The Paradigm Reversal - From The Beginning It Was Not So - Bill Shiley

God's tabernacle has always wanted to live within people. And so that's where the temple of God is: the people as individuals and together. And so we don't want something that distracts from that. We don't want fancy buildings. We want people to be attracted to the life that we live that shows God's presence. Come, come, come eat with us. Come to our simple places and see what real joy and peace is like.

So my message today is part two of the series I started back, I think it was back in February. From the beginning, it was not so. Just a short series I'm going to do talking about how Christianity changed through some key turning points in history. The message today is, the title of it is part two, the paradigm reversal. The first message that I had preached was establishing a paradigm. Because I realized as I was thinking about sharing this message, I realized that unless somehow we understand what the starting position was, what being a follower of Jesus, being a disciple of Christ, a child of God was in the beginning, it's not going to make sense to talk about changes that were made.

Because likely we aren't aware of the changes. And part of the purpose for this series was just in thinking about the things that we talk about a lot here, the preaching that's done here. And in my own discussions about the gospel and about church history and things like that, I've run into this question a lot that, well, shouldn't we be following people? What's the big deal about the early church? Shouldn't we be following Jesus and following the word of God instead of following men, following history? What's the big deal about the early church? I think it's important to understand how things have changed. And so that's kind of what this series is to address is why the big deal about the early church?

Why do we spend a lot of time reading and talking about what the early church taught? So just some introductory framework here to discuss the purpose of the message, particularly the talk this morning, and also how we're going to think about and approach history. For one, this series, let alone this talk this morning, is not intended to be a comprehensive history lesson. There's so much could be said, so much could be brought out, so much happened. So I want to just create some splashes of what happened in history, make you aware of some things that happened. But more of the purpose of this is to connect the dots and help us to understand what happened through the stories and the events.

Also, this is more than a history lesson, even probably more as my own personal testimony. I'm sharing some of the things that I've learned and have made a big difference to me in how I look at the Bible and Jesus' teachings after realizing some of the way things have changed over time, some of the twists and the destruction that happened to what Jesus started.

So I'm more like a tour guide saying, come and see, come look what I found.

So we want to talk more today about what happened than what happened. And that may sound like an oxymoron, but so not the events themselves so much as what they brought on. So just to help us think about more recent things in our lives where that happened. So we could look at things like COVID-19, for example. It was a lot more than just a disease that swept the globe and many people died from it. Lots of things happened because of that that were much larger than that. The fear and the paranoia and the conspiracy theories. We have things like for us as Anabaptist people having to wrestle through how are we going to relate to the government when the government makes laws, gives out orders that maybe we don't feel like are legit.

Having to rethink some of how we do church, how we do our meetings and things like that. Some of it's been good, some of it hasn't. Or some of maybe I should say some of it's just been more difficult. It's also led to a lot of online stuff. So there's a lot more. There's churches that never would have posted things on YouTube. Now are posting messages on YouTube. There's a lot more online virtual meetings, people working from home, just a lot of things. There's a lot of people probably will wear masks the rest of their life because they're afraid of diseases. So it has done a whole lot more and a lot of things have happened.

And who knows? I keep saying this to my students as we talked about this, as I taught my last year at the end of 2020, right at the beginning of all this. I wonder in 40 years what the textbooks are going to say about what all this led to and what all had happened. So just that's more what we want to focus on here is what happened, the changes that it made, the implications and the platform that it has started us out on because of the changes that have happened in time in history.

So we want to alert you to alert ourselves, alert you to the changes that have happened and spark your curiosity into learning more and understanding what has happened, what originally was and what has come out of those, how that changes your approach to following Jesus and to looking at the scriptures.

Also, part of the goal here is to ground us against false teaching when we know that from the beginning it was not so. This has made a huge difference for me on many things. I've heard many very well thought out and honorable discussions trying to persuade somebody of the true exegesis or interpretation of a passage of scripture. But it all is my interpretation versus yours and whose is the most accurate and the proper way to approach it.

