ephesus

This was BY FAR one of my favorite sites that we visited. It just felt like such a real city and was so "modern" cmopared to a lot of the ruins and tels we've seen.

NIKE. The goddess of victory. Can you see the swoosh?

This is what you look out upon as soon as you walk through the gate. A temple is down on the left, some houses are on the right and then straight ahead is the library.

This is the theater. The main focus of our trip here in Turkey was to study not only the history of the land and the people, but also the 7 churches that Paul writes about in Revelation. As you can probably guess, the people here were the Ephesians. A whole book in the New Testament is a letter written to the people that lived here! How cool is that?! In Revelation, the Lord tells commends the people in Ephesus for resisting false teachers and patiently enduring trials. He then warns those who have fallen away to repent {Revelation 2:1-7}

We sang Onward Christian Soldiers and at first I was a little bit uncomfortable with it because I felt Like we were “those people”, some weird religion that does weird things especially in front of all these tourists. But then the spirit hit me and I felt ok about it. I knew we were singing about truth and that we all have the same God who loves us and wants us to have his truth and we should share that.

This picture may look a little bit familiar to some! (see Bible photos)

Another reason we were in Turkey was to learn about the Seven Ecumenical Councils. These were meetings held by the leaders of Christianity following the death of Christ and the apostles. These were men who were looking for truth. Evidence of the apostasy were apparent throughout this whole country. The Third Ecumenical Council was held here in Ephesus at the church of St. Mary. In the back right corner of the church we found this. A baptismal font!

Isn't it absolutely beautiful? As with all things the Romans built, this is big and extravagant to show off. The book nerd inside of me just loves these old libraries. I wonder what kinds of books they had and who would be allowed to study and what all the shelves looked like! The one here in Ephesus was second largest in the world, the first being the library at Alexandria.