#192 Lee Strobel & John Burke - The Resurrection

Lee Strobel is a best-selling author, journalist, and Christian apologist best known for The Case for Christ, which recounts his journey from atheism to faith. A former award-winning legal editor at the Chicago Tribune, Strobel has written over 40 books, including The Case for Faith and The Case for a Creator. He founded the Strobel Center at Colorado Christian University and continues to write, speak, and equip others to explore and share their faith. John Burke is the New York Times bestselling author of Imagine Heaven and Imagine the God of Heaven, based on his research of over 1,500 near-death experiences. A frequent speaker and media guest, John co-founded Gateway Community Church in Austin, Texas, which he led for 26 years. He now hosts “The Imagine Heaven Podcast” and continues to speak globally on faith and the afterlife. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://www. AmericanFinancing.net/SRS NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org https://www.identityguard.com/srs https://www. BetterHelp.com/SRS This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://www.bubsnaturals.com/SHAWN https://www. ShawnLikesGold.com https://www.drinkhoist.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://www.hometitlelock.com - USE CODE "SRS" Go to https://hometitlelock.com/srs and use promo code SRS to get a FREE title history report so you can find out if you’re already a victim AND 14 days of protection for FREE! And make sure to check out the Million Dollar TripleLock protection details when you get there! Exclusions apply. For details visit https://hometitlelock.com/warranty https://www. Moinkbox.com/SRS https://www. PrepareWithShawn.com https://www. PatriotMobile.com/SRS https://www. Shopify.com/SRS Lee Strobel Links: X - https://x.com/leestrobel Seeing the Supernatural - https://www.zondervan.com/p/seeing-the-supernatural Website - https://leestrobel.com Books - https://leestrobel.com/books Speaking - https://leestrobel.com/speaking John Burke Links: For everything John Burke, go to - https://linktr.ee/johnburkeauthor Website - https://imagineheaven.net Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/@JohnBurkeImagineHeaven Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/johnburkeofficial John Burke Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/johnburkeofficial Imagine Heaven Facebook page: type https://www.facebook.com/imagineheavenbook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not admitted without parent.

• 0:30Shawn Ryan?

  So he died on the cross, they put him in a tomb.

• 0:32Lee Strobel?

  Yes.

• 0:33Shawn Ryan?

  Why was it three days?

• 0:34Lee Strobel?

  There's some really powerful new analysis of the shroud.

• 0:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 0:38Lee Strobel?

  That indicates it may very well be the burial cloth of Jesus.

• 0:42Shawn Ryan?

  Why did he have to come and go through that to save us?

• 0:46Speaker 05

  God says to him, Abraham, I want you to take your son, your only son, who you love, take him to a mountain, I will show you, and there I want you to sacrifice him. That was the very place on which Jesus would walk up the hill with his own wood. And by the way, Isaac had to carry the wood. Jesus would walk up with the wood on which he would be sacrificed and the Lord would provide.

• 1:15Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:16Speaker 05

  It's all over.

• 1:17Shawn Ryan?

  And we do know that.

• 1:18Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:18Shawn Ryan?

  How do we know that?

• 1:25Shawn Ryan?

  John Burke, Lee Strobel, welcome back.

• 1:28Lee Strobel?

  Thanks, John.

• 1:29Shawn Ryan?

  Great to be here.

• 1:29Lee Strobel?

  Great to be back.

• 1:30Shawn Ryan?

  So love having you guys on together.

• 1:32Lee Strobel?

  Love being here, especially my buddy, John. We've known each other for, we were figuring over, what, 30 years?

• 1:37Speaker 05

  Too long.

• 1:38Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, too long.

• 1:39Speaker 05

  Not for you, but to be that old.

• 1:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, when I found you guys together, it was off one of the documentaries you guys collaborated on.

• 1:48Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 1:48Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, and I've just learned so much from you guys through the interviews. And, um, it's just an honor to have you back.

• 1:56Lee Strobel?

  Thank you.

• 1:57Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, you know, I'm gonna pepper you with all kinds of questions that are coming up. I'm still new to this whole thing, so, but, um, but yeah, so Easter.

• 2:07Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, so I wanted to get you guys both back on to, to talk about the resurrection, what it means, what's the proof, and, um, and any other rabbit holes that we go down, which I'm sure there'll be plenty.

• 2:21Lee Strobel?

  Sure we will.

• 2:22Shawn Ryan?

  So, yeah, yeah. But, um, quick introduction.

• 2:27Shawn Ryan?

  Shortened it up a little bit because you guys have both been on before. Lee Strobel, New York Times bestselling author, over forty books that have sold millions. Newest book, Seeing the Supernatural, just hit that list as well. The founding director of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University. John Burke, founder of the Gateway Church in Austin, Texas, bestselling author with books like Imagine Heaven that dive into near-death experiences and what they reveal about the afterlife. And now you've just started a podcast, Imagine Heaven with John Burke. Congratulations on the podcast.

• 3:09Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 3:10Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds a little overwhelming.

• 3:11Speaker 05

  It is.

• 3:12Shawn Ryan?

  I can relate. I can relate.

• 3:15Speaker 05

  I know.

• 3:16Shawn Ryan?

  You know.

• 3:16Speaker 05

  I was trying to get you to talk me out of it last time I was on the show and you didn't.

• 3:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, well.

• 3:21Speaker 05

  You could have.

• 3:22Shawn Ryan?

  I hope things are going really good with that.

• 3:24Speaker 05

  They are.

• 3:25Shawn Ryan?

  I know a lot of people have questions and, and I think like we both have talked about, there just seems to be this wave of Christianity just moving quick and a lot of new believers out there.

• 3:38Speaker 05

  New openness, I like, it's good.

• 3:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So, but, you know, everybody gets a gift, even the second appearance, so. Here you guys go.

• 3:48Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:49Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  My gun bears.

• 3:51Shawn Ryan?

  Whoops, my bad. And still legal in all fifty states. And then also.

• 3:59Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 3:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  You know, we're sure we'll be talking about.

• 4:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:02Shawn Ryan?

  Angels and demons a little bit.

• 4:04Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 4:05Shawn Ryan?

  And I think I may have told both of you.

• 4:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, the four, four, four, right.

• 4:08Shawn Ryan?

  Four, four, four stuff, so. So, when I became a believer, I had this experience in Sedona and then ever since then.

• 4:17Speaker 05

  Oh, you told me about that.

• 4:18Shawn Ryan?

  See the four, four, four everywhere.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  Was that related to that?

• 4:22Shawn Ryan?

  It was, it was. So, the quick, quick backstory, so I told you about the Sedona trip and then.

• 4:31Shawn Ryan?

  After the Sedona trip, I think the guy that really, I don't think, the guy that really started my journey to faith was this guy Eddie Penny. Uh, who's, who's a friend of mine, former SEAL Team Six guy. Um, and his, his story of being saved is just like, it's always stuck with me. And then every person that's come on the show since him for,

• 5:00Shawn Ryan?

  man, probably a year after he came on was they brought up something about

• 5:08Shawn Ryan?

  God, Jesus, the Bible, like every single person that's sat in this room for probably about a year. And then, and then I had that experience in Sedona.

• 5:20Shawn Ryan?

  When I came back, I had called Eddie, cause Eddie's been kind of a mentor of mine. And, um, told him about what had happened and, and was just kinda asking him what it all meant. And he started having this conversation with me about guardian angels and attacks will probably start happening because I've chosen a side. He's, he was basically saying demons don't really care when you're just sitting there in the middle. But, uh, he goes, now that you've chosen a side and, and, um, with the influence you have, you'll probably start getting attacks and that led into guardian angels. And then I had a meeting scheduled with my IT guy at the time, also a really good friend and mentor. And, um,

• 6:05Shawn Ryan?

  he had scheduled a meeting at noon and I thought it was just gonna be about IT stuff, website, emails, who knows what? And he's, he has the exact same conversation with me and those two don't know each other. And he had scheduled the meeting at noon and I, and he was like, hey, you know, guardian angels are watching over you. They've known, they've known you since before you were born and all this stuff. And I was like, that's, I was like, this is weird. I just had this conversation like 12 hours ago with Eddie. And, um, I had gone home for a late lunch with my, uh, wife and kid.

• 6:46Shawn Ryan?

  And got back in the, in the truck to drive back to work and I saw 4:44 on the dash clock. And then I had 444 miles left to empty. And so I had texted, um,

• 7:01Shawn Ryan?

  One of the guys that works for me here, and I said, "Hey, Google 4:44. I want to know what that means." And we come back. I get to the office and he says, "We looked it up," and he said, "It means your guardian angels want you to know that they're watching over you." That was like the first thing that popped up in Google. And that was four hours and 44 minutes after I had had that discussion about guardian angels. And so it was like three times, just bam, bam, bam. And, um...

• 7:31Lee Strobel?

  Like God trying to get your attention about something.

• 7:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, right? And, uh, right after, I'd had that really profound experience in Sedona. And, um, and so... Yeah, I don't, I mean, one of the things in the outline that I wanted to talk to you guys about is, is, you know, all these people, they prey on things. They, they say they want to leave it in God's hands. And how do you know you're doing the right thing? And, and for me, I think that, uh, I want to ask you guys, you know, how, how do you know when he's speaking to you? And for me, I think it's my gut instinct.

• 8:13Shawn Ryan?

  And so, you know, we dive into a lot of squirrely things on the podcast, or if I'm looking for some direction, a lot of times I feel like I know what it is. And then I get in my head and I'm like, "Oh, shit. Am I doing the right thing? Am I supposed to be doing this?" Or, and it's like you'll flash a sign, like every time. And a lot of times I'll just randomly look at my watch or my phone or something that'll say 4:44, or exit 4:44. That number will flash sometime. And to me, that, to me, that means your gut's right, Sean. This is the confirmation that you need. Lean into the gut. That's where I'm at.

• 8:56Lee Strobel?

  There's, the guardian angel thing is a fascinating topic. I have a chapter in my book, "Seeing the Supernatural on Angels." And I deal with the guardian angel question. Do we really have guardian angels? And it's interesting, there's some Christian scholars who say no. But you go back in history, Jerome, the great Bible translator, said yes. Uh, Thomas Aquinas said yes. And, um, Martin Luther certainly believed in guardian angels. Uh, well, I would say in, in angel, protective angels. But there's two passages that jump out to me, yeah. There's two passages jump out to me. One is, Jesus was talking to some folks and he said, about little children. He said, "Uh, do not despise these little ones because their angels see the face of God in heaven every day."

• 9:40Lee Strobel?

  Well, who are, their angels, that would be a guardian angel, right? And then Peter is in prison in the book of Acts, and an angel frees him. And he shows up at a house where some Christians are gathered, and he knocks on the door. And, uh, says, "Hey, Peter." And the servant says, "Hey, Peter's at the door." And they say, "He can't be at the door, he's in prison." It must be his angel. Um, and I, you know, I interview a scholar for my book, um, on that question. He says, "I think that is sufficient biblical evidence to say, yeah, we do have a guardian angel." Uh, the Orthodox Christian Church believes that at the moment of baptism, you're assigned a guardian angel. So, um, you know, this is, this is a very interesting phenomenon because people don't think of that, you know?

• 10:25Lee Strobel?

  Well, you know, we're cautioned, I think, through the experience of John in Revelation, not to worship angels. Um, and therefore, I would suggest, uh, from at least the Protestant writings, that you don't, uh, pray to angels. But to pray about angels and to pray for God's intervention through his angels is certainly biblical, I believe. In fact, Jesus, when he was being arrested, said, "Could not my Father, right now, send, what was it, 12 legions of angels?" Yeah, to protect me if I wanted to, yeah, yeah. And, and so, and in the small catechism that Martin Luther wrote, uh, his evening prayer says, "Lord, um, um, send your angels to protect me from the evil one."

• 11:09Lee Strobel?

  So for us to, to pray to God for protection by angelic beings, um, to... Believe and trust that he has perhaps even assigned a guardian angel to protect us. I think tells us something about the love of God, the power of God, his concern for every aspect of our life. And I just find it very encouraging.

• 11:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, and I, you know, my study into near death experiences, you know, having studied thousands of them, definitely confirms all that Lee just said.

• 11:42Lee Strobel?

  Really?

• 11:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, and, um, you know, I think about like Jim Woodford, this commercial airline pilot who, uh, when he died, he was, he had been an agnostic his whole life, very wealthy man. He was a, several multimillion dollar businesses, um, never prayed a day in his life, but his wife was a believer and was praying for him and for his salvation. And he, he, he told me, he said, John, you know, when you're dying, you know, and he knew. He had an opioid overdose. He had Guillain-Barre and ended up addicted and accidental, uh, in his truck looking at the sunset. And as he was dying, he had this thought, you've never

• 12:27Speaker 05

  thanked God for the life you thought was your own making.

• 12:31Lee Strobel?

  Wow. Wow.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  And he looks back now and says, he thinks that was the Lord going, one last time, buddy.

• 12:39Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 05

  What are you gonna do?

• 12:41Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 05

  And he cried out, God forgive me, as his head hit the steering wheel.

• 12:45Lee Strobel?

  Wow.

• 12:46Speaker 05

  Which, he's a jokester, so I like to joke with him, Jim, I think you beat the thief on the cross for last minute, buddy.

• 12:52Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 05

  It was like, wow, how much more are you gonna push it? But he first, so he first has a, a hellish vision of, of actually a creature who knew his name calling to him. And again, he cries out to God for help. And these three angels come and rescue him. And interestingly, in near-death experiences, when it is last-minute kind of foxhole conversion, I find God lets them see where they were going before rescuing them and show them where where their eternity is going to be. So that happens to Jim, and he's there with these three magnificent angels.

• 13:33Speaker 05

  And one was his guardian, one was a scribe angel, and one was a warrior. And people consistently describe those three

• 13:45Lee Strobel?

  Interesting.

• 13:46Speaker 05

  categories. And what's fascinating, too, because I, I'll be honest, like, I, I had no interest in angels or demons. I didn't. I just kind of like, yeah, you know, we're not supposed to pray to them, just like you said. So I'm sure they're there, but who cares? Not who cares, but kind of. But how many near-death experiencers talked about them consistently the same?

• 14:09Lee Strobel?

  All, always in threes?

• 14:10Speaker 05

  One was a ten, one was 10 feet, one another 12 and 15 feet. And I was always like, what? That's bizarre. But they kept saying, same kind of estimation of height, too.

• 14:22Lee Strobel?

  Interesting.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  I know. And so the guardian told Jim that, yes, he was assigned to him since his conception.

• 14:34Lee Strobel?

  Interesting.

• 14:35Speaker 05

  And I've heard that from others as well.

• 14:37Lee Strobel?

  Wow. I think there's sufficient biblical evidence for it.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  I do, too.

• 14:41Lee Strobel?

  This is, this is near-death experience stuff that just confirms that.

• 14:44Speaker 05

  It does.

• 14:45Lee Strobel?

  And I find that encouraging, don't you?

• 14:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:47Lee Strobel?

  And because like you, it's like, yeah, I'm more interested in some of the stuff I can see and touch and evidence and so forth, but then to know that God cares about me so much that he, he's watching over me in that way, and he's assigned someone to really provide protection and guidance and...

• 15:02Speaker 05

  Well, and another guy, a CEO that I interviewed, he's there before the throne of God, and he sees that prayers, and Jim did too, that prayers are tangible. Like, they're real things. Yeah, we just think, oh, it's just, you know, hitting the ceiling or whatever, and it's just my thoughts or... But to God, that's not true. They, they actually...

• 15:24Speaker 05

  You know, they they are seen in heaven. Kind of like like lights. Jim, so Jim is there with these angels and he sees these six streaks of light going up. And he thought, you know, he's a commercial airline pilot. He's like, are those contrails? You know, like the the smoke or the, you know. Chemtrails. Yes. Chemtrail, right. And and he said to the angel, what are those? And the angel said, those are the prayers of your family for your soul going to the throne of God, even as we speak. Wow. At that point, now, he's dead, his body's dead in a truck. The Canadian Royal Mounted Guard, what's the police?

• 16:09Speaker 05

  Mounted police, yeah. Mounted police. Find him the next morning. He was dead overnight. But his family, six family members, were circled up in his home, holding hands, praying that Jesus would rescue him and send him back.

• 16:25Speaker 06

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• 16:54Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not admitted without parent.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  And he sees six. Six contrails. Contrails. And other near-death experiencers who have said the same thing. So the CEO that I interview, Randy, sees the same thing. These lights like coming into the the throne of God. And he knew they were prayers and and the Lord sending angels in answers to the prayers to to act.

• 17:51Speaker 05

  Which I would have thought, I don't know, you know, like I'm still kind of a skeptic at heart. I hate to say it.

• 17:57Lee Strobel?

  Couldn't you just do stuff directly rather than dispatch angels?

• 17:59Speaker 05

  Well, and I, you know, and at first, when I started hearing these, I was like, yeah, I don't know. That's kinda, you know, yeah.

• 18:05Lee Strobel?

  But there's so many stories.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  But so many of them saying that.

• 18:08Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  And then it doesn't, it doesn't go against the Bible and in fact aligns with what, you know, God's told us a lot in there. Our prayers really do make a difference. They, they, they actually move the hand of God.

• 18:21Lee Strobel?

  Yeah. John Payton was a Scottish missionary in the New Hebrides Islands in the South Pacific. And he and his wife lived in this little cottage and the local tribespeople didn't like the fact they were talking about Jesus all the time. So they came to burn down their house and kill him. So this mob is forming. So what do they do? They're praying. They're praying, God, here we are, we're alone, we're in this home, they're coming to kill us, they're coming to burn down our house, pray us, protect us, help us. And, and by dawn, the crowd dissipated. Later, he leads the head of that mob to Jesus Christ. And they become friends. This is a year later. And he says, by the way, do you remember that night that you led that mob to come to our house and burn it down? Why didn't you kill us?

• 19:06Lee Strobel?

  He said, well, who are all those men that you had? So what do you mean? I didn't have any men. It's just my wife and I. What are you talking about? Your house was surrounded by these muscular men in white garments with drawn swords. There's no way we could have come into your house.

• 19:22Speaker 05

  Wow. Lots of stories like that.

• 19:25Shawn Ryan?

  How, how, how did he, how did he, couple of questions. How did he know one was a guardian, one was a scribe and one was a warrior?

• 19:32Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, that's an interesting question. Is that just intuitive in him?

• 19:36Speaker 05

  No, the guardian told him.

• 19:37Lee Strobel?

  Oh, he told him?

• 19:38Speaker 05

  I was your guardian. And he, it is fascinating because the guardian said, he, I mean, this is, this is kind of bizarre. And so let me, let me say this. I, you know, I study these and I study the commonalities. And I usually don't, I usually don't say like, okay, that's, I believe that if it's just a one-off, right? I look for three or four and it's got to align with scripture or, you know, I kind of just like put it on the shelf. So this is a little bit of one of those on the shelf things.

• 20:11Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  But this guardian told him that.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  He, he, he used to, you know, he would fly with him. I mean, Jim was a commercial airline pilot, so he's flown all over the world. And, and he, the guardian named himself Sky Song. Because Jim used to sing to himself to keep himself awake. And, and the guardian named himself Sky Song of all those flights. This is when Jim was not a believer at all.

• 20:45Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 20:47Speaker 05

  But it doesn't mean God doesn't care about us. And it doesn't mean he's not trying to get our attention.

• 20:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  And, uh, yeah, Jim said, my, my guardian had a rough go for many years. He was not succeeding.

• 21:00Shawn Ryan?

  What did he say? I mean, what do they look like? Do they look like humans or do they look? I mean, there's, I've talked to a lot of different people. Some people say they look like UFO-ish. Kind of like they don't look human.

• 21:14Speaker 05

  Well, I don't know for sure, but I think they can take different forms. I think we see that in scripture.

• 21:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 05

  As well.

• 21:22Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 21:22Speaker 05

  Um, I mean, sometimes, you know, uh, angels come and they, they look like people.

• 21:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 21:29Speaker 05

  In, in the scriptures even. Um, I mean, that was the case with, with Abraham.

• 21:35Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 21:36Speaker 05

  When, when the, the angel of God, which is in the Old Testament, the, the kind of human manifestation of God, I think is the pre-incarnate Jesus. You think that?

• 21:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it could be.

• 21:47Speaker 05

  Maybe?

• 21:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  Not so sure?

• 21:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 21:51Shawn Ryan?

  We'll talk about it.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  We can debate that later. Um, I think it was because he allows worship and no other angel allows worship. So think about Gideon.

• 22:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 22:02Speaker 05

  You know?

• 22:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 05

  Gideon worships him in the floor of Aruna. So anyway, that's a side.

• 22:09Shawn Ryan?

  I, I had, I usually didn't talk, I never talked about this for years because I was embarrassed by it.

• 22:17Lee Strobel?

  And, and never talked to a group of people about it till my ordination, where I had all these theologians questioning me about my doctrine. I thought, do I tell them that I had an angelic encounter with my guardian angel? You did? Yeah, I did. Oh. And I, I was embarrassed by it, and I, cause I thought, you'll think I'm nuts, I'm not gonna talk about this. But with all these theologians, I thought, I better tell them, they're gonna ordain me, they better know about this. So I tell them, told them. And when I was 12 years old or so, um, uh, my guardian angel appeared to me. And you asked what he looked like, I knew that's who it was, even though I can't describe him in detail, I knew that's, that he was an angel. It was an intuition? It was intuitive. And he, and, and here's what was important about the in- incident.

• 23:01Lee Strobel?

  I'm in my kitchen at home, I'm a little kid, 12 years old, and he starts extolling heaven, how beautiful and wonderful heaven is. And so I casually said, well, I'm gonna go there someday. And he looked at me, he said, how do you know? What do you mean, how do I know? I'm, I'm a good kid, I, I obey my parents pretty much, I, I, I, I get good grades in school, I'm nice to my friends. You're saying that? I'm saying this to him, I'm trying to justify that I'm good enough to get to heaven. Is it verbal communication? Verbal, yeah, verbal, no, verbal communication. Interesting. And, um, and, and he looks at me, he says, that doesn't matter. And a chill went down my spine, how could my efforts to be a good kid and, and to do

• 23:43Lee Strobel?

  good, how does that not matter? I was just a little, and he said, someday you'll understand. Well, about 16 years- And that was it? That was it. He disappeared. And that was the only dream I remember from my childhood. It was more vivid than any dream I've- Was it a dream? It was a dream. Oh, a vivid dream. But it was a vivid dream unlike any I'd ever had. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I suppressed it, I, oh, I must've had a bad pizza, that's crazy, and, and ultimately became an atheist. Um, but then my wife brought me to church on January the 20th of 1980, and, and I heard the gospel for the first time. It's not based on your good works, how, how hard you try to be good, that the doors of heaven are flung open. No, it is a free gift of God's grace that we receive in repentance and faith. The good do- deeds come later because

• 24:26Lee Strobel?

  we're seeking to please God and to, to, to live accord, and to love others as he loves us. And, and so here I am, and two things happened. Number one, I realized that angel told me something when I was 12 years old that I didn't know. So it wasn't just something coming from my imagination. And secondly, he made a prophecy that someday I'll understand that came true 16 years later.

