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Colin Smith: Our nation as you know well is deeply divided over issues of life, marriage, gender, and increasingly will be divided, I believe, over issues related to death as well. And so all over the country, many people are asking the question that is before us today: what in the world are we to do?

Steve Hiller: Welcome to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith. I'm Steve Hiller, glad you've joined us today. And Colin, we need to answer that question. What are we to do?

Colin Smith: Yeah, and I think first of all we've got to feel the pain of the question. I feel deeply grieved over how divided our country is, and I think every thinking Christian will feel the same. How is it that we've become so polarized and so separated from one another? And then what are we to do about it?

Well, I think Romans 12 really speaks to that question. We're told there, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." And these words were written by the Apostle Paul to Christians in Rome who were in a situation that was really dark. There was tremendous hostility against Christian believers. What were they to do? Well, don't be overcome by the evil. You've got to overcome evil with good.

And the thing is, in Romans 12, he actually tells us how to do that. And the place that we begin is "Let love be genuine." And we're going to take a walk over these next days through Romans and chapter 12 that lays out step by step how Christians are to respond to a divided and alienated culture and not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good.

Steve Hiller: Well, as you just heard, we are in Romans chapter 12, so grab your Bible, join us there as we begin a message entitled "Overcoming Evil With Good." Here is Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Well, good morning everyone. If you would have your Bible open at Romans and chapter 12, I want to draw your attention today to the last verse that was read, verse 21: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." Now friends, you don't need me to tell you that these are difficult days for our country.

After years in which we and many had hoped there would be substantial progress in regards to issues of race, we find ourselves in a circumstance in which anger and tension over these issues are reaching a new intensity. Loss of civility, loss of manners in public life is producing a new kind of meanness of spirit that often makes life increasingly unmanageable in the classroom, at work, and often in the home as well.

One of our seniors said to me recently that she could not remember a time in her entire life where so many people were so angry so much of the time. And on top of this, the shared sense of right and wrong that has really bound our people together over centuries seems to have been discarded and in large measure swept away. Our nation, as you know well, is deeply divided over issues of life, marriage, gender, and increasingly will be divided, I believe, over issues related to death as well.

Having lost the sense of living under the authority of God, our culture now sees fit to take the great issues of life into its own hands and do with them as it pleases. And so all over the country, many people are asking the question that is before us today: What in the world are we to do? What in the world are believing people to do in days like these? Now friends, the answer to that question is found in Romans and chapter 12.

These verses that are before us for the next two months describe what God's people are to do when we find ourselves surrounded by an increasing tide of evil. So over these next weeks, we are going to be camping out in the second half of Romans and chapter 12. And my prayer for this series is threefold: The first is that God will use His word over these weeks to calm our fears, to renew our hope, and to strengthen our resolve. These three things.

Now, these verses from Romans and chapter 12 have really come to me with fresh force as I have studied the historical background of the book of Romans. Now, I just said the word historical, and I know that for some of you, the very word historical makes your eyes glaze over, makes you think it's time to reach for the cell phone. Please, please don't do that. Give me a bit of slack, give me a bit of trust for just a few minutes this morning.

Because when you see what was going on when the Holy Spirit moved the Apostle Paul to write to Christians in Rome the book of Romans, you will see, I believe, in a new way the power and the relevance of these verses that are going to be before us over these next weeks. And you will say, it is as if this was written just for us at this time, which of course all of the word of God is. On the screen you will see a timeline showing the years following the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

During the first 70 years of the first century, there were five Roman emperors. The first of these was Augustus, referred to in Luke's Gospel, chapter two and verse one, read every Christmas: "In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered." After Augustus, there was Tiberius, and we read about him in Luke's Gospel and chapter three: "In the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar," Luke records, "the word of God came to John the Baptist out in the wilderness."

The 15th year of Tiberius would have been the year 29 AD, and that gives us a clear date with regards to the start of our Lord Jesus' ministry, which of course followed immediately after the ministry of John the Baptist. After Tiberius came four traumatic years in which Rome was ruled by the infamous Caligula. Some months into Caligula's reign, he contracted an illness that seems to have affected him very deeply and turned him into a tyrant who was increasingly losing his mind.

