Did We MISS the Entire Point of the GOSPELS?

Well, I would say you have to give consideration to what you heard in the last few minutes. And I would really ask you, if at all possible, that you drop your preconceived notions about the Christian experience up to this point, and go back and remember the origins of the Christian life, the headwaters, the fountainhead, and look again and see if you don’t behold something radically different than anything you and I have been…Can I use the term brainwashed? Is it okay? Anyway, we have developed this evangelical, fundamentalistic, Pentecostal, charismatic mindset of what Christian fellowship is, the Christian life is. I would ask you to go back into God to find its origins. That light and that fellowship and that way and that manner, and if I can use the word method, and it wasn’t, did not greatly alter from the Godhead to Galilee, and I doubt that was altered greatly much after Pentecost.

Well, let’s come to the epistles and let’s come to the time after the Gospels. The Lord was implanting something into 12 to 20 people. They could have easily fit in this room. That’s right. The inner circle was probably around 20 people. They could fit in this room, and He was seeking to give them something. What in the world do you think he was doing for three and a half or 4 years? He was letting them see how He lived with His Father. That’s what He was really doing. They didn’t watch His deeds as much as they watched…the fountainhead, where all these things came from. I believe we read the Gospels amiss. The central theme of the Gospels is not life, redemption, or this or that. I think the center of the Gospels is Christ, and the center of Christ is His fellowship with the Father. Well then, if that’s true, those 12 to 20 people had to have carried something with them to 3000. And from 3000, Judea, Antioch, Asia Minor, and Europe.

Saints, if there’s anything on earth that impresses me about the epistles, and I mean, it really impresses me. I guess you’d have to reread the gospels to know what I’m talking about. There was no generation before them and no generation since them who had such a profound understanding of time and space. Not till this hour. Do you hear Christians walking around today talking about being in Christ? Just a little about Christ in you.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places. Not, have you heard that, but how attuned to you are such concepts. Here, one of the early disciples, followers of the Lord, starts an epistle off with that, just slashing it across the page, as if everyone out there who would read it would understand exactly what He meant. He didn’t explain it; He declared it. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places. Talking about heaven when we die and go to heaven and play on harps, and sit around on clouds? No, some profound something. Before Abraham, I was, the Lord said, and it set the tone for the Epistles. It set the tone for the Gospels. There is so much sense in the epistles of another realm and of a relationship invisible, belonging to other spheres, terms that we simply don’t grasp today.

And what did we end up with? We end up with a gospel, and this is a true gospel. It’s a correct gospel. It’s an awful shallow gospel. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Well, you need to repent of your sins and get saved. Now we’re going to sing “Just as I am.” Come forward. And you repent. Alright, that’s fine. That’s a good place to start, but that’s where it ends. That’s just about the end of it. Where is “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places?” Where is the tone of the epistles? Page after page after page: Christ, all in all. He wrote it, didn’t even tell us what it meant, because He expected everybody to understand what it meant. Mark understands what it means. I don’t understand what it means. That’s Saint Mark.

What does it mean, “all in all”? Our scientific generation in this age is beginning to understand a little bit of time and space, and that which is not time and that which is not space, and it’s only begun in this generation. It has been outside the Christian faith for the past 1,800 years. The sense of the other realm is simply not in our preaching nor our experience. And it was so rich in the first century. Now, I realize that many of you don’t even know what I’m talking about, but just pick up your epistles tonight when you go back to your beautifully, lavishly furnished room and turn on one of your 60-watt bulbs there, and just flip through and just look at all of the things that are in there that are not our Christian vocabulary. It’s not where we live. It’s not the way we think and conceptualize. We always start somewhere else. We start so objective, so surface, so here, so now. And when we do that, we come up with such an objective, shallow gospel prayer becomes you have to come before the Lord, you have to repent of your sins, you have to pray in Jesus’ name, you have to go and make restitution for all you did wrong, and then you present your needs and then you declare your place in Christ and then you say amen and you go to work.

And so here we are: Aristotle. We’ve broken prayer down into 7 basic steps. We get up in the morning to pray, go through our 7 basic steps, and then where have we gone? Where is the deeper Christian life in this? You cannot find this in the New Testament. You can only patch it together with verses. You have to create that by stealing from one book of the New Testament, then another, and putting your logical mind to it, and we end up with such an obligatory relationship to the Lord in a shallow, outlined, performistic relationship that’s not outside of time and space. It’s very in time and very in space. I’ll try to explain what I mean later.

Well, obviously, some were in the New Testament or some period shortly thereafter; we lost it all anyway, or a good part of it. Today, we’re back in the business of trying to get it back. I want to talk to you a little bit about the loss of it. Whatever happened to a first-century experience? The answer is I don’t know. My personal theory is that it got killed off. It was not so much lost as it was killed off. If we were to take this room of people right here, right now, and we were to take the brothers that knew the Lord and the sisters that knew the Lord the best, and we were to take them out and shoot them, then the brothers and sisters who knew the Lord best, who were still alive, would take over. There would be some new Christians brought in, and let’s say that the cream of the crop in this group was killed, and then the next best group would come along, and they would try, and they were killed, and what you would end up with is some new Christians.  Maybe some old boy had been brought out of Hare Krishna, or who knows what, some kind of weird religion. And he’d end up eventually being the leader with almost no experiential foundation. Who knows what that guy would be preaching before it was cleared? Well, there was not that kind of thing in the first century.

