A (0:03)

Welcome to I Don't have Enough Faith to be an Atheist Ladies and gentlemen, I have several questions you have emailed in. I'm going to get to in a moment. But before I do, I want to ask you what is hate speech? Is disagreement hate? Is opposing a behavior hate? We're going to get into that in the first part of this program because I came across an article. It says this Canada Hate bill could be weaponized against people of faith. Conservative Lawmaker warns We'll put the link to the article here in the show Notes So this is a Canadian bill that it's called Bill C9. It passed the House of Commons and heads to Senate after lawmakers removed religious defense position. That's the subtitle of this article. And it's not just an article affecting Canada. It's an article that could affect all of us because there's this notion that if you disagree with someone or the Bible disagrees with certain sexual behaviors, that that somehow is hate. Let me read a portion of this article and then we'll unpack this idea that being opposed to a particular behavior is considered. Ha. Here's what the article says. During a House Justice Committee hearing last October in Canada, Liberal Party MP Mark Miller, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, suggested that certain passages from the Bible were inherently hateful toward homosexuals and questioned the criminal code's initial carve out for religious statements made in, quote, good faith. And here's what this MP Mark Miller said, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, quote, in Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Romans, there are passages with clear hatred towards, for example, homosexuals, miller said, according to the transcript. I don't understand how the concept of good faith could be invoked if someone were literally invoking a passage from, in this case, the Bible, though there are other religious texts that say the same thing. How do we somehow constitute this as being said in good faith? Clearly there are situations in these texts where statements are hateful. They should not be used to invoke or to be a defense. Unquote. All right, let's start at the top of this statement here. He says, in Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Romans, there are passages with clear hatreds towards, for example, homosexuals. Well, notice what he seems to be admitting here, unlike the progressive Christians, that these texts are clear that such behavior is prohibited by the Scriptures. So at least he's correct about that. But is it hatred to be against certain behaviors is the question. If it is hateful to be against certain behaviors, then Miller himself is being hateful toward The Bible writers. Because he is disagreeing with what the Bible writers say. He's disagreeing with what Christians believe and what Muslims believe. Would we say that Miller is being hateful because he disagrees with, with certain moral principles expressed in the Scriptures or expressed even in the Quran or other religious writings? Would we say that he's being hateful to Christians and Muslims and other people that may oppose certain religious behaviors or, or I should say sexual behaviors or behaviors of any kind? Why do we equate or why does he equate disagreement with hate? Why does he say that? Because he's bought into the idea that someone's sexual preference or even sexual behavior is somehow their identity. So if you oppose the behavior according to him, you're opposing that person as an individual and somehow you are hating them. I think this is completely misguided. Hate speech isn't dis. Mere disagreement. You might categorize hate speech as speech that tries to incite violence against some, against someone without justification. You know, kill that person or, or punch that person for no, for no good reason. That. That might be considered hate speech. You're inciting violence. But to say that you're against someone's sexual behavior, that is not hate. If you're say, let's, let's apply it to different sexual behaviors other than say, homosexual behavior. How about pedophilia? Is it hateful to people who want to engage in sex with children? Is it hateful to be opposed to that? No, that's actually wisdom to be opposed to that. That's a good thing to be opposed to sexual behavior with children. And yet pedophiles, people that engage in this, they want to justify themselves by. For what many years, many people who are same sex attracted wanted to identify or wanted to justify their behavior. They wanted to say they were born this way. In fact, way back in 2008, when I wrote the first edition of Correct, Not Politically Correct, How Same Sex Marriage Hurts Everyone, I was emailed by a man who said he was in the FBI. And I checked him out. He was. Because he wrote a book. He wrote a book about it. He was undercover with nambla, the North American Boy Man Love association pedophiles. And he emailed me and he said when I was undercover with them and infiltrated them, they were justifying their behavior by saying, we were born this way. This is our identity. Ladies and gentlemen, your identity is not what you do sexually according to the Christian worldview, which I think of course is the true worldview. Your identity is not what you do Sexually, your identity is how you were made and who you were made by. Your identity is the fact that you are a creature made in the image of God. You have inherent worth because of that. You're an eternal being who was created by the God of this universe. Your behavior is not who you are. Your behavior might be some of the things you do, but your behavior is not what you are. I mean, to say that your behavior is what you are would be to say that if you lie, that means your identity is a liar. No, your identity is not a liar. Your identity is. You're made in the image of God who have sinned by lying. If you commit adultery, is your