Caligula ordered that an altar should be built for himself. He thought of himself as being a god. The Roman historian, Suetonius, he records how Caligula ordered that all of the statues of the gods from around the empire should be brought back to Rome and that whatever image was on the face, that the head should be cut off all the statues and a new head should be put on each statue that was his own image.

He had a temple built and there was a golden statue in the temple that was an entire image of himself and he had a servant dress that image in precisely a replica of the clothes that the emperor was wearing on that particular day. Can you imagine being that servant? "What's he wearing today? We've got to get a replica, we've got to put it on the statue." Extraordinary. Many of you are aware, and we don't need the details, about Caligula's excesses and his indulgence.

He was notorious in regards to the orgies that he held in the Imperial Palace. And when it came to money, nobody could spend the money of the state like Caligula did. In fact, Suetonius records that he had a saying that he repeated often. Now think about this. He said, "A man ought either to be a good economist or an emperor." Now you think, shouldn't it be a man should be a good economist in order to be an emperor? But that wasn't Caligula.

He said, "Oh, let the economist talk and write all they want. I'm an emperor. I'll spend as much as I want." And he did. Extraordinary. He spent all of the assets that had been passed on from Tiberius, who had a very different policy and a very different character, in a very short space of time. Now these four years were a nightmare for Rome, and a huge relief to the people when finally this man was assassinated by two men, members of his own guard.

After Caligula came Claudius, who is referred to in Acts chapter 18 and verse two, where we read about a married couple, Aquila and Priscilla, who moved to Corinth from Italy. And the reason they moved was the Scripture tells us that Claudius had commanded all of the Jews to leave Rome. This was a great edict; the Jews were all expelled from Rome during his time. And there are for sure plenty of hair-raising stories that could be told about Claudius.

But relative to what came before and certainly relative to what came after, he was something of a relief because the next emperor of Rome was a man by the name of Nero. Yeah, Nero. Nero came to power in the year 54 AD. He ruled for 15 years until he took his own life at the age of 32. Three things to know about Nero. Number one, he had a good singing voice. To the astonishment of the Senate and their consternation, he would enter these singing competitions, which, would you be surprised to know, he always won?

I mean, if you're on the jury for a singing competition, I vote for Nero. Then he moved to his own stage and put on his own concerts featuring himself in which the audiences were effectively locked in. Some of Suetonius' stuff on this is hilarious. He says many of the spectators being quite wearied with hearing and applauding him, because they had to keep going all the time after every number, because the town gates were shut, they slipped away privately over the walls or counterfeited themselves dead in order to be carried out.

I mean, you're so desperate thinking, "How am I ever going to get out of here?" and this guy won't let me leave and, "Let me just let the ushers carry me out if they think I'm dead." The arrogance of this man and the self-obsession. He was, of course, also a man of extraordinary cruelty. He arranged for the murder of his first wife, of his aunt, and also of his own mother. Three times he attempted to poison her and failed each time; apparently she had the antidote.

He ordered on one occasion that the floor above where her bedroom was should be weakened in order that the ceiling would collapse on her and kill her. And that didn't work. He ordered that a ship on which she was sailing would be wrecked, and that didn't work either. And finally her life was taken after all these attempts. Nero was married over a period of 15 years five times: to three women and to two men.

Suetonius speaks about Sporus and says this, I quote: "He even went so far as to marry him with all the usual formalities of a wedding settlement. When the ceremony was over, he had him conducted like a bride to his own house and treated him as his wife. This Sporus he carried about with him, dressed, that is, Sporus was dressed in the rich attire of an empress, kissing him from time to time as they rode together."

Suetonius was, of course, a secular historian, no friend of Christianity whatsoever. But he, the secular historian, sums up Nero's life in these words: "The whole of his life was one continued scene of lewdness, sensuality, cruelty, and folly." Now that is what was happening according to the secular historian in Rome at that time.

