Tucked inside his code-riddled book, “The Da Vinci Code,” author Dan Brown has a code telling the reader not to believe the book.

This is at least the assessment of my pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.), who explained in his Sunday sermon this week, “Brown wrote the book in such a way as to say, ‘Don’t trust it.’ He actually puts that secret code—which tells you, ‘Don’t trust the source I’m telling you I got my false information from’—in the genre of the book.”

In 1982, British journalists Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln published the non-fiction book, "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail." It was classified as a study of secret religious history and claimed Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and the two had a child.

Just the other month in London, these authors unsuccessfully sued Brown for plagiarism, arguing he lifted his book’s accounts from their book.

In Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” the central character is Sir Leigh Teabing, a name that combines Richard Leigh's surname and an anagram of Baigent. Additionally, Sir Leigh’s physical description is said to be similar to that of Henry Lincoln.

“If you take Baigent’s name and rearrange the letters, you come up with Teabing and Teabing, in the twist of the book, turns out to be the teacher who’s manipulating assassins and that kind of stuff,” explains Jordan. “At the end of the book, Teabing’s shown to be a liar and a con artist who’s tricked them all along.

“So the guy who set up the plot of the book, when you get to the end of it—if you’ve got the ability to decode Brown’s code—actually tells you that everything responsible for everything in ‘The Da Vinci Code’ is based on a lie.

“Brown himself, by taking the character of Leigh Teabing, and encoding in his name the names of the authors of the book he took his information from, and then showing Teabing is really a liar, is orchestrating a false story, telling you, ‘Hey, this is just a book of fun stuff you shouldn’t believe.’ So if you want to decode or decipher the ‘Da Vinci Code,’ say what it is—a bunch of hooey!”

One of Brown’s obvious aims with the book is to indoctrinate people into not believing the Bible’s accuracy or the fact Jesus Christ is God.

The book’s first charge, in fact, is that Christ never claimed to be God and that no one for 300 years following His crucifixion ever suggested He was God until Roman emperor Constantine came along, converted to Christianity and officially deified Christ.

Brown gives away his own non-belief in the Bible, as well as his apparent New Age convictions, in a Q&A interview on his website (www.danbrown.com). To the question of “Are you a Christian?”, he responds:

“Yes. Interestingly, if you ask three people what it means to be Christian, you will get three different answers. Some feel being baptized is sufficient. Others feel you must accept the Bible as absolute historical fact. Still others require a belief that all those who do not accept Christ as their personal savior are doomed to hell. Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious--that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment. I consider myself a student of many religions. The more I learn, the more questions I have. For me, the spiritual quest will be a life-long work in progress.”

Brown, in fact, passes fiction off as fact on the very first page of his book, referred to on his website as “the ‘FACT’ page.” He writes:

FACT:

The Priory of Sion—a European secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization. In 1975, Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.

The Vatican prelature known as Opus Dei is a deeply devout Catholic group that has been the topic of recent controversy due to reports of brain-washing, coercion, and a practice known as "corporal mortification." Opus Dei has just completed construction of a $47 million National Headquarters at 243 Lexington Avenue in New York City.

All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.

There’s simply no way Brown couldn’t have known the Priory of Sion was really an esoteric order established in France in 1956 by Pierre Plantard, a fact covered in the “Holy Grail, Holy Blood” book itself.

“Brown says the Priory of Sion was from the 11th Century but he knew that wasn’t true because all of that has been demonstrated that the Priory of Sion was invented by some French kook in 1956,” says Jordan. “The guy (Plantard) even admitted in court in France in a lawsuit back in the ’90s that that’s what he did. He admitted it to keep from being prosecuted and going to jail.

“At least one BBC documentary and at least three books in France exposed this stuff ten to twelve years ago.”

Just the fact Brown’s book concerns ‘searching for the Holy Grail’ should be an instant tip-off it’s only a screwball novel, reasons Jordan.

