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So many
others have tried their hand at putting together a story of the
wonderful harvest of Scripture and history that took place among us,
using reports handed down by the original eyewitnesses who served this
Word with their very lives. Since I have investigated all the reports in
close detail, starting from the story's beginning, I decided to write it
all out for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you can know beyond the
shadow of a doubt the reliability of what you were taught.
-Luke 1:1-4
-With so much information available to us today, it’s not hard to get
confused is it?
-Two years ago, author Dan Brown wrote a novel that debuted at
the top of the NY Times bestseller list. And it has been at or near the
top of that list every week since.
-What are Dan Brown’s motives?
-ABC televisions, 20/20, Dan Brown
spoke of his “conversion” to a new way of thinking that he’s been
introduced to.
-He acknowledged that he sees
himself as being on a mission to bring this new religious message to
mainstream America.
-So what is this new way of thinking
and this new religious message Dan wants to share with the world?
-So we are going to do something different today than we have ever done.
We’re going to discuss this book.
-Why?
-The Da Vinci Code has sold over 10 million copies, it’s been
translated into over 40 languages.
-This Friday’s edition of the USA
Today had a two page spread about how every church; museum and chateau
mentioned in the book have now become major tourist attractions
throughout Europe.
-This kind of attention is not unprecedented. Clancy and Grisham have
sold as many copies and created as much chatter with some of their
works.
-But I’m convinced I need to talk to you about this book because this
book is different.
-It’s a book that has become a catalyst for all kinds of questions.
Questions about the church.
Questions about Jesus Christ.
Questions about God.
-All of a sudden, lots of Americans, are asking questions that I haven’t
people ask expect in maybe Bible College classes.
-Questions about the Bible, about
the ancient church councils, about the Gnostics, questions about books
like the Gospel of Thomas.
-Dan Brown makes some claims about these sorts of things, and he makes
some claims for historical accuracy. --On page 1 he says:
-All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret
rituals in this novel are accurate. – Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, p. 1
-As you read the book, you begin to wonder if Mr. Brown has more in mind
that merely making money and entertaining readers.
-Romans
16:18 For
such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By
smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of naive people.
-If you haven’t read the book, you might be interested in knowing that
it has come out as a movie this past week.
-Ron Howard and Columbia
Pictures are producing it, and Tom Hanks is the leading man.
-The Da Vinci Code is a well-written mystery, based on a conspiracy. And
though fascinating to read about the unsuspecting Harvard professor, the
energetic French policeman, the Royal British Knight, and the Albino
Monk-turned-assassin (nod at me if you’ve read the book), and of course
the heroine of the book, “Sophie” whose name means “wisdom,” in Greek.
-As you read you recognize that this
is something that is changing the way people think.
-It’s a plot about the Holy Grail. It you’ve read it and you’ve seen
“Indiana Jones and the Search for the Holy Grail,” you know that
Harrison Ford and Sean Connery had it wrong, the Holy Grail is not a
cup. According to this book it’s a woman. A woman with a huge secret
that has been covered up for the last 1700 years.
-To understand what the book is talking about, you need some background
in three areas. So let me tell you three stories.
-The first story is the story of The Crown, the Council, and the
Creed.
-The story of the Crown, the Council and the Creed is the story of
Constantine.
-The Crown belongs to Constantine. Constantine adopted Christianity in
312 AD and legalized it for all of the Western Roman Empire.
-The Council is the Council of Nicaea.
-As he consolidated his power, Constantine found that there were
disagreements in his realm about the nature of the Son of God. The
problem was that a leader of the church of North Africa, a man named
“Arius,” was teaching that Jesus was God, but a different kind of God
than the Father.
-As a new Christian, Constantine said, “I can help sort this out.” So he
paid the expenses for 300 bishops from across his realm to come together
and council about what was true and what wasn’t about the nature of the
Son of God.
-Arius and his followers believed that Jesus was God, but that he was
a created God (as opposed to God the Father, who was eternally
pre-existent.) – Are you following this? This is a little heady, but
we’ll lighten up in a minute.
-Arius’ phrase was, "There was a time when he was not."
