Now we're looking at the church history to see what did happen and to see how the church, the visible church, the professing church, the church of this world, the church that became known and visible and great, how it got off the track and shunted the opposite direction. We've had to look for some things that most historians never look for. They've never known what to look for. You have to know what is the true church of God. And that church is the very body of Christ, and it is the church that has and is led by the Holy Spirit of God. Those that have repented of their ways and of the ways of this world and that come out from this world and are separate, and they are living by every word of God. But look on the Bible as authority and who fear and tremble before its words instead of saying, "Oh, well, I don't think that makes any difference. I know the Bible says so and so, but then I don't see that it makes any difference." And here's the way I look at it. On that kind of human reasoning, my friends, the popular religion of this world that we call Christianity has been built. No wonder it's gotten so far away. Do you know that the Holy Scriptures are not only given by inspiration of God, but they are profitable to correct us and reprove us? And they are described, the Bible itself says that its own words are like a sharp two-edged sword. They're going to cut both ways. Now, if there is anything that people do not like, if there is anything that goes against the grain of human nature, it's to be criticized; it is to be corrected and reproved, we don't like to be criticized even where we are wrong, and even if we're right, we don't like it. But above all, people do not like to be corrected where they are wrong. It's the last thing that the normal man wants to do — to admit it where he is wrong — and that's why they wanted to continue with their pagan ways as they began coming into Christianity. Now, we've shown you how the visible politically organized Christianity got away from the truth and got away from the word of God, got away from the Gospel. But now we're placing the real two Christian church. Jesus said it would be persecuted if they had persecuted him. He said they'd persecute his own disciples and his people. The prophecies of the Bible said this church would be scattered, that it would be despised by the world, and that it would be a little flock, small in numbers. Now we began tracing this church in history in the preceding program. And I tell you that in the Book of Revelation are two church groups, two religious bodies, both professing to be Christians, yet two altogether contrary and different body pictured. The one, the popular religious groups of this world, picture in Revelation 17. And there, under the symbol of a fallen woman, and woman is a symbol of a church, a great church. Fallen, sitting upon many waters, ruling over many nations, speaking many different languages, and called by the name Babylon the Great. Oh, this is a great church. This isn't some little despised church you can't find and can't identify. This is a great one, Babylon the Great, but Babylon is confused, and here is the mother of confusion, and the whole world is drunk, drunken on her false teaching, false doctor. Now, spiritually drunk, you know what that means, my friends? And the world is spiritually drunk. As a matter of fact, most of us need to wake up and realize we've been born into such a world as we've come to believe in any of these things. Why do we believe what we do? How did you come believe, my friends? Why do you believe? Why you've always heard them? You've accepted them. You've just swallowed these things hook line and sinker, because other people believe them. You know, that's how you tend to believe nearly everything you believe. That's how I came to believe what I believe mostly. But, you know, years ago, God woke me up, and he struck me down in a different manner than the Apostle Paul. But just as surely, and he brought me to my senses and caused me to begin to check up on what I had become to so carelessly believed and caused me to look into his words, and he opened my mind and my understanding to his truth. And I saw that what I had believed was wrong, and I had to repent, and I had to throw it out. And I had to acknowledge that I did not have the truth. And I want to tell you that there can be no true minister of God, no true minister of Jesus Christ who has not gone through that identical experience unless you have come to realize that he has been wrong, that he has been Smith Potter has learned wrong things that he has accepted and just assumed things that are not true and has been willing to take the truth. And if I was going to accept the truth, I had to suffer the storm of the very important people that I had known and of relatives and their friends. And that's the first thing anyone think of. Most people fear people, and they fear friends and relatives; they fear associates and club members and that sort of thing. So much and it's so close to their eyes, they can't see God, and they don't fear God. Well, I had to make the decision, and I made the decision finally that I was a little more afraid of what God thought than what