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Feel free to print them out. 1 Peter 3.15 says, But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear. you Greetings and welcome once again to our program. This is Christian Answers and I'm your host, Larry Wessels, Director of Christian Answers. And I want to thank you for being with us today. Today we have a very special series we're getting ready to do with two of my very special guests. One of them, people are very familiar with, good old Rob Zins here. Rob, you've been on, I think, over 100 of our videos already. You're a glutton for punishment. And of course many of you since you're, if you're familiar with our show, of course new viewers wouldn't be, but most people know that Rob, you have written this book, Romanism, The Relentless Roman Catholic Assault on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Now what can you say about this book for us? Well I can say that this book is highly recommended by me because I'm the author, okay? But other than that, I think anybody who wants to get an idea of the essence of the Roman Catholic religion from top to bottom would be interested in reading a book of this nature. I wrote it in response to a Roman Catholic writer who was, at the time, challenging what he called fundamentalist Bible bumpers and things like that, and I said, well, has anybody answered him? Nobody had it at the time, so I decided to just pick up pen and paper and have at it. But I think it's a good book because it outlines and gives detail, as well as fully footnoted Catholic writers and authors in their way of thinking and their religious system. So yeah, this would be the kind of thing you'd want to take a Bible class through or have your Sunday school teacher use as a reference because it's basically an apologetic. I know it's on Amazon.com. You can readily get your hands on that. Right. Also on your website. That's the website. C-W-R-C-slash-R-Z-dot-O-R-G. All right, let's try it again. C-W-R-C-dash-R-Z-not-slash-dash-R-Z-dot-org. You know, all it takes is one little digit to mess up the whole thing. One slip of the slash into a dash. Slip of the slash into the dash. Hey, you're poetic, man. I like that. Right. And this guy has a degree from Dallas Theological Seminary, by the way. What was that? D-Min and... THM. Yes, THM. And you got another book here. What can you tell us about that? Well, Larry, you're familiar with this book. I was pretty exercised over the idea that there are so many evangelical organizations that were actually trying to pull the Roman Catholic religion into the tent of Christianity and welcome them as brothers and sisters in Christ. And you can't do that. On the edge of apostasy, the evangelical romance with Rome. Let's take a moment here and have our viewers watch a little evangelical romance with Rome from a mass meeting of so-called evangelicals with Roman Catholic priests and evangelists, you might say, where they're kissing each other's feet. So let's take a look at that right now. Raise up Catholics all over the world. One billion souls of Catholics to come into the Kingdom of God. The hour is coming. The chains are broken. The loosing of the Lord upon every single Catholic in the world, that they would see the baptism of the Holy Spirit. A revival will spring forth in the Catholic Church like never before. Yeah, that's just an illustration, I think, of what's going on in our world today. There are so many who are striving for some kind of unity. The trouble is it's not based upon truth. And so if you have unity without truth, you've got nothing but a a club of people who are trying to get together. Now, just real quick, I still want you to keep talking about this book, but just so our viewers know, I don't want to leave them wondering who this guy is over here. That's Tim Coffin, and he's also, besides Rob, an ex-Roman Catholic. Do you know anything about this book called Quite Contrary, A Biblical Reconsideration of the Apparitions? of Mary. Can you tell us a little bit about that book? Yes, there's the book right there. It's actually written by a man that's 30 years younger than I am right now. I became a believer in 1990 and I converted out of Roman Catholicism. I translated from the kingdom of death to the kingdom of life. When I came out of Roman Catholicism, I was inspired in my study of the scriptures to go back to look at what I had learned as a Roman Catholic and compare it to what I was now learning in my study of the scriptures. And that's not to say I had never opened the Bible when I was a Roman Catholic. I was a Roman Catholic for 24 years. But I had joined a church that was studying verse by verse through various books of the Bible, week in and week out, Tuesday nights, Sunday nights, Sunday mornings. Sunday school, and I was exposed for the first time to real verse-by-verse expository preaching and deductive instruction. And when I encountered that, I realized some of the things that I had believed as a Roman Catholic were false. And I went back to look at what I had studied as a Roman Catholic and learned as a Roman Catholic and compared it side by side with what the scriptures were teaching. And one of the focal points in my devotion as a Roman Catholic was a devotion to the apparitions of Mary. And what was interesting as a new believer, I was trying to explain to people what the apparitions of Mary were. Excuse me. And I realized that a lot of people, for some reason, thought that the apparitions of Mary were when people look at a cinnamon bun and see they think they see Mother Teresa in the cinnamon bun, or they think that if the sun hits a dirty window just the right way, they see a picture of Mary. And I thought, I don't think these people understand what an apparition of Mary is. An