When the church begins to lose the power of the gospel, she inevitably turns to the power of force, or the state. Constantine was the first to legislate a Sunday closing law, in 321 AD. This was a religious law, enacted on behalf of the Christian bishops of the Roman church, in order to increase their popularity and power.
Behind this historic joining of church and state, which laid the foundation for the papacy that followed, was a certain theocratic theory, that the state could be used to “build the kingdom of Christ” on earth.
Some years after the initial Sunday Law, church father Augustine proposed the idea that people could be “brought to serve God” by “fear of punishment or by pain” (“the rod of temporal suffering”). This idea, of course, laid the groundwork for the Inquisition.
But God is not pleased with forced worship. Any attempt to establish true worship by the enactment of laws, can only lead to enforced hypocrisy, and eventual separation from God, and destruction.
This booklet covers the history of that first Sunday law, which history is important as a foreshadowing of the future church-state union that is to cover the world before the close of this world’s history.
This booklet from A. T. Jones is Chapter 32 from his larger book, “Great Empires of Prophecy”. 28p
Contents
- True and False Theocracies
- The New, and False, Theocracy
- The New Kingdom of God
- Law Secured for Rest on Sunday
- Constantine’s Famous Sunday Law
- The Sunday Law Only Religious
- By Authority of Pontifex Maximus
- Sunday in the Council of Nice
- Sunday Work Made Sacrilege
- The Church Obtains the Monopoly
- Origin of the Inquisition
