THE
BOOK OF REVELATION
By:
Bertrand L. Comparet
Lesson
#2 Of A Series Of 14, Transcribed From Audio Tapes
Transcribed
By:
Clifton
A. Emahiser’s
Teaching
Ministries
1012
North Vine Street
Fostoria,
OH
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(419) 435-2836
[Unless
in brackets, all of the message is by Bertrand L. Comparet.]
You’ll remember that last month I started on the Book of Revelation, a big
subject and a tough one. We are not going to be able to finish it this month or
for several months to come, because I want to do it right. We noted that the
Book of Revelation starts out with messages to seven “churches”, each
representing a city in Asia, and that it has been the uniform understanding
among Christian scholars that these messages were not directed, in fact, to
those “churches” in those cities, because we have no record of the peculiar
things mentioned as conditions in each one of them. We have no record mentioned
in the Book of Revelation that it was so in that city any more than any other,
and the uniform understanding of scholars has been that each of the cities named
was representative of a stage in the total history of the Christian “Church”
from the time of Yahshua the Christ to His eventual return. The first of these
“churches” mentioned was the “Church” at Ephesus, where the message was that they were
praised for their loyalty to Yahshua the Messiah’s teachings. This is a fact
that when false teachers got among them, they saw they were false and expelled
them. [See note #2 at end of lesson
#1.]
They
were criticized, however, because He said, “thou hast left thy first love.” Well
this represents the early Christian “Church” during the 1st century of the
Christian Era from A.D. 30; the death and resurrection of Yahshua the Christ, to
the end of that century. Now, as you have noted, all that was said about the
second coming of Christ was in such form that – you had to understand that it
was not to be an immediate thing, and many of them misunderstood it, – they
thought, “well, this means that in a matter of a year or two He’ll be coming
back.” Time passed and He didn’t return, and there was the fall of Jerusalem and all that,
and things seemed to be going from bad to worse, so a lot of them became, oh,
perhaps skeptical is the word. They had lost their first enthusiasm. The second
message was to the “Church” at Smyrna. There was no criticism whatsoever of
that “church.” They were praised and encouraged to stand fast through terrible
persecution that they would face. This covers the period of the pagan
persecution of the Christian “Church”, beginning with 64 A.D. and extending to
313 A.D. when the emperor Constantine issued an edict tolerating the Christian
“Church”, ending all persecution of it. You’ll notice that these dates are not
altogether mutually exclusive. There are, in a number of instances, overlaps.
One phase was gradually closing out during the same years that the following
phase was gradually getting under way.
The
third of these “churches” mentioned was the “Church” at Pergamos, and He praised
them: “thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith”, even
though dwelling where Satan’s throne is. The things that were said about the
city of Pergamos
as being the place where Satan’s throne is were in the past even as John wrote
this. That authority had all been transferred to Rome, because the king of the
city of Pergamos, having no heir, by his will, left his kingdom to the people of
Rome (which was still a republic at that time), and left with it his title of
Pontifex Maximus, the supreme pontiff, the high priest of the pagan Babylonian
mystery religion. So this actually operated in Rome rather than Pergamos. The “church” was
criticized, because “thou hast there those that hold the doctrine of Balaam.”
Balaam you’ll remember, being asked to curse the people of Israel when they were
on the march, said he couldn’t do so because Yahweh had only blessed them; but
he did tell the pagan king Balak, “Now if you want to get rid of these people,
the only way to do it is to lead them into idolatry, so when they abandon their
Mighty One, Yahweh will abandon them.” And it was done, with the result that I
think some 30,000 of the Israelites perished in a plague that Yahweh sent upon
them as punishment for turning to idolatry. [Again,
Comparet overlooks the more important part of that incident, inasmuch as the
Israelite men were committing fornication (race-mixing) with Balak’s
women.]
This
refers to the period of the development of the power of the papacy, from 313 to
606 A.D. In the effort to build up converts more rapidly, the Catholic “Church” turned to adopting pagan holidays, pagan
rituals, even adopted some of the pagan gods now under the title of saints, and
there is no question but that it was a corrupting of the religion that they
started with. On the other hand, they never did drop their recognition that
Yahshua the Christ was the Messiah incarnate in the flesh, meaning “Yahshua the
Messiah was Yahweh come in the flesh.” Thus, you had this curious combination.
You had partial Christianity, but at the same time corrupted by a partial
paganism creeping in. Now let’s go in detail from there. The next one of these
“churches” (and this is Revelation 2, verses 18 to 29) is the “Church” at
Thyatira:
“And
unto the angel of the church in Thyatira write; These things saith the Son of
God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine bronze; I know thy works,
and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the
last to be more than the first.
Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that
woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my
servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols. And I
gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold, I
will cast her into a couch, and them that commit adultery with her into great
tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children
with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the
reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.
But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this
doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak; I will
put upon you none other burden. But that which ye have already hold fast till I come. And he
that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power
over the nations: And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a
potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father. And I
will give him the morning star. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the
Spirit saith unto the “churches.”
Thyatira,
the name, simply means “town of Thyra.” It was an ancient village that first
became important when king Seleucus Nicator (he was one of the kings, you see,
who upon the break-up of Alexander the Great’s empire, [divided it among themselves], he seized the Syrian
quarter of it) founded there a Macedonian colony between 301 and 281 B.C., and
it became and remained through ancient times a rich and busy commercial city. In
its religion it was called the holy city of the god Tyrimnos. That was a Libyan
sun god, and pretty much identified with the Greek sun god Apollo. They also had
a temple of
Artemis, and the high
priestess or prophetess of Artemis was the wife of the high priest Apollo
Tyrimnos. They had developed to a great extent, something which, while common in
a good many places, seems to have reached its height here, the matter of the
pagan trade guilds. I think you all know how during the middle ages all the
different merchants and craftsmen had their guilds. You’d have the gold-smith’s
guild, and the carpenter’s guild, and the leather-worker’s guild, and so on.
