All right. Good evening, everybody. Good evening. It’s a real pleasure to be with you down here in warm and sunny Texas.
Um, I think it’s the second time in my life I’ve been down here. A few years ago, I was I think it was White Tower
Church. Is that what it is? White Tower Church in Dallas. Um, anyway, it was very hot there as
well. And I’m being introduced to the heat of the Texas summer here. And so,
um, uh, where I come from in England, we rarely see the sun. And so they paint
the inside of our classrooms all yellow just to remind us that there is a sun and that doesn’t have any uh good impact
on our behavior. But uh anyway, it’s a privilege to be with you down here and
thank you for the warm welcome so far. I bring greetings from my wife and my daughter. They’re back in uh cooler
Michigan and um where we don’t have quite so hot up there. And my son is with me. He’s doing some recordings for
me while I’m down here as well. So um tonight I’m going to be uh my talk is entitled three horns and I’m going to be
talking about the three horns that were uprooted by the rise of the papacy and why those horns were uprooted and what
was the particular reason for them to be uprooted because there were 10 horns but only three of them were uprooted and
there’s a very interesting reason as to why they were uprooted. And then tomorrow we’re going to be talking about
the 11th hour worker uh from the Gospel of Matthew chapter 20. And so uh we’ll
be talking about who are those 11th hour workers who are going to finish the work and what do they stand for and what do
they believe? And we find that in the parable of Jesus in Matthew chapter 20. But tonight we’re going to talk about
the three horns. And as we do invite you to bow your heads with me and invite the presence of the Holy Spirit. Heavenly
Father, we thank you for the freedom we have here in the United States to worship you according to our conscience.
Father, we thank you for the liberty we have to gather here during these opening hours of the Sabbath day. And Lord, as
we gather here tonight, I pray that we will not just be gathering for information or even more for
understanding. But I’m asking, Lord, that as we gather here, you’ll whisper into each of our ears, “This is the way,
walk ye in it.” So, Father, if we stand for liberty of conscience, may we have the courage to live according to our
conscience. May be willing to may we be willing to submit to the convictions of your spirit, even if they go against our
fallen desires. And I pray, Lord, that as I share and speak this evening that your spirit will speak through me and
for me, and you’ll speak into the heart of all those who are here tonight and all those who are watching online. So,
Lord, we give the rest of this evening into your hands. In Jesus name I pray. Amen. So, uh, when I was growing up,
back in the dim and distant mists of history, uh, it was back in England and back in those days, we had no internet.
Now, I know for those of you under about the age of 30 years old, it’s hard to imagine that there was an era without
the internet, but yes, there was. Um we used to walk three miles to school and
uh my mother would give us cod liver oil, a spoon of it every week um just to make sure that we were good little boys
and uh that would be washed down with either a spoonful of molasses or a glass of orange juice and that was the prize.
Now those were the days just after rationing when my mother would put a pat of real butter on the Sabbath table. The
rest of the week we were on margarine but on Sabbath we got a pat of real butter and we didn’t have any cell
phones. We didn’t have a TV and we had a gramophone player in the corner of the living room and we had a radio and uh we
didn’t have air conditioning or even central heating. Um but my father would put on this hot air blower when we got
up in the morning and the four of us little kids would kind of crouch like little baby monkeys around that hot air blower because it was so cold in the
house while we rushed to get dressed. And so those were back in the days as we grew up in England. And back in those
days, books were our window on the world. And the library was a treasured
place because the library was the place where all knowledge could be found. And so, um, as early as, uh, ch children, we
were encouraged by our parents to read everything we could get our hands on. And that is exactly what we did. And so,
books became our window on the world. And I liked reading about military
history because military history is basically world history. And I explained once to a social studies teacher in my
classroom that that I wasn’t really interested in the development of this that or the other. Um because military
history is all that counts because with battles empires rise and empires fall
and civilizations come into existence and civilizations pass away. And so we
measure history and the passing of civilizations and empires and epochs from one battle to another. And in my
reading as a young boy about the age of eight, I came to a book called Count Bellisarius.
And I was interested in this book Count Bellisarius because it was written by my grandmother’s cousin, a man called
Robert Graves. He was a war poet in World War I. And he wrote a number of historical novels based on ancient
histories. Two of them were very famous. In fact, they were turned into serals by the BBC. They were called I Claudius and
Claudius the god on the emperor uh Roman emperor Claudius in AD60 or so. And uh
but the book that really caught my attention was um Count Bellisarius. And you say well who was Count Bellisarius?
Well Bellisarius was one of the greatest Roman generals in the entire Roman history. And he didn’t live during the
time of Julius Caesar or Augustus and the rise of the Roman Empire. He lived in the time of Justinian uh when uh the
Roman Empire had split into half and he was like the firefighter for Justinian going around the eastern Mediterranean
and North Africa and up into Italy fighting these um putting out these fires as the barbarian tribes were
coming into the Roman Empire. And he became very famous for winning against large numbers of barbarian troops with
very small numbers of Roman soldiers. And by the way, uh the word barbarian,
um it doesn’t really have in those days it wasn’t a negative connotation as much as it is today. You were a barbarian
back then if you didn’t speak Greek. And Greek was the common language of the Eastern Roman Empire. And these these
invading um tribes into the Western Roman Empire were called barbarians because they spoke angles and Saxons and
they had all kinds of other language that that they were speaking. And because they didn’t speak um Greek, they
were known as barbarians. And maybe just as a bit of detective work for you tonight, you can look up in the Bible
where Paul talks about barbarians. And he does mention barbarians in one of his letters. So if you want a a little task
tonight, that would be a some uh detective work to look through the Bible. So I want to talk tonight about
this guy Bellisarius and why he was so significant. And so um we’re going to
look first, this is our journey tonight. We’re going to look at Constantine the Great. And you know, it’s amazing how
the Holy Spirit works. I was sitting here listening and Brother Jonathan was expounding on US history and the US
Constitution and he kept referring back to things I’m going to be talking about. You know, it’s fascinating how we never
spoke about this beforehand, but the Holy Spirit kind of weaves these things together. And so, um, we’re going to
look at Constantine the Great. Then we’re going to look at the rise and fall of those three Aryan nations. Then we’re
going to look at basic biblical principles of religious liberty that we adhere to today as 7th Adventists. And
then we’re going to come to our conclusions tonight. All right. So I know it’s 8:04 here and we all want to
get home cuz it’s Friday night and no says pastor. All right. Well, um I was
preaching Dr. Isaacuni’s church last year and I stood up to preach at about
12:45 and somebody said to me, “They’re deliberately cutting your time. You’ve got 15 minutes.” And he whispered to me
as I stood up. says, “Brother Vine,” he said, “the next service is at 4:00. You have till4 to 4.” That was 4 hours of
speaking I had before me. So, don’t worry, we’re not going to do that tonight. Um, as a general rule, um,
African-American and Caribbean congregations have been vaccinated against the impact of long sermons, and
they can sit through them much better than Anglo congregations can. But anyway, Constantine the Great. Who was
this guy here? All right, this is the book, Count Bellisarius. Uh you can read it uh you can buy it on Amazon. It’s a
fascinating history and it’s it’s drawn from uh the historian Proopius’s
histories of Justinian and Belisarius. So it has real historical data behind
it. But this is this is a map of the the uh Roman Empire uh the in the early
500s. And uh you have in in the light pink you have the the Eastern Empire
under Justinian I. and he lived from five he was the reigning the emperor from 527 to 565. So he controlled Turkey
and east and central Europe and the southern parts of Italy and um then he
expanded the empire um all the way across North Africa and up into Italy
and across the Black Sea and the Middle East. Uh so um Justinian was was one of the greater of the Eastern Roman
emperors and he was very famous because of this. But the story starts with this guy here, Constantine the Great. Now, he
reigned from 312 to 337 AD. And he is famous because he made the capital of
the Roman Empire, Constantinople, on the Bosphorus, the modern day is Istanbul.