When if we know that from the beginning for the first couple hundred years, the people who were following the apostles and the men who were raised and taught and trained by the apostles, nobody understood it that way. Nobody practiced that. And so therefore somewhere it was fabricated. And so therefore it's false. And that just lends an authority to our beliefs and our practice much more than just believing that my methods of interpretation, my hermeneutic is better than someone else's more accurate.

Some notes here are just about studying history in general and our attitude and our perspective on it. One thing we want to avoid is making heroes or villains out of people. So just because somebody did many good things doesn't mean everything they did was perfect. We're not going to try to make anybody into having a walking around with a halo on their head.

And also on the other end, just because somebody did many bad things or many bad things came out of their choices doesn't mean they were a demon, doesn't mean they were a villain. So we want to look at things and say, this is what happened, this is what they did, but not try to it just seems that's a tendency to either everything was great about this person or else they were just no good. We want to be careful of that. And as part of that, we want to approach these stories and the things that happened and the characters that lived it out with humility and contrition. Humility being realizing that we don't understand what it was like to face that.

This morning you guys talked about that in Sunday school about church history, how we looking back, we can see things and we aren't living in the pressure of the moment like they were. And so we want to be humble in our critique of the things that happened there. And we want to have an attitude of contrition, being quick to acknowledge weakness and fault ourselves, like Daniel did when he was by the river Kebar there and he prayed and he said, "We and our fathers have sinned." He realized that he had the same things in him that caused his fathers, their ancestors to behave in a way that brought God's judgment, that brought destruction, and that he needed to walk carefully and diligently so that he could live differently.

So humility and contrition as we look at the things that have happened. We don't want to be arrogant or think that we're better or have an attitude of scorn. So moving on from that, I want to ask a question here.

Does the fish know he is wet?

This is really an important question because that's the environment the fish has grown up in all his life is water. And so he doesn't think of it. It's normal. It's not something that he's conscious of because he knows nothing different. Now the cat knows that he's dry because he has been wet and he's sitting there looking at the fish, wishing he could grab that thing, but he doesn't want to feel that feeling on his paw that he's felt before and is disgusting.

And so in the same way, there's often things that we don't realize need to change or that there's a different way of thinking because we've never heard it. It's just the way everybody thinks. We've always been taught. We've always heard this. And so sometimes we need to be pulled out of the water or have somebody who's been outside to tell us, "Look, this is not the way it always was. There is something different." Similarly, building off of that idea is so people say, like I mentioned earlier, say, "Why the big deal about the early church? Shouldn't we just be focusing on scripture? Shouldn't we be following scripture and following Jesus, not people?" Well, the problem is none of us are viewing scripture without a bias.

We all have a bias, preconceived ideas or concepts about how something is to be understood or how things are connected. The question is, which one do we have and how accurate is it? This meme here sort of describes or depicts that to you. And don't take any of the names too seriously. I'm not meaning them as an attack on any particular speaker. I just copied this. It was sent to me. And I thought it made a good point.

When we are looking through even more modern teachers that maybe we appreciate a lot, we don't realize that we are hearing other people that they have learned from, that they were taught by. And so when we listen to some of these speakers, we are still listening to Calvin and Augustine, Augustine and others like that. So the question is, what glasses are you reading scripture through? And do the people who are influencing you directly or indirectly, are they people who bear the fruit of leaders that you should follow? So hopefully today's talk as well as some of the future ones will help us all to think more carefully and understand better how we can be equipped with glasses that help us to see and read the scriptures and follow Jesus in the way that the apostles and their predecessors did or their followers did.

So in review, in the first message I shared on establishing a paradigm, in that message we took a lot of time, basically the whole thing, and looked at all the places where Jesus says, "This is how you know who is my follower." And we looked at the judgment scenes in the New Testament and we noticed that all of them, what is the bottom line measurement is by the way a person lives if they're obedient to the simple teachings of Jesus.