identity an adulterer? Do you go around saying, I'm an adulterer? I mean, if you do, that's pretty sad that you're. You're associating your essence with sin. Your essence is not with sin. You may be a sinner in the sense that you're bent towards sin and you have a sin nature, but you were created by God and made in the image of God. And your adultery or your lying or your stealing or whatever sin you commit or I commit isn't our essence. It might be what we sometimes do, but it's not who we are. We're made in the likeness and image of God. Now, I know. For convenience, we refer to people as adulterers or sinners or liars or. And that's for convenience. We get that it would be difficult to even speak to continually, efficiently by saying, those who commit adultery, those who engage in homosexual acts, those that gain in heather, that engage in heterosexual acts, those that lie, those that steal. It's easier to say thief. It's easier to say liar. I get it. But in reality, that's not the essence of who. Of who you are. What, what you might do simply describes your behavior, but that's not who you are. In fact, the Bible even refers to people by these terms to make a point, because we are all sinners, we are all fallen, and we all need a savior. So, for example, Paul, writing in 1 Corinthians, chapter 6, says this. Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who have sex with men, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor swindlers who inherit the kingdom of God. But then he goes on to say, and that is what some of you were. But you were washed. You were Sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. So the Bible's using the same kind of conventional language we use when we call somebody a liar, an adulterer, a murderer. But the essence of what that person is is to be a creature made in the image of God. All of us, however, are guilty of some of these sins. So we do need to have our sins paid for. Either we're going to pay for them or Jesus is going to pay for them. And that's why Paul says that's what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified. The Bible's using the same language we use, but I don't think the Bible is suggesting that your. Your. It's certainly not suggesting, certainly not stating that the fact that you were made in the image of God has now been erased. You're still made in the image of God. Your behavior mars that image to a certain extent, but you're still made in the image of God. That's who you are. What you do is why you need forgiveness. We all need forgiveness. By the way, I know this passage is quoted a lot, and Christians also will say this is one of the verses that talk about why homosexuality is a sin. Which is true. But this passage gets all of us because he says in here, idolaters. In here he says, the greedy. Some translations say those who are covetous. All of us are covetous to a certain extent. All of us are idolaters to a certain extent. We don't always put God at the top of our priority list. We have idols that we put on top of of God. So don't get all self righteous by saying, well, this passage points out the homosexuals are not going to inherit the kingdom of God. Yeah, they're not going to inherit. Neither are you. Okay. Because you're guilty of one or more of these sins as well. That's why we all need a savior. People will say, well, what's your message to the LGBTQ community? The same message to every other community. We're all sinners. Everyone needs a savior. Even if you could make the case, which you can't, but even if you could make the case that there's nothing wrong with same sex behavior, you're still guilty of other behaviors. So you still need Jesus. Of course. Sexual immorality is a sin. Same sex, opposite sex, illicit opposite sex, still a sin, still needs a savior. That's why Paul goes on to say, flee from sexual immorality we're all guilty. So no, it is not hate speech to be against certain behaviors. In fact, it might be actually love speech because you're trying to warn people to stay away from behaviors that can have eternal and also temporal negative consequences. So this goes right back to Isaiah in Isaiah chapter 5 saying, Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. We have people in our government here in the Canadian government calling good evil and evil good. By the way, it's happened in the NBA as well. I'm sure you've seen the story of Jaden Ivy, who was a player on the Chicago Bulls, who recently I, I suppose became a Christian. I don't exactly know when, but he actually said, I'm not the. The Jade and Ivy I used to be. The old Jaden Ivy is dead. I'm alive to Christ. So no matter what the basketball said or he says, I'm alive to Christ. No matter what the basketball setting is. This man had come out and did a video where he said that the NBA wants us to celebrate Pride Month. He said, the NBA, they proclaim Pride Month unrighteousness, come celebrate Pride Month. And that apparently got him fired within a few hours for conduct, conduct detrimental to the team. To come out and say we ought not be celebrating unrighteousness. That got him fired as a chic. As a Chicago Bulls basketball player. Now, there's so much to, to. To say here about this, but one thing I want to point out about this is the incredible double standard that the NBA has. There have been players, folks I've looked up recently, like Jackson Hayes or Jackson, yeah, Jackson Hayes was arrested for domestic violence, as was Miles Bridges, as was Kevin Porter. These are all NBA players. And at least two of the three there, Porter may still be active, I'm not sure. But Hayes and Bridges are both still active players. They were arrested on felony. Well, Bridges was arrested on felony domestic violence charges in 2022 and he's still an active NBA player. Jackson Hayes was arrested on domestic violence in 2021 and he later entered a no contest plea. So he