefited them. If it benefited them, they valued human life. Their approach on abortion and the abandonment of children in Rome itself is pretty graphic. That's an important statement there. Their continual involvement in warfare. You go through the history of the Roman Empire, you almost can't find any time that they were fighting somebody. Because somebody is either invading the Empire, or they're defending their borders, or one of the Emperors decides, you know what, we need to take that country over there.

And off they go. So, their torture of people and the fact that they would throw them in jails is totally different than any Jewish or Christian viewpoint, in terms of how they treated enemies of the state. Once again, you're a farmer in the backwater of Greece or in Spain, or you have accepted, Spain accepted a lot of the Roman ways, and everybody was happy to be Roman. You wore your toga, you went to a Roman bath, it was good.

And you had a good business. Like I said, if you were a farmer in the backwater of the upper parts of Macedonia someplace, they didn't care unless you did something they didn't like, or they decided they wanted to take your country. Once you find the ugliness, really, you see it in the Colosseum. The Colosseum didn't exist in the early 1st century, it was built in the late 1st century, or the circus maximus. But there were little amphitheaters all over the Roman Empire, and that's where the gladiators would fight. That's where they would kill, publicly kill people that were enemies of the state.

Crucifixion is a horrifying thing, and the reason they crucified people publicly was, you mess with Rome, this happens to you. And there's cases where they would have mass executions by crucifixion. So Romans would say, no, we value life. If everybody had just become Roman, everybody would have a value. They didn't look on, by the way, they didn't look on, say, Arabs or people from North Africa, black people. They didn't look at them as inferior. You just became Roman.

Once you were Roman, you were Roman. It didn't matter if you were from Gaul, which is France, if you were from, it wasn't England yet, because the Anglo-Saxons hadn't gone there yet. If you were a Celtic person from England, if you were a Jew, you know, there were Jews that lived very peacefully in the Aspera, lived in these cities. If you think about 60 to 80 million people, they estimate that there was 5 to 6 million Jews. The Jews could have been as many as 1 out of 10 people in the empire, and they ran businesses.

The Jews did not live, for the most part, in the countryside. They ran businesses. They were in the cities. And so they were a very important part of the economy. And you'd do your job, we don't care what you do. So yeah, their very point would be, we value human life. For everybody else, they didn't value life at all. They didn't value life at all. And that's what the Roman army, I mentioned them, they were professional. When you went into the Roman army, you were there for 20 years. If you survived the 20 years, you received a great reward. So a young man would go in there at 18, figuring he was going to see the world, kill as many barbarians as he could, get some loot, and retire with a great pension.

But to do that, you've got to become not only a professional soldier, you have to become a hard, cold-blooded killer. You have to do that to survive, because you're in battle all the time. So the answer is, from a Jewish or Christian viewpoint, they didn't value life at all. The Roman emperor had a lot of influence on the early church, and during the time of Constantine, the Greeks have an even greater influence on the Judaic religion even before Jesus.

When the Greeks invaded or conquered the Persians, they didn't want the Jews to keep their faith. Yes. If you go back to the time of the Maccabees, the Greeks conquered Judea, and it was a battleground, because the Greeks ended up, there was a Seleucid dynasty of Greeks, and the Ptolemies, who ruled over Egypt, and they fought each other.

They marched back and forth across Judea all the time. Archaeology has all kinds of, or discovered, coins from the Greeks and the Ptolemies, because they just marched back and forth all the time. There's coins all over the place from that time period. What you read in the time of the Maccabees, who actually overthrew the Greeks, you see that the Greeks actually tried to stamp out Judaism. You also have, and we'll talk about the Septuagint a little bit, that kind of Greek influence. There is Greek influence directly on Judaism, not just through the Roman Empire, but through the fact that for many years they were under Greek rule. Although, remember, the Greeks didn't rule them as an empire, so to speak. They just tried to teach them Greek culture, and they were a battleground between these two Greek groups. There was an attempt at one point to actually destroy Judaism.

