Sabbath History - The Lost Years of Christianity

John the Revelator Series #8

By Jim Arrabito

This evening we're going to look into John's vision of Revelation chapter 12. What we'll discover is that the world has been taken in by a tremendous hoax as to what constitutes Christianity. Let's look at it together. Revelation chapter 12, verse 1. " And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. " Those twelve stars represents the twelve tribes of Israel, or the twelve patriarchs. It represents the twelve apostles that Jesus chose. You see, the number twelve in the Bible represents God's church, and it's maintained consistently. The sun that clothed her represents the righteousness of Christ. The moon that's under her feet symbolizes the reflected light of the sun. And what reflects Christ? It's His word, the Old Testament and the New Testament.

"And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered." It was at the time that Christ was about to come into this world through His church, the children of Israel. This woman is talked about over and over again in the Bible, all the way from Genesis to the book of Revelation, God likens His church, His body on earth, as His bride. And it's an indication of how much He loves us.

The second character in the vision is brought to view in verse 3. It says, " And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth." It becomes very obvious in Revelation chapter 12, and in other chapters, that this serpent or this dragon represents Satan and the powers that he works through on this earth to destroy God's church. Indeed in this chapter there are only two characters brought to view, the woman and Christ representing Christ and His church, and the dragon, that power through the ages that's tried to destroy God's people.

In verse 4, when it says, " his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven" , it indicates that when Satan came to this earth, his tail, his deceptive power, deceived a third of the angels in heaven, and they have come down here with him. And we think of the billions of angels that existed in heaven, and that a third of those millions and millions of angels are here in this earth, maybe even more than the population of the earth, they are all working for one purpose, to destroy God's true church.

In verse 5, " And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne." Now you see we pass into the period to when Jesus is born, does His work on earth, fulfills the law which represents the rod of iron, and ascends to heaven to rule. Now we have the church in the Christian period of time, the Christian church.

"And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days." So Christ's Christian church now, the apostolic or primitive church, is to flee after the ascension of Christ into a place called the wilderness for 1260 days, and remember a day is a year in prophecy. So the true church of God would go into the wilderness for 1260 years.

Now we know that the Roman powers we've already studied gained possession of the Roman empire through Justinian in 538 when Sylvester took the scepter of the Caesars and began to rule. From that time, it was exactly 1260 years until 1798 when the pope was placed in prison by General Berthier under Napoleon and brought to France. And there he died. And the papacy lost it's political power. Exactly 1260 years is the period of the Dark Ages.

Now if it's true that this is the Christian church, then what does this wilderness mean? Well, you'd have to go back to the book of Exodus. And there you'll discover in Exodus that when God took His people out of Egypt, he brought them away from pagan civilization, away from society and the observations of the world, and he brought them into a remote region where they could be secluded and obscure, where they could worship God. So here you have that same symbol. God's church left the civilized world and the authority of apostate Christianity, and the apostate powers, and went into a period of obscurity to worship God and to serve Him throughout the period of the Dark Ages.

If this is true, then the Roman papacy cannot, in any way, be considered the Christian church, or even the original Christian church, but a total apostate system. And the true Christian church just disappears into the mists of history. And it is a very difficult task to put together the true history of that, but there are works intact and we're going to quote from those tonight.

The woman in the wilderness continued to worship the apostolic teachings of the primitive Christian church which taught that through the grace of Jesus Christ, man can overcome sin and obey all God's laws. For this reason we find that the true primitive apostolic church always kept the fourth commandment along with all the others. " Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God." And they never lost that day. The Jews kept the seventh day, it was given to them at Sinai, and the primitive Christian church which was originally Jewish, kept that seventh day. And the church in the wilderness kept that seventh day, and it's still the same day today. It's Saturday, the seventh day of the week.

Now look at this history as we go through it. Again in verse 14, chapter 12, it says " And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into" obscurity, or the " wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished," God will take care of her there, supply her with Christ's righteousness there, " for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent."

You'd have to go for the meaning of the word time to the Old Testament. There we find that the Hebrew time represented 12 month period of 30 days a month, or 360 days. Times is two times. So you have one time, two times, and a half a time, and that comes up in days to 1260 days again. So here is just a statement again that the church went into the wilderness for 1260 prophetic days, or 1260 years, the period of the Dark Ages. And there she was hiding from the face of the serpent, or from the effort of Satan to destroy her and to persecute her.

It says, " And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood. And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth." The text says that God would take her and give her eagle's wings and bear her into the wilderness.

To understand that you have to go back to the history of Israel. When God took Israel out of Egypt, He said, I bear you on eagle's wings. And he bore them into the wilderness. So God is using the same symbolism here. It represents supernatural, divine, miraculous guidance by God to remove his church from the centers of authority in this world, to preserve the truth for us today. The flood that came out of the dragon's mouth was simply Satan's effort to wash away the true, pure, primitive doctrines of the apostolic church by bringing in just thousands of various pagan views, philosophies, ideas and symbols. This was Satan's effort, and he knew it was the most successful because he had tried previous to this to openly persecute the church. But the blood of martyrs became seed and now he would try to wash them away with false doctrines.

And friends, he succeeded to a large extent. The entire Christian world has just broken up into so many denominations and very, very few understand the original teachings of the primitive Christian church. That woman was to stay in the wilderness for 1260 years, but at the end of it, she was to come out.

And notice verse 17. It says, " And the dragon was wroth with the woman," that means Satan hates the woman. The woman is the bride of Christ, His body. It's where the Holy Spirit dwells in mankind. Satan hates Jesus. And any place where Jesus' spirit dwells, he wants to destroy it. And so if you accept Christ as your Savior, and are filled with His spirit, Satan wants to destroy you.

"And the dragon was worth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed." This gives us a definition of what the true Christian church is in these last days. It's a remnant of the apostolic church that went into the wilderness. A remnant is a piece of the same item. That means if you're going to be a part of God's remnant church in these last days you've got to have the same doctrines, the same beliefs, and the same faith as a church in the wilderness did. And this is the doctrine of the church in the wilderness that keep the commandments of God. That's not almost keep it, that's not leaving one commandment out, but they fully keep the commandments of God. And they have the testimony of Jesus Christ, that means supernatural guidance.

Revelation 19:10 tells us that the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy or inspiration. At the end of time God will have a people who are guided by His Holy Spirit, and they will obey all of God's commandments. A clear definition of that church. And how many churches today are obeying all God's commandments including the fourth commandment?

Satan's assaults through the century have been dynamic. They've been powerful, and they've been so subtle that few realize today the true history of the primitive Christian church. When Jesus left His disciples and left His apostles, he realized what they were heading for. He knew these prophecies. And so He poured His spirit out into their life so that they would be protected by him, and be a means of bringing this gospel to the world and preserving it through the centuries.

Notice the quotation up above about the middle. It says, " The ancient kings," this is Confucius writing about 500 B.C., he says, "The ancient kings on account of this culminating day, "the seventh, " closed their gates, the merchants did not travel and princes did not inspect their domains." What's this? 500 years before Jesus we find the Jews had been scattered throughout the world and were keeping the Sabbath in every culture. Their religion, because of the knowledge of Daniel in Babylon and Persia, the world knew about Daniel, this great statesman, because of their religion, the nations had largely accepted the Sabbath.

When the primitive Christian church, following the guidance of Jesus, followed the dictate that said go first to the lost of the house of Israel, went to the Jewish centers, these centers became the great centers of Sabbath-keeping Christianity throughout the world. And the nations saw the light of the Sabbath truth.

Josephus, writing about 70 AD tells us about how far scattered the Jews were. He says, " There is not any city of the Grecians nor any of the barbarians, nor any nation whatsoever whither our custom of resting on the seventh day hath not come." That's an amazing thing to say. So these centers were already highly respected by the nations.

When the Christian truths spread to these centers under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, those centers became Sabbath-keeping Christian centers. And even Augustine, a great Catholic father says, Augustine shows here that the Sabbath was observed in his day in the greater part of the Christian world. And in his testimony in this respect it's all the more valuable because he, himself, was an earnest and consistent Sunday keeper.

