When Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ mega-blockbuster opened in 2004, nearly every single national-name preacher you can think of (outside of John MacArthur) wholeheartedly endorsed the movie despite the fact it’s nothing more than a Roman Catholic propaganda film filled with mystic mythology surrounding the crucifixion.

I use this illustration to show the tremendous validity today of Paul’s warning in II Tim 4:3: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.”

When Paul wrote this he was in the last stages of his ministry and life but the application of it fits in with the ‘last days’ of the Body of Christ before the Rapture.

Just the other week, I talked over the phone with a woman in her early 50s who is associated with my church in Chicago. In discussing the timing of the Rapture, she said, “I think things are about ready to wrap up.”

It made me think of a comment my pastor, Richard Jordan, made in a sermon late last year that I saved. He said, “I tell you what I personally believe, and this is an aside, but before this thing’s over with (and the Rapture occurs), the whole Body of Christ is going to be in apostasy, departed from the faith. That doesn’t mean ‘getting lost,’ but they will be departed from the doctrine.”

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Attending college at Ohio State in the mid-1980s, I had a double-major in journalism and political science. I remember seasoned professors in both these highly-respected schools at the university lamenting the fact that our culture was abandoning words for images. Of course, this could not be more apparent than it is right now in March, 2007!

What makes this so amazing from a biblical perspective is that many Christians and unsaved people alike are relying heavily (even exclusively) on films, TV preachers, TV commentators, other visual media, etc., to tell them what the Bible says and means. Also, a lot of the church services you go to today concentrate mostly on song worship, skits, film clips, etc.

Just this past Wednesday I was out driving on a back country road here in rural Ruth, Ala. (where I technically live even though I’m only a half-mile from Arab’s city limits) and saw advertised on the signboard out front of a small Baptist church: “Tonight! Chili and Movie!”

Historically, Wednesday nights at Baptist churches have been designated for hour-long, mid-week Bible studies.

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Amid the real intense hubbub that welcomed Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, Jordan gave a great sermon on the power of images. Here’s a portion of it:

“In Numbers 33, when God told Israel to go into the land of Canaan and exterminate the Canaanites—kick them out of the land, dispossess them and take over the Promised Land—He said for them to ‘destroy all their pictures’ along with their molten images and little worship centers.

“It was the pictures, or images, that were being used to portray their religious doctrine. They had imagizations that described and dramatized the doctrine of Baal worship.

“ The word imagination is where you get imagization. Putting visual images into your mind imprints in your mind visual memories that you forever attach to events when you read about them or hear about them.

“Tell me something: Who does Moses look like? Charlton Heston. Now why do you believe that? Because you’ve seen The 10 Commandments. And that’s an old movie!

“Forever after you see this (Passion of the Christ), whenever you read about the crucifixion of Christ in the Bible, or you hear the stories, the images that have been so emotionally implanted and anchored in your memory (from the movie) are going to come up. The problem with that is those images are simply going to be Roman Catholic propaganda. . .

“Somebody said that a man with an experience is more powerful than a man with a message. And you see, you don’t have to think for images to come in. They say that you learn more when you study visually plus verbally than when you do just verbally, but you don’t learn better. And if you think you do, look at the TV generation we live in today and tell me that they’re smarter and more capable of thinking in the abstract, and thinking rationally and thinking critically, than your grandparents’ generation that didn’t have a television.

“In (Gibson’s) movie you immediately became conscious of the fact that the plot follows the ‘14 Stations of the Cross’ found in Catholicism; it’s filled with all the folklore attached to those ‘stations of the Cross.’ So you fill your mind with a mixture of the Bible story along with Roman Catholic mythology and this is forever envisioned in your mind.

“Then there’s all the Mariology; there are only two people in the movie who have the supernatural ability to see Satan—one is the Lord Jesus and the other is Mary. In the movie, the disciples, over and over, call Mary ‘Mother.’ In the subtitles, mother is capitalized; it’s a name. Mary is given supernatural powers, and when she connects with Christ mentally He’s comforted and she’s sort of hovering over Him and kind of in the background helping Him. In one place, she says, ‘Oh, can I die with you?’ ”

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Jordan continues, “In Paul’s day they had drama; they had the traveling minstrels and all kinds of other dramatic things. If fact, it was an educational tool in his day. Paul could have easily said, ‘In getting the gospel out, what you need to do with these heathen people who have never heard of the name of Jesus before is have a passion play.’ Or what you need is to get a Jesus film.’

“Instead, he says, ‘Preach the gospel!’ All throughout his epistles, Paul talks about preaching. There’s a communication of words that are required. The reason for that is events don’t meaning anything until you explain them, and to explain them you’ve got to use what? Words.

“And if you’re gonna explain them properly, you’ve got to use sound doctrine. Not just Bible doctrine. It’s not enough just to study the Bible. You could have Bible doctrine that isn’t sound doctrine because it isn’t ‘rightly divided.’ I mean, you could take the Book of Genesis and go out and tell people that God said you need to build a boat. The preaching has to be some doctrine that you associate with the events.

“In II Tim. 4:2, Paul tells Timothy, ‘Stick with preaching, Tim!’ Paul tells him the people aren’t going to endure sound doctrine and when they don’t, what are they going to want? They’re going to want the media. They’re going to want fables; dramatizations, stories.

“Now, when folks want stories instead of teaching and preaching, what’s the problem? According to the passage, they turned to drama (i.e., the media) because of a lack of tolerance and hunger for sound doctrine. . .

“I went on the Internet looking for people who were critical of this movie and what I found was that every major Christian celebrity in America with the exception of one has endorsed this thing. Jim Dobson, Charles Stanley, James Kennedy, all these guys. John Macarthur was only national guy who didn’t endorse it.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s interesting; they’re saying it’s a biblical presentation!’ While it does present the Bible story, it’s mixed in with all this other stuff. I thought, ‘I wonder if they just don’t know about this other stuff,’ but then I decided they can’t be that unplugged!