I'll deal with this one later.

The Geneva Bible. I don't know enough about the Geneva Bible to make a comment. I know some of you here speak and read German, so that's an important question. Is it German? Is it in German, or is it Swiss? Okay, that shows you what I know.

Actually, now that you say it, I know that, but I've forgotten. I have never looked at it. I can't say that. I did online once.

I don't know, so I won't go there. I won't try to make up something I don't know.

How did Christianity grow? We've looked at this environment, and we think, how in the world? Jesus says to this small group of people in front of Him, go to all the world. And then, of course, they went down and they set up a website.

How in the world do you do this? What do you do?

Go to all the world. That means they had to walk there, and they had to spread this message. You literally see some of the disciples of Jesus standing out in the street corners, right? Telling people, because there was no other way to get the message out.

How did they get it to the world? Yet it spread. And one of the reasons why, there was actually a system set up for it to spread.

And part of it was the Roman Empire itself.

Here are sections of Roman roads that still exist today. I don't think there are any roads in Ohio that will be around 2,000 years from now.

There are places all through Europe and North Africa you can walk Roman roads.

That means the Apostle Paul could go places that would have been impossible before the Roman Empire.

Now, this also did a lot of other things. Towns sprung up along these roads, and they had Roman influence.

And a lot of times there were Roman soldiers stationed, which meant that it cut down a little bit on crime.

Because you know, you're out on a road, and it's 30 miles between villages, right? Well, 30 miles for us is nothing. If you're walking and you're in really good shape, that's a day's walk. So you're walking through a desolate area or through the woods for 30 miles on a road, someone could come along and rob you, right?

So they had that problem all the time. But having the road system and Roman soldiers posted at different places, you have...

And because towns were springing up, it becomes a safer place to live.

So Paul can go places. They also produced the postal system.

And all those letters, the letter to Ephesus, Paul's letters to Corinth, and even in Corinth it mentions another letter that's not in the Scripture. God chose not to have it put in the Scripture. There's actually another letter that Paul wrote that's just not in there. He mentions it.

He was sending letters out all over the world.

Now it might take a long time to get there. Of course, this leaves another problem with the first century.

If you live in Philippi, who knows when you get the letter sent to Corinth?

Well, we call the New Testament didn't exist until probably the end of the first century.

Churches had bits and pieces of it. In fact, after the first century, churches had bits and pieces of it.

Because it wasn't even all written yet. A new letter is written and sent out. Those people get it. They copy it and send it out to their neighbors. Churches are sharing this, but it's not being codified yet.

That's why Peter talks about Paul's writings being Scripture.

Well, when Peter writes that, a lot of Paul's letters have been written.

Now it's starting to be put together as Scripture, as they realize what it is.

So that postal system made things possible. The Roman Empire, with its roads and with its towns being just springing up all over the place, makes it possible. Also, the Greek language. I mentioned this earlier.

Instead of Latin, they're all speaking Greek. And it's the...if you're an educated person, you know your language plus Greek.

And around 250 B.C., a group of Jewish scholars translated the Torah into Greek.

They eventually would actually take the rest of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, and turn it into Greek.

It's called the Septuagint, which means 70, because it said there were 70 men that worked on it, although others, you know, some of the Jewish sources say, No, there was actually a few more than 70, but it came down to the 70. So it's called the 70, because it took 70 people. And every once in a while, if you have a...especially in the King James, you know the center margin, you have a number, and you look at that number, and it'll say LXX, Roman numerals, 70. That means that that phrase comes from the Septuagint.

There are actually places in the New Testament where the Septuagint is quoted, instead of from the Aramaic or Hebrew version.

