A woman, a child, and a dragon.
At first glance, this might sound like the ingredients for a frightening fairy tale.
In fact, the troubling scenes that you just witnessed are part of a true and
powerful prophecy given to the Apostle John nearly 2,000 years ago.
What does this prophecy found in Revelation 12 tell us?
Does it point to some event that happened thousands of years ago?
Or does it describe things that are going to take place in the near future?
And who do the woman, the dragon, and the child represent?
Join us now as we journey deep into a world that few have ever seen,
but all are a part of.
Revelation, the Bride, the Beast, and Babylon.
In the last book of the Bible, Revelation, the Apostle John was shown a
vision of a great struggle between good and evil, a prophecy of a battle that has
been raging behind the scenes since the dawn of time.
The secrets behind this prophecy have been shrouded in mystery for centuries,
until now.
From the kingdoms and the rulers that have fallen around the world, to the men and
women that stood up to fight for what they believed in, this is the story of
Christianity, the search for truth and the foundation for the faith of billions.
Now a great sign appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the
moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars.
Then being with child, she cried out in labor and in pain to give birth.
And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her
child as soon as it was born.
Many Bible scholars and historians have studied this prophecy over the years and
agree that the prophecy of Revelation 12 points to an event known as the Massacre
of the Innocents, which occurred in first century Judea.
In the decades leading up to the birth of Christ, the Roman Empire had conquered the
whole Mediterranean world, including Judea.
And at various points in that history, they had different people ruling over it.
Twenty years before Jesus was born, you have King Herod, a client king for
Rome.
You know, we have documents about him outside the Bible that tell us that he was
very cruel, he was capable of killing his own sons, he was ruthless and you wouldn't
want to get on his bad side.
Herod was very anxious when a small delegation of wise men from the East came
to Jerusalem announcing their search for the newborn King of the Jews.
Why would Herod be upset about that?
Because that was Herod's title, as bestowed upon him by the Roman Empire,
King of the Jews.
And he asks his astrologers, how long is it possible this child could have been
born ago?
And they determine it's probably been maybe two years at most since this child
was born, maybe less.
He finds out from the Pharisees and the Sadducees exactly where this child is to
be born.
And he finds out it's Bethlehem.
And he worried about losing his throne.
And so he has such anger against this child, he sends in the soldiers to try and
kill Jesus.
The Bible tells us this barbaric act was inspired by more than just the tyrannical
jealousy of an old king.
Many Bible scholars believe that it's part of a much bigger struggle that has spanned
the ages and is still happening today.
To uncover the secrets of this prophecy, we're going to first need to identify the
main characters, the woman, the child, and the dragon.
He says, then I saw another sign, a woman clothed with the sun, with the
moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.
Let's take a closer look at the woman.
We know that she's a symbol of someone or something.
Does the Bible tell us what this woman represents?
We gather from this that the church is the bride of Christ.
Not only is she the bride of Christ, but in a certain sense, since no man hates
his own flesh, the church is Jesus' body.
Very clearly, a woman in Scripture represents the church.
You have a woman as representative of God's people.
We see this in the Old Testament, we see it in the New Testament.
Jesus comes from the people of Israel, and then the church grows up as something
that Jesus develops.
Most importantly, this woman is about to give birth to a special male child.
Who is the child?
We have a couple of indications.
One, he rules with a rod of iron over the nations.
That's a reference to the Old Testament, where clearly God is the one ruling over
the nations with a rod of iron.
And then he says he's caught up into heaven.
And who is caught up into heaven?
Jesus Christ, right?
He's been a king of kings and lord of lords.
So these two indications pretty definitively tell us that this is Jesus.
Now let's consider the arch-villain in this important prophecy, the dragon.
And another sign appeared in heaven.
Behold, a great fiery red dragon.
You know, I wish I could just give you a fanciful theory here, but the Bible tells
us who the dragon is.
The dragon is the devil.
Both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, who tries to destroy it.
That is Satan, you know, the angel, the devil.
And so he attacks as soon as Christ comes upon the face of the earth.
The attack is there.
So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old called the devil and
Satan, who deceives the whole world.
He was cast to the earth and his angels were cast out with him.
What we see here in the first part of Revelation 12 is a symbolic portrayal of
the age-old conflict between Christ and Satan.
And we find this description going all the way back to the Garden of Eden where you
have a snake with wings.
Well, what's a snake with wings?
It's a form of a dragon.
And we have this serpent, this dragon coming all the way down through
scriptures.
All through the life and ministry of Christ, Satan tried to disrupt Jesus'
plans to provide salvation for humanity.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.
The chastisement for our peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed.
At various points they kicked him out of synagogues and wanted to push him off a
cliff.
They tried to silence him, they tortured him to death publicly.
But Satan's scheme to derail the plan of salvation was utterly shattered when Jesus
rose from the dead.
And her child was caught up to God and his throne.
With the Son of God now physically beyond his reach, the devil directed all of his
fury at the followers of Jesus, the new Christians.
He did much of this through the cruel power of imperial Rome.
Now when the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman
who gave birth to the male child.
Christianity was a struggling, small, persecuted minority that didn't
have official status in the Roman Empire.
And there were a series of persecutions, some of which were quite severe.
One of the roles of religion in the Roman Empire was to ensure the well-being of the
state.
The idea was if the gods were worshipped properly, then they would favour the
empire.
And if they were worshipped improperly, then they would, you know, bad things
would happen to the empire as a result of divine wrath.
They do not want to sacrifice to the gods, and the gods at that point include the
emperor.
So it's easy to consider these people religious scapegoats, basically.
If something's going wrong, probably it's because there are Christians around who
are refusing to give the gods their proper due.
Well, of course, you have to punish them.
And punishment meant, you know, most of the time death.
What people thought was that Christians gathered together also seemed to make love
with their brothers and sisters.
Because there were rumours about them that they commit incest.
The Christians used to call themselves brother and sister.
And they used to eat the flesh of Christ.
People heard, apparently, that Christians were eating children.
So when pagans heard about this, they thought the worst, right?
They assumed the worst.
Christians are progressively stripped of their civil offices, their military
offices, their books are confiscated, their churches are destroyed, they're
forbidden to meet, and so on, all because there's an anxiety that this is really
undermining the welfare of the empire.
As the early church suffered under this withering persecution of Rome,
their lives became a powerful testimony for truth.
While the pagans lived in constant superstitious fear, these Christians faced
torture and death with a supernatural peace.
Basically what Nero did was he fed them to the lions, he had them tied to pillars,
he put pitch on them, and then he set them on fire as human torches so they could
have the festivities continue on into the night.
You know, being stretched, pulled into two, being killed by gladiators.
Just about every creative way that you can dispose of Christians.
When facing the painful end of their lives, they often sang and rejoiced.
