Hello friends, I'm Wayne Shepherd, inviting you to listen to the following Bible teaching message by Paul Scharf. Paul is a Church Ministries representative for the Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, serving in the Midwest. You'll find all of his ministry resources at sermonaudio.com slash pscharf, where he provides new content on a regular basis, including a weekly column that he writes, along with news and updates. Right now, we encourage you to follow along as we open God's Word for today's presentation. It's our prayer that the Lord God will use this teaching to bring glory to Himself and to work faith in each of our hearts. Here now with the sermon is Paul Scharf. It's wonderful to be back with you. And so we're going to talk about the Thanksgiving Pilgrims. Just for those of you who aren't aware, I'm Paul Scharf. Actually, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of our official appointment with the Friends of Israel to be Church Ministries representative in the Midwest, and we've shared that with you previously in March. And I've been here before and know many of you, and it's just wonderful to be with you to talk about Thanksgiving. How many of you enjoy Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday I think for as long as I can remember and especially as I've gotten older. Christmas has lost some of the, well it's become so commercialized obviously and overblown in our culture. It's lost some of the childish fascination, I guess, which would be natural. And so, for me, my favorite holiday, and I think the most meaningful holiday to me, is Thanksgiving. And it doesn't feel so much like Thanksgiving out there this year. It feels more like Super Bowl weekend this week, but hopefully we'll bounce back from that and maybe still have some seasonal weather. But I can say, Happy Thanksgiving from the friends of Israel. I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart. I will recount all of your wonderful deeds. Psalm 9, verse 1. And so, I hope this little mini-series will prompt you in your Thanksgiving celebrations this month, this year, and provoke you toward thankfulness and toward thinking about the meaning of how our American Thanksgiving really began. And there's so many lessons we can learn from that. As Pastor mentioned, they relate to the founding of our nation. They relate to our, as we'll see tonight, our life in the church. They relate to, obviously, the topic of just giving thanks. And the song, the hymn we sang tonight, in fact, as we open, The pilgrims wouldn't have been familiar with that because it was written more than 100 years after their time, but I think they would have loved that hymn and the words that we sang. So if we turn with me tonight to begin, we're going to look at just two references that the New Testament contains with the idea of pilgrims, actually the word pilgrim. And we're gonna just look at these briefly to begin, just to prompt our thinking together. If you look with me at, we'll take them in biblical order, I guess. Hebrews 11, the Hall of Faith chapter, talks about those who live by faith, and it describes them in verse 13. This is after the section on Abraham. And it says that these all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, were assured of them, embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and what? Pilgrims on the earth. So you see there the idea of a pilgrim is certainly a biblical concept, a New Testament concept, and in another famous passage that most of us probably know by heart in the book of 1 Peter, chapter 2, Beginning in verse 11, verse 11 and 12, Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and, what, pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul, having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by your good works which they observe, glorify God in the day of visitation. And so you see again, this is not only a biblical concept, but a biblical term that is applied to the people we're thinking about here, the Thanksgiving pilgrims, and obviously they were given that name for reasons that we'll see, Lord willing, before we're done tonight. All right, how many think, let's ask this to begin, how many think you know something about the pilgrims, or maybe a lot about the pilgrims? Okay, well, a few, all right. Some are too bashful to claim that they do. All right, well, whether you do or don't, we're going to hopefully learn some things together. I'm not an expert on the pilgrims, but I'm fascinated with them, and as I said, having a love for Thanksgiving, I have a love for history and for church history, and certainly a passion regarding the Reformation, which we're gonna see how that ties together here in just a minute. So I love to talk about the pilgrims. I've been teaching and preaching on the pilgrims for over 20 years and try to add and learn a little bit more every time every year. So let's think about them tonight. Why should we study the pilgrims? And one reason would be because there is vast confusion