apparition of Mary is actually a visible appearance of something claiming to be Mary the mother of Jesus and interacting with people and giving instructions and teachings. And the most famous apparition of Mary of all was the one at Fatima, Portugal in 1917, where a vision of Mary, an appearance, an apparition of Mary, spoke to three shepherd children in the hillside and had significant instructions and met with them on a monthly basis. And the newspapers were filled with all the information about these apparitions are happening. And after six months, 70,000 people were showing up to watch the children interact with the apparition of Mary. The people couldn't see the apparition of Mary, but the children could. And I realized a couple things, and one was that when Protestants began to understand what I was talking about, about the appearance of something claiming to be Mary, their general response was that, well, it's not from the Lord, therefore it's not really happening. And when I talked to Roman Catholics, they would say, well, look at all this evidence that it's actually happening. You know, the videotapes of actual children interacting with something claiming to be the vision of Mary. You know, Mary didn't show up on film, but the children were clearly talking to somebody. And various evidence of miracles that happened, the miracle of the sun, what happened in Fatima, Portugal in October of 1917 was allegedly the sun was made to come down to earth and 70,000 people thought the sun was going to crash down on them and burn them alive. So, from the Roman Catholic perspective, there's so much evidence that these are actually happening that they conclude, well, it's really happening, therefore it must be from God. And I realized that there was a huge divide between the Protestant response, which was, it's not from God and therefore it's not really happening, and the Catholic response is that it's really happening and therefore it's from God. And I realized that I need to get in the middle of that and say, it's really happening and it's not from God, and therefore it's demonic. And so what I did with the quite contrary was that I went back and I studied the messages that I had embraced and believed, the teachings of the apparition of Mary throughout the centuries, whether it's Lourdes, France, or La Salette, France, Fatima, Portugal, Guadalupe, Mexico, And I began to compare what the apparitions had been saying with what the gospel actually says. And one of the most heartbreaking renditions of the gospel from the apparition of Mary was that every time we sin, that's one more sin that gets placed on Jesus, who continues to suffer for our sins, And that the more we sin, the more Jesus suffers, the more God is angry at us for our sins. And He's so angry that He would destroy us right now, and the only one standing between us and God and His wrath is Mary. And she says, I can't hold back His wrath much longer. And I can't imagine a more pathetic rendition of the gospel than the one the apparitions of Mary came teaching, which was, the more Jesus suffers, the angrier God gets at you. But the gospel of the Scriptures is that because God has crushed Jesus Christ for our iniquities and punished Him for our sins, we are now at peace with Him through our Lord Jesus Christ, because through Christ's death the wrath of God has been satisfied and he is no longer angry at us. So the apparitions of Mary were teaching that the more we sin, The more God punishes Christ, the angrier he becomes. The scriptures say that the Lord's wrath has been satisfied because he was pleased to crush Christ for our iniquities. Those are two totally different Gospels. And because they're two totally different Gospels, and like you said from the Apostle Paul, if anyone, even an angel from heaven should come preaching a Gospel contrary to this, let him be accursed. And I realize the Empresses of Mary do not know the Gospel of Jesus Christ. and therefore they must be demonic. And so that was really the intent of the book was to familiarize people with my personal story about coming out of Roman Catholicism, my particular devotion to the apparitions of Mary as a Roman Catholic, and what I discovered after being born again when I compared the teachings of the apparitions of Mary with the teachings of the scriptures and I realized The teachings of the scriptures are saying one thing and the apparitions are saying another. The apparitions are really happening, they're not from God, therefore they must be demonic. I'd like to interject right here about two videos that Tim Coffman has done. The first one being called Apparitions of Mary. Is the Virgin Mary the fourth part of the Roman Catholic Trinity? Now the second video on the same subject that Tim has done is called Demonic Superstitions in Catholicism Caused by Imitations of the Virgin Mary Signs and Lying Wonders. And I'd like our viewers right now to hear a short clip from that video and then we'll proceed with our regular broadcast. I was visiting Rome myself for a weekend earlier this year and for a brief moment there was a sheep in the Roman Catholic Church. But it depends on how you define words. And of course the scriptures teach us that sheep are those who are elected by God before the foundation of the world, elected in Christ. And some of those sheep may not have been regenerated yet and some of those sheep may not yet have even been born. And so I explained to them, I do believe that there are sheep within the Roman Catholic Church, and I believe that they have not yet been regenerated. And when they are regenerated, they will be de facto excommunicated from Rome, and the Lord will draw them out. But there are no believers who are sitting comfortably in the pews at Rome, acknowledging the sacrifice of the