What was happening is that more and more, the only thing getting left in the gathering of God’s house in the second, third, and fourth centuries was the Greek mind, the Western mind, the Western mind, not the Eastern mind, not the Hebrew mind, but the Western mind. Apollo was coming to the top, and eventually, we ended up with a Christian faith whose roots and foundations are as much in the Greek mindset, maybe not in Greek teaching, but the Greek mindset…there is a difference…as much set in the Greek mindset as it is a set in the Hebrew Christian mindset. I think that the letter of Clement to the Corinthians is a very telling book. He wrote 2 letters. You might read them sometime, and you will find a man tied up with the here and now. He’s telling them about their sins. He’s threatening them with God and with punishment, and he’s griping at them and fussing at them, and you begin, you can almost see fading on the pages in Christ, in God. It’s just seeping through the fingers of the second-century believers. It’s just going fast, and it’s becoming a surface, objective thing. Well, very quickly, I think some of us don’t really appreciate what happened next, because everything that happened next is still in our bloodstream, in our heads, in the marrow of our bones.

As best as it has been figured out by the historians, of the many, many things that took place, one of them was, and I’m going to give you my rendition of this, not history’s rendition. There were a bunch of young, dumb, single brothers who were highly religious, who got caught up with the Buddhist or Indian or Chinese or Hindu concept of a monk, totally foreign to the Christian faith. Now, you can find anything in scripture if you want to, and they went back to scripture and found this masochistic approach to God. For instance, they took the verse Paul said, “I beat my body.” So, they grabbed the whip and started beating their bodies, and they caught on to this thing; they grasped this thing of being sinful, and that sin dwells in the flesh. What they did was head out to the Sinai Desert. Now you have to have a reason for going to the Sinai Desert, and they found one, and that was some ancient teaching that demons dwell mostly in desert places. So, they were going to go out and do battle with the demons. They moved into the caves of the Sinai Peninsula and lived there for two, three, or four hundred years without bathing, drinking the minimum amount of water, eating the minimum amount of food, and looking up at the sun while praying to the Lord. And I always think of St. Simeon more than anyone else. A fifty-foot, I believe it’s a fifty-foot pillar, 3 feet square. He climbed up that thing in his twenties, and he died up there in his seventies or eighties. He never came down. St. Simeon. That was a perfect illustration of the tremendous turn that took place in the Christian faith. These people were lauded and looked upon as the center, the high point, and the high…this was the deeper Christian life. This was where you were going to go if you were serious with God. Today, you become a missionary. There isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two attitudes. Forgive me, but the mindset itself is basically the same. For those of you who might be offended by that, there isn’t any such thing as a scriptural basis for modern-day missionaries. Excuse me, but there’s not, and I have watched so many brothers and sisters with this obligatory outlook go to… this is the deeper Christian life… great service to God, looking up at the sun, going to the Africans. I don’t take from the gospel going to the ends of the earth. I take from the motivations that sometimes, unwittingly and visibly, provoke what we do. I’m for going to Africa; don’t misunderstand, but we’re going on a very shallow plane.

Well, the other thing that happened, some guy down in Egypt whose name I cannot even remember, was not even a Christian, but he was teaching the teachings of Plato. There was a revival of the teachings of Plato, and there were 2 young pagans sitting there in that room, sitting under his feet, and one of them was named Origen. I’ve forgotten the other guy’s name, but they both were Neo-Platonists. One of them became a Christian and joined the Christian faith; the other one started some disciples outside the Christian faith, but some of them also became Christians. And you end up with, I don’t want to get into the structure of Platonic thought, but you can have Platonic thought without Platonic teaching. There is a mindset, an approach, and there was Greek mysticism outside the Christian faith floating around in the world on how to come to a level of knowing the gods, or maybe even a god, the God even, and they saw it as a passage of many, many stages.

Well, then came the man who did us great, great error. He did us more damage than anybody, and like most men who have done us the greatest damage, we don’t even know their names. This man was a Syrian monk who lived in the 5th century, and he was probably thought to be a Christian. He took the name Dionysius after the man in the first century who was converted in Athens, because he figured Dionysius, the first-century Christian, was a great follower of Plato too, and he was trying to marry the two. And he wrote what is called apocalyptic Christian literature, pseudo-Christian. Oh, thank you. Those are the words I was hunting for. Can you say them really loudly here? Okay, great, and that’s why the man is known as Pseudo Dionysius. He wrote a group of letters in which he pretended to be Dionysius writing to Timothy. Dionysius the Areopagite, first century, but this was taking place in the 5th century, and he was teaching his Neo-Platonism in these writings.