-The rest of Christianity disagreed with them, so they came up with this
statement, or creed, as it’s come to be known:
-The Creed of Nicaea
"We believe in one God, the Father, Almighty, Maker of all things
visible and invisible; and in the one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
begotten of the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of
the Father; God from God, Light from Light, Very God from Very God,
begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all
things were made…
-This is the Creed of Nicaea. This is what the Nicaean bishops came
together to clarify.
-Okay?
-That’s story one.
-Story two is The story of Old Testament Worship.
You can read about this in the book of Leviticus if you want.
-When the children of Israel were camping in the dessert, God, through
Moses, gave them a form of worship that was distinct from that of all
the nations around them. He told them to build a Tabernacle that looked
roughly like this: (SLIDE OF the Tabernacle.)
-Inside: Ark of the Covenant, covered by the “Mercy Seat”. God’s
presence lived there.
Outside: the Altar of Sacrifice, for the forgiveness of sins.
-For the Jews, worship consisted of two things: praise and sacrifice.
-When they moved into the land of Israel, they found out that their form
of worship was distinctly different from that of the Canaanites and
other nations around them, because the nations around them worshiped not
just one God, but all kinds of gods.
-And because they were agrarian
societies, these cultures were primarily concerned with the gods who
controlled their crops.
-So everywhere around the Middle East at that time were shrines and
Temples to the male fertility god, who often went by the name “Baal.”
-And the female fertility god, who
went by a variety of related names, from Ashtorath to Astarte to Ishtar
to Isis to Artemis to Diana.
-In order to convince these fertility gods to fertilize their lands,
ancient Middle Easterners would engage in fertility exercises
themselves.
-Every temple to Baal or Ashtorath
had a group of female temple prostitutes whose job it was to engage in
sexual relations with the male worshipers so that the fertility god in
heaven would see and be stimulated and their sexual arousal would cause
the fertilization of the land.
-Seems a little strange, doesn’t it. But do you understand what was
going on?
-This is important because for the Israelites, this practice was
repulsive. God condemned it and urged the Israelites not to participate
in Temple prostitution. Several OT prophets spoke about this.
That’s story 2.
Story 3 is The Story of Gnosticism.
-These will all become relevant to you in a minute. But for now, follow
me for another 90 seconds.
-The word “Gnosis” = “Knowledge”
-In the second century AD (after Christ) a broad spiritual movement grew
up and developed several forms over the next 2 centuries. The movement
was called, “Gnosticism,” because the common thread between all of its
different groups was the each of them had special knowledge, which only
insiders could possess.
-In a nutshell, here’s what Gnostics believed:
-The Gnostics believed that matter was evil and spirit was good.
Everything you touched was tainted, everything immaterial was good. It’s
classic dualism.
-The problem with this view is, if matter is evil and God is good, how
did matter come into existence. The answer for the Gnostics was, through
a chain of lesser and lesser gods.
-Here’s what it looked like.
-God, the pure God. Purely spirit, absolutely untainted, created a group
of lesser gods called, “Aeons” who were mostly untainted.
-There was a movie that came out
last year called “Aeon Flux” based on this idea.
-Listen to this statement from
wikipedia.org about the movie. “The
term Æon comes from the
Gnostic notion of
Æons as emanations of the God, who come in male/female pairs (here
Flux and Goodchild). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeon_Flux
-Anyhow.
-These gods created lesser gods who created lesser gods, who created
lesser gods, until finally, one of these spirits created the world and
matter and people.
-Full knowledge of this complete chain of gods can only be revealed to
those who are fully initiated. This is the nature of “gnosis.” You can’t
have the knowledge until you’ve proven yourself worthy.
-One problem you can see is when some members of Gnostic communities
tried to blend their gnosis with Christianity. If Jesus was God and came
to earth, then he couldn’t be God anymore, because the true God could
never assume material form, he would stay far from it.
-So one Gnostic solution to this was, “Jesus wasn’t actually material.
He was completely spiritual; he only appeared to be material.
-An alternative solution was to
claim that he was fully human and only fully human.
-Of course, to claim that, you’ve got to explain away almost everything
the Bible teaches about him.