Mass and confessing the dogma to Rome. And it took me about 20 minutes to explain that, And I realized the time is going to come when I really need to come up with a better answer to that, a quicker answer to that. And the opportunity presented itself about two months later where someone asked very much the same question. They said, do you believe that there are some people in Roman Catholicism who just don't know any better or believers in Rome who just haven't come out yet? And my answer was simple. I said, the Roman Catholic religion is in league with the devil. That was my answer. And the reason that I answered that way is because I've had so many friends say, I've got some dear friends who are Roman Catholic, and sure, they pray that rosary and all, but what's the big deal about that? And the big deal about that is that the Roman Catholic religion is in league with the devil. And they have friends who think that they have to do extra work. So what's the big deal about that? They believe in Jesus, they believe in eternal life. My answer is, the Roman Catholic religion is in league with the devil. They've got friends who wear their scapulars, but they still confess Christ. What's wrong with that? You know what's wrong with that? The Roman Catholic Church is in league with the devil. Yes. Well, I say that for a very specific reason. That's the ultimate conclusion of the paper that I'm presenting at this conference. And the title of the paper is Roman Catholic Marian Superstition and its Influences in Rome. And the question that I need to answer tonight is where does a lot of this superstition come from? And the superstition comes from the devil in a very active and very specific way. It's not just sort of a random thing that people come up with in their minds, although that too can be a source of superstition. Okay, now you've got a blog site, Tim, that I found kind of fascinating. It's out of his mouth, you know, from Whitehorse. Can you tell us a little bit about that? You had some interesting things on there about the Eucharist. What did you have here? The collapse of the Eucharist. Stuff like that. Can you tell us a little bit about that for our viewers? Yeah, I'll be happy to. It comes from the verse in Revelation of Jesus coming back riding a white horse and out of his mouth comes a sword and the sword is the Word of God. It's a reminder that the weapon of our warfare is in fact the scriptures. That's what we're to use. That's what he uses and that's what we should use. Now, I was actually inspired by a relative to write down the things I was thinking. I think the blog I think the first entry was some time back in 2014, but I suppose my family members just got tired of me talking so much about this at the breakfast table. They said, why don't you get it out of your system somewhere else and put it on a blog site. I was already using White Horse Publications as a publishing house, and I just took White In fact, that book has Whitehorse on it right now. Yes, yes, and so does On the Edge of Apostasy and Romanism, Whitehorse Publications. But I just converted that from Whitehorse Pub to Whitehorse Publications, the Whitehorse blog, and I began simply by writing down my thoughts on Roman Catholicism and why some of the arguments being made were inconsistent and against the Scriptures. As I progressed through that, I just dug deeper and deeper and did some considerable investigation into the early church, the writings of the church fathers. I did write a series called The Collapse of the Eucharist. There's a very specific technical reason why I call it The Collapse of the Eucharist because If you are to ask the Roman Catholic to justify their current practice of taking bread and wine in the Lord's Supper, blessing it, and by blessing it, turning it into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ, and then offering it to the Father for the sins of the world, they would say, well, we have a long history dating back to the apostles. of Christians offering the sacrifice of the consecrated bread and wine of the Lord's Supper to the Father for the sins of the world. And I began my investigation on this first by what was called the Eucharist Challenge And the Eucharist challenge was something that was extended by Roman Catholic apologists, challenging people to go back to the early church and find out if they offered a Eucharistic sacrifice. Because they said, that's the same one we offer today. That's the premise there is that whatever the early church was doing from the time of the apostles That's what we're still doing today. So I said, go back and read. Go back and read and you'll find the early church offering. That's a typical Roman Catholic apologists argument because they always count on the fact that you're not going to do the research. That's how Muslim apologists work. They make clearly false statements, but they're counting on 99 out of 100 people never checking. What they're saying. And actually, I should say that because sometimes people take them up on the challenge, they go back to the early church fathers, but do not read it in its context or with their eyes wide open, they say, oh wow, they're right. They did offer the Eucharistic sacrifice in the early church, so I have to convert to Roman Catholicism. So one of the first challenges I faced when I was examining the Eucharist challenge was to go back and see what the early church was doing. I found that indeed they did offer what they called a sacrifice of the Eucharist. Yeah, they did. And I want to preface that, and it's very important that people understand this, is that we as Christians, as Bible Christians, must not flee from the responsibility to offer sacrifices to God. Now, I say that advisedly. And when I say that, I mean the apostles prescribed