Why The New Testament Makes No Sense To Modern Christians – Grand Prairie DCLC #3

The brothers and the sisters around me did not have a New Testament vocabulary. Now, that was not a religious vocabulary. They struggled to use language to express an experience. By the way, that is always inadequate. Language does not express emotion, feeling, and sense; it only attempts to do so. Here was this high, incredible vocabulary, and I never heard it. I was walking down the street in Dallas, Texas, somewhere near the Baptist bookstore. I was at the first conference, the first convention I was ever at; so excited. But I had that thing, and I was looking at it, and I was reading out of Ephesians, and I asked myself that question for the first time. “Why do I never hear this kind of interchange between believers?”

I wonder if you know what I’m talking about. Can you give me a sentence out of the New Testament that makes absolutely no sense to you whatsoever? I don’t mean one of these crazy things like… Yeah, the baptism of the dead, I don’t mean that kind of thing…or the feast of demons. I don’t know, but do you even know what I’m talking about? Has this ever crossed your mind? Has this ever bothered you? Well, I think the reason we don’t is that we haven’t experienced what they have, or we have rarely done so. You and I must realize that after Constantine, say 313, 323, the Christian faith not only moved westward but also accepted Western rationality. We left our Eastern roots; excuse me, but the Christian faith is an Eastern religion. Now, tell David Hunt that my faith is an Eastern religion. Hey, listen. Anything east of Istanbul is Oriental. You and I have an Oriental faith. I don’t know why in the world we can’t understand that Jerusalem is in the Orient. It’s in the Orient. Hebrews have always been considered Oriental, and if you don’t know that, you’re showing your ignorance.

Well, look, I asked some people the other day: if you had to choose between a Western and an Eastern religion, which would you choose? I didn’t tell them anything, I just told you. And boy, Western religion shot up all over the place. Two or three little timid Eastern hands came up. If you choose a Western religion, you have these choices. Paganism, you will worship Zeus and Jupiter and Venus and those people, witchcraft or Druidism. That’s your choice if you want a Western religion. Now, if you want to be a Hebrew, you have to go to an Eastern faith. I’m telling you, brothers and sisters, that they were an experiential people. They were. They had their roots in an encounter with a living God. I can’t help it if the people on the other side of Israel do the things they do; I’m telling you what God gave us in Christ to the Hebrew people. Now that may shake you up, but it’s nonetheless a physical, historical, undeniable fact.

When it came west, it met Aristotle. I don’t know if you understand that Aristotle once wrote a book on logic, and it has become Western man’s way of conceptualizing. Did you know that when you went to the third grade, your teacher passed out a notebook and a pencil and said, “Now I’m going to teach you how to outline?” When she did that, she started making you a Westerner. And when I preach, and I start with an introduction, three points, and a conclusion…not including the deathbed story and the poem…I am following Aristotle’s actual words on how to deliver a speech. You and I are extremely logical, rational people. I’ll give you another example. I know you’re terribly interested in this. Western man came to the body and said, “The finger is cut; therefore, we will have a finger-ologist.” He’s on the 10th floor of the building, room 1091. I got a cut toe. I go to a toe-ologist. He’s on the 9th floor. I’m having trouble with my eye. I go to an eye-ologist. God forbid there ever be a problem between the toe and the eye, because we dissected him and compartmentalized him, and we never think of him as a whole.

Eastern man sees the whole man and sees that if he’s ailing, then there’s something wrong with the whole man, not some part. A totally different way of approaching things, and I’m not talking about Asia. I am talking about the Near East, not the Middle East or the Far East; the Near East. You cannot possibly comprehend this unless you have truly met a Yemen Jew. Have you ever heard of the Yemen Jews? Okay. Until you have come back to understand that we Westerners don’t conceptualize as Easterners do. We lost our faith, and we adopted theology, and we have become logical, rational, objective people who don’t know we have an indwelling Lord.

Recently, one of the brothers, a friend of mine, went to a seminary, and he was talking about how the professors were all teaching that the way to know God is through the Bible. He went up to his professor, and he said, “What about the fact that we have an indwelling Lord?” And the professor answered, “The only way we can know we have an indwelling Lord is because the Bible tells us so.” He said, the fact that we have an indwelling Lord is totally forensic. Now, what does that mean? I don’t have a foggiest idea. I never looked it up, and I don’t care, but it means something like “scientific”. Logical. And that is where we have arrived as Christians. We’re back to the Pharisees who search the scripture, and in them you think you have eternal life, but you will not come to me.

This incredible vocabulary that first-century Christians had was a struggle to present an experience to one another that was real to them in their everyday life. Let me take again the first Christian piece of literature ever written. Written to people who are mostly illiterate. Now this is the book of Galatia, written to the Galatians, one of the poorest parts of the Roman Empire, made up almost entirely of slaves or sons of slaves. Illiteracy is running close to 100%. About the only people who can read in that country are either some Romans who’ve been imported in or some Jewish merchants or others like that. The population is illiterate. These are among the poorest, most tragic people in the Roman Empire. And Paul has been in their four churches for about four or five months each.

Listen to what he says. “I am crucified with Christ, and nevertheless I live. Yet it is not I that live, but what?” “Christ lives in me, and the life I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and died for me.” It is accurate; the others are not; you are correct. It is by the faith of… But that little guy sitting down there, who could not read or write, understood that perfectly. He said, ” Walk in the Spirit.” And he said, ” Live in the Spirit.” And they understood that. That was their experience. And yet they were illiterates. We stumble all over Galatians 2.20. We don’t have the foggiest idea of what that means. “I am crucified with Christ, yet nevertheless I live. Yet it is not I that live, but Christ lives in me. And the life I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.”

There are mysterious verses all over Galatians written to people who never had but four months of preaching of the gospel to them that are still totally hidden from us. Wow. What was that man preaching? I’m going to say something to you here that I hope you will come to deeply appreciate one day, and it is this: not before, and not since, have there ever been a people who ever lived, who understood the space-time continuum and non-dimensional reality and other realm reality as did first-century Christians. They had a sense of another place. Not that you could get to in a rocket ship. You had to get through by walking out of this realm, this dimension, into another. It wasn’t until Einstein came along that anybody had the foggiest idea that those people understood some of these things, and we’re just now catching up with Einstein. Let me tell you a little story, and I probably will tell it again.

Einstein was once asked to explain relativity in a way that would make sense to people. What do you mean, E equals MC squared? Now, please listen to this very, very carefully. Before I tell you what he said, can you understand that there are two creations, or if I may, two realms? I don’t mean the old and new creations. I mean that, right now, there are two creations: a spiritual one and a material one. You got that? We might call it heaven. I prefer to call it heavenlies, and that’s another good reason not to read the King James Version. It is either the heavenlies or the heavenly places or the eternals. Only once in the New Testament is “heaven” singular, though it’s always translated that way. It’s basically a pagan concept we have that we’re going to die and go to heaven. I’m sorry, but that’s a pagan concept. That beautiful city that you’re going to walk the streets of gold isn’t in heaven. It’s the new Jerusalem coming down out of the heavens. That isn’t heaven. Okay, but it does come out of another realm. Now, first-century Christians were really up on that. A lady named Evelyn Underwood wrote a book about the deep Christians throughout church history, and she said they all have this one characteristic. Every one of them has a deep, profound sense that there is another realm, and it is spiritual.