• 24:49Speaker 05

  Wow. Never heard that.

• 24:51Lee Strobel?

  I didn't like telling people because I told my wife, you know, but I

• 24:56Speaker 05

  So this is a funny thing because you never, you never knew about all my near death experience research. So we worked together, you know, in the 90s.

• 25:04Lee Strobel?

  That's true.

• 25:05Speaker 05

  But I didn't tell anybody either.

• 25:06Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 05

  Because I was still like, oh, they're

• 25:08Lee Strobel?

  It was kind of a new agey thing.

• 25:09Speaker 05

  No, they're gonna think I'm weird. I will not. I mean, when, when I went to write Imagine Heaven in 2015, right before I hit send, I said, well, Lord, this is probably the end of my ministry, but you told me to do it. So here goes. And I heard in my mind, I've opened a door in heaven no one can close.

• 25:26Lee Strobel?

  Hmm. Wow. Wow.

• 25:28Speaker 05

  And I think it's true.

• 25:29Shawn Ryan?

  So let me, so back to the original question.

• 25:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:32Shawn Ryan?

  Because you said God told you.

• 25:33Speaker 05

  Which was what?

• 25:35Shawn Ryan?

  Which was, how does God speak to you?

• 25:37Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:40Shawn Ryan?

  So, so with you.

• 25:41Speaker 05

  I, well, so it's interesting. Near death experiences commonly report that the communication of heaven can be verbal, like with his angel in the, in your vivid dream, but

• 25:54Lee Strobel?

  Telepathic?

• 25:54Speaker 05

  But can, well, so a lot of people use the word telepathic, but many say, no, it's more than that. It's not just thoughts. It's thoughts, it's feelings, it's every associated thought. It's pure, perfect. There's no way to misunderstand. Now, I believe that's how God communicates to us today.

• 26:15Shawn Ryan?

  Thoughts.

• 26:17Speaker 05

  It's thoughts, but it's, you could call it intuition, but it's different than that. It's more than that. And you have to, you have to learn it. You know, Jesus

• 26:25Shawn Ryan?

  God instinct.

• 26:26Speaker 05

  Well, Jesus often said, whoever has ears to hear, let them hear what the Spirit is saying. Well, we all have these. So what do you mean? Well, I think he meant you have to develop a spiritual willingness to hear what the Holy Spirit is trying to communicate. And it is, it is thought to thought. You know, one of the, one of the things I used to say to, to people in our church is like, you know, we always want God to speak in an audible voice, right? Like, just tell me. But that's actually less direct communication.

• 27:01Speaker 05

  You know, right, right now, I'm trying to get all my thoughts that are in my brain into your brain, or your brain, you know, whoever's listening to this. But I have to use words, I can only get so many words out in so much time. You're thinking other thoughts a lot faster than you can hear my words. There's all kind of other noise and distractions. So this is a very, you know, inefficient form of communication. What would be more direct is if I could just put all the things I'm thinking in your mind right now. Now, you could still go like, well, that's a stupid thought and push it aside. Right? Or you could consider it. And I can't do that, but God, God can.

• 27:41Speaker 05

  So I think those times when, especially when it's repetitive, right? I mean, I remember, you know, when I was a brand new believer, uh, what, what helped me start to understand this is I, I was praying one day and I was praying for friends and other things, I was praying, and I had this thought, call Allison. Allison's my younger sister. And I was like, I'm not gonna call Allison, and kept praying. Again, this, and it wasn't just a thought, it was like a thought and a feeling like I'm supposed to call Allison. And I was like, Allison's at school, she's not gonna answer the phone, um, yeah, I'm not gonna call Allison. Third time, call Allison.

• 28:24Speaker 05

  And the third time, because I think I was praying, I was like, God, am I supposed to call Allison? Like, this just feels like my, my stupid thought. Like, you want me to? And I thought, well, okay, look, it's not gonna cost me anything, I'll just do it. I call her. She'd skipped school, she was severely depressed, she'd been bullied, and, and she was home. And I was able to help her. She's her big brother. And so when I hung up the phone, I was like, oh my gosh, I think I might have heard the voice of God. Now, I'll tell you, Sean, I have journaled my journey of faith for the last thirty-five, forty years. Those happen all the time.

• 29:10Speaker 05

  All kinds.

• 29:10Lee Strobel?

  Intuitions that you believe are really from God.

• 29:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it's not just, yeah, so fascinatingly, I just interviewed a helicopter pilot, some medic, and he's going 140 miles an hour after, he flies life flight. A bird went 140 miles an hour through his windshield, right hit his car.

• 29:34Lee Strobel?

  Oh my gosh.

• 29:34Speaker 05

  It's like a baseball at 140 miles an hour, boom, he's dead, like he's out.

• 29:42Speaker 05

  And he suddenly finds himself outside the helicopter, like just floating there, and he sees his body in there, slumped over, his partner, you know, flying. And it's a, it's a cold night, it's 20 degrees outside, and yet he feels warm.

• 30:01Speaker 05

  Anyways, pretty consistent near death experience. He, he then finds himself moving toward the light of God. He sees the outline of what he thought was Jesus, he is a follower of Jesus. And, and the Lord said to him, welcome faithful servant. And here's just this ordinary guy, very ordinary, medic, just doing, doing his job and all that, and he was ready to die. And here's the fascinating thing, the Lord showed him in his life review several times, and he said, that was me testing you.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  So this one time he was talking about was, it was a guy who was walking down the street in the rain,

• 30:52Speaker 05

  and he drove by him and he had the thought, go pick him up. And he's like, I'm not gonna pick him up, it's raining. And, and you know, then another one, you know, same thing, thought, feeling, go pick him up. Third time, louder, go pick him up. And, and so Jeff was like, all right, all right, I'll do it. And he goes back and he picks him up and. And you know, takes them to us, where do you want to go? I don't know, up the, you know, drop me off at the, it's just like a normal, wouldn't think anything. But Jesus said that was, that was me. Wow. So I've had those. I've had those. I remember one time I'm, I'm doing a leadership

• 31:35Speaker 05

  meeting at our church and I'm late and I'm driving down the street and I see these two teenage girls in a broken down car on the side of the street and they're walking around. I could tell they're trying to fix a tire and I drive by because I'm late, right? And I hear, again, you know, you should go back and get them. And I'm like, that's a dumb thought. I don't have time. I'm gonna be late. I got a hundred people waiting for me. Second turnaround, go back. I'm like, so now I'm like, Lord, is this you? Because I've done this before. And it's usually three. It's usually three. And, and I'm like, I

• 32:15Speaker 05

  can't, you know, I'm gonna be late. And the third, it was like, what do you think you're trying to teach these people to do? Go back. And I obeyed. I went back. I turn around, I go back, I help them. Okay, fast forward. So I'm late to my meeting. I just apologized and explained. Two years later, maybe it was three, I, I meet this African American woman in our church who's now a leader of our sexual abuse healing ministry. And she tells me, yeah, you know how I got here? My daughters came home one day. You know, I'm

• 32:58Speaker 05

  a single mom. She had been through all that, of course, but she was now a psychologist and was helping others heal. Her daughters came home one day and told her about the pastor guy down the street who helped them change the tire. And she's like, okay, that church I might be willing to try. Interesting. They all came to faith. Her daughter now works for World Vision.

• 33:24Speaker 05

  Helping kids around the world and she was a leader in our ministry for years.

• 33:28Lee Strobel?

  Wow. And there are these moments, I mean, I think the question, how do you hear the voice of God? For me, and you I'm sure agree, generally through reading scripture.

• 33:39Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 33:40Lee Strobel?

  You hear the voice of God through the scripture that speaks to you and tells you what God wants you to know and so forth.

• 33:47Speaker 05

  Well, because you can get it wrong in your intuition if you don't know the will of God.

• 33:51Lee Strobel?

  And everything has to be measured against that to make sure because God's not going to lead you to do something that's inconsistent. But I've had those moments too. I had one in 1994, back when we used travel agents, remember, to book airline flights. So I had to fly to a city in Ohio. And so I'm on the phone and the travel agent said, okay, you got to fly to Pittsburgh. And then you get in a smaller commuter plane and it takes you, it lands right across the street from where you're going in Canton, Ohio. And I said, okay, sounds great. And you hear the type, type, type, she's typing my reservation. And I had one of those impressions.

• 34:25Lee Strobel?

  Is there another way to go? No, no, no, you have to fly, I think it was to Cleveland and rent a car and drive for several hours. No, no, this is perfect. Gets you right, right where you're going. I just, I just don't feel comfortable with it. All right, well, I can, so type, type, type, she unbooks me on that first flight, books me on the United flight heading somewhere else at Cleveland or wherever it was. Both flights took off at the same time, the one to Pittsburgh that I would have been on and the one to Cleveland that I was on. And I rent a car, I get dinner, I get back in the car, I'm going to drive down to Canton or whatever it was. And I turn on the radio and that other plane had crashed. Wow. That was the 1994 crash in Pittsburgh of the US Air flight that killed everybody on board.

• 35:10Lee Strobel?

  And I think about that and I go, was that God impressing on me that, you know what? I don't want you on that flight. Or was that just me saying, you know, it's US Air, I don't like them as much or whatever. I think it was God. I think it was God protecting me.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  And so interesting tagging on to that because people will say, and you know, like I said, I'm a skeptic, so I think that way. Like, well, what about all those other people? Doesn't he care about them?

• 35:43Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 05

  And I had an interesting thing. I think he's speaking to us all the time. But we have to develop that quiet willingness to hear, to listen. So my own family, so you know, I got all interested in this near death experience stuff when my dad was dying of cancer. Right. As I shared with you. And that actually led me to start reading the Bible and that's how I came to faith in Christ. But during that time, so my dad, my dad was a smoker and a drinker. And so he did not want to get a a physical because he didn't want the bad news.

• 36:28Speaker 05

  So he goes finally for a physical after about five or six years. And the night after they gave my dad the results, my mom's good friend wakes up having had a very vivid dream that kind of like your angel dream and vivid dreams are very different. This is a normal dream. I've had two or three of them and they're very different. Very vivid dream that someone in our family was horribly sick. There was something terribly wrong. And she calls my mom and tells her and my mom is like, well, you know, the kids are fine and no, everybody's okay.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  And you know, John is my dad's name, just had a physical and everything came back great. Well, they told my dad they found a scar on his lungs, but they thought it was just a scar from pneumonia. But it turns out that was actually the beginning of cancer and they missed it. And two years later, when they found it, it was too late. Wow. Wow. So I've always wondered, was the Lord trying to, you know, it does say in the Old Testament that God speaks in various ways. You know, in thoughts or impressions, in dreams, through his word, through his prophets and through Jesus. So I've always wondered about that. Like, what if we had been more Attuned. Attuned.

• 37:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. Good question. And so I, you know, anytime those kinds of things happen, I don't freak out about them and I don't. But I, but I'm always like, Lord, is there something I need to know here? Something I need to pay attention to?

• 38:07Shawn Ryan?

  You have to be open.

• 38:09Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 38:09Speaker 05

  You do. You have to be seeking. You have to, you know? And that's why I think, you know, I think daily making time and space to read God's word, meditate on what is true, what is His will, and pray. You know, and prayer is not like some formal ritualistic thing. It's just talking. You know, it's just talking things over with God. And, and the more, the more you get used to just doing that throughout the day, then I find the more in tune you are to those promptings.

• 38:40Lee Strobel?

  It's what I typically do in my prayers in the morning is I, at the end, I say, Lord, I'm just gonna stay still for a few minutes. And if there's something you want me to know, if you want to communicate something more directly to me, I'm open, I'm in a posture of receptivity. And I just spend a minute or two in that posture and most of the time, nothing. But then every once in a while, there's this impression about something. And I remember when I, when I was in, I was a journalist at Chicago Tribune, very successful in what I was doing, and I felt God was starting to call me out of that into, after I became a Christian, into the staff of a church at a 60% pay cut. And

• 39:22Speaker 05

  I remember that too.

• 39:24Lee Strobel?

  To abandon this entire career.

• 39:26Speaker 05

  Took me two years of

• 39:28Lee Strobel?

  No kidding.

• 39:28Speaker 05

  wrestling, like, really?

• 39:29Lee Strobel?

  Exactly.

• 39:30Speaker 05

  Any other way?

• 39:31Lee Strobel?

  Those are the times you go, really? You're gonna have to tell me three times for this. But, but, but those are the moments that you're receptive to that kind of thing. I think to take the initiative to say, almost like putting up an antenna, and saying, God, I'm, I'm here, I'm waiting, I'm listening. And if you don't have anything for me, that's fine. But if you do, then please.

• 39:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. You know, we're talking about, we're talking about a direct link, basically, to God. And we're talking about guardian angels. And, and John, you had mentioned, you know, as long as it, is it, as long as it aligns with Scripture.

• 40:07Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 40:07Shawn Ryan?

  And so.

• 40:10Lee Strobel?

  The counterpart to that, could demons or Satan be in jet, could there be a direct line of communication from him?

• 40:18Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 40:19Lee Strobel?

  And you could confuse the thought.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  I always, I always tell people, don't think every thought is your own.

• 40:25Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, it is a seatful above all things, the Bible says.

• 40:27Speaker 05

  I've had, you know, gosh, I had, I remember, I've got many of these, but I remember one guy who, um, when I was a pastor was telling me, you know, God's, God's been telling me, I've gotta, I've gotta follow love. And what he was basically doing was hooking up with a younger, prettier woman, cause his wife had had a child who was severely disabled. And it was really hard. And he was gonna abandon them and his first marriage, because this was a lot prettier and easier and more fun.

• 41:10Speaker 05

  And God was telling him. I guarantee you, God was not telling him that.

• 41:15Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 41:15Speaker 05

  What, and how do I know? Well, because.

• 41:18Lee Strobel?

  Violates scripture.

• 41:19Speaker 05

  God wants us to be faithful. You know, he says, never will I leave you or forsake you. And marriage is a, is a mirror of that. You know, Jesus said, God's the one who brings two together as one. And, and they're meant to mirror the oneness he wants to have with us.

• 41:36Lee Strobel?

  But that's a good example too, of how we evaluate, uh, whether or not it's God really speaking. So it is to go to a brother, to go to a sister, a fellow believer and say, hey, I'm feeling, what do you think? And to have you say to him, uh, no, I mean.

• 41:51Speaker 05

  And by the way, he didn't listen.

• 41:52Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, wow.

• 41:53Speaker 05

  Usually don't.

• 41:54Lee Strobel?

  But the demonic world is real. And I have a chapter on my book, I tell the story, this, this is really amazing about the reality of the demonic world. Um, so a guy named Richard Gallagher, he's a psychiatrist. So he's a medical doctor as well, that's trained in psychiatry. Uh, Ivy League trained, he was a professor at several major, very influential, elite institutions in the Northeast. I have a quote from the president, former of the American Psychiatric Association, saying this guy is. A totally, total man of integrity, total man of credibility. I mean, just, this is a great, great human being. And, um, he and his wife had two cats. And they loved each

• 42:39Lee Strobel?

  other. They slept together, they were always together and, uh, but one night, they, they went nuts on each other. They're attacking each other, hissing, they're growling, they're, they're, they're snarling, they're trying to claw, they're trying to kill each other. They literally had to rip them apart. So what the heck is going on? And, um, I couldn't figure it out. Well, the next morning, the doorbell rings at nine in the morning, and it was a previous appointment. A Catholic priest was bringing a woman who claimed to be a high priestess of a satanic cult, to be evaluated by him to see if she was mentally ill, or perhaps demon possessed, or whatever. So at nine o'clock, the doorbell rings, he opens the door, and hears this woman who claims to be a priestess of a satanic cult,

• 43:21Lee Strobel?

  and she kinda sneers at him, and she says, "How'd you like those cats last night?" Yeah. Wow. Talking about a chill going down someone's spine. Um, he ended up spending 20 years investigating the, uh, the demonic worlds. He'd written books about it. Incredibly, uh, credible individual who talks about, um, exorcisms that he has witnessed, um, that there are things that take place that, as he says, are not the results of a psychiatric issue, because he's a great psychiatrist. He knows what psychiatry can tell us. A difference. And this is different, when people are speaking Latin in a language they don't know. When they're, one petite woman picked up a 217-pound Lutheran deacon, threw him

• 44:04Lee Strobel?

  across the room. Uh, when eight witnesses, uh, observed, uh, someone levitating off a bed. Wow. Um, this kinda thing. So, the demonic world is real. Satan can present himself as an angel of light. Mm-hmm. And we have to be so careful when we think we're, you know, our heart is deceitful, and we have, we have our own motivations and so forth. So, you know, you have to consult scriptures, if you're a sister with scripture. I, I have a good friend, Mark Middleburg, you know, Mark, uh, very godly individual, but he knows everything about me, I know everything about him, and, and if I ever have something that... I think is an impression from God. I call Mark, what do you think? Do you think this is legitimate or not?

• 44:42Lee Strobel?

  We have to be really careful. But does God communicate in these? Gosh, there are 200 examples in Scripture of dreams being used to communicate to people. So yeah, God does that through dreams. He speaks in different ways, as you say, so we have to be open to it, but but at the same time, I think discerning, yeah cautious and discerning.

• 45:03Shawn Ryan?

  So is I hear this a lot with my friends that are Catholic and you guys know I was raised Catholic.

• 45:09Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Shawn Ryan?

  And I go back and forth, you know, and I go to mass sometimes, I go to regular church sometimes, but you know, I hear a lot of the Catholics that are really into the spiritual warfare stuff, they talk about kind of like a some type of a legal system. And is basically allowing demons to use the legal system to get to you. So if if we're not, and I'm butchering this, but do you guys know anything about this stuff? Like some type of a

• 45:43Speaker 05

  I know what you're talking about. I've yeah, read and studied. But I don't, I'm not an expert on it. So I'm out of my lane talking about it. But I think what they're referring to is that, you know, God, God is a God of order. He's created laws of nature. I think spiritual laws as well. And and yes, what I have heard is that, you know, there is it's like the military, there are certain levels of authority and hierarchy and I mean, Paul references that in Ephesians five, six, Ephesians six, there's powers, principalities, the dark forces of evil in the world, and he's talking about

• 46:28Speaker 05

  there's a hierarchy, there is a an organization to

• 46:32Lee Strobel?

  And so there is a hierarchy, there are angels, yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 05

  And and and the demonic. And so I think what they're talking about is that, for instance,

• 46:46Speaker 05

  If we choose to give ourselves over, like, let's say, let's say you, you like wine, you know, like wine, or alcohol, whatever, but you choose to keep giving yourself over to it again and again and again.

• 47:03Shawn Ryan?

  A vice.

• 47:05Speaker 05

  Any, yeah, anything, it can be a good thing, but, but it can then gain control over you, mastery over you. And I think that is maybe what that, that legal thing is talking about, because if you think about how evil works in the world, I don't think evil really has much power, except in the power of the lie.

• 47:30Speaker 05

  So, I, you know, I've used the example, I've, I've counseled, you know, like anorexic women in our church before, right?

• 47:40Speaker 05

  But, you know, guys have their own thing, but I remember this woman who literally was starving herself to death, thinking that she was horribly overweight and terribly ugly. None of it was true. But she had believed a lie, and that lie was now controlling her to actually slowly kill herself.

• 48:06Speaker 05

  Well, same, same thing with suicidal ideation. It's a lie, you know, there's no other way out, it's hopeless, you know, this is going to end, the pain and the despair. Well, near-death experiencers consistently say, no, it doesn't. Yeah, it's just a doorway. It's, it's, it's just a step into another life, but you take yourself with you and all the baggage, you gotta work it out here. And, so, yeah, so I think, I think that's probably what they're talking about, that we, you know, there are laws of nature, but there are spiritual laws as well.

• 48:41Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. And then, just one more random question that, that, that doesn't really fit into the, to the structure of the interview is, you know, you guys are talking about, both of you are talking about, does it align with scripture? And so, I mean, I'm, I'm relatively new to this, I try to read the Bible, I'll open it up into a random page and see what's, if he's talking to me or not, sometimes he is.

• 49:09Shawn Ryan?

  I would say the majority of the time, I don't even understand what I just read. And so, the Bible leads to me, and I know it is to a lot of other people, uh, it's just a very daunting book to, to try to consume properly.

• 49:24Speaker 05

  Eight hundred thousand words.

• 49:25Shawn Ryan?

  It can create a lot more confusion than, than, than clarity, at least for me.

• 49:31Speaker 05

  That's true.

• 49:31Shawn Ryan?

  And so, you know, I have a friend, Rob, he sent me this book, I think it's called The Jesus Calling or something, and it's every, every, every day it has a, yeah, new thing you read. I get a lot out of that. Every day, I'm like, oh, man, like, that's like, right, I read it at the end of the day before I go to bed. And, uh, it, it, almost every day, I'm like,

• 49:57Shawn Ryan?

  that's like, right on the money, man. And, um,

• 50:00Speaker 05

  And she's basing that on scripture.

• 50:02Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 50:03Shawn Ryan?

  She puts the scripture underneath of it, and I, uh, she'll summarize it, and then I read the scripture, and I'm like, oh, I don't know what that means, but I know what this means.

• 50:11Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 50:11Shawn Ryan?

  And, so, I'm just curious, you know, how do you guys, I mean, when you started,

• 50:18Shawn Ryan?

  did you just crack it open and read it from cover to cover, or how, I mean, cause it's, it's, it's?

• 50:23Lee Strobel?

  Well, I, I read it when I was an atheist, during my investigation, and found a lot of it, like you say, very hard to understand and put together in a coherent, uh, way. Um, but what I discovered is, God gifts certain people to be able to teach the Bible in a way that, um, um, truthfully and accurately conveys to us the, the contents. And so, I think being part of a church that systematically goes through scripture and is based on the Bible, as lecturers it aren't, um, but a church where the Bible is taught in a systematic way is very, very helpful. I found it very helpful being part of a small group of guys, we'd get together on Saturday morning, and we'd go through, um, um, a book of the Bible together and talk about it, and there's some wonderful books,

• 51:07Lee Strobel?

  uh, called commentaries, written by scholars and experts, that illuminate each book of the Bible, um, and tell you things that you had no way of knowing, uh, uh, because we don't know the Context of a lot of this stuff independently, it was written a long time ago. And a good commentary really explains the context, the background, um, some of the nuances of the language that the layperson just doesn't understand. So I think it's really important to be part of a Bible believing church that teaches the Bible, uh, some sort of, if you can, a mentoring or a small group relationship with someone. My wife had a friend named Linda that they met with all the time and Linda would help walk her through scripture.