“The Holy Grail is the mythological Roman Catholic concept of the chalice that Jesus drank out of at the Last Supper and that’s where ‘The Da Vinci Code’ has its basis,” he says. “The Holy Grail turns out to be Mary Magdalene in the book and the principle plot is this Merovingian heresy.”

The Merovingian dynasty from the Dark Ages in France was said to be made up of the first French kings. The claim is Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a daughter who was carried away to France and became the progenitor of these first kings.

“Now understand why the French needed that tale,” explains Jordan. “The throne of England is said to be the throne of ‘British Israelism’—the throne of David. The Blarney Stone in Ireland that you kiss is in British mythology said to be the stone Jacob slept on in Gen. 28 when he slept under the stars and had the vision of Jacob’s ladder.

“They use an obscure little verse in Jeremiah, from when the Babylonian captivity took place, about how Jeremiah took some of Zedekiah’s daughters and hid them, and the idea is they wind up in the British Isles and become the progenitors of the British throne.

“I’ve seen charts that would fill a wall where they trace the throne of England all the way back to King David. Well, if you’re French you’re not going to let the English get ahead of you, are you? The French couldn’t be outdone by the Brits, and if they’ve got David for the king, then you need somebody important and who’s more important than Jesus, the true Son of David? So they got this heresy, and it’s just mythology. It’s screwy stuff but this is a historical thing, and by the way, in the new emerging Europe of today, this idea has re-emerged. This stuff kind of works behind the scenes.”

The plot of Brown’s book is the Holy Grail turns out to be Mary Magdalene and he gloms onto this ancient heresy from the so-called “Gospel of Philip,” which is nothing more than third-century pseudepigrapha, or spurious writings falsely attributed to Bible characters.

“The ‘Gospel of Philip,’ which is the source of the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, is a third-century book claiming to be written by Philip, who lived in the first century, so immediately you know the author is a fraud,” reasons Jordan. “If you’ve got to use somebody else’s name and write like you’re somebody else, obviously nobody’s going to believe you at the time. That’s why these kinds of books don’t get much play until years later when they wind up in some library, and people go find them and say, ‘Aha! Okay, well why isn’t that in the Bible?!’ ”

This stuff is all just old wives’ tales from eons ago that resurfaces with authority simply because people haven’t heard it before and are encouraged to believe it’s something newly uncovered that lends legitimate proof discounting the Bible’s validity.

Brown is simply playing into the overwhelming skepticism and spiritual confusion that is governing our culture more and more today.

In fact, in the Q&A interview with him on his website, he reveals, “Many historians now believe (as do I) that in gauging the historical accuracy of a given concept, we should first ask ourselves a far deeper question: How historically accurate is history itself.”

In talking about this general skepticism now about previously authoritative history, Jordan emphasized in his Sunday sermon the sad reality of how our government-run education system, in the last 50 years, “has been co-opted and has moved away from the didactic fact-based system of thought, based in logic and absolute truth, to a dialectic, feeling-based system that’s based in change and uncertainty.”

“The only absolute truth anyone is allowed to hold is that there is no absolute truth,” laments Jordan. “You get multi-culturalism that way; egalitarianism. What that means is everybody’s ideas and systems are as good as anybody else’s. They re-write history. The U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are no longer great liberating documents even though they have only the British Magna Carta as peers in the last 2,000 years as embodiments of freedom and liberty and the thinking that produces that.”

As Jordan points out, the government-controlled education system began to be subverted back at the turn of the 20^th Century when John Dewey “had the genius of wanting to do away with the Christian foundation of our culture, and substitute it with a dialectal materialism, known as Marxism.

“And he understood that the way to do it was not to go out and have an assault and egg the President. He understood that what you had to do was take a long-range view. Sociologically, it takes four generations to change a culture into something or away from something, and he understood that in order to do that you needed to educate the teachers who teach the teachers who teach the teachers. Don’t teach the teachers or the students, teach the teachers that teach…Go capture the universities who teach and now you’ve got a download system.”