As thousands of Christians paid the ultimate price for their faith,
their dying prayers and blood essentially became seed for the new church.
People are so enthralled by how these Christians are dying that immediately,
you know, the reaction is, sign me up.
And so the Christians spread like wildfire.
The more you killed them, the more they stood for their faith.
Now it is true, and I think it has to be emphasized, that the early church spreads
despite the very concerted attempts at repression of extremely autocratic and
powerful emperors who set themselves very firmly against the Christians,
and yet the early church survives.
Tertullian argues, whenever something goes wrong, whenever there is a famine or
whenever there is an illness, a pestilence that sweeps through, everybody says,
the Christians to the lion.
And then he says snidely, as if so many could be fed to so few.
And his point is that you can't destroy us all.
During this time of exponential growth, Christians all across the Roman Empire,
quite literally, went underground.
This labyrinth of tunnels and chambers beneath the Roman cities became known as
the catacombs.
Now, the catacombs are important to understand.
First, many people imagine that there are caves naturally under Rome, and the
Christians simply went into them.
The catacombs, almost without exception, are not natural caves.
They were excavated by the Christians.
And so the Christians made a whole labyrinth underground.
Sometimes services would be held there, in the very tombs of the martyrs.
The second point is, the very act of burying your dead is hugely significant.
Christians believe in a resurrection of the body.
Now, of course, that belief has shifted and changed over the centuries,
but from all we understand, early Christians believed that they would be
resurrected in that actual bodily form, and therefore they chose to bury their
dead, not to cremate them.
Therefore, if you are seen to be burying your dead, especially at times when there
are intense waves of persecution, you're more or less saying to the police,
come and investigate me.
I may well be a Christian.
In A.D.
306, a new Roman emperor came into power, and things began to rapidly change.
Constantine the Great was a capable military leader and a shrewd politician.
So Constantine had to fight a series of civil wars in order to achieve his
political aim of becoming emperor, and that's his own personal and political
aim.
It's got nothing to do with Christianity.
He goes down from Gaul, modern-day France, where his power base was to confront his
rival Maxentius in Italy.
Constantine moves down from the north, and you think of Italy, there's this long
stretch, and he wins one battle after another.
As he was marching with his army, he had a dream one night where God came to
him and told him, you will become a Christian and put this sign on your
shield, and you will conquer.
Shortly after that, he actually had a vision, which history tells us was seen by
his army as well as by Constantine himself.
He looked up to the sun, and he saw a cross of light above it, and the Greek
words, Entutu Nikea, by this, conquer.
The story that he had this dream does appear at a relatively early stage.
It's described by Eusebius.
There are different sources, there are different versions, but it does seem that
Constantine does say, I've had this divine encounter, and an angel has told me that
in the sign of the cross I will conquer.
Constantine commanded his troops to adorn their shields with the Christian symbol.
His opponent then moves out of the city to face the oncoming Constantine with his
army, which has now been trained quite a bit because they've already won several
victories on the way down from the north, from Milan down.
His opponent moves across the river at the Milian Bridge, has Constantine and his
army in front of him, the river and the city behind him.
Not a great situation to be in.
So if you do not beat the oncoming army, you have nowhere to retreat, so he loses.
So for Constantine, who is certainly not yet a Christian, this is a powerful thing
because he himself believes, the Christian God has given me victory.
The Christian God is more powerful than these other deities.
I mean it is clear that Constantine made the symbol of Christianity part of the
imperial standards and that he fought under that symbol and he won.
And so being a good Roman emperor, he would then think, yeah, I got the sign.
I'm on the right path.
So if you're a pagan, or just somebody who's confused about religion,
you've had here this clash of deities.
And who's emerged on top?
The Christian God.
You can draw your own conclusions.
Gradually, the national sentiment against Christianity began reversing.
During Constantine's reign, Christians went from being a persecuted sect to
openly holding positions of influence in the courts and palaces of kings and
governors.
So a large part of the elites used to running the show automatically.
Then become also the local bishops, etc.
You know, become Christian.
It wasn't such a big leap because most of them anyway believed in one supreme divine
being which had different representations.
If you want to advance in the army or in the imperial civil service, there's every
incentive to become a Christian because all the people at the top are Christians.
So, you know, if you want to advance in the hierarchy, whether it's military,
civil service, or just at court, people become Christians.
It becomes very attractive because Constantine's edict of toleration makes it
so.
Constantine can rightfully claim the title of great, for he turned the history of the
world into a new course and made Christianity, which until then had
suffered bloody persecution, the religion of the state.
And so, as people from around the Roman Empire entered the Christian church,
they brought with them many of their former pagan beliefs and practices.
Now that Christianity has been given the status as a full legal religion,
then it becomes attractive subsequently in the next generations for a broad number of
members of this upper elite.
Now the percentage of Christians in this top 10, 15, 25 percent increases,
and it increases dramatically in the top 1-2 percent.
That's the real change.
That is when Christianity really becomes the Christianity that it is today.
Because now the people who've been running the show, they are now Christian.
Over time, church leaders began to embrace the regal robes and flamboyant ceremony
that was part of the pagan religions.
And in place of the simple commands of God, they began to teach superstitions and
man-made traditions.
Now, instead of the Christian church converting the heathen world, the pagans
were converting the church.
There's a train coming out of the first century represented by the documents we
have in the New Testament that demonstrate kind of the shape of the church there
going into this long, dark tunnel of the 2nd through 4th centuries.
And then coming out in the 4th century of this long, dark tunnel.
And the train of the church that comes out is so different than the train of the
church that goes in.
You say, what happened?
In AD 391, by the order of Emperor Theodosius I, Christianity became the
official state religion of Rome.
Worship at pagan temples was outlawed and all other religious practices ceased.
You're trying to Christianize an empire.
You're trying to Christianize a pagan culture.
The old basilicas were basically pagan temples.
Put a cross over it.
Put in paintings of biblical scenes, biblical heroes and saints and martyrs.
Christians are very purposeful and intentional about taking over pagan
temples.
And there's a notable church leader who actually writes this in a treatise that
survives.
He writes a rebuttal of pagan attacks on Christianity.
And part of his evidence is he says, your very own places of worship are now
Christian places of worship.
We have taken them over, we have cleansed out the idolatry, we have sanctified them
and we have made them places where the one true God is worshipped.
What clearer evidence could you wish that your whole system of belief is false?
Where are your gods if they're allowing this to happen?
So Christians actually deliberately at times and purposefully as a strategy take
pagan not only places but rituals or ideas and as they think subvert them to advance
the cause of spreading Christianity.
What we don't know is the extent to which they think this through and say,
well at what point is it legitimate to do this and at what point do we perhaps begin
to be taking on other ideas.
The speed with which the early church tobogganed into apostasy will take your
breath away.
As millions of pagans hastily joined the church, they were naturally reluctant to
dispose of their idol treasures.