And if you’ve never been to Istanbul, I’d encourage you to go there. It’s an incredible city. On the western side,
you’ve got Europe, and you got the Bosphorus, which is a narrow water straight that goes up to the Black Sea.
And on the eastern side, you’ve got Asia. And you have these incredible bridges that span the Bosphorus. And if
you want to spend a week looking at some incredible history, go to Istanbul. It’s an incredible place to be. But this was
the guy who turned it into the capital of the Roman Empire. And he moved uh the
capital from Rome to Istanbul. And so you see here, this this is the part of the city that is known as the the Golden
Horn. And uh you’ve got the Hippodromeome in the center there. and they had um horse um chariot racers
between the reds, the whites, the blues and and the greens. And people supported their their chariots. Um they were
fanatical fans. They would riot. They would kill each other in the name of their color. Um they would install
emperors based on whether he was a supporter of the reds, the blues, the greens, and the whites. And um so so the
Hippodrome was a very famous place. And then to the north part of that later in time, you had the Sultan’s palaces
during the the Ottoman Empire. And so um as uh brother Jonathan alluded to
earlier, Constantine believed that in order to promote the unity of the empire because the capital has shifted from
Rome in the west to Constantinople in the east, they needed to unify around a common religion. And so he initially
promoted the worship of the sun in order to unify the peoples of the Roman Empire. So in America today, what we all
have in common is that we pledge allegiance to the republic uh to the flag and the republic for which it
stands when we become Americans. Yes. And we all agree to abide by the constitution of the United States. And
that is what holds us together. It is not a common language or a common ethnicity or a common history, but it’s
something that we agree to share in common. And so Constantinople was the basis of this empire. And Constantine
wanted to hold the empire together through the worship of the sun. But then he realized that the Christians were
becoming very powerful. And so he passed two great edicts. The first was the edict of Milan in AD 313. And that was
where he integrated officially the Roman uh the Christian church
into the Roman Empire. Christianity was now an official religion of the Roman Empire. And Christianity kept growing.
And so in AD 3:21, Constantine passed the first Sunday law in history. And uh
you see the the critical quote there. It says, “Let all the judges and town
people and the occupation of all trades rest on the venerable day of the sun, but let those who are situated in the
country freely and at full liberty attend to the business of agriculture. Because it often happens that no other
day is so fit for sewing corn and planting vines, lest the critical moment being let slip, men should lose the
commodities granted by heaven. And so um they he passed the the national Sunday
law in 321 as well as the edict of Milan. So Christians were on the rise in the empire. They were first made a legal
part of the empire and then uh Constantine not throughout not through any sense of personal conviction or
conversion. He kind of merged Christianity with the worship of the sun and promoted Sunday law because then
everybody would be happy, Christians and pagans alike. Now at the time Christianity was torn in the Eastern
Roman Empire between debates about the nature of Christ. Um there were all kinds of debates. Was he one charact was
he one nature? Was he two natures? Was he a blended nature? Was he two natures side by side? etc etc. And there are all
kinds of theological terms for this. But Constantine decided that he was going to
put an end to these debates about the nature of Christ. And he convened what we now call the council of Nika in AD
325. And the big debate at the time was the teachings of a preacher from Libya
called Aras. And he taught that Christ was not co-eternal with God the Father.
And he was but he was begotten or created by God at some mysterious point of time in the past. And so even today
say we have aryens you know they still exist in Chris as a as a branch of Christianity today and they go all the
way back to the time of Constantine. And so the council of Nika met and they
voted on the Nyine creed. Now the nyine creed that we have today um isn’t really
the one that they voted in 325 but is a later council in Constantinople in 381
but the wording is almost the same but with a couple of minor differences. So I’m just going to read out this is the nyine creed that they voted back then
and um this is something that pretty much every Christian today agrees to
and uh even Adventists would agree to with a nine creed as far as I’m aware unless you believe that the holy spirit
doesn’t really exist and that there was a point in time when the sun did not exist but um this is the nine creed. It
says, “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible, and
in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God,
light of light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one
substance with the Father, by whom all things were made, who for us men and for
our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man and was
crucified also for us under Pontious Pilate. He suffered and was buried and the third day he rose again according to
the scriptures and ascended into heaven and siteth at the right hand of the father. And he shall come again with
glory to judge both the quick that is the living and the dead whose kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the
Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeded from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son
together is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets, and I believe one holy, Catholic, and apostolic church. I
acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins, and I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen. Now, there’s an
awful lot packed into that nyine creed there. And so when it says one holy catholic and apostolic church, they’re
not talking about what we call the Roman Catholic Church today. That really wasn’t in existence at that time. The
word Catholic means universal or worldwide. So this was a a worldwide declaration. And many of the the the
bishops who came to the council of Nika um they came their bodies had been torn apart literally by the last Roman
persecutions. They had lost eyes. They’d lost arms. Their bodies were had been mangled under torture. So that the men
who put together the nyine creed were men who literally paid in blood for the right to put that document together. And
they came out of the last Roman persecutions. So um this Nyine creed um became the
basis for Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean and also in the western Mediterranean. Now the original Nyine
creed um had this um clause added to it. uh that this that was later um
eliminated by the council of Constantinople and this clause is a condemnation of the Aryans and so we
don’t include this clause here now in the nine creed it says but those who say there was a time when he was not and he
was not before he was made and he was made out of nothing or he is of another substance or essence or the son of God
is created or changeable or alterable they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic church.