They were mutual aid societies. They corresponded both to our modern Chamber of
Commerce and our modern labor unions. In addition, these ancient trade guilds
were a social order, something on the order of our modern clubs like Kiwanis and
Rotary club and that sort of thing, which carried out works of charity and did
quite a bit of good. [See note #1 at end of
lesson.]
On
the other hand, they were definitely pagan in their origin and composition.
Their members were pagan. At their meetings, it was quite common that they would
have a banquet. The people ate reclining on couches Roman fashion [which was also the Greek fashion, and the manner of eating
evident in the New Testament Greek]. And Roman fashion, also, by the end
of the banquet, they’d had enough wine that it was apt to turn into quite a
lively occasion, to the detriment of good morals. We have found in the ruins of
Thyatira some rather extensive inscriptions dealing with this. Which give us a
pretty good picture of that. At the time John was writing, it would appear that
the “church” at Thyatira was divided on the question, whether their members
could retain their old memberships in these pagan trade guilds or not. And there
was evidently someone there at Thyatira, a prophetess, who was preaching that
you could, as long as you remembered you were a Christian, and you went to
church on the Sabbath, it didn’t matter if you attended these pagan meetings.
But the food served there was likely to be meat that had been offered in
sacrifice to these idols, and of course it led to much immorality by the time
they got fairly well drunk by the end of the event.
Probably
Jezebel was not her actual name, but was used as an epithet. You’ll remember the
very wicked queen Jezebel, wife of king Ahab of Israel, who brought in the 450
priests of Baal and led the kingdom of Israel into idolatry. The idea of there
being prophetesses, as well as prophets, is nothing startling – the Old
Testament mentions several: Miriam, Deborah, Huldah; and in the New Testament:
Luke 2, verses 36 to 38, it speaks of “Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of
Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher.” There is also mention of prophetesses in Acts
21, verses 8 and 9. Thus, the prophetic office was not limited simply to men.
The period represented in “Church” history by this would be from, say, 604 A.D.
to the death of Pope Gregory the 1st. By that time he had developed and
crystallized the power of the Pope to about as high a degree as it got, and it
would carry, from that time up until what we can call the starting date of the
Protestant reformation, 1517 A.D. During this period you had many pagan and
unscriptural doctrines carried into the “church” doctrine; the adoption of pagan
holidays and pagan ceremonies, the worship of the Virgin Mary, in order to bring
into the “church” the people who were
accustomed to worshipping Semiramis, the wife of Nimrod, under the title of
goddess Ishtar, queen of heaven. Yahshua the Christ was reduced from the mature
Yahshua the Messiah, who was the savior of his people, to just a baby carried in
the arms of Mary. You go into any Catholic “church” today and you’ll see a
statue there of Mary carrying the infant Yahshua in her arms, which naturally is
reducing to the minimum any status that you can give to Him. The worship of
saints as mediators between God and man, and that sort of thing, was another
thing introduced at that time.
You
had a period, running up to 313, when the Christian “Church” suffered terrific
persecutions from the pagan Roman Empire. Then
suddenly all that ceased, because with the issuance of Constantine’s “Edict of Toleration”, all persecution
stopped, and about 30 years later he followed it up with an edict making
Christianity the official religion of the Roman
Empire. How come the sudden change? Here you had three centuries in
which, in spite of their prayers for help, they were martyred by the hundreds.
And now suddenly they escaped all this. Well, some self admittedly bright person
came up with the statement: “Here are all these martyrs who were murdered for
their faith, and by reason of their loyalty they undoubtedly have higher
standings with God, and so they’re up there in heaven praying for us, and their
prayers have now finally brought about what our prayers couldn’t, that God
rescued us from persecution.” Therefore, if there is anything else you want, if
the saints up there are the ones who have influence which you can’t have, why
not pray to “saint who’s-it” for whatever you want.
Now
that was definitely unscriptural, but remember by this time the Catholic “Church” had already reduced the Scriptures to a
very low point. They said that tradition was of at least equal weight with the
Scripture, and in fact, where there was any contradiction between whatever
tradition they had established and Scripture, the Scripture lost out. If they
had read the Bible, they could not have stumbled into this error. 1st Timothy 2,
verse 5: “For Yahweh is One, and one mediator of Yahweh and men: a man Yahshua
Christ” (WFT). Again, John 14, verse 6: “Yahshua saith unto him, I am the way,
the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Not by
“saint what’s-his-name.” And two of the Gospels, Matthew 15, verse 9, and Mark
7, verse 7, quoting Isaiah 29:13 [from the Septuagint] (when he was rebuking
the “Jews” for their apostasy, the Pharisee religion placed tradition on the
same footing as Scripture. In other words, they took the identical position that
the Catholic
“Church” took later. They said the Talmud, which
was called the “traditions of the elders” in Yahshua the Christ’s time, is
entitled to as much weight as anything the prophets have written.) So, Yahshua
quoted to them the terrible words out of Isaiah, “But in vain they do worship
me, teaching for their doctrines the commandments of men.”
