A little pause... and we are back.
From
1203 to 1805 Fifty million Christians died Suffering at the hands of Rome Because
they believed in Christ alone They died through Europe, especially Spain For they
saw all but Christ as vain He suffered by His death for men To save them from their
awful sin Six hundred years of martyred saints Their history cannot erase With
iron heel and iron hand The Roman popes rule the land Those ignorant of history
May be swept into apostasy.
We won't be loved by Rome, sweet lie, With fifty million reasons why.
Salvation is by faith alone, In Christ alone, by grace alone.
A sovereign God give faith to man.
Salvation's in the maker's hand, This gospel offends Rome today.
They offer up another way, A counterfeit, a compromise.
Beware the ancient papal lie, Of such a cloud of witnesses, Who by grace died in
their Lord.
Recall their memory to say, By the same faith we live today.
Today, most people have some knowledge of the Holocaust of World War II,
those six years of unspeakable horror and suffering that the Jewish people were
subjected to under Hitler and the Nazi regime.
Few, however, are aware of the facts about an earlier atrocity, the Inquisition,
the 605 years of torture and murder that was inflicted on Bible-believing
Christians because they refused to compromise their faith.
The Holocaust, which was an unspeakable event in terms of its horror and suffering
against the Jewish people, in which six million people were put to death,
literally liquidated.
The Inquisition, which is a term much forgotten or not known to most people,
certainly the younger generations, occupied a much, much longer period,
more than six centuries of, again, unspeakable torture and slaughter of not
only Bible-believing Christians and Jews, but also Muslims, Knights Templars,
and those which they called witches.
It involved tens of millions of people, possibly as many as 50 million,
according to reputable and trustworthy historians.
Many people were not even aware of the term Inquisition.
It is that period of 605 years where the Church of Rome, in a methodical,
organized way, tortured Bible-believers and others so that they would give up
their faith and trust in Mother Church and not submit to a personal faith in Christ
Jesus alone by His grace.
The Roman Catholic Church began the practice of suppressing heresy long before
the 12th century.
To the Roman Church, anything that did not agree with their system of religion was a
heresy and must be suppressed.
However, before the 12th century, those so-called heretics were typically
individual street preachers or small groups of Bible-believers meeting together
in various locations and scattered throughout the land.
Consequently, the Church had no structured system for the suppression of heresy.
The process was sporadic and slow.
There was no real pattern or standard method for dealing with the heresy or the
heretics, but that was about to change.
In the 12th century, a phenomenon occurred, the likes of which the Catholic
Church had not dealt with in the past.
In southern France, scores of people were becoming Bible-believers.
Groups like the Albigensians were rapidly spreading throughout the region.
This heresy, as the Roman Catholic Church called it, was growing at an alarming
rate.
If the Catholic Church was going to suppress this heresy, it clearly needed a
new and systematic method of dealing with heretics.
That new method came with Pope Innocent III.
With the army of the Crusades at his disposal, and offering land to all who
would come and fight this heretical movement in southern France, Innocent III
was determined to suppress this growing menace of Bible-believers, and he would
begin with the Albigensians.
The Inquisition actually, if we wanted to put a date on it, began in France.
An interesting group of people called the Albigensians.
The Albigensians were a remarkable people, and a remarkable civilization,
culture, and moral, and good standing, and good lives.
They had cultivated a wonderful agricultural life based on the biblical
principles.
And they had many cities across France.
Albi is one of the cities even there to this day.
Of course, it's not Bible-believing anymore, because the way in which they
were obliterated was in brutal torture and the loss of life.
And this was really the beginning of the Inquisition, under the Pope called
Innocent III.
He was the one who, building on the legal rights of Rome, to be not just a religious
power, but a civil power, going back to such as Hildebrand and the famous Gregory
VII, he brought the papal power to a zenith or a climax, when he turned what
had been the armies of the Crusades, now against Bible-believers.
And it wasn't just that their cities were devastated and overrun with blood,
and they lost their lives.
And the actual fall of some of these cities, and historians like Wiley,
is a really difficult history to read.
But their very name has been tarnished.
The Roman Catholics make out as if they were somehow mannequins holding for a
dualism between body and the flesh.
Where in actual fact, you can trace their origins back, most likely to the
politicians, who were those who went back to the faith of Paul, as it is written in
the scripture.