people thought. And so, I had to surrender to God's word, and I had to begin to study it, and I had to let it correct me and prove until I found so many, many things that I had assumed and come to believe that most of us had come to believe in this world were wrong and to come to accept the truth. I don't preach the things I do to you because it's what I wanted to believe. What I grew up accepting carelessly, the things I preach to you are the very things that you will find recorded in your Bible and the things I've had to come to accept the hard way because I've had to be made willing to repent, to put the precious word of God above my ideas and above popular customs and what people think and whether people will condemn me or not. Yes, there's a lot of good in human nature and there's also a lot of evil and it seems the evil predominate. So now in the cross chapter of Revelation, we find another church pictured, and that is the real true church, and it's a persecuted church, it's scattered, it's driven away. It's the church the devil is so angry with and it's the church, it says in the last verse, "Keep the Commandments of God that obeys God." And they have the testimony of Jesus Christ and the faith of Christ. Now we found that back in the second and the third chapters of the Book of Revelation is the history of the true church, [inaudible] church. This church that would be small in number, the church that would be persecuted and driven away from organized society even in order to survive and to live. As a matter of fact, my friends, there were millions of this church that were marred, your Bible says so, it's in prophecy, whatever is prophesized is true and the time for this prophecy has passed. Therefore, it has happened. And history records the fact that there were millions who gave up their lives for the very word of God because they love what the Bible says. You know, today, even today, I can tell many of you in my radio audience what the Bible says and some, some people are going to say, "Well, yes, I know that's what the Bible says. But then I don't see where it makes any difference." Is that what you're going to say? Well, if you're right and privileged to, I wanna tell you, there's a judgment day coming and you're going to stand before the very judgment bar of Christ. How are you going to answer then? You're going to be judged by this word? Let me warn you, don't take it perilously. I've come to tremble before this word. I hope you have. All right. In the 2nd and 3rd chapters of Revelation, you find the history of the church pictured under the seven literal churches that did exist on a mail route there in Asia Minor at that time. And the conditions pictured here are the conditions that did exist in those seven churches that they were merely a pipe, foreshadowing, the condition that God who knows then from the beginning knew would happen in the continuous history of his true church. This beside the persecuted church, the scattered church small in numbers, the real church that Jesus did build its history from that time until the second coming of Christ down in our day. And it's going to happen in our generation, so the church at Ephesus was the symbol of the apostolic church as it was in the days of the apostles. And even in that church, as the Apostle Paul wrote the mystery of iniquity was already at work. And so apostacy was setting in and even in their own selves some up trying to lead the following the wrong way and away from the truth of God because it would be easier, you know, human nature likes to go contrary to God, the natural mind of man, which is human nature. As we read in Romans 8:8 chapter of Romans, the carnal mind, the natural mind is enmity against God. That is, it's antagonistic. It doesn't believe God's way and it is not subject to the law of God. Neither indeed can be. It always wants to go the other way. Just as a young man along from, oh 18 to 21 or so. Perhaps even a little younger with some men, they believe their father is all wrong. Their dad doesn't know very much. And, I know that at that age, even at age 16, I knew a lot more than my dad. My father didn't know very much at that age. I thought he did know something before that time. And then I discovered that my father didn't know very much and I knew a lot more than he did. I've told you before, how, then when I was 20, I believe it was that my folks moved away when we were living in Des Moines, Iowa. And my folks moved out on the West Coast and I didn't see them again until I was about 33. And we came out to the West Coast and I saw my father then for the first time in about 12 or 13 years. And I told you how amazed I was at how much my father had learned in that 12 or 13 years because now I found he knew more than I did. Well, some of us grew up spiritually, but most of us seem to think we know better than God, our heavenly Father; we think we know more than he, and the natural mind is that way, and it will turn away from the things of God if we don't overcome and control our own minds. Now, in the preceding program, we were going through the history of this church at Ephesus. They saw that it was the apostolic church; now verse eight. And under the