sacrifices, okay? The apostle Paul When Epaphroditus sent helpful things to him in Philippians 4.18, Paul wrote back to the Philippians saying, thank you, the package that you sent me from Epaphroditus for the things that I needed is a sacrifice well pleasing to the Lord. Philippians 4.18. what you did for me, what Epaphroditus provided for me, is a sacrifice well-pleasing. Hebrews 13 verses 15 and 16. These are the sacrifices we offer, the fruit of our lips giving praise to his name, sharing with one another, caring for one another. The Apostle Peter, in his epistles, talks about offering spiritual sacrifices, and in fact, that a temple of living stones had been constructed for the very purpose of offering those sacrifices. The difference is that they're sacrifices of thanksgiving. They're simply sacrifices of thanksgiving, saying, thank you, the Lord, for all you've done for us. Now, the challenge, the Eucharist challenge, is that in Malachi chapter 1, verses 10 and Malachi prophesies a time when the heathen would offer a sacrifice that was pleasing to the Lord. The Lord was rejecting the sacrifices of the Jews, but said there's going to come a time when the heathen will offer a sacrifice. And Roman Catholics say, hey, we offer sacrifices. Just come to our churches on Sunday morning and the priest blesses the bread and wine, turns it into the body and blood, soul, and divinity of Christ, and we sacrifice it to the Father. Just a sacrifice by idolatry, that's all. A sacrifice for the salvation of the world. I said, we offer sacrifices. Malachi prophesied that the heathen would offer sacrifices. The apostles say we should offer sacrifices and the early church offered sacrifices. And so that leaves Protestants in a situation where they say, wow, I guess we need to convert to Roman Catholicism. And that's as much resistance as they put up to it. They say, oh wow, I went back and studied and I found they did offer Eucharistic sacrifices in the early church. I don't deny it. I don't deny that the apostles prescribed sacrifices. I don't deny that the apostles said that we should lift up our hands in gratitude to the Lord and thank him for what he has done for us. Eucharist is a Greek word meaning Thanksgiving. And so when we look up to heaven and say, thank you Lord for saving me from my sins, by sending your son Jesus Christ to die in my place, I have just offered a Eucharistic sacrifice. I have offered a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the Lord, something that the apostles explicitly say we ought to do. And as it turns out, in the early church, they believed that their Eucharist sacrifices were offerings to the Lord, thanking Him for His abundant provisions for the harvest and for the salvation of their soul. In other words, they believed that their tithe offerings were Eucharistic sacrifices. They collected the very best of the harvest, set it aside for the poor, brought it to the bishop who would then distribute it to those who were needy, or they would have a love feast in which the needy and the poor were fed with the abundant provisions for the harvest. And in the process of all that, the people would say, Thank you, Lord, for all this. And then, as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 14, 16, when you say your thank you, when you say your thanksgiving, when you say your Eucharist, you should say it in a common tongue so that the people listening can understand what you're saying and say amen, okay? That was the amen of the early ancient Eucharist, the amen of We have said thank you to the Lord, and we say amen to that thanks. And so everybody joins in together to say amen. Yes, thank you, Lord. We harvested all this food, and now we're providing it for those who are in need, the orphan, the widow, the stranger. And that was the ancient Eucharistic sacrifice. And that's what Irenaeus talks about, it's what Ignatius of Antioch talks about, it's what Hippolytus of Rome talks about, all the way through to Athanasius of Alexandria. talking, he says, and let us not forget our sacrifices, observing distribution to the poor. It's in his 45th Festal Letter. Athanasius talked about Eucharistic sacrifices and the fact that the Eucharistic sacrifice is to collect the abundance of the harvest, tithe it to the Lord, and let the hungry and the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger be provided for. It seems to me you're starting to expose a blatant logical fallacy. that there's a non-secular here between the Eucharist that the Roman Catholics are doing and what they're doing in church history as you've been describing. Right, and so you brought us full circle back to the series called The Collapse of the Eucharist. The only thing missing in the early Eucharistic sacrifices is something that Roman Catholicism added to it after the fourth century. Another add-on. And in the early church, The Eucharist consisted of oil, honey, almonds, pomegranates, grapes, wheat, wine, bread, any agricultural product that could be harvested. And the Eucharistic sacrifice was comprised of all these things that people would collect from their farmland and bring to the church. In fact, Hippolytus, in the early third century, said that you should bring your Eucharist to the bishop so that he can distribute it to the poor. He said that when someone is being baptized, on the day they're baptized, they should bring their own Eucharist with them because until they're baptized and a member of the church, they were not allowed to participate in that tithe offering. And so Hippolytus says, when you're finally baptized and you get to participate in the tithe offering, you should bring your own Eucharist with you. And you think about what the Eucharist is to Roman Catholics today. It is consecrated bread and