The whole world was keeping the seventh day Sabbath, and it was all Christian, and it was after the death of Christ indicating that that law was not nailed to the cross. But they believed that through Christ they were to obey that law.

The Roman empire was a difficult area to preach the Christian doctrine in because it was the military headquarters of pagan idolatry. And it crushed out the life of millions of Christians, sending them to be torn apart by wild beasts and terrible tortures.

But what about the rest of the world? Remember the Apostle Paul says that " we have preached the gospel to every creature under heaven." They had reached almost all the major nations of the earth. And in those nations leading Christians became members of government, leaders in trade and industry, and highly respected in different cities. They would go right into the centers of pagan idolatry and with the power of God's spirit, nothing could stand in their way. Peter became the great patriarch of Babylon, later called Baghdad. In fact, his letters, I and II Peter, were written from Babylon.

Because of his influence, we read in the years that followed " The hills of Persia and the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates re-echoed their songs of praise. They reaped their harvests and paid their tithe. They repaired to their churches on the Sabbath day for the worship of God." (The book of Sir Marco Polo, Vol. 2, p. 409) There were thousands and thousands of Sabbath-keeping Christians that believed in obedience to God's commandments because of the result of apostolic Christianity there.

And Thomas. We know that he went down into India, the hard core center of ancient devil worship. And there in that area that had a religion very similar to the New Age thinking today, because of the power of the Holy Spirit moving upon him in the Jewish settlements in the west coast of India, literally thousands and thousands of these Hindus were converted to Jesus Christ, and founded one of the greatest Sabbath-keeping churches of antiquity.

So powerful were the Indian Sabbath-keeping Christians that about 600 years later the Brahmans, realizing they were losing their power over the people through the superstitious Hindu religion, went ahead and developed a counterfeit religion to it, similar to the religion of Roman Catholicism.

What they did is they devised an astrological chart to make it appear that a god had come, an avatar had come to mankind, and this avatar they gave the name of Christ in India, or Krishna. The astrological chart of Krishna dates to 600 years after Jesus Christ. And they tried desperately to duplicate the religion of Christianity saying the stars shone brighter on that night, and saying that the cowherds came to worship, and saying that he was placed in the womb of a mother on earth, they were copying the Christian gospels almost verbatim.

"Widespread and enduring was the observance of the seventh day Sabbath among the believers of the church of the East, and the St. Thomas Christians of India who never were connected with Rome. It also was maintained among these bodies which broke off from Rome after the counsel of Chalocidon, namely the Abyssinians. Those are the Ethiopians, or the African Christian church, the Jacobites, the Maronites and the Armenians." (The New Encylopedia of Religeous Knowledge-Schaff-Hersog)

If we go to Africa, we will find that there was the apostle Philip that evangelized the treasurer of the queen of Ethiopia. And as that man, unordained by any church organization but baptized into the truth of Jesus Christ and receiving the Holy Spirit, with the Bible alone in his hand, went down, and working with the government in Ethiopia, established one of the largest and longest reaching churches of the church in the wilderness. For over 1700 years they kept the seventh day Sabbath and taught obedience to God's commandments through faith in Jesus Christ alone. And they also taught that the Messiah was going to come soon. Because of the tremendous distance from the Roman empire, it remained unnoticed for many, many centuries by the powers of Rome.

In the last half of that century, St. Ambrose of Milan stated officially that the Abyssinian bishop, Museus, had traveled almost everywhere in the country of Seres' or China. For more than 17 centuries the Abyssinian church continued to sanctify Saturday as the holy day of the fourth commandment.

Tertullian announced that the entire world had received Christ, that every nation represented in the world had received the religion of Christ. In Tertullian's time they all kept the seventh day Sabbath, but Rome, Italy, and Alexandria, Egypt, where gnostic Christianity was in vogue.

About the middle or above the center in this quotation you read that " The roads were open for the youth who bade father and mother farewell as they responded to the Macedonian call. Travelers paused at the famous cities of Edessa or Arbela as they passed on their way from the Celts of Ireland to the Celts of Turkistan and Mongolia." (Truth Triumphant, p. 121) We find that because this was outside of the realm of the Roman Empire, the nations lived in comparable peace during those early centuries of Christianity, and the roads were free for young men and women to leave the great educational centers of Sabbath-keeping Christianity in the East, and to travel all the way through China and into Mongolia and to bring those doctrines everywhere.

These young people filled with the Holy Spirit could not be stopped, and we know that they met and preached in every country of the East at that time. Christianity in the East was even more far reaching than it was in the West.

The center of Christian evangelism was north of Palestine after the destruction of Jerusalem. The Jewish Christians fled to be with their brethren in a town called Antioch in Syria, now in Turkey.

This center, Antioch, became the headquarters of a most prestigious Jewish Christian settlement. It was here that in the third century a man by the name of Lucian, a brilliant scholar, pulled together the writings of the apostles into the New Testament, and left out those teachings that were false. Later we find out that Lucian also translated the Old Testament into Greek as well, and formed the Bible that became the foundation of the Protestant Bible, and was translated, and became the King James Bible in Britain.

It says here that " The Protestant denominations are built upon that manuscript of the Greek New Testament, sometimes called the Textus Receptus, or Received Text. It is that Greek New Testament from which the writings of the apostles in Greek have been translated into English, German, Dutch, and other languages. During the Dark Ages, the received text was practically unknown outside the Greek Church." (Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, Mosheim)

And you see what happened was the Roman Catholics did not want a Greek dominated religion, they wanted a Latin dominated religion, so they determined to rewrite the whole Bible in Latin, and then outlaw any other Bible. And this is one reason for the Dark Ages, because the common people had no Bible.

In the East we find that the primitive Christian church was always associated with healthful living. And some of the greatest medical institutions in the world at that time were established in the towns of Edessa and Nisibis, the centers of primitive Sabbath-keeping Christianity. The school of Antioch was one of their prestigious learning centers. " At that time it surpassed almost every other in scientific and literary repute. And its methods dominated all the east. Justinian in the middle of the 6th century wished to rebuild the cathedral of Constantinople, and from the school of Antioch he drew both his architects Anthemus of Tralles, and Isidore of Miletus." (Stokes, Ireland and the Celtic Church)

We have to realize that these Sabbath-keeping Christians became the teachers of the Saracens, the rulers of the Moslem world, and because of that they lived on a close relationship with those Moslems and very likely it was because of that high degree of education in the world of the East that was receiving a renaissance of knowledge and light under the direction of the Sabbath-keeping Christians while the Western world, under the dominion of the Roman Catholic church was in the Dark Ages, that the foundation of culture and education which later came to the Western world during the time of the renaissance was a result of these Sabbath-keeping Christians.

I'm going to go down four lines. " For centuries the followers of Jesus in Asia were generally called Messiahans, or the Messiah people, many renowned Messiahans who withstood the fierce opposition of the Persian state religion, or Mithraism, carried primitive Christianity to India, central Asia, China and Japan." (Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) One tradition has it that St. Thomas, when he finished establishing the church in India, later went on to establish the church in Japan. So we know that very likely before the last of the apostles passed away, there was already an active Sabbath-keeping church in Japan.

One of the rare and strange incidents of history was magnificent cities in Syria are still in the desert completely left desolate. And yet when you look closely at these cities, you will find that they are far in advance of much of the architecture that exists in Europe today. " These silent cities of Syria differ in many respects from the ruins and remains of the archaeological past found elsewhere in the world. The monuments are not the work of some foreign invader, but are indigenous - the work of inhabitants themselves. Furthermore, the stones were skillfully fitted together without cement or mortar. The construction and arrangements for sanitation were of the highest order, and betoken an advanced degree of civilization. Some authors state that the arrangements for health and sanitation would be superior to those found in many places in the Western world today, even in Europe and America." (Truth Triumphant - B.G. Wilkinson)

It's very, very difficult to relate to the fact that these Sabbath- keeping Christians founded by the apostolic church were advanced in education, they were advanced in medical research, they were advanced in architecture, and every area of science because of the spirit of God that was in them. I would venture to say that the foundation of the civilized world today owes the high degree of civilization to these Sabbath-keeping Christians or we would have no civilization today, we would still be under the dominion of the Roman papacy and in the Dark Ages. We can thank God for those who would believe the truth and pass it on to us.

