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Grace Emmanuel Church
Pastor Sam Chess
(Cracking The Code Part
2)
The Da Vinci Code
The underlying theme of this
book is that:
Jesus, was definitely not
God, and didn’t even claim to be God.
Jesus married Mary
Magdalene, Mary was pregnant with their baby when Jesus life was
tragically cut off by his crucifixion.
Mary fled to Gaul (France)
where she gave birth to a baby girl named Sarah.
Jesus, and Mary Magdalene
both from Royal bloodlines produced a group of descendants who are
now scattered across the earth. Sarah gave rise to a royal family
line that is still prominent in France
The Church has used every
means necessary, including murder, to try to cover up this truth
that would shatter the very basis on which our faith rests. It has
worked tirelessly to assassinate the royal bloodline of Jesus and
Mary.
A secret society, called
the Priory of Sion, have held on to the real truth and now are
ready to expose that truth to the world. They worship Mary
Magdalene as a goddess.
In the “original” gospels
it was Mary Magdalene, Jesus commissioned to lead the Church, not
Peter.
Jesus was not viewed as
Divine until he was deified by the Emperor Constantine in the
fourth century.
Today’s version of the
Bible was put together by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine at, a
meeting he hosted called, the council of Nicea.
We need to talk:
We’ve all read lots and lots
of novels and we have a mental understanding of how fiction is supposed
to work. Fiction, by definition, is:
a making up of imaginary
happenings
a literary narrative
which portray imaginary characters and events
I was visiting with George
Korzac this week and he said, “Help me to understand… this book, The
DaVinci Code is just a work of pure fiction right? Is it “a
literary narrative which portray imaginary characters and events”? Yes.
Is it a “making up of imaginary happenings?”… Very much so… So
what’s your problem Chess?
Let me explain:
Here is a fiction author that
I used to read a lot …. Jack Higgins. Most of his novels take place
during WWII and involve spies and intrigue. But on the second page of
each of them is this blurb, which you will/should find in every fiction
book you ever read.
This book is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places,
events, or incidents, are either the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.
Now we know a lot of authors
mix their fiction with real events. Higgins often uses names and facts
about historical people, and because I’ve studied history I can usually
figure out what really happened and what is just part of Higgins
imagination.
And there is the root of why
80-90% of evangelical churches are dealing with the subject of the
DaVinci code, right now, as this movie comes out:
On page two of The DaVinci
code we find the standard legal blurb (above)…… But on page five, Dan
Brown inserts a fact page….
Fact
The Priory of Sion- A
European Society founded in 1099- is a real organization. ( That is
false! He forgets to tell you that the original Priory of Sion,
long gone now, was a group of Catholic monks living in a monastery
in Jerusalem. The new Priory of Sion was a club of men,
formed in France in 1956 to write a right wing newspaper called
“Circuit”. I showed you their founding papers of WED eve.) Even
that organization has dissolved.
In 1975 Paris Bibliotheque
Nationale discovered parchments known as les Dossiers Secrets,
identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion
including…Leonardo de Vinci. (What he forgets to tell you is that
after an extensive investigation by the French government the
“ancient parchments” were discovered to have been printed on the
same printing press used to print the “Circuit” newspaper. He
forgets to mention that the BBC exposed the hoax on national
television in 1992 and that the author confessed to the entire
thing in 2000, before he died.)
All descriptions of
artwork architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel
are accurate. (That is false… art lovers just roll their eyes at
what he claims about DaVinci’s paintings.)
Why do I care? Why should you
care?
Because, much like he did
on his “un-fact” sheet above, Dan Brown goes on to re-write the
history of Christianity in such a way that, if he were telling
the truth, we might as well shut off these lights and go home.
If you know nothing of church
history and you read:
Jesus did not claim he was
God, and nobody else claimed he was God until Emperor Constantine
decided the world needed a new religion in 325 AD and decided to make
the man, Jesus, into a God.
If you are not a Christian…
and if you have heard, all your life, that “people of faith” are just
weak minded people who need a crutch to lean on to get them through
life, and if you know nothing of real 1st,
2nd, and 3rd century history…. You might read something like that and
believe it. But let’s say, in response, some Christian friend shows you
Jesus words, from the Bible:
John 10:27 My sheep listen
to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them
eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them
out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater
than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand. 30 I and
the Father are one." 31 …the Jews picked up stones to stone him,
32 but Jesus said to them, "I have shown you many great miracles from
the Father. For which of these do you stone me?" 33 "We are not
stoning you for any of these," replied the Jews, "but for
blasphemy, because you, a mere
man, claim to be God."
Obviously, the words of the
Bible, in this and scores of other references, totally contradicts what
the book says about Jesus………. but you have an answer, from the book,
for that too:
Today’s version of the Bible
was put together by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine at, a meeting
he hosted called, the council of Nicea in 325 AD.