The Romans and the Greeks were so used to being surrounded by symbols of their
deities, they began doing the same thing with Christianity.
So many of these new converts just relabeled their idols with Christian
names, like Paul, Mary and Peter.
A statue of Jupiter became a statue of Peter.
And we know that because it has a sun disk right over its head that indicates that
this is not Peter, but it's a pagan statue that's been renamed.
Instead of Romulus and Remus, hey, why not the martyrs, the great martyrs
Cosmas and Damien, right?
The representations of Isis, which is originally an Egyptian goddess but has
become very Greek already, becomes essentially the representation of Mary
carrying her child.
You have a mother and child tradition all the way down through history.
You have it in Mithraism, you have it in Babylon, you have it all the way back in
Persia.
It appears that Mary acquired some of the characteristics that were associated with
some of these other goddesses.
She wears a dark blue coat and she stands on the half moon.
She is the mother of all gods.
Isis carrying her son Horus.
That is the image that gets a new name and now the name is Mary carrying the child
Jesus.
Or a depiction of the god Hermes is shown as Christ the Good Shepherd.
Asclepius is the iconographic model for a lot of the depictions of Jesus,
yes.
A young, vibrant god with curly hair down to about here and a little beard.
Soon the statues of the saints and even Jesus began adorning the churches.
Even though God clearly forbids this practice in the Ten Commandments,
people continue to revere and to pray to these relabeled idols.
Related to the last point is the veneration of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
While it is true Mary was a faithful woman and greatly honoured to be his mother,
the scriptures teach nowhere that she is to be deified or worshipped.
Mary had always been important in ancient Christian history, but over the Middle
Ages she becomes elevated almost to a, looking at it detachedly, almost to the
rank of a semi-deity.
The Virgin Mary was believed to be the one who would speak up for guilty human beings
to her supremely virtuous and judgmental and rather censorious son.
It's a very strange image, but that's how the religious art of the period shows it.
The Bible does not venerate Mary as a special saint.
It lifts her up as a pure, wonderful woman used by God to give birth to the Messiah.
Yet, at the Council of Nicaea in 325, the Church elevated Mary to the stature of
a goddess and co-mediator with Christ.
Even as early as the late 4th century, churches were being dedicated to the
Virgin Mary.
But sadly, these were not the only heirs that slipped in during this time.
During the Apostolic Age, baptism was a sacred ceremony reserved only for those
old enough to make a rational decision for Christ.
It was a public testimony of accepting Christ and His forgiveness.
Baptism literally represents being dead and buried to our old life and being
resurrected or born again to a new life in Christ.
It comes to be, in the course of the centuries, seen more as a rite of
initiation into Christianity.
And it begins happening at earlier stages of life, when you're sort of in late
childhood or early adolescence and deemed ready to make that commitment to your
faith.
The baptism ceremony was also performed in a lake or a river where a person could be
fully submerged, signifying they were fully washed from their sins.
The practice of baptism was gradually altered by the Church.
Hundreds of years after Christ, sprinkling and pouring was introduced as a
more convenient mode of baptism.
This actually undermined the powerful symbolism of the service and it
contradicts the example of Jesus, who is baptized by immersion.
And that continues to be the case up until about the 12th century actually because
the 12th century is a time when theologians are really re-examining
Christian doctrine and they come to conclude that original sin, the sin that
all of humanity has as a result of the fall in the Garden of Eden, exists in the
soul from the moment of birth.
There was this unbiblical concept that a child could sin right away and so
therefore if he sinned, he was in danger of going to hell and burning forever in
hell.
So the only way to take care of him was to baptize him.
And he had to be baptized into the Church.
If you weren't a member of the Church, it was tickets for you.
So theologians say, you know what, we need to start baptizing babies
immediately, as soon as possible after they're born so that in case they die,
and of course this is a period when mortality is high and a lot of babies do
die, they can get into heaven.
Another Christian truth that was altered by pagan influence was the Lord's Supper.
Jesus instituted the communion service, also known by some as the Eucharist,
to be a beautiful yet simple ceremony where his followers would drink
unfermented wine and eat unleavened bread.
These symbols of Jesus' sinless body and blood are designed to help believers
remember the sacrifice and the teachings of Christ.
By far the most important rite for late medieval Christians was the Eucharist or
communion, or as they most commonly called it, the Mass.
Men and women all come together and take the sacrament.
They celebrate what we would call communion, taking the body and blood of
Jesus Christ.
But again, under the influence of heathen rituals, the holy communion service was
gradually changed by church leaders into a mystical ceremony.
In this new ritual, fermented wine was used and the priest, allegedly,
had the power to transform the bread and the wine into the actual body and blood of
Christ.
This is transubstantiation, the notion that a priest transforms the Eucharist
into the body and blood of Christ through the pronunciation and the formula,
Hoc esanum corpus meum, this is my body.
They were powerful words believed to have the property that when they were uttered,
God transformed the nature of the bread and the wine into the body and blood of
the risen Jesus Christ.
Even to the point where later on they say, we are creating God by speaking the words
of Mysticogy.
Essentially, what happened on the altar was that bread became body, wine became
blood, but they just still looked like bread and wine.
This offering of the sacrifice in the Eucharist, this sacrifice of praise,
this communal meal, now becomes not a remembrance of the sacrifice, but a
sacrifice in of itself and is giving salvation.
They believed and they taught that in the Mass, Jesus Christ, in the person of the
priest, sacrifices Christ to God the Father and thereby wins good, wins a
quantum of holiness, which the church can then assign to the beneficiaries of that
Mass.
Because people believed that by celebrating a Mass, you were doing
something good, which was offered up to God, there was a theological rationale for
doing it lots and lots of times.
By 1415 AD, at the Council of Constance, church leaders further decreed that only
the priest could drink the wine and the laity would only receive the bread.
Yet the Bible clearly says that when Jesus established the communion service,
they all drank from it.
About 300 years after Christ, the church began to deviate from another of the Ten
Commandments, specifically the fourth commandment that requires believers to
remember the seventh day as the Sabbath.
Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath
of the Lord your God.
In the Roman Empire, Jews are an old religion and old religions are respected.
When the Jews kept fighting against Rome, what had been kind of an umbrella of
safety under Judaism becomes a lightning rod to Christianity.
The Christians become alienated from the Jews.
Jews persecuted them and so they're trying to distance themselves from the Jews.
Church leaders began to devalue the seventh day Sabbath of the Ten
Commandments, in preference for the more popular Roman Sunday.
Some Christians mistakenly thought that you should fast on the Sabbath,
but you could feast on Sunday.
That's what the pagans did.
They feasted on Sunday, fasted on Saturday.
Not a Jewish concept.
The Jews fasted Friday and feasted Sabbath.
But that's how some Christians thought of it.
So if you're fasting on one day and you're feasting on the next, you can guess which
day becomes the more popular day.