To understand why these cities are silent, we have to realize that it was because of the persecution of imperial Christianity. Roman Christianity resulted in persecution in these areas, and the true Christians, the apostolic Christians, had to flee into Persia and other lands leaving these magnificent monuments of architecture and their cities behind.

"There can be no doubt that the civilization of the Eastern church was far higher than that of the Western. No one can read the account of the capture of Constantinople by the crusaders of the 13th century without perceiving that it is the occupation of a refined and civilized capitol by a horde of comparative barbarians." (Stanley - History of the Eastern Church) Europe was so far behind that when they walked into the St. Sophia, and some of these other monuments of the Eastern religion, they were just in absolute awe. It was like cavemen walking into a modern city today.

This high degree of civilization and the truths that it represented, fled Eastward. And it made its way further into India, all the way through Tibet, China, up into Siberia, Mongolia, and the entire Eastern world saw the great light of the Sabbath-keeping Christianity. " The long and predominating favor with which the Mongol rulers treated the church of the East indicates that the doctrines of the Christian Mongols were those of the Assyrian church. This will appear to be more the case when the later histories of this remarkable people are considered. The beginning of their power, however, is connected with the significant fact from which conclusions can be drawn respecting the type of Christianity that they fell in with during the first years of their dominion." (Truth Triumphant - B.G. Wilkinson) It was the Assyrian church that made its way into Mongolia. And many of these leaders in Mongolia, the ancient Khans, actually married into the families of the Sabbath-keeping Christian leaders, and formed a union with them. So entire territories of Mongolia in China, which portions of it were later subjugated by the Mongolians, were completely controlled and operated by Sabbath-keeping Christians from the Assyrian or Eastern church. Whole communities were Sabbath-keeping communities with Sabbath-keeping churches established throughout the valleys and throughout the countries.

The Buddhists were free to travel to Assyria and through China, and to study the Sabbath-keeping teachings. Buddhism originally was just a system of works. It was a fairly dead, philosophical religion. But as they came in contact with the Sabbath-keeping Christians, everything began to change. We find out that Shan -tao, a prominent Chinese Buddhist priest who died in 681, began to proclaim through China salvation by faith in Buddha under his new name Amitabha.Shan -tao also taught the doctrine of a trinity so successfully that it was said of him when he preached the three Buddhas appeared in his breath. He promoted the idea of a vicarious savior, of an unlimited light, or eternal life by faith in Amitabha.

Where did he get this? Evidently from the Christian missionaries. It's the only explanation. They studied in the same centers. They were in the capitol of China together. And they exchanged views, and the Buddhists adopted much of Christianity.

"The Buddhists, in adding Amitabha to their godhead, had been enabled to preach a redeemer. In order to satisfy the longings of the sinful soul, they went further. They were compelled to prophesy a second coming, or a glorious return of their new mediator who had been translated to nirvana, their heaven. After the flight of centuries, he would return, they said, to earth. One Orientalist writes of the second coming of Buddha under his Japanese title "Meitreya," the Loving One Who is Returning." (Truth Tiumphant, B.G. Wilkinson) Nothing like the Meitreya, friends, that is being taught by the New Age today. The original Buddha Meitreya was the Christian Messiah that the Buddhists were preaching was coming back to earth as they copied the teachings of the primitive apostolic church.

So the East saw great light. And they were seeing this wonderful light, the preaching of the coming of Jesus Christ. They were seeing a wonderful light in faith in Christ alone at the time when Rome, the Roman papacy, was just destroying the truths of Christianity in the Western world.

To show the strength of the Assyrian church, or the primitive Christian church, in China, we read this. " In AD 781 the famous China monument was inscribed in marble to tell of the growth of the Christianity in China at that time. The inscription consisting of 763 words was unearthed in 1625 near the city of Changan, and now stands in the forest of tablets, Changan." The following extract from the stone shows that the Sabbath was observed. " On the seventh day we offer sacrifices after having purified our hearts, and received absolution for our sins. This religion so perfect, so excellent is difficult to name, but it enlightens darkness by its brilliant precepts." (Christianity in China.)

Here we find that these people had erected a monument stone to the power of the glorious truth of the Sabbath-keeping Christians who taught the second coming of Jesus Christ, in China the largest religion at that time, 8th and 9th century. China was the center of the largest number of Sabbath- keeping Christians in antiquity. This church monument stone was duplicated later and was placed on Mount Koya, Japan, because one of the leading intellectual theologians of Japan went to study the enlightened religion in China of the Sabbath-keeping Christians, and was so impressed, that at his mausoleum where he was buried they had one of these monument stones established there, and you can see that in Mount Koya, Japan, today. Nothing could stop the primitive Christian church.

Even the flight of centuries could not stop its movement as long as it stayed true to keeping God's Sabbath and all the commandments of God, and faith in Christ alone, and preaching the soon coming of Jesus. These are the doctrines that came from the Holy Spirit.

The movement was just as powerful in the west for many years. We can see here the path that the Christians took in bringing the doctrines to the Roman empire. We find that all of Spain was Sabbath-keeping. All of Gaul was Sabbath-keeping. But the strongest center of Sabbath-keeping Christianity was in Ireland and the British Isles, and Scotland at that time.

Looking at Spain, we find that there is a tradition that the brother of Jesus, Saint James, or Santiago in Spanish, established his mission in Northeastern Spain, and there's a great, huge cathedral as a monument to him at that place. Reading about Spain, we read Canon 26 of the Counsel of Elvira reveals that the church of Spain at that time kept Saturday as the seventh day.

We know that much of Eastern Europe had been completely evangelized by the primitive Christian church, and there were many Sabbath-keeping churches there. Northern Europe received the light in the 2nd and 3rd century. Especially were the Goths impressed with the truths of the Bible through a man by the name of Ulfilus in the fourth century. You see, Ulfilus had been captured by the Goths who were pagans at that time, and he actually, being educated according to the teachings of the primitive church, created an alphabet for them with their sounds and wrote their first book which was the Bible. So the foundation of the whole education of the Goths was the Bible. And these people were great Sabbath-keepers, and they were believers in the coming of the Messiah.

Notice over to the left part of the map you will see the area of Gallia. We find that Gallia was established on what is called France today, was established by the Celts. And that entire area was evangelized by the Sabbath- keeping work of the apostle Paul. One of the early Gallic Christian churches, the oldest one available today, shows that these people we know not only kept the Sabbath, they taught the soon return of Christ, but they baptized by immersion. In the heart of that church we see a deep baptismal font for the people to go down into.

The Abyssinians had fonts the size of small swimming pools where people, with a priest there to witness it, the people would just plunge and dive right into the water, and come out the other side because baptism means immersion.The earliest known depiction of the baptism of Christ from a fresco at the catacomb of St. Calixtus Rome shows Jesus coming out of the water after being baptized by immersion.

It seems to have been the custom in the early Celtic churches of early times, in Ireland as well Scotland, to keep Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Why? Because they had never been affected by Rome. They kept the Sabbath in the same way Jesus and the apostles did. One of their earliest of their patriarchs, after the apostles, was a man by the name of Patrick. The Roman Church had to saint him because he was so deeply embedded in the cultures and legends of the people of the islands there. Patrick had nothing to do with Roman Catholicism. He kept the seventh day holy. He knew nothing of priesthoods. Those schools that he established, the teachers and religious leaders married there. They taught the trinity. They did not believe in Mary. They did not believe in saints. They believed the Bible, and so educated were these people in Biblical languages, and the knowledge of writing and literature, that the schools became centers of actually publishing copies of the Bible.

The Romans and Roman Catholicism had a hard time conquering the northern part of the isles in Ireland simply because these people were too stubborn and powerful. The Celtic people were known for their fiery temperament. And so the Romans, in order to protect themselves, just built a wall across England. That wall is still there today. It is called Hadrian's Wall, and that became the limits of the Roman boundaries.

North of that a tradition developed about a man by the name of Columba. Later the Roman Church again, not able to get Columba out of the culture of the people in the legends, had to saint him. But he was nothing like the stories that are told about this man in legend by the Catholic church. Columba kept the seventh day Sabbath. He was a great scholar of the Bible. In fact, we know that he produced 300 manuscripts of the Bible by his own hand. He had fled his island due to wars, or fled Scotland due to wars, going to Ireland to establish schools there. Then he came back to his homeland.