Even saying that miracles and signs and wonderful preaching doesn't cut it. So building off of that, that was what was the measure of a person who was following Jesus is if they were actually living like him, if they were living in obedience to his teachings. Again, in that message we talked about that this is not a prideful thing. This is not about me being better than somebody else, me somehow working desperately to try to please a God who I can't be good enough for or I think I can't be good enough for. It's not a partial list of things that, "Well, I'm doing all these things so therefore I feel like I'm good and I'm ignoring.

Underneath, I'm full of rottenness." We're not talking about those kinds of things, but a simple obedience out of a childlike heart of love and humility that looks up to Dad and admires him and realizes, "I need to be taught. I need to be trained because I don't know how to live life. And therefore I simply and humbly follow him out of love." That kind of obedience.

So a few notes here about early Christianity. There's so much we could talk about. We can't talk about it all, but just some things to color our scenery as we approach the story for today.

Christianity was predominantly accepted by the lower classes. Jesus even talks about that, that it was a gospel to the poor. And there were some of the aristocrats and even some of the ruling families that were willing to make the sacrifice and leave their prosperity, their prestige in order to follow Jesus. But predominantly it was the lower classes of people who knew they had needs and were willing to do what it took to give up and follow Jesus, take up the cross. Also, it was a very widespread acceptance to the point that our terms pagan and heathen originally didn't have anything to do with who you worshiped. They simply referred to people who lived out in the sticks from the heath or the farmers out in the villages.

And so that infers that the rural inhabitants were the ones that were not exposed to Christianity, to the Bible and its teachings. And it was the people in the cities and the urban areas that were familiar with that. And many of them became followers of Jesus.

Also, Christianity was spoken of as a way by both the Christians and the pagans. It was understood that this wasn't some sort of theological ideas alone, but it was a way of life, a way to live, to change, to surrender to, and to follow Jesus' life and his teachings. It was a way.

Also, the church was unified at this point. You were either part of the church who honored the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of his apostles and were unified, or else you were a heretic like the Gnostics who believed some really weird stuff and didn't believe Jesus came in the flesh and believed that the natural world was evil and unredeemable. Or else you were a pagan. So you were either a Christian or a heretic or you were a heathen, a pagan.

The term Catholic was originally used to describe that. And it simply means universal. So all shared by all is one good way to do it. I think Jude uses that term, the common salvation. It'd be a similar idea to Catholic, one that's shared by all Christians. There weren't different denominations. Later on, there was the Roman Catholic Church.

That's another term where the church began to structuralize and become involved in government and built many teachings and practices that were not according to what Jesus and the apostles taught. But that's different than the term Catholic as used, for example, at the time of the church councils that we'll be looking at.

Churches also were autonomous. In other words, each individual congregation governed itself. The leaders would confer with others and get advice and things like that. But it was each church's responsibility to wrestle through how to live out Jesus' teachings and to preach and to spread that in their locality. And that's actually very important because then what is happening in each group is something that each person and collectively as a group, they are owning for themselves as their personal conviction and not something that's being imposed on them by some outside body. And that's something I'm not going to spend a lot of time this morning on, but that's something that changed drastically and was very detrimental through the church councils, the loss of that personal local conviction.

Heresy. Heresy in the first 300 years was mainly a practice or a school of thought that separated itself from the simple obedient faith handed down from Jesus by the apostles. It was not predominantly just an idea. It referred to a split, a division. And that was spoken against very pointedly and was treated with great seriousness by the apostles and by the church fathers when someone created a split or a division that was right up along with immorality and things like that. So heresy was a practice or a belief which led to practices that were not according to the simple teachings of Jesus passed on by the apostles.

Gnosticism was a primary heresy during the time, which denied Jesus coming in a physical body and that our physical bodies and world can be holy, can be redeemed.

That's in a very, very small nutshell, but basically that's the effect of their beliefs.