“You take even the one who declares himself to be a right-wing fundamental guy, Jerry Falwell, and he’s on the news defending Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ, which he saw in a (special) screening. And I’m thinking, ‘What is going on?!’ Well, I know what is going on—that verse right there (in II Tim. 4:3) is what’s going on! I don’t have to wonder; they don’t endure sound doctrine so they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears, and turn their ears from the truth unto fables.

“You got to understand, preaching is preaching because the Word of God wants to confront ideas, truth and thoughts; not your emotions first. The first connection with the Bible is with your head. ‘Out of the heart are the issues of life.’ It wants to connect with your inner man and who you are and as you think.

“Your emotions come after that, and if they come or they don’t come, the issue is truth; what does something mean. Where’s the meaning and the purpose in something? And all the emphasis on the drama is designed to take you away from that.

“Earlier the choir sang, ‘A Mighty Fortress is our God.’ Do you just listen to that and go, ‘Mm, mmm, mmm, mm, mm,’ or is it, ‘Let’s be soldiers!’ I mean, that thing’s got content in it! Martin Luther wrote that; that’s a Reformation hymn. There were people losing their lives, having their heads cut off and burned at the stake, and that’s the kind of information that produced people willing to face being burned at the stake.

“I was at a Bible conference one time where people were singing this song, ‘Our God is a great God! Hallelujah, praise Him. Our God is great! Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. Our God reigns! My God reigns! Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.’

“They sang five minutes of, ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah, our God reigns!’, and you think, ‘Just what does that tell you?! That didn’t tell you beans with the bag open! Our God reigns? Are you sure?’

“You know who the god of this world is? Satan. Who’s the prince of the power of the air; the prince of this world? Satan. Wrong god! So to just say, ‘Our God reigns,’ well, that needs to be qualified.

“Of course, you know what they’re really saying is, ‘God’s in control; He’s going to take care of me. I’m gonna move up from a rusted-out Toyota to a BMW!’ That’s what that is; that’s that health-and-wealth-name-it-and-claim-it-word-of-faith crowd. And when you examine what they say, and you build your life on it, you build your life on quicksand. You build your life on an illusion and you know it! All you got to do to know it is try it and watch where you wind up.

“The kind of people who wrote songs like, ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God,’ hazarded their lives. You wouldn’t have your Bible if it wasn’t for those people. You wouldn’t have your faith presented to you if it wasn’t for those people, and the people who wrote that song and sang that song endured afflictions and resisted unto blood striving against sin.

“I tell you what, somebody singing that, ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah, Our God Reigns’—the first time their toenail hurts they get tired and quit. They get all mad at God and run off at the mouth.

“I was out at the hospital the other day and this woman they wheeled in on a stretcher who had been in a car wreck was going, ‘Oh, praise Jesus! Oh, praise Jesus! Oh, praise Jesus!’

“I’m thinking, ‘I wish somebody would go stick a sock in it and shut her up! It’s embarrassing! Honestly, those (types) just run off with their emotions; no ability to control themselves in a crisis. Well, that’s the same people who sing, ‘Oh, our God reigns, hallelujah!’

“The guy singing, ‘A Mighty Fortress,’ looks at the crisis and has some internalized doctrinal understanding that gives him some peace and control to take his circumstances as an opportunity to minister to others, rather than thinking that, ‘Oh, praise Jesus!’, is ministering to anybody. . .

“Galatians 3:1 is a fascinating verse in regard to what we’re talking about. Paul tells the Galatians that somebody’s come along and cast a spell on them; fooled them with sleight of hand. You watch a movie and your emotions are dumb. They believe whatever the signals of your mind are giving them as real. People have been telling me from Day One that in going to see this (Gibson) movie they come out emotionally drained, weeping, stunned. There’s silence filling the auditorium. Saved, lost, all of them affected that way.

“Your emotions are dumb. You were just watching a movie. Nobody got hit. That was all sleight of hand. Do you realize that? Your emotions believe anything your mind is thinking is real. That’s why you have so much trouble with life—the way you look at your circumstances; the way you look at what’s happening in your life.

“If you think about it one way, your emotions respond that way. If you think about it another way, your emotions will respond another way. So what’s happening in your life really isn’t the issue; it’s how you’re responding to it. What are you thinking about it? Are you thinking sound doctrine or are you thinking error?

“Paul says, ‘Who has bewitched you? Who’s come in and put error in your mind that’s cast a spell over you and completely carried you away from truth so you don’t obey the truth anymore?’

“Notice he writes, ‘O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?’

“Now, they weren’t there when Jesus died so how was He evidently set forth before their eyes? Through Paul’s preaching of the Word. Paul came in there and preached the gospel of Christ. He preached the grace of God and brought that information about what it was.

“You see, the preaching of the Cross is not describing the gory goo and the events; it’s telling you what it means—telling you what God accomplished through the death and resurrection of His Son. What are the things God is doing; what are the spiritual issues there and what does it mean?

“Paul came in and set forth before them that information so clearly that the doctrine of the Cross—the doctrine of the gospel—was MORE impactful on them and their understanding than if they had been there in person looking at it!

“That verse describes the impact that sound doctrine is to have on your understanding. You’re going to understand more about what took place than if you were actually there, historically present!

“That’s because they knew exactly what Christ did; they knew exactly why He did it and they knew the meaning of the events. And so, the preaching of God’s Word is more valuable than an eyewitness account of the historical event. It gives you things you can’t get the other way. In fact, the other things make you think Moses looked like Charlton Heston.”