-And that my friend is what the Da
Vinci Code is all about. To claim that he was fully human and only fully
human and to explain away almost everything the Bible teaches about him
-Gnosticism pretty much died out by the end of the 4th century, so we
only knew about it through the writings of several early church fathers
that lived during that time.
-We only knew about it through them until December, 1945, when an
Egyptian peasant in the town of Nag Hammadi stumbled on a cache
of 52 manuscripts, some of which we written by Gnostics.
-These were translated over the next several years, and made a big
splash on the English-speaking world in 1977 when a Princeton professor
named Elaine Pagels published a book called, “The Gnostic Gospels”.
-The Gnostic Church is now alive and well in several parts of the world.
In France it’s called, Church of the Initiated
-In England, it’s The Pre-Nicene Gnostic Catholic Church in England,
and in the US, The Gnostic Society.
-After Dr. Pagels, who is a Gnostic, published her work, three
other men published a book in 1982 called, Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
-Here’s where these stories intersect with The Da Vinci Code. It’s from
these two works that Dan Brown gets much of what he teaches in “the
Code”.
-As I already mentioned. A few years ago, in an interview of ABC
televisions, 20/20, Dan Brown spoke of his “conversion” to a new way of
thinking that he’s been introduced to.
-He acknowledged that he sees
himself as being on a mission to bring this new religious message to
mainstream America.
-Holy Blood, Holy Grail is based on documents supplied to the authors by
a man named Pierre Plantard. Plantard was an anti-Semite who spent some
time in jail in 1953, and in 1954 founded a social club called, “The
Priory of Sion.”
-The Priory of Sion dissolved
in 1957, but Plantard held onto the name and in the 1960’s claimed that
he was a descendant of Jesus Christ through his
wife, Mary Magdalene.
-This is what Dan Brown built his
novel around the names and claims of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The Da
Vinci Code claims that
[Theme #1]
A. Jesus Christ is not divine.
B. Jesus was married.
C. Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children and raised them in the south of
France.
-That may sound crazy, but if you’ve read the book nod at me: that’s
what the book is about, right?
-That’s the first conspiratorial theme.
-The second conspiratorial theme.
-The second conspiratorial theme is
that the church suppressed these facts, starting in the 4th century.
According to the “Code,” Constantine called a council in the city of
“Nicaea”, where the Catholic Church made the deliberate decision to
suppress these facts, in 325 AD.
-[Theme #2
Under Constantine, the Roman Catholic Church made the deliberate
decision to suppress the facts at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.]
-Constantine wanted to suppress the truth about Christ, so he started a
campaign of propaganda, called a council of all the church leaders and
spun a new story about Christ – the story that you’re used to hearing,
and collated the Bible to read differently than it previously did,
because Constantine wanted to subjugate women under his patriarchal
ideas about what the world and the church ought to be.
-So his goal was to stamp out the “sacred feminine”. – More on that
later.
-Before that, Christianity was pure. After that, Christianity was a big
cover-up for the truth.
Third Conspiratorial Theme:
[Theme #3 -]
-Constantine rewrote the Bible and therefore the Bible we have today is
not true.
-So the Bible that we have today is not true. You can’t trust it. It’s a
distortion.
-Let’s take these one at a time.
1. Was Jesus married?
-Let’s read it directly from the text.
[-Teabing looked excited now. “The legend of the Holy Grail is a legend
about royal blood. When Grail legend speaks of ‘the chalice that held
the blood of Christ’… it speaks, in fact, of Mary Magdalene – the female
womb that carried Jesus’ royal bloodline.”
-The words seems to echo across the ballroom and back before they fully
registered in Sophie’s mind. Mary Magdalene carried the royal bloodline
of Jesus Christ? “But how could Christ have a bloodline unless…?” She
paused and looked at Langdon.
-Langdon smiled softly. “Unless they had a child.”
-Sophie stood transfixed.
-“Behold,” Teabing proclaimed. “the greatest cover-up in human history.
Not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father.”
The Da Vinci Code, p. 249]
Claim #1, Jesus was married.
-Bold statement, where’s the proof? -Dan Brown’s answer is, “The
Gnostics.”
-What do we know about the Gnostics?