So some things that church leaders spoke and wrote on during this time period. A godly living. A lot of the early church fathers, the pre-Nicene fathers, the fathers before the church councils, which began in 325, wrote a lot about how to live, practical advice about living out Jesus' teachings. They condemned divisions. We talked about that just a little bit ago. Divisions was understood to be a very, very wrong thing. It was carnal. It was of the world. Many of them wrote defending doctrine handed down by the apostles that produced holy people. So replying and teaching against heresies in addition to expounding the scriptures, defending the integrity of the Christian community, speaking to the public and especially to leaders in government, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and especially one that stands out to me is his writing to Scapula, who was a Roman governor, I believe, telling them that the Christian community is not this weird group of people who do these hideous practices at night and are against they're trying to disunify the empire and destroy it, but they actually are people who are trying to live upright lives and be productive citizens, actually in many ways taking care of the social needs that were being neglected by the Romans.

And also defending Christianity's importance to the empire. So an extension of that is that we actually are helpers to the empire. We're actually the ones that the empire unknowingly is relying on us through our prayers and through our taking care of the poor, taking care of the sick, adopting your orphans, teaching people to turn from cruelty and from dishonesty and stealing and things like that. Another thing, trend that began to happen though, especially as Christianity met the Greek world and many converts were from the Greek schools of thought, is this trend of trying to understand everything and make God's word make sense to the carnal man. So there's this trend to defend the rationality of Christianity.

In other words, this makes sense. It is logical and it is a viable life philosophy. And that has its strengths and its weaknesses. It is the only way of living that really makes sense and solves the world's problems. But whenever we try to make everything make sense to us, we're going to end up with problems because everything we can see and know teaches us that there should be a lot that will never make sense to us. And then in addition to that, trying to make it make sense to carnal worldly men who have not tasted the things of God and are full of their own way.

Paul says that the carnal mind is enmity against God. They're opposites. They're pulling in opposite directions. And so they can't get their head inside of God's way. It's not going to make sense. So we should expect to see that kind of stuff not making sense to the world around us.

And so this was a trend that was rather detrimental to the church in some ways because people began to rely on human wisdom, human rationale, and began to try to explain things that we can't explain. And then they're teaching that as doctrine.

Origin's first principles is kind of a poster child of this trend. Origin was a very godly man as far as his life and his behavior, but he was a very intelligent man. And he really began to delve into this thing of trying to answer things, trying to explain things, rationalize them out that scripture was silent on. Things like, for example, where our souls come from, when are they created. And the Bible's silent on it. It's something we don't need to know. Probably if God would explain it to us, it wouldn't make any sense. And so, but he wrote a whole book hashing out details like that and teaching them then for doctrine.

And it began to trend of relying on human wisdom and human rationale and that things need to make sense to us. Everything needs to make sense to us, maybe I should say. Some implications of this are it was one that the uneducated are missing out on a lot of biblical truth. So the kingdom of God is really not for the simple, but for the wise and prudent, the people who can understand and rationalize and figure everything out.

And the people who can't do that are missing out on the majority of the good things of God. And then also teaching as doctrine rationalizations on topics scripture is silent on, things that the Bible doesn't spell out and then setting them up and teaching them as doctrines on equal importance with clear scripture.

And then this whole thing of relying on human rationale rather than simple directives is fascinating. And it becomes a distraction when people sit down and philosophize and rationalize out and explain these things. It's fascinating to those who are less educated. And it creates a distraction and an awe on that that detracts from simple obedience to Jesus and his teachings that became a trend that was detrimental and led to some of the things that we're going to see later on.

It became sort of a battering ram, as I have there at the top of the slide, that began to hammer away at the foundation, the paradigm of that the point of Jesus coming was simple, loving obedience. Change the way we actually live.

Another thing we can't talk about the early church without is persecution because it was something that was almost always going on somewhere in the empire. Sometimes it was empire-wide. Mostly it was local and sporadic.

Some examples of that that were not by the emperor were the persecution that arose about Stephen where Saul is persecuting the church and people are fleeing. The uproar at Ephesus where the gospel message was destroying the business of the silversmiths making images to Diana, the tourist attraction there.

