In an exhaustive $20 encyclopedia on mythology I happened upon during a recent grocery-shopping trip to Sam’s Club, the introduction reads, “Myths tend to have an enduring power because they do not limit the world to statistically verifiable facts and figures, because they people the familiar world with wonder and marvel, and because they intersect humanity with the world of the animals and that of the gods.”

Talking specifically about Greek and Roman mythology, the book states, “The gods of Greek myth, and of Roman retellings of Greek myths, are much closer to human beings than the gods of most other mythologies. They endlessly interact with human beings.

“In Greek and Roman daily life, any girl out on her own fetching water or visiting a temple, any ship on a voyage over the wine-dark sea, any trader wanting to make a profit, anyone wanting to gain revenge or to win love, was aware of the gods’ powers to change a human life.

“Anyone wanting to gain revenge or to win love, was aware of the gods’ powers to change a human life. Anyone wanting to know about the future relied on the gods’ priests and priestesses to transmit their words of truth. In the myths, the gods regularly took on the disguise of human bodies to tease and test human beings.

“This meant that one of the gods might at any time substitute for a member of your family, your neighbor, the person you worked for. A prime directive of Greek myth was to honor and be generous to strangers, for no one could be certain just who was human and who might be a god in disguise.

“The gods took many other nonhuman forms, especially when they came to Earth in search of desirable human beings to rape or to take as lovers, and they also took the form of ideas, inspirations, moments of particular clarity, or confusion . . .

“These gods were not moral beings. The gods of Greece and Rome were neither good nor bad. They are best described as being more like energies, whose use could be judged right or wrong, fair or unfair by humans, but they used their powers without being bound by any system of morality. The only thing they insisted upon was proper respect from mortals.

“Many of the myths of Greece concern people who claimed to be equal to the gods or had the insolence to set themselves up as greater than the gods. Such claims attracted instant retribution. The gods did not always punish murderers, but they always punished those who dared act insolently toward them.”

*****

At the time Paul wrote his epistles, the world was Roman politically but Greek philosophically.

“From Daniel 8, it’s really the Greek empire still going on, just under a different form,” explains Jordan. “And the Greco-Roman empire; that’s what the Gentile world was. It was divided into three basic parts. There were the pagans, then the nation Israel, which had been set aside and scattered, and then the Body of Christ.

“The pagans were materialists, people who had material gods and immaterial gods—they had temples, priests, a full-orbed religious system.

“Paganism has a tremendous religion associated with it, and the dispensation of grace began in the nighttime of spiritual darkness, both among the pagans and the nation Israel.

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Jordan says, “Religious myth is not just about a bunch of naked guys up on Mt. Olympus. Mythology is a way of communicating information by using a story and drama and your imagination.

“A fable is a story which carries a moral meaning and the meaning is in the symbolism of the story. You’ve heard of Aesop’s The Tortoise and the Hare.

“Harry Potter is a modern-day mythology where they seek to communicate doctrine, truth, teaching, thinking, ideas through the mythology. Now Harry’s trying to communicate some bad doctrine.

“There are dozens of books written about The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars—modern mythology trying to communicate Christian doctrine.

“Now, whether the story really happened isn’t an issue and we don’t even sit around and argue whether there really are hobbits or not, do we? We know they’re not. It’s just a story; a symbol.

“So the spiritualizing, the allegorizing, the making a fable out of God’s Word rather than having the literal meaning of God’s Word . . . Adam and Eve—well, they’re just hobbits. They’re just the ‘vehicle to communicate an idea.’ And the idea that they would have to be historical figures, I mean, ‘What planet did you come off to believe some silly thing like that?’

“Now, for you and me, we think that to believe Adam and Eve weren’t real people, created by a real God who had a real creation, is unfathomable.”

*****

In the last epistle Paul writes, he says, in essence, according to Jordan, “Hey, as I go to be with the Lord, look at what’s happening to the church out there. They’ve rejected the literal study of the Scripture and turned to the allegorical approach.

