Why the New Testament Is in Chaotic Order | The Hidden Disaster in Church History

Here’s what happened. Somewhere, someone took that codex, that manuscript of a complete New Testament, to a binder. Well, the binder was, we assume, a pagan. Whether he was a pagan or not, it doesn’t really matter. He was thinking like a pagan, and he was thinking like a bookbinder. So, there were laid out in front of him the letters of Paul of Tarsus. We have no idea what order they were in at that moment, but I can tell you exactly what order they were in by the time that bookbinder had bound those letters of Paul. The bookbinder sat there and figured out each of those letters by length. Not in the order that they were written. Not in the chronological sequence in which Paul wrote them. But by length. And there they stand. There, they have never been moved.

No one has thought about this fact, and they are in such chaotic, jumbled order that it has given rise to Christianity, incomprehensible in the great panoramic scenery, but all messed up. Men were driven to look upon the New Testament in a totally logical, totally intellectual way, and we became not a people of the New Testament in its proper setting, but we finally degenerated down to where we are right now. We are a people of verses, and we have never seen that beautiful story. We have never seen those books of Paul in the proper order, nor have we ever filled in the spaces, and there were spaces sometimes when Paul, for as much as five years, went without writing a single word. There it is. We don’t know what goes on in between them.

We treated Paul’s letters as though they were the same as the writings of Aristotle; Aristotle, who lived 300 years before Christ, before Paul, who wrote treatises, each on a totally different subject, 210 subjects, none of them matching one another. Uniquely different subjects. And he wrote on just about everything that could be imagined. He was a man of pure logic. He taught the Western world to reason. To think. To debate. To take this thought and that thought and put them together.

And that was the mind of man. In the 1st century, 2nd, 3rd century, and 4th century, little by little, it faded away to become Roman Catholicism, but the logic, the studying, the speculation, the guesswork; I don’t know how to say this to you, but there were so many men who were students of Aristotle and those 210 totally separate thoughts, who got saved, became Christians, and the best of them, best known, and maybe the worst of them, was a gentleman named Augustine. If you’re Roman Catholic, he’s referred to as St. Augustine. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Now, Paul’s letters are in total chaos, and the Christian who has been a student of Aristotle looks at the letters of Paul, and they have no sequence; they have no relationship with one another whatsoever; there’s no story there. Now, Acts is a story, but Paul’s 13 letters are not a story, not in the order they’re in now. And if you put them in their proper order, then a story will emerge, but we don’t know that story. We do not know that story. And that’s why the little pamphlet is entitled Unleashing the Word of God.

So, the man who bound the books…ah, well, let’s see. Paul’s longest letter is…and this is the way he was thinking. I just bound the writings of Aristotle, and I put the longest of his 210 treaties together, and then the second longest, and the third longest, and then shorter and shorter, and the shortest one of all is put at the end, and I bound them all. People bought them, and people studied them; those are the works of Aristotle.

And now, you and I, for 1700 years, have done exactly the same thing. Romans is not Paul’s first letter, but we have been treating it like a treatise. We have been treating it like a treatise. It has no father, it has no mother, it has no brother, no sister, no cousins; it is on “an” subject, excuse my English, a subject all by itself. And when we preach through the New Testament, I’m going to preach through the Word of God. No, you’re not; you’re going to preach through a jungle of jumbled-up chaos. It’s not his first letter; it’s his sixth. And it is in real circumstances, under real conditions, written in the year 58 A.D., whereas the first letter Paul ever penned was written in the year 50.

And most people, even scholars, ignore the fact. I didn’t say they didn’t know. They ignore the fact. It was the first letter, and it had history, and it had setting, and it had circumstances. It had surroundings. It had people present. There were conflicts. There were problems that provoked that letter, and when you put it in its proper setting, a story emerges.

The second letter that Paul wrote was First Thessalonians; same thing. A setting, circumstances, problems, provocations, and if you begin continuing on, suddenly there emerges a large part of the first-century story. And it reads so beautifully, it’s breathtaking. And you know something else? Simple. It’s beautiful. And you can understand it without going to a seminary or Bible school, and you don’t have to sit for the rest of your life while a preacher picks on this verse over here, and then the next week on that one, and another one here, and another one there. And the next week this one, and another one that one, and you always appreciate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but you never see the puzzle put together.

I’m going to show you the order in which Paul’s letter should have been bound, and I am inviting you to be in a new generation of Christians who read the New Testament and the words written and come to become acquainted with, to know, to understand, to fathom the story. The story. The story. The dramatic story, and every verse in the New Testament must yield to the story. The story is what happened, and you can’t take a verse here and say, Ah, it says this. Therefore, that in itself changes the story. The story doesn’t change. The verse must yield to the story. The story will not yield to the verse. And pretty soon, you come to the point that there are no verses in you at all, and you can feel the thoughts that flow from Paul’s mind and his pen. And there is drama, beauty; you can feel the pain, and you can also understand.

So, our bookbinder messed us up royally for the last 1700 years, and now you and I are going to change that, because this is the first time any of this has ever been addressed, tackled, and beautifully presented to us. This is page one of the rest of your life’s understanding of the New Testament.

Let me put it in a sentence. Let’s know the story. Let’s read the books of the New Testament in the order in which their events took place, and let’s start a revolution and get back to things as they really were. And you can’t do that without that story, and not without reading it in its order.