The Error Common to “Churchianity” and The DaVinci Code

By Reese Currie, Compass Distributors

We have not written about The DaVinci Code for a number of reasons. First, I believe that evangelical hucksters, trying to prey on the Christian market, actually popularized The DaVinci Code in order to sell their own products refuting it. They painted it as a much more serious threat to the Christian faith than it is in order to sell their own responses. Second, to properly justify an article about The DaVinci Code, one would have to go through the tedium of actually reading it, and I just don't have the interest to wade through yet another poorly constructed, flawed and fundamentally erroneous heresy, especially one that is found in the fiction section of the bookstore. Third, no one will remember what The DaVinci Code was in ten years—for the sake of those readers, it is a fiction mystery novel that assumes a number of old, ridiculous heresies are fact.

That having been said, I think the true, most fundamental flaw in The DaVinci Code and the Roman Catholic Church is the one thing they seem to believe in common. Because these ecumenical evangelicals certainly aren't going to reveal it for fear of offending Catholics (and potentially losing the Catholic market), I thought I would make note of it here.

The DaVinci Code and the Roman Catholic Church both share the delusion that Jesus Christ wanted mere humans to “succeed” Him somehow as the leader of the church. The DaVinci Code has its own notion of who those people should be; the Roman Catholic Church believes it is their popes. Both notions are equally deluded. Jesus Christ is the eternal leader of the church and no man (or woman) can take His place, on earth or anywhere else.

Consider: If you were the king of a kingdom, and some of your subjects appointed a different king to rule over them, would you not consider them to be rebels? No matter how many platitudes these other kings said about you and how they represent you, you would know that they were still rebels representing themselves, and that those who follow them, follow them in their rebellion; otherwise your own rule would have been sufficient for them.

It really doesn't matter if the leader is the pope or Joseph Smith or Charles Rutherford or Herbert W. Armstrong or Ellen G. White, or for that matter Jim Jones or David Koresh, or to go even further, to Mohammed or Buddha. People who transfer their leadership from Jesus Christ to any man or woman commit the same error, and have chosen a different kingdom for themselves.

Why do people do this? Only because Jesus Christ is not “real enough” for them. They lack the spirituality to recognize Jesus Christ as the real and living Savior, the leader of their lives and their churches. This is really no different than the people in the Old Testament who turned from God to idols. God was not real enough for them, so they traded Him for an idol of wood or stone they could see and touch.

The main reason God the Father was not real enough for people then, and Jesus is not real enough for people today, is that many of the people themselves are not even alive spiritually. To become alive spiritually, one must be “born again.” Only when one is spiritually alive, is it possible to recognize that Jesus Christ is also alive and well, and the leadership of the church is fully within His ability.

Others may actually be spiritually alive, but because of peer pressure, or the desire to look good in the eyes of others, or various other possible “cares of this world,” they go along with those who feel that we need a leader other than Christ. We have seen this happen to truly saved people in Scripture. For example, Solomon became an idolater, and Aaron, when requested, though knowing the one true God, willingly made a golden calf for the people of Israel.

So when the ecumenists say that, when they finally successfully join all the churches together and we need a leader, it might as well be the pope, it betrays something about their spiritual condition, and their need to go it alone with a human leader. God is absent to them because they have either pulled away from God, like Solomon, or they are not truly partakers of the spiritual life at all, never having been born again. Assuming that the events described in Revelation are future events, it is this attitude that eventually will make the ecumenists the sponsors of the antichrist: the desire to have a human leader that is real to them because they live in the natural; they do not have spiritual life to recognize the life that is in Jesus Christ, or they are so spiritually dulled that they won't recognize and insist on only His personal leadership.

I will close by giving a word about how to be born again and have the spiritual life that recognizes the reality of Jesus Christ and His ability to lead His church.

You must repent. Those who have never been saved need to repent of sin, and turn to God in repentance for forgiveness and the ability to overcome sin. Those who have already been saved, but nevertheless have accepted the false ideas of others must also repent: They must cast aside every preconceived notion that they have gotten from the churches and leaders who do not recognize these things, and turn to God so He reveal Himself to them.

No one who truly repents will fail to receive faith in God when He reveals Himself. When those who already have faith repent of their false ideas and their desire to hold on to them, it clears away that pseudo-spiritual muck that only serves to block their view of the true and living God and allows them to see clearly when He reveals Himself to them.

Will you do that today? Will you shut The DaVinci Code, open the Bible, and let Him teach you about Himself? Will you repent of all that “knowledge, falsely so-called” that we've gotten from our traditions and let God communicate His true self to you through His Word? If you pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit as you read the Bible, He will teach you everything you need to know about God to be saved, no need for middlemen who claim their own necessity. All that is necessary is God and your willingness to receive His truth.

The Common Error of “Churchianity” and The DaVinci Code is Copyright © 2006 by Compass Distributors to preserve content; permission to reprint is granted.