He came from a noble family that owned a lot of land. So he chose part of the land that his family owned, a little island off the coast, it is toward the center of the picture, and down just to your left a little bit, you will see an island called Iona. Way out in the sea there, that island became the most prestigious college of Christianity for 625 years. And what was the education like for the Sabbath-keeping Christians?

When we go to that island we find that it is very small, and yet they subsisted off that island. These young people learned to work the soil. They learned healthful living. And on that island they studied for 18 years to learn the Biblical languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and languages and dialects from Europe. These young people were all trained in the art of publishing and copying Bibles.

Every area of literature and science was taught to these young people. When they left that island they were scholars. It says here, " if it was true that Columba, with his own hand, copied 300 New Testaments as well as portions of the Old Testament, what must have been the output of Iona when all the workers assigned to the making of manuscripts produced their contribution." (Truth Triumphant - B.G. Wilkinson) And then when you realize that Iona was only one of hundreds of schools of this nature pumping out manuscripts by hundreds, thousands of students, we get an idea of how many Bibles in the different languages were available to the nations of Europe. In fact, there was not one nation of Europe that did not receive the light from these people from those islands.

If you look up into the lower left corner, or the upper left corner of this map, notice all those blue dots. These were the Columban type of schools at that time. They made their way down across Europe. These are the known ruins of those schools. But there are very likely thousands of more centers established by these spiritual leaders that had been totally destroyed by the Roman church.

As we look around Northern Scotland and the islands of Ireland, we will find over and over again little areas where there had been old, primitive churches in ruins, and very likely many of these were Sabbath-keeping Christian centers. Even down to the year 1000 years, 1100 years after Christ, I want you to look at these large areas of color representing theocracies, state religions, powerful monarchy religious combinations from the Moslem religion to Hindu religion and everything, I want you to look up at the island of Ireland. That purple represents the Sabbath-keeping primitive Christian church of the apostles, still 1000 years after Christ, keeping the seventh day Sabbath as the apostles did.

From these schools there came a student, and a great teacher, called Columbanus. Columbanus, in the sixth century, came forth, made his way across Europe, and eventually established one of the most prestigious schools of the Dark Ages in a place called Bobbio. Now this is the time of Calambanas, and I want you to look at the word Columban. That represents Calambanas's work. And you see over here toward the left, about the middle and down, it says Caldi (? sp.) Island. And then that blue line goes on around, says Columban, and then down, it goes across Europe, and Columban continues right on down to the lower right hand corner and it says Bobbio. That's in Northern Italy. And that is where he lived and worked out the last years of his life here. It became a magnificent center, and we do have information about what the college was like here in the mountains of Italy, in Bobbio.

"Of Bobbio it is written: 'Here the nucleus of what was to be the most celebrated library in Italy was formed by the manuscripts which Columban had brought from Ireland, and the treatises of which he himself was the author. The fame of Bobbio reached the shores of Ireland, and the memory of Columban was dear to the hearts of his countrymen. A tenth century catalog published by Muratori shows that at that period every branch of knowledge, divine and human, was represented in this library.' Bobbio became such an evangelical training center that later the Roman Catholic Church followed the same procedure with Columbanus as she did with Patrick and Columba; she finally claimed him as one of her own." (Truth Triumphant, B.G. Wilkinson)

You know, I think that when the final judgment is over, and when we get to the other side of this great warfare between truth and error, we are going to find that many Catholic saints that were sainted in various countries were not either pagan gods or Catholics at all, but were the original Sabbath-keeping primitive Christian leaders that the church sainted because she couldn't get them out of the culture of the people.

Now this quotation here is just amazing when you think of it because it describes the extent of the church in the wilderness throughout the centuries. I'm going to read it very quickly for you. But listen how extensive Sabbath-keeping was. " Mingana proves that as early as A.D. 225 there existed large bishoprics or conferences of the Church of the East stretching from Palestine to, and surrounding India. In 370 Abyssinian Christianity (a Sabbath-keeping church) was so popular that it's famous director, Musaeus, traveled extensively in the East promoting the church in Arabia, Persia, India and China. In 410, Isaac, supreme director of the Church of the East, held a world counsil stimulated, some think, by the trip of Musaeus, attended by eastern delegates from 40 grand metropolitan divisions. In 411 he appointed a metropolitan director for China. These churches were sanctifying the seventh day as can be seen by the famous testimonies of Socrates and Sozomen, Roman Catholic historians (C.A.D. 450), that all the churches throughout the world sanctified Saturday except Rome and Alexandria, which two alone exalted Sunday. A century later, (C.A.D 540) Cosmas, the celebrated world traveler, a member of the great Church of the East, testified to the multiplied number of churches of his faith he had seen in India and central Asia, and to those he had learned about in Scythia and China." Scythia is Russia.

"We wrote in previous pages of the Sabbath-keeping Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English Churches in the British Isles during these same centuries, and down to 1200. We dwelt upon the Paulicians, the Petrobrusians, the Passagians, Waldenses, Insabbatati as great Sabbath-keeping bodies of Europe down to 1250. We wrote of the Sabbatarians in Bohemia, Transylvania, England and Holland between 1250 and 1600 as authenticated by Cox, Jones, Allix, and William of Neuburg. We have mentioned the innumerable Sabbath- keeping churches among the Greeks, the Abyssinians, Armenians, Marionites, Jacobites, Scythians, and the great Church of the East, also from AD 1250 to 1600, with supporting evidence from competent authorities. The doctrines of all these Sabbath-keeping bodies throughout the centuries were comparatively pure, and the lives of their members were simple and holy. They were free from the unscriptural ceremonies which arose from following the tradition. They received the Old Testament, and the whole Bible was their authority." This is from a book by Mingana called "The Early Spread of Christianity" .

What did they face, and what changed the views at that time that altered the face of Christianity and formed the Roman Catholic church? It's very simple. Study the doctrines of the Gnostics in Alexandria, Egypt. It's in the lower right hand area of the Mediterranean Sea, and you will notice green lines going out all over, one green line going to Rome. Those are the doctrines of the Gnostic Christians who were the bridge between paganism and Roman Catholicism. The false teachings that came from Hinduism, Greek philosophy, Babylonian astrology, all made its way into the Christian church through these Gnostic Christians.

The mother of Constantine, St. Helena, was a Gnostic Christian. She believed in the teachings of Gnosticism, Sunday observance, ecstatic experience, speaking in tongues, temporal millennium. You go on and on and on, and many of the doctrines of Roman Catholicism, and evangelical Christianity today, come directly from Gnosticism. And it is a sad thing to have to relate. But the fact is that they are not the primitive Christian religion. And we've got to get back to it by a study of the Bible.

Constantine was Gnostic in his interests. His god was Apollo, the family god was Apollo. The state religion of Constantine's Rome was Mithra. But those bishops in Rome, desiring power, and desiring authority from the state, adopted tenants of Mithra worship, which was Sunday keeping, along with other pagan views in order to gain power over the people. And it is an amazing thing that in many of the large cathedrals of Rome today you will find that underneath those churches, you will find many times temples to the god Mithra where the first early apostatizing Christians began to worship in the pagan temples on Sunday, to Sun day worship.

Magnificent cathedrals overhead also reflect paganism by literally thousands of symbols that go back to early pagan idolatries. In fact, these men claiming authority over other Christians, is in direct opposition to the simplest teachings of Scripture. Jesus said call no man father, call no man rabbi, because there is one teacher and one father, and that's God in heaven. Jesus instituted no priesthood but His own. He said there's only one priesthood, there's only one mediator between God and man, and that's Jesus Christ. Only one way to God. And He tells us to come boldly to the throne of grace to gain help in time of need. And it's from our Priest in heaven.

This system of religion was a duplicate of the pagan idolatry before, and when, in the 4th and 5th century, they adopted the doctrine to compel them to come in, which they believed they had the right to force people to become Roman Catholics, it set in motion a blood bath of horror.