From
Babylon on into Rome you had a well organized and very popular
pagan religion worshipping the Queen of Heaven, which, as I say, was Semiramis,
the wife of Nimrod, deified as Ishtar. And that was something that had gotten
the people of Israel in trouble before. It’s
inexcusable that a repetition of it should come about, when all they’d need to
do would be to read the Book of Jeremiah. You will remember, the deportation of
the southern kingdom of Judah was in two stages! They were first
captured by Nebuchadnezzar in 606 B.C., and the leading citizens, those who were
likely to be leaders in revolt, were all deported to Babylon, but not the bulk
of the population. Then, after about 20 years, revolt came again because
Egypt promised them help,
which Egypt wasn’t able to deliver.
Egypt had become a mulatto nation by
that time. Jeremiah warned them not to revolt, but they did. They were again
captured, nearly all the population deported, – some of them were left behind,
enough to keep the vineyards and orchards from going back to jungle, and
Jeremiah was left among them. [See note #2 at end of
lesson.]
Then,
when one of the Jews murdered the man whom Nebuchadnezzar had appointed as the
governor over them, the rest fled to Egypt, taking Jeremiah along with
them. And in Jeremiah 7, verse 18, and Jeremiah 44, verses 25 to 27, he is
rebuking them for apostasy and paganism – that they had adopted the Babylonian
worship of the Queen of Heaven. He says: “The children gather wood, and the
fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen
of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may
provoke me to anger.” Now, that wasn’t just Jeremiah’s words. He was quoting
this as “thus saith Yahweh.” Again: “Thus saith Yahweh of hosts, the Elohim of
Israel, saying; Ye and your wives have both spoken with your mouths, and
fulfilled with your hand, saying, We will surely perform our vows that we have
vowed, to burn incense to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings
unto her: ye will surely accomplish your vows, and surely perform your vows.
Therefore hear ye the word of Yahweh, all Judah that dwell in the land of Egypt;
Behold, I have sworn by my great name, saith Yahweh, that my name shall no more
be named in the mouth of any man of Judah in all the land of Egypt, saying ...
Behold, I will watch over them for evil, and not for good: and all the men of
Judah that are in the land of Egypt
shall be consumed by the sword and by the famine, until there be an end of
them.”
Well,
you’ll remember in the message to this “church” here at Thyatira, Yahshua said
that time had been given to this false prophetess to repent, but she didn’t, and
therefore the penalty was coming upon her. Now, the things that I have mentioned
here were not limited to the Roman Catholic “Church” in the west. You’ll remember that before
the papacy became fully established in power in Rome, the popes attempted to extend their authority over
the Eastern, or the Greek
Orthodox “Church”,
which was the “church” in Greece and Asia
Minor. But they wouldn’t accept his authority. Although they
maintained a separate “church”, they adopted all these same doctrines. The Greek
“churches” were like pagan temples filled with the idols of all the different
saints to whom the people were encouraged to pray, and that is the thing which
brought down upon the Eastern or Greek “Church” the great Mohammedan raids. Mohammed
said “This is plain idolatry and I am going to stamp it out.” Thus, they
underwent a terrific scourge from the Saracen Mohammedans at a later time
because of the same thing. Hence, both “churches” had done the same thing; they
had not repented of their having altered their doctrines into paganism, and
therefore they must eventually meet their judgment. What that judgment would be
is prophesied later in the book, and when we get to that we’ll also show how it
was fulfilled in history. The next of these “churches”, Revelation 3, verses 1
to 6, is the “church” at Sardis:
“And
unto the angel of the church in Sardis write; These things saith he that hath
the seven Spirits of Yahweh, and the seven stars; I know thy works, that thou
hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. 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. 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. He that overcometh,
the same shall be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out 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.”
This
town of Sardis
was founded beyond the dawn of history. It was already there when the first
records of any kind pertaining to it can be found. It was located on fertile
plain at a point where it commanded the great east-west trade route. It was also
a manufacturing center; very wealthy, and was probably the first city in the
world to coin money. You notice that in the Old Testament, when it comes to
paying for something, they mention how the money was weighed out in gold or
silver ingots. They knew how much an ounce of gold was worth, but they didn’t
know whether this particular ingot held an ounce, or more, or less, or what.
Thus, it was weighed and was valued according to weight. But the city of
Sardis produced
the earliest coinage of a definite value that we can find. [See note #3 at end of lesson.]
That
reference, to being on the watch or they would be taken by surprise, was
something that all the people knew about. Close to the city was a fortified
hill, their acropolis or fortification to which they could retreat in the case
of siege. On three sides of this hill it rose in sheer vertical cliffs, up to a
height of about 1500 feet. No possibility of attack. One side only, where there
was a gentle approach, had to be guarded. With ordinary care and watchfulness,
it was absolutely impregnable; and yet twice it was captured by surprise because
they got over-confident and literally went to sleep on the job. Cyrus, in 549
B.C., and Antiochus the Great, 218 B.C., captured the fortress there. Hence,
this was a well known thing which was used as an illustration that, “if you do
not remain alert, looking for the things I’ve warned you about, you’re going to
be taken by surprise at my coming.”
The
historical period that this refers to is the period during the development of
the Protestant Reformation beginning, say, 1517. It’s hard to fix the latter end
of it. A number of writers have suggested about 1740, perhaps, could be taken as
the end of this period. During the middle ages, all institutions, political and
religious alike, suffered corruption. Morals, in general, were at an
all-time low, along with general bribery and corruption. This was the state of
society, and the “church” did not avoid the common fate of the whole
people. There were, for the last couple of hundred years before the Protestant
Reformation, people in the Catholic “Church” who saw that things were not right. They
were trying to reform the “church”, to keep what was Christian and good, and to
rid it of what things that were pagan, and what things that showed plain
corruption on the part of the “church” hierarchy. But they were never numerous
enough to accomplish anything. You notice the sarcastic reference “thou hast a
few names even in Sardis who have not defiled their garments.”