What this means, though, is real important, because what it means is that in all these synagogues all over the place, where people don't speak Aramaic, and they don't speak Hebrew, maybe the rabbi, guess what they all can speak? Greek. Guess what's there? The scrolls in Greek. So we can argue whether the Septuagint is really a good copy, but it doesn't matter in much of the Roman Empire, because that's all they have. That's all they have throughout much money of these synagogues. And every major city has a synagogue in it. I can't say that. There may be places in Spain, and there may be some places in England that there aren't. But through many of the major cities, there are synagogues. I actually think there were some in Spain at this time. And they all have a Greek version of the Bible. And if you start an Acts and you go through Acts 13 and 14 and 15, all the way up to Acts 19, talking about where Paul goes around and he's starting churches, he always goes to the synagogue first.

Why? Well, Paul isn't carrying around hundreds of pounds of scrolls with him. He's walking or riding a horse or a wagon down the roads that we just showed you. Because they're a little better shaped than. What's interesting is, Roman roads today, sometimes there's ruts in them, because the wagons would wear down ruts. So it got to the place where you got on a road, you had to put the wagons into the ruts, which made it real hard if you had to turn off the road.

You know, well, you're in a road, you can't get out of it. And actually in Pompeii, they have speed bumps in the roads in town. For the chariot riders who would go through town just running free. So they had speed bumps that keep the chariots down. They had speed limits, but they had speed bumps, big speed bumps. I didn't mean to get off there. So you have the synagogue, they have a translation of the Bible. Every place he goes, he opens the scrolls, and he teaches them about Jesus Christ.

And so every place he goes, a couple things happen. One, some Jews say, Jesus is the Christ, and they follow Paul. Most of the time, they get mad at Paul, and sometimes they beat him up. There's places in the book of Acts where the people go out, and there's two kind of people that I'll mention, is that the proselytes and the God fears, you've probably seen in the Bible, proselytes.

And you'll even see those who feared God, those are two classes of non-Jewish people who had come into Judaism. The proselytes were non-Jews who had become fully immersed in Judaism. I mean, they had taken on the customs of Judaism, they were circumcised, they had been baptized, and one of their goals was to get to the temple sometime in their lives and do a sacrifice.

Now remember, many Jews throughout the diaspora never got to Jerusalem. They never got to do a sacrifice. But to be a proselyte, you really wanted to go there and do that. The God fears weren't circumcised. They did not do a sacrifice. They basically kept the Ten Commandments and worshiped the God of the Jews. That's why you'll see in the New Testament, where at one point there's a Roman soldier that is actually a fearr of God, and he actually has given money to build a synagogue.

Peter goes to see him, and he says, Don't come into my house, you're a Jew. You can't come in here. Not because he didn't want him in there, it's because you'll get in trouble. I'm unclean. I'm a God fearr. I'm a Jew. In fact, some synagogues actually had a place for them to sit, but they couldn't sit with the Jews, because they were considered worshippers of the true God. And Peter says, No, I'm not supposed to call you unclean. I just found that out. I got a vision. I'm not supposed to accept you.

So the proselytes and God fears were very important, because you'll see where Paul teaches in a synagogue, and sometimes it will say the next Sabbath, he goes in to teach, and everybody from the whole area around comes. Well, who told them? It wasn't the Jews. It was the proselytes and the God fears. You're going to come hear this. When you do, you'll know why we gave up paganism. You need to come, come on. They would all come. And this is very important, because as Christianity grew out, it no longer was centralized in many of these other places in the Jewish culture.

It still had Old Testament teachings and was considered a sect of Judaism. A pagan is just considered another Jewish group. But in these different cities, these churches began to form, and they started to become predominantly non-Jewish. And so as the churches grow, you think, what a great time! I mean, there's 3,000 baptisms of one day in Jerusalem, right at the beginning of the Book of Acts. Have any of you here been in a baptism, or 3,000 people were baptized in one day?

Wow. I mean, what an experience, right? You don't find that, but you find this growing, and as they grow, a whole new set of problems come up. As people come in from all different backgrounds, and they're trying to figure out how to make this work. Someone asked me about Paul at times, you know, why is he so strong here on a certain issue, and then is he changing over here?