plead down to a misdemeanor and apparently he's now with the Lakers. Kevin Porter was arrested and charged in connection with an assault on his girlfriend while he was with the Rockets. How can these players still be playing in the N. B A? At least two of the three I know are. Yet you come out and you say, I don't think we ought to be celebrating Pride Month. And suddenly you're off the team. Why is that? And oh, by the way, why did the NBA just earlier this year extend their nine year partnership with a Middle Eastern country, the United Arab Emirates, to promote the NBA over in that country when homosexual behavior in that country is illegal? And apparently the deal is worth over $300 million. Hmm, let's see. We can't say anything negative if we live here in America about celebrating lgbtq, but we can make all those things illegal in another country, and we can have a relationship with those people. A big, lucrative $300 million relationship. They imprison homosexuals. Maybe they even execute them, I don't know. But it's illegal to engage in homosexual behavior over there. And the NBA is just fine with that. Hmm. Follow the money, huh? Also, the New York Knicks signed a jersey patch deal with, get this, this is what the patch apparently says, quote, experience Abu Dhabi, unquote, for the 2024, 25 season. And the deal was about $30 million per season. So experience Abu Dhabi. Do we want to send LGBTQ people over to Abu Dhabi for them to experience Abu Dhabi with their laws over there? Is that what you're saying? Well, if it's worth $30 million, we'll look the other way on their. On their objection and even, even their ability and desire and their actual laws that they have against same sex behavior. We'll look the other way for this $30 million deal. But if you're a player and you're hurt so you're not really contributing to the team, as Jaden Ivy was, and you say anything negative against LGBTQ behavior, boom, you're gone, and a lot of people are going to start questioning your mental health. Isn't that interesting? There's been several people, particularly sports commentator commentators, saying, oh, maybe his mental health is a problem. I'm really worried about his mental health. Oh, so now you're going to say that people who oppose same sex behavior are mentally unstable. Okay, by what standard are you saying that? And are you then saying that all Christians, all Muslims, all Jews, all just people of conscience who don't think that same sex behavior is natural, think it's actually sinful, that all of them are mentally unstable? Do you know it's only been in the past 10 minutes, at least in the west, we've had same sex marriage. In fact, all the way up to 1986, there were laws in the United States that made same sex behavior illegal. It was illegal. Let's see, 1986 was the Bowers v. Hartwick decision. It's actually not 1986. I'm getting my cases confused. It was the 2003 decision that Bowers v. Hartwick in 1986 actually affirmed laws against same sex interaction, same sex behavior. It was the subsequent case in 2003, the reference is escaping me right now. That said, those laws are no longer constitutional after they were constitutional for almost 200 years. Over 200 years, the Fed said the states can't have laws that proscribe same sex relationships. So the Constitution never changed. But the interpretation sure did. In any event, it's only been in the past 10 minutes of Western civilization that we've not only made same sex behavior legal, but we've gone from prohibiting it, right through permitting it all the way to promoting it by having same sex marriage. There's a, there's a big difference between prohibiting something, permitting something, and promoting something. Those are the only three things a society can do on any issue. You can prohibit it, you can permit it, or you can promote it. To go from prohibit to promote virtually overnight is pretty extreme. It's been said before, whenever you put a fence somewhere, you ought to pause long enough to figure out why somebody put that fence there to begin with before you try and move it. In any event, claiming now that we're promoting same sex behavior, which we are, through same sex marriage is something that has just happened very recently. And as late as 1973, same sex attraction, according to the medical authorities, was considered a disorder. It was the people that had it that were considered to have some sort of mental health issue. Now this is completely flipped on its head, largely due to the sexual revolution and the politic, the, the, the politicization. I can't, I just can't say that word. I don't know why. Politicization. Politicization. Somebody. I'm from New Jersey, I can hardly speak English. They politicized medicine. They politicized medicine. It's been political pressure that changed all this. It was also political pressure that people decided they thought it was a good idea to try and transition children. Thankfully, that is waning, as even gender clinics overseas are, are admitting this isn't working. It's hurting children. And by the way, we don't want to pay any of the, of the big lawsuits that we're getting by children that we transitioned, we cut off their breasts and now they're adults and now they're suing us. But all that happened through political pressure and now the financial pressure on those people is getting so difficult, so heavy that they're pulling out of the gender affirming care business, thankfully. But when politics starts to get involved in medicine, rather than what really is right, true and good for a person. You know there's an issue. So you might want to reconsider calling Jaden Ivy mentally unstable. It's not Jaden Ivy that's mentally unstable. Well, actually, I don't know his mental health situation, to be honest, and neither do people who are evaluating him from some videos they see online. But the implication here is that