And when you see how remarkable their lives were, and the authenticity of their
lives, and the morality of their lives, obviously they believed in the true gospel
of Christ Jesus, and not in the dualism.
But it's not just that their cities were wiped out, but even the very history has
been darkened, as it were.
This suppression was not limited to the Albigenses or to southern France.
The powerful arm of the Pope reached into other nations and regions where the
Catholic Church had a presence.
Other groups like the Vaudois or Waldensians also suffered terrible
persecution for their faith.
The Vaudois are an interesting group of believers because they go right back to
apostolic times, and to the writings of the apostles in the New Testament,
of course, to the Old Testament scriptures.
And they had a great love for the scripture as the truth, and they believed
in Christ Jesus alone, by faith alone, and grace alone.
We have wonderful accounts of these by believers such as John Paul Perrin,
his book on the Vaudois, and Alex, Peter Alex, and many others.
It is wonderful to see the faith of these men and women, and to know that they stood
strongly.
The Piedmont Valley, this was one of the valleys that was overrun at different
times by the troops that were sent out to slaughter and massacre the believers in
these valleys.
That's where they got their name from, Vaudois, from the name Valley,
the Valley people in northern Italy and in southern France.
Thus began the development of a structured method of dealing with heresy and heretics
wherever it might be found.
Councils of bishops and archbishops acting under the authority of the Pope became
known as the Holy Office of Inquisition into Heretical Wickedness.
The method that Innocent III began was continued by successive popes as they
devised more horrific means and methods to try and suppress those who disagreed with
the Roman Catholic Church.
Innocent IV was the one who brought in the actual details of how torture was to be
done.
There was a pope who devised these tortures and it was going to be 75 popes
in a row that added to these different types of tortures.
Several reputable historians have commented on the Roman Catholic atrocities
during the Inquisition and even the Roman Catholic historians speak about the
horrors of the Inquisition.
Men like Peter de Rosa.
Peter de Rosa wrote a book, the Vicars of Christ book, The Dark Side of the Papacy
was the other title for it.
And it speaks of the Pope's presumed primacy reigning over all the Church and
the arrogance of papal power.
John Paul presents the papacy as the champion of truth and the rights of man.
He takes it for granted that popes have never contradicted one another on
essentials or deviated from gospel truth.
History explodes the myth of a papacy lily white in the matter of truth.
In an age of barbarism, the popes led the pack.
In an age of enlightenment, they trailed the field.
And their record was worst when, contrary to the gospel, they tried to
impose their truth by force.
And Peter de Rosa, in a separate part of the book, also wrote of the atrocities of
the torture machine that you just mentioned of the Roman Catholic Church.
He writes, the record of the Inquisition would be embarrassing for any
organisation.
For the Catholic Church, it is devastating.
Today, it prides itself, and with much justification, on being the defender of
natural law and the rights of man.
The papacy in particular likes to see itself as the champion of morality.
What history shows, however, is that for more than these six centuries,
without a break, the papacy was the sworn enemy of elementary justice.
Eighty popes in a line from the 13th century on, not one of them, among them,
disapproved of the theology and apparatus of the Inquisition.
On the contrary, one after another, each added his own cruel touches to the
working of this deadly machine.
That closes the quote from Peter DeRose's book.
Just to say that the papacy has shockingly fulfilled that image from Revelation 17 of
the woman whose blood drenched from six centuries of her murderous rampage.
In the Bible, the Holy Spirit foretold her lust for power and for blood.
And history has recorded some of the gruesome details of that.
And the second Roman Catholic historian that I can quote from is Lord Acton,
who is made famous for his observation, with the mother Roman Catholic Church
firmly in mind, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And he says about the Inquisition that the Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and
peculiarly the work of the popes.
It stands out from all those things in which they cooperated, followed or
assented as the distinctive feature of papal Rome.
It was set up, renewed and perfected by a long series of acts emanating from the
supreme authority of the church.
No other institution, no doctrine, no teaching, no ceremony is so distinctly
the individual creation of the papacy, except the dispensing power.
It's the principle thing with which the papacy is identified and by which it must
be judged.
The principle of the Inquisition is the pope's sovereign power over life and
death.
Whoever disobeys him should be tried and tortured and burnt.