So they were explicitly condemning the Aryan beliefs um when they put together the nyine creed. But this last clause
was eliminated when they finalized it in the council of Constantinople in AD 381.
So that’s kind of the background that the nyine creed was like the benchmark by which all churches were to be
evaluated in terms of their theology. And so then we come to the rise and fall of those three Aryan nations. And so um
you see on the map there um Attilla the Hun had come across and he came from central Asia and he conquered an empire
from Mongolia all the way up into central Europe. He was one of the most ruthless conquerors of all time and he
invaded the Roman Empire and he came across central Germany and as he was
coming um west into Germany he was pushing the tribes from Germany and Poland and central Europe into the
western Roman Empire. So those were the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire. They were running away from Attilla the
Hun. And you see there on on the map there um Attilla had had a couple of very famous incursions into the Roman
Empire. Um but he was actually beaten back in at least one famous battle. And so the the Huns settled in in central
Europe there. And so you know even you know in World War I the British referred to the Germans as the Hun. Um it was a
it’s a term of abuse um because that was where the Huns had settled down under Attilla the Great. And so uh the Western
Roman Empire um was was kind of collapsing under the pressure of Germanic tribes coming in from central
Europe and they were fleeing Attilla the Hun. And so um the Western Empire had to
deal with this massive immigration. It wasn’t planned. They didn’t have green cards. There weren’t any visas for this
process. They just arrived in huge numbers. And um you might say it was
their crisis at the southern border, but it was a crisis along the Ryan border. And and the German tribes came across in
large numbers and they settled all across the Western Roman Empire. They went all up and down Italy. They came to
northern Africa. There was a group there called the Vandals. Uh from where we get the word the verb he was a vandal or he
vandalized something because that’s what they tended to do. And then you have um they settled in France and Spain and uh
some of them actually went across into England. The Angles and the Saxons went from northern Germany. They went into um
England and we now are Anglo-Saxons or some of us are I’m Anglo-Saxon and uh
the original English were the Kelts and they were pushed into Wales, Scotland, Ireland and northwest Britany, northwest
France and that was the story of King Arthur. So uh anyway, you have these barbarian invasions coming in and as
they came in, they kind of swamped the local population across the Roman Empire
and uh this created a major problem for the emperor in Constantinople because how was he going to maintain control
over Western Europe and the major problem was that these barbarian tribes
didn’t hold to the nyin creed? They were Aryan Christians. They were Aryans. They didn’t hold that
Christ was eternal. They believed that Christ was a created being. And three of those tribes in particular, um the
Vandals in North Africa, the Visigothths in southwest spa France, they later went down to uh to Spain, and the Ostrogoths
and they moved into northern Italy. Those were the three most powerful Aryan tribes who came into the Western Roman
Empire. Now, um the Roman Emperor decided that how is he going to hold his empire together? And so he issued the
edict of Thessalonica um in AD 380. And the empire was divided into two, east
and west. And the east was ruled from Constantinople as you see there, modern day Istanbul. And the west was
theoretically ruled from Rome. Um but in practice, the west was under the control
of many of these Aryan tribes, the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, and the Vandals. And so the emperor Theodosis
issued the edict of Thessalonica in AD 3180 which stated that nobody would be
recognized as a Christian unless they acknowledge the co-equal trinity of God the father the son and the holy spirit
and in this edict of Thessalonica the emperor Theodosius said that there was going to be punishment for those who
desented from the nyine creed and uh they were the government was expected across the empire west and east to
enforce Catholic orthodoxy. And we’re not talking about Roman Catholic yet. We’re talking about Catholic in terms of
the worldwide faith of those who accepted the Nyine creed. And so um the
they became uh there came these struggles for religious supremacy in the ro in the uh western Roman Empire. So
the Aryan Gothic tribes then became came to be viewed as the enemies of the emperor and opponents of the opponents
of the bishops of Rome. And uh so the there was constant struggle between them
and so the these uh Aryan tribes because they didn’t like the bishops of Rome who
supported the Catholic doctrine the Nika council of Nika um declaration they started to invade and sack Rome. Uh very
famous picture here of all Alaric. Um he was a leader of the Goths who had sacked Rome in 410 AD. And uh the Vandals
attacked Rome and the Ostrogoths attacked Rome and the Visigothths attacked Rome and they all took their
pound of flesh and Rome was gradually greatly diminished during the course of
those Gothic um barbarian invasions. Now the Bible says talking about this time
it says in Daniel 7 7-8 there’s a very famous passage um it says after this I
saw in the visions by night a fourth beast terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong. It had great iron
teeth and was devouring breaking in pieces and stamping what was left with its feet. It was different from all the
beasts that preceded it and it had 10 horns. I was considering the horns when another horn appeared, a little horn
coming up among them. To make room for it, three of the earlier horns were plucked up by the roots. There were eyes
like human eyes on this horn and a mouth speaking arrogantly. Now, we’re not
going to go into all the details here tonight, but as Protestants, uh, we hold that the identification of that little
horn is actually the rise of the papacy, but I want to focus tonight for a few minutes on why was it that those three
horns were plucked up? Why was it that those three Aryan nations in particular had to be uprooted? And so we have an
image there of that fourth beast, that indescribable beast with 10 horns. And if you look at um it says he shall put
down three kings. Well, um those the modernday nations of Europe can trace
their ancestry to those van those barbarian tribes. So the Anglo-Saxons uh
but formed the United Kingdom and the Visigoths went to Spain and southern France. The Suave went to Portugal. The
Vandals were in North Africa around modern day Tunisia and Carthage. The Franks uh they turned into the French in
northern France. The Alammani they turned into the Germans. Now German name for Germany is Alammania. They don’t
call it Germany as we English people would. Um the Burgundians were in southeastern France. Now you have
Burgundy as a region of France. The Lombards were in Austria. You have the Lombard region there. The Ostrogoths are
in control of Austria in Hungary and actually northern Italy. And the Herili were mostly southern Italy and they were
eventually overwhelmed by the Ostrogoths themselves. And so the these 10 barbarian tribes, they took over the
Western Roman Empire. And of those tribes, the Ostrogoths, the Vandals, and the Visigoths were van were Aryans. They
didn’t hold to the official religion of the Roman Empire. They didn’t accept the Nyin creed. They held that Christ was a
created being and he was not the co-eternal son of God uh within the trinity as the theuh emperor in
Constantinople was insisting. So why were those 10 those three horns
uprooted? Well, the bishop of Rome and the emperor in Constantinople, they were seeking allies in their religious war
against these three um Aryan nations. the Vandals, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. And uh they found an ally in
a guy called Clovis. Now Clovis, he was king in northern France and he was a pagan and uh but he
had a Catholic wife and she was a very famous woman and under much pressure from his Catholic wife, her name was
Clatilda. He was baptized as a Catholic Christian adhering to the Nyine creeds
in 508 AD. And that is the start of the union between church and state, between
the bishops of Rome and the power of the state. Why? Because Clovis then decided to to essentially become the the the um
the military wing of the church of the bishop of Rome. And he decided to enforce the the uh the nyine creed over
the Aryan nations around him. And so even though he only lived for three more years after his baptism, he set about
campaigns of conquest and forcible conversion. and to much applause from the bishop and clergy in Rome. Uh he
conquered modern-day France, Belgium and Holland and uh those conquered tribes were rapidly persuaded to become
Catholic. Um he established Paris as his capital and under his leadership uh the
Franks became a Catholic rather than an Aryan nation and he was the founder of
the modern French nation and he’s viewed as the father of France even today. This guy called Clovis. Now in 58 AD he
turned his attention to the Visigoths and he beat the Visigoths under their king called Allaric II at a very famous
battle the battle of Vugul in the north of France. The var Visigoths were Aryan and this was the key point. The Aryans
cherished religious liberty. It wasn’t just that they had different theology. is that the Aryans refused to
impose their theology within their tribes and they allowed for Jews and
Catholics that is pre- Roman Catholic and Aryans to exist side by side within
their nations and there are historical records for this and we know we have the the the correspondence between these
Aryan kings and the Roman historians like Gregory of Turs and other other
bishops and monks and so uh one of the kings of the Aryans he once rebuked
Gregory of Turs who was a very famous historian and uh so there you have the
conquest of Clovis and he drove the Visigoths out of out of France and
meanwhile the Ostrogoths have become very powerful in Italy at the same time.