anyone who believes that same sex behavior is somehow wrong is mentally unstable. Nonsense. First of all, you need a standard. What standard? Are you saying that same sex behavior is right and good and true? By what standard? God. If you're not pointing to God, then you don't have a standard. That is, that is binding on all people. It's just your opinion. There are no rights unless God exists. There is no standard of righteousness, justice, or even love unless God exists. You everything is a matter of opinion. So just thought I'd point this out that the hypocrisy is overwhelming here regarding the NBA and the idea that being against a certain sexual behavior is not hate speech. Now, it could be done in a hateful way, don't get me wrong. But to say that I think same sex behavior or adultery or pedophilia or premarital sex or any kind of behavior is wrong is not necessarily hateful. It may be very wise and good and right. All right, let me move on to some other questions if you guys aren't annoyed already. Enough. Let me move on to some other questions. This one comes from our resident skeptic, Mike, who is responding to the first show we did with Dr. Jeremiah J. Johnston on Body of Proof. And then we did a show, of course, on the Shroud of Torah, which by the way, is doing very well. People are very interested in that topic, rightfully so. And Mike writes in and says, if only the truth of Jesus resurrection can explain the spread of Christianity, how do we explain the almost equivalent spread of Islam? Muhammad died a natural death, never resurrected from the grave, and was viewed as a holy messenger of Allah. No resurrection was necessary to create the second largest religion on the planet in a very close second. Yeah, good question, Mike. But there's a big difference between the spread of Islam and the spread of Christianity. Even Jordan Peterson, who has been so coy about his real religious beliefs. And by the way, I haven't seen Jordan lately. I know he's been sick. Pray for Jordan. I, I, I don't know if he's back doing his podcast yet. I haven't checked recently, but I haven't seen much of him. Anyway, a couple of years ago, Jordan Peterson said, well, I can tell you one thing. I can tell you about the difference between Jesus and Muhammad. Jesus was no warlord. Muhammad, of course was. You can see how any belief system could spread through violence, through conquest, through you. Whether you better convert or we're gonna murder you. You can see how that can spread and get ingrained. And that is how Islam spread. By contrast, Christianity did not spread through violence. Christianity spread. Hold on to the Crusade. Objection, we'll get there. Christianity in the first 280 years of its existence, you wouldn't be killed for not becoming a Christian. You would be killed quite possibly for becoming a Christian. This is not a good selling point. Christianity was persecuted and yet it still spread. And it spread among people, at least initially, who were eyewitnesses to what happened to Jesus. They were Jewish. They were not. This, this fact, I think is so often overlooked. People go out, you know, I can't trust the New Testament because it was written by Christians. No, it wasn't. Stop, stop. The people that wrote down the New Testament originally were Jews. They were not Christians. The, the, the Christian writers who, who, who from early on were Christians were the early church fathers that came later. People like Clement and Ignatius and Polycarp, you know, they come the end of the first century, beginning of the second century, that kind of thing. Yeah, those people were Christians from the get go. But the people that wrote down the New Testament were all Jews. Even scholars are starting to admit that Luke was a Jew as well. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, Jude, the writer of Hebrews, obviously a Jew, even though we don't know who he was. He's writing Hebrews, right. They're all Jews. They did not believe a man could claim to be God. That was blasphemy. They did not believe one guy would rise from the dead in the middle of time and save everybody. They thought we'd all rise from the dead at the end of time, like Daniel says and Isaiah hints at. But they didn't think one guy would claim to be God and rise from the dead. But what do they wind up doing? They wind up claiming a man claimed to be God and rose from the dead and we're willing to die for it. We're going to go to our graves proclaiming this. And they didn't get sex, money or power for it. They got the opposite. They were kicked out of the synagogue and then beaten, tortured and killed. This is not a list of perks. It's really hard to explain how that world religion came out of Jerusalem on an empirical claim that Jesus had risen from the dead when his tomb was widely known. Christianity could have been stopped overnight by the Jews and the Romans who obviously didn't want Christianity to emerge. That's what they were trying to stop by killing Jesus. They could have just gone to the tomb and taken out his body and said to everyone, stop all this nonsense talk of the Resurrection. He's dead. Didn't do that. In fact, they came up with excuses. Oh, they came up with other, other poss possibilities how the disciples came and stole the body. Like they had a motive to do that. Why would they do that? To get themselves excommunicated, then beaten, tortured and killed. There's no evidence for that. No. Christianity spread by the sword being used on it, not by it using the sword on others. The Crusades came a thousand years later in response to Muslim aggression in the Holy Land. Why was Islam spreading all over the place? Because it was spread through war, through conquest. That's what, that's what the purpose of the Crusades were designed to stop. You've taken all these Christians lands, you've taken the Holy Land. And the Pope and the, the government at