GYC 2015: Called. Chosen. Faithful.

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!

Dave Steward

1. Tree Without a Fence: Religious Liberty in Bible Times

This message was presented at the GYC 2015 conference called Chosen Faithful in Louisville, Kentucky.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

All right, my topic this morning is entitled Tree Without a Fence.

I want to begin with a quote from Acts of the Apostles, page 68.

The banner of truth and religious liberty held aloft by the founders of the Gospel Church and by God's witnesses during the centuries that have passed since then has, in this last conflict, been committed to our hands.

The responsibility for this great gift rests with those whom God has blessed with a knowledge of His Word.

Do you realize there's very few people in this world that know the 3 angels' message?

Have you been given the gift of understanding God's Word and the 3 angels' message?

To 1 degree or another, everybody in this room knows something about the 3 angels' message, right?

And so this responsibility of carrying the truth forward that has been handed to us from other generations is a very incredible responsibility, the sacred trust.

I used to run a relay race when I was in law enforcement that goes every year in the spring.

It starts in a little town called Baker, California, and it ends up in Las Vegas.

They pick a different casino every year for the finish line.

And that's spread out among 20 runners on your team, so it's a relay race.

And so every runner has an average of, I guess, that would be 6 miles that they run, And I usually ran in the middle of the night toward the end of the race.

But the race would start in the middle of the day when it was hot.

And I remember I did it, I think, 4 years.

And every time I would carry that baton, I was mindful of all the blood, sweat, and tears that got the baton to the stage where I was at.

All those runners that had run so hard on my team.

And it wasn't just that day where we had ran.

It was, think of all the training that had taken place all year long to get us to that point.

So the same thing in the Protestant Reformation.

We stand on the shoulders of amazing people that God has raised up through the centuries, especially in the last 500 years.

And so we are carrying on an amazing legacy.

Now we're talking about religious liberty.

Let's just start with some basic definitions.

Freedom from restraint, slavery, or oppression.

Immunity from arbitrary exercise of authority.

The capacity to exercise free choice, free will.

Are you glad that God has given us free choice and a free will?

Well, 1 definition is it's a system of faith in and worship of God.

So put them together, what do you come up with?

It's really, when you think about it, the freedom of choice to worship God.

Okay, it's the freedom to worship God if you want, and it's also the freedom to not worship God if you want.

It includes freedom to worship the God you want, when you want, how you want, and where you want, or not.

Or do you wish that God had made us so we have to worship him?

You know, this first talk is focused on the Bible.

Because my friend John is gonna focus a lot on the history of the Reformation.

I'm gonna talk about the Mark of the Beast, which obviously is in the Bible and other things.

But, you know, I just wanted to do a study in the Bible on religious liberty and what we can find in the Bible.

There's a lot more than I ever realized that you can find about religious liberty.

And of course, I just have an hour to share some of the highlights, but there's so much more.

Really when you look at it, religious liberty in the Bible highlights the difference between 2 kingdoms, the kingdom of Jesus, a kingdom of freedom, and the kingdom of Satan, which is a kingdom based on force and fear.

Satan loves to use force, the love of force, but Jesus uses the force of love.

And it really highlights the differences between the 2.

So our topic today is a tree without a fence.

So let's take a look at that passage in Genesis chapter 2 verse 9, where I think it kind of begins at least for humans on religious liberty.

The Bible says, and out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil." So how many trees did God put in the Garden of Eden?

He put probably hundreds if not thousands of trees.

And He said, look, you can eat from all these trees.

But He also especially gave them the tree of life and then the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Now in verse 16, the Lord God says, commanded the man saying of every tree of the garden, thou mayest freely eat.

There's that word free, because God's all about freedom.

I think If Satan had created the Garden of Eden, he'd have put 1, 000 trees you couldn't eat from, and then 1 you could eat from, right?

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.

Now I think there's a little bit of a paradox here.

God said they could freely eat from the tree of life and the other trees, but he said that they could, he commanded them not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Now were they still free to eat from that tree?

So why didn't God say you're free to eat from all of them?

Was it true freedom to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil?

And so here you have this tree that God says, don't eat from it.

Even though God commanded them not to eat from it, He still gave them the freedom, if they wanted to, to eat from that tree.

Are you thankful that God provided this tree?

Some people say, why did God put a tree in there which allowed Adam and Eve to fail?

Without freedom of choice, there can be no love.

Because love, by definition, has to allow the object love to choose it.

Do you think that free choice is an important element of love?

Could God have created man to not have the power to break his law?

He could have done that, couldn't he have?