Some of the counsils, or some of the statements made by popes about their right to enforce their religion, " We command all Christians to observe the Lord's day" , that's Mithra, or sun day, " to be held not in honor of the past Sabbath, but on account of that holy night of the first of the week, called the Lord's Day, when speaking of that Sabbath which the Jews observe, the last day of the week, and which also our peasants observe." (Council of Friaul, Ital - A.D. 791 - Canon 13) You see even at the time that Rome was apostatizing her truths, and forcing people to worship on Sunday, still there were faithful people in Italy that kept the primitive Christian truths of the apostles.

Pope Gregory I " Declared that when antichrist should come, he would keep Saturday as the Sabbath. Moreover, this same Pope Gregory had issued an official pronouncement against a section of the city of Rome itself because the Christian believers there rested and worshiped on the Sabbath." (Epistles of Gregory I - b. 13, Epist 1)

"Gregory Bishop, by the grace of God, to his well beloved sons, the Roman citizens, it came to me that certain men of a perverse spirit have disseminated among you, things depraved and opposed to the holy faith, so that they forbid anything to be done on the day of the Sabbath. What shall I call them except preachers of antichrist?" (Epistles, b 13:1)

You see what's happening? Rome actually set itself up to destroy the true preaching of the primitive Christian church. From Socrates Ecclesiastical History, Book 5, we read, " For although almost all churches throughout the world celebrate the sacred mysteries, the Lord's Supper, on the Sabbath day of every week," that's Saturday, " yet the Christians of Alexandria and at Rome, on account of some ancient traditions," that's Mithra worship, " refused to do this."

So even while the pope in Rome was condemning Sabbath-keeping, and those books have been preserved in history, the true Christians throughout the world were still keeping the seventh day Sabbath according to the true primitive apostolic church, the church in the wilderness. Even Ambrose, as late as the fifth century, is saying, " Ambrose, the celebrated bishop of Milan, said that when he was in Milan he observed Saturday," that's just north of Italy, or north of Rome. " But when in Rome he observed Sunday. This gave rise to the proverb, 'When you are in Rome, do as the Romans do.'" (Hevlyn - The History of the Sabbath - 1612)

You see, here even right around them, the countries right around Rome were keeping holy the seventh day of the week according to the Bible, and the fourth of the ten commandments, and yet Rome had adopted paganism in those early years.

"Pope Nicholas I in the 9th century sent the ruling prince of Bulgaria a long document saying in it that one is to cease from work on Sunday, but not on Sabbath. The head of the Greek church, offended at the interference of the papacy, declared the pope ex-communicated." (Truth Triumphant, B.G. Wilkinson) A little pip squeak over in Rome was trying to tell part of the Eastern church that they weren't to keep Saturday. And the pope got ex-communicated over it. When we look at the pompousness of the bishop of Rome, because it became a state religion after a time, we realize how horrible this opposition to the truth was when systematically, once it gained military power, it began to crush out all of it's brethren throughout the world to maintain the pagan doctrines of Rome.

And friends, the Reformation is only an outgrowth of Catholicism. It was an effort on the part of sincere men finding their way back to the Bible to come out of the Catholic church. But it never came out all the way. God is still calling it out today. The primitive Christian church of the wilderness was not the Reformation church, and Reformation theology is not Biblical theology.

This is when the church separated into the wilderness. It was a time that Justinian came to power. He conquered the enemies of the papacy in Western Europe, and in the East, and then he made a terrible edict. And the edict was like this, " By an edict which he issued to unite all men in one faith, whether Jews, Gentiles or Christians, such as did not in the term of three months, embrace and profess the Catholic faith, or declare it infamous, and as such excluded from all employments, both civil and military, rendered incapable of leaving anything by will, and their estates confiscated whether real or personal. These were convincing arguments of the truth of the Catholic faith; but many, however, withstood them; and against such as did, the imperial edict was executed with utmost rigor. Great numbers were driven from their habitations with their wives and children stripped and naked. Others betook themselves to flight carrying with them what they could conceal for their support and maintenance, but they were plundered of the little they had, and many of them inhumanely massacred by the Catholic peasants, or the soldiery who guarded the passes." (Bower - The History of the Popes, vol. 1, p. 334)

It was at this time, you see, that the church drifted into the mists of history as the Catholic church dominated the writing of history, except in the Eastern world where it continued to flourish for hundreds of years. But can you see the perfect fulfillment of the prophecies of scripture here? Can you see what happened at this juncture? At this point in time the church went into the wilderness about 538, and it went into obscurity in history, perfectly fulfilling the prophecy.

What was the reason for the destruction in the church in the wilderness in the latter centuries? We find that in the 14th century, " Tamerlane was another world conqueror. Many famous men of military genius look like pygmies compared to Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. With the exception of southern India, Genghis, conquered all of Asia and most of eastern Europe. It has been thought that had it not been for the Christian influences exercised by the Church of the East on the successors of Genghis Khan to spare certain Christian nations, all of them today might be speaking the Mongolian tongues. Tamerlan won dominion over all the lands subjected by Genghis with the exception of China. Genghis was a Mongolian, displaying, throughout his empire a religious liberty wonderful for his day. Tamerlane was a Turk, a fanatical Mohammedan, who slew Christians by the hundreds of thousands if not by the millions, and destroyed Christian churches and training centers." (Truth Triumphant, B.G. Wilkinson)

So they had a large to do with the destruction. But you see, the Christian church would have risen again if it had not been for this next thing. Notice down there again at the bottom in a quotation, " His violence is one of the reasons for the ruin" of this area in Christianity in the far East. " The other reason was the coming of the Jesuits supported by the guns of Spain and Portugal, of which more shall be written later." (IBID)

You see, the Roman church was losing its grip over the monarchies which were tired of its effort to dominate everything that they did and think. Those oligarchical families had a tremendous desire for independence. These families were trying to throw off the yoke of Rome, and Rome was also having to face the period of the Reformation, and at that time she adopted a group called the Jesuit order. This little group had within it a genius and a motivation to reconquer the world for the Catholicism, and later under the flags of Portugal and under the flags of Spain, they were able to bring Catholicism to these countries which had been outside of the jurisdiction of Rome at that time.

Portugal erected an astonishing empire in the east, and it covered the areas of China, the areas of Africa, the adjacent islands to Africa, the south coasts of Arabia, Persia, Baluchistan in northwest India, the west coast of India, all of these areas, you see, were under the influence of the Sabbath-keeping Christians. The Portuguese came into the east coast of India as well, and the west coast of what today is Burma and the Malay States, the coast from Singapore around Siam, Indo-China and China as far north as the island of Macao.

With these Portuguese came the Jesuits. The Jesuits brought with them the inquisition. And it was a terrifying event for these simple Christians who knew nothing but the Bible and to keep the seventh day Sabbath as the primitive apostolic church did. It says, as the Jesuits were already in control of Spain and Portugal, they accompanied the conquerors principally for the purpose of converting the St. Thomas Christians. It was the unhappy lot of India to experience a crushing weight of these haughty monks. These men were skilled in subliminal treachery and trained for years in rapid debate in which they could trap an opponent by the cunning use of ambiguous terms. Consequently, the simple, trusting St. Thomas Christians were no match for them. Eventually the Jesuits took over the schools, the training centers, and then dishonestly, under the guise of Protestants, they took over the leading Protestant seminaries and schools as well setting up the inquisition again in Europe and in these other areas of the world. Many of these people were tortured to death by these Roman Catholic inquisitors.

In Goa, which was the capitol of the west coast of India at that time, they set up a great big inquisition center for persecution there. It says the supreme punishment, of course, is burning at the stake. If the unhappy believer in the New Testament Christianity failed to renounce his simple faith and accept all innovations, rites and mysteries of the Roman Catholic church, the day would come when, with a black gown and a cowl over his head, he would be lead to the public square to make the supreme sacrifice. Arriving at their Golgotha, these condemned to the flames would be chained to a high stake many feet above the piles of faggots. Then two Jesuits would wail out an exhortation to repent. When finally the nod of the inquisitor was given, blazing torches on long poles were dashed into the faces of the agonizing martyrs, and this continued until their faces were burned to cinder. The flames were them applied below, and as the roaring fire mounted higher and higher, consumed the sufferers who died for their faith.