that point were almost one in the same. We've got to get a bunch of fighters to go take this land back and free the Holy Land. And that's what the Crusades were about. Now there were atrocities committed on the Crusades, but the initial rationale was considered necessary to regain lands taken through Muslim conquest. So it's easy to see how Islam could spread because it was spread through the sword. Convert or die, it's hard to see how Christianity could spread while the sword was being used on it. Unless a man really did claim to be God and rose from the dead. And that emboldened the early followers. The rest, of course, after they had. Had died and passed on. Then the rest of those people are just going on the, the testimony of what we find in the New Testament, those New Testament documents and those early apostles, what they wrote down that was passed on. And those people therefore believe that this was good evidence that this had really happened. But they still persisted through all the persecution. Mike also writes in our resident skeptic and referencing something that Jeremiah Johnston said about the battle of Franklin, Tennessee. He was saying this. Comparing belief in the battle of Franklin, Tennessee to a belief in the resurrection is quite a stretch. That's what Jeremiah J. Johnston was saying that we have eyewitness testimony for this. And Mike says accounts of the battle were dated within weeks and even days of the Event. Okay, so it's. He's saying it's better evidence. Well, first of all, I would say even if there, the battle for Franklin, Tennessee, had better evidence, that doesn't mean there's not good evidence for the resurrection. But I wouldn't even admit that point because as Jeremiah J. Johnston said in the broadcast that we had some scholars, like Jimmy Dunn, James Dunn, who's since passed on, not a conservative in his view, said that the evidence for the resurrection, the earliest creed of the New Testament, which is recorded in 1 Corinthians 15, goes all the way back to within weeks of the event. The exact same thing that you're saying here for the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, Mike. And it doesn't matter whether the testimony is 2000 years old or 200 years old. Why not? If it's accurate testimony, and we have documents which show that the testimony has not changed for the past 2,000 years, and we do, that's just as good as something that came from 200 years ago or 20 years ago or two years ago, if the testimony has been preserved. The important point is the closeness of the testimony to the event, not the closeness of the event to today. If you can maintain the testimony and show that it's accurate by comparing manuscripts, which is what this biblical criticism is all about, or manuscript reconstruction is all about, if you can show that the same thing they wrote down 19, say, 70 years ago is the same thing we have today, it doesn't matter that it happened almost 2,000 years ago. What matters is the gap between the event and the testimony, not the gap between the event and today. Just like, I mean, you could take a more modern example if you have a, say, a newspaper report of the battle of the bulge by eyewitnesses who were there, and now you're reading it 80 years later. What's more important, the closeness of the testimony to the event, or when you're reading it, to the event? No, it's the closeness of the testimony to the event as long as the article has been preserved in its original form. And we can say that about the New Testament. All right, let me go to a couple of other questions, but before I do, I want to point out what's coming up here. Let's see what's coming up. There's so much going on. We've been on the road a lot just because we know hearts are still tender. And we want to double our efforts on college campuses since Charlie's tragic murder. So we were at several colleges over the past few weeks. We've Got some more coming up before we get to those colleges. I do want to mention next week I'll be down at the Faith Forward Pastors Conference in Grapevine, Texas, right near Dallas. That's TPUSA is putting that on. You can go to the tpusa. TPUSA face putting that on. You can go to the TPUSA website or even our website to see more about that. That's the 21st to the 23rd of April. Then Rob Schneider and myself will be here in Charlotte, North Carolina. Actually, just north of Charlotte at Freedom House church in Cornelius, North Carolina. That's the night of the 27th of April and it's going to be live stream. So if you're not in the area, you can watch it live. We're going to talk about a lot of issues there. The great Rob Schneider. Then a little bit later that week on the 30th, Lisa Childers and I are going to go to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They've got a great Ratio Christie group there. Anna Kitko is the leader there. She's a great leader there. I've had her on the podcast before. So that's the 30th. Then the next week, University of New Mexico on the 5th of of May, Cinco de Mayo and the night after that I'll be at Calvary Church there in Albuquerque with my friend Skip Heitzik. So that's what's coming up. Keep an eye on the calendar for all of that. Then we're going to have some more of the Bible you never knew. Episodes one will be on the 11th and I think we're gonna have one more after that May 11th, so check all that out. Our online CIA course is full. Sorry, you're too late for that. We'll have some more courses coming up soon. Keep an eye on the website. All right, let me go back to some questions. The website, by the way, is cross examined dot org. That's cross examined with a D on the end of it.org Jack writes in and he says, enjoyed your podcast on Hell with Kirk Cameron. This goes back a couple of months ago. You or you have acknowledged that NDAs, I think you mean NDEs, near death experiences, Jack, are real and provide some