And Christ is resurrected on a Sunday and there's a very natural tendency therefore
to mark that and celebrate that.
There's a third reason and that is the influence of sun worship that creeps into
the church.
And when sun worship begins to creep into the church, Constantine can make use of
that to lead to the exaltation of Sunday, the day of the sun, as being the day that
people should worship on.
This gradual departure from God's law over the centuries has become so widely
accepted that most are shocked to learn that Sunday keeping has no foundation in
the Bible.
In A.D.
313, Constantine published the Edict of Milan, establishing Sunday as a day of
rest.
The Emperor's Sunday law had nothing to do with Christianity.
It was actually to honor the main Greco-Roman sun god called Helios or
Apollo.
The Emperor Constantine became a convert to Christianity and also because he
remained partial to the sun god, the Emperor Constantine moved the day of
worship from Saturday, the Sabbath, as had been traditional in Judaism,
obviously, to Sunday, the day of the sun god.
And ever since, Christian folks, at least for the most part,
overwhelmingly, have held their day of worship on Sunday rather than Saturday.
This is clear from another Edict of Constantine given in A.D.
321 when the Emperor ordered On the venerable day of the sun, let the
magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed.
Notice, the Edict uses the word sun, S-U-N.
It's also recorded that Constantine the Great made a law for the whole empire that
Sunday should be kept as a day of rest.
Obviously, this change did not infiltrate the Church overnight.
History tells us that for decades, the seventh day Sabbath, together with
Sunday, were both observed as holy days.
The very, very early Church clearly is still worshipping on the Jewish Saturday
in the times of the Apostles.
But by the mid to late third century, that has largely been abandoned or is in
the process of being abandoned.
By the early fourth century, in many parts of the Roman world, Christians are
generally worshipping on Sunday.
A lot of Christians during this period of time would observe the Sabbath,
and then on Sunday they would have a service remembering the resurrection,
and then they'd go about their regular work.
It's during the time of Constantine in which the idea of transferring the
solemnity of the Sabbath to Sunday is first expressed.
Centuries earlier, the prophet Daniel had foretold, a religious power would arise
that would think to change times and laws.
Within the Ten Commandments, there is only one law that is also a time, the Sabbath.
The doctrine of hellfire was also distorted by pagan mythology.
In the book of Revelation, the Bible teaches that following the great judgment
day, the lost will be cast into a lake of fire.
At that time, each person is punished according to what they deserve,
and then they're totally consumed and eternally perish.
And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, but rather fear
Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing.
The priests began to teach that hell was a place of eternal torment, ruled by the
devil, and it began at the moment of death.
The fallen church was able to use this frightful concept of never-ending torture
to terrorize and manipulate both the king and the commoner.
Most tragic of all, this false teaching portrays Jesus as some sort of sadistic
fiend.
It's encouraged some atheists and agnostics to challenge Christianity and
Christianity's idea of a loving God if he does something that is worse than even
what Hitler did.
No matter what somebody has done, it's billions of years of torture fitting
the crime.
So there have been people who have hated God and have learned to hate God because
of this.
Another pagan concept that infiltrated Christian thinking was regarding the
afterlife.
Purgatory is the idea that teaches that, at death, some people will enter a
temporary hellfire where they're purified for heaven.
Purgatory is a halfway house.
Halfway kind of between heaven and hell.
And the thing with purgatory is you can escape from it.
As the mass says, consigned to flames of woe.
It's filled with vermin.
It's filled with sulfuric smells.
It may be quite a bit better than hell, but it's no picnic either.
The church develops gradually and again it grows on the church by slow degrees.
The idea that anyone who dies with their works of satisfaction incomplete will
probably have to pay them off in some place of post-mortem suffering.
They are suffering in order to be purified, purged from their sins and
offenses which they've committed in life.
Medieval people believe almost everyone will be saved and redeemed who is a
baptized member of the church.
But almost everyone will also have to make satisfaction for the sins that they've
committed and that they haven't confessed by spending some time in purgatory.
So the real task then is to reduce the time in purgatory.
Many people misunderstand purgatory and hell.
There's an idea you can get out of hell.
You can't.
If you go to hell, that's it.
There's no release.
You're very, very wicked and you're just doomed.
But most people have a lot of bad things in us.
So how can we be made good for heaven?
We have to have it purged out of us and thus you get the word purgatory.
Therefore, most Christians believe that their relatives are suffering in
purgatory.
And purgatory is not a nice place, but you're there for thousands of years.
The idea of purgatory dates back centuries before Jesus' time.
Writings from Plato as early as 400 BC helped shed light on where this concept of
purification and punishment came from.
However, purgatory didn't become regarded as an actual place until centuries later.
Between 1160 and 1180 AD, theologians developed the doctrine of purgatory,
leading to the formal acceptance of it at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274.
The Church then offers to support the dead in purgatory by its prayers and by
attributing to people the benefits of the sacraments, especially the communion.
This is all perfectly orthodox.
The Church believes that this is doing good and lay people seem to be willing to
put large amounts of money into it.
And you have an extraordinary proliferation of institutions founded
principally for priests to say Masses for the souls of the departed, particularly in
the 14th and 15th centuries.
This doctrine was fabricated to manipulate the Masses for financial gain.
People were willing to pay huge amounts of money to release a loved one from the
tortures of purgatory.
Of course, believers could never really be sure when someone left purgatory,
so the money kept flowing into the pockets of corrupt priests.
The head of the Church would have people going out to raise money and encourage
people to give their money to the Church, buy people out of purgatory, so they could
fund these elaborate buildings.
This belief in purgatory is also built on the dangerous concept that the works and
the prayers of the living can somehow alter the destiny of the dead.
Yet Jesus made it very clear there is no limbo or purgatory.
After death, a person's next conscious thought was the resurrection and their
eternal reward.
Those who have done good to the resurrection of life and those who have
done evil to the resurrection of condemnation.
Central in the Gospel message is the teaching of how we obtain forgiveness.
This was another major Bible truth that suffered during this age of compromise.
It was taught that if a person wished to be forgiven, he or she must first confess
their sins through a priest, through a rite called the sacrament of penance,
more commonly known as confession.
So in order to make up for our insufficient goodness and our actual wrong
actions, we must all, lay people as well as clergy, we must all confess our sins at
least once a year and preferably more often than that to a priest.
This was a negative development on several counts.
First of all, it's taught nowhere in the Bible.
Secondly, it puts a mortal man in the place of Christ and it made God seem
detached from the average person.
Of course, at the time, it also placed the priest in an awkward position to hear
about all the wicked deeds of his parishioners.
When one goes to a priest in the Middle Ages, there are really three things that
are accomplished through confessing one's sin.
First of all, you make the confession.
The priest grants the words of assurance that the sin is absolved.
It's gone.