about the pilgrims, certainly in our culture. If you watch anything in the mainstream media between now and Thanksgiving, if they actually have time to talk about the pilgrims, you can basically just disregard anything they say about them because it's basically gonna be just probably far off the base. And there's, of course, great confusion as well among many Christians about the pilgrims and just in general. Did the pilgrims really thank the Indians? That's one common politically correct version of the Thanksgiving story in our culture today. I was in a service like the one we'll have in a couple of weeks back when I was in college and there was another guy who went to community college and he came to the service and he gave a little testimony during the prayer time and he's just reporting that They had a lesson that day in class about what was really the meaning of the first Thanksgiving, and the professor clarified that it was basically just kind of a drunken bash, you know, a drunken brawl between the pilgrims and the Indians, and that was really what the first Thanksgiving was really all about. Did the pilgrims really wear funny hats and black and white suits? That's how we see them pictured all the time. Is that real? Is that true? Were the pilgrims really just a single local church congregation? How many think that could be possible? Okay, if you don't, hang on, stay with us, alright. Was the Mayflower Voyage what's been called really a church relocation project? And why did the Mayflower Compact begin with the words, in the name of God, amen? We'll think through some of those things as we go. Dr. Paul Jaley, who's pastored for years a church in Plymouth, Massachusetts, really given his life to the study of the history of the pilgrims as well, says, Christians have not studied their history and have not studied their heritage, and there's become a vacuum of the truth regarding these issues surrounding the pilgrims. Well, if the pilgrims landed today, the scene might be something like this. Hey, there's no praying here. This is a public beach, right? Thankfully, there were different obstacles, but nothing like that in the way of the pilgrims when they came here. This is an interesting quote that comes from, actually, my college history, American history textbook, secular textbook, secular publisher. And it says this, little did the German monk Martin Luther know when he nailed his protests against Catholic doctrines to the door of Wittenberg's cathedral in 1517, that he was shaping the destiny of a yet unheralded nation. He's saying here that there is a connection between Martin Luther, October 31st, 1517, and the founding of America. Now, what is that connection? Well, I hope before we're done tonight, you'll see there's a very definite, strong connection that binds those things together. This, of course, a famous image of what it may have looked like when Luther nailed the 95 Theses. There are the doors in Wittenberg as we saw them two years ago. on our trip to Germany. By the way, I said I have a passion for studying and teaching the Reformation and likewise the pilgrims. The weakness of my pilgrim study compared to the Reformation is we have not taken a tour of the pilgrim sites that I can bring you pictures of those things. And I would love to do that, so if anyone would love to finance that for us, we would be glad to go and take all the pictures. My dream is to actually go and recreate their entire voyage. I don't know if I'll ever get that done, but I at least need to get to Plymouth and take pictures there. And there's the Reformation monument in Worms. Now, I put that there and I actually was thinking about this. There's a character missing there from this Reformation monument which covers so many characters of the Reformation and there was a character who we'll see in just a few minutes was in Worms and he didn't get a statue, but I put this in there to remind us of vorms. Keep vorms in your mind, on the sticky side of your mind, okay? You don't know what that means? Just hang on, you will in a minute. All right, so the Reformation. Why is there confusion about the pilgrims? Well, one reason would be, perhaps, because we don't put them in context. If you want to learn about the pilgrims in five minutes and begin with them on the Mayflower, which is what you'll hear in the news report if you watch, you know, just a popular TV program, you aren't going to really understand anything about the pilgrims at all in that context. The pilgrims are definitely a succeeding chapter in the story of the Reformation. And so again, that's why I bring some slides about the Reformation and the quote to remind us, this is the backdrop and we're gonna see much more about that here as we go. So what really is the Pilgrim's Story? Well, the Pilgrim's Story is very much an English story. I know we have at least one English, excuse me, history student here tonight. How many of you love history? Okay, how many love English history? Anybody? If you know anything