proof of God and the soul. There are just too many accurate NDEs to deny them. Have you ever considered NDEs about people who have seen hell in them? Bill Wise or Wiese wrote a book, 23 Minutes in Hell, about his near death experience there. It's a scary place. Might be a good podcast interview. Yeah, Jack, I. I understand there are some NDEs like that. My problem with those is there's no way to verify them. Those aren't the NDEs that I find persuasive. Maybe it happened. Maybe he's telling the truth, but I can't verify it. What I can verify and what others have verified is what we call veridical NDEs. Veridical NDEs are those where a person has an out of body experience. They're on the operating table. They have an out of body body experience. They're maybe over the hospital viewing things, or they're over the operating room viewing things. And when they're revived, they'll say to the doctor, hey, I just saw an accident on third in Maine. It was between a Ford Explorer, a blue one, and a black Hyundai. And then they check into it and they go, yeah, that happened, but this guy was on the table the whole time. How could he know what was happening outside this operating room at that time? There have been some NDEs where people have witnessed things that are 1,200 miles away. And these can be verified. They're called veridical. There's been, I think, at least a hundred of these that have been verified. There have been many more where you can't verify. You know, I saw Aunt Be or I saw my mom welcome me into heaven, and then suddenly I was back in my body. Though. Yeah, they. They may. They may be true. You just can't verify them. There are things out there called death visions. And we had Lee Strobel on a few months ago to talk about these. These are when people will say they're in hospice, and they'll say, oh, I see the angels coming for me, you know, that kind of thing. Or I see my mom coming for me, and then they die. Now, how can you verify that? Well, Lee was telling this one story where a lady was in hospice. I think her name was Doris, if I remember correctly. And she's near death. She's got maybe a week or two to go. And her sister Ada dies prior to her death. And her relatives. There's no sense telling Doris that her sister's dead. You're just going to upset her. And she's only got a week or two left. Let's not upset her. Let's just let her go peacefully. Well, two weeks later, she has this. This death vision, and she goes, oh, I see Mom. Oh, there's dad. What's Ada doing there? What. What's Ada doing there? She saw her sister in this death vision, and she didn't even know her sister was dead. Consistently. All these death visions will only be visions of people that are already gone, never people that are still living. So Lee's book gets into that. I think it's something about, I have it up here on my shelf understanding the supernatural, or I have to look it up, but it's over here somewhere. We had Leon go back like six months. You'll see Lee Strobel in the podcast talking about the supernatural. And that's just one aspect. Those are two different things. Near death experience, where a near death experience is somebody that flatlines but then they revive. A death vision is somebody that is leaving this earth for good in terms of their present life and they don't come back. But they. They see things and say things that only some of. Some of these things can be verified. In fact, they did, according to Lee, they. They had people in hospice and they asked them, hey, we. We've been told that some people have death visions. If you feel like you're having a death vision, would you at least tell us? And over 80% of the people who then died subsequently would tell them, yes, I'm seeing this, I'm seeing that. So it's a real thing. Thanks for your question, Jack. All right, let me go to Cody, who writes in. Thank you so much for your ministry and for the work you do. You and your team have been doing the Lord's work. My question is this. I've been struggling lately from living by the Gospel because I have felt that what the gospel entails is that the entire world stands condemned by default and that we all need Jesus to be saved. True, the Gospel tells us it gives us peace, and it does give me some peace with the prospect of having forgiveness, a perfect heavenly Father and an eternal life secured. But there's also tension on the other side of it where Jesus says he has come to cast fire onto the earth. I sometimes feel a great weight on my shoulders feeling like every person I walk by is going to be condemned. How do I change my thinking so that the Gospel brings me the joy and peace it intends? It intends to while having this other side of the message. Intention. Hey, great question, Cody. I think that, yes, God has put us on this earth to be his ambassadors and give us the dignity of causality to affect time and eternity, to try and bring people into the kingdom. Because we're all on a road to hell unless we turn, unless we repent and ask Christ for forgiveness. Because an infinitely just being can't allow sin to go unpunished. So what does he have to do? He has to punish an innocent substitute in our place. The only place he can find an innocent substitute is in himself. So he adds humanity to his deity, comes to earth, allows the creatures that rebelled against him, that's me and you, to torture and kill him so he could remain just and also justify us. This is why Paul says in Romans 3:26, God remains just and is the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. This is why Jesus is the only way, ladies and gentlemen. It's not an arbitrary claim. He's the only way because that's the only way. Infinite justice can be maintained and unjust people can be forgiven. Justice is satisfied while we're still forgiven. Now, how do people acquire that? Cody, it's important that you understand that God has put people in your life that