• 51:47Lee Strobel?

  Um, um, and, and I think, um, over time, and it takes, it takes a period of time, you begin to feel like you have a better handle on what the, not only what the Bible is saying, but how I can find in the Bible guidance for this particular issue that I'm facing. Um, so I'll call my friend Mark, say, Mark, I'm wrestling with something and I feel like God's leading me in this direction and I don't know what to do. And he'll say, Lee, you know what, you should read the fourth chapter of Ephesians or something. And, uh, let's talk about it because I think you may or may not be on the right track. Um, to have somebody like that in my life who, uh, cares about me and helps me and guides me along in understanding scripture and how to apply it to my life is invaluable to me.

• 52:31Lee Strobel?

  And, and I would encourage anybody who's, who feels that, as we all do, when you first open the Bible, that's very confusing, uh, take advantage of those resources, but especially the local church, um, where you can really dig in and over time, develop that confidence that you're understanding not just the general flow of the Bible, but the specific teachings of it.

• 52:52Speaker 05

  Okay, okay. Yeah, and I would say, and even though I started a church and led the church, a small group, I think is the best. Um, and that's, you know, I didn't come to faith through the church. I, I actually came to faith through a small group where I could ask my questions and wrestle, and we were doing that. And what I like to say is start with. The most clear and then work back from there. Yeah. So, the Bible, you know, I, I, I think the reason it's so daunting is there's no other book like it. It's not a book, it's a library of books. It's sixty-six books, you know, like we talked about the first time, written over fifteen hundred years in three different languages by forty different authors,

• 53:36Speaker 05

  and yet consistent theme about God's story throughout human history, the God of all nations, right? So, the thing about it, though, is throughout, it consistently tells of a time that God would intersect human history in a form we could understand. God is far beyond what Jesus revealed, but all of the character, the full representation of God in human form. And so, starting with the Gospels, with Jesus' life and teachings, the four eyewitnesses that report on it, because I think Jesus even said,

• 54:20Speaker 05

  "I have not come to do away with the law and the prophets," which is all the Old Testament, "except I've come to fulfill them." Which I think means that all of that, the law and the prophets and the history of the Old Testament and humanity and all that, comes to fulfillment in Jesus. And then he becomes, and his teaching becomes the lens to look back and understand and interpret, the less clear. So, for instance, he was asked, "How do you sum up the whole Old Testament? What's most important?" Right? This is Matthew twenty-two, and he says, "The first, the most important command is to love God with all you've got."

• 55:02Speaker 05

  And, you know, so he's quoting Deuteronomy six, four, the Shema, the creed of Judaism. Love God, you know, there's only one God. The second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. That's in Leviticus. So, he's quoting the Torah, the Old Testament.

• 55:21Speaker 05

  And, and then he says, "Do these and you fulfill all the commands of Scripture."

• 55:29Speaker 05

  Which basically means all the rest of the commands of Scripture are commentary on what love actually looks like.

• 55:34Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, okay.

• 55:36Speaker 05

  So, so there, I agree with Lee though, there, you know, there are great tools out there now. I mean, um, I, I, I read the Bible on my phone. There's, you know, an app, the U version Bible and, and you can get a, I use the New Living Translation because it's a, it's a consistent translation of the original Greek into English that we can understand and does a really good job, or the New International Version, those two translations. And then there are things like, um, right now I'm doing the Bible recap. It's really good. It takes you through the Bible, but every day, uh, this woman Tarly Cobble comes on

• 56:18Speaker 05

  and gives a little seven minute, like, here's what you just read and here's how to make sense of it.

• 56:23Lee Strobel?

  I have a friend named Skip Heitzig, who wrote a book called The Bible from 30,000 Feet. And the idea is kind of get that orientation, you know, you look at, get the basics and get it kind of figured out in your mind, how this all fits together. That's a great resource. I like the Net Bible. You ever use the Net Bible?

• 56:40Speaker 05

  No.

• 56:41Lee Strobel?

  Uh, it's a pretty new translation headed up by Daniel D. B. Wallace of Dallas Seminary. But what I like about it, it has thousands of footnotes explaining why certain translation decisions were made.

• 56:53Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 56:54Lee Strobel?

  And you can really get into, oh, you could have translated this way or this way, and the footnotes and say, this is why we chose this way, because this and this, things you wouldn't understand about the Greek or the Hebrew, uh, but they kind of illuminate and, and help you understand the decisions that were made beside, uh, behind the translation.

• 57:09Shawn Ryan?

  That's just, thank you, thank you. All right, let's get into the interview now.

• 57:15Speaker 05

  I know, I was gonna say, we started down the rabbit hole, family.

• 57:18Shawn Ryan?

  Had a couple of things I had to clear up.

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• 57:53Speaker 00

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• 57:57Speaker 06

  On October 2nd.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 58:03Speaker 06

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• 58:04Speaker 01

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 58:08Speaker 06

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You starved, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 58:14Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 58:19Speaker 06

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 58:32Speaker 06

  On October 2nd.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 58:38Speaker 06

  Tom Cruise is.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 58:43Speaker 06

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You starved, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 58:49Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 58:54Speaker 06

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 59:03Shawn Ryan?

  All right, so here we are. We're getting ready to do the real interview. And, um, but first, one of you guys want to start us off with a prayer?

• 59:13Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, I'd be glad to pray. Yeah. Lord, thanks for this opportunity to talk niches to Shawn, but all these folks who are listening in, watching in, we pray that you would move in all of our hearts to draw us closer and closer to you, those that are skeptics or those that are seekers. We pray that even today be the day that they cross that line, receive you as a forgiver and leader through your son, Jesus. And for those of us who are your children and been your followers for a long time, we pray that you would encourage us, enlighten us, and point us ever more strongly toward the reality of who you are. In Jesus' name, amen.

• 59:53Shawn Ryan?

  Amen. Thank you.

• 59:56Lee Strobel?

  True.

• 59:57Shawn Ryan?

  All right, so let's start with the crucifixion.

• 1:00:01Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:02Shawn Ryan?

  You know, kind of the journey to it, what did it mean? And we'll just start wherever you want to start with that.

• 1:00:09Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, I mean, I would go back a little further to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus, it says, "sweated blood." And I read that when I was a skeptic and thought, that just shows this is just fantasy land. This is just a literary device to suggest that he was under stress or something. And then I find there are like 70 cases in medical journals of this medical phenomenon called hematidrosis, hematidrosis, which is when you're under extreme stress, your capillaries in your sweat glands break down and blood seeps in and you sweat, a combination of sweat and blood. And so, there's actually a medical

• 1:00:50Lee Strobel?

  support for that description of Jesus sweating blood. But the other thing that happens with that medical phenomenon is that it makes your skin ever more sensitive. And so, Jesus was set up for an incredibly painful next step, which was being flogged by the Roman soldiers. Now, there's only like a sentence or so in the Bible that says he was flogged, but that was an incredibly brutal experience, that he was stripped, that he was tied to a post, that he was beaten with a whip that had jagged bits of sheep bone embedded in it. Balls of lead, the balls of lead would break open the back, the sheep, the jagged sheep bone would cut the flesh.

• 1:01:34Lee Strobel?

  There's an eyewitness to a Roman flogging who described it this way, he said, "The sufferer's veins were laid bare, and the very muscles and tendons and bowels of the victim were laid open to exposure." So this was a horrific beating. Yeah, torture, horrific beating that he endured, and it put him in what's called hypovolemic shock, which is shock from a great loss of blood. And you could see evidence of that in the fact he couldn't carry the cross beam of the cross very far, and also he had great thirst and so forth. So, here he is, already in critical condition, before he's even crucified. And then nails are driven through his wrists, not through the hand, because it would just tear, but driven through his wrists and through his feet, he's hoisted on the cross, and

• 1:02:18Lee Strobel?

  what happens when you're in that position is that it puts incredible stresses on your chest muscles. So, you can't breathe. And so you're hanging on that cross, you're having trouble breathing, you can take air in, but not expel the air. And so you're on the cross, and the only way you can continue to breathe is by lessening the stress on your chest muscles. The only way you can do that is push up with your feet, which of course have a spike through them, and your bloodied back is now scraping against the coarse wood of the cross, and you let up and you can exhale, and then you inhale again, and then you settle down, and then you just keep going through that motion, time and time again, until you can't do it

• 1:03:00Lee Strobel?

  anymore, and your acidic qualities are building up in your blood, your heart rate is now getting irregular, and you actually end up dying of asphyxiation, ultimately can't breathe, that causes your heart to fail. And what's interesting as well is that this would cause fluid to collect around your heart and around your lungs. And so when the spear was thrust into him, to make sure he was dead, John interestingly describes water and blood coming out. And people think, "Oh, well, that's just a metaphor for baptism or something." No, no, no. That is what would happen.

• 1:03:39Lee Strobel?

  The pericardial effusion, in other words, the membrane of fluid around the heart and the lung was punctured, and what looked like water would come out, as well as blood. And he was declared dead. Now, I used to think like a skeptic, "Oh, wait a minute, maybe he survived the cross somehow. Maybe he fainted, and they thought he was dead." Well, that's been disproven a thousand times in many different ways. But the Journal of the American Medical Association, several years ago, published an evaluation of the death of Jesus Christ, and the conclusion was, quote, "Clearly, the weight of the historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead even

• 1:04:23Lee Strobel?

  before the wound to his side was inflicted." So, and in fact, the atheist New Testament scholar, Garrett Looneman, says it's indisputable that Jesus was truly dead after being crucified. We have no record anywhere of anyone ever surviving a full Roman crucifixion. And not only do we have multiple reports of his death in the documents of the New Testament, we got five inches sources outside the Bible that confirm his execution. So we have Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian who worked for the Romans. Tacitus, another early historian. Mirabah Sarapian, Lucian, even the Jewish Talmud admits that he was executed. So this idea that somehow Jesus survived the cross and was revived by the cool damp air of the tomb is ridiculous.

• 1:05:08Shawn Ryan?

  Have you guys seen the movie, I think it's called The Passion?

• 1:05:12Lee Strobel?

  Yes.

• 1:05:13Shawn Ryan?

  Would you say that was pretty accurate?

• 1:05:16Lee Strobel?

  I would say it approached how bad it was, but didn't fully capture it. I don't think it could have, because people would have been vomiting in the audience watching if they had taken it to the, don't you think?

• 1:05:29Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:05:30Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:30Speaker 05

  Well, and so this is what actually convinced me when I was a skeptic. You know, and learning this. So, as you know, my father's dying of cancer. I read this first research on near-death experiences. I'd always said, "Well, Jesus is probably a legend. God, who can know? There's no evidence." And then I read this, and I'm like, "Oh, my gosh, maybe this is evidence." And because so many were talking about in their near-death experience, this God of light, who is love, and even Jesus, I was like, well, maybe I should be more open to reading the Bible. So I start reading the Bible. I go to a small group.

• 1:06:10Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Speaker 05

  And, and I'm asking my questions and wrestling. And here's what I learned that actually, it wasn't near-death experiences that led me to faith. It was this. Everything Lee just explained is history. Historians like that are not believers. They will not deny these things. These are facts. Okay? But all that, God told in advance. Jesus, Jesus was a man with an address in history. I think you said that, didn't you? Quoting my good friend. But, but the who, the where, the, the how, the why, the what, the why, all of that, God foretold so that we would know this is real. This is not myth. So for instance,

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

  um, in Isaiah, in the book of Isaiah. And, and remember Isaiah, uh, we found a complete copy of the book of Isaiah in the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948. Complete copy that you can read online, if you can read the Hebrew, but you can read a translation. It reads exactly like our, our modern day Bible.

• 1:07:15Lee Strobel?

  And that's how many years before the death of Jesus? 600 years or so?

• 1:07:19Speaker 05

  So 780 years before Jesus, Isaiah writes. All these prophecies. Now we have.

• 1:07:27Lee Strobel?

  What prophecies?

• 1:07:28Speaker 05

  I'm gonna tell you. But we have a surviving copy of the whole scroll of Isaiah that carbon dates to 150 to 300 years before Jesus. So this is a copy of Isaiah's original written in 780 B.C., but we have it in a museum.

• 1:07:47Speaker 05

  It tours the United States. You can go read it online, exactly what it says. And here's what it says.

• 1:07:53Speaker 05

  That where? That, that um, Isaiah nine, that to Galilee, a light has come. For a child is born, a son is given, and he will be called mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace. So this is Judaism. So you don't, you don't call any human God. There's only one God, and he's the, the eternal Yahweh, the I am, the eternal self-existent one. And yet here in Judaism in about seven eighty B.C. And even before that with Moses, is this foretelling of this time that God is going

• 1:08:37Speaker 05

  to enter into humanity and reveal himself in the form of a son, a child, and come to Galilee. Okay, so that now of the whole world, this is a very specific place, right? Specific identification of a human. He's going to come from the lineage of David. If you've ever read the Bible, you always wonder, why do they put all these stupid genealogies in there? Cause it's relating back. It's showing that this is in fact what happened. Okay. So, so, so that's the who, a little bit of the where. Actually in Micah five, two, it also says that Bethlehem is going to, so though it's

• 1:09:18Speaker 05

  the least of the villages, from you will come a ruler over Israel whose days are from eternity. Okay, so who, who comes from days of eternity, right? So he's going to come from Bethlehem and Galilee. So that's, that's the where. Then you have the when. So in the book of Daniel, in Daniel, chapter nine, Daniel is praying, they're in captivity in Babylon, the Jewish people. Okay, so this is in like the five hundreds, four hundreds B.C. Daniel's praying, what's going to happen to us?

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

  And an angel Gabriel comes to him and says, I've, I've come to tell you what's going to happen to the Jewish people. And he's, he's saying, till all human history is fulfilled. Okay. And he says, from the decree of the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Okay, Jerusalem had been wiped out by the Babylonians. This is real history. From the decree of the rebuilding of Jerusalem until Meshach, which is what we translate Messiah, until the anointed one, the Messiah comes. And then he, he, he gives a timeline. And, and literally a timeline, like he, he says they're gonna, basically they're gonna be seven, seven plus forty-two sevens.

• 1:10:44Speaker 05

  And I think there's a good reason to believe there's sevens of years. So forty-nine times seven years, four hundred and eighty-three years. From the starting point of the decree to rebuild Jerusalem. Now, interestingly, in Ezra seven, we have that decree. It was Art Xerxes, who's a Persian king. And the decree, though the Bible's written, the Old Testament in Hebrew, this decree is written in Aramaic. So that's the, the language of the Persians. So it's literally the decree just put into the text of Ezra. And it was in the seventh year of Art Xerxes. You know, Encyclopedia Britannica tells us when Art Xerxes ruled started in four sixty-five.

• 1:11:26Speaker 05

  Um, so literally, we know from four fifty-seven, go four hundred and eighty-three years, and Messiah's going to come. Well, that's twenty-seven A.D. It's the when. And by the way, even if you don't do the church math and don't follow that, the angel goes on and says to Daniel, this is all in Daniel nine. He says, "The Messiah will come and be killed. And then the ruler will come who will destroy the city and the temple." Okay, so the city of Jerusalem and the temple. Okay, so think about this. That happened too. Seventy A.D., the Roman general Titus wipes out the city, destroys a temple. And the angel says the Messiah will be killed before that happens.

• 1:12:13Speaker 05

  So this is, this is real history.

• 1:12:15Lee Strobel?

  So if Jesus isn't the Messiah, there will never be a Messiah.

• 1:12:18Speaker 05

  No. And then in Isaiah 53, now remember all this, we have a copy predating Jesus. So it wasn't doctored up after the fact. That's what I initially said as a skeptic, like, oh, you know, Jesus came and then they just redacted the text. No, proof, no.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  In Isaiah 53, it says, and actually in 52, it paints a picture. It says that he was so, they're talking about the suffering servant. That's what he's called. And see, that's what we don't realize is Jesus is going to come and rule, but first he had to come and suffer. And that was foretold. And it said, he will be so marred and disfigured, like no human before him. He was barely recognizable, I think is the way it says. And then it says, to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? Okay, so the idea is like, through Jesus, we're not seeing all of the infinite Creator God, who can't be contained in time and space. It's like his arm reaching into our reality.

• 1:13:20Speaker 05

  And it said, he grew up before him. So he grew up before God, the eternal Father. He was despised and rejected by mankind. He was pierced for our transgressions.

• 1:13:34Lee Strobel?

  This is before crucifixion was ever implemented.

• 1:13:37Speaker 05

  Even known. This is before the Romans invented crucifixion.

• 1:13:40Lee Strobel?

  And Psalm says his bones were out of joint, which is what happens to your shoulders when you're crucified.

• 1:13:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it says, and it says why. So it says what he will do. He will, and it says, he was, he, by his wounds, we were healed. And for our iniquities, he, he took on our punishment. Because, and this is Isaiah 53, all of us like sheep have wandered off. We've gone astray. But, but God laid on him the sins of us all.

• 1:14:10Shawn Ryan?

  See, this might go into some of the legal stuff that I was talking about earlier, with, with the, with the, whatever you want to call the legalities of the spiritual realm. I mean,

• 1:14:20Speaker 05

  Why did he have to come and go through that to save us? Well, before we go there, I want to tie to what Lee was just saying, because even Jesus on the cross, when he's, these are all real things, and he cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Well, that hearkens back to- Who cried that out? Jesus.

• 1:14:41Lee Strobel?

  And that's actually a quote, in the old days, back then, they didn't have numbers on the psalms, so they would quote the first line to indicate, "I'm applying the psalm." So here Jesus is on the cross, and he says, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" That's the first line of Psalm 22.

• 1:14:56Speaker 05

  The Psalm of David in a thousand B.C., thousand years before. Go ahead.

• 1:15:00Lee Strobel?

  Foretelling, I mean, the bones be out of joint, and so forth, this idea of the crucifixion, before crucifixion was even invented.

• 1:15:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, he says, he says, "They pierced my hands and my feet. They circle me like a pack of dogs. They divide my garments among them. The soldiers cast lots to see who would get his cloak. You know, my mouth is dried up like a pot's herd. He was thirsty."

• 1:15:31Lee Strobel?

  Which is a product of hypovolemia, hypovolemic shock.

• 1:15:36Speaker 05

  "My heart has turned to wax within me." Okay, so that's what Lee studied with Dr. Matherell.

• 1:15:43Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, Dr. Alexander Matherell, who was like the world's leading authority on the crucifixion of Jesus. I interviewed my book, The Case for Christ. And of course, all of this is, you know, predicting it just amplifies the reality of what we're talking about. This was an event in history, but it was an event foretold hundreds and hundreds of years in advance, which gives it that much more credibility and supernatural implications.

• 1:16:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, and so, so here David is-

• 1:16:13Speaker 05

  foretelling what it from the Messiah's viewpoint, what crucifixion was going to be like. And his heart turns to wax, his bones are all out of joint, he's pierced through his hands and his feet. His heart turns to wax.

• 1:16:25Lee Strobel?

  And the hand in that day, in the Greek, in Hebrew, the hand was considered, or the wrist was considered to be part of the hand, so.

• 1:16:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, and that's, and that's where people say it was, it was like.

• 1:16:34Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, which you can imagine the nerve there, there's a nerve there. And it's like taking your nerve here and taking pliers and just squeezing it when you insert a seven inch spike through your wrist, horrible, horrible way to die. They exempted Roman citizens from crucifixion. You couldn't crucify a Roman citizen because it's too awful.

• 1:16:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, they were trying to send a message, don't screw with Rome.

• 1:16:57Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:58Speaker 05

  And that's why they put him up publicly.

• 1:16:59Lee Strobel?

  I have a friend who was a GI from Vietnam and came back and was on a street corner, ran into an evangelist there. And he was Jewish, my friend, and, and the guy said, showed him Isaiah 53. And 52 and 53 from, that John's talking about that foretold Jesus. And he said, who do you think this is talking about? And my friend Lewis said, well, Jesus, but obviously that's been doctored. Obviously, it's been, you know, so he called his, his relative and said, send me the original. You know, our scriptures, I want to compare. He read it and realized this is the original. And the odds of all of this coming true were so ridiculously astronomical

• 1:17:42Lee Strobel?

  that he received Jesus as his forgiver and leader, and he became a pastor, Louis Lepes's day.

• 1:17:47Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 1:17:48Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Speaker 05

  Well, and so, so, so what, what Lee was saying, that Dr. Methrel said about the, the blood and the water.

• 1:17:55Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 05

  So think about this, and thousand years before Jesus crucifixion, he says, it says, my heart has turned to wax within me. So what the eyewitnesses of Jesus crucifixion say is that he was hung, but he was hung between two thieves and they, it was on the Passover. It's also significant.

• 1:18:17Speaker 05

  And they came and broke the legs of the two thieves again, so they can't push up and get air. That's how they would accelerate the death, break their legs. Because they wanted him dead before the Passover evening began. And, and so the Romans said, okay, whatever. And they did. They broke their legs, but they didn't break Jesus' legs. Which was another thing, not a bone, his body was broken. Right. Instead, the Roman guy makes sure he's dead by stabbing him in the side. And like Lee said, John reports, before the medical knowledge of this would be, he didn't know. He didn't know the implications of what he was saying. He said, blood and water came out.

• 1:18:57Speaker 05

  Okay, so what that indicates and what Lee found interviewing Dr. Matheral is when you have a heart attack, the pericardial fluid builds up. It's this clear fluid around the heart. And that's what happened. Jesus died of a heart attack. Just like Psalm 22 says, "My heart has turned to wax within me." Yeah. And, and so I believe, and I don't, I don't know what you think about this, but I believe that, you know, when Jesus cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And he's referring to that Psalm. At that moment, he experienced all of the sins and hurt and hatred and woundedness

• 1:19:41Speaker 05

  of every human for all history. He felt it. Yeah. And his heart couldn't take it. His human heart couldn't take it. So he didn't actually die, he died on the cross. Yeah. But he died from taking on all our sins and paying for them. And he, of course, was the sinless sacrifice. So this is another wild thing is the whole sacrificial system of Judaism. For tells, for tells all this. 1500 years. And, and, and they had to sacrifice these lambs every year to pay for and cover their sins for the year before. So that their faith in God, that, that he is going to pay ultimately.

• 1:20:24Speaker 05

  All right. So this is, this whole sacrificial system happened in the, in the temple. It could only happen in the temple. According to Moses. And the, the last Passover, okay, so Jesus is crucified on the Passover, which is, which is when all this would take place, the sacrificial, you know, yearly thing. So he dies on the Passover. And then, like we've said, 40 years later, the temple is destroyed, so no more sacrifices can happen.

• 1:21:00Lee Strobel?

  Right.

• 1:21:02Speaker 05

  So it's a conundrum for Jewish people. Where does

• 1:21:05Lee Strobel?