At Philippi, you have the demon that was cast out of the fortune-telling girl. And so the men were upset because they lost all the money they were making from her. And so there was persecution. Much of the persecution did not necessarily include martyrdom, but maybe imprisonment or being beaten, harassment, being banished, or your property being confiscated, things like that that would wear people out and make life very difficult aside from being killed.

There were imperial persecutions where the emperor decreed that this sect was not to be tolerated and was to be done away with. Here's a list of some of them here. You can see there's time gaps between them. The last one, the biggest and worst one was probably the persecution started by Diocletian and continued by Galerius until his death. So that sort of brings us up to Constantine because Constantine is a pivotal figure in so many ways. He changed so much of history. So he ascended to power and part of the empire following the death of Galerius.

There is his likeness. That's a statue in Britain, I believe, commemorating one of his conquests.

And so he is in power. The Roman Empire at that point was split into a tetrarchy or four districts that were governed by two Caesars and two Augustuses or Augusti. And Constantine was ruler over this portion. And so we're mainly going to talk about Constantine and Maxentius because that's where the conflict happened. That was the main turning point here. Some other things, there were intrigues where other emperors were done away with and things like that.

And Constantine did end up having full control of the empire. But Maxentius was a usurper. He rose up because he wasn't happy about how he got overlooked in rulers being set up. And he forcibly took over the section there you see in red. And Constantine was not in favor of that. There's lots of things, ideas about Constantine, motives and whatever. A lot of it was power. Maybe some of it was that he was a man of the people and wanted freedom and prosperity for Rome, especially if his name was attached to it. And so he begins to assemble an army and heads towards Rome and defeats Maxentius in several battles. And then he is coming up to the city of Rome itself, which is Maxentius' last stronghold.

And he is getting ready for a battle. There's going to be a battle the next day. One of them is going to die. This is the last stop. And one of them is going to die. And the other one is going to be the ruler of all of that half of the Roman Empire now. And so there's a story from several different sources. We don't know exactly what happened, but he saw some sort of a vision.

Some say it was in the sky. Some say it was night. Maybe it was both. But he saw this vision in the sky with a sign that had the first two letters of the Greek word Christos or Christ and the words that's in Greek there, but it basically means, "In this sign, you will conquer."

And we don't understand what it is. I sort of like to think that maybe he did actually see something and God was giving him one last chance to conquer by suffering and serving to conquer in Jesus' way rather than conquer with the sword and with power. But anyways, he saw this thing and gave him this idea that he could use that symbol and go and face the battle under the name of the Christian God and that that would give him victory. Here are some other pictures of engravings and things like that where you see the two letters.

This is the Greek word Christos, and this is actually Russian still today. If you would read a Russian Bible and it would say Jesus Christ, it would say Иисус Христос. And that is still the first two letters of the Russian word because Russian got its alphabet from the Greek missionaries. So this word is kind of a type of sound. And then this is actually the R sound. So Christ or Christos. So the sign told him to arrange those two letters like this and make a cross out of it. Not like today the Christian cross, the Greek cross of a vertical upright with a horizontal cross beam on it, but the symbol representing the first two letters of the name Christ.

And so he made standards to carry in his army and had that painted on the shields of his soldiers and marched into battle at the Milvian Bridge. This is a picture of that location today in Rome. Of course, that bridge was not there at the time. Here's another artist rendering of it. You see the soldiers with the X and the P or the Chi on the row on their shields there. And in this battle, the battle went badly and Maxentius fell into the river and drowned. And Constantine's army was victorious. And of course, he's exhilarated because he's alive and he's in sole power now. And he credits it to the Christian God because he painted the sign on his shields and carried the banner into battle and was successful.

So the Christian God is his new favorite God among the pantheon of Rome. That's the way they would do. They would worship whatever gods they felt like would give them advantage. And so he ends the persecution with the Edict of Toleration in Milan in 1313 and says, "We resolve to grant both to the Christians and to all men freedom to follow the religion which they choose so that whatever heavenly divinity exists may be favorably inclined to us and to all who live under our government."