you can affect. But your job is not to save the whole world. None of us can save the whole world. We just can't walk by every person and say, it's my responsibility to save that person. First of all, it's not your responsibility to save that person. The Holy Spirit is going to be very integral in that happening. You are responsible for the people that you have in your area, in your area of persuasion, so to speak, the people that you know to tell them the truth, but you can't bring them to Christ. You can bring Christ maybe to everyone you know, but you can't bring everyone to Christ. You can bring Christ, but you can't bring everyone to Christ. And if you're just walking down the street and you think you need to talk to everybody about Jesus, first of all, I don't think that's realistic. Second of all, I don't think it's going to have the intended effect. I think people are going to think you're crazy in this culture to just talk to everybody about Jesus. They're going to feel uncomfortable. Okay? Now, I'm not saying that comfort is always the test for whether or not you ought to do something. Sometimes you have to do uncomfortable things. But to be real practical with you here, you're better off spending your time on the people that at least have some respect for you and know you, than you are trying to accost everyone you see and bring them the gospel. God has people everywhere that can bring people that they know the gospel. You can't be responsible or feel responsible for everyone you see. If you do, first of all, as I say, it's going to be very difficult to do that. Secondly, it's going to be very awkward and not have the intended effect that you want it to have. And thirdly, you'll never get anything done, right? I mean, you've got to still live your life. So serve where you can serve. You can't save the whole world, but you can potentially save the world of someone you know. Change the world of someone you know. Now, I'm not saying evangelism shouldn't be done. I'm not saying door to door evangelism can't be done. I'm not saying street preaching can't be done. But Cody, if that's not a gift of yours and you're not good at it, don't feel compelled to shoehorn your skills into a. A job that you don't have the capacity to do. The gospel is good news, but it's not the kind of news that you have to tell every single person you see or somehow you're going to be guilty about it. I mean, Jesus didn't even talk to everybody about it, right? There were times when Jesus got alone, a way to pray. Jesus didn't heal certain people. There are other things to do. In fact, the gospel, I know it's going to sound crazy for those of you. Some of you go, what? What are you talking about, Frank? Evangelism is not our first duty. It's not. Our first duty is worship. That's our first duty. If you're always talking to other people about Jesus and you're not talking to Jesus yourself or learning about Jesus by reading the Bible and praying, you're not worshiping. So worship is our primary responsibility. Don't think that every person you run into, you've got to tell them about Jesus. Now, there may be times when the Holy Spirit prompts you, yeah, you ought to talk to this person right now. But especially in our culture, I don't think it's going to be effective. And you're not going to get much done in your life. You'd probably be a lot more productive making people closer to Jesus by concentrating on certain people you have influence over, rather than spending all your time in our society trying to accost strangers with, with the news of the gospel. Now, some people can do that better than others, but you've got to know your own gifts, Cody. It is great news, and I don't want you to lose the heart that you have for other people. But remember, you can't save the whole world. I can't save the whole world. Don't get a messiah complex that thinks that everybody. You got to say, you can't do it. I can't do it. Jesus. Jesus himself as a man didn't even do it. Now his body can do it. That's what the church is all about. And you're a small part of that body. So do what you can do. Use your gifts. Leave the rest to God and to others. All right. Ed writes in, if the redeemed state in the end is both free and incapable of falling, then why was the initial state different? What is uniquely accomplished by allowing the fall and suffering that could not have been achieved by creating us directly in that final state? Great question, Ed. Why didn't God just take us directly to heaven? Well, first of all, let's talk about the fall of Satan, which doesn't. There's not a lot in the Bible about it. You know, how could Satan fall when he's in the presence of God? Direct presence of God. Dr. William Lane Craig, a great apologist, philosopher, I've heard him talk about this. And he said. And he's speculating because it doesn't say this. In fact, we have to read between the lines to figure out the fall of Satan in the Bible. It's not directly stated clearly. I mean, sometimes people use, I think Isaiah 14, Isaiah 28, when it talks about the king of Babylon, that's really talking about the fall of Lucifer might be right. Maybe not. Not sure. In any event, Dr. Craig says this. I think that God gave Satan and the angels, the other angels, some what he would call epistemic distance. What does that mean? That he doesn't show his full glory. He re. He holds back enough so those people have the true freedom to either select to follow Jesus or to follow Yahweh or to rebel. He pulls back enough to give them that freedom. Now, for some reason, angels can't be redeemed, demons can't be redeemed. Angels don't need to be redeemed. But we can be redeemed. And when we sin, we realize that sin. Ultimately, we realize if we then become redeemed, that sin was stupid and destructive. In other words, there is a phenomenon going on here that innocence, while good, is not as good as