angel of the church that Smyrna writes these things, saith the first and the last: it was dead and is alive. And that's Christ. He's the Alpha and the Omega; the first, he's always existed. Now, here's what Christ says to this church. I know thy works and tribulation. Here's the church that was persecuted and living in tribulation. It wasn't a very popular church living in ease and luxury and popular in the world. I know thy works and tribulation and poverty that thou art rich spiritually, just poor physically. And I know the blasphemy of them that say they are Jews and are not but are the synagogue of Satan; who is that? You know, some people today are trying to tell you, some people that have an anti-Semitism in their minds and they have hatred for the race of Jewish people will try to tell you that today's race of Jewish people are the people here meant and that they're not real Jews at all that they are some foreign breed and, and that they're only pretending they're Jews. Now my friends, there is not a word of truth and fact. I don't know why we have to have such bigotry and race hatred and things of that sort. I wanna tell you that people that have that are not Christians, the very first thing in Christianity above everything else is having love in our hearts for other people. And I want to say to you my friends, I don't care who you are and I don't care if this makes you angry. If you do not have love in your heart for the Jewish people. If you have hatred in your heart for the Jewish people today, you're not a Christian. I don't care how much you profess. Jesus Christ told us we have to learn to even love our own enemies. I don't think you have a lot of Jews that are your enemies either. There are a lot of false accusations going around saying that the Jews control the world and they've got a stranglehold on all of us and all that kind of poppycock. You know, it's about time it's branded for what it is. I don't love the Jewish people anymore or any less than I do other people, but I'm not going to love him any less either. I just want to have love in my heart for all people and I think you'd better join me and have the same thing. You know, I don't care how much faith you have, you can have enough faith to move mountains. And if you haven't got charity and love for people, you haven't got anything. Turn the I Corinthians the 13th chapter and read the first verse or two and you'll find it there and that's what God says. And it's true and it's gonna judge you someday. All right. Now, we're going to see who these people are that are the synagogue of Satan and say they're Jews and are not. All right. Let's get into that. Now, let's look at the history of this particular church at Smyrna. This is the one that arose next after the Apostolic original Apostolic church. It was a church that suffered persecution and poverty, but it was a church that had works. Now today they try to tell us there aren't any works in the Christian church. Well, there were works in this church and in every one of the true churches, Jesus says, I know thy works and there were works and they were good ones. But a little later, he always had something wrong with them. He said, fear, none of those things which thou shalt suffer. They were going to suffer even more. Behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison that you may be tried and you shall have tribulation 10 days. Be thou faithful under death and I will give thee a crown of life, overcome, endure to the end, be faithful to death. He that hath an ear. let him hear what the Spirit say unto the churches. Now, that is one stage of the true church of God as it was coming along in history. All right, this pictures God's church during more than four centuries, more than 400 years under the persecution of the old pagan Roman empire in the days of Nero and before and after, of course too. Now, besides the true church, there was also as you read here, a synagogue of Satan developing in this period that is a church of Satan, and Satan is the God of this world. And Satan masquerades as God and has palmed himself off as the true God and has millions, yes, millions of people believing that He is God and turning the word of God in the true Bible upside down. I don't want to tell you, my friends, you need to listen and see if you've been deceived by this thing. And I started to say a moment ago that when a person is spiritually drunk, what does it mean? But when a person is literally drunk on alcohol, you know what happens when you get drunk? Your eyes don't see very well and you become, as they say, blurry-eyed and, and your eyes are all out of focus and things are all blurred, and they're so blurred you can't see and you can't tell whether there's one or two or five things in front of you like the fellow that was found out late at night on a nice clear night and he was counting, he'd get up to four or five and then he'd start all over, he'd get up to three and he'd start again, get up to maybe six or seven and he'd start again. And someone says, "What in the world are you doing?" He told him to hush up and he said with a thick tongue, he was pretty drunk. He said, "I'm counting the moon." You know, he just