If that cannot be done, formalities may be dispensed with and the culprit may be
killed like an outlaw.
That is to say, the principle of the Inquisition is murderous.
And the man's opinion of the papacy is regulated and determined by his opinion of
religious assassination.
So did the English Lord Acton, Roman Catholic, write.
The Roman Catholic Church was not satisfied to put the heretics to death in
a humane manner.
They continued to devise more horrific tortures in their attempt to make the
so-called heretics renounce their faith and accept Roman Catholicism.
Things like the Judas Chair.
The Judas Chair was used in the Spanish Inquisition in particular.
It was a pyramid-type seat.
The victim was lowered down on this seat so that the pointed end of the Judas Seat,
which was this pyramid, penetrated the orifices of both male and female so that
they suffered excruciating pain.
And there was hope that they would renounce their biblical faith and proclaim
their faith in Holy Mother Church.
This is just one example.
Other Bible believers were burned at the stake.
Burning at the stake was often carried out in front of a large crowd in an auto-defe,
in occasion of dramatic pomp and festivity.
Those who were burnt at the stake were very often those, of course, who were
called heretics, whose faith and biblical convictions carried the most threat to the
papacy.
And it was almost as if the Roman Church believed that by burning them,
both their bodies and their beliefs would disappear into the cinders together.
And in England, at the time of the English Reformation in the 16th century and during
the reign of Mary Tudor, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, who became known
as Bloody Mary, she was a fervent Catholic, beholden to the Pope,
who brought in the Inquisition to cause the martyrdom of some 288 Protestant
martyrs in England.
Most of them died because they denied the real presence, the real presence being
Catholic dogma or doctrine or teaching that Jesus Christ is really present,
body, soul, divinity and humanity, in the sacrament.
The burning back-to-back of Bishops Latham and Ridley, which took place in Oxford
outside Balliol College in 1555, is still well known to many people as are
Latham's stirring last words, which were an inspiration for centuries to
Bible-believing Christians in the English-speaking world mainly.
And his words were, Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man.
We shall this day, by God's grace, light such a candle in England as I trust
shall never be put out.
In the movie Flame in the Wind, produced by Unusual Films at Bob Jones
University, a young man has been befriended by a Bible-believer who has
shared the gospel with him.
That young man, out of fear, has continued to be subservient to the Roman Catholic
Church.
He is now called forward at an auto-defe and instructed to light the fire that will
burn his heretical friend.
As a special favor to you, it has been granted the privilege of showing your
loyalty and devotion to our Blessed Virgin and our Holy Church before the great and
public assembly.
That mule-tear is a hated enemy of the Church.
You is granted the privilege of purifying her of this corruption.
Light the flame!
What's he waiting for?
Have you no fear?
God forbid that while I breathe I should cease to proclaim his word, for in it are
the words of everlasting life.
I am guilty of trusting the Lord Jesus Christ and serving him, for he is my
Savior, not the Church.
Whatever I suffer here today can in no way repay the debt I owe to him.
How can you stand there like that, facing death, if this isn't truth?
Yet I have not Christ.
Till now.
The rack was another instrument used by the Inquisition.
The rack, which was quite famous for the horrors that it brought upon the victims.
The victim was made to be stretched out on a rack whereby cords pulled from one side,
their arms and their legs from the other side, so that the body began to dislocate,
so that in the agony and pain of being pulled on the rack, the Bible believer
would submit to the Church of Rome.
Another method of imposing horrific pain to the joints was to raise the victim
toward the ceiling by ropes.
And then with weights tied to the ankles, the victim was dropped almost to the floor
before coming to a jarring stop that sent horrendous pain ripping through the body.
Once again, the movie Flame in the Wind gives us an excellent example of this
means of torture.
In this scene, the same young man is now being asked to denounce his newfound faith
in Christ.
Begin the torture.
The skull crusher was yet another means the Inquisition used to urge repentance.
The skull crusher, one of these medieval torture machines, whereby the believer's
chin was placed on the lower bar and a screw then forced the cap down on his head
or her head.
The teeth were crushed and smashed and the eyes were squeezed from the socket.
It was hoped that as they were going through this torture that they would
submit and give up their personal faith and believe in the faith in the system,
the system being the Catholic Church.
The Iron Maiden, or Iron Virgin as it was also called, is yet another of the
Inquisition's horrors.