No, they're dealing with things, and sometimes they're trying to figure out a step at a time what they're supposed to do. That's why it took him, I think, a while to finally figure out. My man, circumcision of the heart, baptism, this all works. At least, I don't know if it took him that long to figure it out, but it took him that long to write it, as far as we know, before we actually have the written record of it, the written explanation.

So what happens is Paul understands. Paul speaks Greek, he speaks Aramaic, he speaks Hebrew. He is trained as a rabbi, and he comes from Tarsus where he has a classical Jewish or Greek education. He literally can be all things to all people. If you read some places he writes, you see him interacting with the Jews, it's like, wow, he argues like a rabbi. You see him in the Areopagus, he's sitting down with a bunch of pagans, and he never quotes the Bible. And yet he has people saying, we want to talk to you.

Because he knew Hebrew Scriptures, they're not going to listen to that. Not yet. So I've got to get them to start looking at themselves. He talks to them about being made in the image of God. There's a couple places he actually quotes in some of his writings some pagan Hebrew poets to make a point. They go, why does he do that? Is he saying they're equal? No. He's saying, how do I reach these people? I was in France one time, and I was speaking to a room full of French people.

And I told them, I come from a... because they're all looking at me, he's American, I'm not sure what he's going to do here. And I said, I come from a county in the state of Pennsylvania, Fayette County, named after Lafayette. And if it wasn't for Lafayette, we wouldn't have won the revolution. So I'm here to thank you for sending us Lafayette, and suddenly I was the most popular guy in the room, right?

Had nothing to do with the Bible, but at least now I was going to be able to talk. And that's what Paul's doing. He's finding those places to connect with people.

But in doing so, the church becomes very complicated. Here's four areas in which the church had to deal with problems immediately. One was Jewish sectarianism. Now we already talked a little bit about that, about circumcision. But circumcision was more than just a pharisaical problem. That was a problem. Wait a minute, wait a minute. What do you have to do to be a Christian? Don't you have to be circumcised? That would have been a common question. Except in some of the synagogues outlying where they already had a lot of Gentiles who said, I'm not being circumcised. The Greeks thought circumcision was mutilation, because the Greeks looked at the human body as being beautiful. That's why they would do these beautiful sculptures of naked men and women. That wasn't pornography. I mean, there was some pornography in Greek stuff, but a lot of that was not for that reason.

It was to show the beauty of the body. So circumcision, they considered just barbarianism to mutilate the human body. And so they're coming into the church and saying, I'm not going to be circumcised. They were really happy to find out they didn't have to be. Others were coming in and saying, whatever it takes. That's what it takes, fine.

So you have this Jewish sectarianism. Right at the beginning of the book of Acts and Acts 7, you have a controversy in the Jerusalem church. Now think about this. This is a new church that's grown into thousands of people. Many of them have seen the resurrected Jesus Christ. Surely they wouldn't have controversies.

And they have run right away. There's this big fight going on between the Hebrews and the Hellenists. That's why it's translated in the New King James. The Hebrews and the Hellenists. Well, does that mean the Jews and the Greeks? No. The Hebrews there in the context means the Jews who really had a Jewish culture. The Hellenists, and the only reason you know that is because everybody in the church at this point is either Jewish or proselytes. They haven't gone beyond Jerusalem yet. The Hellenists were Jews that had accepted a certain amount of Greek culture.

Greek was probably the primary language. And they were seen as sort of second-class Christians. Now, they're fellow Jews, and they're now fellow Christians. But you're still, you know, you don't know Hebrew. And so they weren't the same. And so they had to deal with that issue. So you have that sectarian Judaism, and the problems with the Judaism began... were problems with the church because they were Jews. Then other people started to come in, and you have the paganism of the people who were coming in.