about the history of England, it is incredibly, at the time we're talking about, it is incredibly complicated, isn't it? It is convoluted and just crazy things happening in terms of especially England's relationship to the Reformation. And this is the backdrop for the Pilgrim story, and it is not an easy storyline to master, okay? So let's think about just some big-picture ideas related here to give us, help set the context. Henry VIII separated from the Church of Rome. That's where we're going to pick it up. How many remember Henry VIII? We'll see about him a little bit. He denounces the Pope and the Catholic Church. This is 1534. We'll see why in a moment. So he forms the Church of England. In essence, he's the new Pope. So the church in England had been part of the church at Rome. There was tension, by the way, in that going back. 200 years. But finally, Henry, now, is going to be the one who breaks the link. And this is, in itself, just an incredibly complicated scenario with the power structure in Europe at the time, and the Pope looking at the political situation, and having to figure out how this chess move will affect the rest of the board, and so on. Very complicated things all interwoven and behind in going into all of this. But Henry, we'll see why in a moment, finally breaks the link between England and Rome, says we're not the Church of Rome, we're the Church of England. I'm the Pope, I'm the head of the church. Now, by the way, if you're a bishop in England, you wanna read the morning newspaper and make sure you're up, because this is gonna keep changing, all right? So one moment, you may be called to be a Protestant bishop, and the next, a Roman Catholic bishop. I'm exaggerating, of course, but it's gonna go back and forth, take a number of twists and turns over many decades. including, as a Protestant, are you supposed to be a Calvinist? Are you supposed to be an Arminian? That'll be an issue later. So this history of the English church and its relation to the Reformation, again, very complex. Here's a general statement. This is not meant to be a sweeping, authoritative statement of all time, but it's generally, I think, fair to say it's basically illegal to possess the Bible or read it in public. That's certainly true at the beginning of Henry's time. Even as the church turns nominally Protestant, becomes the Church of England, Two years after Henry breaks ties with Rome, he's going to have William Tyndale burned at the stake and then his body blown apart with gunpowder to show, don't you ever do again what William Tyndale's tried to do. And yet two years after that, what's Henry going to do? He's gonna go from forbidding the Bible to mandating it, put it in every church in England. So it's just very, again, very hard to even follow some of these things. And then how is this the backdrop to the pilgrims? Well, we're trying to look at, again, just the big picture. So let's think about the English monarchs. Henry VIII, 1509 to 1547. He had many opponents and rivals, including many who never wanted him to be on the throne to begin with. He had a lot of interesting personality traits, including one we'll think about in a moment on the next slide. But he has a son, which he so desperately wanted to have. That was his sole real driving purpose in life, to have a son who could succeed him on the throne. He had Edward VI, the boy king, the second Josiah, who ruled for just six years in his youth and then died of tuberculosis. And so he is followed by a distant, more distant relative, Lady Jane Grey, who the public will not accept. She rules for anyone know how long? Nine days, okay, real short time. And she is taken out by, here's the name you want to know, Bloody Mary. Mary of Tudor, okay? And we'll think about her coming up, and she rules for about five to six years. Mary is succeeded by another queen, Elizabeth I. a half-sister who's going to rule for more than 40 years. And by the way, so Mary, Bloody Mary, is she Catholic or Protestant? She's Catholic. She's going to turn the whole country back to Rome. Elizabeth is Protestant. She's going to then turn the whole country back to the Reformation. Not in a really biblically vital way that's going to please those who would support that kind of a change. Ultimately, we'll see. but in a political way. But then things sort of go a little bit downhill from there because Elizabeth is succeeded by the Stuart King. James VI of Scotland becomes also James I of England. Anyone know anything about King James? What did he do for us? The Bible version, okay. James, as we'll see, was not personally pious. His authorization of the Bible translation was completely political. That does not reflect on the value of the translation, but that's the background. And he was a severe disappointment to the Reformation movement, because he came from Presbyterian Scotland. They had great hopes for him, that he would be really a spiritual leader, in essence, leading the country in the Reformation. And he was a very severe