The Iron Virgin, it was a tomb-sized container with folding doors.
And at the touch of a spring, the spiked, studded arms would wrap around the body of
the victim in such a way as to puncture parts of the entire body, including the
eyes and the ears.
And the purpose, obviously, was to inflict pain, but by means of a slow death,
vicious spikes into the body and a slow death.
The Roman Catholic Church learned that they could completely remove the skin from
a person, all the way down to their waist, before the person would die.
They also had several other ways and instruments to tear and mutilate the flesh
of their victims.
Another way of slowly bringing upon death was the different ways that the Catholic
Church used to tear the flesh of men and women, and even children.
These implement a torture of whips and saws and different claws by which they
tore into the human flesh.
It wasn't just that they did this over the body in general, it was often done in
particular on the genitals of men and women, so that they could inflict the
greatest pain at the most sensitive areas of the body, particularly the genital
organs of both sexes.
Sometimes these things were heated to make them even worse.
The Inquisitors also had devised several methods to crush the bones of those who
refused to repent.
Instruments for compressing the fingers till the bones would be squeezed to
splinters.
There were instruments for probing below the fingernails till an exquisite pain
like a burning fire would run along the nerves.
And there were instruments for tearing out the tongue, scooping out the eyes,
rooting out the ears.
And there was a bunch of iron cords with a spiked circle at the end of every whip for
tearing the flesh from the back till bone and sinew were laid bare.
There were iron cases for the legs, which were tightened upon the limb placed
in them by means of a screw till the flesh and bone were reduced to a pulp.
Thumb screws were also applied, apart from for thumbs, to prisoners' toes,
while larger, heavier devices, based on the same design principle,
were applied to destroying knees and elbows.
Another set of instruments were used by the Inquisition to pierce the body,
such as the chair of nails.
This chair of nails was so that the victim would be placed on this and then mallets
would be hit down on it to make sure that the nails really did their work of
puncturing the body with exquisite pain.
And the fire was lit under the chair of nails so that the heresy of trusting in
Christ alone, by faith alone and grace alone, would be given up, or the so-called
heresy that is Biblical faith, and people would trust in Holy Mother
Church.
There were also devices to slowly and painfully remove the intestines and other
organs from the body while keeping the person alive and conscious of the pain.
Any one of those horrors could be inflicted on anybody, man, woman or child,
over the age of 12, that did not agree with the Roman Catholic Church,
and the trials were not conducted in a democratic or fair manner.
Anyone could be arrested by the Inquisition on suspicion.
And then the trial was secret, the prisoner wasn't allowed to know the
accusers or the witnesses, and the judges were the priesthood.
There were ecclesiastics with absolute power and discretion.
The evidence of infamous persons, of criminals, perjurers or heretics was
admitted so long as it was hostile.
When I use the word heretic there, I'm not referring to true believers.
Children from the age of 12 were required to bear testimony.
The prisoner didn't have the help, rather, of an advocate, for anyone
defending a heretic was held guilty of the crime of furthering heresy.
And this, it's worth mentioning, that the Inquisition was consistently
carried out in European countries, France, Germany, Holland, Spain and Italy.
Those people were subjected to horrendous suffering, and yet they continued to be
steadfast in their faith, and were able to derive the strength and courage to face
those atrocities.
Well, it was a wonderful demonstration of the grace and divine power of the Lord
Jesus Christ, in whom they believed so firmly, that carried them through and
enabled them to survive the ordeal, which today we can hardly begin to
contemplate, that we could deal with.
Many of the afflictions of the righteous, and the Lord delivereth them out of them
all, they remembered that the Lord had said in the Gospel, be not afraid of them
that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.
And also I say unto you, whosoever shall confess me before men, that him shall the
Son of Man also confess before the angels of God.
And again, who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness,
or peril, or sword?
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
They not only knew who the Christ was, but very clearly they knew who the
Antichrist was.
And they came back to scripture texts, and this is quoted by Vaudois and others
throughout the years of the Inquisition, whereby they saw clearly that the
scriptures proclaimed who the Christ was and who the Antichrist was.
And they were upheld in their faith because they knew that the scriptures had
foretold that these sufferings would come upon believers.
Christ Jesus talked about many Christs coming and we were not to believe in them.