But a person, because they have violated the laws of the church and the teachings
of Christ, has to perform a work of satisfaction in order to make up for the
fact that they have sinned.
The Bible teaches that mankind is helpless to save himself.
This is why Jesus came to this world.
The scriptures teach that salvation depends entirely upon our trusting God for
mercy and grace, that we don't deserve it.
It's a magnificent gift that can never be earned by our efforts or good works.
Even obedience comes through a gift of grace.
The New Testament doctrine of salvation by faith is widely taught and understood
today.
But during the darkness of the Middle Ages, it was easier to convince the
illiterate masses that they needed to perform good deeds in order to earn God's
favor.
The people were taught that if a sinner was to have any hope of appeasing God,
he or she would need to pay huge sums of money, perform painful acts of penance,
or make some weary pilgrimage.
This would often include an assignment to recite certain prayers over and over as a
requirement to obtain forgiveness.
Forty Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers and putting a coin in the collection box.
In the heathen religions of the world, the idea of repetitive prayers or chants
was nothing new.
It was believed that you could appease or influence the gods by constant echoing of
prayers or by using special magical words.
Jesus clearly warned against this form of prayer.
And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do,
for they think that they will be heard for their many words.
Corrupt church leaders knew in order to maintain any lasting power over God's
people, they would need to separate them from the one thing that they knew could
expose these deceptions, the Holy Scriptures.
The Bible was not initially withheld from the people.
It was accessible.
But in time, when people saw differences, they challenged the clergy.
And so it was in their interest over time not to make available the Bible to the
people.
Only the priests can interpret Scripture because they combined Scripture with
tradition.
And so tradition interpreted Scripture.
And the only ones who understood this long tradition were the priests.
And they could read the Scriptures.
Many of the common people couldn't even read the Scriptures.
And they wanted to make sure that they interpreted Scripture in a way that would
harmonize with tradition.
So from the 5th century to the 15th century, a thousand years of history,
it was taught and accepted that only religious leaders were qualified enough to
explain the sacred texts.
The common man was told he could never hope to understand the Scriptures without
the assistance of a priest.
With this lethal deception, the church laity was kept in darkness.
Meanwhile, the visible church, once a biblical bastion of truth,
had degraded into a corrupt political organization trimmed with spiritualistic
ceremonies.
It's no wonder that this time period of cultural, economic, and spiritual
deterioration is known as the Dark Ages.
It's tragic how in just a few short centuries, the wonderful light that had
been blazing from the luminous bright of Christ had been eclipsed by pagan
traditions.
Now, a very different kind of woman emerged to take her place.
And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, which was full of names of
blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.
The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and
precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and
the filthiness of her fornication.
And on her forehead a name was written, Mystery Babylon the Great, the mother of
harlots and the abominations of the earth.
I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the
martyrs of Jesus.
And when I saw her, I marveled with great amazement.
In Revelation chapter 17, John sees a woman who he describes as strikingly
different from the pure woman of Revelation 12.
Who is this new bloodthirsty harlot, and what about the bizarre beast that
she's riding?
If you're not sitting down, this might be the time to do so.
You may find what you're about to hear a bit shocking.
There is only one empire, one church, one institution that matches the criteria
in this prophecy, the Roman Catholic Church.
This does not mean that all the people within this faith are bad, insincere,
or lost.
The Catholic people are among the most kind and have accomplished a phenomenal
amount of good throughout history.
This is really about a bigger struggle between spiritual powers and institutions
battling over the truth of scripture.
But now we need to pull back the veil and really take a hard look at the facts.
In Revelation 17-1, we observe this harlot woman sits on many waters.
Fortunately, the angel explains the meaning of this symbol for us in verse 15.
Then he said to me, the waters which you saw, where the harlot sits, are peoples,
multitudes, nations, and tongues.
So the woman reigns over a densely populated civilization.
You've probably heard the expression, all roads lead to Rome.
During the zenith of their rule, the Romans had built a network with 50,000
miles of roads circulating throughout the entire empire.
Just as imperial Rome began to unravel, the church in Rome was gaining in
strength.
In effect, the Catholic church kind of rushes in to fill the power vacuum that is
left by the fall of the Roman Empire.
And you get into situations where, for example, in the middle of the 5th
century when Attila the Hun is advancing on the city of Rome with his army,
the emperor is not the one who goes out to stop him, the pope is, the bishop of Rome.
This kind of prominence, political prominence as well as religious
prominence, comes to really define the pope's role.
The prophecy also indicates that the woman is riding a beast with 7 heads and 10
horns.
Obviously these things are symbols.
This creature here clearly represents the same monster with 7 heads and 10 horns
that we just saw warring with the bride of Christ in chapter 12.
And it's the same beast that the world is compelled to worship in chapter 13.
So what do these 7 heads and 10 horns represent?
The 7 heads are 7 mountains on which the woman sits.
The 10 horns which you saw are 10 kings.
There is only one city in the world that sits on 7 hills like this, one major city,
and that's the city of Rome.
So there is no doubt in most expositors' minds that when John is talking about this
woman, he is talking about Rome.
So you see the connection here.
7 heads, 7 mountains.
You go to Revelation 12, 7 heads.
Revelation 13 deals with 7 heads.
There is a continuity here.
It is within the city of Rome, called the City of Seven Hills,
that the entire area of Vatican State proper is now confined.
There is only one church that is also an independent country and has political
world power, the Vatican.
This country with the world's smallest population was established as an
independent state with 109 acres within Rome.
Behind the walls of Vatican City, there are less than 1,000 people living
within this small country that is governed by the Pope, who has absolute executive,
legislative, and judicial powers.
Ambassadors from around the world meet with the Pope and his representatives,
seeking the influence and guidance of this international religious power.
Even the United Nations will assemble to be addressed by the Pope.
When the Western Roman Empire fell, their territory fragmented into 10 primary
divisions.
The 10 horns represent the 10 kings or kingdoms into which Imperial Rome was
eventually split.
The 10 horns are a description of Rome, which breaks up into 10 smaller kingdoms.
Throughout history, Catholicism has been dominating many kingdoms.
So you have the church riding on a political power.
See, because the woman raised the beast, and so for many centuries she was in
control.
You have a union of church and state.
The names of blasphemy is another key element to this prophecy that points
directly at the Roman Catholic Church.
We hold upon this earth the place of God Almighty.
This puts a mortal man in a position of God and is ultimately the very definition
of blasphemy.
This is not meant to question the sincerity of any specific Pope.
But the prophecy is addressing the office that he holds and the institution he
represents.
The woman is also clothed in unique colors.
She has specific colors that are mentioned here, not the color of white anymore.
But now we have colors that represent, strangely enough, two things.
Royalty and prostitution.
And specific colors that we happen to see coming out in the historic Christian
church later on, in the colors of the priests of the historic Christian church.
