The Task Unfinished – The Present State of the Lord’s Testimony – Introduction

There finally came a day after several hundred years, when they actually took up arms and defended themselves. I’m not sure they should have done that…I don’t know…God knows. But they lasted from 1200 to 1500. They actually lasted from 1000 to 1500. How do they do that? How do you do that when they take your leader, and something just keeps on going? I bet you figured out where I’m going by now.

Jesus made a statement. “If we had lived in the days of the prophets, we would not have stoned them.” To which Jesus strongly hinted, yes, you would have to stone me. Don’t turn that around positively. Yes, I’m a Romanic. Yes, I wish I could have belonged to the Priscillianists, the Celtics, but I’d be sitting there taking notes, writing down the history of how they did it. I wish I could have lived among the Bogomils, the Paulicians, and the Cathars. I’d like to know how they did it. I’d like to be here tonight and tell you how they did.

The only thing we know about the Bogomils, the Cathars, and the Paulicians is that they were all Manichaeans, which is absolutely not true because that’s what their enemies call them. And it was a good way to kill them. The church didn’t like Manicheans. Every once in a while, they dig up something some of these people wrote, and there’s nothing in there to indicate they ever had such beliefs, and that includes Priscillian himself.

Well, there were the United Brethren, who grew out of many of the persecuted groups. Martin Luther said they had greatly influenced him. But there was another group that was just incredible, and they grew up out of nowhere. There’s no record of them ever touching anybody else. The only reason they don’t have a more glorious history than they did is that I think there were six men who led that group, and all of them, but one, were martyred, and they were all under 30. They began in Zurich, Switzerland, and their testimony has profoundly influenced me, just as the Waldensians did. They were slaughtered, and they had ironic deaths in that if you believe in baptism, fine. The Catholics drowned them. You want to preach your doctrine as rebaptism, then we’ll cut your tongue out for doing so. And they burned them, and they drowned them, and they tortured them to death.

Where are the Dutch? I want to see the Dutch. One, two, three. I read the account of a man, and I can’t remember if he walked or rode a horse, and I don’t know where he started from. Still, he went to Amsterdam, and he recorded that, of the days he walked, he walked all the way across Holland to some place previous to Holland and all the way to Amsterdam in the middle of one of these bloodlettings. He made the statement, “There was not a tree he passed on his entire journey, but what there was either a Huguenot, a Dutch Protestant, or an Anabaptist nailed to the tree.”

I don’t think you know that, do you? Okay, CJ, you’ve never heard that, have you? I’m going to gamble on something here. CJ, would you stand up now? And if I don’t miss my bet, either you or you can tell me the name of the man who said it and the place he said it. If you can tell us his name and the place he said it, I’d appreciate it. I’m going to tell the story, and you’re going to tell me his name. But as far as I know, this is the most-quoted single story in Dutch history. He stood on the battlements of a city surrounded by the Spanish Catholic army, and he held two arms up, and the Spaniards had just yelled to him, “You should surrender, or you’ll starve to death.” And he said, “When it becomes necessary, I will eat this arm and fight you with this one.” Do you know who he was? You never heard this? Thank you, sister. You don’t. You have never heard this story. You haven’t either. I never met a Dutchman in my life who didn’t know that story.

Well, then, let me tell you a little bit about your history. Do you know this? The Spaniards did everything they could to annihilate Holland. Do you know that? You do know that. That’s good. Alright. And you also know why the Flemish hate the French and the northern Belgians hate the Dutch, and they hate the Dutch, and they hate the French, but they hate one another more than they hate the Dutch or the French. You know this? You know this? I think you know that. It’s because the Spaniards and the French conquered a little part of Holland, but it was the wrong end of it, the wrong part of it. And then the Huguenots and the Calvinists managed to get in there in this little piece of land called Belgium and turn them into Protestants. But the Protestants were on the Catholic side of Belgium, and the Roman Catholics were on the Protestant side of Holland. And so you got Catholics up against Dutch reform, and they can’t get out because the Flemish are in their way to get France. And this all came about from these Spanish and French efforts to annihilate the Dutch.

Well, the next time I see you, you’re going to tell me that man’s name because I had forgotten it. And you’re going to tell me what town he was in, and I’ve never been a Dutch person who didn’t know his story. I tell you, educational systems are coming to pieces. (laughter) I don’t think you’re aware of how many Dutchmen died in the post-Reformation era. Forgive me. I’ll tell you something else: I owe you a debt. Most of you know that when I was very young, I studied abroad. I studied in Switzerland at a Baptist seminary in Zurich. What you don’t know is that that was a liberal school. I never told anybody that. I was getting taught an awful lot of stuff, and I knew what was up, but it was being handed down to me as gospel and law. They weren’t going to affect me, but I wanted to know I had an answer to that. And over there in our library, I found the Dutch Reform books on this subject, and they were brilliant. They were incredible and absolutely slaughtered what I was being taught.

I want you guys to know that I owe a great deal to Dutch Reformed theology and to the critical scholars who defended the word of God. I’m sorry for what happened to the Anabaptists. That was probably the purest, cleanest work there was. They got just about decimated. Then a guy named Menno came along, and the Anabaptists got a new name: Mennonites. Are you aware that the Amish are Anabaptist? Didn’t you know that? Well, they are the strictest people in this world, and they’re very self-righteous because they lead such a clean, pure life. They won’t have anything to do with the rest of us. I don’t know if most of you know, but it’s a religious foundation of theirs.

I will tell you this. I’ll tell you what history says. The Anabaptist gospel spread across Europe so quickly because people did not want the state church imposed on them. They didn’t want the Catholics, and they didn’t want the Lutherans, but there was a blowing of the spirit of God all over. I don’t know how many Anabaptists died, but I will tell you how many were estimated to have died in a short period of time. That included those on the road to Amsterdam. If these statistics are true, then this is the largest work of God ever on this earth. That God has ever had on this earth.  5 million.

Then the Moravians. I guess the Moravians shone brighter and shorter than anyone else did. Zinzendorf died; he was the founder of the Moravians. He took the torch from the United Brethren. I believe he died in 1760. But I’ll tell you this, they lived long enough that a young man in his 20s who was not saved was going to America from England to preach the gospel, and you can do that if you’re an Anglican. And he met…they were having a storm, and everybody thought that the ship was going to sink. Huddled over here in one corner of the ship were a group of Moravians, very calmly, very quietly singing and giving praises to the Lord.

And that young man was absolutely dumbfounded at the peace of those people. Now, somebody tell me what his name was…John Wesley, who got saved later. They held that torch for 100 years, and nobody has done what they’ve done since then or before. They took the gospel to the Eskimos. Maybe if the brothers and sisters from Johannesburg would do me the favor of telling me, because the names have changed. We read about a group of people who were slaves…no, prisoners who had been turned into slaves…where the gospel of Jesus Christ had never been preached, and they sold themselves into slavery so that they could be put in that country. I believe it was Johann Leonhard Dober, but I’m not sure. I can tell you this: they went there, preached the gospel, and died there. That’s what Moravians did, and they did it for over a generation.