  Exactly. And John

• 1:21:06Speaker 05

  Where are your sins paid for? Well, it was paid for once and for all.

• 1:21:09Lee Strobel?

  Right. John the Baptist pointed Jesus as said, behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. So he's, he's applying this Roman, or this Jewish sacrificial system to the ultimate sacrifice, who is a sinless son of God, who would pay the sacrifice that we deserve for the sins that we've committed, and yet takes that on so that we can be forgiven.

• 1:21:28Speaker 05

  Now, here's what's fascinating is, so, so, you know, I started opening up to God and faith by reading about near-death experiences, because of the experiences they were having. But it was that that led me to faith. And then I start studying the Bible, but I'm also curious about these near-death experiences. I'm trying to figure out, how does this fit together? And that's how I, you know, ended up writing the books I did. But interestingly, some of the people that I've interviewed, all around the world, that have had near-death experiences, I think just confirm the resurrection.

• 1:22:05Lee Strobel?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:06Speaker 05

  Which, by the way, was also in Isaiah 53.

• 1:22:08Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:09Speaker 05

  After he pays for their sins, he will see the light of life and be satisfied. Even resurrection is right there, foretold. So, I interviewed this one guy, Swadeek. He was a Muslim Imam in Rwanda. You can see him on my podcast. I mean, I, you can hear him talking about it. Um, okay, so he's not, he's not a believer in Jesus. He was actually an apologist for Islam. So he would fight in the streets against Christians, why, why they were wrong and um, amazing story. His mom was a Hutu, his dad was a Tutsi during the genocide, tore, ripped their

• 1:22:51Speaker 05

  family apart. Um, he ended up a street kid at age eight, doing cocaine, dealing cocaine. And then there's this whole experience where he, he has a mental breakdown and um, and this, these people from the Anglican church pray for him and, and he's healed. It was like a Nebuchadnezzar kind of like, and he's healed and he didn't know what to do with that. And um, and then like a year and a half later, he gets blood cancer. And it's fourth stage blood cancer. And so they put him on palliative care. He's gonna die.

• 1:23:29Speaker 05

  And his mom actually worshiped the African goddess Baco. His dad was a sheik, so an Imam in the Muslim faith. And he had become an Imam. Um, nothing the Muslims do could heal him. Nothing Baco could do could heal him. His mom, out of desperation, knowing that he had been healed after they prayed in Jesus' name, goes to the Anglican church and says, will you ask Jesus, your God, to heal him? And they said, yes, we will, but you need to pray to him too. Swedie dies. And, and he is in this hellish place. He called it, he,

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  he said to me, it was like a slaughterhouse. That's the way he described it. And these three human-like, but very distorted people, creatures come in, uh, one, one with an axe, one with a scythe and, and a bucket. And, and they're about to like, put the axe through his chest. It's like a torture. And he says, into, into this room, steps this man of light in a robe with a beard, and he holds out his hands, and in his wrists are holes.

• 1:24:53Speaker 05

  And the light coming out of them and light coming out of him into into me, Swadeek said. Like looking right through every part of me. And he said, and I felt a peace and a warmth because he was terrified and suddenly. He's at peace and he said, I knew who this was. And he knew because when the passion of the Christ had come to Kirigali, Rwanda. He'd been given three free movie tickets and that was one of them. And even though he didn't want to see something about Jesus, he wanted his full money's worth. So he went. And and Jesus says to him. He never said, I'm Jesus. But I mean, he's.

• 1:25:37Speaker 05

  He knows. He said, I died for mankind. You were among those I died for. Never deny it again and tell everyone.

• 1:25:46Speaker 05

  And Swadeek. Sits up. And a sheik falls off his face. And suddenly there are all these people screaming and running and he's like, what's going on? And it was the it was he had died that evening. It was the next morning and it was his burial. He looks down to the right and there's a grave dug. Wow, wow. And he and and he goes. Jesus is here. Jesus saved me. Jesus brought me back from hell. And half, I mean, half the Muslims are just freaked out and half of them came to faith that day. But here's the thing.

• 1:26:23Speaker 05

  He is now an Anglican pastor and has had seven attempts on his life, including by his father. Wow. Because you can't, you can't become a Christian out of Islam. So what motivates him to keep doing that? And he's he's still going at it today. He's a great young guy. But my but my point is, he's not the only one who has seen. The risen Jesus and the whole, he keeps the scars. He keeps the holes because they are the sign of his love. They're the reminder of the the price he would pay for every one of us. Wow, that's awesome.

• 1:27:06Shawn Ryan?

  So by going back to my question.

• 1:27:09Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Shawn Ryan?

  About the legalities. And why, why did he have to do that to pay for our sins?

• 1:27:16Lee Strobel?

  Well, our sins are what separate us from God.

• 1:27:18Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:19Lee Strobel?

  God is holy, God is perfect, God is pure. We're not. We, we sin every day. We violate his commands. Yeah. Let me tell you about it. Um, and that is separate us from God. And the question is, how do we become reconciled with God? Somebody has to pay the, the price of the sin. And either we do, which would be an eternity separated from God. Or Jesus said, let me pay the price for you on the cross. The, the penalty you deserve for the sins that you've committed. So that I can offer forgiveness and eternal life as a free gift of my grace.

• 1:27:53Speaker 05

  And still be just.

• 1:27:54Lee Strobel?

  And still be just.

• 1:27:55Speaker 05

  That's the key.

• 1:27:55Lee Strobel?

  And, and so Romans, um, uh, six, 23 says, for the wages of sin is death. In other words, what we earn, what we deserve because of the sin in our life is death, which is separation from God for eternity. But the verse says, the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus, our Lord. It's Jesus who paid the penalty to, to bridge that gap between us and God. And when we receive his free gift of grace, then we become reconciled with God forever. And, um, uh, so it required a payment of that kind of the sinless son of God in order to, uh, atone for the sins that we've committed.

• 1:28:35Speaker 05

  I'll tell you, you know, in, in the new book and Imagine the God of Heaven, one of my favorite stories, I got to know him well, uh, is, uh, a man named Santosh Akarji. He's a Hindu, he grew up in India. Um, manufacturing engineer, very smart guy. He has a, um, he has his, uh, pancreas, or his gallstones erupt into his pancreas. He's in the hospital for a week. He's got a 200 beat per minute heart rate. They can't get it down in order to operate. He hears code blue, code blue, his heart stopped.

• 1:29:13Speaker 05

  And he, like most near-death experiences, he said to me this, he said, "I thought when you die, it's just nothing, or maybe I'd come back as another life form." But he said, "That's not what happened." He said, "I, I saw my body down below and this divine light comes brighter than the sun, but not hard to look at." And he said, "I fell in love with this light." And, because I knew this light was for me and was, was there to protect me.

• 1:29:48Speaker 05

  And this, this, this god of light takes him, uh, and similar through journey to this place. And he finds himself standing up high, looking out over what he described to me as a giant compound. Now, if you've ever been to India, they're, they're gated communities everywhere. They're gates with high walls and they call them compounds. But what he was describing was this, this city. Thousands of miles, he said, square shaped. And he's looking in and he's describing these, this, these beautiful grounds and other buildings of otherworldly building material.

• 1:30:33Speaker 05

  That's the way he described it. He was a manufacturing engineer, which is what I love is these people are still themselves fully, uh, even on the other side. And, and he's describing this place and he longs to go in. And he said, "This is, this is the longing of every human heart to live there in this place." And he was looking for a way in and he said, "I counted, there were 12 gates." He said, "I counted all the way around because your eyesight there is like telescopic." Which I used to think, "No, that's not biblical." Then I read Revelation 21, John is taken in the spirit through a very high mountain.

• 1:31:13Speaker 05

  And yet he reads the names on the foundation stones of the city. Yeah. How? Right? So Santosh says all these same things. He's describing the holy city of God, just like John does in Revelation 21. He's a Hindu. Yeah. He's never read the Bible. He's only, he's only read the Vedas and the, you know, Bhagavad Gita and the Hindu scriptures. Then he's like, where am I? And he realizes I'm up on a very high platform looking and he looks down to his left and he said, what I saw terrifies me even to say it to this day. He said, because what I saw was an abyss of darkness and at the end of it, a lake of fire that I would fall into if I fell.

• 1:31:58Speaker 05

  And I knew if I go there, it's hopeless. There's, there's no way out. And it's like he got a vision of hell. And he doesn't want to go there and he wants to go in the city, but he, he can't. He sees angels guarding the gates. He's like, how do I get in? And then he turns and there on the platform, he, he sees this. He said, I knew this was the Almighty on this giant throne. But he's in the form of a man. And he, he looks at him. Now he later said, I believe that was the risen Jesus. He didn't know that at the time. He said, because I looked up into his eyes and his eyes were like lightning. Well, that's what John describes in Revelation 21 of the risen Jesus.

• 1:32:42Speaker 05

  He said, his eyes were like, like lightning and his feet gold like, or like bronze glowing metal. Santosh said the same thing. And he instantly, as soon as he looks in his eyes, his whole life flashes before him. And this is a life review, which we talked about, you know, it's common in near death experiences. Cause time doesn't work the same way on, on the other side. And so he re experiences life and realizes because of his sin, I deserve hell. I deserve that separation from God. And he falls to his knees and says, forgive me, forgive me, God, forgive me, forgive me.

• 1:33:25Speaker 05

  And he expected that the Lord was gonna send him there. And he said, but when he spoke to me, he said, Santosh, I'm gonna send you back. And when you go back, you must love, love your family and especially your daughter. She needs you right now. And he said, I was shocked. I was shocked because I knew what I deserved. And, and he said, God is just. That's what he said to me. God is just. And he knew what he deserved. And by the way, this is a commonality of near death experiences. And we can, we can hide and pretend and, you know, defer, deflect our, our wrongs and, you know, justify, but on the other side, it's all very clear.

• 1:34:10Speaker 05

  And he said, but God's voice was so tender and merciful and compassionate and full of love for me. I was shocked. And they had this conversation because he's, because what happened is he sees a, a very narrow, he called it the very narrow gate or door, right to the side of the throne that was open to him into the kingdom of God. And, and, and he was confused. He was like, okay, all these 12 gates are closed, but that narrow gate is open. And he wanted to go in, but he knew he couldn't without permission. This is the authority of all authorities. And so after this long conversation, we're, we're basically God, you know, he's, he's asking,

• 1:34:55Speaker 05

  which mosque, which synagogue, which temple, which church, what do I do? And he's thinking religious observance. And the Lord says to him, no, Santosh, I want to see how honest, how honest, how real you are with me. Not one day a week, but 24/7, 365 days, walk with me. And then he said, the wages of sin is death. Exactly what Lee just quoted from Romans 623 to this Hindu guy, right? And then he says, surrender yourself. And Santosh says, I should underline surrender. Surrender yourself to me in your daily life.

• 1:35:42Speaker 05

  And Santosh comes back. Oh, well, before he came back, he said, Lord, when I, when I come back, I want to go through that narrow gate into your kingdom. How do I go through that narrow gate? He didn't, he didn't tell him. And he sends him back. Okay, so, and I told Lee, we were, we were talking about this and I told him, you know, it's so fascinating because God, for people who have, have not necessarily searched or don't know Jesus, he often gives them parables, even on the other side. Which is fascinating because Jesus taught in parables and no one liked it. What is a parable? A parable is a, is a teaching that doesn't just tell you what to do. It makes you think and it makes you search.

• 1:36:27Speaker 05

  And if you're, if you're just impatient and you're like, just either tell me or I'm done with you. God's like, okay, I guess you're done with me, but I want you to seek and when you seek, you will find. And that's why Jesus taught in parables. He wanted to see what's in the heart.

• 1:36:44Speaker 05

  See, because, because that's what God is after. He's after our hearts. He wants relationship. That's what he said to Santosh. I want relationship. How honest will you be walking with me? Santosh didn't understand any of that, but he comes back and he is seeking God. Every day he's praying. He's, he's like, Lord, you weren't like the gods I learned about in the Vedas. Who are you? Who is this God of compassion and love and mercy? I want to know you. And his daughter, two years later, so he's seeking for two years. His daughter is invited to sing at a church with a friend because she was a choral major in college. Santosh goes to hear her sing, walks into the church and feels the same loving presence

• 1:37:28Speaker 05

  of this God of light. And the message that day was Matthew seven, uh, the, about the narrow gate that leads to heaven. There's a narrow gate through which you must go through. And then John 10, where Jesus said, I am the gate for the sheep. Whoever enters in through me will be saved and will find eternal, will find rest.

• 1:37:54Speaker 05

  And Santosh was blown away. He was like, oh, my gosh, this is like just for me. So he goes home, he starts reading the Bible. He said, John, everything I experienced, I found in that book.

• 1:38:03Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:38:04Speaker 05

  And he became a follower of Jesus. So, you know, the risen Jesus is now being testified to by, I've interviewed people from every religious background, having a similar experience in a near death experience of the risen Jesus.

• 1:38:27Speaker 05

  So not only is there biblical evidence from all history, but I think what God's doing today is he's saying, look, I created all people of all nations to be my children. And like Lee said, the reason he did what he did through Jesus is so that anybody, anywhere, can simply turn their heart back to God, wanting forgiveness, because we all know we've screwed up and we continue to, and wanting his leadership. Like, meaning, God, you get to be God instead of me playing God.

• 1:39:04Speaker 05

  What's your will instead of just what's my will be done? Yeah.

• 1:39:09Speaker 05

  It's awesome.

• 1:39:13Shawn Ryan?

  Going back to the crucifixion, we were having a conversation downstairs about Jesus was praying to God on the cross.

• 1:39:24Shawn Ryan?

  And we were talking about the Holy Trinity. And I know we talked about this

• 1:39:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:39:30Shawn Ryan?

  in our interview, Lee, but

• 1:39:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:39:31Shawn Ryan?

  I'd like to revisit it. So if Jesus is also God, who was he praying to?

• 1:39:40Speaker 05

  Well, the Trinity is God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Spirit, three persons, one God. What's interesting, Jesus, at one point, shortly before he was killed, got up before a group and he said, I and the Father are one.

• 1:39:57Lee Strobel?

  But the Greek word for one there is not masculine, it's neuter. Which means Jesus was not saying, "I and the Father are the same person." He was saying, "I and the Father are the same thing, we're one in nature, we're one in essence." And that's why people picked up stones and killed him, because they said, "You're just a man and you're claiming to be God." So Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. He was saying, "I'm not the same person, but we are the same God." And that's part of the mystery of the Trinity. That he was praying to the Father, and on the cross, it's interesting too. When he prays, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Here are these people, we've talked about the horror of the cross, the flogging he went through. This torture of the cross.

• 1:40:42Lee Strobel?

  And yet, the imperfect tense of the Greek in the original language in which that passage is written suggests, he didn't just say it once, but he kept repeating it over and over again. Maybe even while the nails were being driven through his feet. Maybe while the nails were being driven through his hands, maybe when he was hoisted on the cross. He kept repeating, he kept praying. "Father, forgive them, Father, forgive them, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." I mean, that is an expression of the love of God. That, you know, how can we not pray for people in our life who are spiritually confused? After him praying for people who are so depraved, they're torturing to death.

• 1:41:22Lee Strobel?

  But that just is another expression of the depth and the breadth of the love of God for us.

• 1:41:29Shawn Ryan?

  So how would you guys articulate the Holy Trinity?

• 1:41:35Speaker 05

  So I have a whole chapter in Imagine the God of Heaven. And I am trying to show that, because what I found fascinating is people I've interviewed who had no prior understanding of the triune nature of God. Which, let me just say, the word Trinity is not in the Bible, okay? So what we have instead is a progressive revelation of the mystery of God. So all the way back... With with Moses. So before Moses, he was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So the forefathers, right?

• 1:42:17Speaker 05

  But even to Abraham, he appears with two angels as a man.

• 1:42:26Speaker 05

  Genesis, where is that? Genesis 15? Yeah, under the, under the oak? Yeah. Of mammary or whatever it is and, and, and Abraham worships and offers sacrifice to him. So even then, I, and, and I think that's, that's when it says the angel of the Lord. Many times I think this is the pre-incarnate Jesus, the third person of the Trinity. But there's not the word Trinity, but the idea is there. So again, to Moses,

• 1:43:04Speaker 05

  goes up on Mount Sinai and sees this, he calls it this burning bush. Okay, so it's a brilliant light that doesn't burn the bush. Well, hello, that's exactly what near-death experiencers are meeting all over the globe. This God of light, they say brighter than the sun a thousand times and yet not hard to look at. And God, he asks, who are, what's your name? And he says, I am is my name, Yahweh. But then he says, I am, tell them, I am, I am who I am. I am, meaning the self-existent one. Now here's what's interesting, Jesus then, I think in the same passage, is it John eight? That you just quoted? I think so, yeah.

• 1:43:50Speaker 05

  He says, before Abraham was born, okay, Abraham was the father of the Jewish nation, right? So 2,000 years before, before Abraham was born, ego a me is the Greek, I am.

• 1:44:04Speaker 05

  So he's applying that to himself. And they pick up stones to stone him because they understood exactly what he was claiming. And then they said, how can you, being a man, claim, you know, you were before our father Abraham? And then he said, I saw, Abraham saw my day and he rejoiced in it. So he's very clearly associating with the God of the Old Testament. Now, in the book, I, so one person I interviewed, Heidi, she was Jewish, grew up in a Jewish home, but her father was an atheist, a lawyer. So what's the thing with lawyers?

• 1:44:47Speaker 05

  And not a nice man. He was very abusive. And every night he said to his girls, there is no God, your life is worthless, Jesus Christ is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind. Like this is his mantra every night. And he was also, he was very abusive. Wow. But Heidi, despite the fact that her mom was agnostic, her dad is atheist, always believed in God and prayed to God every night. And she remembers as a little eight-year-old girl, you know, coming, talking to God as she was going to bed about the abuses and the things and sorting it out. And always felt like God was there comforting her, putting her to bed at night. So she always felt like God was my father.

• 1:45:28Speaker 05

  At 16, she's riding bareback on her horse, on a mountainside, her horse steps back off, rears up, steps back off and lands on her and crushes her. She said, I was 30 feet up in the air instantly. I knew I was dead. She sees her sisters panicking. She said, but I felt fine. I was at peace. I just felt bad that they had to watch me die like this. And she said, and then I see a light over my shoulder and it was a cloudy day. So I wondered like, what is that? It's not the sun. And she turns and she said, there floating with me 30 feet in the air is this? She said, I knew who this was instantly. And he was this man of light, but he was Jesus.

• 1:46:13Speaker 05

  And she said, I knew he was Jesus, no doubt in my mind. And she said, "I know you." And he gets this big grin. And she said, "It was like this reunion because I knew this was the God I had prayed to my whole life." No doubt in her mind. And interestingly, Jesus then shows her her life review. And he shows her when she was a little girl of eight praying. She sees him there. Like in what was really happening spiritually. Then he takes her, he grabs her hand and takes her. And they're off.

• 1:46:53Speaker 05

  And he takes her, she said, "to this, this light that was, felt infinite, that they enter into, that she knew was God. And she found herself, she felt like with God the Father. But she said, "But Jesus was also there. You couldn't separate them." And then she said to me, "I don't understand how God can be light and God can be a man and God can be love, but that's what I experienced." So then he puts her, he says, "It's not your time. You have to go back."

• 1:47:34Speaker 05

  And when he puts her back in her body, Jesus does. "He left, but he left his presence with her," she said. And she later realized that she thinks that was his Holy Spirit, who was, who was always with her to guide her. Now, this is a little Jewish girl raised by atheists. And yet she testifies to the triune nature of God. And then I interview another woman, 12-year-old, nurse, almost the same identical experience. Dean Braxton, who also had a near-death experience. And, and he said to me, "You could not separate them there."

• 1:48:18Speaker 05

  So when I was speaking to Jesus, I knew I was also speaking to the Father and the Holy Spirit. And when I was there at the throne of God with the Father, speaking to him, though Jesus was always here with me, he was also there. And I can't explain how that makes sense. And in our time and space, it doesn't, but it made perfect sense there. And, and what he says is, "They are one." So in the book, I give an analogy. And you can see a picture of it there. So by, it's a contradiction to us, right? We say, okay, three persons, but there are only one. Well, that, that doesn't work.

• 1:49:01Speaker 05

  The three of us are not one, right? Okay, but think about it by analogy. So imagine I create a two, a flat, two dimensional world, okay? That only has forward and back and side to side. There's no up or down, all right? In this flat world. And then I decide I'm, I'm going to enter this world and I stick my three fingers through that plane. The flat people there would see three slices of me, okay? But what if I said to them, well, I'm actually not three slices. I'm actually one being. But that would be a contradiction to them because in flat land, three slices can never

• 1:49:45Speaker 05

  stack up an arm into one being. Cause that can only happen on a third dimension. They don't even have that dimension. And so what I say is perhaps, and every, every analogy breaks down, so I'm not claiming to have the ultimate analogy, but perhaps Father, Son, and Spirit, the, the personhood of God unites in dimensions beyond ours in ways that sound like a contradiction to us, but in fact it's not. And that actually is what near death experiences tell us.

• 1:50:21Lee Strobel?

  I think, that's fascinating, by the way.

• 1:50:25Speaker 05

  Am I a heretic?

• 1:50:26Lee Strobel?

  No, no, no. That's a process of it. But I, for me, when you, when you delve into scriptures, A to Z, Genesis to Revelation, I see four things being taught. Number one. The Father is God. Number two, the Son is God. Number three, the Holy Spirit is God. And number four, there is one God. That's the Trinity. How it fits together, I think your analogy is fascinating. Um, we may not understand. I don't see it as a contradiction. I see it as something beyond our perhaps ability to comprehend, but I don't think it's necessarily a contradiction.

• 1:51:07Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:51:08Lee Strobel?

  Um, but, um.

• 1:51:09Speaker 05

  A mystery, yeah.

• 1:51:10Lee Strobel?

  Mystery, a mystery, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:12Speaker 05

  But there are lots of mysteries. I mean, go try to understand quantum physics.

• 1:51:18Lee Strobel?

  Tried.

• 1:51:18Speaker 05

  Tried to understand my wife.

• 1:51:22Speaker 05

  I'm gonna tell Leslie you said that. She says that about me, so. Yeah, I'm sure she does. Well, and, and, and so, but think about it. Even what I told you before about Isaiah 53. To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

• 1:51:37Lee Strobel?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:38Speaker 05

  So Jesus, this suffering Messiah foretold, was the arm of the Lord reaching in, like me reaching into the flatland. Right? And people, you know, skeptics have said over the years to me, you know, like, okay, you know, so Jesus is God, well then, and supposedly he died on a cross, then who is ruling the universe while he's dead?

• 1:52:00Lee Strobel?

  Hmm.