Thus, the situation was reaching a pretty bad state.
The
first glimmer of the Reformation did not come with Martin Luther; it really
began in England with John Wycliffe. He lived
from 1320 to 1384. He taught philosophy at the University of Oxford most of the time. The way the
Reformation got its start in England was not anything to crow
about either, because it was not with a demand for religious reform. It was a
political and financial thing, and while it served the purpose of King Henry the
8th, it really accomplished nothing as to anything in their religion that needed
touching up. The Pope was demanding all these larger and larger tributes from
the “churches” in England. By this time the English
“church” owned probably half or more of the land of England. Therefore, they collected the
rents from all the people living on that land, in addition to collecting the
tithe from all the people who lived on that land and, well, all who lived on the
other lands for that matter. And additionally, all the extra money that they
brought in through indulgences. It was just bleeding England white
financially, and it wasn’t leaving the people enough money to pay the amount of
taxes that the king needed to keep himself and his nobles on one long, drunken
debauch all year long. Hence, you had a financial rivalry
there.
Wycliffe
defended the king against the Pope’s demands for excessive tribute in the bitter
discussions that went on between the king and parliament, on one hand, and the
“church”, on the other, from 1374 to 1378. In 1378 he translated the Bible into
English, and he and his scholars saw that the accepted doctrines not only could
not find any support in the Bible, but the accepted doctrines were squarely
contrary to the Bible. Wycliffe was evidently a man of tremendous personality as
well as a very brilliant mind, and he inspired his students with tremendous
enthusiasm. So he started sending them out over the country as poor preachers.
The “church” was maintaining itself in high financial glory and making excessive
demands for money. Wycliffe’s men were content if they just got enough to eat,
as they went out carrying the message of the Gospel to people and proving to
them with the Bible in English, the people’s own language, that they didn’t need
to pay these excessive sums of money to the “church” to buy salvation, because
it couldn’t be bought. It had been given to them freely by the sacrifice of
Yahshua the Christ upon the cross. Thus, he was really stirring up some
opposition. He taught the direct relationship between man and Yahshua, without
the need of priests as intermediaries. He taught that the Bible was supreme over
any man-made doctrine. He denounced the pilgrimages.
You
see, the Catholic
“Church” had developed a doctrine that Christ
died in vain and He wasn’t able to get you your salvation. You’d committed a
sin, so you’d recognize that Yahshua the Christ died to be your Savior. But that
didn’t do it. You had to do penances or else spend some considerable time
burning in the flames of purgatory, maybe a thousand years or two, to pay the
penalty of your sins because Yahshua the Christ hadn’t been able to do it. Now
of course, for a fee the “church” could get you out of it. One of the things you
could do for a penance – oh – you could wear an itchy, scratchy hair shirt, or
you could go on a pilgrimage to Rome, or you could go without eating meat on a
Tuesday or something of that sort, or you could buy from the “church” an
indulgence. Now your beloved mother; you thought so much of her, but of course
at the time of her death, not enough had been paid to get her out of purgatory.
So she was screaming and burning in horrible agony in the flames of purgatory,
but you were told, “for a sufficient sum you can buy an indulgence which will
get her out of purgatory, not a thousand years from now, but it’ll save a
hundred years of torture. Later you can come back and get her out another
hundred years earlier”, and so on.
These
things were going on during that period, because, remember, you had in the
congregations ignorant people who knew nothing else. This is all that had ever
been taught to them. The Bible in their own language didn’t exist. Most of them
couldn’t have read it anyway. Only the few well-educated scholars could. But
there was no available Bible in their language, and therefore, in all good
faith, they were taking what their priests were telling them was the religion.
It had reached a terrible state. Wycliffe was often accused of heresy – he was
condemned for it and expelled from Oxford in 1382. But his teachings and his
translation of the Bible into the common language of the country really got the
Reformation started. He didn’t yet accomplish it in his own country, but he
planted the seed, because his writings soon spread to the continent of Europe
and they influenced John Huss in Bohemia, and Martin
Luther.
In
1403 A.D., Wycliffe’s work was translated by Huss into Bohemian. In 1408, Huss
was suspended as a Catholic priest. In 1410, he was excommunicated as a heretic.
In 1414, the “church” summoned him to appear at a general council at the city of
Constance, where
he must either recant his teachings or show that he hadn’t taught anything that
was wrong, otherwise he would be condemned for heresy. He was given a very
specific promise of safe conduct, there and to return. What was done was the
thing that was done in many, many cases. We have not on record one case where
the hierarchy of the Catholic “Church” ever kept their word on a promise of
this sort. He attended in good faith, relying on the safe conduct. They
immediately seized him, arrested him, imprisoned him, tried him for heresy and
burned him at the stake.
Well
he had, by this time, a great deal of influence. He had been preaching in
Bohemia, and this act of treacherous murder
aroused Bohemia to a fury. It led to the Hussite wars.