Not only were these the principal colors of the Roman Caesars, but according to the
Catholic Encyclopedia, purple is the official color of bishops and scarlet for
cardinals.
In addition to the scarlet and the purple, we see that this harlot or corrupt church
possesses vast mineral riches.
When one considers its countless artistic treasures of gold, silver, and pearls,
the Roman Catholic Church is by far the wealthiest religious institution on earth.
Every year, tourists come from around the world to view the glittering opulence of
the Roman church.
Another disturbing mark of this woman is found in verse 6.
History reveals that the Roman church was the worst oppressor of Christians and Jews
over the centuries.
In fact, historians tell us, over 50 million martyrs fell victim to the
terrible inquisitions and persecutions of the Church of Rome.
So what we have here is a prophecy saying that the church would engage in incredible
persecution, and that's exactly what took place.
And the church started a legal process, a legal system, known as inquisition,
to interrogate these people, to force as many as possible to recant and retract
their ideas, and to grab hold of the leaders of the movement and to stop them
spreading any further.
The highest number of deaths ever recorded occurred when the church persecuted those
who disagreed with it.
And that level of repression continues through the Middle Ages.
So this woman, or church, is a persecuting power that oppresses Christ's true
followers.
We'll be looking at several brave souls that risked their lives to speak up
against the corrosive pagan influences and to share God's Word during this time of
spiritual darkness.
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.
Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined.
Living in Lyon, France, there was one young man who would alter the course of
Christian history.
Peter Waldo, also known as Valdez, a very wealthy and educated young
merchant, had a life-changing experience.
A young friend of Waldo's died suddenly.
Realizing the brevity of life and the vanity of worldly treasure, Waldo made a
firm decision to forsake all for Christ.
He gave his wealth to the poor and became an itinerant preacher.
Waldo taught that the Bible should be understood literally and freely proclaimed
to the people in their own language.
He encouraged believers to live lives of simplicity and poverty.
And at the same time, he boldly denounced the excesses of the priests.
By A.D.
1170, Peter Waldo had gathered a large number of followers who were referred to
as the poor of Lyon, or Waldensians.
Peter Waldo, by conventional scholarship, is the founder of the Waldensies,
a group of Bible-believing individuals living in France and Italy.
He was a Catholic layman who became inspired by the preaching regarding the
early church.
And he started a group of traveling preachers who would teach the gospel.
He spoke against transubstantiation in the mass, although there are some Waldensies
who seem to go to mass and then do their own worships as well.
Once officially trained inquisitors are out in Europe, they start finding people
whom they start calling Waldensies, or followers of Valdez, all over the
place.
So, sprinkled across Europe, you get these little cells of communities of people
where lay people are mostly, let's be honest, they're mostly going to Catholic
churches most of the year.
But once or twice a year, maybe every year or two, they will have a traveling team of
Waldensian pastors who will arrive and talk to them.
Everywhere he went, Peter Waldo saw people hungering for truth.
He believed that there was a famine in the land for the word of God, so Waldo paid a
cleric to assist him in translating the New Testament into the Franco vernacular.
The story is that Valdez commissioned two learned religious people in Lyon to
prepare a translation of part of the Bible and some sayings of the fathers into the
vernacular language.
Something between French and Provençal, it's really kind of hard to describe.
But it seems to have established a tradition that the Waldensian communities
would try to acquire copies of scripture in the common language of the people.
And they would carry scriptures around with them, they would act as merchants and
traders, share the scriptures with the people where they went.
There's even references to them sending their young people to the great
universities and colleges of the land so they could share their faith there and
also gain an understanding of contemporary theology and use it to reach out to the
larger community.
But the Roman church could not long tolerate this free preaching of the gospel
by peasants.
During the Third Lateran Council in 1179, Waldo's ideas were officially condemned as
heresy.
And soon after, he and his followers were excommunicated.
Driven away from Lyon, the Waldensians settled in the high valleys of Piedmont
and the French Alps.
Here, among their families, the Bible was made the chief study.
The gospels of Matthew and John were committed to memory along with many of the
epistles.
With no printing press, the Waldensians were frequently employed in hand-copying
the scriptures.
Known for their strict adherence to the Bible, these lay preachers spread their
teachings abroad while traveling as peddlers.
To avoid arrest, they'd sometimes sew hand-copied passages of the Bible into the
lining of their garments.
And then they'd carefully share them when they detected an open heart.
Even following the death of Peter Waldo in 1218, the Roman church continued to
fiercely persecute the Waldensians.
For centuries, many were tried and sentenced to death in various European
countries.
The Holy Spirit stirred upon many within the church who courageously stood up and
called for reform.
One such man was John Wycliffe, an English theologian and lay preacher,
translator, and teacher at Oxford.
His education proved to be a great asset to him as he began to address the
cancerous errors that were spreading among God's people.
Wycliffe never wanted to set himself up against the church's leaders.
But as he saw the glaring contradictions between what the Bible said and what the
church was doing, he could not keep silent.
Well, Wycliffe is really a rather unusual person to have become a heretic because he
was an Oxford Don, he was very much brought up within the power structure of
the church, and yet he was distressed by what he saw around him.
As he saw Rome substituting tradition for the Holy Scripture, he accused the
priesthood of withholding the bread of life from the spiritually starving people.
He believed that the Bible was a supreme authority, and he commissioned the
translation of the Bible.
He had some followers called Lollards that went around distributing Scripture and
preaching.
They did believe in Bible reading, they did read Wycliffe's Bible,
and they did believe in the same kind of simpler piety that the Waldensians and
others had advocated as early as the 12th century.
This was the greatest gift he could give the common people.
No document has altered the course of history more than the English translation
of the Bible.
He brought forward some of the truths that Protestantism would later bring forward.
And as I just suggested, his teachings, even though it's centuries before,
is preparing the way for many people in England to accept the Reformation when it
comes.
Wycliffe had the audacity to declare that the universal authority of the Pope was
unbiblical.
It was under these conditions that on May 22nd, 1377, Pope Gregory XI condemned the
writings of John Wycliffe, stating that his teachings were dangerous to the church
and the state.
Wycliffe continued to teach salvation through Christ alone, and that the
scriptures were infallible, rather than the Roman church.
Over time, his writings and work of reform spread out like seismic waves,
influencing millions of God's people.
They can be read anywhere where there are schoolmen, where there are scholastic
theologians who can pick them up.
They do travel, and they travel to Bohemia, and they inspire John Hus as
well.
And Hus shares the attack on transubstantiation, on clerical power,
and on, as with Wycliffe, on the wealth of the church.
Hus was only a young boy when Wycliffe passed away, but Wycliffe's works had a
powerful influence on his life and his future mission.
John Hus was a Bohemian preacher, also a university professor, and also
king's chaplain for a while.
He's entrusted with, eventually, with the office of preaching at a little
chapel that has just been founded, the Bethlehem Chapel.
