Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Lambert Podcast. If you didn't listen to the last couple episodes in like the last five or six, you might want to. It'll make more sense. We're looking at Galatians 6.10, which says, Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, obviously, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. Oh, well, maybe that's a little more startling. We've been working that through. And we've been working this concept through with the help of a guy named Rodney Stark, who is a scholar who wrote The Rise of Christianity. He wrote it about 30 years ago. It's an amazing book that I highly recommend. And he has this chapter, chapter four, which is about the Christian response to epidemics in the first few hundred years after Paul wrote Galatians, after Paul wrote the words that I just read to you about Christians should do good to people outside the church and especially do good to their brothers and sisters. Well, there's no qualifier here that comes next in Galatians where it's like, unless obviously it's really bad or very scary, or unless there's risk, then I mean, good heavens, I don't want anybody to get hurt. We need to be safe. Then obviously don't do good to anybody. Safety is the most important thing. Nope, it ain't there. The qualifier of safety, dang, that kind of HR insurance, don't get sued value. It really doesn't appear a lot in the New Testament. This is the New Testament is a pretty assertive, this is going to be crazy, the seed falls to the ground and die. I'm crucified with Christ. This might hurt a little bit, but it's totally worth it. Bring it on. That's more the tone and the values of the New Testament, not sort of HR safety culture. So there is no qualifier that comes next where Paul is like, unless things are bad, if things get bad, then don't worry about doing good to all people and don't worry about doing good to the family of faith. The idea is you do this stuff when it's hard. I mean, you think about what happens at the end of Matthew in that kind of terrifying passage from Jesus when he's going through stuff and he's talking about who he knew and who he didn't know. And he's like, you know, whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me. And there's going to be all these false people who show up and they're like, Oh yeah, I totally, I totally knew you. And then he says to him, like, depart from me. You didn't know me. I was hungry. You gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty. You gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger. You didn't invite me in. I needed clothes and you didn't clothe me. I was sick and in prison and you didn't look after me. Well, these early Christians in the first few centuries after the Bible, after the New Testament, they remembered that Jesus said that. They remembered that there was no do good to all people, especially to the family of believers caveat that was like, unless it's hard or dangerous. But Jesus himself waded into the fray, and then he was like, Take up your cross and follow me. Do what I just did, follow my example. That's the I mean, the Christianity is it's named after him. It's named after his example. And so he gives this whole speech here right at the end of the book of Matthew. And it looks like if somebody's sick or having a hard time, uh, especially in the church, show up, help. Apparently, Christians took it to heart. And in the face of these horrible plagues that came down the pike over the latter years of the Roman Empire, there's all this ancient stuff, all these ancient sources telling us how the pagans, the non-Christians who believed in the old Greek, local Roman gods, whatever, they ran, they hid. They, the the what do you call it, conventional wisdom of the day for that crowd was save your skin because this doesn't mean anything. Plague is the thing that makes our moral philosophical compass spin. We don't know. You go all the back to Thucydides writing about the plagues during the Persian era. They didn't know what to do with it back then either. And they had Socrates. Nobody knew, but then along comes Christianity. And I read that long quote from Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage yesterday, and all of a sudden here's a group who does know what to do with suffering. Now, like I get that everybody has questions about, well, if you know God is all good, why is there suffering in the world? Everybody, probably even people who wouldn't admit to it, have prayed that God would spare them something and then wondered why their prayer didn't get answered the way that they wanted. I mean, from our perspective, those kind of questions are gonna come up. The Bible's not afraid of those questions. I mean, there's an entire book, there's more than one book that's dedicated to all of that. But at the same time, you got to acknowledge that there's a whole bunch of language in the Bible that would get the Christian ready for what to do in the face of suffering, what to do in the face of difficult things. And one of the things to do is imitate Christ and show up. So this Rodney Stark fellow, he gives an account of how Christians did that. And then he starts working through how much that would have mattered. Around 260, there's a Christian leader named Dionysius who writes this about how Christians responded in the face of the pressure of the plagues. Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only for one another. Isn't that amazing? You're talking about probably about 210 years after Paul wrote what he wrote in Galatians 6.10. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let's do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. This is about 230 years after Jesus said, 240 years after Jesus said what he did in that passage in Matthew that I read to you earlier. And it's still sticking. If anything, it's gaining more traction as these people, they're not sitting around complaining, like, why didn't Jesus come back already? No, they're just imitating him. Dionysius goes on, heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life, serenely happy, for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors, and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many in nursing and curing others transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead. The best of our brothers lost their lives in this manner, a number of presbyters, deacons, and laymen winning high commendations so that death in this form, the result of great piety and strong faith, seems in every way the equal of martyrdom. D'ye catch that? It wasn't like the leaders dispatched the unimportant people in church to go and take care of the sick. The leaders of the churches did it and they died doing it, and they died smiling and confident in what was ahead. This is just mind-boggling compared to how we think about the world today. What I mean, this is why this is why I'm into church history. Because there are people who came before us who figured out stuff that I don't have figured out, and they died, and the one thing they leave behind is crossing that divide, is facing down that thing that I haven't faced down. And a whole lotum did a really dang good job of it. That passage I just read, that is powerful to me. It's okay if it's not to you. But that that hits for me. Dionysius goes on. The heathen behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treated unburied corpses as a dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease. But do what they might, they found it difficult to escape. Okay. That guy is obviously a Christian leader, and he's going to like the Christian version of things, and so it might be easy to write that off, but then Stark goes on to talk about one of the people in all of history most famous for hating Christians, Julian, whose nickname was Julian the Apostate, the great Roman leader. And even he had to admit that what Dionysius said was right about how Christians did it. I mean, literally the guy's nickname includes the connotation that he rejects Christianity and isn't into that. About a hundred years after Dionysius facing yet another plague, Julian the apostate said that Christian growth was a result of their moral character, even if their moral character is pretend. And he went on to say that their quote benevolence towards strangers and care for the graves of the dead is part of that. I'm just going to read you exactly what Stark says here. In a letter to another priest, Julian the apostate wrote, I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious, he means Christians, but his nickname for Christians was Galileans, because that's where the disciples were from and where Jesus was from. So I'm just going to say Christians. The impious Galileans or Christians observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence. He's saying Christians looked at awful things that people like Julian did, people of Julian's persuasion, and they were like, we got to do the opposite of that. We have to go above and beyond. Julian goes on writing in the 300s AD. The impious Christians, they call them impious because they didn't believe in the Roman gods. The impious Christians support not only their poor, but ours as well. Everyone can see that our people lack aid from us. Dang. And even he, as he's scratching his head about how to make his kingdom work, how to make the empire work, he's sitting there bemoaning this to a priest. These stupid Christians are doing it better than we're doing it. What the heck? So yeah, Christian sources say Christians got it right in the ancient world in the face of plague. Also, non-Christian sources begrudgingly admit that Christians got it right in the face of plague. I've mentioned several times Thucydides writing about the Persian wars from hundreds of years before the time that Galatians was written, 450-ish BC or whatever it was. And he talks about how people in the pagan, Greco, Roman classical world responded to this. Listen to how horrible this sounds compared to what was happening in Christian communities in the face of plague later on. He says, quote, they died with no one to look after them. Indeed, there were many houses in which all the inhabitants perished through lack of any attention. The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could also be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. Also, I should note that this isn't some backwater town that Thucydides is talking about here. This is Athens in the time of Socrates or leading up to the time of Socrates. This is the most sophisticated town in the world, outside of maybe a couple in Persia, and this is what the scene was like. These enlightened geniuses from whom we gained our moral philosophy and our sense of how government ought to be. This is what they did in the face of plague. He goes on. This is tough listening, but I'm reading it anyway. The temples in which they took up their quarters were full of the dead bodies of people who had died inside them, for the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or of law. No fear of God or law of man had a restraining influence. As for the gods, it seemed to be the same thing, whether one worshipped them or not, when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscriminately. Wow. Not much had changed from the time of Socrates and Plato and Thucydides and the Greco-Persian Wars and this horrible plague in Athens in four hundredty-one BC. Not much had changed between then and the time that we're looking at in the plague of Marcus Aurelius in the one hundred sixties AD, or the plague that Julian is lamenting in the three hundred sixties AD. The Greco-Roman pagan world did not know what to do in the face of plague, but the Christians did, running with little turns of phrases like what we got from Jesus there toward the end of Matthew, what we get from the verse that sprung us off into all of this. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. Heck, Julian the apostate is even admitting that when this crisis hit and the infrastructure of the Roman government and economy couldn't keep their own pagan citizens afloat. It's the impoverished Christians from the bottom of the social and economic food chain who were doing the work the government is no longer functionally capable of doing as the Roman government was flirting with becoming a failed state. It was Christians who were propping up their very persecutors by doing good to all people and especially to those within the family of believers. I'm not done. We're doing another day on this as we break down how all of that played out and why it worked. Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.