Jonathan Zirkle

2. By Sword, By Flame, By Captivity: The Protestant Reformation

I have 1 question, just out of sheer curiosity.

Is anyone visiting here from a different country?

It's very interesting, religious liberty and how America has been a pioneer of it.

I'd like to start with a word of prayer, if you could bow your heads.

Dear Lord, I just ask that you would be with us here today.

May I speak the words that you would have me to speak.

Well, today we're going to look at religious liberty.

And as I was looking at this, I realized that the way to understand it, you need to understand the world we live in.

And the way to understand the world we live in, you kind of got to know how we got to where we are.

And so I'm actually going to look back a long ways.

In these 2, the first 2 presentations that I'm going to be making, we're going to cover about 2, 000 years of history in about 2 hours.

So with that, we'll be looking at pagan Rome first because pagan Rome transformed into papal Rome, but papal Rome took much of what it does and what it did from pagan Rome.

The only way to understand papal Rome is to understand pagan Rome.

So we're going to start by looking at pagan Rome.

We'll look at papal Rome to see the world that the Reformation started in.

The goal of this presentation is to see what was going on in the world.

What was the world when the Reformation started?

And then in our next presentation we'll look at the Reformation and the progress that was made in religious liberty.

1 other point that I'd like you to think about as we think about this, the world is about 6, 000 years old.

And if you really look, you're going to see that we've only had religious liberty for probably a little over 150 years.

That's not very long, not very long at all.

And many parts of the world don't have religious liberty even today.

Turn with me, if you will, in your Bibles to 2 Thessalonians.

It's 1 of those little books that's easy to go over very quickly.

Second Thessalonians chapter 2 verses 3 through 8, it says this, this, let no man deceive you by any means for that day, Christ's coming, shall not come except there come a falling away first and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition.

Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped, so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God." Now, As Protestants, we traditionally interpreted that to be the Antichrist power and the papacy.

It says this, remember ye not that when I was yet with you, I told you all these things?

And now ye know that, now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his times.

Now listen to this, when I used to say this, I was always surprised, it says this, for the mystery of iniquity doth already work.

It's like, wow, this is already going on?

He says, but the mystery of iniquity doth already work.

Only he who now letteth or holdeth back will hold back until he be taken out of the way.

And then shall the wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming." So this man of sin is already there, but he's being hidden.

I also want to show you another prophecy here.

Turn with me if you will to Daniel chapter 7.

Looking here at Daniel chapter 7, this is 1 that we should be very familiar with.

If you look here, I'm going to kind of skip through this fairly quickly, but Daniel chapter 7 verse 3, Daniel's having a vision and he says, And 4 great beasts came out from the sea, diverse 1 from another.

The first is like a lion, The second is like a bear, then the leopard.

And then looking at verse 7, he starts to really pay attention here.

After this I saw in the night vision, and behold, a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly.

And it had great iron teeth, it devoured and break in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it.

And it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it.

I considered the horns, and behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom all the 3 of the first horns were plucked up.

But what I wanted to point out was this beast is there and he's just, he's stamping on the residue.

I wish we had time to just study Daniel, but what's this chapter about?

If you look at Daniel's prophecies, so many of them are set as a chiasm.

And you can look here, chapter 7 has got what?

So if you look here in verse 14, it says, and there was given him dominion and glory and a kingdom.

If you look in that verse, count how many times it uses the word dominion.

And you see here this terrible beast is trying to take away dominion.

He's fighting for dominion and he's stamping on the residue or the remnant.

We know this as good students of prophecy.

Brass is more of the symbol of the metal of Greece.

And if you look at Rome, it combined both aspects of its own Roman aspects, but Rome was very good at administration, but what was it administering?

You look at it, a lot of it comes from Greek.

And you have a lot of Greek philosophy in there.

I'd like you to read something from Plato.

No 1 shall possess shrines of the gods in private houses, and he who is found to possess them and perform any sacred rites not publicly authorized shall be informed against to the guardians of the law, and let them issue orders that he shall carry his private rights to the public temples, and if he not obey let them inflict a penalty until he comply." So for Plato, religion was a very public thing and It was nothing that you could even do at home.

They had this idea, this concept of a civil religion.

And you had to go and sacrifice to the emperor.

Rome, now Rome's really interesting if you look at its religion and how it was organized.

At the head of the Roman religion was a Pontifex Maximus.

How many of you have heard the term Pontifex Maximus?

And you know who uses the term today, correct?

Well back in 300 BC there was a King Numa and he developed and instituted the Pontifex Maximus.

And the idea was a pontifex, a pont, it comes from the term bridge, he's a bridge.

