Welcome back to Engage the Faith Live Question and Answers with David Bercot. Thank you all for joining us. It's a pleasure to have you here. One of the things we need to ask all of you is what would the best time, if you can chat me, what would be the preferred time to have these live questions and answers? We're also going to have a forum on the website that's uphold to see what the best time would be. But we'd like the most participation we could have.
We think this is very important just to hash out some things. And today we have a lot to go over, so I'm not going to talk a whole lot here with us. I don't think you need any kind of introduction. And I'm Daniel Willis. I'm a part of the, this is David Bercot if you didn't know. And I'm Daniel Willis, part of the historic faith team. And we are going to jump into these questions. Are you ready, David? I'm ready.
So today we're going to have, we're going to go over some Passover baptism Sabbath and the reliability of the Christian writings. And we're going to go over some more than other things than that if we have time, and not in that order either. First, baptism. Alex and Sarah Martin, and there was one other, but I wasn't sure if the name should be added. So what are the thoughts on the age of baptism? Can a child be baptized too young? Should it be as early as the age of accountability?
Is there any precedent from the early church that was recorded? Okay, that's a good question that a lot of people are asking these days. And there's not a clear answer from the early church. Now, I'm going to give you my personal opinion, but that's all it is. It is my personal opinion. And other people would have different thoughts, and that's perfectly fine as well.
So I think personally, I like the age of accountability as being maybe the ideal age as a floor that I wouldn't personally encourage somebody younger than that to get baptized. Now, the age of accountability seems to have been among the Jews, the early Christians, something around like age 12 or 13, something like that, the beginning of adolescence. Of course, each parent, I think, is in the best position to be able to discern the spiritual maturity of their children.
I mean, you have some children who are very spiritual at a young age and are able to make a commitment to Christ. My wife was baptized. She wasn't quite 11 years old. And it was a commitment she made and that she has stuck with all of her life and has never doubted that she was old enough to be baptized. I was 14 myself. And again, never been a question in my mind that the commitment I made to Christ at that age was very real. I understood completely what I was doing. And then you meet other people.
I mean, they might be 18 and they're not ready to get baptized. They're not ready to give their life to Christ. Not because perhaps they're not old enough, but maybe they're not spiritually mature enough or their love of Christ hasn't reached that stage where they're really able to make a total commitment to Him. So I think each person is different, and I think parents hopefully would be in the best position. Parents and the elders in the local church of, you know, examining whether somebody is old enough or not.
Now, as far as the early Christians, you find complete gamut. I couldn't tell you what the normal age was. It's very hard to discern from their writings. Of course, the period of the early church was still largely a period of new conversions. And so you're dealing a lot with adults. But, you know, as you get to around the year 200, you now have quite a lot of children of Christians who are being baptized.
And they don't talk about, they talk about catechumen classes, you know, classes for learners, but they don't, you know, give an age that, you know, at a certain age that they're allowed to get in these classes. So we don't know what age churches put on that. And then you mainly see this around the beginning of the third century. And it's hard to know how widespread it was, but of infant baptism.
At the same time, as you had some advocating infant baptism, you had others like Tertullian in the early 3rd century advocating that a person wait until they're married. Or if they're going to stay celibate until at least they're old enough to be married or old enough to make a legal will or something like that under Roman law. And then it's particularly common in the fourth century that people put off baptism until they thought death was near. They'd go their whole adult life as a catechumen.
And then they would try to time it to get baptized towards the end of their life, hopefully arranging it to do it before they actually did die. Now, most of these considerations that I've talked about all centered on theology. The ones who advocated infant baptism, and I've been a lifelong foe of infant baptism in case you've wondered, I have tried to look at it with an honest heart. I think I can definitely say I've tried to see that side of things, even tried to embrace it for a short period.
And I'm very convinced in believers baptism as being the best route to go. And I belong to a church that does not accept infant baptism. If you came to join our church and that was your only baptism was as an infant, we would require you to get rebaptized. But the theology behind that was Jesus said, " Unless you are born again of water and the Spirit, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. " And the early Christians universally understood this to be talking about baptism of water and baptism of the Holy Spirit.
And in an age where maybe, I don't know, a third, perhaps, of children did not reach adulthood who died as children, and maybe a fourth of all babies died in infancy. That was a very scary proposition. Also, it's particularly pronounced in the third century. You see a theology of inheriting a fallen nature from Adam, not inheriting his, you know, his guilt, but inheriting a nature that's imperfect, fallen from Adam. And I would tend to support that view.
It's not the only view out there, but I would lean to that myself. And so like Cyprian, he felt like it's in baptism that the stain from Adam is washed away and you start with a new slate. And so you want an infant to start life with that stain being washed away. That was the argument from that perspective. Now, Tertullian, who, like I say, argued for waiting until you were married or after.