Many people claiming to be the Christ.
Peter talked about many false teachers.
The Apostle Paul talked about wolves coming in the midst of the flock of the
Lord.
And it was always the many and the few who would stand strong.
So they were warned and they took great cognizance of the fact that they were
coming under the woman spoken about in Revelation 17.
They knew that 17 of Revelation said the words, mystery, Babylon the great,
mother of harlots, drunken with the blood of the saints and the blood of the martyrs
of Jesus.
Revelation chapter 17 and verse 6.
They realized that the papal system was the one that was doing these things and
that they were to stand strong in the faith because this was what was
prophesied.
And they saw that she indeed was great because she had brought in princes and
kings and queens to do her work and that she indeed was mystery because she was
proclaiming a message that was unknown to the pages of scripture except that it had
been prophesied that such horrors would come.
An apostasy from the true gospel.
It is sad that many Bible believers of our own day will say that they know who the
Christ is but they do not know who the Antichrist is.
It is proclaimed in 2 Thessalonians 2 as both a system and a person.
The man of sin and the one who would sit in the temple of God calling himself God
and the only one in the pages of history who has done this is the Pope.
To this day the Pope calls himself the Holy Father which is a title of God and he
calls himself the vicar of Christ which is a title of the Holy Spirit.
So he sits in the temple of God calling himself God.
Now the Bible believers saw these things and they saw that it was historically
true.
Unlike many Bible believers of our own day who say they do not know who the
Antichrist is and they are looking for something to come in future times whereby
they will get implanted with a computer chip or something in their brain or some
other of these wild ideas that go around.
Whereby in the pages of scripture we see these things prophesied and we see it
fulfilled.
And a problem for the church today is that we ignore history at our peril.
In those days the cardinals wore scarlet and the bishops purpled and to this day
the Roman church still boasts these two colours.
I remember when I was a priest in Rome in 1963 going into 1964 and I went to Vatican
Council 2 as it was in session and I saw the square filling up with 3000 prelates
pouring into the square after one of the sessions of the council.
And I saw that the colours were scarlet and purple and I was taken aback because
even as a Catholic priest I knew what Revelation said and this was real and this
is the real colours of Rome and this is what was prophesied of her.
And that's only one of the details.
She holds the golden cup.
She is the only system that has dumped the blood of the saints over such a long
period of time.
This is fact.
It is not something that is surmised.
This can be verified on the pages of history.
The Roman Catholic Church today still maintains the canon laws that she used as
her authority to torture and murder Bible believers for over 600 years.
And it is not just that she held these things in the past.
She still holds in the present day teachings that you must submit to her and
she says that she has the right to coerce Christian people.
This is in modern canon law, canon 1311, quotation, the church has an innate and
proper right to coerce offending members of the Christian faithful by means of
papal sanctions, end of quotation.
The Catholic Church also holds to the fact that she can demand a submission of
intellect and will.
Now we know that submission of intellect and will is usually a hallmark of a cult
and we wouldn't expect that the church that holds itself to be a true church
would in any way in its writings hold to this.
But she does in fact, in the famous canon 752, she says the following, quotation,
a religious respect of intellect and will, even if not the assent of faith,
is to be paid to the teaching of the supreme pontiff or college of bishops
enunciate on faith and morals.
Which the supreme pontiff or college of bishops enunciate on faith and morals.
So what the supreme pontiff, the supreme mediator says or his college of bishops on
faith and morals, you have to submit your intellect and will.
And this is the same teaching, it is not upheld with the rigors of the
past or there are no sanctions like the past, but the same mindset is there and I
think that we have to see that and we have to realize that Bible believers were
fortified.
They saw what the apostle Peter said kept by the power of God and they were kept by
the power of God and their faith resounded at that time before the throne of God and
it still resounds on the pages of history for those who dare read the true
historical accounts.
Why would the church that claims to be a humanitarian loving organization continue
to write those canons into her modern law?
Could it be that the Roman Catholic Church is still using those laws and maintaining
that same mindset in our day and age?
It is certainly among the best kept secrets of the history of the 20th century
that an inquisition which was as severe as in previous centuries that we have been
discussing did take place at the time of the Second World War.
Just to give you a little background first, in 1929 Benito Mussolini signed the
Lateran Treaty with the Pope of the time, Pope Pius XI, officially conceding Vatican
Hill to the Pope.
