Lie #4: Jesus Has A Dark Secret – 1 of 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Some who study the life of Jesus cannot accept any supernatural factors. Thus, the virgin birth of Christ is dismissed as a myth. For these people, Jesus has a dark secret who was his real father.

To see why there is no dark secret, stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, why do some theologians these days deny the virgin birth? Well, what they want to do, Dave, and you have already indicated this, they want to strip Jesus of anything that is miraculous. These scholars, as they call themselves, come to the New Testament with a presupposition that there can be no miracles.

Therefore, anything that is miraculous must be denied. And of course, in that category we have the virgin birth. Now, in the book I've written entitled Don't Be Deceived, Six Lies About Jesus, I emphasize the need for us to understand the virgin birth, why it was necessary, the implications, but also to contrast it with pagan ideas. It's very interesting there, various theories about Alexander the Great, how he had a miraculous birth, but they all developed after Alexander became a great man. Jesus Christ's birth was predicted.

These are important things for us to understand, and for a gift of any amount we're making this book available for you, go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. So my friend, don't be deceived, there are plenty of lies out there about Jesus. Well, what if everything that you knew about Jesus was wrong? Exposing the greatest cover-up in history, those are the taglines of the book The Jesus Papers. So many books are being written today about Jesus, it's hard to keep up with them, but I was in the Los Angeles airport about a month ago and I saw the book there and I had read about it earlier and so I decided to buy a copy and read it on the plane from Los Angeles to Chicago. The author, who is one of the co-authors of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, says that Jesus was crucified, but he survived the crucifixion.

He was taken and he was put in that cool tomb and there in the tomb he revived and then he went to Egypt to live out the rest of his life there in a monastery. He also says that there are some Jesus papers that he has seen in Jerusalem that he wasn't able to translate, he was shown them only very briefly, and these Jesus papers apparently say that there was a man who claimed to be the Son of God, but wouldn't you know it, he said he was the Son of God only in the sense in which others are also the Son of God. So these are the Jesus papers that are going to expose the greatest cover-up of history.

What do we do with all this? Well, the book is based on all kinds of marginal, unprovable assumptions, imaginations, and all of the eyewitness accounts of the New Testament are basically discounted. You know, it's like somebody being in an accident and they say, well, what evidence do you have that this happened or that happened? Well, we have five or six witnesses who were there who saw it. Well, yeah, but let's find some other witnesses that weren't there and let's find what they have to say about it. We have a strong rope, not just a thread, but a rope that goes right back to the historical Jesus and you can pull on that rope, you can push on it, you can do whatever you like and it will not break because it is woven with so many different strands.

Imagine in the New Testament, we not only have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but we have two brothers of Jesus, two half-brothers of Jesus, Jude and James. They wrote books and what they wrote can be corroborated by even secular history in some instances. Another thing about this book is that it uses the Bible whenever it fits its theory. In fact, it will go into the meaning of Greek words and look at the text very carefully if it thinks it supports the basic imaginary thesis, but will disregard the Bible when it comes to all of the other important matters. I think it's important to say that there are many books that are written and you can describe it this way. They begin with the imagination, what they imagine and then they say possibly this could be true, possibility leads to probability and then they say suppose it is true and by the time you get to the end of the chapter it is true, which is something like this.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and lays duck eggs, it's obviously a camel. You say, well Pastor Lutzer, why are you preaching on that this morning? Well, you're in the middle of a series, actually beyond the middle of a series entitled the Jesus Deception. Lies that are being told about the man who claimed to be the son of God and this happens to be message number four, I believe it is, number four. But the reason I'm bringing these messages is not because I've run out of things to preach on. The reason I'm doing that is to inspire confidence within you, a sense of deep satisfaction that the evidence for Jesus is compelling and overwhelming.

That is the evidence for the traditional Jesus. I know that the Bible is self-affirming. When you introduce people to it, when they begin to read it, they are often converted. I heard a marvelous story this past week in Dallas of a man who began to read the Bible and was converted from Islam.

In fact, maybe next week I'll tell you that remarkable story. It has inherent power. But at the same time, these books that are being written that cast doubt upon the scriptures, we need to have some understanding of them. We need to realize where the people are coming from.

Because I want you high school students and college students and business people. And no matter what your work is, no matter where you find yourself to know that when we, when we talk about the Bible, we're holding a book that not only we believe because it's in the Bible, but we actually believe it because it is in point of fact true. And I want you to have that confidence as you hold the Bible in your hands. A more serious attack against the Christian faith comes from another book, the Jesus Dynasty by James Tabor.

He's of the University of Chicago, a great scholar, a great archeologist. And he would indicate that Jesus has a dark secret. Before I tell you what that secret is in his book, the Jesus Dynasty, he denies the virgin birth and writes, and I quote, the assumption of the historian is that all human beings have both a biological mother and father and that Jesus is no exception.

That leaves two possibilities. Either Joseph or some other unnamed man was the father of Jesus. Now, you remember we dealt with this briefly last time, the philosophical circle.