Like Wycliffe, John Hus preached the scriptures in the language of the people,
a practice that the church had now forbidden, in favor of the lost language
of Latin.
He did preach in the vernacular language, and the Bohemians had had a scripture in
their language, despite church councils.
And it's from that he comes into contact with the teachings of Wycliffe,
and he especially is drawn to the attack on transubstantiation, the attack on the
wealth and influence of the church.
Walking through town one day, Hus noticed a couple of paintings that two men had
displayed as a silent protest.
Each of the canvases portrayed a different scene.
On one was the image of the lowly Jesus, humbly entering Jerusalem with his
travel-worn disciples.
On the other canvas was an image of the Pope, dressed in rich and luxurious
clothing, carrying on a leader and followed by a regal procession.
The paintings certainly presented a contrast between Jesus, who said that
foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, and the Son of Man has nowhere
to lay his head, with the magnificent splendor of the papal palace and the papal
entourage.
Moved by this knowledge, he began to publicly denounce the pride, ambition,
and corruption of the clergy, and he fearlessly called for the church to
reform.
If you must interpret scripture according to the truth, truth is defined by what the
church believes, how do you correct an error in the church?
You don't have a check on mistakes.
There is no correcting the church.
And that, I think, is the fundamental flaw of what allowed the church to start going
wrong and keep going wrong.
John Hus was invited to come to Constance, Germany to defend his criticism of the
Church of Rome.
Sigismund, king of Hungary and later the Holy Roman Empire, guaranteed him a safe
passage.
But immediately upon Hus' arrival in the city, he was arrested and placed in the
dungeon at Gadelben Castle.
King Sigismund was greatly angered at the imprisonment of Hus, and he threatened the
church council.
But the council convinced Sigismund that promises made to a heretic were not
binding.
On July 6, 1415, the council gathered into the cathedral after mass and liturgy,
and John Hus was then led in for his trial.
He was asked to defend his positions.
In the act of defending them, he was found to have voiced a heresy, and so he was
seized and tried for heresy.
Guards then led Hus away to be executed.
At the place of his execution, Hus stood firm.
As the flames rose about him, he was actually able to lift his voice in song.
Among his dying words, Hus predicted, In a hundred years, God will raise up a
man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed.
Raised in a humble home in Mansfield, Germany, Martin Luther, theologian,
author, composer, and priest, was arguably the best-known religious reformer of the
16th century.
Luther was born on November 10, 1483, nearly 70 years after the martyrdom
of John Hus.
Born into a hard-working middle-class family with several brothers and sisters,
Luther developed a firm character and personality.
The Luther family seems to have been, to some extent, a family of overachievers.
They were very strict, according to Luther's later stories, they were very
strict on the young Martin, and they certainly saw that the way forward for
their son was through education.
But when he was young, he was intended to become a lawyer.
However, a dramatic experience forever altered the course of his life.
Luther is caught in a thunderstorm and fears for his life.
He's outside and he fears he'll be struck by lightning.
The lightning was striking in front of him and behind him and on both sides of him.
And so in terror, he cries out and promises that if a saint will save him,
he will become a monk.
He called out to St. Anne, the saint of hopeless causes, St. Anne, deliver me and
I'll become a monk.
And he kept his word.
In spite of his father's angry protests, Luther dropped his law studies,
sold his books, and entered a closed Augustinian monastery at Erfurt and fully
dedicated his time to the monastic life.
Following his desperate longing for salvation, he practiced frequent fastings,
long hours of prayer, austere living, and endless confession.
If anyone could have gained heaven as a monk, then I would indeed have been among
them.
He found an elder confessor there who realized that Luther had a particularly
sensitive soul.
And this confessor realized that Luther needed to teach the Bible.
So he becomes, simultaneously, professor of theology, preacher in the
town church, and a member of the religious community in the Augustinian house.
He's basically doing three jobs.
At Wittenberg, he learned to study the Bible in its original tongues.
Soon, he began to freely share the truths that he was learning in his lectures,
and his listeners were delighted.
In 1510, Luther made a pilgrimage to visit the headquarters of the church in the holy
city of Rome.
He was sickened to witness the terrible greed and wickedness that he saw among all
classes of the clergy.
His great expectation of the holy city was crushed as he beheld the decadent
lifestyles of the monks and the priests.
This was in stark contrast to his very frugal life in Germany.
But Luther's most unsettling revelation was yet to come.
He went to Rome and he was climbing up the stairs there and hears a voice,
not necessarily a verbal one, but one in his head, the just shall live by faith,
and so climbing up these pilot stairs on his knees, which was supposed to earn you
some kind of assurance of not burning in purgatory for too long, and it just dawned
on him as he looked around, what are we doing?
The Bible says this comes by faith and he got up off his knees and this seemed to be
a turning point.
Luther finally understood the importance of trusting in the merits of Christ for
forgiveness.
After returning from Rome in 1512, Luther was awarded the Doctorate of
Divinity at the University of Wittenberg and he began to boldly preach to the
people that Christians should not accept any doctrine unless it came from the
Bible.
And it was this principle of sola scriptura that would become the battle cry
of the Reformation.
It's in a series of three treatises in 1520 that he presents the notion that now,
since the tradition of the church has become so corrupted by human innovation,
that the church should only follow the testimony of the scriptures.
This is the common thread in the story that describes the decline of the church.
It's when people lost scripture and the ability to read scripture for themselves
and there was a barrier between them and scripture and them and Christ.
And then it began to recover when Martin Luther and his colleagues decided that
scripture really was the authority.
Sola scriptura, tota scriptura, prima scriptura.
And they began to climb back out.
About this same time, Rome was breaking ground for the construction of the
magnificent new St. Peter's Basilica.
The church sent John Tetzel, a Dominican friar, to Germany to sell indulgences in
order to raise the funds necessary for the cathedral.
The church believes not only that its services and offerings can help the dead,
but also that the head of the church, in the West, the Pope, can, out of the
superabundant saved up grace which is in the possession of the church, the church
can simply declare that someone's penalties owed after they died are just
wiped out.
That's what's called an indulgence.
The full plenary indulgence absolved a person of all the sins that they had
committed up to that time and thus speeded you, according to church teaching,
through a purgatory directly into heaven.
By very late in the Middle Ages, the church has got into its head that it
can say to people, if you are willing to make an offering to the church,
the church will give an indulgence in the manner of an offering for your departed
family friend, relative, loved one.
And that loved one will escape the pains of purgatory, supposedly immediately.
This became, by the 14th and 15th century, a very popular belief and people clamored
for indulgences.
When Luther learned that his members were purchasing indulgences, he was outraged.
As the people came to him to cash in their indulgences, he flatly refused to honor
them.
Luther declared that what they really needed to do was to sincerely repent and
turn from their sins.
This was the first issue that forced Luther into battle with his own beloved
church.