disappointment. And then his son, Charles is even far worse than James, and that's beyond what we'll be studying here with the pilgrims. But that's just kind of the broad background. Now, here's a picture of Henry VIII. Doesn't he look splendid in his regalia there? This is how he looked in 1540. And we need to talk just for a moment about the wives of Henry, because believe it or not, this is, as we've already kind of seen, a huge part of the story. How many wives did Henry have? Anybody know? Six wives. As I told Pastor this joke before Oren Lutzer when he speaks, often says to the crowd as he's beginning, as Henry VIII said to each of his six wives, don't worry, I won't be keeping you long. Okay? So, six wives. Catherine of Aragon, she's Catholic. Anne Boleyn, she is Protestant, and believe it or not, this affects the whole kingdom for decades, okay, these kinds of things. Jane Seymour, the wife that he really loved, that gave him his son Edward, she died in childbirth, bearing Edward. Anne of Cleves, who really wasn't his wife other than in name. Catherine Howard, who was allegedly unfaithful to Henry. And then finally, sort of the most normal person in the bunch, Catherine Parr, who at the end of Henry's life wants to bring the whole convoluted family back together and make some sense of order out of the chaos that has been Henry's life. There's a little rhyme, a way of remembering what happened to the six wives of Henry. That is, they were divorced, beheaded, died, Divorced, beheaded, survived. How do you like that? So Catherine has a daughter, Mary I. This is of course the issue that leads to Henry separating from the Church of Rome. Catherine cannot have a son, or does not have a son. And they have multiple children, but they have no living son who can be the heir to the throne. That is why Henry is going to seek what? Divorce or annulment from the Pope. One problem here is Catherine is the daughter of, anybody know? She's the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain. Their fame arises from sending who on his journey? Columbus. Their grandson is Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, before whom Luther stands at the Diet of Worms. The Pope is looking around again the chessboard of Europe and saying, no way I'm giving Henry an annulment to throw out Catherine, who's related to Charles, Ferdinand, and Isabella. By the way, Ferdinand and Isabella hated the Jewish people and were tremendous persecutors of the Jewish people. They were no heroes either, though we like to think nice thoughts about them in regard to Columbus. But so, this is what prompts Henry to separate from the Church of Rome. He cannot get a divorce. So he, in essence, divorces the Pope, says, I'm the Pope, all right? Anne comes in as the second wife. She is going to bear Elizabeth. All right, and Edward is the son of Jane Seymour, as we've seen. All right, just a little bit of background, again, so we have a little bit of point of reference of what we're talking about here. We could really say it like this. There were two English Reformations. So unlike Germany, Switzerland, France, Scotland, the Reformation in England takes two different forms, if you will. There's an official Reformation. The Crown implemented this Reformation of convenience. Really begins when Henry separates from the Pope in 1534, but before that, Only 13 years later, 1521, that's, of course, the year Luther stood at Worms and defended his teachings on justification by faith. Henry, in response to what's happening in Germany, writes in defense of the Seven Sacraments. And Henry, by the way, was trained as a theologian. He knew absolutely nothing about the Bible. didn't even understand what the Bible was, but he was trained as a Roman Catholic theologian. And so he actually wrote, I mean, it'd be sort of like, I guess the only equivalent I could make to it would be kind of like being an attorney. He was trained in canon law, in essence, right? So he's an intelligent man, he's a well-trained man, he's an academic, and he can write something like the defense of the seven sacraments, but he has no spiritual knowledge whatsoever. But the Pope is so appreciated what Henry wrote that he gave him the name calling him the what? Defender of the Faith. You know that the English crown still claims that title today? Defender of the Faith, okay, even though they've separated from Rome. So, only 13 years later now, this same Henry is gonna declare himself Supreme Head of the Church. Forget the Pope, all right? There's a second act of supremacy, 1558. Elizabeth, after Mary had returned the country to Catholicism, Elizabeth comes back in and she returns the country to Protestantism and they pass a second act of supremacy because she's a woman, as queen, she takes a little different title, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Now, by the way, this official Protestant church will become the most incredible persecutor of the real Protestant church in England. The official Protestant state-run church