couldn't see it very clear. And that's the way with things. Now, when you're drunk, you can't see physical things plainly. They're all blurred, they're out of focus. And when you are spiritually drunk as the whole world is according to your Bible on these false teachings, I wanna tell you that your spiritual perception is so blurred and so out of focus, you can't see the truth of God clearly and plainly. And even when you hear it so plain, so clear that a little child could understand the people that are spiritually drunk just somehow can't see it. And those of us who have gotten our spiritual eyesight and cameras and nice sharp, clear focus. We just can't understand how it is that the truth, which is so plain, so clear, so simple, a little child can understand it and yet educated people and mature grown-up people, they just don't get it. Well, that's the answer. And that's the reason, now, let's get at this synagogue of Satan. What is it, now synagogue is merely the Hebrew word for church. That's all, Hebrew word from church. So then this is Satan's church. Satan pawns himself off as the God of the world. He has his churches. And in II Corinthians 11th chapter you read he has his ministers and they pose as the ministers of Christ. They don't say I'm a minister of Satan the devil. They say I'm a minister of Jesus Christ. He's had them, my friends from that time, way, way back there centuries ago. It's no new thing. This is something that's been going on a long, long time and it's in your Bible and it's in history. Then Jesus was not speaking here of a race. He isn't speaking of a race of Jewish people. He's speaking about a church, the Pentagon or church and it's a church that belongs to the devil. It's in symbolic language in other words. And it's speaking of a church. Now, this church claimed that they are Jews. Now, why do they claim they're Jews? Well, now listen in Bible language and this is speaking symbolically, all right. In Bible language, Jesus said salvation is of the Jews. That's John 4:22. And then the Apostle Paul said in Romans 1:16 to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Yes, it was opened up to the Gentile too. But what about that? Now in Romans 11. And if you'll notice especially verses 16 to 27 (Romans 11:16-27) the Apostle Paul explains that Israel and the Jews to whom salvation belonged had been broken off, that is individually, all had sinned and came short of the glory of God. So that those that are Israelite, each born or born Jews because they have sinned had been cut off from their natural olive tree. And Gentile there is pictured as an olive tree and Gentile nations and Gentile races as the wild olive trees. Now, all the promises of God are to Israel, and in this natural olive tree, that's where the olive oil is not in the wild olive trees. But here they are, they're branches of that tree, each individual, and they have all been broken off because of unbelief. So, there's no salvation just because they were born as Israelites none whatsoever. And Gentiles are pictured here. If they are in Christ, if they have repented and accepted Christ and become begotten children of God, then they are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. And then they are pictured in Romans 11 as being grafted as twigs or branches of a wild olive tree, Gentile that are cut off from their Gentile citizenship and grafted contrary to nature into the Israel tree, the natural olive tree. Read that in Romans 11 verses 16 to 27 (Romans 11:16-27). All right. But once they're grafted in, they're no longer Gentiles because in Ephesians 2:11, the Apostle Paul says that you, you Gentiles being in time past Gentiles than in time past, they were Gentiles, but they're not anymore. Now, they are all one in Christ Jesus. And as he says in verse 19 Ephesians, the second chapter (Ephesians 2:19), you are no more strangers and foreigners than Israel. But now your fellowcitizens with the saints and those in Israel, they with the spirit of God, those that are converted and put in Israel. They are the real church and they are the saints and now the Gentiles, the fellow citizens with the saints. Now, Paul said to the Gentiles in Romans 2:29 Paul said he is a Jew which is one inwardly. He was speaking religiously of the church. He is a Jew who is one inwardly and circumcision is out of the heart in the spirit and not in the letter whose praise is not of men but of God. Now you see what he means by a church that is called Jews. He is a Jew which is one inwardly and all the promises were given to them and even the Gentiles became spiritual Jews when they were in the true church. Now, then these people call themselves Jews, but they were liars. They were not, they were of the synagogue of the church of Satan and not of the church of God. That's what he's speaking of there. And here was this Smyrna church and they hated those people that said that, they had separated themselves from this popular delusion and snare and error that was deceiving the work. So here was a church made up of Gentiles, claiming salvation, claiming to be Jews inwardly masquerading itself as the Christian church of the real church of God. But if God was Satan, and it