How Does God Need Us to Reply to Ache & Struggling? – John Barnett
“The Close to-Extinction of Christianity: The closest Christianity ever got here to being worn out was throughout the reign of the emperor Diocletian. He administratively went by way of the empire and located an anomaly, a gaggle of those that didn’t behave as they have been imagined to.
They didn’t worship the emperor like everybody else, they didn’t go to the pagan temples and have interaction in sexual immorality, they usually didn’t sacrifice to the Greek pantheon of gods that so dominated the lifestyle.
They have been anomalies, and so Diocletian determined to do away with them.
First, he went by way of and located the assembly locations the place the church gathered collectively and tore them down.
Then he went in and arrested the Christian leaders, killing each one among them he might discover.
Then he searched out and destroyed each copy of the Scriptures he might get his fingers on in order that not a single, full copy of the Scriptures survived from earlier than the fourth century.
Diocletian got here nearer to exterminating Christianity than some other emperor, and there have been no less than thirty of them who tried.
This started when John wrote down the Revelation of Jesus Christ, and within the midst of this persecution, the struggling believers at Smyrna obtained a letter from Jesus.” from the video introduction