So he's very clear there about his motives in it so that the gods, whatever God was out there, would make his empire and his reign prosperous.

And so we run into the second battering ram, and that's Constantine's reforms. So Constantine didn't just make freedom for Christianity, but it actually became a preferred religion. And he favored it because the Christian God is giving him the empire and giving him glory and power and prosperity. So he wants to take care of that. So he actually begins to do favors for the Christians.

And he builds beautiful buildings for them in place of the shops and remodeled buildings that they would have used as meeting places. He gives special subsidies, so funds, pays their leaders, and gives special exemptions and tax breaks to Christians.

And he promoted Christians to prominent positions in government as his personal advisors even.

This is actually from after one of the church councils. I think for the sake of time, I'm going to read the whole thing here. Maybe I will. This is about a feast that he invited all the bishops to. About this time, he completed the 20th year of his reign. That's Constantine. On this occasion, public festivals were celebrated by the people of the provinces generally, but the emperor himself invited and feasted with those ministers of God whom he had reconciled and thus offered, as it were, through them a suitable sacrifice to God. Not one of the bishops was wanting at the imperial banquet, the circumstances of which were splendid beyond description. Detachments of the bodyguard and other troops surrounded the entrance of the palace with drawn swords.

And 30 years ago, these men would have been arrested and put to the sword, would have been killed. But now they proceed without fear into the innermost imperial apartments in which some were the emperor's own companions at the table while others reclined on couches arranged on either side. One might have thought that a picture of Christ's kingdom was thus shadowed forth in a dream rather than reality. That's the bishop Eusebius of Caesarea's history talking about the event. And you see how this affected the people. They were exhausted from persecution. And I don't know what all else played together, but they looked at this and they said, "Wow, this is wonderful. This is a good thing."

And they began to think, "This is actually what God wants. This feasting together and being under the favor of the emperor and adjoining of forces is actually this is a good thing. This is what Jesus wants to happen." So what happens here is Constantine, as a carnal man who's looking out for the empire to be orderly and powerful as man thinks, is bringing those ideas to the church and funding and building buildings and giving suggestions that are his way and his idea.

And some of what backed it up is this sign. So he sees the sign and it helps him conquer. So therefore, God must be with him, right? Well, we really need to keep these kind of things clear. We'll end up doing a lot of things that are against clear teachings of Jesus because Paul says, "I marvel that you are turning away so soon from him who called you in the grace of Christ to a different gospel, which is not another." In other words, it's not even good news. "But there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed."

And he's referring, at least in part, to the Sermon on the Mount as the gospel, the new laws for the new kingdom and the new reign.

So this is really important to be grounded in. It doesn't matter how wonderful something looks or how much good comes out of it. If it doesn't follow the clear teachings of Jesus, it's not Jesus' way. There's a story in the Old Testament about a man of God who went to Bethel to make a prophecy. And he was explicitly told, "Don't stay there. Don't eat. Come straight home."

And on his way home, another old prophet from the city somehow wakes up and he says, "Ah, you know he was a good guy. I wish I was like him." I think that's really sort of what happened. He admired the prophet's boldness and wished he had been that way. And he sends messengers after him and tells him, "Come back, come back. The Lord came to me and said, 'You're actually supposed to come back and eat with me.'" And if you know the story, it ends up the original man of God goes back home and he is eaten by a lion on the way because he went against the word of the Lord because God's not going to come and tell you to do the exact opposite of what he just told you to do.

So it's really important that we keep our lenses clear on those things. It doesn't matter what kind of signs and wonders and eloquence or those kind of things that come from a person. If they're not teaching us to follow Jesus in a simple, practical way, then we need to be aware of them. Again, Jesus says, "It's not the people who say, 'Lord, Lord,' or even have cast out devils and prophesied and worked miracles in his name." Jesus says that he's going to tell those people, "I never knew you. Depart from me. You are lawbreakers. You're enemies of my kingdom."

