Making Christ Central Part 2

I have point one. You want me to quit? You want me to go to number two? Stand up. We’re going to sing “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.” Sit down; let’s take some more. We have some contributions to make that I think are monumental, and we’re not making them. And I have to tell you, I’m promoting right now…I’m not hitting…I’m promoting. If there is anything that you and I could do that no one seems to have ever thought of, I sure would like to talk you into doing this. I’m not going to live long enough to do it, and it needs to be done so desperately.

There is something so simple that we could do, that if it had been done, if somebody had handed me this particular book when I was a young Christian, I would have left the organized church. I would even go on to say this: what I’m about to tell you, if it were done and began to be accepted, as simple a thing as it is, I think it would bring down the organized church. I think it would bring it down. Now what in the world, Gene, could you possibly be talking about? Have you ever wondered how we got the order of the books in the New Testament? It is the most fouled-up conglomeration. It makes absolutely no sense, and no one seems to care, and no one ever thinks about it. I’d like to suggest this for the New Testament. I suggest that someone publish a New Testament that combines Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into one book, so you don’t have to keep reading the whole story over again. I have a book in my library that I have read more than any other book, maybe all the other books combined. It’s called The Life of Christ in Stereo. Have you ever seen or heard of it? It’s Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all combined as one, with not a single word left out of any of them. It’s all put together. It’s really beautiful. It’s a masterpiece. It’s a masterful work.

What if we had a New Testament that combined Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into one book, with the book of Acts attached, and the story…you could read it all the way through, right up to the last chapter of Acts. Then what if we rearranged the New Testament book epistles in the order they were written? Have you ever heard, “I’m going to sit down and read the New Testament through. I’m going to find out what God’s doing. I want to know what happened in the first century.” That is the stupidest thing on earth you can do. You are going to get to the epistles, and you’re going to find Paul in Corinth writing to a church in Rome, and you’re going to ask yourself, where did Paul come from? What’s Corinth, and why is he writing to Rome? This is over halfway through his ministry. Then we go to I and II Corinthians, which were written before the book of Romans, and Paul is somewhere else writing to the Corinthians. When we get through reading those, we go to the book of Galatians, and he’s down in Antioch writing to four churches in Galatia. Where in the world is this? We’ve got him in Rome, we’ve got him in Corinth, we’ve got him in Antioch. He’s all over the place.

I would recommend that you take the epistles and put them in their chronological order and read them, and it will shake you to your core because there’s enough of the story of the first-century church in there to blow you right out of a Baptist pew. I would like to see a New Testament combining Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then you’re reading along to Acts, and just a little note right across the middle of the page: “It was at this point Paul wrote the first piece of literature ever penned. See the epistles, book number one, Galatians.” And you could stop right there and go over to the first book among the epistles, the letters, and the first book would be Galatians, and you would read what they went through. Then you’d be reading a little bit further, and a little strip right across the middle of the book of Acts is, “At this point Paul wrote to the Thessalonians.” You’d go back over and read Thessalonians. When you got through, you’d be outside the organized church. You would be. It is only the chaos of the New Testament arrangement of the letters that keeps us from seeing a clear picture of what the church in the first century was like. I was taught in the seminary through the New Testament as it was arranged; I never had the foggiest idea of what the church in the first century looked like. Do you know where we got this arrangement? For pity’s sake.

There was a young man. He was 30 years old and teaching Augustine’s systematic theology at the seminary of action, the University of Wittenberg. His name was Martin Luther, and he had a syllabus on doctrine, and to him, if you were going to teach doctrine, the first and best book on doctrine was Romans. The second-best book on doctrine was Corinthians, and the third one was Galatians. And when he wrote the New Testament, he put the New Testament in the order of his syllabus in dogmatic theology, and there has never been a publication of a Bible or a commentary, but what has been arranged in the order Martin Luther put it in, and that’s some kind of insanity. It is that our minds could be so glued to something so chaotic and never even think about it.

I’d like to see a commentary on the New Testament put together in chronological order. I’d like to see the New Testament arranged chronologically. It would be one of the greatest contributions we could make. Brothers, it would show that we really do have a right to be here. There are no grounds for pastors. There are no grounds for church buildings. There is no ground for a Sunday morning ritual. There are no grounds for the sermon. There are no grounds for the pulpit nor the pew. There are no grounds for Bible schools. We have a right to be here, and we could make a contribution by showing the rest of the Christian family we’ve got a right to be here as far as the New Testament is concerned, too. I wish somebody would put that Bible in our chair. We need that contribution.