The theology there that affected that view was Tertullian believed and a lot of other Christians did too that after baptism, you can only stumble in a major way one time. And if you commit, you can commit a serious sin like adultery, maybe denouncing Christ and persecution, reverting to idolatry. I'm not sure what all the sins would be included in that topic of a major sin. But you could commit one.
So why Tertullian didn't want people being baptized at say age 12 or 13 or younger is they're going to go through their adolescent years, which particularly in Roman society was a time of a lot of immorality. And so he felt like, yeah, wait until you're married. Wait till you're safely past that age where you might fall into sexual immorality. I mean, you still could after marriage, but it was less likely. And so that was his primary concern behind that.
Now later when he joined the Montanists and they taught that there is not even one extra chance after baptism. If you commit a major sin, that's it. You're lost forever. But that was the Montanists. The church as a whole never taught that. And then of course, because they all taught that when you're baptized, all your prior sins are washed away, but not your future sins, then this idea will just put it off and keep putting it off.
And then, you know, when you're like my age, hopefully there's not a whole lot of serious sins left in your life. I guess there could be. And so then maybe you can safely be baptized when you're 70. Of course, you might get killed by a runaway horse or something. So you're taking quite a chance in that. I think that's a very wrong stance to take. And I can't imagine anyone who loved Christ doing that.
And yet there were some godly people in the fourth century who had just saintly lives who waited until their deathbed to get baptized. So that's the gamut, you know like I'm saying that was there. And my personal preference is waiting until the age of accountability, you know, allowing for exceptions in that. And then once a person is really ready spiritually to surrender their life to Christ and make a lifelong commitment.
Now, one of the auxiliary questions was, how in the earth did the early Christians make such a mistake as infant baptism? Well, as I said, I mean, I grew up you know as Jehovah's Witness who, I mean, infant baptism was just one of those, one of a long list of heresies that if you practice that, you're not a Christian. That puts you outside of you know any claim to be a real Christian. And now I'm an Anabaptist that have generally held somewhat the same view. So like I say, I'm not soft on infant baptism.
But you know I look at Christian history and there have been just hundreds I'm sure tens of thousands of very godly Christians that that was their only baptism was as an infant. I mean, people in recent times like John Wesley, William Law, people I look up to a lot, Francis of Assisi, who I know my life will never even come close to walking in the footsteps of Jesus the way that He did. Even more significantly, you had whole movements like the Waldensians.
As near as I can tell from looking at the scant writings we have that they practiced infant baptism. I mean, I feel 99% sure of that. The same with the Moravians, the Czech brethren, they went by different names. They later joined with Count Zinzendorf. We know him as the Moravians now, but they were a persecuted small group there in Bohemia and Czechoslovakia. And they practice infant baptism.
So yeah, I'm very slow to just write everybody off who did that, including the early Christians, like, oh, they fell into some horrible heresy. What makes me maybe slow to be judgmental? In other words, I've got my own strong views and I belong to a church that has strong views on it as well. But because you hold strong views on something doesn't mean you have to be judgmental towards everyone else who holds a different view.
But the two things I think we should recognize, every Christian should recognize that we absolutely do not know. And we're not going to know on this side of paradise because it's not revealed in Scripture and it's not revealed in the early Christian writings. And that is in Acts, you see so often whole households being baptized. Okay, what was the age of the youngest children in those households? We do not know. Nothing is said about that.
I mean, people, you can come up with things to offer a theory, but it's not really discussed. And then the other thing is during the New Testament period, Christians had children. What age were those children baptized? We don't have a single clue. There is not anything said in the New Testament about that. So even though I'm a strong advocate of believers ' baptism and would like to say want somebody coming to our church who is baptized as an infant to be rebaptized.
I don't have to judge those in the past where they stand with God. I think he can make he can give a later validation to an infant who was baptized or rather a person who was only baptized as an infant. Okay, I guess we should go to the next question. Yeah, thank you. It was very thorough and very concise at the same time. This is a long question, but a good one.
Sally asks, well stated, I have had a question coming from an evangelical background about the large number of people I know, several in my own family, who regularly attend church, sometimes study the Bible, some very regularly and who serve the congregations as Sunday school teachers, et cetera. They have prayed the sinner's prayer and so consider themselves Christians. But I have never been, but they have never been baptized yet. One second.
In several of the evangelical churches I attend, when I was younger, baptism was very deemphasized because many of the people in leadership had come from a liturgical background of believing infant baptism saved them. So they went to the opposite extreme saying outward baptism is not necessary. Just focus on the sinner's prayer in your heart. How would the early church have viewed a young person like this, not yet a Christian, a baby Christian, almost a Christian?