The “real” early Scriptures,
according to the book, were Gnostic gospels that described Jesus as a
good man married to Mary Magdalene. The real Early Church was simply
written out of history 300 years later by an Emperor hungry for
political power.
What if that’s true????
What if I can easily prove it
isn’t??
I am having, one after another
of you tell me of family members who, after reading this book, are
beginning to doubt the very foundation their Bible rests upon. Jesus
warned us:
Matthew 7:13"You can enter
God's Kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is
broad, and its gate is wide for the many that choose the easy way.
14 but the gateway to life is small, and the road is narrow, and
only a few ever find it. 15 Beware of false prophets who come
disguised as harmless sheep, but are really wolves that will tear
you apart. 16 You can
detect them by the way
they act, just as you can identify a tree by its fruit.
We are used to looking for
false prophets who assure us the Bible does not mean what it seems to
be saying. We are not as familiar with dealing with people who carve
the historical foundation right out from under the Bible.
Let me illustrate…Think with
me logically here…… There’s quite a difference in viewpoint about what
happened during the Crusades starting in 1099. The Muslims say
Christians came in and stole their land….Christian say they were taking
back the land the Muslims stole from Christians to begin with. If you
really want to know the facts you wouldn’t try to find out the truth by
listening to what some modern-day “talking head” says is truth….
You would go back and read
the history of the times written by people who lived as close to
the actual events as possible!
This is pointing, to me, out a
glaring problem, even among strong Christians. We know our Bible fairly
well and we believed it. We can relate the history of the Bible from
Jesus birth to his resurrection. We know how the Early Church spread
across the near East because we read the book of Acts. We know Paul
journeyed across Asia and wrote his Epistles during those trips. We
know the New Testament took place under the occupation of the Roman
Empire. We know John was exiled on the Isle of Patmos when he wrote
Revelations.
Beyond that…when someone
comes along and says he’s got the truth of what happened in the
three hundred years after Jesus unfortunate death and it doesn’t
look anything like what Christianity has taught for 2000 years,
many, many Christians are left scratching their heads because,
while they’re pretty sure it’s not true, they are not sure why
it’s not true.
Even more tragic are those
who’s faith, has been, maybe a little too blind and not enough
informed, who read something so contrary to what they know the
Bible teaches and they actually begin to believe the heresy and
doubt the Word of God.
Think logically with me here….
In order for Dan Brown to be right in the Code, that Constantine, 300
years after Jesus death decided to make this “good man” into a God and
came up with a new set of Gospels and Epistles of Paul to support his
newly formed religion …….
In order to believe that… you
have to first believe that during that 300 year period nobody else
wrote any history to the contrary.. or you have to believe that after
Constantine came up with his new plan, he then went all over the empire
and found every book, every scroll, found every person who knew
somebody who knew somebody and erase their memories of everything they
ever read or their grandpa had told them.
Every one of you can turn on
your computer, go online, type three words into a Google search and in
three minutes you will know that thousands of people wrote innumerable
pages of history during that three hundred years that is still readable
today.)
Three hundred years is a long
time, but not as long as you might think:
President Andrew Jackson
was born 240 years ago. My grandmother’s (who is still alive at
101) great-great-great grandmother was Andrew Jackson’s aunt who
was well alive when Andrew was born. I can go back three generation
where one person is still alive when the great-grandchild is born
and span almost three hundred years.
So it was in the first
three century’s. I showed you this list of Early Church leaders on
Wed eve and what they believed about Jesus diety.
-Ignatius (AD 105) “God
himself was manifested in human form”
This 3rd leader of the
church in Antioch knew John and helped in the distribution of
his gospel.
-Clement (AD 150) “It is
fitting that you should think of Jesus Christ as God”
-Justin Martyr (AD 160) “The
Father of the universe has a Son…and He is..God”
-Iraneaus (AD 180) He is
God….for the name Emmanuel indicates this…
- This man is writing
are credited with destroying the heresy of Gnosticism which is
the total underlying philosophy the DaVinci Code is written on.
-Tertullian (AD 200)
…Christ…our God
-Origen (AD 225) No one should
be offended that the Savior is also God
-Novatian (AD 235) He is not
only man…but God also
-Cyprian (AD 250) Jesus
Christ, our Lord and God
Point is: the distance between
Jesus, who Ignatius is said to have met, and Constantine is only
separated by, perhaps, four generations of Church leaders, each who
knew the other. All of these people wrote reams of historical material,
much of which you can still find and read today.
The Code theory ignores
these people and their writings, which had a huge influence on
their world as if they didn’t even exist! Iraneus wasn’t an emperor
but he probably had a more lasting influence on Christianity than
Constantine did. You can’t just pretend he never existed! That’s
what Dan Brown does.
I have up here Philip Schaff’s
History of the Christian Church. He covers the history of the
development of the Christian church step by step, each happening
carefully documented… every thing meticulously sourced so there can be
no confusion. Brown writes a book with not one footnote…. Not one shred
of documentation to support his absolute re-writing of history
and…sadly many believe his re-write of history without ever asking him
to prove it.