wine, blessed by the priest, and it should be adored because it's the God of the universe, right? It doesn't sound like anything you're talking about from church history. Unless Roman Catholics are currently offering cheese and oil and blackberries and almonds and plums in their Eucharist, Their Eucharist is not the same as the Eucharist of the early church. What they had done is that they weren't tithing with e-checks from their paycheck. They were tithing with the excess they collected from the harvest. Tim, I said I wasn't going to do this, but I'm going to have to do it because I want your excellent clarification on this. I'm going to go up to this board right now. For the sake of our audience, you're saying, if I'm hearing you right, that sacrifice, the word sacrifice, sacrifice, right, equals not a burnt offering, not something that you put on an altar and burnt up, not the beheading of an animal or frying as entrails. Sacrifice has a broader meaning. What does the word sacrifice mean? What would you say? To the common guy. I'm a common guy. You offer sacrifices, right? Right. But why do I call them sacrifices? Why do you call it an offering? Because I'm giving it up. Yes. So why is it a sacrifice? Because they take the very, very, very best of the harvest that they worked for and they give it away. Would it be like a mom who works two jobs so that her daughter or her son can go to college? She sacrifices her time and sacrifices her earnings for the sake of her son. I'm just, I want I love what you're saying, but you're saying sacrifice, because most Christians, would you agree, Larry, when they hear the word sacrifice, they say, well, I haven't burned anything on an altar. I haven't sacrificed anything. Well, right. See, that goes back to what we were talking about a second ago. Each person, it works its way in religions. I can say a word to a Mormon and he'll interpret Father, Son, Holy Ghost as three different gods. But I'm not thinking that when I say that. I'm thinking of the biblical terminology. But now people say sacrifice, they can mean different things that would be apart from a burnt offering. Like what? Like giving up something that you have. Giving a gift. A gift, okay. Sacrifice is a gift. I think the Bible talks about sacrifice of praise, right? Yes. So when you praise the Lord, you're giving to him from your... I mean, you don't have to do it, but you do it willingly. You're giving it from your heart. So what does Philippians 4.18 mean? So we look at Philippians 4.18. A pleasing aroma and sacrifice. He says, but I have all and abound. I am full, having received of Epaphroditus the things which were sent from you. An odor of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable and well-pleasing to God. Okay, and it was a sacrifice because they gave the gift of money to Paul. Or whatever it was. He said he abounds, he has needful things that were provided. So if we could take the idea of sacrifice as a gift to the Lord or a gift to another person, because I'm sacrificing for Christian answers by being here. That's right. It's my money that got me here, right? So I'm sacrificing, I'm giving you the gift. So when we play sports, we sacrifice our time And sometimes your body. You do sacrifice your body on the field for the sake of the team. So there's a sense that it's giving, right? And when you tithe from your paycheck, you're sacrificing money. When you give from the harvest, you're sacrificing food. When you give from your time, you're sacrificing your calendar. When you provide bandages for somebody's wounds, you're sacrificing from your abundance to provide for somebody else. Hebrews 13, 15-16, let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name, but to do good and to communicate forget not, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased." The doing good itself is a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and the early church recognized it as, this is the sacrifice that we offer, not sacrificing animals for the payments of sins, but sacrificing of our abundance that the Lord has provided as a thank you to him. All right, so let's take the word Eucharist, okay? That's another term. Eucharist, you're saying, equals the English Thanksgiving. It's Thanksgiving. So, if we put this together, as you've done so well, Tim, you're saying that the early Christians sacrificed in their thanksgiving to the Lord, and that's it. That's the essence of them coming together. It was a Thanksgiving Eucharist, and it was a sacrifice in what they brought, their gifts, their tithe, and providing for others. So when we look at it that way, there's no room for the representation of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ in an unbloody manner. for forgiveness. Yes, and now you've brought us full circle again back to the title, and it's important to remember that the Bible verses that I just quoted, whether it be from Peter and spiritual sacrifices, Hebrews 13 verses 15 and 16, about the fruit of our lips giving thanks and praise and to do good for one another, or it's from Epaphroditus in Philippians 4, 18, where Paul says, I've received the things you sent. It's a sacrifice well-pleasing. The early church took all of those instances of sacrifice, that is, of providing for the needs of others out of gratitude to the Lord, and understood that to be the fulfillment of Malachi 1 verses 10 to 11. And reading from verse 11, it says, from the rising of the sun even to the going down of the same, my name shall be great among the Gentiles and in every place incense shall be offered unto my name and a pure offering. For my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the Lord of hosts. And the early church believed that by offering sacrifices of thanksgiving, that is by offering the