This isn't Christianity. And for people to look to Rome today and call that Christianity is an abomination before God. You've got to study history. We know that those who refuse to look at history and the way that God has led in history are going to repeat it again.

The Jesuits also came into China, and while they were in China in 1625, this boundary stone was discovered by the Chinese Mandarin leaders and the Jesuits. The Mandarins wanted to destroy the Chinese inscription on it because they saw in that inscription a language older than they could understand. And the people thought that the Mandarins were all wise, and that the language of the Mandarins had existed forever. So they made a duplicate stone and they put and destroyed the first stone, and then changed the Chinese characters.

What interest did the Jesuits have in this? Well, we find that the Jesuits' interest in that stone was that the Christianity that was described on that stone from the 8th and the 9th century was the Sabbath-keeping Christianity of the apostles. And it did not line up with Catholicism. So the new concept of Christianity that was put on the stone up above was a form of Catholic Christianity. But what the Jesuits and the Chinese Mandarins didn't know was that that funny old writing down at the bottom of the monument stone was Syrian, and they didn't know that at that time. The stone that stands to day has in the Syrian characters a description of the Sabbath-keeping church of the East as a monument to show the truth of the early primitive Christian church.

One of the last vestiges or centers of Sabbath-keeping bringing us clear down to the 17th and 18th century was that of Northern Italy, north of Milano, close to Rome, the truth existed all the way through the centuries, and Rome could not completely eradicate it. Their histories can be read today because many of these history books were sent to England and there they were preserved, even though many of those manuscripts were destroyed by the papacy. These people went clear back to the time of the apostles where Northern Italy was the early Italian church, the early Latin church. And as you go into their old churches in the mountains, you see that it's far different from Catholicism in every way. There are no images, there are no pictures on the walls, there is no gingerbread and fancy artwork. What it is, is a worship of Jesus Christ through His word. They stood on the word of God. That's what the early church did. Remember the symbolism of the woman standing upon the moon. God's church has always stood on the word of God alone.

Now if you notice down by the communion table they showed by the Bible being present there that they believe that that communion cup and that bread represented the body and blood of Jesus Christ and Christ said, It is my word that is spirit, and my word that is life. And we have to partake of God's word to partake of Jesus Christ.

As you look at the way these people lived, you will see that they had every luxury. They were very industrious, they were very skilled people, and they reached one of the highest cultures of Europe in their time. All these things were made by hand from the hardwood trees of the mountains around. They were geniuses in the area of agriculture. And many a noble family invited the Waldenses to come into their territory and settle there so that their knowledge of agriculture and their knowledge of industry would bless those countries. We look at the mountainsides in the northern Italian valleys and see that they have been terraced for hundreds of years and magnificent gardens are there.

"It is indeed gratifying that this branch of the Church in the Wilderness was a Bible people. No subsequent Protestant church reverenced the Holy Scriptures more than did they. Their obedience to the Book of God was at once the cause of their incomparable success as it was also the offense which they gave to their enemies. Through the long night of the Dark Ages these people were a sanctuary for the Holy Scriptures. They were the ark in Europe which safely carried the Bible across the stormy waters of medieval persecution." (Truth Triumphant, B.G. Wilkinson) We find that these Waldenses existed absolutely everywhere. They were found influencing all the countries around. They were one of the most prolific people of the ancient world. And one reason why you don't find many of their Bibles, even though every family had a Bible, and that Bible was used and reused and passed from generation to generation was that their Bibles were worn out. And the Roman church destroyed all the Bibles they could find. This Bible here just goes back to the 17th century, and it was a Reformation Bible. Look how it's worn as those people studied that Bible.

The education of the children was considered to be the most important thing because they believed the future of truth, the future of God's work, depended upon the faithfulness of their children to pass it on to later generations. These kids were highly educated in literature, science and history. But the most important thing that they were educated in was in the word of God. They actually established what we call Bible societies for the children, where the children had to go and memorize Scripture. They would memorize whole chapters, sometimes whole books. And they would have an entire children's Bible society would, within that society, had children that knew each part of Scripture, so that in an emergency, if the Bibles were destroyed, they could gather the children on a mountainside or in a cave some place, and the entire Bible would be repeated from beginning to end. They put the Bible in the minds of their children, and this is one reason why it made its way through the century.

But those children were not childish children. As soon as they could walk, the kids learned responsibility and learned to work. By the time they were 9, 10, 11-years-old these kids were adults. They knew the world they existed in was hostile to the truth. And they lived as Daniels did in their day. They were trained to work and to be educated and to know their Bible so they could continue the culture of the Waldenses throughout the years of persecution.

One of the most prestigious centers of Waldenses learning was built high in the almost inaccessible valley of Angrogna in a place the Pra Del Tor. It was a small institution by today's standards, but it was a most prestigious institution throughout those centuries. This college was the place where the pastors were trained in theology of the Waldenses. And as you walk into the center room there, you will see a big table, and on it is the center of education for these young people. It was the Bible. And these kids knew the Bible and the Biblical languages so well, that later when they were sent out to get other facets of education in worldly institutions which were all dominated by the papacy, the monks were terrified of running into these kids because these kids knew the Bible so much better than they did.

These young men that wanted to go on and become pastors were never allowed to learn theology under a man who had not spent a lifetime in the field winning souls. The mind of a man who is unskilled in saving souls was never to come in contact with those young people. These young people received the highest form of theological education and training to win people to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Before ordination, they would have to spend three years traveling with a pastor, and they would enter into the field of evangelism in different ways. One of the most prominent was to pose as a traveling itenerate salesman of exotic wares. They would focus on the wealthier class, and they would lay their wares before them in the home, and among them would be little copies of portions of the Bible. At times then these people looking through these wares would ask what these papers were. This would be a sign to the Waldensian missionary to drop to his knees with that paper open in his hand, and with tears in his eyes he would read the true gospel of the word of God.

These people when they saw that heard the wonderful news that they didn't have any priests or sacraments to go through. They didn't have to worry about a church for salvation. They could go to Jesus for salvation and confess their sins to Him, and receive through faith complete cleansing from sin. This was so good to these people that many of the leading monarchies, many of the leading industrial leaders, business people, were actually Waldenses and sustained the great Waldenses movement with a tremendous amount of means.

"This sect, says Nangis," second paragraph, " were infinite in number appeared says Rainerus in nearly every country, multiplied says Sanderus, through all lands; infected says Caesarius thousand cities, and spread their contagion says Ciaconius through almost the whole land Latin world. Scarcely any region, says Gretzer, remained free and untainted from this pestilence. The Waldensians says Popliner, spread not only through France but also through nearly all the European coasts and appear in Gaul, Spain, England, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Bohemia, Saxony, Poland, and Lithuania. Matthew Paris represents this people as spread through Bulgaria, Croatia, Dalmatia, Spain and Germany. Their number, according to Benedict, was prodigious in France, England, Piedmont Sicily, Calabria, Poland, Bohemia, Saxony, Pomerania, Germany, Livonia, Sarmatia, Constantinople, Philadelphia, and Bulgaria." (Gilly - Waldensian Researches)

We have no idea how far reaching this movement was. But let it be known that even when Catholicism was at its height in Europe, it was still, the true Sabbath-keeping church was still there throughout almost every country of Europe. " Unfortunately many of these books were lost during the persecution of the 17th century, and only those books and ancient documents sent to the libraries of Cambridge and Geneva by Pastor Leger were perserved. The Papists took care, after every persecution, to destroy as much of the Waldensean literature as possible. Many of the Barbes were learned men and well versed in the languages and science of the Scriptures. A knowledge of the Bible was the distinctive feature of the ancient, and now the modern Vaudois. Deprived for centuries of a visible church and forced to worship in caves and dens, this intimate knowledge of God's word was their only light. Their school was in the almost inaccessible solitude of the deep mountain gorge called 'Pra Del Tor', and their studies were severe and long-continued, embracing the Latin, Romaunt and Italian languages." (Bompiani - A Short History of the Italian Waldenses)

What could the Roman Catholic church do to destroy the Church in the Wilderness when it had such an influence over the minds of the people in the various cultures? They do what Christian churches have done today with the primitive truth. Those people who believe in the Sabbath-keeping Christianity, you create a campaign to call them a cult. That's what you do. Don't study carefully the Bible and compare it with their teachings, just call them a cult and keep the other Christians away from it. And that's exactly what happened historically. History is repeating itself.