And so he wrote to um Gregory of Turs who was a very famous monk in the early 6th century and this is what this
Visigothth this barbarian king wrote. He said, “You must blasphem against a faith
which you yourself do not accept. You notice that we who do not believe the things which you believe nevertheless do
not blaspheme against them. It is no crime for one set of people to believe in one doctrine and another set of
people to believe in another.” Now this is a remarkably enlightened statement from a barbarian king to um a a a
Catholic or a bit a monk called Gregory of Turs in the early 6th century AD. Um
as uh as as we heard earlier this evening often times throughout history um pagan states enforced one religion as
a way of unifying their state. A classic example is Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel chapter 3. But these barbarian nations
were actually um celebrating the fact that they did not they did not they did not just allow religious freedom within
their borders but they didn’t attack the religions of other people. They didn’t blaspheme other people’s faiths. They
had this attitude of religious tolerance. And so the this Visigothth Agalan um who lived just before Clovis
came and wiped out his people um he was defending um the rights of the Visigoths, the the this Aryan nation um
that he’s saying that it’s not right for one group to to attack another group of faith and it is not a crime for some
people to believe one thing and for other people to believe another thing. Essentially, it’s not the state’s business to determine who believes what.
Well, the Visigos didn’t last very long. They were eliminated by Clovis. And after Clovis had defeated the Visigoths
in the battle of Vugul in 508, he brought in a new legal code all across France to establish the supremacy of the
c the Catholic faith for all his subjects whether they were Catholic or Aryan. The principles in government of
the Roman Catholic Church would now be imposed by Clovis and he imposed a legal code known as the Lex Romana Visigoth
which is the law of Rome of the Visigoths. That’s a literal translation from Latin is sometimes known as the
brev brev breviieri law code and that law enshrined the supremacy of the
Catholic view of religion over all other religions within his empire. And what he did was he shut down all the Aryan
churches. He banned public worship by the Aryans. He he exiled the Aryan
bishops, those who would not convert. And he drove the Aryan faith underground. And there were some
executions as well. And so uh maybe just as you know many centuries later um the
the French kings they did the same thing to the hugenos in in Paris in France. So
earlier in France um Clovis was busy imposing the Catholic faith and and
driving the Aryan faith underground. So um at the same time the ostrogoths
had come to dominate in Italy and uh Theodore the great was a very famous
Ostrogoth king and though he was a barbarian he spoke many languages and he
himself conquered Rome as well and he took over Rome in 493 AD and when he
arrived in Rome he showed remarkable tolerance he didn’t engage in rape and pillage uh but he celebrated the Roman
past and basically said that he was going to be a benign autotocrat and that he was going to allow them to keep their
faiths and their traditions, they just weren’t to rebel against him. And uh a this king Theodore the Great, though he
was a barbarian, he enforced religious freedom for all his subjects, even
though he conquered all of modern day Italy and Switzerland and parts of Hungary, he didn’t impose the Aryan
faith upon anybody, but he explicitly allowed religious freedom for all of his subjects. um he issued a very famous
decree in 507 AD and there there’s a map of his that yellow bit is where he was
the king um in 507 just before Clovis allied with the bishop of Rome and in
507 um King Theodore issued a decree um to all the Jews living in Genoa. It’s
recorded in a document called the letters of Casiodoris. And in that document, he he expressed at some length
the need to uphold religious liberty for all his citizens. This was a strange concept at the time. And uh he actually
wrote to the Jews of of of uh that city. Uh he wrote this. He said, “We that is
the government cannot order a religion because no one is forced to believe against his will.”
Now this was an astonishing statement from a barbarian king to the Jewish people living in one of his cities there
and um he rejected the concept of a union of church and state which was being pushed by the Catholic bishops of
Rome and the Byzantine emperors over in Constantinople. So the emperor Justin the he was the
predecessor and uncle of Justinian the he issued a decree against Arminionism
or Aryanism in 518 AD and he reaffirmed the decisions of the council of Nika.
And so uh he was reacting also to Theodore the Great who was allowing religious liberty across Italy. And
Theodore the Great went on to write this. He said he wrote this to a Catholic priest. He said to pretend to a
dominion over the conscience is to user the prerogative of God. By the nature of
things the power of sovereigns has confined to political government. They have no right of punishment but over
those who disturb the public peace. The most dangerous heresy is that of a sovereign who separates himself from
part of his subjects because they believe not according to his belief. Again, it’s an astonishing statement.
And you know what Jonathan has just been sharing with us this evening, that could have been part of your quote, brother Jonathan. You know, and and if Sister
White had said that, we’d be saying, “Praise the Lord because it’s almost an inspired document.” But this is a barbarian king who is an Aryan and he’s
upholding the principle of religious liberty and that the rulers should not impose their religion on their subjects
and that government has no right to interfere in matters of conscience and private faith on the part of their
citizens. And this was an an astonishingly enlightened view for a for a kingdom in the early 500s. And it was
a diametrically opposed to what the Roman emperor in in Constantinople was trying to impose and what the bishops in
Rome were trying to enforce as well. And Sister White, she says something very
similar to this in signs of the times 1897. She said, “Force is the last resort of every false religion.” It’s a
very famous quote. At first it tries attraction as the king of Babylon tried the power of music and outward show. If
these attractions invented by men and inspired by Satan failed to make men worship the image, the hungry flames of
the firm furnace were ready to consume them. So it will be now. The papacy has
exercised her power to compel men to obey her and she will continue to do so.