Miracles can't happen because they've never happened, and therefore there can't be any miracles, which is, of course, circular reasoning. But he's going on the assumption that it's not possible for God to have done something unique in the coming of Jesus. So he writes that this idea of humans being fathered by gods is quite common in Greco-Roman culture. He goes on to say that followers of Jesus invented these stories to honor Jesus and promote his exalted status.

Interestingly, listen to this concession. He says, granted both Matthew and Luke include dreams and visions of angels, but the core of the story itself is that of the man who discovers that his bride to be is pregnant and knows that he is not the father. It has a realistic and thoroughly human quality to it. The narrative, despite its miraculous elements, rings true.

Thank you. But not true enough for him to believe it. He asks, what if the virgin birth stories were created not to present Jesus as a divine Greco-Roman style hero, but to address a shockingly real situation, Mary's pregnancy before her marriage to Joseph. And he goes on to speculate that possibly the father might be Pantera, a story that dates back to 178, more than 100 years after the time of Jesus, a Greek philosopher by the name of Celsus wrote a book against Christianity in which he relates a tale that was circulating that Mary was pregnant by the Roman soldier Pantera. So James Tabor made a trip to Germany where apparently this Pantera is buried and to try to find the real father of Jesus.

So that's where we're at. He's saying that Jesus has a dark secret. Now, I know that there are other things that he says about Jesus, the dynasty and all, which is also false, but we can't go into that today. I don't mean to imply that if you were conceived out of wedlock that you have a dark secret, by the way, because after all, there are people whom God uses mightily. Just the other day, I discovered that someone who's a great Christian leader was actually conceived out of wedlock. God loves you as much as he loves all those of us who were born into families.

Just know that, that you're received and welcomed and loved and God has a plan for your life. But in the case of Jesus, it would be a very dark secret because what it would mean is that Jesus was not who he claimed to be and unable to do what the New Testament says that he can do. You see, the virgin birth in the New Testament is very different from pagan mythology. Oh, I know it's true that Zeus apparently was the father of the gods and father of people. Plato supposedly, there was a legend, was fathered by the god Apollo.

Alexander the Great, his mother became pregnant when she swallowed a pomegranate, et cetera, et cetera, and the list could go on. But you look at the New Testament, are you telling me that the writers of the New Testament would borrow these ideas from pagan mythology at their most degrading point? In Greek mythology, the gods were like humans, full of lusts and jealousies and arguments and wars and and all of the other thing. And that has nothing to do with Christianity. You read the accounts of the New Testament and they are bathed, bathed in holiness. God is not involved in a sexual relationship.

God is doing a miracle for a very specific purpose. It's hard for us to believe that that Alexander the Great's mother became pregnant in the way in which I describe, because number one, it has the ring of legend. And number two, Alexander the Great was a sinner. He was a great man, but he was a sinner.

He was one of us completely. In the case of Jesus, it is so entirely different. Yes, indeed, he is man, but he's also God. And you think of the miracles that he did, the claims that he made. And then in retrospect, now we can look back at the resurrection of Jesus and we can see what all that means. And and surely we understand that he was virgin born. And I might say today had to be virgin born, the necessity of the virgin birth. I want you to take your Bibles for a moment and we're going to turn to two passages today. The first is Matthew chapter one, Matthew chapter one, and we will see the virgin birth described. And later on, I'm going to give you the purpose of the virgin birth and we'll see why it is absolutely necessary for us to understand its significance. I'm going to jump right into the text in Matthew one, verse 16.

This is a genealogy and sometimes genealogies aren't very interesting, but it says in verse 16 and Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ. Of course, in this culture, the genealogies were always male. So and so begets so and so males. And in Greek, that little preposition of whom can be either feminine or masculine. In English, that's not so. We use the word whom and it's the very same word, whether it refers to a man or a woman. But in Greek, it happens to be different than that. The femininity or masculinity is determined in that little word whom. And there in the text in chapter one, verse 16, it says of Mary, of whom that phrase is feminine.

Wow. Breaking all precedent. Matthew wants us to understand very clearly that Joseph is not the father of Jesus, but rather Mary is the mother of Jesus, of whom of whom Jesus was born. But he did not have an earthly father.

Now you remember the story of the angel. It says in verse 19, her husband, Joseph, being a just man before they came together. It says in verse 18, she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit. Verse 19, Joseph wonders what to do. An angel comes to him and says in verse 20, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.

She will bear a son and you will call his name Jesus for he will save his people from their sins. By the way, Jesus lives up to his name. You see, he's a savior.

It means the Lord is salvation. Not everybody lives up to his name. There was a cemetery in which it said on the tombstone sacred to the memory of Methuselah.

Six months he didn't live up to his name. Methuselah, you know, is the man who lived the oldest. It's amazing how many names we don't live up to, but Jesus lived up to his name.

Now let's notice carefully. You will call his name Jesus for he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken. Behold, the Virgin shall conceive and bear his son and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us. I know that if you're here today and you're a Hebrew scholar, you might come to me later and say, well, the word Alma in Isaiah 714, which is quoted here, really means young woman.