was merely Satan's proud Satan group, not God's church, it was the church of Satan, not the church of God. This synagogue of Satan simply is the political religious organized group that developed immediately after the apostolic age. And that's the way God brands that. Now the world at this time did not recognize the true church. If you read in I John 3:1, the world knoweth us not. And the world has never recognized the true church. So the historians in trying to check the history of the church and find out what happened. They looked here at this church in Revelation two of Ephesus, and Smyrna and Pergamos, Thyatira, and in Revelation three, it's Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea and they try to fit the visible political organizations of this world, the political religious organizations, they try to fit them into this thing and it never fits and no wonder it doesn't, it wasn't intended to. They're looking at the churches that say that the Jews and are out of the Synagogue of Satan and trying to fit it into this. No wonder they've never found it. They haven't known what to look for, yes, as the Bible says, the world knoweth us the truth church or knoweth us not. Now it is from the organizations of this world that we still have to go through though, for the scanty records of God's people who are now maligned as heretics. And you're going to find them branded as heretics. But when you find what they're branded for and what they believe and when you find that they believe the same thing, Jesus said, the same things that are in the Bible, then you know, they were the true church and that's the way you have to find it in history. Now, for centuries, worldly writers mentioned remnants of the true church within the bounds of the Roman Empire. Ans sometimes they were individuals, sometimes they were scattered families, and sometimes larger groups. And there were still a few local congregations preaching the real true gospel the same one Jesus had preached and that the apostles had believed and keeping the Commandments of God, realizing God is the Supreme Ruler, and that we have to surrender to him and repent, that's the first beginning of salvation, and they had that truth. Then, as late as the beginning of the fifth century in Asia Minor, the Bishop Chrysostom bewailed members of the world church, the popular church in the world, who upon learning the truth from the scattered remnants of the true church had repented of their way and had begun to observe the same things that Jesus had the same things the apostles had the original Apostolic church. They began to observe, as you read in Bingham's Antiquities of the Christian Church in book 16 and chapter six. In this history, this authentic history, they began to observe the Feast of Trumpets, the Feast of Tabernacles, and the truth of the Great Day of Expiation. That's where you read it. They got right back to the things that the world sneered at as Jewish, and the world had taken up pagan celebrations instead, and branded the ways of Christ and the ways of the apostles as being Jewish. Well, now, my friends, from the time of Constantine along in the fourth century, the true church fled into the valleys and the mountains in Europe, and John the apostle describes this flight in the Book of Revelation for over 1000 years. It's in the 12th chapter of Revelation, and I read it to you in one or two broadcasts back here, where he pictures the true church as a woman fleeing for her life from persecution. Now we come to the next one, the Pergamos church. I'd hope to get two or three of these today, but time's about up again. And we're coming now to Pergamos in verse 12 of Revelation 2 (Revelation 2:12), the next stage in the history of the true church. Well, I'm ready to show you. Christ said of this church, "I know thy work." There's another church that had works and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is. I'm going to give you the actual historic truth about that in the next program and that they have not denied his faith in what happened to them. We're going to come right on down. I want to tell you, my friends, that true church of God has existed in every generation from then until now. And we can trace the history, and I'm going to give it to you in brief, of course in complete history would take a whole book, and it would take two years of these broadcasts to give it to you. But I'm going to give you the highlights of it and the whole history. I want to tell you that the real church of God has existed and its time we got our eyes open and searched the Scriptures for the truth. Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Pentecostals—millions of sincere people believing that they are Christians but adhering to different beliefs. How can there be so many denominations with so many different doctrines when Christ said he would build just one church? Where can you find the original church Jesus Christ built? The free booklet "Where is the True Church?" answers these and other questions. The history of Christ's original church can be traced through the past 1950 years. You need to know where that church is today. Request your free copy of "Where is the True Church?"