On October 31st, 1517, Luther nailed his famous protest to the doors of the All
Saints Church in Wittenberg.
What are the 95 theses that he famously nails to the door of Wittenberg Castle
Church?
It's an academic invitation to a debate.
You write down 95 thesis statements and you're basically saying, here are my
proposals.
And they're always more strongly worded than you may think because it's a debating
point.
It's what's called a disputation.
The 95 theses is just a series of 95 propositions that he intends to spark a
university debate on.
And this is standard issue, late medieval academic practice.
So Luther is engaging in a very narrowly academic exercise.
It's like publishing a paper in a scholarly journal today.
As a historian myself at times, you're not actually expecting very many
people to read this.
You're just going into a very narrow circle.
And so he takes it and he nails it to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church because
that's the traditional place you post invitations for a disputation.
So he's not expecting anything necessarily to come of this.
And this got a lot of people's attention, including the Pope's.
As far as Luther's concerned, he's not promoting something that the church would
be hostile to.
He believes he's promoting things that the church will welcome.
And indeed, if you go back to the early church fathers, including Augustine,
you can find many things in their writings that accord with Luther's ideas.
So Luther doesn't feel, you know, he actually expects people to sort of say,
oh, great, thanks for pointing that out, which was perhaps a trifle naive and
perhaps that's what comes from him being an academic.
But Luther isn't expecting, he's not trying to set up another movement.
Just the opposite.
But the reality, of course, is that the church does not welcome much of what
Luther has to say.
And a bull went out, a papal bull, meaning a kind of declaration,
condemning Luther and his writings and saying they should be consigned to the
flames.
The bull was delivered at Wittenberg and instead of consigning the writings to the
flames, Luther had a big gathering in Wittenberg and consigned the bull to the
flames.
And there was a burning of this papal bull.
And this, of course, was a throwdown now, right?
The challenge had been sent out and the challenge had been responded to.
And that's when Luther says, right, if you condemn me, I will condemn you,
because he believes this is a matter of truth.
And so if the church is condemning biblical truth, then the church must
actually be antichrist.
And he calls it that.
And, of course, once you call somebody antichrist, it's rather hard to reach
consensus and compromise.
So the German emperor organized a hearing and all the important princes and priests
were assembled for a historic meeting at a place called Worms.
So there are representatives here of all the different princes, nobles,
and free cities of the empire.
And Luther goes believing he'll have a chance to debate.
And the church knows that Luther's a brilliant debater and they're not going to
give him any chance.
He was pulled up before the group.
He was shown a pile of his books.
He was asked two questions.
Are these books yours?
And will you recant?
Will you withdraw the teachings you've made in them?
And he didn't immediately reply.
He said, well, yes, they are my books, but there's many things written there.
And I need some time to think about it.
He almost loses his nerve, but ultimately he doesn't.
And the next day he comes in and he starts to play with words.
And they say, you know, are all these your works and do you recant them?
And he says, well, do you ask me to recant all my works?
Because some of my works everyone in the church would agree with.
I've written against certain evils that the church generally agrees are wrong.
And he starts, he's trying to get into a debate.
And the authorities aren't having any of this.
And they say, no, no, no.
You just have to say, are you going to retract these?
Are you going to recant?
It's a heroic moment, especially because as far as Luther is concerned,
he believes it's going to lead to his death.
Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason,
for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known
that they have often erred and contradicted themselves, I am bound by the
Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.
I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go
against conscience.
Here I stand.
I can do no other.
May God help me.
Amen.
The council did not have much it could say in reply.
Luther was declared an outlaw.
His literature was banned and his arrest ordered.
The documents said, we want him to be apprehended and to be punished as a
notorious heretic.
Now Luther had been given a safe conduct to the Diet of Worms, just as Huss had
been given to the Council of Constance just over a hundred years earlier.
And there were those authorities who urged the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to ignore
the safe conduct, just as the Emperor Sigismund had with Huss's safe conduct.
Charles V didn't want to be known as the second emperor that had reneged on a good
faith conduct passage.
And so for whatever reason, this reason and maybe some others, he allowed Luther
to leave town and start home.
The thought was he would probably be killed by someone on the way because there
was an open price on his head.
Instead, of course, Luther is kidnapped by an armed group of men who are actually
working for Frederick the Wise, who decides he needs to take Luther out of
circulation for a little while.
To Wartburg Castle, which the Elector Frederick knew about, but nobody knew what
had happened to Luther.
Many people thought that he was dead.
For the next year, from this lonely exile, which Luther referred to as my Patmos,
the former priest continued his work of prolific writing.
He even managed to translate the New Testament from Greek into the German
language.
Now, about 72 years before Luther completed his New Testament translation,
Gutenberg changed history with the invention of the printing press.
With this wonderful new technology, the truth of God's Word began to spread
like the leaves of autumn all through Europe.
And so, in the midst of this great reformation, the Lord armed his people
with the sword of his Word.
Around this same time, several other powerful champions of truth rose up from
within the Church of Rome.
Among these brave men calling for a return to the scriptures were Philip Melanchthon,
William Tyndale, John Calvin, and John Knox, just to name a few.
As the Reformers preached and the printing press clattered, the teeming masses
studied the Word of God.
Gradually, the light of truth began to dissolve the shackles of error and
superstition that had bound the people for ages.
Like a breath of fresh spring air, Europe experienced a religious
renaissance.
And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
The book of Revelation also foretells that in the final days, the dragon,
Satan, will once again intensify his efforts to persecute the Church of God.
They are identified as the ones who keep the commandments of God and have the
testimony of Jesus.
Revelation warns that in the last days, there will be a very convincing
counterfeit of God's real Church that compromises the truth of scripture.
Jesus warns it will nearly deceive the whole world.
For false Christs and false prophets will rise and show signs and wonders to
deceive, if possible, even the elect.
Shortly after this final deception, Christ will return.
And He will come for a Church that has been purified from all the false
traditions and paganism.
It will be a Church that requires a thus saith the Lord for every doctrine that it
holds.
Jesus also said that when He returns, the world will be absorbed in selfishness,
violence, and evil.
And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars, for nation will rise against nation,
and there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes.
The love of many will grow cold, and then the end will come.
This spiritual war has been raging down through the ages, and it's clear that this
prophecy is fast fulfilling.
As the battle intensifies, we are all faced with a choice.
Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve.
Friends, we've just seen how the glorious light of God's Church was overshadowed and
distorted through the influence of mythology.
We've also seen how early Christians were gradually enticed to adopt pagan rituals
and traditions in place of biblical truth.
But then God rose up faithful men and women to resist the errors of an entire
empire.
History is now repeating itself.
Soon, all will either join the Bride of Christ or follow the Beast of Babylon.
Where will you stand?
The Bible is clear.
The evidence is irrefutable.
The decision is ultimately yours.
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