Well, hello, children. Welcome to Spring Branch Academy, where we are seeking to instill wisdom and inspire worship in every student to the glory of God. We're learning about social order in theology. God is a God of order, remember? He forms and then he fills. There are five areas of social order that are interesting in scripture. There are Jews and there are Greeks. And the phrase to the Jew first is interesting. There are slaves and there are free men. We have struggled with that as a culture. There is male and female, old and young. Your families represent that pretty good, don't they? And then there are kings and there are priests. Surprisingly, a Christian is a king and a priest in Christ. And so we're gonna learn about these five areas, Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, old and young, king and priest. In language, there are three R's in traditional education. We learned last week education is the arts and the sciences. And there's liberal arts, the trivium and quadrivium. but they are related to the three R's of reading, writing, and arithmetic. I like to think of the writing as the trivium and the arithmetic as the quadrivium, meaning the arts of words and the arts of numbers, and reading is reading your Bible, which gives you the big picture of history, something that can happen in no other way but by revelation. Speaking of revelation, we're in the book of Genesis, learning some verses. It is not good for man to be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him, Genesis 2.18. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife, and they shall become one flesh, Genesis 2.24. God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth. We call this the dominion mandate. When God entrusts the management of his creation on earth to mankind and Jesus, according to Psalm 8, fulfills that someday by managing the universe, all things are put under his feet. Again, the verses are, it is not good for man to be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him, Genesis 2.18. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife and they shall become one flesh, Genesis 2.24. God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth. Genesis 1 28. Jesus said the kingdom of God is like a man that had a field and And his enemy came and sowed his field with weeds, and they looked so much like the grain that he had planted. His servant said, can I pull out the weeds? And the master of the field said, no, lest you pull out the grain. Let them grow up and at the end, at the harvest, then separate the two. Jesus said, that's what the world is like. The devil has planted counterfeit people in the world that can look like Christians. but they don't have the heart of a Christian, they're not born again. And eventually their lives will show it. A heart manifests itself in words and in actions, especially when it is put under trial or when it's left alone and it isn't thinking. Careless words show what's in a heart. At the end of the age, those words, that fruit will show that's a weed, that's not a grain. And the angels will come and take them away and burn them, which is a picture of heaven and hell, the judgment at the end. And so Jesus said, let them both grow up together until the harvest. As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. Children, we need to take that to heart, don't we? May God make us grain through being born again. Well, I told you that the liberal arts are trivium and quadrivium. Well, the quadrivium, meaning four, are the mathematical arts. You've learned two, arithmetic and geometry, the art of counting and the art of measuring. But there's also music. which deals with ratios or harmony and it's measuring in time. And then astronomy, which is measuring the stars. One man taught me that arithmetic is counting numbers. Geometry is numbers in space, and music is numbers in time, and astronomy is numbers in time and space. Probably better to call it measuring in space, measuring in time, and measuring in time and space, but you get the idea. In science, we have the scientific method this week. And this varies from place to place depending on who tells it, so I'm just going to give you a general idea. Starts with observations. leading to questions. I had a question recently about how did that caterpillar turn into that chrysalis? How did that happen? Well, one day I observed a caterpillar stuck to the ceiling, and the next day I observed, or two days later, a chrysalis. How did that happen? So I ask questions. Then I come up with a guess, an hypothesis. Well, could it be this? Well, let's test it. Maybe I collect a lot of butterflies and watch them carefully and test my hypothesis. I do experiments, and then I draw a conclusion. So, we have observations, questions, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion, which leads to levels of scientific certainty. A hypothesis is just a guess. It may be an educated guess. but it hasn't been tested. If it's been tested and seems to prove true many, many times, it becomes a theory or maybe it's a way of looking at things that works out all the time and it's a theory. And if there doesn't seem to be any exceptions ever, it becomes a law. And we have a few of those in science and physics in particular searches for laws, fundamental laws. Well, I'm going to teach you two dates in church history today. Remember, there are three eras, patristic, medieval, and modern. Say it please, patristic, medieval, modern. Two dates. One is kind of in between patristic and medieval, and the other is definitely in between medieval and modern. December 25th, 800 is when Charlemagne was crowned. the so-called Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III. Charlemagne had just saved the Pope from some other invader and it seemed like he was the one now that was on top and the Pope owed him a favor. Well, the Pope then crowns him while he's worshiping as if, now I've done you something even better. And now it would seem like the King owes the Pope a favor. A lot of the Middle Ages is kind of a power struggle between Pope and King. But on Christmas, 800, Charlemagne is crowned. And on Halloween, at least that's what we think, or many suppose, it's around that time, but October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg. And so the 95 Theses of Martin Luther are October 31st, 1517. It's kind of like you have two, you know, kind of like holidays of sorts with Christmas and Halloween. You can remember these December 25th, October 31st, 815 17. Hey, we have a poem now. Jesus Apostles the fall of Jerusalem. Nero, the Romans, and Constantine moves them. Martyrs Ignatius and Polycarp dying. Then Irenaeus and Origen writing. Now Athanasius stood firm contra Mundum. Basil and Gregories also stood with him. Antony, Benedict, monks and the mystics. The church in the east beginning patristics. The two theologians I mentioned in there are Irenaeus, and Origen. And there's other ones in the 4th century, but these are the earliest ones. Irenaeus in the 2nd century, Origen in the 3rd century. Irenaeus fought the Gnostics and had a recapitulation of a view of the Bible where Jesus basically recaps the Old Testament. And so just as we fell at a tree, so now we have been saved at a tree. Meaning the first one is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the second is the cross. And Origen, he is an interesting man. He wanted to be a martyr with his dad when he was a teenager. But his mom saved his life by hiding his clothes, and he was too embarrassed to go out of the house. And so he didn't die with his dad. And later, he basically became a monk, acted as if he was dying because he didn't feed himself well. He slept, I think, on the ground. And he speculated a lot. His mind was like a geometer. And he thought, in heaven, we must be the perfect shape. which in his mind was a sphere. Can you imagine everybody in heaven being like a bubble? I've always thought that's kind of funny and it has never left my memory yet. And so Origen's an interesting speculative guy and so later he gets condemned as somebody that's a hider of a thousand lies. You cut a head off and new heads sprout out. Get rid of one lie or heresy and new heresies are there. I think that's maybe mistreating him but history has basically written him off largely as a heretic. So I wrote this little poem about him a while back. Is origin the origin of all our father's creedal sins, the hydra of a thousand lies, of allegories piled high? Those who are anti-Trinitarian call it Alexandrian. That last line can vary a little bit in the poem, but the basic idea is that people that want to kind of take the things out of the spiritual realm, which ultimately means God being outside of time and space or Jesus being fully God, lower it down into this realm and they tend to kind of smear the Trinity with this kind of, it's just Greek or it's from origin. And that's why I came up with that poem. So, children, now you've learned Ignatius and Polycarp, two martyrs, and now also two theologians, Irenaeus and Origen. Well, God bless you. Until next time, the Lord be with you. Amen.