is really ultimately no friend at all to Biblical Christianity or Biblical Reformation in England. So there's really a second reformation, if we can call it that. The English reformers, many of whom became English martyrs, implemented a reformation of conviction. And they would base their heritage on Wycliffe and Tyndale, who we'll think about tonight. And they began to meet in the 1520s as they were listening to what's happening in Germany and reading Luther, And they would gather at Cambridge in a tavern called the White Horse Inn. And they met there to have secret, prohibited discussions about what they were hearing, this new learning coming from Germany. And so their group was called the Little Germany. And these would be men like Robert Barnes and Thomas Bilney and Miles Coverdale and John Fox, Fox's Book of Martyrs, and Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer. Many names that we know, some we'll think about a little bit more tonight. So let's think about this background just real briefly. Wycliffe, the morning star of the Reformation, really the very first light of Reformation in England, or in Europe. Here's his statue at the Reformation monument in Worms. What did Wycliffe do that no one had ever done before? He translated the Bible into English, not the whole Bible, And he went back to the Latin Vulgate. He did not go back to the original Hebrew and Greek. But he began to do things that never before contemplated. And he opposed the papacy and transubstantiation. He was the leading theologian at Oxford. He somehow made it to a natural death without being martyred, and then, of course, his bones were exhumed and burned after he died. The Council of Constance made that decision. But so here's Wycliffe. Here is really the basis, the beginning of the Reformation in England. Now, three weeks ago, I was down at the Shepherds 360 conference in Cary, North Carolina. And one of the exhibitors was Cross and Crown Rare Books, a man we'll see coming up here, from Lynchburg, Virginia. And he had the most incredible display, tens of thousands of dollars worth of rare books and Bibles. and he let me take pictures of these. So I have a picture here of a Wycliffe New Testament facsimile there, and I believe that's a... I don't know what you call it, not a statue, but Wycliffe's head there. In fact, if anybody wants Pastor Peter to buy you a Christmas present, maybe that right there would be it. Or one of these books coming up that's much more valuable, maybe, all right? But, all right, joking aside, getting closer here to the pilgrims, William Tyndale. How many know about William Tyndale? All right, William Tyndale is one of the great heroes of all of Christian history, certainly of our English Bible and our background as English-speaking Christians. And we don't really know what influenced William Tyndale initially. We don't really have the story of his conversion. We don't have things like we have about Luther. But we know that very early in his life, something really set him afire. And he was educated at Cambridge and Oxford, really as highly educated as anyone could be in his day. But he came out of that official ecclesiastical education, Roman Catholic education, just really with a tremendous desire to understand and to ultimately translate and distribute God's word in English. And so William Tyndale, he was sitting one night, he was a chaplain of a very wealthy family. Wouldn't that be a great job to have, you know? And he was the tutor for the children and the family's chaplain on their estate. And they would have dignitaries come for supper and dine with them, and they had a Roman Catholic official, I've forgotten his name right now, but he came for supper one night, and he very pompously made the statement, we'd be better off if we had not God's laws, but only the laws of the Pope. And that statement sort of changed William Tyndale's life forever. And he said right there at the table, if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy who drives the plow to know more of the scriptures than you do. and that became the consuming passion of his life. By the way, how many of you know, now this is why we talked about Worms before, how many of you know that Tyndale was not only influenced by Luther, he was a contemporary of Luther, obviously, but he was a colleague of Luther. This is one of the great untold stories of history. William Tyndale has to flee England because he's basically a man on the run, and he goes to Germany, and he goes to Wittenberg. And he spends maybe as much as possibly two years, we don't know any of the details because this is, Tyndale is, he's running from the English authorities this whole time and for years to come. But he may have spent as much as two years with Luther in Wittenberg. And he printed some of his English Bible work in Wittenberg and also in Worms. And then, he fled from there to Belgium, Antwerp, and Brussels. And the story of Tyndale would really be a whole separate session. But here's, again, this is