• 1:52:01Speaker 05

  Right? Or, or while he's here? And again, that, that assumes that the infinite God who is Spirit was somehow completely contained in the body of Jesus, and he wasn't. And that's not the claim of Scripture. So yes, just like I can reveal myself as a slice in Flatland, and they might even kill me in Flatland, but I'm much more than my little slice.

• 1:52:30Lee Strobel?

  Okay.

• 1:52:31Speaker 05

  And that's why I think when he's saying I and the Father are one, it's really true. Um, but God, and this is, this is a phenomenal thing if you think about it. That God is love. And every bit of love we've ever experienced, it's comes from Him. It's, we just borrow it. We're just borrowing and sharing.

• 1:52:54Lee Strobel?

  If God is love, there must be an object of that love. Which is the Trinity, which is existing from eternity past in a perfect love relationship. Otherwise, if it's just God, one, in one, God, one person, not triune, who's He loving before the existence or the creation of humankind?

• 1:53:10Speaker 05

  So God, God is a relationship. And that's why relationship is so important to God. Not only, not only God's relationship with us, but also our relationships with each other. And that is consistently, these near death experiences around the globe, when they're in God's presence and they have a life review, they re-experience their lives. But what they consistently say is, you know, what was interesting is the emphasis was on my relation, my interactions with people, not my accomplishments. And what consistently God wants them to see is that every little act of kindness mattered. And every little mean thing mattered.

• 1:53:54Speaker 05

  And it had a ripple effect through humanity. And they consistently say exactly what Moses said and what Jesus taught. God is love and how we love or treat one another is what matters most. So again, you have these near death experiences. I mean, that's why, that's why I'm doing what I'm doing.

• 1:54:13Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Speaker 05

  Because I think they are testimony to, again, I don't advise people to believe everything every near death experiencer says. I don't. But the commonality of consistency of what they say fully aligns with what God's revealed throughout history. And I think we have a reason to trust it first, the Bible. But this just confirms that.

• 1:54:39Lee Strobel?

  It's another window.

• 1:54:40Speaker 05

  It's another window of witness that yes, indeed, this is, this is true and real. And God loves us more than we can possibly imagine. I mean, so much so, He took the bullet. It's, it's just like, you know, I mean, you know, the greatest act of heroism is someone who jumps in front of the bullet for, you know, a fellow soldier, right? Well, that is the love of God.

• 1:55:09Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:55:11Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Let's take a quick break and um when we come back we'll we'll get into the resurrection.

• 1:55:17Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:21Speaker 06

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• 1:55:55Speaker 06

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• 1:56:31Shawn Ryan?

  All right. We're back from the break. Like I said, we're we're getting close to Easter here, so so why is the resurrection so important? What is the?

• 1:56:43Lee Strobel?

  Well, we said earlier, Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. He said, "I and the Father are one." Um, people recognized that was his claim. They picked up stones to kill him, but so what? I could claim to be God. You know, John could, well, maybe not John. Uh, anybody could claim to be God. But if Jesus claimed to be God, died, and then came back to life on the third day, that's pretty good evidence he's telling the truth. So I, for me, as a skeptic, the first confirmation of his claim of divinity was whether or not he fulfilled this um prophecy of the Messiah returning from the dead. And I think the evidence is clear. I think it's compelling. I look at it, I summarize it with four words that begin with the letter E. That way it's easy to remember. First E is execution.

• 1:57:27Lee Strobel?

  We talked earlier about all the evidence that Jesus truly died when he was crucified. Even the atheist scholar Gerd Ludeman says it's indisputable that he was dead. Even the Journal of the American Medical Association says that.

• 1:57:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's no historian that would doubt that today.

• 1:57:41Lee Strobel?

  No, no. So, E, first E is for execution. Second E stands for the word early. We have early accounts that he rose from the dead. In other words, reports that go back virtually to the cross itself. Why is that important? Because I used to think like a lot of skeptics that the resurrection was a legend. Got to give you the fact he was dead. Okay, I give you that. But, raising from the dead, that's a legend. It must have taken few generations to develop in the ancient world. Stories were invented, mythologies were created. That's where I thought it came from. But, we have preserved for us a creed of the earliest Christians. The first Christians, right there in the first century, gathered around this creedal statement based on facts that they knew to be true. It's kind of a rallying point. And this creed

• 1:58:23Lee Strobel?

  says, "Jesus died." Why? "For our sins." He was buried. On the third day, he rose from the dead. And then, it mentions the specific names of eyewitnesses and groups of eyewitnesses to whom he appeared, including 500 people at once. Including a skeptic like James, the half-brother of Jesus, who didn't follow Jesus during Jesus' lifetime, and yet ended up dying as a leader of the church in Jerusalem. Why? Because Jesus appeared to him. So, we've got this creedal statement that, including named eyewitnesses and groups of eyewitnesses, that has been dated back by scholars, including James D.G. Dunn, who was one of the most eminent historians of, he recently passed, but of the last 100 years in England. It has been dated back to within months of the death of Jesus.

• 1:59:09Lee Strobel?

  So if I can, from memory, quote what Dr. Dunn said, he said, "This tradition, this creed, we can be entirely confident was formulated as a creed within months of Jesus' death." I mean, that is a news flash from ancient history, far too quick, in my opinion, to be a legend that developed over the 100, 150, 200 years later.

• 1:59:32Speaker 05

  Well, and it's recorded in 1 Corinthians 15.

• 1:59:34Lee Strobel?

  That's right, if anybody wants to check it out.

• 1:59:36Speaker 05

  Which was written, you know, sometime in the 60s?

• 1:59:40Lee Strobel?

  No, no, no, in the 50s, yeah.

• 1:59:42Speaker 05

  50s.

• 1:59:43Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, well, but we can, we can go back.

• 1:59:44Speaker 05

  20 years after Jesus' crucifixion, so that's not time for legend to develop.

• 1:59:49Lee Strobel?

  Not even, not only that, you're right, but within 20 years or so, that would tell us it existed, but we know Saul of Tarsus became the Apostle Paul, one to three years after the crucifixion. So he's on the road to Damascus, he has this encounter with the risen Christ, he becomes the Apostle Paul. Immediately, he goes into Damascus and he meets with some apostles. Many people believe this is when he was given that creed that he later wrote to the church in Corinth. Others say it was three years later, he went to Jerusalem and he met for 15 days with two eyewitnesses to the resurrected Jesus, who are named in the creed, Peter and James. And they had a meeting in Jerusalem for 15 days, and some believe that's when he was given the creed by two people named in the creed as eyewitnesses.

• 2:00:33Lee Strobel?

  Either way, that means within one to six years after the death of Jesus, this creed is already in existence, therefore, the beliefs that make up that creed go back even earlier, virtually to the cross itself. And then you have a scholar like James D. G. Jones say, "No, it's within months." So this is-

• 2:00:49Speaker 05

  And even Bart Ehrman, didn't he-

• 2:00:51Lee Strobel?

  I'm not sure where he's at on that, but, but you know, I read stuff like, um-

• 2:00:56Speaker 05

  Can we go through the timeline real quick?

• 2:00:58Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:59Speaker 05

  Of what, so he died on the cross, they put him in a tomb.

• 2:01:01Lee Strobel?

  Yes.

• 2:01:03Shawn Ryan?

  Why was it three days?

• 2:01:05Lee Strobel?

  Well, it's, um, why, why was it three days? You know, he predicted like Jonah was in the fish for three days that, that he would be coming back in three days. So that was kind of a, uh, I don't think it's a requirement necessarily, but it was three days on the third day he returned. The, the Jewish word for day was reckoned as an onah, which is O-N-A-H, and it meant a night and a day, um, is, is an onah, but any portion of an onah was considered as the whole. And so he was, he died on Friday, he was in the tomb on Saturday, and he rose sometime Sunday morning. That's parts of three days that he was in two, one day for fully and parts of two others.

• 2:01:48Lee Strobel?

  But according to Jewish reckoning of time, that's the third day. So he returns on the third day, um.

• 2:01:55Shawn Ryan?

  You don't think there's any significance to that?

• 2:01:58Lee Strobel?

  What would you say, John? I'm not, I, I, I don't, I, I think the fact that he did liken it to Jonah.

• 2:02:04Speaker 05

  The sign of, the sign of Jonah. This generation will not be given a sign except the sign. They were demanding, I mean, just think about this. So he, he had been healing people, raising people from the dead. That's why he had thousands following him everywhere. That's why the Jewish authorities were, were, and he was also calling them hypocrites because they were playing a religious game. Their hearts were far from God, he said. So they look good on the outside and go read Matthew 23, man. He just rips them a new one. Seriously, he does. He, he holds no punches

• 2:02:41Speaker 05

  back. And so they are like, we can't put up with this because they are leading Israel astray away from us and our power and our prestige. And so they decide to crucify him. And but but they were saying, "You're really the Messiah? Give us a sign. Give us a sign." He said, "You're not going to be given any sign." I mean, given them tons of signs. We talked about all the signs that were already in their scriptures. I mean, all of it's there, right? He's gonna, he's gonna, uh, "Come from Bethlehem." He was born in Bethlehem. He's gonna come from Galilee. He did most of his ministry in Galilee. It's all in Isaiah.

• 2:03:22Speaker 05

  They, so they were, they were blinded to it because of their egos and their desire for power and greed and money.

• 2:03:30Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:30Speaker 05

  So he says, "This generation will be given no sign except the sign of Jonah."

• 2:03:36Lee Strobel?

  Which would be three days. So that it's a fulfillment of that.

• 2:03:40Speaker 05

  So I think that's the significance.

• 2:03:41Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, that would be the significance. So you've got the execution, the early, and by the way, it's not the only early report we've got. Others, right? We have others in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the book of Acts, all of which were circulating during the lifetimes of Jesus' contemporaries. And they would have pointed out the errors if they were making this stuff up. So we've got an execution. He's dead. We got early reports that he rose from the dead too quick to be a legend. Third, we have an empty tomb. And we could talk all day about all the evidence the tomb was empty, but the best evidence to me was, we know from sources inside and outside the New Testament that when the disciples began proclaiming that Jesus had risen, what the enemies of Jesus said was, "Oh, well, um, the disciples stole the body." Now they're admitting the tomb is empty.

• 2:04:26Lee Strobel?

  They're, they're admitting it's empty.

• 2:04:28Speaker 05

  The ones who crucified it.

• 2:04:29Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, they're just trying to explain how it got empty. It's like if you're a teacher and a student comes up to you and says, "The dog ate my homework." That student's admitting it. Look, I don't have my homework, but I can explain what happened to it the dog ate. It's the same thing. So everybody in the first century, whether they're supporters of Jesus explicitly saying the tomb is empty or the enemies of Jesus implicitly admitting it was empty, everybody's conceding the tomb is empty. The real question is, how did it get empty? And you go through the usual list of suspects. The Romans weren't about to steal the body. They wanted Jesus dead. The Jewish leaders of the day weren't about to steal the body. They wanted Jesus to stay dead. The disciples weren't about to steal the body. They didn't have the motive. They didn't have the means, and they didn't have the opportunity. In fact, I found seven ancient sources, six of them outside the Bible,

• 2:05:12Lee Strobel?

  that report that the disciples lived lives of deprivation and suffering as a result of their proclamation that Jesus had risen. Why were they willing to do that?

• 2:05:20Speaker 05

  How many died for their faith without recounting it?

• 2:05:23Lee Strobel?

  And their willingness to die is well established. How some, a couple of them died gets a little bit misty in history. But their willingness to die, seven sources tell me that they willingly lived lives of deprivation and suffering. Think about this, of all human beings who've ever lived on the planet, they were in a unique position to know, is this a lie or is it true? Cause they were there. They touched the resurrected Jesus, they talked with them, they ate with them. Of all people who ever lived, they knew the truth, they didn't just believe it. They just have faith in it, they knew the truth and knowing the truth, they were willing to die for it. That's the difference between a terrorist today who crashes an airplane into the trade center.

• 2:06:05Speaker 05

  Believe in him.

• 2:06:06Lee Strobel?

  He believes if he dies that way, he's gonna go to paradise. Does he know for sure? No, he couldn't know for sure, he just believes it so much that he's willing to die that way, that tells me nothing about the veracity of his claims. But the disciples were in a position to know for a fact. Is this true? Is it false? Knowing it was true, they were willing to die for it. So we have an execution, he was dead, we have early reports too quick to be a legend. We've got the empty tomb and then fourth E is eyewitnesses. Um, over a period of time, Jesus appears alive in a dozen different instances to more than 515 people. A lot more than that, but uh, to doubters and to skeptics.

• 2:06:47Lee Strobel?

  To men, to women, to groups, to individuals, indoors, outdoors, daytime, nighttime. Um, what I found fascinating in studying this as a skeptic is that when you study ancient history and you're looking at some fact about the life of Alexander the Great, for instance, and you dig down, how do I know this fact is true? Most of the time, it's based on one source. Maybe two sources of information. But for the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the resurrected Jesus, we have no fewer than nine ancient sources, inside and outside the New Testament, confirming and corroborating the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the risen Jesus.

• 2:07:30Lee Strobel?

  I can tick them off real quick if you, so you know what they are. The first is that creed I mentioned earlier. A creed whose historical credentials are so strong that one of the few Jewish New Testament scholars, Pinchas Lapid, said, "It may be taken as a statement of eyewitnesses." Second, we have Paul's testimony. Because Paul said, "I encountered the risen Christ." And, and then he got to know the disciples.

• 2:07:53Speaker 05

  Which, which was just what people around the world are encountering today. On the Damascus, and Paul was one of the Pharisees of the Pharisees who had Jesus crucified.

• 2:08:03Lee Strobel?

  Right.

• 2:08:04Speaker 05

  So he was, he was the enemy.

• 2:08:06Lee Strobel?

  Exactly.

• 2:08:07Speaker 05

  It's like, it's like the Taliban now, you know.

• 2:08:09Lee Strobel?

  He had no incentive.

• 2:08:10Speaker 05

  Coming over our side, kind of thing.

• 2:08:11Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:08:12Speaker 05

  And it says, "On the Damascus Road, he's going to arrest and kill Christians." He was there when Stephen was martyred, giving him two thumbs up. Uh, because Stephen believed in Jesus as the Messiah. And he's like, "That's wrong, we're getting rid of these people." When, on the Damascus Road, this brilliant God of light appears to him. Sound familiar?

• 2:08:34Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:34Speaker 05

  All over the world today, this is near-death experiences. "Who are you, Lord?" he asked. And he says, "I am Jesus, whom you're persecuting." And Jesus didn't tell him the gospel. He didn't tell him what to do. He said, "You'll be told." And then later sends Ananias to explain to him. And Paul still had a choice. Because he had a lot to lose.

• 2:08:58Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:58Speaker 05

  Is he, is he going to leave behind his power and his prestige and, you know, and then, and then suffer? Because he did.

• 2:09:06Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:06Speaker 05

  But, um, I mean, that's a, you know, that's a huge.

• 2:09:10Lee Strobel?

  Absolutely huge. No incentive to do that. But what's also interesting is after he became the Apostle Paul, he became friends with many of the disciples, the other eyewitnesses. So he knew Peter, James, and John. And he says in 1 Corinthians, in his letter he wrote, he said, "Whether it is I or they, this is what we preach." So he's saying, "Look, I encountered the risen Christ, so have they." So he's confirming that the disciples were eyewitnesses. He's another point of confirmation. The third, um, area of evidence, corroboration, is the Book of Acts. Even skeptical scholars will accept that the Book of Acts is the account of the spread of the early church. And what is the thing that drove it? It was the proclamation of the resurrection.

• 2:09:54Lee Strobel?

  So here we have Peter in Acts, chapter 2, who gets up before a crowd, and he says, "Men of Israel, listen to these words. This Jesus, a man attested to you by miracles and wonders and signs, which he did in your midst, you know that he did." He's appealing to their common knowledge. And then he says, "This Jesus, God raised from the dead, to which we're all witnesses." And how did they react? History tells us that 3,000 people said, "Peter, we know you're telling this truth. What do we do?" They repented, and the church was born. So that's the first three sources. Then we have the next four sources, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which are historical biographies based on eyewitness accounts. There's, what, nine appearances of the risen Jesus in those four gospels. So that's seven ancient sources. But then...

• 2:10:38Speaker 05

  Plus you got Luke, who interviewed Mary.

• 2:10:40Lee Strobel?

  Oh yeah, there's other sources, right. Um, but we have sources from people who sat under the teachings of the eyewitnesses. So, for instance, if you still were teaching at your church in Austin, if, uh, Sean, if you were to come to his church for three years... You'd have a pretty good idea what he believes, right? Yeah. Well, we have writings by people who sat under the teachings of the apostles themselves and can report what they said about the resurrection. So we have a letter that was written by Clement. Clement was, we believe, ordained by Peter himself. And Clement writes a letter in the first century to the church in Corinth, and he says that the disciples had a complete confidence. Why? Why did they have so much confidence?

• 2:11:25Lee Strobel?

  Because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, because they were eyewitnesses to the risen Lord. And then Polycarp, who was appointed by John himself to be bishop at Smyrna, he writes a letter to the Philippian church, and he mentions the resurrection five times in that letter. And he said, talking about Paul and the other apostles, he says, "For they did not love the present age, but him who died for them and was raised by God on the third day." So he's confirming the teachings of these eyewitnesses that they encountered the risen Christ. That's nine very early eyewitness-based accounts or accounts of the corroboration of the eyewitnesses, the disciples who encountered personally the risen Jesus.

• 2:12:10Lee Strobel?

  That is an avalanche of historical data.

• 2:12:13Speaker 05

  Can you tell he's a lawyer?

• 2:12:14Lee Strobel?

  Yeah. I'm not a lawyer, I just have a law degree.

• 2:12:16Speaker 05

  Well, no, but here's the significance is what Lee's saying, and he was. He was the legal editor for the Chicago Tribune, so not a slouch. But also, Simon Greenleaf, who was a lawyer who wrote the Treaties of Legal Evidence, right?

• 2:12:35Lee Strobel?

  He's the guy who made Harvard Law School what it is today, the second-best law school, because I went to Yale, so.

• 2:12:40Speaker 05

  Well, there you have it. I went to the University of Texas.

• 2:12:44Lee Strobel?

  The basketball team.

• 2:12:48Speaker 05

  Okay. So, so Simon Greenleaf was always making fun of Christians and Christianity in his, in his legal classes, until some of his students came up and challenged him to take his treaties, his works on, on the, on legal evidence, how to evaluate legal evidence, and put it against all the documents and evidence that Lee just said, he came to faith, just like Lee.

• 2:13:14Lee Strobel?

  I remember.

• 2:13:14Speaker 05

  When he looked at the evidence.

• 2:13:15Lee Strobel?

  That's right.

• 2:13:16Speaker 05

  Same with C.S. Lewis.

• 2:13:17Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, when I was an atheist, I went and I'm doing this investigation into the resurrection. I remember going to the library, and of course, they didn't have Simon Greenleaf's book, which was written in the, in the, you know, 1800s. And so I put an interlibrary loan, and it took about six months, and six months later, they give me this copy from the 1800s of this book by Simon Greenleaf, this great light legal scholar, who reports on the resurrection and so forth, and it was held together by rubber bands. But back then, we didn't have the internet. But, you know, that's another great example is, um, Sir Lionel Luckoo, who was the greatest defense attorney in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

• 2:13:54Speaker 05

  More convictions of murder trials.

• 2:13:56Lee Strobel?

  245 convictions in a row that he, well, he, he won acquittals 245 times in a row, either before the jury or on appeal, knighted twice by Queen Elizabeth, became a member of the Supreme Court of his country, and he was a doubter about the resurrection. Same thing, he was challenged to investigate it, he did, and I'll recite to you one sentence he wrote, that summarized his conclusion. He said, "I say unequivocally that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming, that it compels acceptance by proof, which leaves absolutely no room for doubt." This from the greatest defense attorney who ever lived. And here's the funny thing, I told that story at Saddleback Church in Southern California,

• 2:14:37Lee Strobel?

  where Leslie and I had moved in the year 2000 to be a pastor there, and a woman came up to me afterwards, and she said, "Hey, I'm your new neighbor, you're moving into my neighborhood, we haven't met yet." I said, "Oh, great to meet you." She said, "Yeah." Said, "I'm Sir Lionel Luckoo's sister."

• 2:14:50Speaker 05

  No way.

• 2:14:51Lee Strobel?

  Who's his sister? And she not only confirmed the story, she showed me his private documents that he had done his research on.

• 2:14:59Speaker 05

  Oh, how.

• 2:14:59Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:00Speaker 05

  But here's, here's the point, and this is, this is what got me into this, this is why I left my career in engineering. I was like, There's so much evidence. Why has no one told me this?

• 2:15:11Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:13Speaker 05

  And we have even gone into all the near-death experience stuff that also connects to all the historical and it's overwhelming.

• 2:15:22Lee Strobel?

  But people don't look at it.

• 2:15:23Speaker 05

  People don't take the time.

• 2:15:24Lee Strobel?

  I remember sharing with Hugh Hefner in the Playboy Mansion.

• 2:15:28Speaker 05

  Really?

• 2:15:28Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:29Speaker 05

  Wait a second.

• 2:15:30Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, well, I was.

• 2:15:32Speaker 05

  We're gonna hear this one.

• 2:15:33Lee Strobel?

  No, I was, I had a TV show at the time and we're interviewing him about his faith. So he said, "You want a tour?" I said, "No, I don't want a tour. I just want to interview you about your faith." So I interviewed him, but he was a very bright guy, very smart guy. And I started to show him, he got fascinated by my book, Case for Christ. I showed him the table of contests. He's looked at this, he said, "Are you telling me there's evidence that Jesus?" Because he said, "If the resurrection is true, it changes everything." "Are you telling me there's evidence for it?" I said, "Yes." "Had he ever checked it out?" "No." "Did he read my book?" "I don't know." But.

• 2:16:12Speaker 05

  Maybe so. God's always at work everywhere.

• 2:16:14Lee Strobel?

  So many people know it's the linchpin of the faith, but they don't investigate it.

• 2:16:19Speaker 05

  And here's why all this is the so what of all this? So I'll never forget when, when all of this evidence kind of came, you know, formulated in my head and I was like, "This is true."

• 2:16:33Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:34Speaker 05

  Like, "God really did send Jesus. He really did die for our sins. He really does love me." And then it was like, and here was the thought that came into my head. "Now what are you gonna do with it?"

• 2:16:48Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:49Speaker 05

  And that was a scary thought to me.

• 2:16:51Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:52Speaker 05

  Because it wasn't, it's not the head knowledge. Like, we can, we can believe in God. We can believe Jesus died for our sins. Intellectually, but that's not what God wants.

• 2:17:04Lee Strobel?

  Right.