redemption. Or to put another way, redemption is better in the long run than innocence. What do we mean by that? It's hard to explain. I haven't really found a good way to explain this. But think about it this way. If everything. If you're at a state of innocence and then you fall, say you're in a relationship with someone and the relationship is damaged and you're at odds with that other person. But then suppose that other person does something heroic and literally saves your life and as as a result of that, you are indebted to that person and you love that person to a greater degree than if the falling out never occurred. In other words, redemption brings your relationship to a higher, stronger level than if the state of innocence than if you had stayed in the state of innocence the entire time. So redemption turns out to make the relationship and the love experience between the two people stronger than prior. I'll give you a business example of this. In business, it's widely known that if a customer has a negative event with your business and you as the business owner or business representative, go to heroic lengths to fix that problem, that customer is more loyal to you than if the problem had never occurred. If the state of innocence stayed the same and there never was a problem, that customer would not be as loyal to you as they are now after you have heroically saved the day by fixing their problem. Redemption is better than innocence. And Paul talks about this in not these exact words, but in 2nd Corinthians 4. He says, for our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us a greater weight of glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, for what is seen is temporary. We fix our eyes on what is unseen, for what is unseen is eternal. Translation. When you go through difficulty and you come out the other side, you ex. You have enhanced your capacity to enjoy God, not only now, but in eternity. A sports analogy may help. Let's suppose there's a football player, like, let's just take the most recent one. Sam Darnold, right? Was drafted number one by the Jets. Never did anything with the Jets. Cause he was with the jets, okay, and then he go, he bounced around to other teams, never really catches on. He does okay in Minnesota the prior year, has a good year, but flops in the playoff. Then he gets to Seattle and he leads the team to the Super Bowl. Most of the the years that he has been in the league prior to this, people are going, this guy's a draft bust. I mean, he's drafted in the first round. He's not very good. He never does anything well. He did well in the regular season one year, but then he got throttled in the playoffs. Didn't do anything there. He's not really very good. This year though, he leads his team and wins the super bowl and the Seahawks. Everybody on the team holds up the Lombardi Trophy, even the third string quarterback who hardly played it down all Year. He holds it up too. Right. But don't you think that Sam Darnold enjoyed holding up the Lombardi Trophy more so than the third string quarterback? Yeah. Why? Because he went through all the difficulty. He went through all the problems, all the difficulty. He was actually in the game. He played through the injuries, he played through the people who said he couldn't do it. He persevered through difficulty and came out the other end. Redemption is better than innocence. He's now enjoying the victory more so than if he had not played at all. It was just on the team. Yeah, he'd enjoyed being on the team, but he didn't really do anything. The third string quarterback all year. Yeah. He's got a Super bowl ring. Yeah. Okay. But he didn't really play much. But the guy who was in the game who went through all the trouble, went through all the difficulty, he's enjoying it much more. And oh, by the way, from a theological perspective, or maybe even a more practical perspective, when we get to heaven and we realize all the havoc that sin created, that's going to make us even more content to be in our redeemed state and to never sin again. By the way, why do we sin now? Because we lack things. You know, we want sex, money and power, which are good things. The problem is sex, money and power are so good we'll often take shortcuts to get them. And that's what sin is. In heaven, we're not going to lack anything. So there's nothing that we're going to want that we don't already have. There's no motivation to sin. But then you add that, you add the idea that we've already experienced it and we know how horrific it is, there's even more of a reason to not sin again. So a redeemed state is better than an innocent state in terms of the outcome. Of course, it would be better to never sin, but if you do sin, you can be advanced to a greater relationship than if you had stayed in innocence. That. That's what I think the answer to that question is, Ed. I hope it's helpful. All right, friends, we're going to have a lot more coming up. We're going to talk to the great Stephen C. Meyer, who's got a brand new fantastic movie coming out called the Story of Everything. He's going to be on this coming Friday and Saturday. You don't want to miss that. Make sure you tune in for the Story of Everything. By the way, the movie is going to start in theaters on April 30th I've seen a pre screen of it. It's fantastic. It talks about the three major discoveries that have been found scientifically over the past century. The creation of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, and the design found in life. This is essentially bringing people and understanding that this universe, this reality, actually has a divine mind behind it. And it's the kind of movie you can bring unbelievers to non Christians to. It's very well done. So make sure you're here next time. For the next I Don't have Enough Faith to be an Atheist episode. Great being with you. Thanks. See you next time.