-We know that because of their belief that matter is evil, they had to
take some leaps to explain who Jesus was. He couldn’t be fully God and
fully man, because full, spiritual God could never mix with man.
-In the book, Teabing says that the Gnostics knew and taught that Jesus
was married. He sights the Gospel of Philip, a Gnostic writing uncovered
at Nag Hammadi, as the source.
The problem with this is:
1) The Gospel of Philip doesn’t say that Jesus was married.
2) The Gospel of Philip was written 250 years after Jesus.
3) The Gospel of Philip wasn’t written by Philip. Philip the Apostle
died in the first century. So, this book we are supposed to trust is
written by someone who makes a false claim about himself before he even
begins to write.
-Teabing’s supposed case for Philip saying Jesus is married comes out of
one phrase which describes Mary Magdalene as a companion of Jesus.
-His disciples were companions. Same word.
-Teabing tries to make the case that the word “companion” can also mean,
“wife,” based on the meaning of the word in Aramaic. But the gospel of
Philip wasn’t written in Aramaic, it was written in Greek.
-No other Gnostic gospel mentions anything about the marriage of Jesus.
-Next question: Was there a cover-up, or suppression of evidence,
which is a central thesis of the book?
-Let’s look at the book again:
[“Behold,” Teabing proclaimed, “the greatest cover-up in human history.
Not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father.” p. 249]
A few pages earlier:
[“The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today,
was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.” – p.
231]
-Constantine was the one who distorted the original, Gnostic teaching
and made it into what we know of as Christianity today by calling the
bishops together at the Council of Nicaea.
Quote:
[“At this gathering,” Teabing said, “many aspects of Christianity were
debated and voted up – the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the
administration of the sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of
Jesus.”
“I don’t follow. His divinity?”
“My dear,” Teabing said, “until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed
by His followers as a mortal prophet… a great and powerful man, but a
man nonetheless. A mortal.”
“Not the Son of God?”
“Right,” Teabing said, “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was
officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.”
- p. 233]
-We’ve already seen, the purpose of the council of Nicaea was not to
decide if Jesus was God, but in what way Jesus was God.
-If you want to look at the records, this was the first great ecumenical
council of the church. Notes were taken and preserved and you can buy
and read them from several books that cover the church councils.
-Or, study the historical record.
-Here’s what you’ll find
-We have all sorts of writings from the first 325 years of Christianity,
including hundreds of scrolls and manuscripts and fragments of the NT.
We have hundreds of these and related documents from after 325 AD.
-Dan Brown believes that Christianity was fundamentally altered at the
Council of Nicaea. If that were the case, you would expect to see that
these documents look substantially different than these documents.
-But they don’t. Why? Because the
Constantine and the Council did not invent anything new. They simply
affirmed what the majority of Christianity already knew.
-According to Brown, the purpose of the Nicene Council was to stamp out
feminism and the feminine goddess. -This, frankly, is a complete
fabrication. Nothing of the kind ever came up there, nor needed to come
up, because pre-Nicene Christianity never had a goddess or sacred
feminine aspect.
-Besides I do not see Gnosticism
waving the banner of women’s rights. Gnosticism is basically what Dan
Brown is supporting, and Gnosticism is rooted and grounded in dominant
males making prostitutes of women. Remember what we read…
-“Every
temple to Baal or Ashtorath had a group of female temple prostitutes
whose job it was to engage in sexual relations with the male worshipers
so that the fertility god in heaven would see and be stimulated and
their sexual arousal would cause the fertilization of the land.”
-So for Brown to implicate that the
Nicene Council was to stamp out feminism and the feminine goddess is
crazy. That sounds to me like the pot calling the kettle black.
-If you were a feminist what
teaching would you rather adhere to? A Gnostic teaching or the teaching
of the New Testament where it says to love your neighbor as yourself?
-In fact it is true that Jesus’ teachings were very progressive and
liberating to the women of his day.
-So to make this accusation of the
council is fabricated. And search all of the pre-Nicene documents and
you won’t find any mention of this type of theology, of men dominating
women.
-And look at the O.T. and you will find that the Jews and their
practices abhorred the idea of temple prostitution.
-Check what the book implicates, and what it is interested in, again odd
spiritual sexual relations, a Gnostic practice.