In the book "Occult Theocracy" by Lady Queensboro , she tries to expose the cults and secret societies of the Dark Ages. And when she talks about the Albigenses or the Waldenses of France, she quotes material that says that they were Manichaeans and Aryans, and that they were Jews, and that they were of various religious cults. But she does say or Judaized Christians, you can see the Sabbath-keeping existed still there. But they were not Manichaeans, they weren't Gnostic, they weren't Aryans at all. They were Bible believing Christians.

In another scholarly book called "The Secret Societies of All Ages" , Heckethorn quoting again from current material of the Dark Ages when Catholicism had control of history, said the Albigenses, or the French Waldenses, were from Manichaeism, or from the Templars, or the Rosicrucians which are occult or spiritualistic groups. Again in the same book when he mentions the Waldenses, he calls it the rationalism of the Waldenses, so-called after Peter Waldo which isn't true. He said they connected themselves with the German mysticism, or the occult, or the Rhine, and the Netherlands, and so on. This is absolutely false. In fact, pictures were put in publications by the Roman church of these people with horns, and their children with eyes in the middle of their foreheads looking like little ugly gremlins. And pictures of these people cutting up their children and offering them as human sacrifices or dancing around naked with the devil in their churches. This, when you have control of the media, you have tremendous control over the minds of the people. And if people aren't studying their Bible for themselves, they're going to be deceived by apostate Christianity. There's no way around it. One of the main arguments of Catholicism and many of the scholars within the world of theological history concerning the Waldenses and their Sabbath-keeping say not so. Because they don't go past a man by the name of Peter Waldo from Lyons, France.

Peter Waldo was a wealthy Catholic man. He sold his business, he sold everything, and he invested his money in helping the poor and translating a Bible into the French language. Now Peter Waldo wanted to be like the apostles. He believed he should study the Bible and copy the apostolic form of religion. Because of this, he was ostracized by the Catholic church and the group that he wanted to form, an organization within Catholicism called the Poor of Lyons, was rejected. They made contact with the Waldenses, but the Waldenses were already called Waldense, or the people of the valley, or the Vaudois. They were not named after Peter Waldo, and they were not a product of his movement. But the Roman church wants you to believe that because the majority of Waldo's followers eventually rejoined the Catholic church. In this way the Roman Church can call the Waldenses heretics claiming that they were formerly Catholic, and utilizing that philosophy, they felt they had a right to destroy those people because they claimed them as part of their own. A terrible, hideous distortion of history.

But when you look at an ancient statement of beliefs written by the Waldenses called The Nobla Lecon which came out 100 years before Waldo, you realize that the supreme antiquity of these people had no connection with Waldo at all, and their doctrines have nothing to do with Catholicism. But because of the control of the media, and because the people of Europe did not have the Bible for themselves, the Catholic church was able to carry out terrifying campaigns on these people. They were destroyed by the millions. They were destroyed throughout all the countries of Europe except just one little group high in the mountains of the Waldensian Alps in time.

It says here in the second paragraph, " There was no village of the Vaudois valleys but had its martyrs. The Waldenses were burned; they were cast into damp and horrid dungeons; they were smothered in crowds in mountain caverns, mothers and babes, and old men and women together; they were sent out into exile in the winter night, unclothed and unfed, to climb the snowy mountains; they were hurled over the rocks; their houses and lands were taken from them; their children were stolen to be indoctrinated with the religion which they abhorred. Rapacious individuals were sent among them to strip them of their property, to persecute and exterminate them. Thousands of heretics" or Waldenses, " old men, women and children, were hung, quartered, broken upon the wheel, or burned alive and their property confiscated for the benefit of the king, and Holy See." (Thompson - The Papacy and the Civil Power)

This shows one group meeting in a cave to worship. They weren't bothering anybody. They were meeting in a cave in the woods, minding their own business, and the papal soldiers came in, and you can see what they're doing. They're going to grab that man and torture him to death. That's their barb, a well educated man. These men are barbarians compared to the knowledge that that man possessed. They're tearing up the Bible down below, these men who claim to be Christian soldiers. And if you'll notice, they are taking the children away from their parents. They are grabbing the women. They're going to abuse those women and kill them before it's over with. And at the entrance of the cave is a man who claims to be a Christian priest, a monk of the Roman Catholic church.

Feeling that they were doing God's will, they destroyed these primitive Christians not knowing that in fact they were destroying the very apostolic church, the church of the wilderness, which Jesus Himself was a part of. These men don't realize on the day of judgment many of these religious leaders who have spoken out against the Sabbath-keeping Christians, either today or in the past, or persecuting them, were actually persecuting Jesus Christ in the person of His saints. Everything that touches His children, hurts Him. And at the end of time those men are going to be accused of the blood of the martyrs of Jesus Christ, the blood of the saints, and the blood of the prophets.

Many times the Waldenses had to wander in the mountains, many times just starving to death, but even there they counted it an honor to suffer for Christ. They loved Jesus. He was everything to them. They knew that Jesus had died and he said the servants would be no better than the master. If they persecuted me, they're going to persecute you if you're faithful, and these people died praising God for the privilege of suffering for him.

I visited one of the caves that these people worshiped in when I was visiting Northern Italy, and it was a cave, from outside you couldn't tell there was a cave there, but once you got in, there was an area where a shaft of light came down so the preacher could read his Bible to the congregation, and in this cave was a church of 400 Waldenses.

Another passage I passed over was an area where the Waldenses had fled through a gorge in the mountain to get away from the papal soldiers, 700 soldiers coming after these few families. They made their way up into this valley. Some young men climbed up on the rocks overhead and began to drop rocks down to try to protect their families. But these men knew that it was hopeless. They and their wives knelt down there before God in that beautiful valley and they pleaded with God for deliverance, and dark clouds began to form over that crevice where these men were walking up through to get to the valley to kill these people. And the dark cloud made its way down into that crevice and filled it with darkness. A terror seized these men and every one of them died but one man to repeat that story.

But Wylie in his book on the history of the Waldenses tells us that this valley, called the Pra , was a goodly valley that a whole nation could dwell in, and indeed what was left of a nation of Waldenses did dwell there. There are a few little towns, ruins, still left in that valley from that time. These little houses are still used by the peasants as they go up to bring their sheep to feed on the grass in the spring.

"The time passed on until a reformation dawned upon the world. The Vaudois were well pleased at this general awakening of the human mind. They entered into correspondence with reformers in various parts of Europe." (McCabe -- Cross and Crown) The correspondence with the reformers, and to see some aspects of truth rising again in Europe, thrilled the Waldenses. And they took a vow to fight again for the historical truths that they once believed. But unfortunately as they met with the Reformers later, they actually compromised some of their doctrines, just a few, but you see, God demands purity of doctrine for Him to send the Holy Spirit into our lives for work. And He could no longer protect something that wasn't preserving the truth.

It was after those years that the most terrible scourges came upon them, and eventually all was lost. In the 17th century, the middle of the 17th century, a great plague swept through the Waldenses valleys killing off almost all of their pastors. And so the reformed churches from Geneva sent over these half-pagan reformed theologians over, and they brought Sunday keeping instead of Saturday keeping, and the false concepts of righteousness by faith. Once a little compromise takes place, then God has to begin to withdraw His Spirit unless we return to our first love.

There in the valley of Chanforan is a memorial where the Waldenses and reformers met to make that compromise. After that time, terrible scourges came upon them as they began to preach the faith of the Bible, and one time Pianeza men, one of the last great scourges in 1655, came into the valleys. He told these people, listen, we don't want to hurt you, we're looking for a couple of criminals. Please take care of my men and feed them for me, and maybe you can help us. These people were happy to help even though they knew these men hated them. They were happy to help them. They opened up their homes, and within a few days, the order came down from Pianeza to destroy the Waldenses. And thousands of them were butchered in those valleys. Many tried to flee into the dead of winter, and froze to death. Some of the most horrible scenes of butchery took place in 1655 as the Catholic church began to persecute again the church of the wilderness.