Now, the second thing is very, very close to my heart, and you’re not going to care one bit about this, but it means everything in the world to me. Have you ever noticed that we Christians, especially us outside of the organized church, do you notice that we’ve got more kooks out here than they have? Say amen. And somewhere or other, they become our leaders. If I have any indictment of those of us outside the organized church, it is simply that we do not do our homework. We do not do our homework. We pick up whatever somebody else we loved and was impressed with, we pick up what he says, and we don’t go back to really challenge a great deal of the garbage we pick up along the way. One of the biggest problems we have is that every time we get into a crisis in our churches and fellowships, we start digging through the New Testament for an answer and come up with a verse. And that, my dear brothers and sisters, is not where you start. Maybe that’s where you finish, or you’re in the middle, but that’s not where you start, and I think we’re doing great damage by coming up with verses and saying, “See, God said,” and in the first century they so-and-so. We get more doctrines, and we get more teachings out of weaving verses together. You can prove anything in the world by weaving verses together. Say amen. In fact, you could do the absolute… I believe it would be possible that you could take the New Testament and prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that God Himself was an atheist. In other words, I’m telling you there isn’t anything you can’t prove by the New Testament. Amen. Thank you, brothers. I really appreciate that. I’m glad to know you have a whit.

Strangely enough, in science, you have to present a model for anything you do. I’m a schoolteacher by trade. We deal with models all the time. If you’re going to propose something, you’ve got to create a model. You know the big battle between creationists and evolutionists: both create their models, take them apart, and improve on them. In science and mathematics, everybody starts with a model, and it is an enormous way to prove or disprove who or what you believe, or anything like that. And I cannot believe that I’m standing here in the year 1990…now, that’s nineteen hundred and ninety years…that’s nineteen hundred and sixty years of Christian history, and there has never been a model built of the first-century church.

Now, okay, I’m going to rush to tell you: I’m building one (a model). You can get Volume 1, Revolution, by Gene Edwards, but there are also Volumes 2, 3, and 4, and that’s one reason I’m taking off the next two years. I’ve got to finish it. But if I were in a place where I could, I would pass a federal law that said every preacher, before he started ministering, seriously, would have to present his model, and that model would be in the form of the story of the church from its beginning to its end. You could sit down and read it, and you could find out what that man believed the New Testament church looked like, because he’s going to constantly be pulling verses out on you, and changing your life on the basis of verses that cannot be forced into that model. Did you follow that?

Oh, brothers, the hour is late. The world is wicked. And what we’ve got to do is move up on a mountain, and the sisters have got to wear long dresses and stop wearing lipstick, and the brothers have got to grow beards and put on coveralls, and we’re all going up to the mountains to protect our kids, and we’re going to live on organic carrots. You build a model of the first-century church and try to stick that in the middle of it. Do you understand that it cannot be done? That the church of the living God was right down in the middle of the stink and the mess.

Hmmm…how about this one? I’ve got this verse in Thessalonians, and I’ve got this verse in Hebrews, and I’ve got this verse in such and such and so and so…I hope I get out of here alive. I’m picking on y’all in case you don’t notice. I’ll warn you ahead of time. I think it’s safe to here; I think you may have outgrown one of the things that you may or may not have been guilty of. And so, I got all these little verses that say that I’m supposed to be in submission to, and boy, you end up with a situation where an elder calls you at three o’clock in the morning and tells you to wash his car, and you have to be submissive. You can do that with verses, but you can’t put that in a model of the first-century church. It won’t hold. It absolutely will not hold. It won’t hold.

Let me tell you something really interesting. This ought to burn your toast. The book of Galatians, written by an apostle, a church planter, is the first book in the New Testament. It’s written to an entire church, four of them, in big trouble, huge trouble; trouble so bad that those churches are on the verge of total collapse. And there is no reference to an elder or any other leader in that letter. The next-oldest books in the New Testament are 1 and 2 Thessalonians… and those churches were premillennial, by the way. The churches in Galatians were legalists. The 1 and 2 Thessalonians are written to a church that’s into premillennialism. Real bad. Bad eschatology. The church is in chaos. People are not working; they’re about to go up a hill and wait for the Lord’s return. There is not a single reference in 1st or 2nd Thessalonians to an elder or to a specific type of leader. Not one.