the man Gene Elbert with Cross and Crown Rare Books, and he let me take pictures here of things related to Tyndale. Here's a picture, an illustration. Here's the Tyndale New Testament. A very old and expensive Bible he's holding there. Alright, so then, as we move forward in history, those who were really contemporaries of Tyndale, but Tyndale is burned at the stake in 1536, remember. After Henry is separated from Rome, and the nation is allegedly Protestant, Tyndale is still burned at the stake. Well then, a few years later, who's going to come to power again? Bloody Mary, and we have the Marian martyrs, okay, included among them Ridley and Latimer, Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, the three Oxford martyrs. And their story would be another whole message, but we have to, we can't pass them by without remembering what was said as they were burning back to back at the stake, Ridley and Latimer. Latimer said to Ridley, Be strong, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle in England as I pray by God's grace shall never be put out. And so these are the two men we need to remember. And we're inching closer, closer toward the pilgrim story here. Now, those that didn't get burned at the stake in England, if they had money, they would do what? Leave. Okay, so keep that in mind here. The pilgrims and the Puritans, we're getting a little bit ahead and then we'll come back. Puritans and pilgrims are gonna develop based on what's happening in Europe and the real reformation there in Germany, Switzerland, especially Switzerland. And based on their experience with people like Tyndale, especially Ridley Latimer. And what's gonna happen is now, The reformation-minded people that have the means to do so are going to escape England and escape the rule of Mary and most of them are going to reconstitute their existence in Geneva. Calvin's Geneva. There's an English-speaking congregation there in Geneva, I believe pastored for a while by John Knox under Calvin. And they're going to come together in Geneva and they produce there the Geneva Bible. How many are familiar with the Geneva Bible? All right. You've got one. All right. So the Geneva Bible, you really cannot understand the formation of America unless you understand something about the Geneva Bible. It's that fundamental to the founding of America, really. So we have Theodore Beza, he's Calvin's right-hand disciple. Okay, Miles Coverdale, who'd worked with Tyndale and picked up Tyndale's translation work after Tyndale was martyred. John Knox. These all fled Bloody Mary and come together in Calvin's Geneva. And they decide they're gonna produce a new Bible translation in Geneva. And they're gonna, of course, ship it back to England, where it's forbidden, it's prohibited, it's illegal. They base their work on the work that's already been done by Tyndale, basically just pick up his work. And they complete the New Testament in 1557. In 1560, they complete the Old Testament, revise the New Testament. It's the first complete Old Testament translated directly from Hebrew to English. Remember, Tyndale had the New Testament. Tyndale translated the whole New Testament from Greek to English and gave us, and in so doing, by the way, he invented much of the English language itself and invented many of the biblical phrases we know and love and are familiar with. But he didn't finish the whole Old Testament. So they now give us the first complete Old Testament translated from Hebrew to English. It's the first English Bible to use Stephanus verse numbers, chapters and verses. It's the first mass-produced, mass-marketed Bible. They even had different sizes, different editions of it. They had one that you could actually put in your pocket, like a compact edition. It's the world's first study Bible. We'll see in a moment. It's the Bible of the Puritans and the Pilgrims. It's the Bible that built America. The Bible that built America, some of us might think, was the King James Version of the Bible. Well, if we really want to understand the foundation of America, it was the Geneva Bible, no question about it. And the notes, not just the translation, but the notes in the Geneva Bible, the study Bible, they opposed Roman Catholicism and the divine right of kings. By the way, who do you think in England didn't like that? King James, he hated it. He made it illegal to have a Geneva Bible. See again, pendulum swings. Bible's forbidden. Bible's mandated. Everyone must have a Bible. No one can read the Bible. Geneva Bible, outlawed. He's just following these roller coaster. But King James hated the Geneva Bible. and the notes that it had. And so he responds by authorizing a new translation, obviously, which we're familiar with. By the way, we call it the authorized version. It's actually the King James is the third authorized by the crown translation after the Great Bible and the Bishop's Bible. But the Geneva Bible, our New Testament, here's a big problem. Okay, we hear about today modern Bible versions and some of them