Grace Emmanuel Church

Pastor Sam Chess

What if Jesus had Never Been Born?

(Part 6)

^{(Christianity’s Impact on Human Sexuality #2)}

We’re naïve! We tend to look at the world around us….we get…I get.. very bothered by some of the things I see around me that are so far from a biblical pattern of thinking. If, for one moment we could time-travel back to a day in the Roman empire in New Testament times or a day in the Babylonian, Assyrian, or Egyptian Empires of Old Testament times, and see the evilness of the world the Biblical characters lived in, we would probably feel very, very fortunate. We are still, very much, living in a world where most of the things we encounter day to day are deeply influenced by Christians of the past.

Not so in Bible days… I told you about the ancient Canaanites low view of human life; especially children under eight, , and I told you about the evil of their sexually focused worship involving prostitution and child sacrifice. There’s more…. They were a violent murderous, civilization! Their god, Baal, supposedly had a woman Goddess associate, named Anath, who was, according to the Caananites; his sister and lover.

Anath was the patroness of war, and in a fragment of the Baal epic we read of an incredible orgy of bloody destruction. In the epic she butchers mankind in the most horrible manner, wading delightedly in human gore up to her knees….

This was one of their gods…they worshipped her. In fact most all of the god’s and goddesses of the Ancients, the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, etc, were fallable, sinful, evil personalities, who indulged in every kind of sadistic evil know to mankind.

If a god woke up angry he would hurl thunderbolts across the sky (or sent a hurricane to destroy those he was angry with).

The people who worshipped these gods acted just like them! They didn’t have moral societies, with just a few misguided immoral people among them. Their cultures were totally defined by what we would call….. gross immorality!

The Roman emperor Nero had an affair, his wife objected, he killed her. His mother then objected to the affair and the wife killing and he killed her. He married his mistress, she became pregnant…made the mistake of nagging him one day.. and he kicked her in the stomach until she and the baby were dead. We have long trials and issue death sentences about such obscene and evil behavior. Nero got up the next morning and went to work.

A society without the benefit of the influence of God’s truth, either directly or indirectly, is a society of social chaos and moral bankruptcy!

Into this cesspool of pagan sin comes God with an intricate system of laws designed to rip the paganism out of the hearts of his children….that’s what you see unfolding in the Old Testament. A Holy God demands that those who follow him are to be holy, as well.

Then along comes the incarnate Son of God himself, God in the flesh, and he takes the holiness of the Old Testament law and stretches it to fit all mankind, in all nations, for all time. Listen to him on the Sermon on the Mount:

Jesus call to holy living began to spread across the earth….I’ve already detailed to you the massive effect it had on the practice of killing children, on abortion, on sexual immorality, on cannibalism, on slavery, on gladiator shows pitting humans against wild animals… but you need to hear me well when I say this:

If Jesus had never come into this world, we would be living in a very different world….a world with an abominably low level of morality. Our world would look little different than the pagan civilizations that literally filled this world before Christ came!

After Jesus Christ’s Great Commission to; “Go and Disciple all nations“, the Roman Empire went from putting their unwanted children out for the wild animals, and crucifying Christians on crosses to,…. in just 300 years declaring Christianity the official religion of the Empire! Christians didn’t amount to more than 5% of the total population but they so infected the other 95% that their righteous ways slowly became the laws of a pagan society…… It was never easy….. Up until Christianity became the legal religion it was always an illegal religion!

Early on, the Romans tried to get the Christians to recant their faith or die. They found they could not succeed so they began to bring their children, or, father, or mother and threaten their horrible death, in front of the believer. Ancient writing preserve the cries of family members begging the others not to recant to save their lives….they didn’t! But as the uncivilized watched the righteous ones die…it did something inside them. The barbarians became civilized and it wasn’t because of some government program!

Time brought many more barbarians, the Goths, the Franks, the Saxons, who invaded Europe killing everything and everyone. They were brutal slaughters without any regard for human life…until they ran up against Christians. Those barbarians are the forerunners of a large percentage of everyone in this room and the Europe many of us came out of became, literally, the cradle of Christianity.

Another percentage of us came from Scandinavia and our forefathers were the vicious Norsemen…the Vikings. These guys would show up in Europe killing, raping, pillaging, destroying churches and stealing all the goodies inside. Their fighter were called “berserkers” from which we get the word “berserk”.

By 1020 AD they had a national assembly in which the King declared Christianity the law. “Old practiced became illegal such as blood sacrifice, black magic, the setting out of infants, slavery, and polygamy.” The power of the Gospel on, even, a barbaric world!

We all remember the story of the Auca Indians who killed 5 missionaries in 1956 but now many Auca’s are open armed Christians. That has been the story of the spread of Christianity across this planet. The original God-less societies were immoral in ways we can only imagine in our nightmares…but with the coming of Christ all of that began to change.

I’ll predict something…the more we move away from our Christian roots the more we will move toward what we used to call violent barbarian behavior.