So many people I know attach great meaning who does the baptism and to baptism making you a member of a local church, whereas others focus more on baptism placing you into the body of Christ, or baptism just being an outward sign of what you want to follow, sorry, sign that you want to follow Jesus, but not really having the power to place, sorry, and not having the power to place you in the body of Christ. Okay, now to you, David. Okay, so those are some good questions in there, Sally.
And one reason I'm spending a little bit of extra time on this issue of baptism is these questions were asked last month. And we felt like if we answered them, there were so many other questions that we would have to neglect the others. So we were kind of unfair to the ones who asked about baptism. And so this month, I want to give them a fair shake and give a thorough answer.
So you've asked several questions, Sally, but they reflect very much the state of evangelical Christianity where baptism is viewed as certainly not essential. Sometimes it's described just as an act of obedience is all, but you are already saved before you're baptized. So if you never get baptized, then it's not that important. But Jesus said, " He who believes and is baptized shall be saved. " So Jesus seems to tie baptism in with salvation. Now, of course, God isn't locked in a box.
If somebody would want to be baptized and they don't have the opportunity, they're killed, let's say the thief on the cross. Well, obviously, I mean, you know, God can make exceptions where He wants. I was talking earlier about infant baptism. Even if that is totally invalid, God can still, He knows the hearts of people. And He makes the final decision, we don't, of who He's going to admit into the Kingdom of Heaven.
But yeah, your question, what would the early Christians have called such a person who believes and decides not to get baptized? Well, they would have called them a catechumen, a learner. Now, you asked about, do they call them a Christian? Now, this is a little bit more complicated question because in the evangelical world, Christian has taken on a meaning that I don't think is in the Scriptures. I don't see it in the early church.
The reference to the word Christian in Acts, it just says that the disciples, I think this is where they were first called Christians. So I think anyone who is a disciple of Jesus Christ is a Christian, even if they have not yet been baptized, even if they haven't prayed the sinner's prayer or whatever, it's used almost in a sectarian sense among evangelicals. Well, do you think he's a Christian? No, I don't think he's a Christian.
And it has nothing to do with whether they believe, whether they've been baptized, whether they even live a godly life often. Is there theology right? Or this or that? It becomes this subjective thing that I never see that used in the early Christians. So I think anyone who believed whether or not they had been baptized were called a Christian. But again, they're using it in a different sense than an evangelical would use the word Christian. Like I think it's being misused today.
But someone who wasn't baptized, I think today we could maybe call them an unbaptized believer or whatever, but they are lacking something essential. I mean, if they aren't baptized simply because they choose to ignore Jesus ' clear words and the rest of Scripture, what it has to say about baptism, then I think there's some you know serious potential liability there of losing their eternal life. So it's not something to treat so lightly that so many churches are doing.
I mean, this is definitely false teaching, erroneous teaching. And again, I'm not making judgmental calls, but I'm saying it is serious error. When Jesus says, " He who believes and is baptized shall be saved. " And then we say, " Well, we don't need to get baptized, " then we're trampling on what Jesus said. And His final commission to His apostles to go out and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
So if we think we can become a disciple and just stop without getting baptized, yeah we're disobeying the very commission that Jesus gave to His apostles. So once you are baptized in Acts, I don't have the verse in front of me. It says that those who were being baptized were being added daily to the church. And the church there is talking about was not the local church of Jerusalem, but the church, the body of Christ. So when we're baptized, we become assuming that we believe that we're properly baptized.
We become a member of the body of Christ. And it doesn't turn on who is baptizing us. I mean, assuming it's not an out and out heretic or someone who's not qualified to be baptized, it doesn't have to be a minister. Most churches, the ministers do the baptizing, and the early church would have certainly encouraged that.
But in an emergency situation, if the need is there, then certainly any brother, and I think in a dire emergency, even a sister could give baptism, perhaps, to somebody if they were on the point of death or something like that. But you know we don't run into that very often. So like I said, I think it's good practice to have the ministry of the church either do it or it is being done under their authority if they don't personally do it. But yeah, you become a member, not of a local church.
I mean, that may also be part of it, but you become a member of the body of Christ. And baptism should not be used as, oh, this is membership in our church. So if you join some other church and you're going to get baptized all over again, there's only one baptism. And it's not to be done over and over again every time we might change from one denomination to another. That's a very wrong practice and teaching that is out there. Thank you so much. This is a very interesting one.