Four hundred and fifty Bohemian noblemen, led by king Wenceslaus of Bohemia,
defied the Pope. When the Pope called upon the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire
to send his troops and massacre the Bohemians, they stood up to them. Pope
Martin the 5th, in 1420, proclaimed a holy crusade against Bohemia to massacre the population of Bohemia as heretics. He
proclaimed another crusade in 1426, a third in 1427, and a fourth in 1431. They
were all defeated by the Bohemians. But these Bohemians, or as we would call
them today, Czechs, were truly our people, never able to agree on anything. You
know how it is today, we are many groups. We all agree on one point and from
there we diverge, because some other group has some other point, and unless we
accept “that” they want nothing to do with us. So the Bohemians split into two
groups and they fought among themselves till their power was so badly wrecked
that they finally got off with a compromise agreement with the Catholic “Church” –
that they could keep control of their own “churches” in Bohemia.
In
the matter of serving the Communion (the “Lord’s” Supper), they were allowed to
depart from the Catholic custom. You remember, Yahshua the Christ himself
instituted the sacrament of the Last Supper. He gave them bread which He said
represented His body, broken for them, and wine which represented His blood,
shed to save them. You know the number of places in the Bible where it says, “it
is by the shedding of blood of Yahshua the Christ, by His blood we are saved,
not otherwise.” Yet in the Catholic “Church” (and it is true to this day), they won’t
let you get the benefit of the blood. When you partake of Communion in a
Catholic
“Church”, they give you a little wafer of bread,
that’s true, but only the priest gets to taste the wine. Only he is going to get
the benefit of the blood of Christ, and his congregation are denied it. So that
was denounced by the Bohemians. They got the right to let the congregation have
the wine as well as the bread at the Communion. [See
note #4 at end of lesson.]
Martin
Luther was a Catholic priest. He is the man who actually got the Reformation
going as a really effective movement. The others had been sowing the seed, but
he was really getting a crop now that could be reaped. He was ordained a
Catholic priest in 1507, became a lecturer at the University of Wittenberg. He was a pretty good language
scholar and he was not content merely with being told what was official
doctrine. He read the Bible of course, in the Latin of the Vulgate, which was
the official Bible of the Catholic “Church.” And even there he discovered that
it said “the just shall live by his faith” – not by indulgences, not by
pilgrimages to Rome, not by the worship of “Saint who’s-it”,
but by his faith. Hence, it jolted him to see how far the customs of the
“church” and their doctrines strayed from actual Scripture. Thus, he went into
the whole thing, and in fact he translated the entire Bible into German. In
1517, things came to a head. The Pope had sent traveling through
Germany a Dominican monk
named Tetzel whose job it was to sell indulgences to raise a vast sum of money
for the repair of the “Church” of Saint Peter in Rome. It was an out and out sale. Tetzel had
reduced to verse one of which read: “The money rattles in the box, the soul from
purgatory flies. Aren’t you willing to give the “church” so much money so that
your mother will escape thousands of years she is going to have to burn in
purgatory otherwise? You give us something for the ‘church’, and for that good
act you get an indulgence that gets her out a whole hundred years earlier.”
Well, that was more than Martin Luther could stomach, so on the door of the
“church” at Wittenberg he nailed up papers stating 95
theses that he was prepared to debate with any comer. He picked out all these
things that were corrupt in “church” doctrine and practice, and stated that they
were unscriptural. They were, in fact, contrary to Scripture, and he was
prepared to debate that with anybody. That was the point where the Reformation
really got underway.
Martin
Luther did not intend to start a separate Protestant “church”. He was a Catholic
priest, and all he wanted was to clean up the things in his own “church” that he
found shouldn’t be there. He intended to save all that part which was good, and
he had no intention of cutting himself off from it. Well, there was all the
usual “church” strategy. He was excommunicated. He was summoned to attend a
great gathering, a diet at the city of Worms. He was outlawed, with any man encouraged
to kill him with no penalty. But he went there. He was given the safe conduct
promise: he could go and return to his own home. But there was intention to
treacherously capture him and murder him. But by this time his doctrines had
spread to some pretty influential places. He came there – he refused to recant –
he defended his doctrines, showed where they were sound according to the Bible,
and he just planted himself. He said “Here I stand, God helping me, I can do no
other.” He wouldn’t yield one inch. Prince Frederick of Saxony knew of the plot to arrest and murder him, so he
had some of his troops kidnap Martin Luther and rush him out to safety, and for
a bit over a year he hid Luther in his own castle where Luther continued his
writings. Finally, after a bit more than a year, it was safe to let Luther out
again. Lutheranism spread very rapidly through Germany and Scandinavia from then on. Now the “church”, having refused
to clean up any of this thing – the people who saw that these things were
contrary to the Bible had no choice left to them but to leave the “church” and
organize their own “church” which would not have these doctrinal errors. As I
say, that is not what Martin Luther started out trying to do. He wanted the
“church” to clean up its own mistakes and to keep all its people, but it was so
not to be.
In
France – Protestantism filtered into France – oh, by 1520 to 1523 A.D.,
largely through Wycliffe’s writings, although Martin Luther’s also became very
well known there, which spread rapidly. By 1561, over two thousand “churches” in
France sent representatives to a
great synod, or gathering of representatives of the Protestant “churches” there.
And it was, by the way, in France that the name Protestant was
coined. At one of their bitter controversies with the Catholic “Church” hierarchy they were promised that they
might conduct their own worship without any interference, and this was official
– the official resolution settling the matter. A matter of just a few weeks
later the “church” declared that promise was void – they weren’t going to stand
by it. And the Huguenots, the French Protestants, protested against that breach
of faith, and from that they got their name as
“Protestants.”