the publishers just can't, whether it's the idea that maybe they think by revising it, putting out a new edition, there'll be increased sales, everybody has to buy a new one. You know, we hear about that and it's very frustrating and we all have perhaps the same Bible version of a particular modern version. But there's different readings in the same modern Bible version because they've put out different editions and you have to look at the front page, the copyright page, and see which edition from which year. Well, think of the Geneva Bible. It went through 140 editions, not printings, but editions in 84 years. And it killed it. This is what killed the Geneva Bible. It was the Bible of Shakespeare. It was the Bible of English culture. It was the Bible that built America and they killed it by really foolishness in that way. The continual updating of the text and notes led to the demise of the Geneva Bible and of course it was surpassed by the King James which was largely built on the same foundation of Tyndale and even incorporated some of the scholarship of the Geneva and it overtakes. Here's some pictures of the Geneva Bible, a 1583 Geneva Bible. Gene is there holding open. You can kind of see how the notes wrap around the text. Very controversial notes. By the way, so if you look at a Geneva Bible from one year and compare it to another, you'll see different notes because, again, of this changing. Here's a 1600 Geneva Bible. It's open here to Genesis 1. Sort of looks like your MacArthur Study Bible with this genealogical chart, the last of multiple pages of charts here at the front of the Bible. Here it's open to Exodus. This would have been a chapter the pilgrims would have turned to many times, we'll see upcoming here. Here it's open to Matthew in the beginning of the New Testament. And here's a 1608 Geneva Bible. So they studied the Geneva Bible. Puritans wanted to purify and change the church to reform church and community, would be how they would put it. The pilgrims realized this is impossible and separate. Big problem. It's illegal to separate from the Church of England. Can't do that. And you can't leave the country. You don't have that privilege either if you're leaving in descent. So here we have the Catholic Church, obviously monolithic for centuries throughout Europe. And then the Reformation occurs in Europe. And then Henry separates in England. And so we have the launch of the Anglican Church. Now, within the Anglicans, though, we have, through the decades that follow, through real Reformation coming into England, through the influence of the Geneva Bible, we have the development of the Puritans. Notice they're inside the Anglicans. They want to reform the church. They want to work from within. They take positions in government, in academia, in the church. They want to work within the church. Many of the things they're doing are illegal and prohibited, and they can be severely punished, and many of them were, for things like refusing to wear the proper vestment. in church service, or to pray as is, you know, mandated within the Anglican order, things like this. You can be taken and tortured and killed for doing things like that. And many of them were, but they wanted to work within the church and reform the church within. Well, now there's another group who realizes this is just really impossible. And history calls them, where we started out tonight, the pilgrims. They were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. People without a country, if you will. They are nonconformists, dissenters, Protestants. They are radicals. They are separatists. And they decide the only way to deal with this controversy is to leave England. because King James enforces the persecution against them. Here's what he was famous for saying. This is sort of his political slogan. He said, I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of the land. Well, the last part wasn't, I mean, they weren't really allowed to leave, so it's sort of like hyperbole, but this is, of course, the King James of the King James Version. So what happens is in 1606, a little group of people begin to congregate in Scrooby, England, and covenant together to form a separatist church. Their theology would have been identical, basically, to the Puritans. It would have been strongly a result of the teachings of Calvin, the influence of Calvin, the reformed arm of the Reformation from Switzerland, but with this separatist element. And so they hold these underground meetings in the county of Nottinghamshire in eastern England. And their first pastor is a man named Richard Clifton. William Bradford, who we'll think about more, he said later that Clifton was a grave and reverent preacher who by his pains and diligence had done much good and under God had been the means of the conversion of many. And so Elder William Brewster was there also. The congregation met in his home, which is called Scrooby Manor. There's a picture of it as you see it today. It had about 40 rooms. It functioned