How do you interpret 1 Corinthians 7:14 in the King James Version? For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband. Else were your children unclean, but now are they holy? Does it mean that the unbelieving spouse somehow shares and the believing spouses inherit holiness? Okay. This was an excellent question, Susan. And I'll admit, I had to go look that up.
I didn't feel like, I had an idea of what the Christians believed on this, the early Christians, but this one, I needed to go do some research of my own. There's not a lot written about it in the pre-Nicene Christians. I prefer to go to them, but my fallback guy, if I can't find something in the pre-Nicene Christians, my fallback guy is John Chrysostom. And usually, I'd say 90% of what he says, if not more than that, very much reflects what the early church said. It's the same reasoning.
Even if he's discussing something that we don't find discussed in the pre-Nicene Christian, he always reasons the same way that you see in the pre-Nicene Christians. There's only one or two topics where his views would be noticeably different. So anyway, let's look at that passage because the passage helps to give, I think, the answer to the question.
1 Corinthians 7:12 through 14, Paul says, " But to the rest, I, not the Lord, say, if any brother has a wife who does not believe and she is willing to live with him, let him not divorce her, and a woman who has a husband who does not believe. If he is willing to live with her, let her not divorce him. For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but now they are holy.
" So I'm going to just go ahead and read what Chrysostom says. I don't want it to sound like it's coming for me like this is my wisdom when I turn to him for his answer. And this is his comment on it. So unless a woman, of course, the same would apply to a husband, fear that she would become unclean because of relations with her husband. He says, " For the unbelieving husband is sanctified in the wife and the unbelieving wife is sanctified in the husband.
" And yet someone may say, " Well, if he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her, it is quite clear that the woman who is joined to an idolater is likewise one body with him. " Chrysostom answers very well. They are one body. Nevertheless, she does not become unclean. For the cleanness of the wife overcomes the uncleanness of the husband. Similarly, the cleanness of the believing husband overcomes the uncleanness of the unbelieving wife. I thought that was such an excellent answer.
So this is what he's talking about. The unbelieving spouse doesn't sanctify the other one in the sense is going to save them or something just by being married. But because you are one flesh, you don't have to worry about, oh, my spouse is not a believer. I'm one flesh with an unbeliever. Does that make me an idolater or whatever else? Am I somehow made unclean because of that relationship? And he's saying, Paul is saying no, that the believer is going to sanctify that relationship.
And so as a result, their relations and their life together is going to be pure because of that sanctity. And then the question, well, what about the children? Well, he says, not only are they clean, he says they are holy. So the children start off with a clean slate. They don't start off being somehow marked because one of the spouses is an unbeliever. It doesn't mean they can't become unholy later on, but they start off with a holy slate, the same as the infants of a Christian couple. Okay. Very good.
Thank you so much. Now, Elvis, it's true that Rome has altered early church documents to support papal supremacy. How do you know if the early church writings are reliable and not altered by Rome? Okay. That question, and I was trying to wreck my brain if this has been answered or rather asked before now, because when I first started reading the early Christian writings and telling people about them, that was the first thing I got hit with. Well, the castle, they've altered all of that stuff.
And then later, when I wrote my first book, " Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up, " oh, I got asked that question in so many letters. People asked that. And it's a very good question. Of course, you should ask that. You know, a lot of people said, " Well, the Bible being God's Word, we can believe that God protected it, but the early Christian writings aren't inspired, so we can't you know count on God necessarily protecting them. " And I think that's valid as well. But there's good news.
We don't have to worry about have these writings been altered. And I'll tell you why. What the early Christians teach about the Trinity, and you've probably heard me talk about it before, if you haven't, on the historic faith, you know one of the topics is what the early Christians believed about the Trinity. And listen to that. But that only goes, I mean, that sums up what they believe.
But when you're reading their writings, they say all kinds of things because orthodoxy didn't depend on, oh, you say this word and you avoid this word. I mean, they say if you take a certain sentence here and there out of just about any of them, if you just take a certain sentence, in the fourth century, you had been called a heretic because you said that. After the Council of Nicaea, it got extremely narrow what you dared say about the Trinity. It got absurd.
I love the spirit of early Christianity where there was freedom to talk about a subject without somebody you know jumping up, heretic, heretic. But that's the atmosphere you have, like I say, after the Council of Nicaea 325, and they're on. So when you read these writings, it's like, there is no way a Roman Catholic would make these statements concerning the Trinity or concerning the begetting of the Son or something like that. I mean, that would be heresy.
I mean, you would be, well, in the early Middle Ages, you know put out of the church, disciplined in the center of the Middle Ages, you'd be put to death, burned at the stake, you know, whatever. No one would be making those. So it's nice. We have pretty much a guarantee. And virtually every writer talks about the Trinity is the nice thing. They're all talking about it. And it's obviously in language that would not be acceptable in post-Nicene Christianity, particularly in the West.