This is one that we hear often, "But God did so much good through it," or, "There's a lot of good came from it." And that's good. But the fact is God does good from everything. God even uses Satan in his efforts to bring good. Look at the book of Job.

So just because there's good things come from it doesn't mean that we follow it and listen to it and allow it to change our lives. Was it Constantine's fault that he was a bad influence on the church? I don't think so necessarily.

He didn't know any better. He was just practicing pagan piety as he understood it, worshiping the gods and trying to do things to please them to win their favor. But what if the church would have said, instead of just welcoming all this stuff, would have said, "Thank you, Constantine. We really appreciate you. You have been a tremendous blessing to us." But Jesus said, "Let me read you Stephen's message from Acts chapter 7," where he explains to us that God's tabernacle has always wanted to live within people. And so that's where the temple of God is, the people as individuals and together. And so we don't want something that distracts from that. We don't want fancy buildings.

We want people to be attracted to the life that we live that shows God's presence. "Come meet with us. Come to our simple places and see what real joy and peace is like," and things like that. If they would have taught Constantine Jesus' way instead of being swayed. Again, we want to be careful not to be critical. We weren't there. We don't know what it's like. The church council, some of the bishops who came there were missing limbs from persecution, from being tortured. So we want to be careful not to be judgmental, but we do want to learn from it.

And we want to learn that things changed in the platform that we have been handed as Western Christianity is not looking clearly at doctrine and at the scriptures. The church councils then, the two battering rams, synchronize. So we have this problem of men wanting to rationalize and figure everything out on their own and getting out on some limbs that don't agree with scripture.

And we have Constantine, who is obviously a carnal man, using his methods as a skillful and a good leader, coming together at the church councils and dealing some real fatal blows to the last vestiges of a godly kingdom life, a Christ-like life. So the Arian controversy was one of the big issues that came up. And this was a controversy over the Trinity. Was Jesus created or was he the same as the Father? And we're not going to talk about all that this morning.

But Constantine values the success of Christianity because he believes the success of his empire depends on it. So he jumps in here. He doesn't want to see the church fall apart and the Christian God become displeased with them. And he loses his help in the empire. So he jumps in to try to help solve the whole thing.

He first contacts Husius, who was a bishop that he highly appreciated. And Husius gave the advice that these guys should really just drop it, that it was wrong to propose those kind of questions to feel like we need to figure it out and then to get into a meaningful discussion about trying to say which way it was.

They're not required by the authority of any law. They didn't affect whether or not a person was following Jesus' teachings. And they actually led to some very bad things.

Well, they didn't listen. They kept on. Pardon? Could you read that thing? The whole thing? Sure. Yeah. He replied that it was wrong in the first instance to propose such questions as these. In other words, about the substance of Christ. Was he the same as the Father? Was he created or some hybrid of a third thing? Or to reply to them when propounded. For those points of discussion are not required by the authority of any law. Rather, they are suggested by the contentious spirit that is fostered by misused free time.

That's not very flattering. In other words, you should be busy doing what you know instead of wasting your time trying to figure out what you don't know.

Even though they may be intended merely as an intellectual exercise, we're just asking it because we're wondering about it. They certainly should be confined to the region of our own thoughts and not hastily produced in the popular assemblies, nor unadvisedly entrusted to the general ear. So we should keep them private and not go around touting them as this is probably the way it is.

For how very few there are who are able either to accurately comprehend or to adequately explain subjects so sublime and obscure in their nature. Thank you. Thank you. It was good to read that too, I think.

Constantine calls these meetings and gets as many bishops as he can to come together for a meeting to figure this out. He pays the traveling expenses and hosts the meetings. He presides at the meeting. So he's the moderator and guides the discussions and things like that.

Some of the other church councils, some of the things it says about what he experienced was not godly at all. They sit there and argue and are accusing each other. And he's the one who has to say, "Hey, guys, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's get along here."