In other words, the Vatican to be set up again as a political entity.
The papacy once again became a sovereign civil state.
The legal agreement with Mussolini was just the beginning of the concordats that
were to be established with many nations, perhaps the most infamous being the one
between Pope Pius XII and Adolf Hitler.
The Vatican formed alliances with the following Roman Catholic dictators,
among others, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco in Spain,
Antonio Salazar in Portugal, Juan Perón in Argentina, but the most brutal and
bloodthirsty of all of them was Anton Pavelich in Croatia.
According to a memorandum in the documents of the United States Army's
counterintelligence corps, dated 12th September 1947, agents hunting escaped
Nazi war criminals after World War II purposely avoided capturing one man
because, to quote the document, his contacts are so high and his present
position so compromising to the Vatican that any extradition of the subject would
deal a staggering blow to the Roman Catholic Church.
The man was Anton Pavelich, head of the new nation state of Croatia, carved out of
Yugoslavia during the war.
During Pavelich's four-year reign, he and Roman Catholic prelate Archbishop
Alois Stepinac pursued a convert-or-die policy among the 900,000 approximately
Greek Orthodox Serbs, Jews and others in Croatia.
200,000 were converted.
700,000 who chose to die were tortured, burned, buried alive or shot after digging
their own graves.
This appalling persecution was carried out by the Ustashis, including many of the
worst atrocities of the whole Second World War.
Certainly the mutilations were horrific and the savagery was terrible.
The Catholic Church did not leave the execution of a religious war to the
secular arm on this occasion.
She was there herself, openly ignoring precautions and bolder than she had been
for a very long time.
Wielding the hatchet or dagger, pulling the trigger, organizing the
massacre, the Roman Catholic priesthood became again its own instrument of
inquisition.
Many of the Ustashi officers were priests or friars who were sworn to fight with
dagger or gun for the triumph of Christ and Croatia.
Priests played a prominent role in the closing or takeover of the Serbian
Orthodox churches, the seizure of church records and the interrogation of the
Serbian Orthodox clergy as well.
They also supervised the concentration camps and organized the torture of many of
the victims.
And this is all happening in the 20th century.
French author Edmond Paris, who was born a Roman Catholic, has written a very
thorough account of this terrible massacre in his book Convert or Die.
And he wrote, it's difficult for the world to believe that a whole people could be
doomed to extermination by a government and religious hierarchy of the 20th
century, just because it happened to belong to another ethnical and racial
group and had inherited the Christianity of the Byzantium kind instead of the Roman
kind.
The world does not in fact know and is thus unable to understand fully all this
background in the Second World War to what happened in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s
in Yugoslavia.
After the Vatican, note the Vatican, led Western nations in recognizing Croatia
as an independent sovereign state.
And of course, immediately hostilities broke out between the Croats and the
Serbs, given this background of what took place in the Second World War.
British historian and journalist Andrew Roberts of the Sunday Telegraph expressed
surprise in that newspaper.
He wrote, in the present crisis, almost the entire Western media have
chosen to champion the Croats.
He goes on to ask the question, how are the Serbs expected to react to the
decision to adopt the Ustashe's chequered symbol as the Croatian national flag?
In Krajina, it takes longer than the 45 minute attention span of today's CNN
broadcaster to forget the way Franciscan friars participated in the slaughter of
Serbs in Croatian Bosnia.
Orthodox Serbs were promised protection if they converted to Catholicism,
but were then killed after they entered the churches as the priests looked on.
The attempt during the Second World War to create the entirely Roman Catholic
independent state of Croatia was accompanied by a persecution so ferocious
that it is difficult to find a parallel in all of history.
The Inquisition applied to the Serbian Orthodox by the Croatian Catholics
accounted for 700,000 Serbs tortured and killed in just four years.
And of course, we have that state that they wanted in Croatia now.
In the year 2000, the Pope asked for forgiveness for the part that the members
of the church played in the Inquisition.
I remember the time well.
It was March in the year 2000.
The Pope asked for forgiveness for the acts of the members of the church that
they had done in the service of truth.
Now, it wasn't the members of the church or individual members of the church who
did these things.
It was the papacy itself and the Popes in particular.
Peter de Rosa had said 80 Popes in a row.