They did not give it up easily. And if you...to understand that, read 1 Corinthians. That was a church that would not give up its paganism. And Paul...the immorality is so terrible that Paul's writing them and saying, there's certain people you need to put out of your church. There's certain things there that only make sense in terms of the paganism.

And that is...he tells them, when you eat the bread and the drink, the wine, that's the body of Jesus, then you go to a pagan temple, and you do one of their ceremonies. You can't do that because that's worshipping demons. He said, well, why would he be telling them that? Because they were doing it. They were sort of half this way and half the other way. The immorality was terrible. He asked...Paul actually has to chide some of the men in the Corinth church because they were going to prostitutes.

Now, you see, how could Christian men be going to prostitutes? You have to understand. In Corinth, for a number of reasons, one reason was a way of making money because it was a port city.

Sailors came in from all over the world, and they found out a way to make money by that. The greatest temple was to the goddess of love, Athena, and they estimate from the writings of the time there were a thousand prostitutes. So if you grew up in Corinth, going to a prostitute, male and female, was considered part of your religious duties. So someone comes into the church, and they're still thinking, it's my religious duty to go to the prostitute.

The bizarre what's going on in Corinth is just unbelievable. It's because they still are holding on to pagan ideas. First Corinthians is like an Old Testament prophet. I mean, he blasts away at those people. In fact, in 2 Corinthians, he says, I wrote that so harshly, there was a time I wish I wouldn't have said it, and then I said, no, they needed to hear it.

So pagan influences were really coming into the church. The third, protonostic. Gnosticism hadn't really formed into a system yet, but there were Gnostic ideas already out there. Remember I talked about Plato, and how Plato's philosophies would get mingled in with Gnostic ideas? Let me show you a place where this is happening. 1 John 4. 1 John 4. Let's see. Let's start in verse 2. By this you shall know that the Spirit of God, every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flashes of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.

And this is the Spirit of the Antichrist, which you've heard was coming as already in the world. The Spirit of Antichrist was there was going to be false Christianity. Well, they weren't denying that Jesus came. They were denying that Jesus came in the flesh. Remember Plato? There's spirit, and there's physical things, and the great God is involved in the physical things.

The great God created the demiurge or the craftsman who created the physical things. The great God is above all this. Well, they accepted the divinity of Jesus Christ, so He couldn't have become physical. And it's already started at the time when John writes 1 John. People were saying, well, yes, He came, but He couldn't have come in the flesh. The idea that God would come in the flesh was inconceivable. This would later get so bizarre by the middle of the second century.

There were whole stories written how, like when Jesus was... He appeared in this body, but it wasn't real. But when He was going to be crucified, He jumped into a real body and switched places, and this other poor man got crucified for Jesus. Gnosticism. I see the look from your faces. Gnosticism, at least according to some estimates, were half the Christians in Rome by 150. And just in that sense, they don't know otherwise because we don't know what went on in much of the other world except in Alexandria, so we'll have to talk about that.

So we have this protonostic thing we're getting to form. And then the fourth is Greek and Roman culture. Once again, if we go back to 1 Corinthians 1, in 1 Corinthians 1 and verse 20 on there, from there, Paul was telling the Corinthians, you have to stop thinking like Greeks. Now Corinth wasn't a Greek... well, it was a Greek place, but he wrote to other places that weren't Greek and called them Greeks. You have to stop thinking like Greeks because the Greeks had influence so much.

You have to stop thinking like Greeks because all you want is wisdom and all you want is mysteries. And all the Jews want are signs, prove it to me, do a miracle. And the Greek is saying, well, we have to sit and work out, work this out philosophically, and he's saying, I'm telling you, it's Christ. That's the great mystery and that's the wisdom. So stop thinking like Greeks. You Greek people living in Corinth. So the whole philosophy of the world was constantly coming into the church and they were battling it.