oblation of the Eucharist, which was simply to set aside the best of the harvest, the best of their paycheck, and use it to feed the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the prisoner, they were offering sacrifices of thanksgiving to the Lord, whether it be plums, almonds, sheep, oil, milk, or blackberries, whatever it was that they had harvested, they set it aside, brought it to the bishop, the bishop distributed it to the poor, and if you weren't a member of the church, you couldn't participate in that tithe offering, and therefore, they said on the day you get baptized, you can bring your own Eucharist with you because you finally get to participate in the offertory. So you're saying that when they brought all these foods, sheep and animals and everything else, as a gift to the bishop, he didn't sit there with those things and say, well, I declare all the stuff he brought is the body of Christ, and it becomes God himself. He didn't do that? No. Right, and I would correct you there and say they didn't bring it as a gift to the bishop. They brought it as a gift, and the bishop was just the custodian for distributing it. But he didn't do anything about making it into God. No, and the thing is that if we could help people get this idea straight, Eucharist is Thanksgiving. And think about it. Before we give to the Lord, we are thankful for what he's given to us, right? So we come together as Christians and we say, we're so thankful the Lord has blessed us so much. We're saying, this is Eucharist, we're thankful. God has blessed me so much, I'm gonna write a check to you. I wanna share it, right? That is a sacrifice. So Eucharist sacrifice equals thanksgiving and giving. That's exactly what happened first. And then, Tim, what happened next? Okay, so that's an important point in the history of the Eucharist, is that when the bishop had collected the food, and whether it was used for a love feast to feed the poor, or it was distributed to the poor, brought to the strangers in prison, When that was concluded, the people would say amen. It was the apostolic amen that Paul prescribed to be said after the Eucharist offering. He said make sure that you give your Eucharist in a common tongue so that when you say it, people can say amen to it. The amen concluded the offering. Then, because the offering, because it was a collection of agricultural products that could be used to feed the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger, it always included bread and wine as well. So, after that sacrifice was complete, a sacrifice of oil and milk and honey and almonds and pomegranates and bread and wine, the bishop or the president who is administering the supper, would then take some bread and wine from the supper after the amen, after the sacrifice is over, and then he would say, let's celebrate the Lord's Supper now, because he commanded us the night before he died that we should do this in memory of him. He took the bread and wine, and he said on the night before he died, Jesus took the cup and said, this is my blood. He took the bread and said, this is my body. And then distributed it to the congregation to eat it, as a memorial to remember what Christ had done for them. In fact, in some of the earliest renditions of that liturgy, the bread was already distributed to the people before anybody ever said the consecration. And the consecration today is what Protestants in their churches today, when they say, they take the bread and say, the night before he died, he said, this is my body. They distribute it to the congregants. On the night before he died, he took the cup and said, this is the covenant in my blood, distributed it. And then everybody eats and drinks. the Lord's Supper. But the important thing to remember is that there was a Eucharistic prayer, a thanksgiving, thank you Lord for all the things you provided to us. And then bread and wine was taken from the offering to be used for the Lord's Supper. And because the bread and wine was taken from the Eucharist offering, the bread and wine were still considered to be the Eucharist. And in Irenaeus' rendition of this, he says, When the bread is tithed, it becomes the Eucharist. When the Eucharist is consecrated, it becomes the body and blood of Christ. And even having said that, Irenaeus believed that it was still an antitype or a symbol and only intended to remind us of what Christ had done by its solid and liquid texture. The bread did not become the body and blood of Christ. It was still, even after the bishop or whomever was presiding over the supper would say, this is the cup of my blood or this is my body, it still remained anti-typical. Now, the reason this is important is by the time you get to the end of the fourth century, you have this liturgy that prevailed for 300 years. Eucharist offering and amen indicating that the Eucharist offering was complete. Take bread and wine from the Eucharist and consecrate it for a meal, and then you eat the meal. Eucharist, amen, consecration, and meal. And that's the way they celebrated the Eucharist for 300 years. And like I said, all the way through Athanasius. Athanasius was saying, the Eucharist, the sacrifices, is what we distribute to the poor. It's the abundance of the harvest. It's only at the end of the fourth century that that consecration that used to take place after the sacrifice was complete got moved to the beginning of the liturgy. So the food was collected, and the consecration was spoken over the collected food. At about the same time, people were instructed that they were no longer to bring all the fruit of the harvest, whether it be plums and pomegranates, oil, milk, wine, and cheese, but to only bring bread and wine. or wheat and grapes in the harvest season. So the assembled goods of the Eucharist