The
conditions in France were peculiarly bad. You had
two families constantly conducting civil wars for the crown. At that time, the
House of Valois included the king on the throne, and since a large part of the
population of France, probably 30 to 40 percent,
seemed to be Protestant, they wanted the support of the Protestant Huguenots
because the rival family, the Guise family, were very strong Catholics and had
the support of the Pope. Thus, in the civil war, the Valois family were constantly seeking the support of the
Protestants and promising, as a reward, that they would be permitted to worship
undisturbed. That is all the Huguenots asked. As fast as the king got past the
crisis through the military help of the Huguenots and found things steady again,
he would then go back on his promise. Well there were some eight of these
different civil wars in which the Huguenots participated under promise of being
allowed to worship in peace, each one repudiated.
In
1570, King Charles the 9th signed an official treaty granting toleration to the
Huguenots. He was married to a daughter of Catherine de Medici. You remember,
there were two Italian Jewish families who furnished Popes. One was the de
Medicis and the other the Borgias, and they were both infamous. You remember
both families as being assassins, murdering by poison. The de Medicis were also,
as is consistent with their race, money lenders, usurers. The pawnbroker’s
emblem of the three golden balls was the coat of arms of the de Medici family.
Well, Catherine de Medici, of course was very much on the side of the Catholics
because she wanted more de Medicis to become Popes, in time she was the mother
and queen of France. Catherine de Medici and the
king plotted a treacherous massacre of the Protestants. On the evening before
Saint Bartholomew’s Day, August 4, 1572, the word had been sent out – the king
sent out to his army, and through the “churches” the priests had sent word to
all the members of the Catholic “churches” that that night there was to be a
wholesale massacre, an attempt to entirely exterminate all the Protestants of
France. My own ancestors [that is the ancestors of
Bertrand L. Comparet] were among the survivors of that, or I wouldn’t be
here.
Suddenly,
without warning, around midnight the “church” bells started tolling, and then –
the members of the Catholic congregation, as I say, are not personally
blameworthy to the extent of the “church” hierarchy, because these people never
had been told anything different. They were told that the most praiseworthy
thing they could do for their “church” was to go out and murder a heretic – man,
woman or child – and they were officially promised indulgences for their sins.
If you murdered a heretic child, age four, you could go out and commit a few
rapes, or that sort of thing, and you had the pardon of the “church” granted in
advance. Hence, you had these people in a frenzy, all stirred up, and there were
some of the king’s troops participating, they burst into the houses of the
Protestants, caught the people in their houses just starting up out of sleep,
and they murdered men, women and children indiscriminately. Any house they got
into, no person was left alive. It was a frightful slaughter. The Pope issued a
medal commemorating the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s eve as a great triumph
for the “church.”
While
these civil wars were still going on, the Valois family failed to produce an
heir to the throne, and the Navarre family became the ones contesting the
throne with the Guise family, and by Huguenot help in eight of these civil wars,
Henry of Navarre gained the throne of France. He issued the edict of
Nantes, which
gave Huguenots complete religious freedom. However, he changed his own religion.
He had claimed to be Protestant up to that time, and he changed his religion to
Catholicism so he wouldn’t have friction with the opposing faction. And then,
October, 1685, treacherously without warning, he revoked this edict and sent his
troops out to murder the Huguenots. This completed the slaughter of considerably
over half of all the Huguenots in France, and such as survived fled
into other countries. For a long time, you might say up until the French
Revolution, Catholicism was supreme in France, and the Reformation had no
further foothold.
In
England, the Reformation came about,
as I said, as a financial and political matter. King Henry the 8th was greatly
disturbed at the amount of money that the “church” in England was
collecting from its people and sending to the Pope as tribute. Also, he was
married to Catherine of Aragon of the Spanish royal family and she had borne him
four daughters, but no sons, and he could see where on his death there would be
civil war to take over the throne and his family was going to be left out in the
cold. He wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry another queen and see
if he couldn’t get a son to succeed him on the throne. As a matter of fact, he
went through that process six times, all told. Well, the Pope would not grant
him a divorce, so they were completely at loggerheads. Henry married Anne Boleyn
after he had the Archbishop of Canterbury grant him a divorce from Catherine of
Aragon – that was 1533. The Pope excommunicated Henry the 8th, and Henry in
reply had Parliament pass a law appointing the king the supreme head of the
“church” in England. Also, laws cutting off all
revenue from England going to the Pope. Now, that
was the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in England, and you’ll note there isn’t
a bit of religious principal involved at all in it. Henry the 8th had everything
he wanted. He got Parliament to pass laws making it heresy, punishable by death,
to dispute any of the major doctrines of the Catholic “Church.” And, as a matter
of fact, Henry the 8th had a number of Lutherans burned at the stake. Now, we
Protestants are proud of the fact that our Protestant religion began as matter
of principal on religion, but not in England. That was Martin Luther, and
not Henry the 8th.
Upon
his death he did get a son by one of the other queens, and Edward the 6th, his
son, on the death of Henry in 1547, had these laws against Protestantism
repealed, and laws favorable to the Protestant worship passed. On his death in
1553, Bloody Mary came to the throne. She was the daughter of Henry the 8th by
Catherine of Aragon. Very strong in her Catholic faith herself, she married king
Phillip of Spain, which also pushed the thing farther because the Spaniards
particularly were all for murdering all heretics. She became Queen of England.