And that's right. It means young woman. It is used, however, almost exclusively for young unmarried women, but it is young woman. And the Septuagint translation, which is 200 years before the time of Christ, which Jesus may have used in some occasions, which is a Greek translation of the Hebrew, does use Parthenon from which we get the Parthenon parthenos, I should say, which means exclusively virgin. And that's the Greek word that's used here. Remember the Old Testament written in Hebrew, the New Testament written in Greek. So regardless of what Isaiah 714 means, Matthew understood it to mean a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.

But the question is why? Why couldn't Jesus have had Joseph or Pantera as his father? The angel that comes to Mary in Luke chapter one gives us the answer and will not turn there.

I have another passage in mind for you, but it says very clearly there, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born within you will be called holy, the son of God. Jesus had to be conceived miraculously so that he would not have a sin nature, so that he would be born in such a way that he would be preserved from original sin, preserved from every taint of sin. And maybe the blessed Holy Spirit of God used that which Mary as a mother would supply for the child.

Jesus may have looked like his mother, Mary, but if Jesus looked like Joseph, it was because God just chose to make it that way. That which was conceived in Mary had to be perfectly and completely holy and sinless. And that's why Jesus was born of a virgin. Obviously there's a lot of mystery around Jesus, isn't there? Even when we talk about the virgin birth, because the moment we talk about the virgin birth, we're speaking about his humanity. We also have to speak about his deity. We have to remind ourselves that Jesus was a very complex person, God and man, but not two separate people. His humanity and his deity were all brought together in one person whom we call the son of God. My dear friend, you perhaps say to yourself that you are indeed committed to this son of God, but you know someone who isn't. Maybe a college student, perhaps a child or a grandchild that is tempted to walk away from the faith. That's why I've written the book entitled Don't Be Deceived Six Lies About Jesus.

In this book I talk about some of the lies of our culture, but also I keep pointing people to the very good and compelling biblical evidence that Jesus is who he is as portrayed in the New Testament. For a gift of any amount, we're making this resource available for you. Now, Running to Win exists to give you resources just like this to help you to run successfully all the way to the finish line. Once again, to connect with us, go to RTWOffer.com. That's RTWOffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337.

Remember the title of the book, Don't Be Deceived Six Lies About Jesus. Go to RTWOffer.com. Of course, RTWOffer is all one word.

RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. It's time again for you to ask Pastor Lutzer a question about the Bible or the Christian life. A listener named Pierce got in touch with us and he wants a book review from Pastor Lutzer. He says, I'm concerned about Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol. Brown talks about Freemasonry and seems to include many gnostic ideas in his book.

What do you think about his views? Well, that of course is a long story. Thank you so much for asking me about it. Just the other day in an airport, I saw the book for sale, The Lost Symbol. I didn't buy a copy and I don't intend to read it, but one of the books by Dan Brown that I did read is of course The Da Vinci Code. As a matter of fact, I wrote a book against The Da Vinci Code entitled The Da Vinci Deception.

So I'm well aware of the way in which he promotes his ideas. Now, even though I've not read The Lost Symbol, I can tell you in advance that what Dan Brown probably does is to use some ancient documents and give them credibility. That's of course what he did in The Da Vinci Code. In fact, he gave the gnostic gospel so much credibility, more credibility than those of the New Testament. The second thing that he will do is to read into those documents, things that aren't even there and make assumptions. He will have dots that seem to connect even though there is no real connection. And then what he does is of course spin a very wonderful, exciting story.

So we must be very careful. A word about the gnostic gospels. The gnostic gospels were written by people who believed that they could harmonize Greek mythology and Greek philosophy with Christianity. In order to give their ideas credibility, they wrote their documents attributing them to the apostles. So you get the gospel of Thomas and the gospel of Philip, but everyone knows that they're fraudulent documents. And if you've ever read them, you'll understand why we know that they are fraudulent. They have no such things as the earmarks of actually being historical. Now, for all of those reasons, we need to remember that if we want to find real history, we have to go back to the Bible. And when we do that, we discover in the New Testament stories about Jesus that have all of the marks of being authentic and historical.

They're references to times and places and rivers and cities and people. And when you read it, you know that you're reading something that is true. Well, my friend, you may or may not read the lost symbol.

I have no plans to read it, but this much I know that the word of God stands sure and whatever Dan Brown says must be judged by what the Bible has to say. Have a good day all day. Thank you, Pierce, for your question. Thank you, Dr. Lutzer, for those perspectives. If you'd like to hear one of your questions answered, go to our website at rtwoffer.com and click on Ask Pastor Lutzer, or call us at 1-888-218-9337.

That's 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. The sinful nature we all share was never passed on to Jesus, so He could then be the perfect sacrifice for sin. Without that perfect sacrifice, none of us has a prayer of seeing eternal life with the Father. Next time on Running to Win, more on slandering Jesus and on why the truth of the virgin birth really matters. Thanks for listening. This is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.