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First of all, the Gospel of Phillip is a Gnostic text that is widely considered by scholars to have been written at least a century after the canonical gospels. So it’s not authoritative.
Second, even that debunked book does not refer to Jesus having married Mary Magdalene, but simply states that he kissed her. The word used does not even denote a romantic kiss, but denotes something more like a kiss on the cheek or forehead.
A kiss was a common way for men to greet each otherPhillip, in mentioning that Jesus kissed Mary, is telling us that he treated her like other disciples.
“I’ve become convinced that the problem with believing the Bible is not based on what we don’t understand about the Bible – but it’s based on what we do understand about the Bible.
“What we do understand challenges everything about us. Jesus calls us to follow him, and that means we have to give up our life. That, I think, is the major reason why people don’t want to believe in the Gospels, because it involves self-surrender, the hardest thing in life to do.” (Dr. Scot McKnight, Biblical scholar, professor of religious studies at North Park University, Chicago. Quoted in Exploring the Da Vinci Code, Lee Strobel and Garry Poole)
John MacArthur writes:
This passage...strikes a death blow to the self-centered false gospels that are so popular in contemporary Christianity. It leaves no room for the gospel of getting, in which God is considered a type of utilitarian genie who jumps to provide a believer's every whim. It closes the door to the gospel of health and wealth, which asserts if a believer is not healthy and prosperous he has simply not exercised his divine rights or else does not have enough faith to claim his blessings. It undermines the gospel of self-esteem, self-love and high self-image, which appeals to man's natural narcissism and prostitutes the spirit of humble brokenness and repentance that marks the gospel of the cross.
To come to Jesus Christ is to receive and to keep receiving forever. But Jesus...repeatedly makes clear that there must be a cross before the crown, suffering before glory [and] sacrifice before reward.
MacArthur, John New Testament Commentary Matt 16-23 Moody 1988 pp. 45-46
John 14:6 – “Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.’”
This is so hard for prideful people to accept.
Elaine Pagels (author of The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ) says she had an epiphany while reading the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas during graduate school, particularly this passage: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.” According to Pagels, “The strength of this saying is that it does not tell us what to believe but challenges us to discover what lies hidden within ourselves….” This Gnostic perspective essentially says that salvation is within ourselves, and that it is in a process of self-discovery that we find redemption.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a different perspective: “The fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than the fact that I shall die, and the fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead is the sole ground of my hope that I, too, shall be raised on the Last Day. Our salvation is “external to us.” I find no salvation in my life history, but only in the history of Jesus Ch...
WESLEY'S PEACE
Although Charles Wesley had been engaged in preaching the gospel with much diligence and earnestness, he did not know what it was to enjoy peace with God until he was in his thirtieth year. Being laid low by an alarming illness, and seeming as if he were going to die, a young Moravian named Peter Bohler, who was undergoing a course of preparation by him to go out as a missionary, asked him, "Do you hope to be saved?" Charles answered, "Yes."
"For what reason do you hope it?" "Because I have used my best endeavors to serve God," was his reply. The Moravian shook his head and said no more.
That sad, silent, significant shake of the head shattered all Charles Wesley's false foundation of salvation by endeavors. He was afterwards taught by Peter Bohler the way of the Lord more perfectly, and brought to see that by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ men are justified. And now in his sick-room, he was able to write for the first time in his life, "I now find myself at peace with God"; and it was on this occasion he composed that beautiful hymn, "O for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise!"
Our hope likewise need only rest in the finished work of our remarkable Redeemer. Our righteousness is not about our righteousness. Our righteousness is the gift of the imputation, the transfer, of the righteousness of Christ credited, as it were, to our account. The debt that we couldn't pay, He paid.
(From Chris Surber's Sermon "Remarkable Redeemer")
A Nation of Bible Illiterates
George Barna wrote The State of the Church in 2002. Barna conducted a survey of self-pronounced Christians and here’s what he found about their knowledge of the Bible. These are Christians.
• 48% could not name the four Gospels.