Steve Hiller: You're listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith and a message called "Overcoming Evil With Good." We've been looking primarily at the timeline of the first 70 years after Christ in the Roman Empire. When we come back in just a moment, we're going to look at that same time period through the lens of the church, so I hope you'll stay with us.

If you ever miss a broadcast, you can always come and listen online. Our website is openthebible.org and you can stream the program or download an MP3 for free. Again, that's at openthebible.org. Back to the message, here is Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Now let's put the key events of the story of the church onto this timeline. Pentecost, that great day when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the church and the people of God, the church in the true sense was born, that was the year 33 AD. The events then that are covered by the Book of Acts cover the next 30 years and therefore they were in large measure set against the background of the reigns of Caligula and Claudius and Nero himself.

The Book of Romans was written when Paul was in Corinth in the winter of AD 56-57. And so when you read Romans 12, you are reading the word that God gave to Paul by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit when Nero was emperor. This is very significant, especially when you read Romans 13, where the word of God speaks about submitting to governing authorities, that that word was given and spoken to Christians in Rome in the time of Nero.

Shortly after the Book of Romans was written, false charges were brought against the Apostle Paul in a place called Caesarea and he was arrested. Serious charges that people wanted that the death penalty should be applied to him. They wanted to stop him from preaching the gospel. But Paul was a Roman citizen, and so any Roman citizen who was charged with a crime had the right of appeal to be tried in Rome itself rather than in one of the provinces that had been conquered by Rome.

And so, having been arrested, the Apostle Paul said, and this is recorded in Acts 25, "I appeal to Caesar." And the local governor, a man by the name of Festus, said to him, "Well, to Caesar you have appealed, and to Caesar you will go." And so you can read this at the end of the Book of Acts. What followed was that Paul was taken by an armed guard on a ship to Rome. The ship got shipwrecked, but finally, in the last chapter of Acts, the Apostle Paul actually arrives in Rome itself.

And the Book of Acts ends with two years in which we are told Paul was effectively under a kind of house arrest in Rome, and these would have been the years 60 and 61. Two years after that, we know that the Apostle Peter was in Rome and while he was there, he wrote what we have in the New Testament, the first letter of Peter. And moved by the Holy Spirit while he was in Rome, he writes these words, chapter four and verse 12: "Do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you."

Now He speaks prophetically there, surely: "the fiery trial when it comes upon you." There's going to be a fiery trial, He says. That's AD 63. What happened one year later? The Great Fire of Rome. Rome, the whole city set ablaze. And the Roman historian Tacitus records there were 14 precincts in the city; only four of them were unaffected, the rest of the city utterly devastated.

And Tacitus also records that at the very time that Rome burned, Nero got on his platform and was singing. He was happy about this. Why? Because the fire was giving the opportunity for the building of a grander and more glorious city. And that's, by the way, where you get the phrase "fiddling while Rome burns" because he was rejoicing while the city was being destroyed. Extraordinary thing.

Now, of course, people perceived and quickly got that actually Nero himself was behind the fire and that was widely believed and widely spread around. And so Nero needed a scapegoat, someone else to blame for starting this fire. And the scapegoat that he chose was Christians. Now the Roman historian Tacitus, again, no friend of Christianity, records, and I quote his exact words: "To scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty a class of men whom the crowd styled Christians."

Christus, from whom they got their name, had been executed by the sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was the emperor. First, then, those who confessed themselves Christians were arrested. Next, on their disclosures, a vast multitude were convicted, not so much on the charge of arson—because, of course, there wasn't any evidence whatsoever that any of them had been involved in the fire, none of them were—a vast multitude of them were convicted, not so much on the charge of arson, but for hatred of the human race. Any echoes coming to your mind there?

You see, the Christians weren't going in the direction of the culture and so what did the culture say about them? You folks must be haters. You must just be people who hate everyone else. You must be haters of the human race, and if you're haters of the human race, there's no place for you here in the human race. I continue to quote Tacitus: "Their deaths were made a matter of sport. They were covered in wild beast skins and torn to pieces by dogs, or were fastened to crosses and set on fire in order to serve as torches by night when daylight failed."