So now the church reaches the 60s AD and it's battling these internal issues. They have by this point been kicked out of the synagogues. They're no longer considered a sect of Judaism. They're out on their own. The Romans are looking at them and saying, what's this new religion? Well, think about they liked religions. They didn't like new religions in which declared kings, declared lords. The same Greek word that was used to call Caesar Lord is the same Greek word used to call Jesus Lord.

Another lord? What's that mean? A king of kings? What's that mean? And you know what Christians believed? Well, someday Christ comes back and all the kings of the world, including you Romans, become the kings of God. So you want to overthrow Rome. If you want to worship the dead Jesus, we don't care. We killed him. But wait a minute. King of kings, that's not acceptable. Besides, you people have all kinds of other weird beliefs. And some of those, and some of them wasn't what Christians believed. They were persecuted for things they actually didn't believe. And some of this started at this time period. Two great events that happened late in the first century that changed where Christianity was going.

One was the fire in Rome in 64. The slums in Rome caught fire, and Nero didn't do anything to stop it. Nero, if you want to find an evil person in history, just read the life of Nero. I'm getting tired. Almost lunchtime. Suetonius is a man who wrote the lives of the Twelve Caesars. Suetonius became a secretary at the first part of the second century of one of the Caesars.

And he found all these records, and he wrote down biographies, and he didn't paint a good picture of most of them. Nero was absolutely insane. I could spend the next 30 minutes telling you stories about Nero, that if you have children here, you would have to cover their ears. Sexually perverted. There are some interesting stories about how he tried to kill his mother, but she was so politically astute, she kept surviving.

He actually built a ship one time as a present. And of course, they rode it out into the Mediterranean with the rows of big sails. It was designed at some point out there. Some guy was supposed to hit this one part. The whole thing was designed by engineers to fall apart.

And she swam back to shore. He kept trying to kill her. She wouldn't die. He finally killed her.

The fire broke out, and people said, you know what? He didn't send the army to help us. In fact, the few places where the soldiers showed up, all they did was loot the burning buildings. I mean, they couldn't stop it. The best parts of Rome were built out of stone. The slums were all built of bad wood. There was no way to find it. But now the soldiers are looting. Ten out of fourteen of the main areas, neighborhoods, are burned. Hundreds of thousands of people are out of—they don't have any homes. Nero looks at this as a good thing because now this gives him a chance to rebuild Rome the way he wants to.

So what happened was the poor people started saying, he did this on purpose. And he realized if 100, 200,000 people revolt in Rome itself, he's in trouble. You have to send the legions against these own people. So he needs a scapegoat. And there's a group of people that believe that the earth someday is destroyed by fire. And he decides, we'll just tell everybody they did it. He knows he's making it up. I mean, there's no proof of anything.

And he starts a systematic persecution on Christians in Rome that's horrific. And being the type of man he is, he would dress them up in animal skins and then put them in among a bunch of ravenous wolves to tear them apart.

He liked to have nighttime parties filled with drunkenness and just orgies. And what he would do in order to light up the parties, he would put Christians on poles, douse them in a flammable liquid, and burn them as lights for his parties. I won't go any farther. All over the empire, really loyal Germans, or Germans, I was talking about the Germans earlier, the Romans, started saying, what we have to do is persecute them, because Nero is persecuting them.

Now other Romans said, I'm not going to persecute these people. They haven't done anything bad here. But these periodic now persecutions start to show up. They start killing Christians and trying to wipe them out. That has a dramatic effect on what happens because of the fear now people have. Christians. Remember at this point, Christians are people from all nationalities, all types of people, all groups of people throughout the empire are Christians. Everybody. There's pockets. It's mainly though an urban group. You know why? They can't get the message out to the countryside. They have to go to the town. So it's mainly an urban movement.