The spirit of the Waldenses can be seen in Gianavello's reply. He was one of the leading generals of the Waldenses army. His reply to Pianeza who had had captured Gianavello's family, Pianeza was going to burn them to death, and he sent a letter telling Gianavello that if you do not turn yourself in, I'm going to burn your family to death, and this is what Gianavello says. " To these ferocious threats, Gianavello magnanimously and promptly replied; 'There are no torments so terrible, no deaths so barbarous, that I would not choose rather than deny my Saviour. Your threats cannot cause me to renounce my faith; they but fortify me in it. Should the Marquis de Pianeza cause my wife and daughters to pass through fire, it can but consume their mortal bodies; their souls I commend to God, trusting that He will have mercy on them, and on mine, should it please Him that I fall into the Marquis's hands." (Wylie - History of the Waldenses) God was more important, and truth was more important than all besides to Gianavelo and the work of preserving that faith for later generations.

So impressed with the Waldenses and their suffering was Cromwell in England that he directed Milton to include a poem in "Paradise Lost" , or one of his leading poems on the Waldenses, and this is how it goes.

"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,

Ev'n them who kept Thy truth so pure of old

When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones.

Forget not: in Thy book record their groans

Who were Thy sheep and in their ancient fold

Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled

Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans

The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow

O'er all the Italian fields where still doth sway

The triple tyrant: that from these may grow

A hundredfold, who have learned Thy way.

Early may fly the Babylonian woe."

In 1680s the Roman church, working through the Duke of Savoy in the Piedmont, made a demand that the Waldenses give up their ancient faith. And these were the demands. From this time forward, to discontinue all the exercises of their religion. They were forbidden to have religious meetings under penalty of death or confiscation of their goods, all their ancient privileges or the treaties they signed with the government for religious freedom were abolished. All of the churches and prayer houses were to be destroyed. All of the pastors and school masters were to be sent away. All the children were to be educated by Roman Catholics, you see. The Vaudois pastors are to give up their doctrines publicly. And then all Protestant foreigners who settle in Piedmont are ordered either to become Roman Catholic citizens or leave. By special act of this great paternal clemency, the sovereign will permit persons to sell, in this interval, the property that they have, and so on.

What did the Waldenses do with this final challenge? They rejected it. And as a result of it, 14,000 of them were gathered out of those valleys, all that was left of the Waldenses race, and brought into the dungeons of Torino, Italy. There they were for three years, and all but 3000 of them died of disease and starvation from being inhumanely treated in that place. How were they treated in prison? As the African slave was treated on the middle passage. They had a sufficiency of neither food nor clothing. The bread dealt out to them was fetted. They had putrid water to drink. They were exposed to the sun by day, and to the cold by night. They were compelled to sleep on the bare pavement and so on. We see that when they finally crawled out, they were half dead.

But because of the pressure that was put upon them by the leading Protestant governments of Europe, put upon the papacy, the papacy sent the orders down to release these people. But it was in the middle of winter when they were set out. About the middle of this quotation it says, it was at this season that these poor captives, emaciated with sickness, weakened by hunger and shivering from insufficient clothing, were commanded to rise up and cross the snowy hills. They began their journey on the afternoon of that very day on which the order arrived for their enemies would permit no delay. 150 of them died on their first march. At night they halted at the foot of Mount Cenis.

And as it describes what these people went through, it describes a mother and the children falling by the way, and the other members of the family not allowed to even watch their dying agonies, had to continue plodding through the snow. These people froze to death. And in the springtime their bones could be seen scattered throughout that trail, all the way over to France.

The French reformers in Geneva gladly took them in, took care of these ancient, primitive Christians. But they could never be satisfied. Just like the Jews when they were kept in Babylon, sat by the river, Euphrates, and could not sing the songs of Zion because of their sadness. So these people wanted back in those valleys which they believed were a fulfillment of the prophecy of the Church in the Wilderness.

This book was written by a man named Enrico Arnaud. He was a pastor of the Waldenses in exile. With his Bible in his hand and his sword in his other hand, he took 800 men and he went back into those valleys believing that God would guide to the reestablishment of this ancient institution. And God did. Through one miracle after another, and certain political agreements, these people were allowed to have their valleys again. They reconquered them, they reestablished their churches, they established their homes and communities again, and the ancient history was revived with these people, and eventually, when I was in Italy near the Vatican, I noticed a great Waldensian church right there. They couldn't be stopped. And I believe that God is going to use these people again when these people throw off the reformed theology and the false doctrine of the false Sabbath and find the Bible again. I believe the truth will echo again from those mountains.

But unfortunately they united with the Protestant reformation. Each one of these reformed churches formed their own creed, and persecuted anybody else that didn't agree with them. They had adopted so much of the mind of the Roman Catholic church that they still had many tenants that resulted in them being half pagan.

Today the Waldenses church organization has mongrelized into the Methodist organization, and all of them are supporting the ecumenical movement to pull all religions together and put aside personal disagreements and doctrine. In this way, Satan is trying desperately to keep the old primitive truths of the word of God from ever clearly being presented to the world.

In the World Council of Churches it has been clearly brought out to be a communist agent in the world. We find that this union of leading churches has depicted on the front of their meeting hall in Geneva a picture of their Christ. Now I want you to look at this Christ, because it's an antichrist. He's bald. Jesus was never bald. He would never have shaved His head. That's pagan. He's naked down to his waist. Jesus would never have unclothed His body. The Hebrew religion forbid that. He was shaved. The Hebrew religion said he was to have a beard. When you look at this, it's not Jesus at all. But it's a counterfeit. It's a half pagan, half Hindu Christian god, a mongrelized antichrist that the world is going to exalt at the end of time. And where will the people come from? Where are those that will give that loud cry to come out of the false religions at the end? Well, the Waldenses are asleep. Where are the Waldenses going to come from in the future?

I went into one of the caves there in the Waldenses valleys just to sit just to imagine what it would be like if I was back in the time of the Dark Ages willing to die for the Biblical truths. And I had my little family around me and I just imagined what it would be like if the soldiers were coming. I knew what would happen to my wife, my children and myself if I didn't cooperate. Would I stand for the truth? Would I stand on the word of God alone and leave all consequences to God and leave our martyrdom to Him to honor Him and glorify His name? That's a question that every Christian needs to ask today.

Today we are at the end of our history as Christians. And we know that God is going to call a people out of every denomination to stand for the truth though the heavens fall, to stand for the right even when champions are few. And there is no way that we are going to survive this test of being God's people in the midst of the confusion in the air unless we go to the Bible for ourselves, and study for ourselves prayerfully, asking God's spirit to guide us into all truth. Don't listen to theologians. Don't follow structural religions and denominations. Go to the word of God for yourself before Jesus Christ and ask him what you should do. The primitive Christian church is to arise at the end of time, and all of its doctrines will be true. They are going to believe in the soon return of Jesus and the true righteousness by faith overcoming sin through faith in Jesus alone, but the sign will be with them, that sign that was ever with that primitive Christian church, they are going to keep the seventh day Sabbath. You watch for this, a Sabbath-keeping church that keeps God's commandments are going to be the last group, and you need to be one of those people. You need to study it for yourself and be ready for them.

I urge you to open up your Bible and start a course of study now like you never have before because I know time is short, friend. There isn't much time left. And God needs you in this last great work to call people out of error and to call people home to meet Jesus at His coming. God bless you as you study and as you pray.

In closing tonight let's kneel together, shall we?

Dear Father in heaven, we come before Thy throne of mercy tonight, thank you for the privilege of being able to talk to the Creator of the universe. We thank Thee for Thy word, Lord, that you have preserved for us through so much suffering and sacrifice through the centuries. Lord, we want to do Thy will and we want to be filled with Thy truth. And we ask that You guide us as we study Your word and prepare us to be mouthpieces for You, to present these old truths again in this last great battle with Satan. Father in heaven, keep us faithful to these truths. I pray for each one in the audience, dear Lord, and for each one that listens to the tape that they may find You and that they may be filled with the spirit of Christ and readied for what's coming. I pray that they would not procrastinate, Lord, that they would make that decision for time and eternity. These things I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.