“They’ve rejected right division, rejected final authority of the Scripture and they’ve rejected me, and consequently they never are going to understand who they really are or where the real life of Christ really functions.”

Jordan continues, “So when you step out of the book of the Bible onto the pages of early church history, that (allegorical approach) is where you are when you begin to study the big names and the big shots; you know, the people everybody always wants to talk about: Clement and Ignatius, Polycarp and Origen, and Cyprian; all these guys.

“When you begin to read what they have to say, you begin to say, ‘Wow, I wonder if these guys were even saved!’

“Polycarp was the first guy who used the word Catholic. He originated the term Catholic. He was supposed to have been a disciple of John and all this other bunk. He said, ‘He who raised Him from the dead will also raise up us if we do His will and walk in His commandments and love what He loved, keeping ourselves from all unrighteousness.’

“Now, I’m supposed to worry about what he thinks about dispensationalism or doctrine of any kind?! I’m supposed to hang on his every word?! I read that and say ‘NEXT!’

“Well, let’s try Justin Martyr. Just by virtue of his name he gets everybody all excited. He once said (of unsaved people), ‘We also pray and fast with them, then we bring them to a place where there is water and they are regenerated in the same manner in which ourselves were regenerated.’

“But if you’re going to get somebody regenerated with water, what do you call that? Baptismal regeneration. You know what you call that? Heresy. You call that a lie. Well, we can talk about Hermes or Turtillian or Clement of Alexander or Origen or Cyprian. And you can go right on down the annals . . .

“So I’m worried that those guys weren’t dispensationalists?! Not me. I’m glad they weren’t. I don’t want to be associated with them. But these are the leading lights of every church history book—that’s who they want to talk about. You say, ‘Well, where are the other guys?’ The other guys are there; they’re just behind the mud.

“Somebody asked one of John Wesley’s followers—where was you faith before John Wesley? And the guy, being an Englishman, responded, ‘Same place your faith is before you wash it—behind the dirt.’ ”

*****

In Romans 1, Paul gives the reader an appreciation for just what kind of world he and the other early Believers operated in.

He writes, “I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”

Jordan says, “Paul refers to the Barbarians, so is there somebody besides Greeks in Paul’s mind who are not Jews? When you read the passage, you know he’s talking about the Gentiles.

“In Romans 1:16, Paul makes a contrast between the Jews and everybody else, but he calls everybody else Greeks. Why does he do that? Well, if you don’t understand Daniel 8, you never are going to understand this.

“By the way, to understand Paul’s epistles, Paul assumes you already understand the prophetic program or some things in it. There are people who have the idea we don’t study anything but Paul’s epistles.

“Well, if you do that, you’re going to miss a lot because Paul expects you to already understand the other program. Did you ever notice the book of Romans is not the first book in the Bible?

“When Paul writes that he’s the ‘servant of Jesus Christ,’ he expects you to know who Jesus Christ is, right?

“The idea that all (dispensationalists) ever study is Paul’s epistles doesn’t make sense. Paul didn’t expect you just to study only his epistles. He just expected you to understand that his epistles were the epistles that talked to you—about who you are and what God’s doing TODAY.

“God’s got a relationship with the nation Israel that you need to understand. He talks about Christ being ‘of the seed of David according to the flesh.’ He expects you to understand a lot about Israel’s program. That’s how you know when you’re not part of it and somebody has tried to sneak some of it in on you.

“Somebody just last night asked me about the doctrine of the priesthood of the Believer. That’s a good Protestant Reformation doctrine but it’s not Bible doctrine for a Believer today; that’s kingdom doctrine for the circumcision believers in I Peter 2 because they are who Exodus 19 said Israel was going to be—a kingdom of priests.

“But that’s not who we are. You don’t have a priest today; you have a mediator. Why? Because you’re not this group of people over here (in the Four Gospels). You’re this group of people (in Paul’s epistles). That’s why we have pastors, not priests.

“See, people who don’t understand that, what are they going to have? Because you can see them and you can have a form of them without that. See how elusive that can be? And, boy, when you study church history, who do you study? Them which you can see, count, feel and write about.”