She conducted terrific persecutions against the Protestants, burning large
numbers of them at the stake, and a great many more of them fled to the
continent of Europe for their lives. For that
persecution she was called “Bloody Mary.” Now over in Ireland – it’s kind of hard for us to understand
the bitter battles going on between the Irish Protestants and the Irish
Catholics, because here in America we haven’t had religious
persecution like that. But, if you remember that some of your ancestors were
burned at the stake for their religious views, and if you remember the
succeeding popes since then have also declared officially, “It is the policy of
the ‘church’ to use violence whenever it seems appropriate”, then you aren’t too
keen about seeing the Catholic hierarchy regaining political power again, as
perhaps the next step will be going back to burning so-called heretics at the
stake.
The
Irish have had a bad time of it. No country ever suffered under worse misrule
than the Irish under their English conquerors. And the fact that the hated
English, with their bad behavior, were also trying to destroy the Catholic “Church” in
Ireland and set up a Protestant
“church”, did nothing to give the Protestant “church” any better standing in the
eyes of the Irish. It was just part of the oppression against them, and that is
why you note that the Southern Irish are perhaps the most strongly Catholic
people in the world today, and the Protestants are among those in the Northern
counties who are actually Scottish settlers there rather than originally Irish.
Queen Elizabeth the 1st came to the throne in 1558 and she immediately restored
Protestantism. Having a Protestant majority in Parliament, she got through laws
which established the present “Church” of England. So
basically, that is what was happening during this period.
You
had the few people within the Catholic “Church” trying in vain to bring about reform.
You had the hierarchy holding the power in the “church”, not budging an inch on
it until finally all those who wanted to clean up the mess were compelled to
leave. Now we are sometimes told that the Catholic “Church” cleaned things up after that with their
counter-reformation. It might be interesting to know what this consisted of.
With the loss of millions of people going over to Protestantism, the reaction of
the Catholic hierarchy was entirely one of fear and rage. They summoned the
council at Trent
in 1545 to settle all these disputes of doctrine. The council continued meeting,
with intermissions, from 1545 until 1563. All these points that had been
disputed were brought up and they didn’t yield in any of them; they reaffirmed
them. So-called “Sacred” tradition was as authoritative as the Bible, and
nothing that was traditional with the “church” could be questioned on the
grounds that the Bible was contrary to it. All the books in the Vulgate, the
Latin translation of the Bible, were canonical, and the Vulgate itself was
authoritative. The worship of saints, the doctrine of purgatory, which is
contrary to the Bible, the sale of indulgences, all these were affirmed. The
Lutheran doctrine, that salvation is obtained not by payment of money to the
“church” but by faith in Yahshua the Christ, was condemned as heretical. And
finally, the official resolution, “all heretics were to be exterminated.” Well,
during the period from the solidification of the power in the papacy in 604 A.D.
down to the point where the Protestants finally broke away from them, the
estimates of the number of people murdered by the Catholic “Church” (about 900
years in there) has varied from as low as 40 million people to as high as 60
million people. There were no official records kept of just how many were killed
each time; one must simply have to judge by the writings of the historians of
that period, making the best estimate one can. If you assume that these
estimates were all too high, and there were never more than 30 million people,
that low is at least 20 or 30 times more than all the massacres of Christians by
all the other pagans in all history. Not only the pagan Roman Empire, but those who were massacred by the Saracens
and the Turks in the Eastern “Church.” So the most frightful persecution of
Christianity that ever occurred in history was that which went on under the
papacy in this period.
As
I say, I don’t want you to assume that this is a condemnation of the people in their congregations who had
no authority to do anything, who, if they ventured to ask questions of this,
were told “You are on your way to hell for heresy if you don’t give this up.”
And, all they knew was what they had been taught from infancy; that the priests
had the authority to send them to hell if they so chose. So they went along
ignorant, terrified. But upon the shoulders of the hierarchy, the priests and
the bishops and cardinals, and all who knew better, rests the most terrible
responsibility that any man will ever face on judgment day. You notice that in
this message to the “church” at Sardis, Yahshua the Christ, speaking of Himself
at the start: “These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of Yahweh, and
the seven stars ...” In other words, “I am the One who has the authority to
determine what is true; and not any man, priest or Pope though he be.” [End of Comparet’s Lesson #2.]
CRITICAL
NOTES ON LESSON #2
Comments
by William Finck initialed W.R.F.
Comments
by Clifton A. Emahiser in brackets in lesson text as “your
transcriber”
or
initialed C.A.E. in critical
notes.
Note
#1:
While Comparet does quite well in many areas, I haven’t the slightest idea of
the source where he got the information that the name “Thyatira” (Thuáteira) simply means “town of
Thyra.” Although
thyra means “door” it is not related
to thua in the name here. Surely this
connection would be mentioned by commentators and lexicographers, if it were
true. In Greek, thua- is a prefix
form of thuos, or “sacrifice.” The
word teira may be from the noun teiros “found only in the plural [teirea],
the heavenly constellations, signs.”
(Liddle & Scott), or it may be from the verb teirô, which means “to rub hard, ... to wear away, wear out,
distress” (L&S). So in Greek, thuáteira may mean “heavenly sacrifice”,
or perhaps “distressed sacrifice” or “sacrifice of distress” or something
similar. Strong’s simply lists the
word as being “of uncertain derivation” (2363), not venturing a meaning, and
neither does Thayer. W.R.F.