was narrowed down to just bread and wine. The consecration was moved to the beginning of the liturgy. So you had consecration over the bread and wine. And then people would say amen to the consecration. Say amen, this is the body and blood of Christ. And that offering is the birth of the Roman Catholic sacrifice of the mass. where they, for the first time, were actually offering consecrated bread and wine to the Father, believing that because it's consecrated and they're offering it to the Father, this is the sacrifice of Jesus to the Father for the sins of the world. And it was after that that they introduced what's called the Agnus Dei to the liturgy of the Mass, where the priest would say, this is the Lamb of God, So this is an evolutionary process. Yes, it's an evolutionary process, but it's extremely important to remember that the early liturgies did not have a consecration at the beginning of the Eucharist offering. They had a consecration after the Eucharist offering was complete. And for that reason, we know that the early church could not possibly have offered consecrated bread and wine in their Eucharistic sacrifices. Now, and that's 300 years of liturgy where the consecration doesn't take place until after they're already finished with the sacrifice, and therefore they could not possibly have been offering consecrated cheese, oil, wine, bread, and pomegranates to the Lord. They were offering the fruit of the harvest, and when the sacrifice, the oblation, the offertory was complete, People would say amen and then someone would take bread and wine from it and then they would celebrate the Lord's Supper. I like to say it was offered but not eaten and then afterward is eaten but not offered. It sounds like you're historically proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that transubstantiation is false. Well, that is for a separate topic briefly, but my point is to say that the idea of offering consecrated bread and wine to the Father liturgically in the supper was unknown to the early church. But because that consecration was missing from the early liturgies, the one that they expected to find, for a long time, for many years, including Protestant theologians, trying to figure out how do you reconcile the Eucharistic liturgy of the early church with the medieval Eucharistic liturgy of Roman Catholicism, where the consecration comes after the Eucharistic offering, whereas in the early church, I'm sorry, the early church, the consecration came after the Eucharistic offering, and then in the medieval era, the consecration came before the Eucharistic offering. How do you reconcile that? And what happened is that early liturgies were redacted, edited, retranslated, and sometimes even changed to make them comport with the later, And what they did is they collapsed the Eucharistic prayer into the consecration to give the appearance that simply by saying, thank you to the Lord, they were consecrating the bread and wine. That consecration, the one that says, this is my body, this is my blood. that is how the early church blessed the bread for the supper, that was missing from the Eucharistic prayers. And therefore, the appearance was, for 300 years, that people were offering unconsecrated bread and wine to the Father, right? Well, of course they were, and cheese, and oil, and honey, because it was the tithe offering. To correct that gap, instead of understanding the novelty of the medieval liturgy, the historians went back and collapsed the ancient Eucharist into the consecration to give the appearance that the Eucharistic prayer of Thanksgiving was itself consecratory. so that the early liturgy can be reconciled to the medieval novelty. It's just absolutely abominable practice in the discipline of a historian to go back and try to fix the ancient data to make it conform with the late. Some of this modern day redaction you have going on to fix things that, particularly in communist systems, they're changing or revising history. Because they know people don't know their history. And they'll fix it and get rid of things they don't want people to know about. And I'll say in that series, The Collapse of the Eucharist, I think there's eight installments. It's the Protestants are just as much to blame as the Catholics. The Protestants will go back and say, well surely he must have meant this. But all this is documented in your block that you brought up. And the significance of it that's more relevant to our conversation today is that Patrick Madrid in his book, Answer Me This, says that, hey, we're the only people that can trace their religion all the way back to the apostles. If you go back 500 years, it's the same liturgy. Go back another 500, it's the same liturgy. Another 500 years before that, it's the same liturgy. All the way back to the apostles, it's the same liturgy. It most certainly is not. Exactly. See, that's just like with Muslim apologists or Jehovah's Witnesses. I've done a lot of videos on Jehovah's Witnesses, debated them and everything else, but Achilles heel is always history. I've got their books going back over a hundred years and they can't hide from their own books and what it said. And see what you've just done is the same thing with, you know, like in this case Madrid's apologetic dealing with the Eucharist. Right, well so much, and this gets back to what we, as we were evaluating Patrick's thinking in his book as it's reflected in Answer Me This and other writings, What we found is that he represents history the way he wishes it was, but can't substantiate it. But all these cultic groups do the same thing with their own history, and it's amazing the pattern, but that's the only thing the devil can do when he's trying to pass off a fake, you know, so that's how it goes. Now, I want to finish