He was actually a bridge to heaven, that's what the pontifix was, a bridge to heaven.

That's what a priest does, he bridges between earth and heaven and the pontifix Maximus is the head of all those priests.

3. Swallowing the Dragon’s Flood

Dear Lord, we thank you for this time that we can come together and to study your word and to study your work in history and how you care for your people.

Lord, I ask that you would be with us here now.

Please help me to speak the words that you would have me to speak.

This presentation is definitely the second part of the presentation I gave earlier.

But just to recap, we talked a little bit about the pagan Roman system and how that system was based upon public religion.

It was based upon the system of the Pontifex Maximus, and the Pontifex Maximus' job was to see to it that everyone worshiped their gods, because if all of the gods were worshipped, then the gods would be happy, and if the gods are happy, then the empire would prosper.

This was a system that was taken over by the emperors because it's not good to have competition between the church and the state.

So the emperors took that title and They ruled the religious affairs through that religious system.

When the empire failed, the Bishop of Rome took up that title.

I guess I left a little piece out there that we talked about, and that is the fact that when Constantine converted, he was the Pontifex Maximus, and he maintained those prerogatives and controlled the church through that.

Then the Bishop of Rome takes that up and models his activity basically on Constantine's.

And then the other thing that we saw was the Magna Carta.

And basically through all of what was going on with Magna Carta, you can see how the Pope used all kinds of political intrigue and all of his powers of interdict and excommunication and papal bulls and things like that to try to manipulate the British system.

But in the end what we got was a constitution.

And that constitution meant that the monarch had to abide by certain rules, and it put the power with the British people instead of with the papacy.

And then Wycliffe came along, and he said, you know what, that's exactly right from a biblical reason.

And he had to give up his offices because of that, which gave him time to translate the Bible, and before it was all done, he had the church based on the Bible, and the Bible alone, and a biblical basis like a constitution.

And so, what you see now is a gradual move away from Rome.

So Martin Luther, October 31, 1517, He puts his 95 theses on the wall.

Hallow means holy and the een, this part, is the evening.

This is the evening before All Saints Day.

And basically what you have here is you have the Catholic calendar is set in such a way that Halloween will fall on October 31.

And so instead of celebrating Reformation Day, we celebrate Halloween.

But let's not be defeatists on all of this.

He put his 95 theses up and what did he complain about?

He complained about the use of indulgences.

He talked about the need for grace through repentance, genuine repentance, not the confessional.

He talked about papal blasphemy and papal wealth.

I don't believe he had any desire to start a Reformation, he didn't know what he was doing.

But it snowballed, and God used it, and the Reformation was on its way.

I'd like to read something from the Bible, if you will.

Turn in your Bibles to Revelation, Chapter 3.

I just want to read what God has to say about this time period.

When you look at Revelation, in chapters 2 and 3, you have the message as the letters to the 7 churches.

And each 1 of these letters refers to a different period in time.

And so if we look at the message to Sardis, this message is for the time period that we're talking about, the time period of the Reformation.

And so looking at Revelation chapter 3 verses 1 to 6, it says this, And unto the angel of the church in Sardis write, These things saith he that hath the 7 spirits of God and the 7 stars.

I know thy works that thou hast a name that thou livest and art dead." Ooh, this is a bad time to be.

But he says this, Be watchful and strengthen the things which remain that are ready to die, For I have not found thy works perfect before God.

Remember therefore how thou hast received, and heard, and hold fast, and repent.

If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee." But listen to this, Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments, and they shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy." I believe that's talking about the true Christians of the Reformation.

He that overcometh the same shall be clothed in white raiment, and I will not blot his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my father and before his angels.

He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches." So this is a time of weakness, but it's also a time where there are those that are not spotted.

Now, if you look at the Reformation, there's really 2 Reformations that are going on at exactly the same time.

There's a Magisterial Reformation, and there's a Radical Reformation.

Now, You may not know what's the difference between the 2, so let me tell you.

The magisterial reformation, this includes the likes of Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and all these different people.

And basically what you see in this part of the Reformation is a movement away from the papacy and you see a lot of reforms and a lot of different doctrines here.

So that's, you know, there's definitely a lot going on.

But what I want to focus on, the thing that makes it different, is Magisterial Reformation moves away from the papacy, but has national churches.

And so you take the Lutherans, for instance.

They're the national church, they're a state church of the German people.

And Calvin was doing the same thing in Geneva.

The radical Reformation, though, was breaking off from the church-state completely.

So let me try to tell the story of that a little bit.

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Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!

1. Tree Without a Fence: Religious Liberty in Bible Times

Transcript

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