The question was the Roman Catholic Church, and Roman Catholics would not say this. Now, the Eastern Orthodox Church, their modern understanding of the Trinity is not very far from that of the pre-Nicene Christians, but still, they wouldn't make some of the same statements that they would be really careful how they phrase this particular statement or that one, where the early church, they just have the freedom to talk about it. And everyone understood, " Okay, we know what you mean.
" And maybe you didn't explain that quite right. So that's, I think, our biggest guarantee. But then other things, I mean, you know, there are some fake letters of Ignatius, for example, a whole bunch of them. There's a lot of fake gospels, but particularly the letters of Ignatius, I mean, they stand out as a sore thumb. I mean, you can go through there and pick out things. Like one of them is a supposed letter to Mary.
And, well, this is, you know, this is obviously post, not only post-Nicene, but post Council of Ephesus, which was 431. Because one of the things you see in the pre-Nicene writings is very little discussion of Mary, extremely little. And what is said is usually pretty much no more than what's said in the New Testament. So no Roman Catholic in the Middle Ages trying to doctor these up. They're going to stick Mary in there everywhere they turn, and she's not there. So that's another guarantee.
Some of the other things, there's no references to popes. I mean, you do, in a few letters, there's encounters with the bishop of Rome, but everyone's not bowing down, " Oh, the bishop of Rome says this. " In fact, usually it's somebody disagreeing with the bishop of Rome and telling him to mind his own business or something. And then you have, in a lot of the writings, teachings on war, on the two kingdoms that would go totally against the post-Nicene Church.
And then, again, if someone from the Middle Ages, even the early Middle Ages were doctoring these up, you'd have a lot of references to saints, to miracles, to things, you know, tying into relics and all that kind of stuff. I mean, it changed very fast after Constantine. So just because of those changes, it does set these writings apart. And it's one reason why the pre-Nicene writings don't have the same stature in the Roman Catholic Church as the post-Nicene writers.
And it's to a degree, not to the same extent, but to a degree, it's the same in the Eastern Orthodox Church. I mean, the big guys they look up to in the Roman Catholic Church, of course, Augustine would be the big ones, Athanasius. And people on, you know, beyond that, Ambrose, they don't pay a lot of attention to the pre-Nicene writers. I mean, when they're thinking of the fathers, they're thinking of post-Nicene writers.
And again, in the Eastern Orthodox Church, their big guys, John Chrysostom and some others are post-Nicene. So, like I say, because the pre-Nicene Christians are saying things that the post-Nicene Church didn't particularly like or appreciate. So that gives us a guarantee that we are reading authentic writings. Plus, no church has controlled these writings.
I mean, some of them have just been discovered, you know, in the early 19th or 20th century, often, you know, in a Coptic monastery or a monastery, you know, somewhere in the East, the Roman Catholic Church never even had control of these writings to be able to doctor. And yet the new ones, like the Didache wasn't discovered until the late 1800s, it fits in seamlessly with the writings, you know, from the second century. So it's another guarantee that, yeah, nothing has been changed. That really makes sense.
Thanks a lot. Moving on, Terry asked, " Well, I have recently heard of Christians celebrating the Passover. Do you or Anabaptists in general celebrate the Passover? Why or why not? I know we are Gentiles, but it was a requirement for the Jews, and Jesus celebrated it. " Okay. I'm sorry. I was taking a drink there. I was hoping the question would go a little bit longer. Yeah, in answer to that, no, the Anabaptists do not celebrate the Passover. I do not celebrate the Passover.
My question would be, why would a Christian want to celebrate a feast that is pointing to something ahead, pointing to Jesus Christ, now that the fulfillment has come and the Passover has been replaced by communion, why would we want to go back to the old law and celebrate something that was a temporary thing pointing to Jesus Christ? It was a shadow. The reality is here. It made me think the question, and it's a good question.
I'm not knocking you for asking it because I've got Christian friends, particularly friends in the evangelical world who, yeah, they'll have Passover Seder meals and all that. And they think this is really spiritual. This is getting closer to the New Testament church to have these Jewish feasts you know around the time of Easter. And yeah, it just stuns me. But it's a growing thing. It's not diminishing. It's growing. But it makes me think of Paul's words of Galatians 4, 9 through 11.
But now after you have known God or rather are known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements to which you desire again to be in bondage? You observe days and months and seasons and years. I am afraid for you, lest I have labored for you in vain. So certainly the season, one of the seasons, the big season among the Jews in the Mosaic Law was the Passover. And he says, I fear for you. You know, because you're observing these days and seasons and New Years, that sort of thing.