We need the same spirit that was manifested by God’s servants in the conflict with paganism. And so there is
no historical record of Aryan persecution of the Catholics, but there
are plentiful records of the Catholic persecution of the Aryans either through the armies of Clovis or public smear
campaigns to force the Aryans to accept the Nyine creed and submit to Rome.
There was a very famous um Roman cleric called Cesarius. He wrote a commentary on Revelation chapter 13. It’s a
fascinating commentary and you can still read it to this day. It’s called the patrolia latina. And he identified the
sea beast, the first beast of Romans, revelation 13 as being the heretics, the aryens who were per given power by Satan
to persecute uh the true believers who were the Catholics. So it’s an exact reverse of how we read that passage
today. And so that was in the patrol patrol um Latina from Cesarius of Als.
And he argued that God was allowing the sea beast that is the these Aryan pagan
nations these barbarians um to oppress and persecute the true church of Christ
which was those who upheld the nyine creed or in those days that was the Catholic church. So eventually Justinian
becomes the emperor and in 527 in Constantinople and he immediately turned
to this brilliant young general called Bellisarius and he asked Belisarius to fight the battles to save the Roman
Empire. And at first Belisarius went off to modernday Syria. He went into Persia.
He went into Armenia and Georgia and he won a series of very famous battles against the empires of the of the
eastern borders of the Eastern Roman Empire. But then the Justinian asked him to march across um Africa and uh he did
that and he he he destroyed the the um the Aryan nation of the Vandals. And so
um he fought on the eastern part of the empire and he established the the Eastern Roman Empire’s boundaries. They
were secure. And then Belisarius marched across North Africa. And on the map
there, you see where it says Vandals in the south of modern day Tunisia. And they were based around the city of
Carthage in the north there. And he wiped out the Vandals in two years of brutal fighting. And that so thus one of
the three major Aryan nations was extinguished. He was then told by Justinian that he had to set free the
bishops of Rome so that they could be um removed from Ostrogoth or Aryan control
and they could be um Orthodox or Nyine creed supporting bishops. So Bellisarius
crossed into Italy and he marched up through Italy and he drove out most of the the the Ostrogoths and he captured
Rome. They then rallied and there was a siege of two years and at the end of that siege Belisarius won the battle and
the Ostrogo were defeated and Bellisarus went all the way to northern Italy and
he took over the Ostrogothic capital of Ravena in northern Italy where it is today. And while he was doing that, and
this is important for us as Adventists and those who study their prophecy, um, in the middle of that siege in 538 AD,
he deposed the Pope Sylvius, who had been appointed by the Ostrogoths. And he installed a new pope called Vigilus on
the orders of the Baantine Empress. And so in 538 AD under the arms of
Belisarius, the first, you might say, Roman Catholic bishop of Rome was established, who was unquestionably
loyal to the council of Nika and the creed of Nika. And the Aryan nations of Italy, particularly the Ostrogoths, they
were basically wiped out by Belisarius and his troops. And so Rome became that
started, you might say, the official start of of the of of the Roman era of supremacy in Western Europe. And with
the elimination of the three Aryan nations, Visigothth, Vandal, and Ostrogoth, um there was nobody left to
challenge the bishop of Rome because he had the armies of the Catholic nations such as Fran, the Franks, to support
their political goals. And so Roman Catholic supremacy was assured in Western Europe. And so began in 58 AD
the 1290day prophecy of Daniel 1211. Those 1290 years began with the formal
union of church and state when the French king Clovis allied with the bishop of Rome in 58 and he defeated the
Aryan Visigoths. And after Belisarius defeated the Aryan Vandals in 534 AD and
he drove the Aryan Ostrogoths from Rome together with their appointed bishop in 538 AD. that 1260 years of papal
supremacy began in Western Europe precisely as foretold in Daniel 7:25 and
Daniel 12:7. Now the core issue when you read the documentation of the time, the
letters between Ostrogoth and Visigothth kings and the bishops of Rome or the emperors in Constantinople, it wasn’t so
much that they held a different creed. It was that the Aryan nations insisted on religious tolerance.
and those who insisted on the n the council of the creed of nika the Catholic faith they wanted Catholic
supremacy and they didn’t agree with religious tolerance and so a core issue of the time was that
those three Aryan nations were upholding religious liberty for all their subjects they insisted on tolerance for their
Jewish subjects for their Aryan subjects and for their Catholic subjects and the
bishops of Rome and the emperors in Constantinople didn’t want that kind of tolerance and so those three Aryan
nations had to be wiped out. And Sister Dwight puts it this way, the the the rise of the early church. She
says, “No church within the limits of Rome’s jurisdiction was long left undisturbed in the enjoyment of freedom
of conscience. No sooner had the papacy obtained power than she stretched out her arms to crush all those that refused
to acknowledge her sway, and one after another, the churches submitted to her dominion.” And if you look at the story
of say the Celtic church in Wales and Scotland and Northern England, um they held out for three or four centuries,
but eventually they were overwhelmed as well. And so wherever Rome went, liberty of conscience was crushed. Um but Roman
supremacy was established in Western Europe only when the three Aryan nations were uprooted and their great danger to
Rome was not their theology. It was their upholding of the principle of religious liberty. And so they had to be
done away with. So having talked about some of the history, I want to talk
about some basic principles of religious liberty here. And that’s what I’m going to go through in the next 10 minutes.