Violence has become a staple of our television fare…..We are still stunned when a schoolchild brings a gun and shoots up his classroom. We are still nauseated when two of our young Americans pull a truck full of explosives in front of a building in Oklahoma. The less the effects of God’s law permeate our society the more normal these activities will seem.

According to the US Chamber of commerce…Right now, .everything you buy today has a 15% “sin-tax” built in to cover the cost of theft. Your paying a 15% premium because so many others are stealing what you don’t buy

Dr. Elton Trueblood- We are a “cut flower” civilization… we may for the moment have beauty.. Our technological advances are stirring but we have already been cut off from our source of life and we are decaying. Already we see the wilting petals and drooping leaves. Our nation is already in a state of of advanced degeneration.

When you and I go to the hospital we probably assume that we are walking into an institution that has always been a part of man-kinds existence. Wherever there are people there is sickness…wherever there is sickness, there are kindhearted folk ready to nurse the sick back to health.

That is not the case! Insert into your mind the barbaric nature of mankind before Christ came. (that we have just been talking about) Imagine societies that freely killed off the unwanted and unproductive, 2/3 of the societies were slaves thought to be no more important than property, their form of entertainment was watching people being ripped apart by wild animals. Now, try to imagine ambulances picking up hurt people and little ladies in white dresses nursing them back to health.

It just didn’t happen…in fact sickness was so often tied, in the pagans minds to their religion, and those who were sick, might need to be sacrificed to appease the angry gods.

When God showed up to the Jews with big chunks of his Law dedicated to sanitary codes, and hygiene, and cleanliness, and nutrition, obstetrics ,and the care of children….This was light years ahead of any other civilization.

Then along comes the incarnate Son of God himself, God in the flesh, and he takes the healing principles of the Old Testament law and stretches them into the hallmark of his ministry. He healed vast numbers of people from whatever sicknesses they were experiencing. His power over sickness and even death gave great credibility to his words.

Many use the prophetic passage in Isaiah 53 to show that Christ’s death and resurrection provided for healing of body as well as the soul.

Many use this text as proof that Christ is Lord over our physical infirmities. I agree with that…. Some say this text is proof that God wants all his children to be perfectly well all of the time and any sickness is simply a lack of faith…I don’t agree with that. We do have examples. In this church, of those God has miraculously healed for his glory.

The profession of giving one’s life to bring healing to the sick came directly out of Christianity. If Jesus had never been born we might well have been nowhere near where we are in the art of healing the human body. Some historians give complete credit to Christianity for the development of the hospital, and I showed you a few weeks back, the huge number of scientific fields that were pioneered by Christians.

The Romans had, something of the idea of a hospital, but it was for dignitaries, for the military , for the gladiators and for slaves owned by the dignitaries. Anyone else who might come for care was simply driven back into the street to fend for themselves.

Christianity brought the first “hospitals” for the common man, but they were largely “hostels” for the poor and needy. Those who had money could hire a “doctor” to come to their home to try to bring relief.

In 325AD, at the Council of Nicaea, not only did the church hash out the concept of the Trinity, but they also decreed that everywhere a church was founded, a hospital was to be founded as well.

After Constantine legalized Christianity, Hospital began to spring up everywhere, often in the most unlikely places. People began to give their lives to the care of the sick. This process was purely the result of the spread of Christianity and it’s teaching on the importance of imitating the pattern of Jesus Christ’s love to all men.

Nursing societies sprang up, and women particularly would give their entire lives going from village to village caring for the sick and needy.

Voltaire, (skeptic, atheist)- The religious institutions devoted to caring for the poor and serving the sick are among those most worthy of respect. There is perhaps nothing greater on this earth than the sacrifice that the delicate sex makes of it’s beauty and it’s youth in caring within the hospitals for the collection of every sort of human wretchedness, the very sight of which is so humiliating for mankind’s pride.

Florence Nightingale- founder of modern nursing credits her work to the inspiration of Jesus Christ. She gathered Catholic Nuns and Protestant Deaconesses, and Anglican Sisters, went to the battlefield of the world and established nursing as we know it today.

Henry Durant, and evangelical Christian, setting up YMCA’s in Europe witnesses a Terrible battle in Italy. He worked as a volunteer helping with the wounded came home and wrote:

In this state of pent up emotion which filled my heart, I was aware of an intuition, vague, yet profound, that my work was an instrument of His will. It seemed to me that I had to accomplish it as a sacred duty and that it was destined to have fruit of infinite consequence for mankind. He formed an organization called the Red Cross.

Dr Louis Pasteur, devout Christian, father of pasteurization, sterilization, vaccines for everything from rabies to anthrax. Henry Morris says of him:

He undoubtedly made the greatest contribution of any one man to the saving of human lives…yet in his lifetime he was the object of intense opposition by almost the entire biological establishment because of his opposition to Darwinism. It was only his persistence and sound experimental and analytical procedures that finally compelled most biological and medical scientists to give up their idea of the naturalistic origins of life and their treatment of disease based on this notion.