So even the word pagan, there are some people, no languages, think that word actually comes from the people who live in the country. Because Christians were basically at this point an urban movement. So that also means they're targeted. You know where they are and you can find them and you can't persecute them. The second thing that happens, this is 70 AD. What you have is the revolt of the Jews in... The revolt of the Jews in Judea. The Romans start taking casualties. They don't like that. They send in some legions.

And they devastate Jerusalem. And they burn it. And they destroy the temple. In fact, at Masada, the last Jewish people hold out probably Essenes in this fortress. And just before the Romans... because it's on top of a mesa...

Just before the Romans take it, they all commit suicide. Women, children, they kill each other and then the last men commit suicide. So the Romans finally take the fortress and there's hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies. That's all there. Because they said, we're not going to submit to you.

So they killed their own children, the men killed their wives, men killed each other, and the last two men slit their own throats. This did something in that it drove Christianity out of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the headquarters of Christianity. This is where the apostles would come from. Acts 15 is the first time they got everybody together. They had all these elders and all the apostles together to come up with some doctoral decisions.

In Acts 15, it was in Jerusalem. You get to the point now that except for John, probably, it's not long after 70, all the original apostles were dead. They've all been killed. They've all been martyred. Paul, of course, was killed way back in the Nero persecution. Not way back, but a few years before. And so Christianity has no moorings anymore. It's separated from where it started in Judea. It's scattered all over the place and they're living in fear. Here's the result. We'll finish this with this and then we'll go to lunch. You get to Revelation 2 and 3. The letter was written specifically. Now there may be prophetic meanings to this too, but that's not the issue.

The point is that Revelation was written to seven specific churches. They're all listed there in Revelation 2 and 3. So if this was written towards the end of the century, you have these churches that are all developing differently. Ephesus, they had withstood false teaching, but they lost what John calls... well, actually what Jesus calls because he's inspiring this. They're first love. Smyrna suffered poverty and persecution, but they remained loyal. And what's interesting, that word poverty there, literally in Greek means extreme poverty.

So to be a Christian in Smyrna meant you lived in poverty and you were persecuted. Pergamos of Thyatira suffered from heresies and immorality. The churches themselves... Now you didn't have that problem in Ephesus. You didn't have that problem in Smyrna. But you have that problem in these two churches. There's all kinds of sexual immorality going on. And there's all kinds of heresies going on. Sardis, he said, you're just a dead church. You look like you're a really strong church, but you're a dead church. Philadelphia was praised for being a faithful church. And then the last one was Laodicea. It contained a congregation that was just... He said, you just lukewarm. You're neither here nor there. If you look at these seven churches, they're in, of course, Asia Minor, which is today Turkey. In fact, the ruins... I haven't been to Ephesus, but the ruins at Ephesus... I've seen pictures, are amazing. You can still see that city... where this congregation was. And Ephesus was a big enough congregation that they rented a hall. Many churches in the first century actually were in people's houses. They're on a mail route that letters were sent on this mail route. A Roman mail route. And on that mail route, Ephesus is first and Laodicea is last, and all these ones are on the mail route. It's in the order in which they received it. Which is fascinating. They all received the same letter, a copy of it, and as you did, oh, comes the Smyrna, or number two. Oh, this is going on to the next group, too. And all these people got this. But notice, it's fragmented. It's not the church that Jesus started. It's not the church of 35 AD, or 40 AD, or 50 AD. Parts of it is, parts of it's not. There's no centralized authority to help them work out issues. There's no...they're going all over different directions. The reason this is important, because now we're going to launch into a century in which there's no more scripture being written, and the church is like an explosion that's happened. Between what happened in Rome with Nero, and between what happened in 70 AD in Jerusalem, it's like it exploded, and it's moving out like this. And the problems that would come from the second and third centuries are frightening. So I'm going to stop there. If you have any questions, you can give them to John, and then we'll pick them up afterwards, because I know everybody's getting tired. I can see it in your eyes, and besides, you're getting hungry, and besides, I'm getting tired and hungry. So we'll take a break, and then we'll have lunch.