• 2:17:05Speaker 05

  What God wants is our hearts. Like He created us and He loves us and what He wants is that we would love Him back. And what do we have to give the one who gave us everything? Nothing. But He actually gave us a free will so we would have something to give Him. And what we can give Him is our very lives.

• 2:17:27Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:27Speaker 05

  Like, "I'm gonna trust you. I'm gonna follow you." And I'll never forget, you know, that was, that was like a, it was like, "Oh, wow." And that was scary. And that was scary because I already knew what I wanted my life to be about.

• 2:17:42Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:17:42Speaker 05

  Right? I've got a plan for my life and you're not gonna screw it up, right?

• 2:17:48Lee Strobel?

  For me, it was, Leslie pointed out the verse, John 1:12. "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name." So that forms an equation of what it means to become a child of God. Believe, as you said, intellectually, I agree with that, I believe it, plus receive.

• 2:18:06Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:06Lee Strobel?

  Equals become. That's the heart. That's where you receive this free gift of forgiveness and eternal life and a prayer of repentance and faith. And you become then a child of God.

• 2:18:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, and the point of the whole thing is not just get your ticket stamped, okay? You go to heaven one day. The point of it is that we were created for a relationship with our Creator and we don't become what we were intended to be without that.

• 2:18:33Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:34Speaker 05

  And what He wants is that, that we would walk through life in a relationship, like we were talking about before, learning how to listen to those promptings. It's like any other relationship. You know, to, to, to be in a deep intimate relationship, you've got to know the person and you've got to let yourself be known.

• 2:18:55Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:55Speaker 05

  And then you have to trust. You have to entrust more vulnerable things about yourself to that person and you have to trust them more. And then it takes time. And over time, that relationship grows. And that's exactly the same with the Lord. And that's what it's all about. Is that we would walk with God moment by moment throughout our days. And He would then naturally grow in us what He calls the fruits of His Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness.

• 2:19:29Lee Strobel?

  Goodness.

• 2:19:30Speaker 05

  Self-control, goodness. That's what it says in Galatians 5. That's what His Spirit does in us. As we, all we have to do is just, Jesus said, like a branch stays connected to a tree. And the nutrients flow and fruit grows naturally. He says, that's all you have to do. Just stay connected to Me. It's what He said to Santosh. The wages of sinner's death. I don't want your religious, you know, once a week thing. I want to see how honest you'll be with Me. I want to see your relationship with Me.

• 2:20:06Lee Strobel?

  Who did, who did He appear to first? Did He appear first?

• 2:20:11Speaker 02

  That's a great question.

• 2:20:13Lee Strobel?

  It is a very interesting question. Because in first century Jewish and Roman culture, the testimony of women was not considered reliable. Wouldn't even allow it in a court of law. Right, they wouldn't allow it to be testified. And yet, the first people to encounter the risen Christ was Mary Magdalene. And Joanna. And Joanna the tomb. And. Joanna.

• 2:20:36Speaker 05

  Another follower of Jesus. So there were disciples or beyond the 12. There were many disciples and some of them were women. Who it says even, even provided for them. So Joanna was one of them. She was in the royal household, right?

• 2:20:54Lee Strobel?

  I think Luke actually interviewed her. That's the indication.

• 2:20:57Speaker 05

  So, so it is a fascinating thing because it was almost like God was like putting it on the guys.

• 2:21:03Lee Strobel?

  Well, and part of it too is that's one reason we know we can trust the story. Because if you're going to make up a story and try to convince people in the first century, you would never say women discover the tomb empty.

• 2:21:14Speaker 05

  And the disciples remember are writing this.

• 2:21:16Lee Strobel?

  That's right.

• 2:21:17Speaker 05

  They would never say, yeah, we were wrong. They were right.

• 2:21:21Lee Strobel?

  Right.

• 2:21:22Speaker 05

  Because, because the disciple, they were scared to death. Because Jesus, their leader, just got crucified, and guess what? You're next. They're hiding out. They're literally hiding out. And the women come back from the tomb. He's risen. He's risen. This is what he said. He's risen. And they're like, "You're crazy." No, he isn't. And then, in closed doors, locked, Jesus appears to them, except Thomas isn't there.

• 2:21:51Shawn Ryan?

  So they went to the tomb and it was open?

• 2:21:53Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:21:53Shawn Ryan?

  And then they said he was risen? And then he appeared to them?

• 2:21:56Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:21:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yep. Yep. Yep. And so what did he say?

• 2:22:02Speaker 05

  To, well, to Mary. So Mary Magdalene, who, remember, was, um, delivered. She was, uh, a very immoral woman, from what we know, and, and demon-possessed. And then she became, he delivered her. He set her free. And, uh, she became one of his followers. And she fa- she, she goes into, she sees the tomb is empty, and then she thinks someone stole him the body. And then she sees someone outside, and she thinks it's the gardener. And she's weeping, and she runs out, and she says, "Where have you put my Lord? You know, what have you done with him?" Um, correct me if I'm getting this wrong.

• 2:22:45Speaker 05

  And then, uh, and then she realizes, she, he says, "Mary." And she hears this voice, and she realizes it's him, and she falls at his feet.

• 2:22:56Shawn Ryan?

  The gardener?

• 2:22:57Speaker 05

  The gardener was Jesus. Wasn't the gardener.

• 2:23:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:01Speaker 05

  Falls at his feet and grabs his feet, and is crying, "Lord." And, and he says, "Don't, don't hold on to me, for I've not yet gone to my Father in heaven. But go and tell your brothers, 'I have risen just as I said,' and basically, meet me in, in Galilee."

• 2:23:21Speaker 05

  Which is kind of a funny thing, because he couldn't even wait. Yeah, right. He didn't wait for them to meet him in Galilee. That's right. He showed up in the room. You know, the other thing, when I was an atheist. I think he was having fun. I really, seriously, because then, think about the two disciples on the Emmaus road. Yes, right. He kind of, he kind of played with them. So there are these two guys, not, not the 12, but there are also two disciples on the Emmaus road. They're going, this is a town outside of Jerusalem called Emmaus. They're walking and they're, and they're talking. And this guy comes up next to him and goes, what are you guys talking about? And he's, and they say, you know, haven't, haven't you heard, you know, Jesus, who we thought was going to be the Messiah?

• 2:24:02Speaker 05

  And this happened and, and he's, and he's like, um, no, he says, are you the only one in Jerusalem who doesn't know this? And they keep telling him all the things that Jesus taught him and did and all this. Well. So they don't recognize him until they, they, they invite him. He's a stranger walking with them on the road and they invite him to eat. He sits down at the table with them. He takes the bread and breaks it. And they probably see the wounds. And then they, they realize who he is. They, they know this is the risen Jesus. And, and so they, and then he's gone. So, and, and interestingly, I think, well, I won't even go there.

• 2:24:46Speaker 05

  It's the whole risen body, the resurrected body, but it is. Well, go, let's go there. What is it?

• 2:24:55Speaker 05

  Well, so, um. When we die, you know, um. We leave our bodies, but we still have a body. We have a spiritual body. Our soul still has a spiritual body. Paul talks about this in 1 Corinthians 15. So he says, our bodies are buried, a natural body. They're raised a spiritual body. They're buried in weakness, but they're raised, and the Greek word is in dunamae, which is the word we get, from which we get dynamite. They're raised in power. And that's what near-death experiencers say is they they leave their body, they still are themselves in the spiritual body with new powers of sight like we talked about,

• 2:25:38Speaker 05

  like telescopic, of communication, of movement, not five senses, more like 50 senses. Howard Storm said, "I felt like Superman." Hmm. And but but here's the thing is that but we in our spiritual bodies cannot communicate with people on earth. We can't. And that's that's what they realize. They're they're trying to get the attention of the people doing the resuscitation and they can't. So this is version 1.0, this physical body. I think version 2.0 is when we die, our soul

• 2:26:18Speaker 05

  leaves, but we're in a spiritual body. But version 3.0 is coming. Jesus, it says, is it in 1 Corinthians 15, is the first fruits of the resurrection. So right now, heaven and earth are separated. That that they are they are separate. But there's a day coming, it says in Revelation 20, when God is going to make a new heaven and new earth, and the the two are going to be one. They're going to be joined again. And our bodies, our physical bodies will be resurrected and joined to our spiritual bodies. So now think about this. So and it says, Jesus is the first fruits of the resurrection. Yeah.

• 2:27:03Speaker 05

  So he's he he went first. So he's what we will be. So he could both be seen, he's he's seen by these near-death experiencers, sometimes as his physical human self, but sometimes as the glorified, resurrected Jesus, you know, this brilliant God of light. Well, guess what? On the Mount Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John, through Jesus' disciples, said, "He was transfigured before him. They saw his glory and his face shone like the sun."

• 2:27:37Speaker 05

  Jesus said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but have the light of life." So, so this is who he is, but his, his body, near-death experiencers are not resurrected, they're resuscitated.

• 2:27:52Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 2:27:54Speaker 05

  Jesus' body died permanently, but his body was resurrected, was reconstituted and rejoined to his spiritual body, so that he then can both interact in heaven. But he shows up to the, to the disciples after the resurrection in this room, and Thomas, you know, who was called Doubting Thomas, he wasn't there the first time. And the disciples, you know, Mary and Joanna said, "Yeah, we saw him." The, the other disciples, "Yeah, he, he showed up." And he's like, "I don't believe it. I'm not gonna believe it. In fact, I won't believe it unless I see the holes in his hands and his side and I put my hand in it."

• 2:28:39Speaker 05

  He's like, "I'm, you know, I'm not gonna believe it." Well, then Jesus shows up when he's there. And Jesus says to him, "Look, it's me. I'm not a ghost. Touch me." You know, uh, "Give me, you have a piece of fish? Give him a piece of fish, he eats it." So he is able to interact in our, in our world. Unlike those who are dead, near-death experiencers experience, Jesus has this version three resurrected body.

• 2:29:13Speaker 05

  That was a rabbit hole.

• 2:29:14Shawn Ryan?

  So how does he, how does he appear? How does he appear with his body? I mean, the gardener, he was there, he was just there. How does he appear to these, to the other people?

• 2:29:25Speaker 05

  You mean in the resurrection appearances?

• 2:29:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:28Speaker 05

  I, I think, well, so to the guys on the Amos Road, they didn't recognize him until he wanted to be recognized. So obviously, he can somewhat change appearance. And like, to Santosh, this Hindu guy I was telling you about, he appeared huge, but just like John described in Revelation one, John sees Jesus and he knows he's Jesus. Jesus says, I'm, I am the first and the last, the beginning and the end. I died, I died, but I've come back to life, you know, forever. How did he say it? It was like, basically that Revelation

• 2:30:12Speaker 05

  one. And John said his eyes were like lightning. He was like full of light. His feet were like glowing bronze metal on fire. That's exactly what Santosh, this Hindu guy said. But that's also, interestingly, I interviewed a woman in Tehran, who is giving me her story in Persian, in Farsi. She dies of a, of a heart attack. She's Muslim. She dies of a heart attack. And she thought that, you know, the Shiite belief is that the prophet Ali is going to come right after death and judge you. And that's not what she said happened. She said,

• 2:30:54Speaker 05

  instead, this giant man in this glowing regal robe with a beard, but, but his face, I couldn't make out his face because of the, the light of it, comes and says to her, I am he who is. And boom, she's back in her body. But with a peace and a joy she had never felt before. And she's like, who was it? She knew this is, this is God. He's divine. But who was that? And, and, you know, of course, this is exactly what God said to Moses on Mount Sinai, I am who I am. I am the self-existent one. It's what Jesus, we said, quoted before

• 2:31:37Speaker 05

  Abraham was born, I am, quoting the exact words. So, yeah, I mean, there's triangulation all around the globe even today.

• 2:31:46Shawn Ryan?

  Did he, did he ever appear out of thin air?

• 2:31:52Lee Strobel?

  Well, when he appeared in the resurrection with Thomas.

• 2:31:56Speaker 05

  So he could go through walls. He could also, he floated up into the clouds before their very sight, it says in Acts 1.

• 2:32:06Lee Strobel?

  Somewhere there.

• 2:32:07Speaker 05

  Which again is what near-death experiencers say too. You know, that, that we have new abilities and new powers. So, there's a lot left to come.

• 2:32:18Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, we're talking about the women discovering the tomb empty, and that's, that's become a point of contention among some skeptics. Uh, because if you look at the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke say there were multiple women going to the tomb, but John only mentions Mary Magdalene.

• 2:32:32Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:32:32Lee Strobel?

  And they say, oh, there's a discrepancy, that it can't both be true, that's false. But Dr. Michael Lacona, who's a historian, uh, recently published an analysis of the gospels based on how ancient biographers would write in that era. So Plutarch and others who were historians of that day, the literary techniques they would use, because the gospels are considered ancient biographies, and you would think they'd use the same literary techniques in writing the gospels. Well, one literary technique is called spotlighting. Um, and what I mean by that is if I were to text my wife right now and say, "Hey, I'm sitting here with Sean Ryan," um, that would be true, but I didn't mention there's other people in the room. I'm spotlighting you because I want to highlight you.

• 2:33:17Speaker 05

  Spotlighting important.

• 2:33:18Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, exactly. So, it's not false to say I'm with Sean Ryan, but I'm just spotlighting you. And if you look at what John says with Mary Magdalene, yes, he's the only one that, uh, uh, he mentions going to the tomb, but then she says, "Uh, um, they have taken my Savior, and, um, we don't know where they've taken them." Well, who's the "we"? It's the others who were there. But he's not highlighting them, he's highlighting her. But she refers to the "we," that, you know, "we, we don't know where they've taken them." So, that reconciled that issue, and there's, there's virtually every so-called contradiction in the gospels.

• 2:34:00Lee Strobel?

  It disappears when you begin reading them in the same way you would read Plutarch or any other ancient historian, using the same literary techniques that they used in that day and they use today. Use that same technique today.

• 2:34:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, plus, you know, people, the word on the street that too many people believe, because again, do we really seek to understand, right? Is that, you know, oh, well, um, they've been changed over the years. The Gospels, the, the, the New Testament's been changed so much and transmission, which that's not true.

• 2:34:32Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:32Speaker 05

  And, and textual criticism has proven that's not true. We have more sources for the validity of the New Testament.

• 2:34:41Lee Strobel?

  By far.

• 2:34:42Speaker 05

  Twenty-four thousand manuscripts. The second best in history is Homer's Iliad with 643. So just as a comparison.

• 2:34:51Lee Strobel?

  Wow. They've actually found a few more recently, but it's still, it's, it's a pittance compared.

• 2:34:55Speaker 05

  So, but, but even the fact that over the centuries, they didn't change, they didn't try to reconcile these discrepancies like Lee's talking about. The discrepancies being one eyewitness writing, um, like, like Mark is writing for Peter, uh, you know, or Matthew. Spotlights Mary was at the tomb, but then others are saying Mary and, and, and, uh, and Joanne.

• 2:35:23Lee Strobel?

  Right, others.

• 2:35:24Speaker 05

  If, if they were just making it up, they would have tried to reconcile.

• 2:35:28Lee Strobel?

  That's right.

• 2:35:28Speaker 05

  But they didn't.

• 2:35:29Lee Strobel?

  And somebody did it in the year 175 A.D. It was a Tatesan. He developed what's called the Diatessaron. He went through the four Gospels and blended them.

• 2:35:37Speaker 05

  Took out all the discrepancies.

• 2:35:38Lee Strobel?

  Took out, just blended them together. You know what? Nobody reads that. Nobody cares. The, the first century folks didn't see this, this as being an issue. They didn't see a discrepancy because they were reading it as they would read any other ancient writing.

• 2:35:53Speaker 05

  But the, the significance, back to your question, but the significance of the resurrection.

• 2:35:59Speaker 05

  You know, it, it says something about the character in the heart of God.

• 2:36:04Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:04Speaker 05

  So, again, this is not, this is something that God has been doing throughout human history. Is that we, yes, we are born in the knowledge of both good and evil. All of us fall. At some point, all of us stray away. We go our own way rather than God's way. And that's the, that's the problem of the world. That's the thing we hate about the world. But from the very beginning, so all the way back in, in Genesis, chapter 12, God says to Abraham and Sarah, "I'm going to raise up a nation out of you." And it was the Jewish nation, also the Arab nation also came from Abraham and Sarah.

• 2:36:44Speaker 05

  I'm going to bless you to be a blessing to all nations. Okay, so we're talking 4,000 years ago. God intervenes in human history to say, "I'm gonna do something to bless all nations." And what was he doing? Well, he was creating this nation with all their peculiar laws and idiosyncrasies to protect what he was doing, which I believe is revealing through the prophets, his will, his words, his history. And we have that today. It's unbelievable how,

• 2:37:20Speaker 05

  I mean, there's so many reasons to believe God actually inspired this.

• 2:37:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:24Speaker 05

  He was doing something throughout history. I've given you some of them just in the prophecies. But also, Jesus said that, you know, of much, he said, "Don't think I've come to abolish the law and the prophets," which is the sum of the whole Old Testament. He said, "No, I've come to fulfill it, and not a single word, not a jot or tittle, which is like a dot of the i or a cross at the t, will be done away with until all of it's fulfilled." So, God was doing something from the beginning of human history for all nations. And Jesus, when he then comes in fulfillment of all these prophecies we've talked about, after the resurrection, appears to the disciples and he says,

• 2:38:09Speaker 05

  "All these things that I've been teaching you, this was pointing toward this fulfillment." He said, he opened their minds to see how his, all the scriptures of old were pointing toward him. And he said, "Go and tell it to all the nations, there's forgiveness in my name." So what he was doing was so that all people of all nations

• 2:38:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:36Speaker 05

  can turn back to God and be forgiven. And yet, God be just.

• 2:38:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:41Speaker 05

  Because we don't like injustice, by the way.

• 2:38:43Shawn Ryan?

  Right. So, I think I was gonna ask this, and I think this is what you're saying, is

• 2:38:50Shawn Ryan?

  in the beginning...

• 2:38:53Shawn Ryan?

  The Jewish people were the chosen people, correct?

• 2:38:56Speaker 05

  They were the ones-

• 2:38:57Shawn Ryan?

  Then there were the Gentiles.

• 2:38:59Speaker 05

  Chosen is very misunderstood. Chosen does not mean, "I like you more than someone else."

• 2:39:03Shawn Ryan?

  Because that's the way I always tell you.

• 2:39:05Speaker 05

  Right, no, it's, no, you can be chosen for a special mission.

• 2:39:10Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 2:39:10Speaker 05

  That's a responsibility.

• 2:39:12Lee Strobel?

  They were the ones chosen through whom the Messiah would come into humankind and bless all nations.

• 2:39:16Speaker 05

  It was a responsibility, not a, not a, "I like you better than others." So it was always for all nations.

• 2:39:23Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:24Speaker 05

  And in fact, John, in the-

• 2:39:25Shawn Ryan?

  And they broke the promise, correct?

• 2:39:28Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, not all of them. Some of them were faithful and, you know, many. Um, but they, yes, they, they, yeah, I mean, we all have. We've all fallen short.

• 2:39:42Shawn Ryan?

  So what, what, what, what? Because there wasn't that many people back at the time of Abraham, correct? And he was, he was like the the one that started it, correct? And so what separated the Jews from the Gentiles? What eventually, where did that separation happen?

• 2:39:59Speaker 05

  Um.

• 2:40:03Speaker 05

  That's a good question, isn't it? Is it the time of Moses? When they set up the laws and the...

• 2:40:12Lee Strobel?

  Well, even, even before that.

• 2:40:14Speaker 05

  Well, but, yeah. I didn't, yeah, that's a great question. Get back to us on that.

• 2:40:21Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:23Shawn Ryan?

  I got you.

• 2:40:26Lee Strobel?

  You know what's, it struck me because you and I were talking about Santa Barbara earlier and how you love Santa Barbara, and I was thinking that, uh, you know, we've talked about these prophecies that hundreds of years before Jesus, uh, that point toward the crucifixion, the resurrection, all this stuff. And, um, uh, you know, when I was a skeptic, I used to think, "Oh, he just maneuvered his life to, you know, like it says, the Messiah will ride a, a donkey into Jerusalem, and he just got a donkey and rode in, so people think-

• 2:40:53Speaker 05

  He knew all this.

• 2:40:55Lee Strobel?

  But there was all these things he couldn't have fulfilled, like where he was born, and the time he was born, and soldiers gambling for his government. All, all these things he couldn't have fulfilled.

• 2:41:03Speaker 05

  Or how about also the nations coming together?

• 2:41:07Lee Strobel?

  Nations coming together, the crucifixion. Exactly. But, you talk about Santa Barbara, there's, there's a professor there at, um, Westmont College named Peter Stoner. And Peter Stoner said one day, he said, you know what? You can quantify the likelihood, what are the odds that any one of these prophecies could be fulfilled? For instance, Micah says-

• 2:41:28Speaker 05

  You the one who did that?

• 2:41:29Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:41:30Speaker 05

  Wesmont.

• 2:41:30Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, Wesmont.

• 2:41:31Speaker 05

  I used to work at Wesmont.

• 2:41:32Lee Strobel?

  Micah says that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Well, how many people have been born in Bethlehem? So you could figure out the odds. So he got a group of mathematics students together. He said, let's run the odds.

• 2:41:43Speaker 05

  Cause there are like sixty-one prophecies just of the Messiah.

• 2:41:47Lee Strobel?

  Right, so he took forty-eight of them. And he said, let's run the numbers. What are the, here's this question. What are the odds that any human being throughout history could fulfill forty-eight of these prophecies? And they calculated it was one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.

• 2:42:09Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:42:09Lee Strobel?

  That's equal to the number of atoms, like, it's like one atom in a trillion, trillion, billion universes. I mean, this, this is an astronomical, it's not twelve trillion, it's twelve trillions. You know, the, the odds of any human being-

• 2:42:26Speaker 05

  Zero.

• 2:42:26Lee Strobel?

  Fulfilling these, yeah, yeah. I talked to one physicist, I said, when you get the numbers that big, what are the odds it can actually happen? He said, oh, we, we scientists have a term for that. I said, what is it? He said, ain't gonna happen. So, it ain't gonna happen. And yet it did. And it only happened in Jesus. He's the only one. And as you pointed out earlier, quite accurately, that because of the timeframe, if Jesus isn't the Messiah, there will never be one.

• 2:42:53Speaker 05

  Can't be.

• 2:42:53Lee Strobel?

  Can't be.

• 2:42:54Speaker 05

  Cause he had to come before the temple was destroyed.

• 2:42:56Lee Strobel?

  The temple was destroyed in seventy-eight.

• 2:42:57Speaker 05

  There is no temple.

• 2:42:58Lee Strobel?

  That's right.

• 2:42:59Speaker 05

  There is a Muslim mosque on the temple site.

• 2:43:02Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:03Speaker 05

  To this day.

• 2:43:05Lee Strobel?

  Wow. So it's him or nothing?

• 2:43:09Shawn Ryan?