So, yeah, to me, it's a strange new thing. I mean, this isn't something that's been going on for 2,000 years or something like that. You know, it disappeared all these celebrations of the Passover. And I don't know. I would say it's been more in the last century that there's been this renewal. I think with renewed interest in Israel and the creation of the modern state of Israel, that then Christians are wanting to turn back to Judaism. You have so-called Messianic Jews who are nearly always Gentiles.
And yeah, they're wanting to embrace the law and everything like that, the very things that Paul goes to great lengths to write against. Well, what about Jesus? Well, Jesus says the law and the prophets were until John. And since then, the kingdom of God is preached. But yet Jesus was sent to none but to the lost house of Israel. And so the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So yeah, he lived his life as a Jew. And of course, the Passover wasn't fulfilled until Jesus died on the cross.
So yeah, there was good reason. It was still pointing to the future. But Jesus came as a Jew. He was circumcised, his parents took him to the temple when he was a baby. He kept all of the Jewish commandments, didn't break anything in the law. But yeah, it came to an end with Jesus. It really ended with John, the new came in, the gospel age, but everything was finalized with the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. So Christians shouldn't go back and be celebrating the Jewish feast. We gain nothing.
And it's a step backward, not a step forward. Hey, thanks a lot, Terry, for asking that. A long time ago, I was confused about that, wondering, I ran into all these YouTubers saying that that's something we need to do. And then someone at my college, my Bible university was trying to convince me of it. And thankfully, I didn't fall into that, but it's really good to hear David's answers to that. It's not always as clear as is it.
I mean, it's straightforward when you hear it, but when you're hearing all these people confusing you, it can be confusing. So thanks a lot. This is a long one, so you can get a drink of water. It's only three slides. So Chris, how do you reconcile Jesus ' teachings in Matthew 5, that whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
With the apostles ' instructions, so we're reconciling that with this, with the apostles ' instructions in Acts 15, that Gentile believers only need to abstain from things polluted by idols and from sexual immorality and from things strangled and from blood. For example, how do you biblically reconcile Jesus teaching that He is the Lord of the Sabbath and it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath with the absence of any command on this matter from the Jerusalem Council.
They also didn't specify not to murder, steal, or envy. Thank you. Okay, so I grouped this one with Terry's question because they were somewhat similar in nature. And again, like I say, this is a big thing today. It's a growing, it's been a growing movement for a number of decades. And so these are sincere questions. And Terry, I hope you didn't take my answer as a rebuke or anything like that. I'm reading Paul's words. Paul writes pretty strongly. So that wasn't me trying to put you down for asking the question.
I appreciated that you did. That's what this is for to ask questions. Okay, so my first thought was to just say, look, get the commentary I wrote on Matthew, because I talk about that at length about Matthew 5, whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments. But I'm not trying to plug my book. But if you do have the ability to get that and read that, I answered in more depth there with a lot of quotations.
And basically what I point out there is, well, first of all, let me just read the passage because you need the context of when he says whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments. And I misunderstood this, I would say, pretty much my whole life until I was working on the Matthew commentary. When I say I misunderstood it, I just didn't try to explain it ' cause I didn't know what it meant. I just, you know, I just made sure I wasn't in a position where I had to discuss it.
Jesus said, " Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law until all is fulfilled. Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
So what you have in the Sermon on the Mount, and this is all from the early church, is a repeat on a much grander scale of what you had at Sinai. In Sinai, Moses gave the law, or it was given to Moses by God and distributed for Moses to the people of Israel. The Mosaic Law was given, okay? So it's for that reason Jesus goes up on a mountain to give His legislation. And we know it as the Sermon on the Mount. And this and the rest of His teaching replaces the Law of Moses.
So that's why Jesus starts off saying, look, I'm not desecrating the law, that I didn't come to destroy it. I came to fulfill it. Now, fulfill has several meanings. And as the early Christians, the Greek word that Jesus uses, or that's used there in Matthew, the early Christians explain that fulfill means, and I had some quotes, but I think I left them at home, to fill up.
So a lot of the requirements in the law were incomplete, like not commit adultery, but there was no law forbidding lusting after somebody, committing adultery in your heart. Or don't murder someone, but there was no law against hating in your heart. You were not going to get punished just for hating and so on. So Jesus fulfills. He fills it full. He takes the Mosaic Law and He covers things that are the root of sin. And so it's a more complete law.
At the same time, there are many commandments in the Mosaic Law that were just temporary. They were never intended to be permanent. They were never intended to apply to anyone but the Jews. I mean, the law was only given to the Jews to start with. And those were fulfilled and that they were finished with Jesus. When he came and explained that the entire law turns on loving God the Father with your whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loving your neighbor as yourself.
