Sermon Central
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Davinci Code: What Really Happened In History Series
Contributed by Hal Seed on Aug 2, 2007 (message contributor)
Summary: This is the second in The DaVinci Code Series. It answers Dan Brown’s claim that Christianity suppressed the truth about what happened in history.
[This sermon is contributed by Hal Seed of New Song Church in Oceanside, California and of www.PastorMentor.com. Hal is the author of numerous books including The God Questions and The Bible Questions. If you are interested in The Bible Questions Church-wide Campaign, please visit and watch Hal’s video at www.PastorMentor.com.]
Sometimes there are situations that rock our boat and make the whole world seem unstable and chaotic, maybe even uncertain. Aren’t there, friends?
Last weekend a movie came out that makes some seriously claims about the falsehood of the largest organization in the world. Author Dan Brown’s, The DaVinci Code claims that everything taught about Christianity for the last 1700 is wrong.
That may not be enough to rock your world, but for most of us, it’s enough to want to take a weekend to sincerely investigate the claims of the movie and the claims of Christianity to see what is really believable and worth believing.
So find a Bible for a minute, because I want to read with you three short passages by one of the eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus Christ.
Turn to p. 1049, John 1:14.
The N.T. contains 27 books, all written between 46 A.D. and 90 A.D. The last five books to be written were all written by the last living Apostle and eyewitness to the life of Jesus, a man named John. Towards the end of his life, 50 or 60 years after Jesus went to heaven, John saw some teachings creeping into certain sectors of the church that were a concern to him, because they were teachings that he knew to be false. And he knew them to be false because he was there, when the things they were talking about actually happened.
How many of you were alive during the Korean War? Anyone? Were any of you there in Korea? For John, it was like people were making up accounts about the Korean war that never happened.
One of the things that a few – not many – were beginning to teach at that time was that Jesus wasn’t really human.
John says to himself, “Not really human? I was with him. I watched him eat. I watched him cry, I watched him sleep, I watched him die. I touched him, before and after death. To say he was not really human was crazy talk.”
So John writes his account of the life of Jesus, called, “The Gospel of John.” And in the first chapter he says, “Let me tell you about Jesus. He was the “Living Word – the Logos” of God. In v. 14, he says…
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory...
Just want you to know, he was God and he became flesh, he became a human being.
Flip forward 25 pages to… just to make sure nobody misunderstood, at the end of the story of Jesus’ life, John says…
Turn to p. 1074.
One of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. The man who saw it has given testimony and his testimony is true.
“Blood and water came out of him. This was no apparition, this was a man.”
The second book John wrote was a letter to some churches. I’d like you to turn to it as well. John wrote three letters to churches, and this was the first letter he wrote, so someone aptly titled it, “First John.”
Turn to p. 1209.
Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God.
See what John is doing here? He’s drawing a line in the sand. He’s saying, “Church, here’s the truth about Jesus. He came in the flesh. He was the Word, God, who became a man for our sakes. This is a truth from God. Anyone who teaches something else does not have the truth of God.”
Why did I read those to you? Because those are the claims of Christianity, written, documented, and believed about Jesus from the first century on.
About the same time that Christianity was taking its place on the world scene, another religion, a dualistic religion called, “Gnosticism” was also on the rise. Gnosticism and Christianity had some clashes and some points of commonality, but to understand the DVC, and to understand where Dan Brown is coming from when he writes his novel, you must under Gnosticism.
“Gnosticism” takes its name from the Greek word, “Gnosis.”
“Gnosis” = “Knowledge”
The Gnostists taught that special knowledge about the nature of God and the universe could be known only by an elite class of people who had been initiated and let in on this knowledge.