  So was there, so was it a new responsibility? Cause, cause, cause-

• 2:43:15Speaker 05

  What?

• 2:43:16Shawn Ryan?

  With the, with the, when they broke the covenant, right? When he was crucified? And then-

• 2:43:23Speaker 05

  Well, they broke the covenant way before that. There were, there were several covenants, so.

• 2:43:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:28Speaker 05

  But the real covenant that, that God was making with, through Jesus is an unconditional one.

• 2:43:33Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:35Speaker 05

  Meaning, and so there's, there's, there's so much fascinating stuff, isn't there? It's just unbelievable. So Abraham, okay, back, two thousand years.

• 2:43:46Speaker 05

  He, God says to Abraham and Sarah, "I'm gonna give you a son, and through him is going to be a blessing for all the nations." So, so again, this is the lineage of the Messiah. So that's the second way he's gonna bless all the nations, through the Messiah. Okay? Well then, Abraham is told, "Go to the land I'm gonna show you, and then you will have this son." So they go, they leave Ur, where they were living, travel to this land, which is now Palestine or Israel. It's nowhere, nothing town, right? And, um, and then they don't have a kid. For 10 years. And she's getting old. She's getting old, they're old.

• 2:44:31Speaker 05

  They're older than... Hey, come on, man!

• 2:44:37Speaker 05

  Makes me feel better.

• 2:44:41Speaker 05

  So, so, you know, they're not having a kid. And Abraham, like all of us, is like, "Maybe God needs a little help." Right? And Sarah's like, "Yeah, good idea. Here, sleep with my maid servant Hagar and give us a child. We'll surrogate one." And they do, and Ishmael is born. And God's like, "You didn't trust me." And he said, "No, there will be a child of the promise that will come." So, what is it, 10 years after that, it was like, I mean, they're really old. You know, it's impossible, but it, but it happened. Isaiah, uh, Isaac is born. And, um, the, the wild thing is God then, when Isaac's like, uh, 12, 13,

• 2:45:26Speaker 05

  something like that, close to a teenager, and, and the love of Abraham's life, God says to him, "Abraham, I want you to take your son, your only son, who you love, and I want you to take him to a mountain I will show you, and there I want you to sacrifice him."

• 2:45:48Speaker 05

  Now, God also said through the law, "Don't do that. Do not sacrifice your children like the other gods demand." So this is pretty confusing, right? But Abraham follows him. Now here's the thing. He gets two of his servants, he gets Isaac, and he's struggling, but he goes, and it says, "He traveled three days' journey to Mount Moriah," to the region of Mount Moriah. And there, he, God says, "That's, that's the mountain. Go up there and sacrifice your son." So he's got two servants, they could have carried the wood, on which he's going to make this altar and sacrifice his son, right?

• 2:46:30Speaker 05

  And Abraham says to his servants, "You stay here. The boy and I will go, "offer a sacrifice, and we will return."

• 2:46:41Speaker 05

  So here's, here's the thing. Abraham believed, even if God makes me go through, he's going to bring him back to life somehow because he's promised to bless all nations through Isaac. And now he trusted. Now he believed. So he goes up there.

• 2:47:00Speaker 05

  This is what, Genesis 22? Twenty, yeah, 22. It's the latter part of Genesis. He goes up, he's struggling, but he's like, "Okay, God." And he raises the knife to do it, and God says, "Stop, Abraham.

• 2:47:17Speaker 05

  "Now I, I, I see, you know, how, how much you trust me." And he's, he looks, and he says, "There was a lamb, a ram, caught in the thicket."

• 2:47:31Speaker 05

  And he says, "Do not sacrifice your son. I'll provide it." And so he, he sacrificed the lamb or the ram in his place. And Abraham named that place, "On this mount, the Lord will provide." Okay, fast forward 2,000 years, and I won't get into all the how we know, but we know. That was the very place on which Jesus would walk up the hill with his own wood. And by the way, Isaac had to carry the wood. Jesus would walk up with the wood on which he would be sacrificed and the Lord would provide. Wow.

• 2:48:15Shawn Ryan?

  Powerful.

• 2:48:16Speaker 05

  Wow. It's all over.

• 2:48:17Shawn Ryan?

  And we do know that.

• 2:48:18Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Yes.

• 2:48:21Shawn Ryan?

  How do we know that?

• 2:48:22Speaker 05

  Okay. Oh, boy. You tell them. Well, so, um, so we know that because, uh, Mount Moriah is, is the, the place on which the temple was built. And right outside the temple walls is, is Gol- Golgotha.

• 2:48:47Speaker 05

  On Moriah, a part of Moriah, Mount Moriah. And we, we, we know all that because, um, so the angel of the Lord appears to Gideon on the threshing floor of Aru- of Aruna. And, um, that's, that's a whole other story in Joshua? No. Genesis, no, it's Joshua. Judges, it's on Judges. And, and then later David, King David, so this is about a thousand B.C., builds the temple on the threshing floor of Haruna. So that's right there on Mount Moriah. So this was not Jerusalem.

• 2:49:32Speaker 05

  There was no city there when Abraham took, took Isaac, and yet it's the very place where the temple and Moriah, the, the hill on which Jesus was crucified. He, he, he literally had him prophetically act out what he didn't make Abraham do. That's what people are like, how could God be so cruel? He didn't. He wasn't. Right. He showed what he would do. Yeah. Out of love for us.

• 2:50:01Shawn Ryan?

  He provided.

• 2:50:02Speaker 05

  He provided. And not only that, then, then he comes along and, you know, delivers the Jewish people from Egyptian slavery in about fourteen, fifteen hundred B.C.

• 2:50:17Speaker 05

  And they, they, you know, they, they get out of Egypt on what was called the Passover. So the Passover was when, you know, God had basically warned Pharaoh again and again, ten times, "Let my people go." He kept upping the ante, like, "Look, I'm serious, I'm God, you're not God. Obey me." "Let them go." And he wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't. And the final one was, "The firstborn will die. Unless you take the blood of a lamb and, and paint your doorpost with it." And then he said, "And if that's the case, the, the angel of death will pass over your house."

• 2:50:59Speaker 05

  So all the Israelites painted this blood of a lamb on their doorposts, Passover. That was Passover, the first Passover.

• 2:51:09Speaker 05

  They celebrated Passover and this sacrificial system where every year they had to come to Jerusalem and bring a lamb to be killed in their stead for the, for the sins of the previous year. And all that happened for fifteen hundred years until that Friday of Passover, which, which was good, what we call Good Friday, when Jesus was, was crucified as the Lamb of God who would finally take away the sins of the world.

• 2:51:48Speaker 05

  So this is another fifteen hundred year prophetic fulfillment. And like I said, you know, the Jewish people can't do that anymore because the temple's gone. And, and God specifically said, "You can only make sacrifices in the temple."

• 2:52:03Shawn Ryan?

  So this, this, this mountain, what's the name of the mountain?

• 2:52:06Speaker 05

  Mount Moriah.

• 2:52:07Shawn Ryan?

  This is, this is the mountain in Jerusalem today where the temple was? And how did Damascus get there?

• 2:52:15Speaker 05

  Well, so, you know, when Mohammed, Mohammed came in the 600s AD, so 600 years after Jesus. And, interestingly, Mohammed, Mecca was Medina, it was in the caravan routes. So he knew a lot of Jews and Christians and, and actually, you know, had read the Bible. He calls the people of the book in the Quran.

• 2:52:57Speaker 05

  But in the, in the 600s, you know, I'm sorry, I totally lost your question.

• 2:53:05Lee Strobel?

  How did, so, so there was a temple there, that's where Jesus was crucified, that's where?

• 2:53:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so Islam?

• 2:53:14Lee Strobel?

  How did a mosque wind up there?

• 2:53:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the, the caliphates after Mohammed, they, they came and took places by force. So not free will, you became a Muslim by force. And, and they took, they took Jerusalem and, and, and built a mosque on the most holy site of Judaism.

• 2:53:41Lee Strobel?

  It's interesting too, that when you, when you look at the Quran, which I read when I was doing my investigation, you know, trying to check out all the possible options and so forth. When you get to Surah 4, verse 156, 157, most people interpret it as saying Jesus was not crucified and therefore couldn't have been resurrected.

• 2:54:02Speaker 05

  I thought they thought he's, he was crucified, but he survived it.

• 2:54:07Lee Strobel?

  No, it wasn't him, yeah. God replaced him with some, some think it was Judas that he replaced him with. But the point is, the Quran specifically highlights things and says that are not true, that you must believe if you're a Christian. So it says in Surah 4, 156, 157, that Jesus didn't die on the cross. Well, then he wouldn't have been resurrected.

• 2:54:30Speaker 05

  And history?

• 2:54:31Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, well, yeah. Secondly, it says, "No one can bear the sins of another." It also says, "God does not have a son." So, these are specific teachings the Quran explicitly rejects that Christians must accept. Now, I have a good friend who's a Muslim, and he came over, we're grilling steaks, and I said, "Let's set aside religion, let's just look at history." And I said, "Here's what I have from first-century sources about the crucifixion of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus," and I went through some of that, and I said, "Now, what have you got on your side?" "Honestly, you've got a guy 600 years later in a cave that said it isn't true."

• 2:55:13Lee Strobel?

  "Which is the most credibility?" And his response was, "I choose to believe the Quran." "Okay, that's his choice, but I think the evidence of history points powerfully toward the truth of the Christians' claim, in a way that it doesn't support those claims of the Quran."

• 2:55:34Speaker 05

  And it's not, it's not an us against them.

• 2:55:36Lee Strobel?

  No.

• 2:55:37Speaker 05

  I mean, you know, like I said, God is for everyone. He wants everyone to know what He's done, you know?

• 2:55:43Lee Strobel?

  And we see this in my book, I talk about these supernatural dreams that people are having, and visions of Jesus in closed countries, Islamic countries, where God says, "I love these people so much that you can't close out my gospel from them. I'm going to intervene through supernatural dreams that are happening to these people in a remarkable way, and they're corroborated by outside events and so forth, so we know they're not just being generated by a subconscious mind, because He loves them."

• 2:56:11Speaker 05

  And, you know, that's what I report on in Imagine the God of Heaven. These Muslims, who, when they clinically die, that's who they're meeting.

• 2:56:21Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:23Speaker 05

  They're not meeting Allah, they're not even claiming to meet Allah.

• 2:56:26Lee Strobel?

  That's a-

• 2:56:27Speaker 05

  No, and by the way, the word "Allah" just means God.

• 2:56:30Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:31Speaker 05

  You know, so-

• 2:56:34Speaker 05

  But they they come back knowing Bibi in Tehran came back and found Jesus.

• 2:56:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:42Speaker 05

  Suedeek in Rwanda, you know, Muslim and and again and again and again. So I say that because I think many times, you know, and maybe people watching are like, well, see, this is the problem with you guys, right? You're right and they're wrong. This is what causes all the problems in the world. And that's kind of this, you know, the stereotype that's put up. And I think that can be true. That can be true. But that's not God. God is for everyone. He's for all of us. And, you know, I wasn't a believer and he wasn't a believer. Before we looked at the evidence, that's where the evidence points.

• 2:57:25Speaker 05

  And what God is leading us to is really not to war against one another.

• 2:57:31Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 2:57:32Speaker 05

  But to really see that, no, we were all created to be his children. He wants us to love one another. He wants us to seek peace with one another. And one day that will happen, but it will only happen for those who do seek his ways and his will.

• 2:57:53Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. It's interesting stuff. Is there any? Is there any physical evidence? You know, sometimes I've seen reports that maybe Jesus's face is showing up on a cloth.

• 2:58:07Speaker 05

  Oh, the shroud of Turin.

• 2:58:09Lee Strobel?

  Well, the shroud of Turin is a very fascinating topic.

• 2:58:12Speaker 05

  I've been looking.

• 2:58:13Lee Strobel?

  New research into.

• 2:58:14Speaker 05

  Yes. John Campbell, Dr. John Campbell.

• 2:58:16Lee Strobel?

  There's some really powerful new analysis of the shroud.

• 2:58:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:58:20Lee Strobel?

  That indicates it may very well be the burial cloth of Jesus. In fact, several, many years ago, they did a, a, a study of it. And they took a piece of it and they did radiocarbon dating and they said, oh, it dates back to the Middle Ages. So is this a forgery? Well, they had taken. By mistake, a threads that were part of a patch that was added in the Middle Ages.

• 2:58:42Speaker 05

  Because it was burned. If you look at it, you can see the burn marks. It was, it was in a fire in,

• 2:58:48Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:48Speaker 05

  in Turin.

• 2:58:49Lee Strobel?

  Right.

• 2:58:49Speaker 05

  In the 1500s.

• 2:58:51Lee Strobel?

  Somewhere in there, yeah.

• 2:58:51Speaker 05

  And what happened is it got burned. Well, nuns took it and sewed patches of cloth on to piece it back together.

• 2:58:59Lee Strobel?

  So they accidentally dated that. Um, and, and, but when, now when they date it, there, there is, and I'm not an expert on it, but Dr. Jeremiah Johnston and several others are written, are writing books and doing lectures on it now. There's a lot of new stuff coming out on the shroud that really does suggest. By the way, uh, one of the most powerful moments I've ever had was, there, there was a guy, uh, I met him, I used to do a TV show and I had him as a guest. He was the official photographer of the Shroud of Turin.

• 2:59:27Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:28Lee Strobel?

  Yeah. Um, a Jewish guy, Barry Schwartz, I think is his name. And, um, and he made several life-size, actual-size copies of the photo of the shroud. And I, I met a guy who has one. He has a traveling exhibit that he has. It was out East. And so he said, you want to see it? I said, yes. I'm telling you, when you come face to face with this image and you contemplate the possibility that is an image of my Jesus, it's pretty overwhelming. It is pretty overwhelming.

• 3:00:06Speaker 05

  But, well, and, and, and so, you know, some of the evidence now, like when they studied it, they still cannot figure out what, what put.

• 3:00:16Lee Strobel?

  Mechanism.

• 3:00:17Speaker 05

  Because, because the image is a, um, what do you, what do you?

• 3:00:22Lee Strobel?

  It's like an X-ray kind of thing.

• 3:00:23Speaker 05

  Well, it is. It's, it's, it's just on the, the outside of it, but it's, but it's a, um, What do you call it in a, in a, you know, film, in the old film where you, it was, it's a negative?

• 3:00:37Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:00:38Speaker 05

  It's a negative on the cloth.

• 3:00:40Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:41Speaker 05

  And, and so you, you actually have to, you know, flip it basically, um, make dark light and light dark. But they do not know what the mechanism is that burned the image on there. There's, there's nothing we have.

• 3:00:57Lee Strobel?

  Are you serious?

• 3:00:57Speaker 05

  No, no. And when they've done, now they've done even AI, three dimensional reconstruction because the data in the cloth is three dimensional. It's three dimensional information. It's, in other words, it somehow came off an actual body to put three dimensional spatial information in the cloth.

• 3:01:23Speaker 05

  In some kind of way we don't know. It's not dye, it's not just radiation, it's something else and they don't know what it is. So here's a little funny thing, fascinating thing. Heidi, who I told you about, the Jewish

• 3:01:34Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:34Speaker 05

  girl who met Jesus in her near death experience, were friends. She texted me when she saw that three dimensional image. That's him.

• 3:01:43Lee Strobel?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:01:45Speaker 05

  Now, I don't know.

• 3:01:46Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, yeah, but that's pretty good. Yeah, yeah. Wow. And I think they found-

• 3:01:51Speaker 05

  So she said his nose was longer than I thought and it was a little crooked.

• 3:01:56Lee Strobel?

  Interesting.

• 3:01:57Speaker 05

  Like it had been broken.

• 3:01:58Lee Strobel?

  Wow. That's fascinating. They, didn't they find some pollen in the shroud that they could trace back to first century Jerusalem?

• 3:02:06Speaker 05

  I don't know about that.

• 3:02:07Lee Strobel?

  I think that's true. Anyway, it'd be great to have an expert on who could really-

• 3:02:11Speaker 05

  Dr. John Campbell did some, I saw some stuff he did.

• 3:02:14Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, Jeremiah Johnston is another one.

• 3:02:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:02:16Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:17Shawn Ryan?

  Any other physical type stuff?

• 3:02:21Speaker 05

  Like that?

• 3:02:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, like that.

• 3:02:22Lee Strobel?

  No, there's a lot of fraudulent stuff. A lot of fraudulent. There's a piece of the cross. You can buy it for $1,500.

• 3:02:29Speaker 05

  There is, yeah. And that stuff, that bothers-

• 3:02:32Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, me too.

• 3:02:33Speaker 05

  I mean, even, I'll tell you, even near death experiences, I was, I was telling you, I'm, I'm doing more research. I continue to do research and- I, I think, you know, some of these, I'm hearing them. I think it's AI. I think they're just saying to AI, make up a near-death experience and have Jesus say this or that or the other, and we're just gonna make a lot of money off people who believe anything.

• 3:02:55Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:55Speaker 05

  And that's why I say, if, you know, if there aren't names attached and it's not videotaped and it's just, I would, I'm very skeptical of that stuff, you know?

• 3:03:06Lee Strobel?

  Yeah. There's another species of evidence, um, not physical evidence, but interesting, uh, about the darkness that fell over the earth at the time of the crucifixion. Bible says the earth went dark for a period of time, and I'm thinking when I'm reading this for the first time.

• 3:03:21Speaker 05

  No, specifically, from the sixth to the ninth hour.

• 3:03:25Lee Strobel?

  Right, so, yeah.

• 3:03:26Speaker 05

  It says for those three hours it was dark.

• 3:03:28Lee Strobel?

  Right. And I'm reading this thinking, wouldn't somebody have noticed this? Wouldn't somebody else have written something about this if the earth actually went dark during that time period? Well, there was a guy named Thalys, who was a historian, who wrote a history of the Eastern Mediterranean world about 50 AD, which is shortly after this.

• 3:03:46Speaker 05

  A Roman historian.

• 3:03:46Lee Strobel?

  Roman, that's right. And, uh, his works have been lost, but in the year 221, a guy named Julius Africanus, uh, had a copy of what he wrote, and he was kind of responding to it and said, oh yeah, Thalys says that, um, the darkness was as a result of an eclipse.

• 3:04:02Speaker 05

  Of the sun.

• 3:04:03Lee Strobel?

  Which we knew it couldn't have been because of the timing of the Passover.

• 3:04:06Speaker 05

  Because it was the Passover when he was crucified, and that's, Passover is always a full moon.

• 3:04:12Lee Strobel?

  Full moon.

• 3:04:12Speaker 05

  That's how they know it's time for Passover. It's not our calendar, it's a full moon.

• 3:04:16Lee Strobel?

  So there you have it.

• 3:04:17Speaker 05

  You can't have a eclipse of the sun during a full moon.

• 3:04:20Lee Strobel?

  Right. So there you have a, a, um, um, a report, a, a report by a Roman scholar, an historian, that is, uh, corroborating a claim in the scriptures that many people would read and say, that can't be true.

• 3:04:37Speaker 05

  And there were other extra biblical sources that also talked about the darkness.

• 3:04:41Lee Strobel?

  My book Case for Christ.

• 3:04:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:04:43Lee Strobel?

  Wow. Yeah, it's fascinating, it really is.

• 3:04:45Speaker 05

  There's so much.

• 3:04:46Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:47Speaker 05

  You know, there is, there's so much, and I think... I think that's where, you know, if people are willing to really stay open minded enough to really seek with an open mind, with an open heart, they'll find. But then again, that's not the point. At the end of the day, the point is, do you want a relationship with your Creator? Yeah. And that's where I think it comes back to trust and realizing, and I'll tell you, Shawn, you know, like I just did a podcast called The Ecstatic Love of God. That's the name of the podcast? Yes. I love that. The Ecstatic Love of God because of what they say. Oh.

• 3:05:25Speaker 05

  So I, I interviewed this guy, he was a lawyer in Australia, and, and multiple other people too, trying to describe, so when he clinically dies, and he's going to the presence of this, this light that he knew was God, the love, and he says, as I'm, I'm, I'm moving toward this, and he says, "In the light, I see these arms outstretched toward me like this, like, like come, welcome." And he said, "As I'm, as I'm moving there," and he had just come to faith in Jesus the week before. Hmm.

• 3:06:05Speaker 05

  So he's, he's moving toward this, and he said, "And suddenly I, I start to be filled up," he said, "when I, when I met the light, when I touched the light, my soul touched the light," he said, "it was like, it was like we became like one, we merged." And Jesus prayed for this. Hmm. John 17. Yeah. "I pray that they may be one with us, Father, just as I am in you and you in me, may they be in us, that the world might believe you sent me." And he said, he said, I read that later, I hadn't read the Bible. He said, "It was like that," and he said, "I, I was being filled up, filled up, filled up with this love, but our word love doesn't even do justice."

• 3:06:48Speaker 05

  He said, "It was ecstasy, it was," he, he, I mean, he used all these metaphors I can't even describe, but he said, "I felt like I was gonna explode, and I thought to myself, I'm gonna explode." And he said, "Then it starts to subside."

• 3:07:07Speaker 05

  And he's like, wait a second, I didn't say that. I thought that. Did he hear my thoughts? And, and, and then he says, no, don't stop. Give me all you got. And it started, and he hears a chuckle.

• 3:07:24Speaker 05

  He hears a chuckle and he thought it was funny. And then he starts to fill him up again, more and more and more. And he said, as he enters this light, he said, I knew who this was. He said, I didn't have to ask. I knew.

• 3:07:40Shawn Ryan?

  Didn't have a name tag.

• 3:07:41Speaker 05

  This was Jesus. He was the way, the truth, and the life. He said, I had not read that, but I knew it. It was self-evident to me. He was the, and I knew what that meant. And he said,

• 3:07:58Speaker 05

  you know, there's just never been a love. He said, take all the love you've ever experienced from a spouse, from a, for a kid, from a grandparent, any love you've experienced, put it all together in one, and you have to multiply it by a billion. And that's consistently. And so I, I let you hear from all these different people. And the point is that God is the love we've always wanted. He is the relationship we were created for. And then all of our other relationships are made complete. They don't go away.

• 3:08:34Shawn Ryan?

  Sure.

• 3:08:34Speaker 05

  They get better.

• 3:08:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:39Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Well, Lee, you just wrote a book on seeing the supernatural.

• 3:08:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:08:46Shawn Ryan?

  John, lots, 1,500 plus NDEs you've written about. Every once in a while, bring on a psychic on this podcast.

• 3:08:57Shawn Ryan?

  I get blasted by the Christian community. Every time I talk about mediums, every time I bring on a psychic or a remote viewer, I think it's a fascinating subject, I get destroyed. And so I'm curious, you know, what are your guys' thoughts on that?

• 3:09:14Lee Strobel?