[The Jewish Tetragrammaton YHWH – the sacred name of God – in fact
derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the
masculine “Jah” and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, “Havah”. – p. 309
-The word “Jehovah” is a German word that didn’t exist until the 13th
century. The word for Eve in Hebrew is “Havva” – No “H” at the end.
“Havah” as it is spelled here is the nickname for Eve, not the real name
at all.]
-Do I have to spell what this is
implying between God and Eve?
Or this:
[“Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple housed
not only God but also His powerful female equal, Shekinah. Men seeking
spiritual wholeness came to the Temple to visit priestesses… with whom
they made love and experienced the divine through physical union.” – p.
309]
-That is a blatant lie. Shekinah is a Hebrew word for glory. The Jews
never allowed anything but the Arc of the Covenant into the Holy of
Holies. They never thought of a female god, and abhorred the practice of
their neighbors of temple prostitution.
-One more question: Did Constantine rewrite the Bible?
-Or, really, at the root of every theory behind the book is the
question:
-Is the Bible reliable?
Teabing, p. 231:
[“…everything you need to know about the Bible can be summed up by the
great canon doctor Martyn Percy…. ‘The Bible did not arrive by fax from
heaven.’”
“…the Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God…. Man created it as
a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through
countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had
a definitive version of the book.” – p. 231]
Here’s how the NT developed.
a. – Books written from various places (Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth,
Rome)
b. – Books copied and circulated
c. – Books recognized as bearing the marks of God were kept, those that
weren’t were tossed.
d. – Books were copied carefully.
e. – We have 15,000 manuscripts.
f. – We always copy from the Greek.
g. – NT is the most reliable book in history because of
1. the care in copying
2. the number of copies to compare
3. the closeness of the copies to the original.
In your message notes are 2 scriptures.
Phil. 2:11 …every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Romans 10:9
That if you confess with your
mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him
from the dead, you will be saved.
-Both of these were written between
50 and 60 AD, and we have 100s of copies from before the council of
Nicaea. Clearly, Christianity has always taught and believed that Jesus
Christ was God from God, Light from Light, Very God from Very God,
begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all
things were made…
-I like what Dr. Luke said he did. In the opening words of his book,
Luke says,
So many others have tried
their hand at putting together a story of the wonderful harvest of
Scripture and history that took place among us, using reports handed
down by the original eyewitnesses who served this Word with their very
lives…
Since I have investigated all
the reports in close detail, starting from the story's beginning, I
decided to write it all out for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you
can know beyond the shadow of a doubt the reliability of what you were
taught. -Luke 1:1-4
-For some of us, my research will be enough. For others among us, we’ll
need to do some careful investigating for ourselves.
-But I want to encourage all of you to do the research you need to come
to a definitive conclusion about the two things spoken of in this book:
1. Is Jesus the Son of God?
2. Is the Bible reliable?
Conclusion
-Whether Dan Brown claims this book
is fact or fiction or not is not the point.
-The point is that Dan Brown has
acknowledged that he sees himself as being on a mission to bring this
new religious message to mainstream America.
-And the question is, is this the
message we want.
-What would America be if we tuned
into a Gnostic Nation?
-A nation of those who cannot know
God.
-A nation of those who cannot touch
God.
-A nation where churches are turned
into temples of prostitution.
-Oh come on Pastor it is just
suspenseful fiction we shouldn’t get all worked up.
-Because this is where it all starts…with the devil questioning the Word
of God
Genesis 3:1 Now
the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God
had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat
from any tree in the garden'?"
-Out of
all the ways the devil could have chosen to temp Eve, He strategic
attack that he thought would work best is to question the Word of God.
-And this
morning friends we are faced with the same old trick. With the same old
question did God really say that? Is this bible really true? Is Jesus
really the Son of God?
-Become enlighten, get more
knowledge, try this form of Jesus.
-The day we are living in sounds
like what the Bible predicted many years ago, when the Apostle Paul
stated…
2
Timothy 3:1-5
1But
mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.
2People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of
money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents,
ungrateful, unholy, 3without love, unforgiving,
slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good,
4treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of
pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5having a
form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.
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