Decoding The Da Vinci Code: Listen To Your Mother! Series

INTRODUCTION

Opening Statement: Mothers are teachers. Mothers are disciplinarians. Mothers are cleaning ladies. Some mothers are gardeners and landscapers. And most mothers understand that baking cookies is more important than washing windows. Mothers are nurses and doctors and psychologists and counselors and chauffeurs and coaches. Mothers are developers of personalities, molders of vocabularies, and shapers of attitudes. Mothers are soft voices saying, "I love you." And mothers are a link to God, a child’s first impression of God’s love. Mothers are all of these things and much, much more.

Quotation: A Jewish proverb says, "God could not be everywhere so he made mothers." The power of a godly mother who understands the issues of the Faith and who takes the time to communicate those to her children surpasses the impact of a thousand Dan Brown’s. I love what Paul wrote to Timothy in 2 Timothy 1:3-5: 1:3 I am thankful to God, whom I have served with a clear conscience as my ancestors did, when I remember you in my prayers as I do constantly night and day. 1:4 As I remember your tears, I long to see you, so that I may be filled with joy. 1:5 I recall your sincere faith that was alive first in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice, and I am sure is in you. And then later in this book: 3:14 You, however, must continue in the things you have learned and are confident about. You know who taught you 3:15 and how from infancy [brephos “a baby”: Luke used this word to describe the newborn Jesus as “a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes] you have known the holy writings, which are able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 3:16 Every scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 3:17 that the person dedicated to God may be capable and equipped for every good work.

Explanation: It’s important to do what Paul exhorts Timothy to do here because you’re going to run into some dangerous plots along the way like The Da Vinci Code. The main plot goes something like this:

While in Paris on business, a Harvard Professor who specializes in interpreting symbols named Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night call. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. A baffling secret message has been found near his body. As Langdon and a gifted French cryptologist, Sophie Nevue, who just happens to be the granddaughter of the slain curator, solve a series of bizarre riddles, they are stunned to discover a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo DaVinci. These clues, though visible for all to see, are ingeniously disguised by the painter.

The stakes are raised when Langdon uncovers a link between the clues and a secret society named the Priory of Sion, whose more famous members include Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and DaVinci. Gradually they come to understand that the two are on a hunt for the Holy Grail and a breathtaking historical secret that would completely change the way people look at Christianity forever. It is a fast-paced tale that eventually leads to the home of Sir Leigh Teabing, an English knight living in Paris who has been searching for the Holy Grail for most of his adult life.

It is a conversation that the principle characters have in his study that has caused many who have read the book to question the very integrity of the Christian faith in three important areas. All the questions sharply debated at the beginning of Christianity in the first century are now being reopened. Is Jesus God? Is the Bible reliable? Is the church credible? What is even more disconcerting is that woven throughout Brown’s story is a movement toward the “sacred feminine.” There’s a movement to worship Mary Magdalene because he suggests that she was the mother of Jesus’ children. Through one of his main characters Teabing, Brown asserts that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, based on sketchy information in the Gospel of Philip. They had children and the church has covered this up for years. A secret society given to the worship of “the sacred feminine” knows about this secret. Leonardo Da Vinci was a member of this society and wanted to get the secret out in his day without being detected by the church. So he supposedly painted Mary Magdalene to Jesus’ right in The Last Supper painting of Christ with his disciples. This present day secret society knows the location of the Holy Grail, which turns out to be, based on their understanding of symbology, not a cup that Christ drank from at all, but rather, a person – Mary Magdalene’s grave. She is a Holy Grail with a trail of royal descendants from Jesus.