I’m not going to not going to take long over this. I want to talk about five things here very briefly. The basic
principles of religious liberty. And the first is the order of creation. So God
revealed himself and his perfect will to Adam in the garden of Eden. It says, ‘The Lord God took the man and put him
in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, you may freely eat of every tree in
the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of
it, you shall die. Now, why is this so significant, this verse? Well, it tells us that Adam was a created being in a
moral universe. God had revealed morality to him. Adam was morally accountable to God with eternal
consequences for whether he lived or not according to God’s revealed will. That’s the first thing we learn there. The
second thing about this is that the greatest commandment is that you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all
your mind. And the second is like unto it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. But in this passage here, Eve
has not yet been created. So it’s not possible to keep the second commandment at this stage of the pro of
of this of this this stage of creation. So before Eve comes along, it’s not possible for Adam to love Eve or anybody
else. So the only person he can love is his heavenly father or his creator. So
the first principle of the of of the creation being is that um we are to live
according to what God has revealed to us has revealed morality. And our first
responsibility is to love, worship and honor God before we think about love, honoring and worshiping loving other
people, not worshiping and honoring them. Certainly. But before we love our neighbor as ourself, our first responsibility is to love our heavenly
father. And when we are when we are in a right relationship with our heavenly father, then it is natural that love for
our fellow man flows out through us. And if you do not have love for your fellow man, it’s a proxy indicates that maybe
you don’t have love for your creator. But when you have love for your creator and you honor your creator, that is it
naturally expressed through love for your fellow man. it kind of it oozes out of you, you know. Um when you fall in
love, you can’t hide it, can you? And when when when you fall in love, you can pretend to people that you haven’t
fallen in love, but people pick it up. And so love is something that you cannot hide. It’s like body odor as well. You
can put deodorant on, but you can’t hide that there’s a strong case of body odor there as well. And so some things just
ooze out of you. And when you’re in a right relationship with God, that leads to a right relationship with your fellow
man. But the the points I’m making here is in the creation order of things, our first responsibility is to honor God and
his will for us. Would you agree with that? Okay. So that is the that is why religious liberty is what we say in the
general conference working in policy manual. It is the primordial right of man. It goes beyond before anything
else. before your rights to free speech, before your rights to gather or associate or to have freedom of the
press, before your right to bear arms or to pay taxes or whatever else we have in our constitution, the first right we
have before God is to worship him and to honor him and to live according to his
revealed will. And so Peter expressed this before the Sanhedrin when he said
we ought to obey God rather than men. That’s the first principle of religious liberty. And that comes because it’s the
created order. Before we can before Adam could love his fellow man, before he even existed, Adam was in a loving and
obedient relation to his creator. So the first principle is that um the the f the
most important and fundamental right of any human being by order of the virtue of the order of creation is that we
love, honor and obey God and his revealed will for us. The and following on from that, we come to the lordship of
Jesus Christ. Now to be a Christian means not just you accept Jesus as your
savior. It means you ask him to be Lord of your life today as well. Many Christians want Jesus to be savior
tomorrow but they want to be lord of their lives today. But Jesus wants to be Lord and Savior in our lives. And so uh
in Acts 2:36 Peter says this. He said therefore let the entire house of Israel
know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah. this Jesus
whom you crucified. And uh this means that Jesus is both
Lord and Messiah for those who are his disciples. He’s not just our savior, he is our Lord as well. And uh how what
does that mean? Matthew 28:20, Jesus says, “Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.”
So a Christian is one who obeys the teachings of Jesus. Would you agree with that? A Christian obeys the teachings of
Jesus. Now Jesus promised us the Holy Spirit and it came at Pentecost in Acts chapter 2. And Jesus promised that if
any disciple asked for the gift of the Holy Spirit, God would give the Holy Spirit to that individual. We read about
that in Luke 11. And the Holy Spirit points us to Jesus, reminds us of his teaching, convicts us of our sins, and
brings us conversion through the new birth experience. But it’s also interesting in scripture that the Holy
Spirit or the spirit of Christ re um brings conviction to the life and the heart of the believer on things that are
not explicitly covered in scripture. And this was a key point of contention the last 5 years. And a classic example of
that is found in the book of Acts where Paul wants to go um into into another
part of Turkey and Luke writes this. He says when they, that is Paul and Barnabas had come opposite Mysa. Um or
this is Paul and Silas, they attempted to go into Bethnia, but the spirit of Jesus did not allow them.
It’s a fascinating passage. It tells us that if you are a Christian under the lordship of Jesus Christ and he speaks
to you through his spirit, it means that he can bring conviction on your heart on matters that are not explicitly covered
in the word of God. Would you agree with that? Is crossing
into Bethnia a matter covered in the word of God? Absolutely not. Did the Holy Spirit or what this the text says
here, the spirit of Jesus brought conviction to the apostles not to go into a certain area? And so it is
perfectly possible for Christians to say the Holy Spirit has brought conviction on me to act in a certain way on matters
that are not explicitly articulated in the scriptures.
And that’s what we were talking about in the last 5 years that God sends his holy spirit to bring you conviction about
certain things that are not explicitly mentioned in the word of God. So the fact that the Bible does not mention for
instance vaccination does not mean that the spirit of Jesus does not bring you conviction on matters relating to
vaccination because in this passage here we see the spirit of Jesus does bring conviction on matters that are not
explicitly articulated in the scriptures. And if I’m a Christian and I follow the teachings of Jesus and I’m
obedient to the convictions of the spirit of Jesus upon my conscience, then I must follow through with those. I must
be obedient to the teachings and the commands of Jesus in scripture and through his holy spirit. So the holy
spirit brings specific convictions into the conscience of the individual believers that on matters that are not
directly covered by scripture. You see that in the text there. Thus, it is critical for us to develop a conscience
that is sensitive and recognizes the convictions of the Holy Spirit that we may know and follow God’s will for us in
our lives. We do this by a daily study of the word of God and a meaningful devotional life. You come to recognize
the voice of the Holy Spirit. And so the uh then we come to our
conscience in scripture. Our conscience as a summary of what your conscience is is a God-given inner
faculty by which the Holy Spirit gives an awareness of the morality of given deeds, actions or thoughts.
In Romans chapter 2, Paul discusses how God is going to dis judge the Gentiles, those who have never had the law of God.
And he says this. He says, “When Gentiles who do not possess the law do instinctively what the law requires,
these though not having the law are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their
hearts to which their own conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse
them on the day when according to my gospel God through Jesus Christ will judge the secret thoughts of all. So
what Paul is saying here is that if little Muhammad dies of road accident and he’s ageed six in Jedha in Saudi
Arabia, how is God going to judge little Muhammad who’s never heard of Jesus? How
is God going to be fair to little Muhammad? Well, God knows what little Muhammad thought in his mind and he
knows whether when when Muhammad wanted to push his sister over in the kitchen and the Holy Spirit said, “Don’t do it.”
Whether Muhammad responded positively or not to the convictions of the Holy Spirit and so God, this this text tells
us that in your conscience, the Holy Spirit brings you conviction and there are conflicting thoughts between the
desires of the flesh and the life of the spirit. And as we respond to the the convictions of the spirit and reject the
desires and works of the flesh, God honors that. And that has eternal consequence.