The result, says Jordan, is kids in high school today are taught that the very institutions our country is founded on were put in place by “just a bunch of rich white men who wrote those institutions just to perpetuate their monopoly. Just a bunch of old, selfish, rich white guys that did that. And the kids aren’t given the concepts and the ideas our culture was founded on.”

Here’s a great out-take on all this from another sermon Jordan recently gave:

You can’t even go to the culture today and say marriage is “one man, one woman for a lifetime.” Families can’t be identified as “mom and dad.” You say, “Where did that come from?” It came from taking away the foundation upon which those kinds of understandings are based, and replacing it with a dialectic sort of reasoning that’s based on feeling and no absolute truth:

“Who are you to absolutely say that’s what a family and marriage is because I feel loved and if the person I feel loved by happens to be the same sex, who are you to say that’s not right?”

So it sounds more and more like the Edge of Night and As the World Turns and the Young and the Restless. That philosophy that used to have to be relegated to a TV soap opera is now the governing philosophy of the educational institution of our country and that makes a difference. There’s no absolute truth. It’s just whatever’s right for you.

Now when you do that, you do what Israel did: “Every man does that which is right in his own eyes.” (Judges 17:6)

So when you get that kind of widespread skepticism about everything, where, “We don’t know what to believe because there's no absolute truth,” you naturally get chaos.

In a Christian culture, people are going to be self-governed and self-restrained, for the most part, because they know God’s looking. They know there’s a right and a wrong and that “it’s appointed unto a man once to die but after that the judgment.” (Heb. 9:27)

You know there’s an accounting. There’s some absolute truth. There’s a god and there’s accountability. There’s justice.

But when every man does that which is right in his own eyes, what kind of eyes do people have? Your heart is desperately wicked. You’re going to wind up in sin and you know what sin does? “Righteousness exalts a nation and sin is a reproach to any people.” (Proverbs 14:34)

Sin produces corruption. Things fall apart. That’s called chaos and when you get chaos in a culture, that can only go so far.

When you don’t have character in people to restrain the chaos, somebody’s going to restrain it. I’ve said for years the problems are in the cities and the solutions to the problems are going to be in the cities. According to the last census, 54 percent of the population of our country resides in 50 major metropolitan centers in America.

The problems aren’t going to be resolved without truth being spoken to people, and what little presence there is for the church the Body of Christ, it’s such a weak, ineffectual ‘Praise Jesus, Hallelujah!’ kind of thing that isn’t based on the Scripture and doesn’t have any answers for these kinds of things and can’t contend with them intellectually.

They think they can stand out there on the street corner and pray and ask God to throw demons out and He’s going to fix the neighborhood. I’ve read Mark 5, and I know what Mark 5 says, but Mark 5 isn’t what God’s doing today.

That’s why the church today is totally irrelevant in solving those things. So where do people go for answers? They go to themselves. Human viewpoint. Where does that get them? More chaos, and when you’ve got to get rid of chaos, there’s always somebody going to come in with a gun and a government, and people will say, “I’ll take it because I can’t live with the chaos.”

And that’s where tyranny comes from. Now that’s the way the cycle of history’s always been. But in the midst of that widespread skepticism, and that enormous spiritual confusion, there’s always a real deep spiritual hunger and that’s really what will drive the interest in a book like “The Da Vinci Code.” It’s because people are looking for answers.

Jordan recalled going into his neighborhood bank a couple of weeks ago, and while walking up to the teller to make a deposit a young employee who knew Jordan was a preacher, yelled over, “Hey, have you heard about the ‘Gospel of Judas?’ ”

Jordan said he answered back, “Did he say he was sorry?” to which the young man replied, “Well, I don’t know,” and then Jordan responded, “Well, if he did, it wouldn’t be worth reading, would it?” To this, the young employee simply laughed.