In my study of going through one after another of Popes in the past, as I have
studied history, I have seen that I can document at least 75 Popes in a row who
have upheld torture.
And this is historical fact.
It was the Popes that gave the authority, as we saw.
Lord Acton said it was primarily an institution of papal Rome.
Even under Isabel and Ferdinand in Spain, under the famous Spanish Inquisition,
it was still under the papal inquisitors that the authority came and that the
devices of the tortures were given by papal Rome.
So, for the Pope to apologize that it was somehow members of the church,
this is a total mock apology because it was papal Rome that did the horrific deeds
for all these centuries and papal Rome has not apologized.
And the same remains and the same doctrines that they held then,
they hold today.
They hold through salvation, through sacramental system, as they did at the
time of the Inquisition, and they still hold to a type of sacramentalism by which
a person looks to the communion bread that it can sanctify you.
It is not any physical thing that sanctifies.
It is the righteousness of Christ Jesus received by faith under the conviction of
the Holy Spirit by which a person becomes a Bible believer.
As the Roman Catholic Church continues to embrace the increasingly popular
ecumenical movement across the world, it would be wise for all of us,
and especially Bible believers, to remember the lessons of history and to
remain steadfast in our faith.
Now, what happened to the faith of believers at this time?
The faith of believers stood strong.
They knew that Christ Jesus had said that he would be with them.
They knew that Christ Jesus promised to be with them all days, even until the end of
the world.
They knew that Christ Jesus was with them and the power of the Holy Spirit that they
could withstand the suffering that they were going through.
It is not just that Christ Jesus, who is the judge of all, will finally one
day judge them that he will, and he will bring into light all the horrors of the
past, but Christ Jesus was, even in those years, triumphing in the gospel and in the
glorious faith of these men and women, and sometimes even children, suffering for
their faith.
They died because of their faith in Christ alone.
They trusted in Christ alone and in his glorious gospel alone, and they withstood
the torture to die for the true faith.
And in that way, Christ Jesus was gloriously reigning, as it says in Psalm
2, and he was holding in derision those who would try to break apart his kingdom.
He held them in derision and they were triumphant even then.
Look at the same Christ Jesus who, at the cross, suffered the most
ignominious death one could ever imagine.
And what looked to be the greatest of all failures turned out to be the greatest
triumph in his sacrifice in the place of believers and his righteousness credited
to them.
And in the same way, through all those horrible years, he was triumphing in the
faith of believers.
Now, Rome has not just given up.
She has given up, actually, the physical tortures, but she still has the same
mindset as we gave from some of her canon laws of the present day.
And she still draws many onto a bosom, but we are not to be afraid.
Christ Jesus talked about the little flock.
He told us that there would be few that would stand, but they would stand by his
power.
And so, we know the true gospel is not numerical.
It is brilliantly true that Christ Jesus has given his life, the one for the many,
as you trust on him and him alone.
It is to look to Christ Jesus and him alone for faith and recognize that you are
destitute of anything spiritually and to trust on him and to share in that same
victory of faith that was demonstrated through all those years before the throne
of God and will be seen for all eternity.
We need to remember that so many of them, especially in my country in England,
had come out from the Roman Catholic Church and had been converted wonderfully
to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
And they were comforted, as we've already mentioned, by the Scriptures, by
Scriptures like all who walk godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.
And they had heeded the injunction of Scripture from Revelation 17 and 18.
Revelation 18, come out of her my people that ye be not partakers of her sins and
that ye receive not of her plagues.
And they had been obedient and they knew that the Lord had called them out.
And that gave them the strength and the fortitude and the perseverance that is so
much the calling of all who would place their faith and trust their lives to the
Lord Jesus Christ.
Trust on the same Lord Jesus Christ and know the same joy that they knew and the
joy that will be for all eternity as we give praise to the glory of his grace and
his person.
And we thank God for the remarkable faith of all those men and women.
And to God be glory, praise, worship and honour now and forevermore.
Amen and Amen.
It involved tens of millions of people.
They not only knew who the Christ was, but very clearly they knew who the
Antichrist was.
In an age of barbarism, the Popes led the pack.
In an age of enlightenment, they trailed the field.
Trust on the same Lord Jesus Christ and know the same joy that they knew.
And a problem for the church today is that we ignore history at our peril.