And so living according to your conscience is very, very important because God one day will judge people
according to whether they lived according to the light that they’ve received. And God is not saying you must
have a certain amount of light to be saved. He’s saying what is important is whether you lived in the light that you
did have. And God knows how much light we have because he’s the one who brings light into our conscience. So through
our conscience, the Holy Spirit also bears witness to what we already know to be God’s will. The Apostle Paul says
this, “I’m speaking the truth in Christ. I’m not lying. My conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit.” And through our
conscience, therefore, the Holy Spirit reveals God’s will to you and to me and to the wider community of faith. Now our
conscience can be seared and um
in Michigan we don’t have genuine Mexican food like you have down here. You know our our stomachs have been
seared by Taco Bell. But when you come down here you have genuine you know
genuine Mexican food and it’s delicious and and so but you can also have a
seared conscience. And now the apostle Paul says to a young preacher called Timothy. He says, “Now
the spirit expressly says that in later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits
and teachings of demons through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron.” So in this
passage here we read that you can have a seared conscience that when we when we
repeatedly refuse to listen to the convictions of the Holy Spirit upon our heart, we harden our conscience. We
harden our hearts and it becomes ever harder and harder and harder for God to reach through to us till eventually we
no longer hear the voice of the Holy Spirit. And so when people say, “Have I committed the unforgivable sin?” The
answer is no. How do you know that? The very fact that you are concerned about whether you’ve committed the
unforgivable sin shows that you’re sensitive to the prompings of the Holy Spirit upon your heart. Only those who
have no concern for the unforgivable sin are in any danger of having committed the unforgivable sin. And so people who
are sunk in sin, but they’re worried, have am I lost? Have I committed the unforgivable sin? The good news tonight is no, you haven’t because you wouldn’t
be asking that question because you’re still sensitive to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, even though you may not
recognize it in this moment. And so the Holy Spirit can uh brings us conviction
in our consciences, but we may have a conscience that is seared. And that conscience is seared when we choose
deliberately to go against the convictions of the Holy Spirit.
So Romans 14:23, last couple of verses here, for whatsoever does not proceed
from faith is sin. I tried this on my mother as a small small boy. I said,
“Mother, I’m not convinced that eating my Sabbath broccoli is good for me.” And she convinced me with a smack. So that
that solved that theological question. And I soon learned that that isn’t quite what this text is talking about.
Whatsoever does not proceed from faith is sin. But uh to go against God’s
revealed will either revealed in scripture or the convictions of our conscience um would be a sin. And so in
order to avoid that sin, we are to nurture our conscience through a daily reading of the word of God. And in
particular, as Christians who accept the lordship of Jesus Christ, we should be reading the Gospels every single day.
Whatever else you do in your studies, I want to encourage you tonight, read a passage from the Gospels every day and know the teachings of Jesus. So if
somebody doesn’t know what the gospels say, they can know from how you live your life what Jesus taught. That your
life is a living testimony and living sermon. And if somebody doesn’t actually have a Bible or know what Jesus taught,
they know, well, that person’s a Christian. She’s a Christian. He’s a Christian. And because they act in this way, this is therefore what Jesus
taught. And we can only reach that point in our Christian experience when we are reading the Gospels every single day. So
I’d encourage you as Christians to live the teachings of Jesus. Read the teachings of Jesus. Know the teachings
of Jesus. Let other people see Christ in you. And that is not seen not just in
your profession of faith or the day you go to church, but how you live your life from Sunday through Friday out there in
wider Texas. That your life, my life is transparently Christian. And John 16:8,
Jesus speaks about the Holy Spirit. He says, “When he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness
and judgment.” And so to protect and preserve our conscience, we can invite the Holy Spirit tonight to convict us of
our sins. We can invite the Holy Spirit to lead us to the righteousness of Jesus Christ. And we can ask the Holy Spirit
to remind us of how we are spared eternal judgment through our union with Jesus Christ. So there are many
blessings to living a life of the spirit. And then this leads us to the last couple of points here. And this is
the passage that brother Jonathan earlier referred to on the separation of church and state. very famous passage
Matthew 22:15-22 and uh this other fundamental biblical principle of religious liberty is that
we believe in the separation of church and state and so what the Aryans were were upholding those three pagan nations
barbarian nations what those barbarian nations were upholding was the principle of the separation of church and state
and they were wiped out for believing that and thus the bishop of Rome was established as a sole ruler in Western
Europe by the Roman general Bellisarius but this this matter exercise the minds
of the Pharisees. And you see on the on the question there, it says, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or
not?” He says, “But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me
the coin used for the tax?” And they brought him a dinarius. Then he said to them, whose head is this, and whose title? Uh more accurate interpretation
is whose image is on this coin, and whose title? They answered, “The emperors.” Then Jesus said to them,
“Give there to or render therefore unto the Caesar the things that are the emperors or Caesars and to God the
things that are gods.” When they heard this, they were amazed and they left him and went away. So in this passage, Jesus
affirms a few basic princip basic religious liberty principles. Number one, Jesus recognized that the civil
state has a legitimate claim upon the individual. The government can claim tax
from its citizens. Jesus is not um he’s not a um a radical anti-government
activist here. He recognizes that if Caesar says this is the tax, you need to pay that tax. That is civil government
has a legitimate claim upon a part of your life. That’s the first principle. The second principle is though that God
also has a legitimate claim on a part of the believer’s life because you render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesars’s and you must render unto God the things that are God’s. So the civil authority has a legitimate um sphere of
influence and jurisdiction over us. But God also has legitimate influence and sphere of jurisdiction over us as well.
And the third principle from that is that the civil authorities must recognize the claims of God upon
individuals. It’s not just that Jesus teaches that that there are the claims of the civil
authorities and the claims of God upon the individual, but the civil authorities must also recognize the claim of God upon individuals. And when
there are competing claims between the civil authorities and the and and God himself, then it is the civil
authorities that must give way to the conscience and convictions of the believer. And so the civil authority has
legitimate claims. God has legitimate claims. When there is a clash between the two, the civil authority must give
way. And the civil authority needs to recognize and affirm the claims of God upon the conscience and life of the
believer. These are some of the principles that Jesus is teaching here. And but more fundamentally, Jesus holds
up a coin and he says, “Whose image is this?” And there’s there’s an image of Caesar there. Like today, you get
Washington’s head. Yes. On a on a coin or King Queen Elizabeth on a 50 piece in England. And so when Jesus held up the
coin, the coin belongs to Caesar because it bears his image. Would you agree?
But we’re created in the image of God. And so therefore, we belong to God. And
every part of that coin, that coin is issued by the Roman treasury and it can be claimed back in whole by the Roman
treasury. We are created by God. We bear his image and therefore God has ultimate
claim over each one of us today. And so because we are the imagebearers of God,
Caesar only has a partial claim over to us. And that partial claim is allowed to run in our lives only in so far as it
does not compete with the claims of God upon the conscience and life of the individual believer. So this this
seemingly simple teaching of Jesus has a lot of you know rich ideas that flow out of it for religious liberty today. So
then we come to what we define as religious liberty in our church. And this is what we define in our working
policy manual. It says, “Religious liberty includes the fundamental human right to have, adopt, or change one’s
religion or religious belief according to conscience, and to manifest and practice one’s religion individually or
in fellowship with other believers in prayer, devotions, witness, and teaching, including the observance of a
weekly day of rest and worship in harmony with the precepts of one religion, subject to respect for the
equivalent rights of others. Public affairs and religious liberty.