  I actually have a chapter in my book on ghosts and psychics. And I talk about the biblical admonition to avoid mediums, to avoid psychics. And,

• 3:09:30Lee Strobel?

  I actually talk about ways in which psychics use different techniques of cold readings, warm readings, and hot readings. There are different ways in which they can make it appear that they know things that they don't really know. They're discerning things supernaturally, which they're really just trying to figure out by a more naturalistic means. And, you know, do I believe some are demonic? Yeah, I believe some are in contact with demons. You know, for instance- Not the psychics, but who their contact is. Exactly, yeah, who their contact is. There was a case with President Carter,

• 3:10:11Lee Strobel?

  and there was an airplane that went down, I think in Africa somewhere, twin-engine plane, and the government CIA was trying to find it. And they couldn't find it. They moved satellites, they're looking for it, they couldn't find this plane. And Stansfield Turner, who was the CIA director, came in and said, "I've contacted this medium in California, and she went into a trance, and she wrote down the longitude and latitude. And we moved the satellites, and sure enough, we found the plane." So there are those cases. What do you do with that? And I think there's probably, I mean, my hypothesis would be

• 3:10:51Lee Strobel?

  that there was a demon who was very intent on convincing others that she is psychic and a reliable source of information for future tapping into. And so, he might have had knowledge of where the plane was and provided it that way. I'm not saying the psychic herself was culpable, but I'm just saying, given the Bible's admonition against psychics, against divination, they call it, against mediums, I don't think God would honor that.

• 3:11:23Shawn Ryan?

  What does it say about that?

• 3:11:25Lee Strobel?

  In Deuteronomy, there's, actually, in my book, I quote it.

• 3:11:30Shawn Ryan?

  Because a lot of them, there's a lot of good things that have happened through these kind of things.

• 3:11:34Lee Strobel?

  Well-

• 3:11:35Shawn Ryan?

  On the way, just this morning, I mean, I was thinking about this subject, and I opened one of the social media accounts, and the first thing I saw was some type of CIA document that was leaked to find the Ark of the Covenant.

• 3:11:50Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:53Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know if you guys know anything about that.

• 3:11:54Speaker 05

  No.

• 3:11:55Shawn Ryan?

  But I didn't have time to dive into it because we're getting ready to interview, but I've interviewed a number of these guys.

• 3:12:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:12:01Shawn Ryan?

  And, um.

• 3:12:02Speaker 05

  Well, here's the thing, I, you know, I think sometimes, and I don't really like, um, when Christians just blast, just take out the machine gun and just tear it, rip it apart.

• 3:12:16Shawn Ryan?

  I don't like it either.

• 3:12:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, and look at you, you're the guy. No, so, uh, because, because I have, you know, I've been on shows with, with people like this, and many times they're very sincere. And they really are seeking.

• 3:12:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:33Speaker 05

  And I think many times maybe they're, they're seeking and closer to finding God than, than others who are maybe, you know, they're just playing a Christian game.

• 3:12:44Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 3:12:44Speaker 05

  Okay, so, so it's not like they're all bad. We're not, we're not saying that.

• 3:12:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:49Speaker 05

  But I think there's a reality to the spiritual world and it's not all good. There is deception.

• 3:12:56Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 3:12:57Speaker 05

  And I think that's why in, um, like you said, in Deuteronomy, so what they, what, what God was warning. So the nations around Israel were worshiping these gods and many times, you know, and leading them to child sacrifice and things like that, like as a, this is, this is what God wants. Um, and, and trying to gain control, power, knowledge of the future.

• 3:13:28Shawn Ryan?

  Is this like Moloch and some of his other, I can't remember all the names.

• 3:13:33Speaker 05

  But through mediums or through, through psychics and God warned them that, don't try to contact the dead because in fact, you're probably communicating with the demonic.

• 3:13:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:45Speaker 05

  So it's, it's. And I'll tell you, you know, I, I um, I interviewed a woman in Brazil who, um, and she was a, she was a pastor with her husband, but she lost her, her 16-year-old son in an accident. And, and she was just devastated and just couldn't get over it, went into a depression. Um, you know, just couldn't grieve and let it go. And she ends up getting, um, she ends up having an overdose of medications that she was taking, not intentionally, but she did. And she dies and she has a near-death experience. And in her experience, she's there with Jesus.

• 3:14:31Speaker 05

  And, and Jesus shows her, again, he sometimes gives parables and metaphors. And he, he shows her a garden and says, this is the garden I've, I've created you to work in. And then she sees across like a, a divide, like a chasm. And there, walking across there is her son.

• 3:14:53Speaker 05

  And Jesus said to her, and, and she wants to go to him. And he said, it's not your time yet. I still have you on earth for a purpose and it's, it's your garden. He has accomplished his, he came into my gates with joy. And basically you're saying, you've got to keep going on your life. He's fine. Look, I'm letting you see. But she comes back and she still can't let it go. And, and she still is like, almost like idolizing her son and wanting him to be back. And one day she told me, and, and again, she's telling me in Portuguese. This is through a translator, my, my translator there. You don't speak Portuguese?

• 3:15:37Speaker 05

  I don't. I'm learning Spanish. It's close.

• 3:15:42Speaker 05

  She said, my son burst into the house and flops down the couch, just like he did every day after school.

• 3:15:52Speaker 05

  And she was blown away. It's like this is what she wanted and, and, and she even walks over and she starts to rub his head, just like she used to do. And the angel that was with her in her near death experience appears and says to her, you know, that's not your son. And she said, there was this terrible tension in me because I so wanted it to be true. I so wanted it to be my son. And she struggled. And finally she said, I know. Wow.

• 3:16:30Speaker 05

  And as soon as she said that, her son is a demonic creature, not her son. Hmm. And, and then both are gone. And I think that's a, you know, I, I think unfortunately, that's what we've got to pay attention to. You know, I have many near death experience, um, examples of, uh, Steve Khan, who, who was a Buddhist, who this, this Buddha figure appears to him as he's, he, he did a death bowl. You know what that is? Hmm. Uh, it's like a smoking a bowl of marijuana, but laced with PCP and meth and crack, all

• 3:17:13Speaker 05

  kinds of stuff. And, um, and about day eight, nine, 10 of not sleeping after doing this, this, the same Buddha figure who used to, he used to appear to him in the, in the temple in Korea, uh, appears to him and, and starts to convince him that, uh, it would be best if he went ahead and took his life. And if he does, he'll give him, he'll, he'll get 50,000 years less of hell. And for some reason, he decides that's a great idea. And, and he

• 3:17:53Speaker 05

  slits himself with a, with a butcher knife across his stomach. His mother sees it, calls the police. The police come. He also cuts his throat. And he and he dies and he is descending. He knows he's going to hell. And he realizes this nice, this nice Buddha figure is not Buddha at all. This old, old man that he thought was, you know, Buddha figure was not at all. He was demonic. And he realizes that on the other side. And he, he actually ends up getting rescued by Jesus.

• 3:18:34Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:18:35Speaker 05

  Who tells him, no more drugs, no more Buddhism, and I love you.

• 3:18:38Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm, wow.

• 3:18:39Speaker 05

  And he's a pastor today.

• 3:18:41Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm, wow.

• 3:18:43Speaker 05

  So not everything that appears good is always good. You remember Howard Storm, who had the near death experience, the atheist college professor? These really nice people in the hallway. He doesn't even know he's dead. And, and they're dressed like the hospital staff and they're like, Howard, come with us. He's like, I need surgery. And oh, we know all about you. Come, come with us. They seem real nice. And like I like to point out, if Howard's near death experience had ended right there, he would have had a very different interpretation.

• 3:19:15Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 3:19:15Speaker 05

  But he followed them and they lead him into an outer darkness, just like Jesus talked about, where they just, you know, worst prison scene you can imagine. Until he calls out to Jesus to save him. And he does.

• 3:19:32Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:19:32Speaker 05

  And he leaves his tenured professorship and becomes a Christian pastor as well. In fact, do you know, I know Howard, Kyle, Paul, Yen, is another Buddhist that Jesus saved. Um, who's the other one I just said? Uh, Kyle, five, Howard, five or six of them who had hellish near death experiences and cried out to God and Jesus saved them. And they're all Christian pastors or missionaries today.

• 3:20:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's awesome.

• 3:20:01Speaker 05

  It's wild. You can't make this stuff up. Like, how do you explain that?

• 3:20:05Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's an interesting subject. I've, I've interviewed a handful of them and one of them was Angela Ford. And she had done a lot of work for the government and, um, found some, uh, missing kids and stuff. And I, I asked her in the interview, I said, if you ever remote viewed.

• 3:20:22Speaker 05

  Oh, she's a psychic?

• 3:20:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. And she did not want to answer that. She started rubbing her teeth and like moving her head back and forth and.

• 3:20:32Speaker 05

  Why?

• 3:20:33Shawn Ryan?

  I didn't want to dig any deeper. It was, uh, I mean, she was really open the whole interview. And then when I asked her that, it just.

• 3:20:41Speaker 05

  It shut down.

• 3:20:42Shawn Ryan?

  Like she switched.

• 3:20:43Speaker 05

  Well, and here's the thing, I, you know, again, I don't think necessarily people know.

• 3:20:49Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 3:20:49Speaker 05

  And I think that's part of the problem is that I don't think they're necessarily evil, wicked people. They many times have good intentions and good motives. And again, the best deception is 80, 90% true.

• 3:21:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:05Speaker 05

  And so I think, like, like Lee was saying, I think sometimes you can have things that are helpful.

• 3:21:15Speaker 05

  But are they, are they in fact helpful for a reason to, to get people to follow after them, not after God?

• 3:21:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. It was interesting. I mean, she said, yes, I have. And I said, do you want to talk about it? And she just started rubbing her teeth, moving her eyes around and it was.

• 3:21:36Speaker 05

  Well, look, here's the thing.

• 3:21:37Shawn Ryan?

  It scared the hell out of me to be honest.

• 3:21:38Speaker 05

  Well, when, when, you know, like, like Randy, the CEO I interviewed, when, when he, when the six embolisms traveled up his leg and pulmonary embolism, his heart stops, body shuts down. He's rising up and he looks out over the surface of the earth, but, but there, there was something else going on. Again, you're moving into another dimensionality, I believe. But he sees a battle going on. And it's about, he believes it was a battle for, for his soul because he was really struggling with God. His, he'd gone through a lot of stuff, um, and was really struggling with God, even though he's a believer, he was struggling.

• 3:22:22Speaker 05

  But he sees this battle going on and, you know, Jesus talked about that. I mean, he said, the ruler of this world is coming. This is before his crucifixion.

• 3:22:36Speaker 05

  The ruler of this world, I thought he was the king of kings, the Messiah. What about God, the Father, you know? Well, God has given the demonic angelic host rule for a time.

• 3:22:52Lee Strobel?

  For a time. On a leash, but there's still.

• 3:22:54Speaker 05

  And again, I think it's part of God's plan. This is a very diminutive experience. This is like a one one thousandth of the goodness to come or the horrors to come. And it's a time of living, of knowing good and evil and choosing. With the opportunity for a second chance. Again, when, when time is not linear, there's no such thing as a second chance. There's no second. It's eternity. And so I think that's what, I think that's what Easter was all about. It's grace, it's God giving us chance after chance after chance of forgiveness to, to get things right, to learn and to grow and to become more and more of what he created us to be.

• 3:23:39Lee Strobel?

  Lee, what were you gonna, what were you gonna say? Oh, I was just gonna reference, there was a, I interviewed a scholar on this question of psychics and mediums and so forth, my book, and this is what he said. The Bible condemns all forms of occultism. Leviticus 1926 commands, "Do not practice divination or seek omens." Similarly, Leviticus 19, verse 31 warns, "Do not turn to mediums," sorry, I don't have my reading glasses, "do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritus, for you will be defiled by them." The Old Testament asserts that those who associate with familiar spirits are cursed by God.

• 3:24:18Lee Strobel?

  Furthermore, Exodus 30, 22, 18, and Leviticus 20, 27 mandate that sorcerers and mediums living at that time be put to death. Deuteronomy 18, verses 10 through 12 is explicit, "Let no one be found among you who is a medium or spiritus, or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord." Revelation 9, 21 promises that all who practice sorcery will face God's judgment. Their destiny is not heaven, but rather the lake that burns with fire and sulfur. Take a look at Revelation 21, verse 8, and 22, verse 15.

• 3:24:59Lee Strobel?

  So I think you're right. I think there, yeah, there's some pretty strong.

• 3:25:03Speaker 05

  Which I have friends who, you know, I'm just, I'm thinking through the lens of, and I, so again, if we didn't tell you all this reason to believe that God was actually

• 3:25:19Speaker 05

  inspiring the writing of the scriptures to know his, his will and understand. But I have, I have friends who both had a near death experience and now are mediums.

• 3:25:33Lee Strobel?

  Really?

• 3:25:34Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:25:34Lee Strobel?

  Interesting.

• 3:25:35Speaker 05

  And, you know, I, I've said to her the same, the same thing.

• 3:25:41Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:42Speaker 05

  But just hearing that fresh, I'm like,

• 3:25:43Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:44Speaker 05

  dang, you know?

• 3:25:45Lee Strobel?

  I know.

• 3:25:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, that doesn't sound good.

• 3:25:47Lee Strobel?

  No, it doesn't sound good. I, I, seriously, I mean, I think it's a dangerous area.

• 3:25:52Speaker 05

  But again, but again, you know, okay.

• 3:25:55Lee Strobel?

  I think it's dangerous because of how Satan may intervene in ways that people are unconscious of and lead people to conclusions that are not biblical.

• 3:26:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, what I wanted to say is I would list, I would hear that and some people may be saying, oh, so you're saying they're just cursed and damned and there's no hope for them. No, that's what I take it. Exactly. And that's not, that's not what he's saying.

• 3:26:16Lee Strobel?

  There's repentance, there's hope.

• 3:26:17Speaker 05

  There's for everyone.

• 3:26:18Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:19Speaker 05

  I mean, the thief on the cross, it was last minute. All he said was, remember me.

• 3:26:23Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:23Speaker 05

  I mean, he didn't, so, so is, and, and so this doesn't mean keep practicing it. But is that the unforgivable sin? No, it's not. David committed, King David committed adultery, murdered her husband, had her husband killed to cover up his sin. And, and somehow he still was forgiven.

• 3:26:51Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:52Speaker 05

  So, you know, God paid an enormous price for our justice and that's what we don't realize.

• 3:27:01Speaker 05

  So my point is, Lee is not saying all psychics are those who, because here's, here's that, that they're all going to hell. He's not saying that. It's, it's a matter, again, of being right with God by turning back to Him and saying, okay, God, you get to be God, I will follow you.

• 3:27:21Lee Strobel?

  An unrepentant sinner is in trouble.

• 3:27:23Speaker 05

  Someone who persists.

• 3:27:25Lee Strobel?

  Someone who persists despite admonition and despite biblical teaching and persists to the end and resists to the end. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes. Um, I mean, you know, I, I lived incredibly a moral life before I became a Christian. God has forgiven me of all of that.

• 3:27:41Speaker 05

  Me too.

• 3:27:42Lee Strobel?

  And the, and all of us who've come to faith have, uh, have, um, been forgiven of, of things that, um, we, you know, I, I look at the grace of God and say, I can't even fathom, uh, how deep and how wide and how strong it is. Um, so anyone who, uh, comes to Him in repentance and faith, I believe is, uh, has eternal life through Jesus Christ and Him alone.

• 3:28:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. But He, He gives us these things so that, so that we will learn and grow and not be deceived and not be led astray.

• 3:28:16Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:17Speaker 05

  And so I think that's, I think that's what, you know, that's what the point of that is.

• 3:28:22Lee Strobel?

  Yeah. I mean, it is interesting, you know, I mean, lots of similarities between near death experiences in mediumship.

• 3:28:32Speaker 05

  So people who have near death experiences often come back and find that there are spirits wanting to channel through them.

• 3:28:42Lee Strobel?

  Hmm, really?

• 3:28:44Speaker 05

  And the veil seems thinner when they come back. And I've had some that I've interviewed who knew like, I'm not letting that happen. I'm not going to be your, your channel. And others who have thought, hell, I guess that's why I had this and that's what I'm supposed to do. And they go down that road.

• 3:29:05Lee Strobel?

  That's why Scripture, I think, is so important in terms of the guide.

• 3:29:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:29:09Lee Strobel?

  You know, that's our plumb line. And we go to that and say, what can I learn from that? That God told me through Scripture to protect me and to nurture my spirit and not to defile me.

• 3:29:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, and, you know,

• 3:29:26Speaker 05

  when we quote Scripture and people, you know, who don't know it, hear that, they're like,

• 3:29:33Speaker 05

  "2,000-year-old book that, you know, is out of touch with today." But what we've been trying to show, and if you've gotten all of this, is that, no, God has been putting very tangible evidence throughout history that He was in fact doing this, very intentionally. And that's what Jesus said. He said, you know, "God by His Spirit was speaking through the prophets, and I am the fulfillment of it." And so that's why we both came to the conclusion like, "Okay, that needs to be the plumb line by which we judge all the rest." In other words, I'm not going to just go listen to whatever a near-death experiencer says and believe it.

• 3:30:18Speaker 05

  They sometimes contradict.

• 3:30:20Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:22Speaker 05

  But the commonality of what they say, they contradict in their interpretations, you know? But the commonality of what they're reporting is what I'm showing. It aligns with what God's been revealing throughout history.

• 3:30:37Lee Strobel?

  Makes sense.

• 3:30:40Lee Strobel?

  Covered a lot of ground today.

• 3:30:41Speaker 05

  We did.

• 3:30:42Lee Strobel?

  I'm excited about Easter Dog on it, you know? It is awesome. When you think about Jesus, and the shroud kind of brings that to life, whether or not we determine ultimately it is authentic or not, it just kind of reminds us, this is a person who died for me to pay the penalty I should have died for and said, "No, no, no, I love you so much. Yes, the penalty has to be paid for because that's justice and God is just, but I'm going to offer you forgiveness. I'll take it upon myself." It's just awesome. And then to the resurrection, to say, "As I have conquered death, so will you. So will you, who follow Him, will all conquer death."

• 3:31:25Speaker 05

  And that's just the start. And I mean, what, you know, what people like Heidi, I was telling you about, what she said is like...

• 3:31:32Speaker 05

  He's so enjoyable.

• 3:31:35Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:35Speaker 05

  She was a 16 year old. And she said, "We had more fun than I've ever had in my life." Now, you don't think of God or Jesus as being described that way.

• 3:31:49Speaker 05

  But that's, that's what, he is both the most powerful, majestic, only worthy of our worship, but also so personable, knows us so well, that he would come and live among us. And the disciples felt so close to him. Like I said, John, his youngest disciple called himself the one Jesus loved.

• 3:32:14Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:14Speaker 05

  Cause that's how he felt.

• 3:32:15Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:16Speaker 05

  Like I was the only one. You know what's fascinating? I've had four, in fact, they're, they're on my podcast. You can hear them talk about it. Four different near death experiencers who said, Jim Woodford, the agnostic to the very end till his head hit the steering wheel, said in Jesus' presence, he said, "You know, I, I knew it couldn't be true, but I felt like, like I was his, his special child, like I was the only one he loved."

• 3:32:43Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:45Speaker 05

  And again, and again, and again, they say that.

• 3:32:49Speaker 05

  Like, like his love for me was so unique that it was like he loved only me of the billions. And he said, "But then I would," Dean Braxton said, "But then I would think about my wife." And I realized, "Oh, he loves her like that too." And I think about someone else, like, "Oh, he loves..."

• 3:33:06Lee Strobel?

  It reminds me of a story of a woman who's a hospice nurse. She's retired now and I have her story in my book where she came into the room of a guy who was dying. And he was weeping, uncontrollably weeping. He was a brilliant guy. His name was Frederick and he was in his seventies, but very highly educated person, weeping uncontrollably. And she said, "What's wrong? What's wrong?" And he said, "Jesus was here. I saw him. He came. He stood right here. And, and, and I felt the love and the grace and it was so overwhelming. I just, and she said, "If I saw him, would I cry?" And he said, "Oh yes, you'd cry." And she said, "Why would I cry?"

• 3:33:50Lee Strobel?

  Because you would feel the depth of his love and forgiveness and it would just overwhelm you. And here's a guy, a brilliant guy, who knew a lot about life, but he didn't know the depth of God's love until he had that pre-death vision right before he died, where God met him in that moment through Jesus Christ. And it just reminds me of that moment when we recognize Easter what it is, and you go, "Oh, my goodness." We ought to be weeping in light of what He did for us.

• 3:34:19Speaker 05

  And still to this day, when I interview, I mean, the CEO, you know, he was a medical executive, fast-growing pharmaceutical company, then started a biotech firm, this commercial airline pilot, Captain Dale Black. And when they talk about looking into the eyes of Jesus, they say, "I could get lost in His eyes forever," because it was like He saw into me everything, every good, every dark thing, but loved me, accepted me. I, He's my best friend, and my father, and everything. And they can't hold it together.

• 3:35:04Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:05Speaker 05

  Every time.

• 3:35:06Lee Strobel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:35:07Speaker 05

  That's like-

• 3:35:08Lee Strobel?

  It's overwhelming.

• 3:35:09Speaker 05

  I do, I'll ask them, "So, well, tell me about when you, when you were with Him, and you..." And these are brilliant guys, I mean, these are like, very smart people, double PhDs and stuff, you know? They've been in the world, they've lived in the world, and yet they say, "What it felt like was so wonderful, it overwhelms my emotions. When I think about it, it just, I'm there and it overwhelms me."

• 3:35:36Lee Strobel?

  Wow.

• 3:35:37Speaker 05

  So, that's the point of, that's the point of Easter, that's the point of the resurrection.

• 3:35:41Lee Strobel?

  And so, Jesus, we can know.

• 3:35:43Speaker 05

  It's not just for forgiveness of our sins.

• 3:35:45Lee Strobel?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:46Speaker 05

  It's to realize that God entered into our very suffering, and though we, we still have to go through it, He's with us. He's always with us. And all He, like He told Randy, the CEO, when, He showed Randy when he was still an agnostic, and He, Randy said, in his life review, he said, "You mean, you were there when I went through that, and that, and even when I hated you?" And he was at Northwestern, and he tried to prove, disprove God. And He said, Jesus said, "I was always there, just waiting for you to turn to Me."

• 3:36:22Lee Strobel?

  Wow.

• 3:36:23Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 3:36:27Shawn Ryan?

  Well.

• 3:36:29Shawn Ryan?

  That was awesome. Thank you guys. Thank you both. A pleasure. You're welcome. It's fun. Yeah. Once again, it's an honor to have you guys back and, and um.

• 3:36:40Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think this could have gone any better. So. Happy Easter. Yeah. Happy Easter. Happy Easter. Alright. God bless. You too. God bless you Sean. Thank you.