Hence, and this is Tacitus, the Roman historian, "Hence there arose a feeling of pity." Ordinary people had pity towards Christians. "Because it was felt that they were being sacrificed not for the common good but to gratify the savagery of one man." Now notice how quickly the world changed for Christians. In the late 50s, Paul could say, "I appeal to Caesar," and be very confident that if he was in Rome, even under a bad emperor, the Roman system of justice was sufficiently strong that it could protect his liberty to preach the gospel.

So he said, "I'll be tried there, I'll get a fair trial there." Within about six years, five or six years of the Apostle Paul saying that, what do you have? You have Christians being thrown to the lions in Rome. And here's where it comes home for us today because you'll have heard many resonances in the account that I've given to you. When you find yourself saying, "It seems that our freedoms are under threat," when you find yourself saying that morality as we have known it seems to be swept away, remember this, friends: Christians have been here before.

The church has been here before. And you know what? The church is alive and well today and the Roman Empire is not. Remember that.

Steve Hiller: And that is where we have to pause today's message. You're listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith and a message called "How to Overcome Evil With Good." We've been looking primarily at the timeline of the first 70 years after Christ. On our next broadcast, we're going to look at two possibilities: to be overcome by evil or how to overcome evil with good. And you know, that's exactly what Jesus did.

We're going to see how He did that and what good did He use to overcome that evil, so I hope you'll make it a point to join us. If you ever miss a program, come and listen online. Our website is openthebible.org. Open the Bible is a listener-supported ministry. It is your generosity that allows us to bring you Pastor Colin's teaching each day. And as you give a gift to Open the Bible this month, we want to say thank you by sending you a copy of a book written by Brad Wetherell called "Saved to Sin No More." And Colin, who is Brad Wetherell and why should we read this book?

Colin Smith: Well, you know, I've often said that we should choose books not by the title but by the author. And the reason for that, of course, is that when you read a book, you're actually reading a person. You're reading what has come out of that person. So who has written a book is really very, very important. And I'm just so glad to have the opportunity to introduce Brad Wetherell. His name may not be widely known. He is my successor as the senior pastor of the Orchard Evangelical Free Church. I've served that church for 30 years. I've worked with Brad for more than 15.

I stepped down from being the senior pastor just over a year ago to focus full-time on the ministry of Open the Bible. And so Brad is someone that I feel very, very close to and very, very confident in. He has a deep, authentic walk with the Lord. That's always the first thing you want to know about someone who you're going to read. He has a wonderful gift of preaching and a wonderful gift of writing.

This is his first book, and he's chosen to write on a subject that he's studied very deeply, and it's this wonderful truth of union with Christ. I think this, Steve, may be the most important and least understood doctrine in all of the Bible. People often kind of look a bit quizzical, "Union with Christ, what's that?" Well, folks are going to love this compelling and clear introduction to what I think is one of the most encouraging truths in all of the Christian life.

Steve Hiller: Well, the book is called "Saved to Sin No More: How Union with Christ Empowers a Life of Holiness." And we want to send you a copy as our way of saying thank you for financially supporting Open the Bible this month. You can call and give over the phone. Our number is 1-877-OPEN-365. Or give online at openthebible.org. Again, our phone number is 1-877-673-6365 and the website is openthebible.org. For Pastor Colin Smith, I'm Steve Hiller. Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join us next time. This program is a listener-supported production of Open the Bible.

Colin Smith: At Open the Bible, we're grateful for like-minded organizations committed to sharing the gospel around the world. And to that end, I'd like to commend the work of Global Fingerprints. You know, in the Book of James, God calls us to help orphans in their distress. That's a clear command, but it's not always clear how we should obey it. And this is where Global Fingerprints comes in.

Through Global Fingerprints, you can sponsor a vulnerable child to help meet their physical needs and ensure they hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. I want to commend Global Fingerprints to you. They're focused on equipping the local church to care for children, and where there is no church, they help to plant one. If you'd like to help a vulnerable child, you can find more information on Global Fingerprints at our website, openthebible.org/gf. That's openthebible.org/gf.