One of the original core departments of the church was initially established to promote and maintain religious liberty
with particular emphasis upon the most intimate freedom individual liberty of conscience.
Now that this says that the most intimate freedom we have or earlier in
this document it says that the the primordial right of a human being is to live in harmony with God because Adam
was created before Eve was created. Therefore, the only relationship that could exist was between creator and and
Adam, his first created human being. And so, your most core, your most most
important right tonight is not the right to free speech and it’s
not the first amendment that we have in America. It’s the right to live in harmony with God’s revealed will because
we are his creation and we bear his image and we are morally accountable to him. And when we live in harmony with
his revealed will, there are eternal consequences on the line. It’s a much more important relationship in our lives
than any any civil relationship we have today. The most intimate freedom we have today is individual liberty of
conscience, which means living in harmony with the will of God. Choosing
to live in harmony with his will uh rather than choosing to live exactly as you want to live your life. And so this
is our definition of religious liberty. The fact that we ignored it in the last five years doesn’t mean it’s not a
powerful statement. But the most intimate freedom we have today is individual liberty of conscience. And um
I was as as brother Jonathan was talking about Roger Williams, you know, the founder of Rhode Island and the
principles of tolerance there. I just discovered that you have in your great controversy um library uh um museum here. You bought
on eBay the headstone of Roger Williams from his grave. I was astonished to discover that. So, I’m going to take a
look at it after this this this meeting here tonight. Um, I’d like to take a picture of it because it must be a it’s
a fascinating thing. But, um, Roger Williams, his vision of America was
sharply at odds with that of the Puritan fathers. And when Winthrop was sailing, a famous Puritan preacher was sailing
across the Atlantic in 1630, I think it was, um he gave a famous speech that the
eyes of the world are upon us and we’re going to build a city on a hill and the eyes of the world are upon us and that
we’re going to build a new theocracy in America. There’s going to be a light to the world. And John F. Kennedy quoted
that before the Massachusetts legislature 11 days before he was inaugurated as president. The eyes of
the world are upon us. We will be a city on a hill for the world to see. But that vision of America did not take hold in
our constitution. The idea that we’re going to be a union of church and state was not accepted. It was the vision of
Roger Williams of separation of church and state that eventually made its way into our first amendment. And we should
be grateful today for the work of Roger Williams um in in in overturning the the
Puritans vision with Winthrop and his famous sermon and insisting that church and state should not mix.
So we as Adventists today, we’ve been raised in a country, we were founded by God in a country where we have the most
uh incredible and important freedoms of all and that is primarily freedom of
conscience. Treasure that freedom and don’t despise it.
stand up for it because when the third angel’s message goes out during the time of the mark of the beast and everybody
in the world has to make a choice. We’ll just we’ll talk about this a bit more tomorrow. The first angel’s message
basically is Jesus revealed. The second angel’s message is is Satan exposed. And
the third angel’s message is you’ve got to make a choice. If you may summarize the three angels in those ways, Jesus
revealed Satan exposed. You need to make a choice. And that making a choice
requires and assumes that people have the liberty of conscience to make a choice for God.
And so therefore, if we are to preach the three angels messages, we’re also called by God to uphold religious
liberty for all people, not just Adventists, so that as many people as possible, have the chance to choose for
God in the final crisis. People may not choose for God today, but we are we
uphold their religious liberties today because one day when the mark of the beast is imposed, everybody has to make
that choice. And we want them to have that freedom. So tonight, the Apostle Paul says to us,
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you which you have from God and that you are
not your own? For you are bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God with your
body. Uh whatsoever you eat or drink or whatever you do, do everything to the
glory of God. So seek God’s will.
H um hunt for God’s will. Study the scriptures for God’s will.
When God brings you conviction, don’t harden your heart and say, “I’ll come back to it next year.”
Live according to those convictions. Put them into practice. And the more you do this, the clearer and clearer the voice
of the Holy Spirit will be upon your conscience. And we need that Holy Spirit to be as
clear as possible because when there’s so much noise in this world out there, most of it is coming from satanic
sources seeking to drive out and drown out the voice of the Holy Spirit. We need to be able to live according to the
convictions of our conscience. So whatever you do in this coming week,
do it to the glory of God. And you know it’s the glory of God if you’re living according to his revealed will. We find
his revealed will here in the word of God. We find it through prayer. And we find it through being obedient to the
convictions that his holy spirit brings upon our consciences. So stand up for religious liberty. Never
yield an inch on it. It’s the most important most primordial right of all. All of the rights are subject to that
one right of religious liberty. And when the three angels messages are proclaimed
in that final crisis, when the mark of the beast is imposed, we’re going to assume that everybody has
the right, the ability, and the means to choose for God and not for Satan. So we
stand up for it today so that as many people as possible tomorrow might be saved. We don’t stand up for liberty
just for ourselves. We stand it up for those who are lost today in order that they may choose for God when everything
is on the line. So may God bless us as we stand tall for Jesus. Don’t be afraid of what the world
might say to you. We’re to fear God rather than fear men. And what can men do to us at the end of the day? We had
that song, a mighty fortress is our God. They may rage. They may get angry with you. But it’s God and only God who has
control of our eternal destiny. So we are to please God rather than men in all things. And to God be the glory in each
of our lives. And may people find Jesus through how we live our lives. And when
Jesus comes again, it’s my prayer that there’ll be multitudes through the witness of this congregation because we
stood tall for the right of every man, woman, boy, and girl to choose for Jesus in the final time of crisis. May God
bless us as we shine for him here in Texas. Let’s bow our heads for a word of prayer. Heavenly Father,
as we uh enter these Sabbath hours, we uh we’re mindful of the freedoms that we
have here today. Well, those freedoms didn’t come easily, but they were won. Sometimes in battle, sometimes in
letter, sometimes in pulpit, but they were won. And we are beneficiaries of those freedoms today. Lord, I pray that
we will not use those freedoms as an opportunity for self-indulgence. But Lord, may those freedoms pass
through us to the next generation, to those living around us in spiritual darkness. May this may this uh church,
this congregation indeed be a light on a hill. May it be a light that can never be um silenced or shut down by the
darkness around us. And in the light that shines from this congregation, Father, may people know of a sinbearing
and sooncoming Savior. And may they have the opportunity to place their faith in him. This is our prayer tonight. In the
name of Jesus, our Lord and Savior we pray. Amen.