• 52% cannot identify more than two or three of Jesus’ disciples.
• 60% of American Christians can’t name even five of the 10 Commandments.
• 61% of American Christians think the Sermon on the Mount was preached by Billy Graham.
• 71% of American Christians think “God helps those who help themselves” is a Bible verse.
George Barna said, "Americans revere the Bible, but by and large they don’t know what it says. And because they don’t know it, they have become a nation of biblical illiterates."
Just as the people in this Barna poll are woefully biblical illiterate, Christians are far too ignorant of the Word of God. No wonder 21st century Christians are failing to finish their marathon race. No wonder Christians by the thousands are falling prey to the false teachers of our day. They are being feed junk food and don’t feed themselves on the Word of God. They are desperately in need of a solid diet of good food, Scripture. We need to get into "spiritual shape"!
THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL WAY
Charles Finney stated, "Ever more the Law and consequences of breaking it must prepare the way for the Gospel. To overlook this in instructing souls is almost certain to result in false hope, the introduction of a false standard of Christian experience, and to fill the church with false converts... Time will make this plain."
Source: From a sermon by Sean Harder, A Wife for Isaac Pt. 2, 6/16/2010
The Gospel came to Hawaii during the period in American history called "The Second Great Awakening" (1785-1820). Henry Opukaha’ia was the first Hawaiian Christian. In the late 1700s his entire family was killed during a tribal war on the shores of Kealakakua Bay on the Big Island. As he fled from the battle with his baby brother on his back, someone threw a spear and his little brother was killed. In his grief, he pled with the captain of the Ship Triumph, harbored in the bay, to let him come on board and leave Hawaii. Eventually he ended up in the home of Timothy Dwight, the President of Yale College and the grandson of Jonathan Edwards. There Henry came to faith in Christ. He attended Yale College, learned Greek and Hebrew and became a scholar and an evangelist with a passion to go back to Hawaii to tell his own people the Good News of salvation in Christ.
But Henry Opukaha’ia died of Typhus fever before fulfilling that vision. Christians on the East Coast of the United States read his memoirs and said, “If Henry can’t go, we will go.” That led to the arrival of the first missionaries to Hawaii in 1820. Just six months before the missionaries arrived, in God’s wonderful providence, the Hawaiian people had overthrown their idol system and rejected their gods. They realized their gods were false and unable to rescue them from the many diseases they were dying of as a result of foreigners coming into Hawaii at the time – eg. the sailors on the whaling vessels. For that six month period the Hawaiians were a people without a religion. The Chief Kahuna of King Kamehameha prophesied that someone would come to tell them about the true God. Then the missionaries showed up and the rest is history!
The spiritual awakening in Hawaii between 1820 and 1840 is considered to be one of the greatest movements of the Spirit of God in the Western Hemisphere. Thousands of Hawaiians turned...
Thomas Merton: "The Gospel looks to a future event that is still not fulfilled - the full revelation of the Glory and the Reign of Christ. He reigns already, but his reign is not yet manifest as it will be.
"Yet this brings with it another temptation: the false news of those who have too much of a message, too clear a message - 'Lo, here is Christ, precisely here. and we are the ones who have found him for you.' They have the date and the hour of his coming, and they are themselves the main point of the news. A very important point, indeed. The Second Coming is their news.
"Such news is not to be believed. The Gospel itself is much simpler. Now is the judgment of the world..."
Years ago I read an autobiography of a lady named Patty Roberts. She had been the wife of Richard Roberts and the daughter in law of Oral Roberts. She and Richard were often the musical portion of Oral Roberts television specials. Patty had a simple faith and struggled with the financial aspect of this supposed life of ministry. In her book she describes sitting in a bathtub and looking at the gold spout the water was coming out of and thinking of all the sacrifices made to buy this and many other extravagant things that were a part of her and Richards lives. She knew inside this was not what the gospel was really all about and in her conviction walked away from it. She and Richard soon divorced and she was replaced by another wife who was able to deal with the compromise of taking from those who gave and investing it in an extravagant lifestyle.
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