up with this. I just wanted to mention to our viewers at home that The videos that we've had, over 800 videos on our YouTube channel. We've got tons of videos by Rob here, but we've only got a few with brother Tim over there. But we have made transcriptions of a lot of these videos. Now, Tim did a radio show with us way back when he was a younger man. You still look good though. Anyway, here's a 20-page transcription that's free to anybody that just goes to our YouTube video with Tim on the apparitions of Mary. and you can click on the link and you can get one printed out and you can also get it in 20 languages. Here's the one you did in Illinois. This one happens to be 15 pages. So your message there was a little shorter. And the same with Rob over here. The viewers at home can see some of our videos that we've done that have transcripts. And there's just page after page. And you'll see Rob's picture in there in different places. Like, Roman Catholic teaching condemns 98% of Roman Catholics to hell. Where Rob went into detail from the Catechism and all the other Roman Catholic references. The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. No forgiveness in this life. That was a well-received video. That didn't have so much to do with Roman Catholicism. So you actually do different things sometimes. You cover different topics. That's amazing. But we have a lot of transcripts of a lot of videos and you can get them in multiple languages. So that's kind of a cool thing I wanted to mention here. So with that, I'll finish up with this. We have newsletters that are available through our ministry. The very first newsletter we ever did Was with Rob here as you get as you poke oops it fell down Focus in see there's Rob from like 32 years ago. Isn't that my grandson? And he was dealing with Roman Catholicism in our very first newsletter. We did Divinely Given Faith, really works. It really works. And then of course there's other newsletters like this one here, unpopular topic, How Sovereign is God? And that's very unpopular with the cults and false world religions. They don't like a sovereign God because they can't do the Frank Sinatra thing. We did it my way. That's usually what you get with all the false religions in the world. They want to leave God out of their salvation so they can control their own salvation. And that's how it works. So with that, I'll just finish up with that. And then also, I just wanted to, since I brought this, while I was doing a video I just uploaded before we did this series with Brother Rob here, on an excellent message he gave on Roman Catholicism and Evangelicalism, believing the lie. While I was actually working on that upload yesterday for hours, my wife was shredding things she picked up at her house, because her parents had passed away recently, and her and her brother went over there and picked up a bunch of stuff. Anyway, she was shredding things and calling out what she's shredding, and she shredded a lot of it, before I realized, wait a minute, maybe I can put this on our TV show. Our Lady of Lords, pray for us. Health and healing, prayers and devotions to Mary. Novena prayers to Our Lady of the Snows. And then she's got all these funeral things from some of her past relatives and loving memory and all of them, having a Virgin Mary on the back of them. All these dead relatives of hers, you know, she was shredding all this stuff. I said, no, don't give them to me. I'll probably throw them somewhere in the videos we're doing, you know, St. Jude Novena book. And just one Virgin Mary thing after another. Yeah, and you'll notice that these are not merely devotions to Mary. They're devotions to apparitions of Mary, which, as we pointed out earlier, are demonic. Yeah, in fact, here's our Lady of Lourdes. Was that an apparition there? It's filled with stuff there. It's an artist's rendering of the apparition, because we can't see him. So, what we're talking about is serious stuff here, folks. We're dealing with, basically, I see these apparitions, for instance, as just demonic apparitions. We have a whole playlist on our channel on the supernatural, demonic activity, demons, haunted houses, we got all that stuff there, you know, a bunch of videos, because the devil's real. He's really out there. In fact, when you look at the Bible, the devil is presented as real as Jesus himself is. And the apostles, and the city, Jerusalem, all these places are real. But the devil is presented just as real as anything else you find in the Scripture. King David was real. Solomon, all this stuff. Well, anyway, our time's run out for this episode. I want to thank you for joining us for Christian Answers Presents with Rob Zins. Thank you, Rob, for being here, brother. My pleasure, Larry. And Tim Kaufman. Great job, brother. Really appreciate it. And join us again for another episode of Christian Answers Presents. And remember this, in John 14, 6, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except by me. And that means that you don't come by way of Muhammad in this Quran. You don't come that way by the Virgin Mary and her novenas and everything else, masses, whatever. You don't need to join the Watchtower Bible and Track Society you know, be one of the 144 people that actually make it to heaven. You don't need any of that. What you need is faith alone in Jesus Christ alone for your salvation, because it's by Him that you come to God and are redeemed through Jesus' sacrifice. With that, God bless you all. Join us again next time. If you like our YouTube channel, please subscribe by clicking on the subscribe button and then by also clicking the bell above to get an automatic update whenever we produce another YouTube video for our See Answers TV channel. 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