as something like a hotel, as well as a home, and was used as a meeting place for the pilgrims. And Brewster was a Cambridge graduate alumnus, and he served in the government. He served under Elizabeth, and had followed his father in that. And now the pilgrims are going to add another pastor. He actually initially comes in as teacher, but he is known in history as the pilgrim's pastor, and that is John Robinson. He's going to assume what we would call the senior pastor at some point. He's 30 years of age, begins as an assistant of Richard Clifton. He's a graduate of Cambridge University Divinity School, learned in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and theology. And then there's a young boy that joins the congregation. We might have to end with this tonight. William Bradford, okay, who's gonna go on and write the book I've already quoted from of Plymouth Plantation. He was an orphan. His original, his natural father had died, and there were a number of circumstances in his life. But he has really received... The church almost becomes his family at 12 years of age. He begins with the Pilgrim Church in Scruby. He's just like all the 12-year-olds you know. He walks 12 miles each way to church to get there each Sunday to hear what he calls the illuminating ministry of Richard Clifton. So just, again, just like all the kids you know, right? He's going to go on and become the author of Plymouth Plantation. And Brewster and Bradford are with the pilgrims all the way from Scrooby to America. And we're going to see that's four stops, but they're with them all the way, these two men who love each other and love the church there at Scrooby. Bradford was later the governor of Plymouth Plantation for 30 out of 35 years. In 1607, remember I had the Bible open to Exodus 1? The group decides we need a second exodus under a second Moses. And so they're going to decide to leave England and go to Holland. And we're going to have to find a stopping point here in a moment. What happens is in 1607, they hire an English captain to take them to Holland, and they basically give up all of their life savings and all of their possessions to contract this voyage. And the captain betrays them, and they have all the king's men there to take them all, haul them all off to prison. They have nothing, okay? You say, that'd be enough for me. I think I learned my lesson. I think I'll be at the Anglican Church this Sunday, right? That doesn't stop the pilgrims. They come back in the spring of 1608. This time they're a little bit smarter. They keep getting a little wiser as they go. And this time they hire a Dutch captain. And what happens is he gets the men on board, but there's a problem with the roughness in the harbor of the sea. And the men go sailing off, and the women and children are left behind with Bradford and Brewster, I believe. We'll see in a second. And the men are screaming, you know, no, no, stop, turn us back. Captain pretends like he doesn't even hear him. Takes him on. What happens, though, is a one-day journey turns into a 14-day journey to Holland. Every other ship that left during that time sank. Only the Pilgrim ship survives. They were... Bradford writes about how they went all these days without ever seeing sun, moon, or stars. At times, the ship was completely submerged underwater. Just this horrendous storm. And remember, they're doing all this with their wives and children back, having been left on shore. And you think God was maybe preparing them for something that lay ahead during this time? What happened, the wives and the children were ultimately released. Yeah, Brewster and Bradford had stayed intentionally with them, not knowing this would happen. Stayed with the wives and the children. Finally, the magistrate hears the case and says, what are we going to do with these people? Get rid of them. Send them back. Send them on. And so you can imagine the joy when they're reunited in Holland. And we'll close with this quote. This is the heart of a pilgrim, folks. This is what Bradford says about what they did. These events, we're talking about, did not dismay them, though they did sometimes trouble them. Well, that's an understatement, isn't it? For their desires were set on the ways of God and to enjoy His ordinances, but they rested on His providence and knew whom they had believed. Yet this was not all, for though they could not stay, yet were they not suffered to go. But the ports and havens were shut against them, so as they were feigned to seek secret means of conveyance, and to bribe and fee the mariners, and give extraordinary rates for their passages. And yet, they were oftentimes betrayed. So we'll pick up there next time with the congregation now in Holland. We'll take them through Holland. across the ocean on the Mayflower into America, and we'll end with some lessons of what this teaches us as we celebrate Thanksgiving. Thank you for your kind attention tonight. We'll pause there, put a bookmark there, and I'll see you in almost two weeks.