Note
#2:
To the Greeks, Semiramis was the wife of Ninus, the founder of Nineveh, and founded and ruled Babylon after Ninus’
death. Strabo called them “Syrians”, as the geographer always has the Assyrians
confused with the Syrians (2.1.31, 11.13.5). Diodorus Siculus says of Semiramis:
“Now there is in Syria a city known as Ascalon, and
not far from it a large and deep lake, full of fish. On its shore is a precinct
of a famous goddess whom the Syrians call Derceto; and this goddess has the head
of a woman but all the rest of her body is that of a fish, the reason being
something like this. The story as given by the most learned of the inhabitants
of the region is as follows: Aphrodite, being offended with this goddess,
inspired in her a violent passion for a certain handsome youth among her
votaries; and Derceto gave herself to the Syrian and bore a daughter, but then,
filled with shame of her sinful deed, she killed the youth and exposed the child
in a rocky desert region, while as for herself, from shame and grief she threw
herself into the lake and was changed as to the form of her body into a fish;
and it is for this reason that the Syrians to this day abstain from this animal
and honour their fish as gods. But about the region where the babe was exposed a
great multitude of doves had their nests, and by them the child was nurtured in
an astounding and miraculous manner; for some of the doves kept the body of the
babe warm on all sides by covering it with their wings, while others, when they
observed that the cowherds and the other keepers were absent from the nearby
steadings, brought milk therefrom in their beaks and fed the babe by putting it
drop by drop between its lips. And when the child was a year old and in need of
more solid nourishment, the doves, pecking off bits from the cheeses, supplied
it with sufficient nourishment. Now when the keepers returned and saw that the
cheeses had been nibbled about the edges, they were astonished at the strange
happening; they accordingly kept a look-out, and on discovering the cause found
the infant, which was of surprising beauty. At once, then bringing it to their
steadings they turned it over to the keeper of the royal herds, whose name was
Simmas; and Simmas, being childless gave every care to the rearing of the girl,
as his own daughter, and called her Semiramis, a name slightly altered from the
word which, in the language of the Syrians, means “doves”, birds which since
that time all the inhabitants of Syria have continued to honour as goddesses”
(2.4.4).
And
while this myth is surely far-fetched, it must have been extant in some form in
Assyria, for Jonah – whose name means “dove” in Hebrew – emerged from a fish in
Nineveh and was
given full credibility there! Yet the point of relating this is to show that, in
the Greek mind, Aphrodite and Semiramis are definitely two distinct people, the
one a goddess, and the other a mortal woman who became a queen and went on with
her husband to build an empire, as described by Diodorus Siculus and discussed
by Strabo. On the other hand, Ishtar, or Astartê, is equated to Aphrodite by the
Greeks (compare 1 Sam. 31:10 with Josephus’ Antiquities 6:14:8 [6:374], and note
that Herodotus called the temple
Astartê, or Ashtaroth, at Ashkelon, the temple of “celestial Aphrodite”). Ishtar was
never the wife of Ninus in Babylonian or Assyrian mythology, but was rather, as
queen of heaven, the wife of Bel or Baal. Semiramis could not have been assigned
this role, and Ninus, Semiramis and Bel are even mentioned together by Diodorus
(i.e. 2.8.8). More can be said concerning this, yet it should be evident that
Comparet was incorrect in identifying Semiramis with Ishtar. W.R.F.
Note
#3:
Sardis, the capital of the Lydians in Anatolia, was never mentioned by Homer,
who was believed by the ancients to have mentioned practically every place known
to man in the period which he wrote about, but especially those so near to Troy
as Sardis was. The Lydians are listed in the Iliad with those who came to the
defense of the Trojans, in Book 2 after line 1030: those about Lake Gygaiê,
Mount Tmolos (which Sardis
lied near), Hydê, Hyllos (a stream) and Hermos (a river), but no mention of
Sardis, nor of other Lydian cities such as
Thyatira and Smyrna. Strabo says of Homer’s account: “But
there is no Hydê to be found in the country of the Lydians”, and goes on further
to explain “Some call Sardeis Hydê, while others call its acropolis Hydê.” My
point is that, while Sardis may have been on the site of some much more ancient
city, a city named “Sardis” is not found in the earlier Greek records (though of
course it is known to Herodotus), and I cannot imagine by what authority
Comparet states: “The town of Sardis was founded beyond the dawn of history”,
since I find this not to be so. W.R.F.
Note
#4:
Within the paradigm of the Catholic “Church”, the statement here concerning the
withholding of the wine from the congregation is legitimate; however, the entire
paradigm is wrong! Comparet is wrong for calling Communion a “sacrament” because
there are no “sacraments” in the New Testament! “Sacraments” were identified and
then organized by the Nicolaitans! The American Heritage College Dictionary,
under “sacramentalism” reads: “The doctrine that observance of the sacraments is
necessary for salvation and that such participation can confer grace.” And, of
course, in the “church” only the professional priesthood can confer this grace,
because only they can perform “sacraments”, which are rituals! In truth,
sacraments are sacrilege, because “grace” comes from Yahweh, and it is given to
the children of Israel
freely!
Yahshua
Christ performed what is called “Communion” in a nondescript house, in a
nondescript room, around a nondescript table with His companions, and (not
considering Judas Iscariot, the devil who was present, so that a greater purpose
might be fulfilled) all of His companions were Israelites and were of His body
and of His blood. That is the essence of “Communion”, which is from the Greek
word meaning “the sharing of things in common” with our brethren – who are the
body and blood of Christ – and which we should do in His name each time we
partake of such things. It is quite clear, unless one is of His body and is of
His blood, one is “unworthy” to partake; and “Communion” should normally only be
performed in the presence of one’s genetic brethren! (Ephesians 5:30). W.R.F.