And he's the one who suggests a solution. We'll look at that in just a little bit. He words the creeds, adds wording to the creed, and then he enforces the decision. He metes out a penalty, first banishment, and then death for someone who harbors the writings of Arius.

That's not Jesus' way at all. But nobody stood up to him about this. They let it roll and benefited by it. This is from the writings of Eusebius about it. So he says, "On this faith being publicly set forth by us," in other words, this agreement about what we believe about the Trinity, "no room for contradiction appeared. But our most pious emperor, which is Constantine, before anyone else testified that it comprised most orthodox statements." So we have this heathen emperor who appreciated and learned a lot and admired a lot about Christianity but never surrendered himself to the lordship of Christ and patterned his life after Jesus' teachings. He still participated in war and many of the scandals and intrigues that were normal among the Roman emperors.

And he was baptized on his deathbed, but there's never any sort of clear manifestation that he surrendered himself to Christ's lordship and lived in obedience. So he said that they were made up of orthodox statements. In other words, it was right or straight doctrine, straight doctrine. Ortho like an orthodontist straightens your teeth. So orthodoxy is straight doctrine.

He confessed, moreover, that such were his own sentiments. In other words, he thought, "Yeah, that's what he would say." And he advised all present to agree to it and to subscribe its articles and to assent to them with the insertion of the single word. So he says, "This is all good. I like this. I think everybody should agree with this. But you should add this yet. This would really just be the it would really top it off and maybe just make it perfect." And that was one in substance or homooeusian. It's there in Greek after that.

And such were the theological remarks of our most wise and most religious emperor. But they, with a view to the addition of one in substance, drew up the following formula, which we know as the Nicene Creed. We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, only begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father. In other words, homooeusia. We're reading it in English. They wrote it in Greek. God from God, light from light, very God from very God, begotten, not made, one in substance with the Father, by whom all things were made, both things in heaven and things in earth, who for us men and for our salvation came down and was made flesh and was made man, suffered, and rose again the third day, ascended into heaven and cometh to judge the quick and the dead, and in the Holy Ghost.

But those who say, "Once he was not, and before his generation he was not, and he came to be from nothing," or those who pretend that the Son of God is of other substance, other subsistence or substance, or created or alterable or mutable, the Catholic Church anathematizes or curses.

So now they have it all figured out. And many ways what they say there, I think we would all agree is what we would understand. And most Christians, it was what was handed down by the apostles. But there's a problem here. Something happened here.

Actually, quite a few things. But one is this by inserting this word homooeusian in there. And now that was how you decided who was an orthodox Christian was if they believed that Jesus was homooeusia, homooeusian with the Father of the same substance. That became what decided who was a Christian now was their ideas. And it actually began to be overlooked the rest of the way they lived. And so in the years following, we have people become very lazy in living in luxury and getting involved in the upper-class Roman lifestyle. You have mobs fighting and even killing people. You have soldiers, Christians, "going to war," which even at the time of Nicaea, it was agreed that if a Christian would join the military, that he would be excommunicated and would not be able, even if he repented, he would be put on proving, so to speak, for 10 years.

They considered it that bad of treason. Within 100 years of Nicaea, there were armies of Christians going out to fight because man's idea was held up as the standard and what defined who was a Christian rather than simple obedience to Jesus. It gave the idea that scripture is not enough, and we need our ideas to actually improve on scripture.

Man's definition was elevated above scripture. And the measure of the follower of Jesus becomes mental assent to an idea rather than a humble, loving obedience to Jesus. As if that wasn't bad enough, another thing that arose out of this coming up with a man-made term that was elevated to the level of scripture and used to evaluate a person being a Christian or not was that even if a person was living like Jesus, just like Jesus, a completely godly example, if they did not embrace the term homooeusian to describe the nature of the Son, he was condemned as a heretic, a completely godly as godly as Jesus himself even. Not saying that anybody was, but a completely godly person that was all of no credit unless they used this man-made term to talk about their ideas that man had figured out.