Yet this fulfilled the whole law, those two. And then so much of Jesus ' teaching is explaining how love operates and what it involves. So Jesus isn't talking about the Mosaic Law, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments. He's talking about His teachings, His new legislation, whoever breaks the least of these commandments, will be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven, which the early Christians understood that expression to mean you're not going to be in the kingdom of heaven.
In other words, you've been designated least with regard to the kingdom of heaven. You don't merit being in it. You're not acceptable as a citizen of God's kingdom. Okay, so that's why Acts 15 makes perfect sense because Jesus, and again, he said the law and the prophets were until John. So the law was finished, but a lot of the Jewish Christians were having a difficult time. I mean, the law had been around for 1,500 years. This is how God had always worked with His people.
And so Jewish Christians, they had no trouble believing in Christ and they even accepted Gentiles being able to be Christians, but well, surely they have to live by the law. So that's why you have the Jerusalem Council that's described in Acts 15. But it's interesting the statute or commandment that they laid down, the apostolic decree, doesn't have anything in it that is simply in the Mosaic Law.
In other words, they bypass the Mosaic Law entirely and they go back to the pre-mosaic period, the laws that were in play there. They mentioned idolatry. So men like Noah, if we go back to him, okay, he did not, he served the true God. He didn't worship idols. Men like Abraham, you know, a thousand years later or so, they didn't worship idols. He mentions immorality. That was what was going on on the earth before the flood. So you have strict teachings on morality for God's people with Noah, and then blood.
That law was given to Noah, that it's okay to eat animals for food, but not their blood, because the life is in the blood. And that's, you know, go back in the passage in Genesis, and you can read that. It's right after Noah offers the sacrifices and God makes the covenant, the rainbow covenant with Noah. So these things prohibited in Acts 15, these were given to all mankind because they were laws that were binding on Noah and his descendants.
So the Gentiles were always bound to do those things, but they had gotten away from them. And the apostles are calling to mind, " Look, all of those apply. " But they don't bring up anything that is only in the law that was not also a law before Moses came upon the earth. Okay, and then you asked about Jesus said He was the Lord of the Sabbath. Well, He wasn't saying that His followers were going to need to keep obeying all of the commandments of the Mosaic Law concerning the Sabbath.
Christians today who think they're keeping the Sabbath almost never are. I mean, go back in Exodus and look at what was forbidden. I mean, you couldn't kindle a fire on the Sabbath. You couldn't cook. And so many Christians who think they're keeping the Sabbath, they do all of those things. You couldn't travel the distance that Christians travel today. You were supposed to stay at your home. And so I don't know of anyone who literally keeps those commandments today among Christians to start with.
But why Jesus said when He said He was Lord of the Sabbath, and it's discussed again in the Matthew commentary, the Pharisees had been criticizing, if I remember the incident correctly, had been criticizing his apostles for taking grain when they were walking and rubbing it in their hands and eating it as they were walking through a field. Something they were allowed to do as far as eating grain in a field. It was lawful and the Sabbath laws don't address that.
And the same within healing on the Sabbath, which isn't forbidden in the law, but Jesus said, " I am the Lord of the Sabbath. " In other words, I'm the one who gave the Sabbath law. I can change it, I can modify it, I can interpret it however I want, because I know what the law was, what the Sabbath law was all about. So when announcing he was the Lord of the Sabbath, he wasn't saying it to instill more strict keeping of the Sabbath. He was announcing that he had the power to do away with the law entirely.
In fact, he says the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. So, in this historic faith, the courses that are available to you, I do have a message on what the early Christians believed about the Sabbath. And I would encourage you to listen to that. I go into a lot more detail, but certainly the early Christians did not keep the Jewish Sabbath. They believe the Sabbath pointed to a time, the Christian era, when every day is sacred.
We don't treat one day as being more sacred than others, but we do good every day of the week, seven days a week. Very good. Thank you so much. This name is fun to try to say a bunch of times. I can never figure out how to crack myself up, but I'll just say, Gary, Jesus taught that we must live as His disciples. I tried to see what the early Christian writers had to say about this, but I couldn't find much on it. It doesn't seem like they used the term, at least in the earliest writings where I checked.
Just Ignatius used the term. Okay. Yeah, Gary, I assume is Lewandowski. I appreciate you've been on quite a few of these Q&As and I appreciate that. You've asked a lot of good questions over the months and years. And wow, you taught me something new on this one. I wouldn't have been aware of that. And when I read your question, I thought, really? And I thought, well, I'm sure you know what you're talking about. You wouldn't have asked it unless you had checked.