What really did happen in the
three hundred years after Jesus death…and resurrection?
The Christian Church was
so excited about the news that Jesus, the Christ, after being
horribly crucified had risen from the dead. They boldly proclaimed
the news to a pagan society where the Good News was not
appreciated.
Romans 1:3-4 ….the
Good News about his Son, Jesus, who came as a man, born into King
David's royal family line. 4 And Jesus Christ, our Lord, was shown
to be the Son of God when God powerfully raised him from the dead
by means of the Holy Spirit.(NLT)
Romans 10:8-9 ...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.
Those word s sound nice enough
to us… but imagine saying them in a world where the majority of people
in your town who believed in a loving Creator God all thought you were
blaspheming for holding out that a carpenters son from Galilee was
equal with God.
The entire rest of the
civilized world around you was pagan. The most religious were the
dreaded Romans and those of Greek ancestry who’s idea of god were these
strange, unknowable beings who has to be appeased to keep them from
wiping you out. When your neighbor went to worship his god he went to a
temple where he communed with god through the help of a temple
prostitute. If your neighbor came home from his temple worship and
decided he didn’t like his wife or his daughters or his kids under 8
yrs. of age he could kill them and set them out with the trash and no
one would prosecute. Babies were regularly set out for wild animals to
eat as a form of population control.
Entertainment wasn’t watching
a boxing match but instead, often involved watching people fight to the
death or watching humans fighting for their lives against wild animals.
If your mother got to old to
be productive she would simply be eliminated. Worse yet, pots of human
flesh were kept cooking outside the towns so the poorest of the poor
would have something to eat. Over half the population were slaves and
could be killed, raped, used for recreation, or even eaten by the poor.
Put this new, growing message
of a Savior come to bring salvation to the world into that context and
try to imagine how they were received….. not well. The fact that
thousands and thousand of people were accepting the Good News made it
all the more threatening to everyone else.
The fact that Jerusalem was
the place where many people saw the risen Christ didn’t stop (probably
even contributed to) it from being the first place to begin all out
persecution of the church. The silver lining was that as people were
threatened with death they fled Jerusalem taking the message of the
risen Lord with them spreading the Good News across the civilized world
in a very short period of time.
Thirty years after Jesus
Resurrection there was a very strong wave of persecution, all across
the Roman empire. It was in that wave that both Paul and Peter were
arrested and killed. Strong persecution, toward the end of the first
century, exiled John on the prison island of Patmos in time to write
Revelation.
During the second century
Christianity was declared illegal! Christian were blamed for every bad
thing that happened to society and during the next 200 years
persecution increased to a feverish pitch.
Emperor Diocletian removed
all Christians from places of influence in the government and
military, burned churches, and tortured and killed Christians in
public arenas. Yet, through all of these violent acts perpetrated
against the church, believers in Christ continued to increase in
numbers faster than they could be killed. In Ad 312, Constantine
was proclaimed emperor of the West.
D. James Kennedy says:
The Roman conquerors knew
believers would not deny Jesus to save their lives.. so they would
bring their spouse, or child or Father or Mother and they would ask
them to deny Christ or watch the horrible death of their loved one.
Ancient writings of the Church are filled with accounts of these
people begging their loved ones not to deny Christ to save their
lives.
It didn’t help to try to flee
the clutches of the Romans because the Goths and the Franks and the
Saxons (most of our ancestors) were fierce barbarians who would kill
off whole families as sacrifices to their war gods.
This brings us to the mother
of all questions…at least for today….
You can buy into Brown’s
re-writing of history that Jesus was just a good man, and everyone
benefited from his words of wisdom but didn’t take him too
seriously until Constantine got a burr under his saddle and made up
the myth about Jesus being a God
Or you can pick up a
history book…for goodness sake… and find out that for the first 300
years of history after Jesus resurrection Christians were murdered
by the thousands because they would not recant their belief that
Jesus was the Savior of the world… He came to die for the sins of
all mankind, he was crucified, and then he rose from the dead
promising eternal life to all who would believe in him!!
History tells us that when
Peter was crucified he asked to be hung upside down because he was not
worthy to die in the same position as Jesus.
Here’s the mother of all
questions:
Does any thinking reader of
history who reads of the thousands who gave up their lives rather than
recant their faith believe….
…..that these people would
have died for a lie?!
Does any thoughtful person
believe that a second century Christian would have watched their loved
ones tortured and mutilated and murdered and then gone through every
conceivable kind of personal torture themselves, all the while
thinking:
Man, we are sure putting
one over on all the generations who will follow. All of this is so
persuasive that eventually the whole world will bite into our lie
and truly believe that Jesus was more than just a good man.
If that's not true then the
only other option is….
Jesus is who he said he
was, those who have told you otherwise are lying to you… and you
now have to deal with the plan Jesus Christ has for your life!
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