But I did, just to verify it, I went to my PDF version of the Ante-Nicene Fathers and typed in the word disciple and then had its search. And like you say, Ignatius mentions it. And then after that, it was always in the comments of the editors that, okay, disciple, and this was a disciple and a disciple. And it wasn't in the text of the early Christians. Now, I didn't want to spend too much time, so I skipped the distant volumes.
I did find, it is used a few times, but you know I think I learned something from that. The Greek word is mathetes, that's translated disciple. And the fact usually, when the early Christians use it, now, I mean, it does appear a number of times, but when they're using it, they're nearly always talking about the immediate disciples, the direct pupils of Jesus, or the direct pupils of the apostles. Excuse me.
So maybe we are misunderstanding this word in English, or at least misunderstanding how it was used in New Testament times. I know one of the definitions of disciple is a pupil, and they seem to be using it more in that sense of somebody who sat at your feet and learned directly from you, and they didn't use it as much for a distant learner. Now, they did use it some. I mean, there's a few quotes I found.
Tertullian says, " So then where is there any likeness between the Christian and the philosopher, between the disciple of Greece and of heaven? " So he uses, you know, disciple of heaven there. Archelaus, who is writing, I think in the early 300s or late 200s perhaps, he says, " In consequently, in addition to what has once been committed to us by the apostles, a disciple of Christ ought to receive nothing new as doctrine. " So he uses it there as a distant disciple the way we would.
Lactantius says, " This it is to be a disciple of God, and this it is to be a soldier of Christ, a soldier whom no enemy can dislodge. " And then he talks about you know what a disciple means. But he doesn't use the word a lot. So it is in there a few times. But now the irony, the point we could easily miss, is that the writings of the early Christians, they abound with discussions and teachings on what we would call discipleship.
They call it by another name, just living, obeying Christ, living the Christian life, et cetera. They sometimes use the term being a disciple, but it's not the primary term they use, but it's what they totally write about, which is the thing that I noticed when I first read them, whenever that was going on 40 years, that, wow, there's not as much theology. The further back you go, the less and less theology there is. Instead, what you get is all this discussion about Christian living.
I mean, perhaps the oldest writing, the Didache, I mean, no theology I can think of. It's, you know, the long discussion of the two ways, you know, and they're about how to live. You know, being a disciple, it doesn't use the word disciple, I don't think, but that's what it's talking about. Likewise, the letter of Diognetus, although there he describes himself by that word mathetes, you know, a disciple. He doesn't use it after that that I'm aware of.
The Shepherd of Hermas, again, I don't think it uses the term, but it's all about discipleship. And then the apologetic writings, look at the extensive writings of Clement of Alexandria. I mean, he really goes into length about discipleship. He doesn't use that term, but that's what his writings are about. So yeah, I would say we shouldn't worry about the term that they don't use that particular term.
And like I say, maybe in New Testament Greek, in the ancient among native speakers, they reserved that word more for a personal student of somebody rather than someone generations later who would learn from them. That's what I would conclude from that. In fact, two of the people who use that term that I just quoted, Tertullian and Lactantius were Latin writers. They weren't Greek writers. So again, in Latin, maybe people used it more freely, and maybe that's why we do in English today.
But yeah, again, thanks for educating me. And as a result, educating all of these listeners today. Thank you. So we're on the very last one, if you wanted to hit it. And I'll leave it up to you. Yeah, let me think, because it's a long question. Have any questions come in while we've been doing this? Let me see here. AJ, would you be better? No, there has not been. Okay. Well, let me do this. I think I'm going to put, it's a question that just came in yesterday and the answer is going to be fairly extensive.
So I show three minutes to nine. Yeah, if I answer the last question, and I'll just tell you, it's about the beard. So what we're going to do is say that till next time. So it'll give you something to look forward to to the next Q&A that I'm involved with. I don't know if that'll be next month or when we schedule that. And we'll start off with that question because I want to answer it into some detail. And then hopefully we'll have a number of other questions as well.
Again, I really appreciate the questions people have sent in. I find myself learning nearly as much as I think most of you listening. And your good questions are driving me to have to really dig and do a lot of research. And I appreciate that. Very good. We have a few announcements. One, be paying attention to a new blog that's going to be posted here next week. And next month, we're going to post another course by Chuck Pike called Resurrection Prophecies.
And it'll be something that will stretch us and make us grow. And one last reminder, look for the forum or send a comment in here of the time that you would prefer the live question and answers to take place and the day. We can't guarantee that we'll pick yours, but if there's a lot of people saying the same thing, then we might change the time. Otherwise, we'll keep it the same. Thanks a lot, and God bless. Have a wonderful evening. Bye-bye.
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