Either Jesus rose from the dead, or they knew it was a lie and were willing to die for it. Nobody does that. The greatest miracle in the Bible is not the resurrection; the greatest miracle in the Bible is the first verse. Faith is not having everything explained; it is when some unexplainable things meet an undeniable thing. The only way we could know here’s the right way to live and here’s the wrong way to live is if we have an objective for life. If there is no God, there is no objective; everything’s just up for grabs.

Frank Durk: Good to have you, Josh.

Josh: My pleasure, brother. I’ve been following you a while, man. I’m telling you that sermon you did on voting was like one of the best I’ve ever heard.

Frank Durk: Thank you. And so I had to have you on my podcast. Now here I am, man. So for anybody that doesn’t know, um, I’ll just jump in. So if you don’t know who Frank Turk is, um, this is a legend that has influenced my life, uh, so you’ve got, you know, Cross Politic is, I mean, man, I think you guys are like, uh, actually I looked it up, 650,000 subs on YouTube. You guys are doing great.

Josh: Yeah, cross-examined. We’re doing all right.

Frank Durk: Cross-examined, I’m sorry. Yeah, we’re doing all right. Um, you know, I don’t know if it’s as much to do with subs anymore, cuz you can have a whole ton of subs and I, I don’t get it sometimes the video goes, sometimes it doesn’t, you know, I, I don’t know the algorithm. Carlos knows the algorithm. I Carlos, tell me why stuff works and other stuff doesn’t. I don’t have no idea.

Josh: All right. Well, you’ve like, I said, you’ve influenced my life pretty significantly, so I’m just going to jump right in. You’ve got, um, you’ve got over, you wrote a book that I’m going to get to here in a second, sold over a million copies.

Frank Durk: The Influence?

Josh: Not yet. It’s getting there.

Frank Durk: Is it not? No, Grock told me it sold a million.

Josh: Grock did?

Frank Durk: It’s got to be true. It’s got to be true. It’s got to be true.

Josh: So over a million copies, you got the YouTube channel, just incredible reach. I, I’ve got like, um, we’ve got uh, residents on our team who tell me about your podcast constantly.

Frank Durk: Oh, good.

Josh: So it’s like, man, just incredible reach. You were flying fighter jets for the Navy?

Frank Durk: Not quite. I was flying in the Navy; it wasn’t fighter jets. I was a P3 guy. We went out and hunt submarines.

Josh: Not quite as sexy, but it was…

Frank Durk: Hunting submarines. Sounds pretty cool.

Josh: Yeah, yeah, pretty cool. Well, here’s what I appreciate about you. You are, when I watch your stuff, um, you are clear and courageous. You are also thoughtful and compassionate. That is a very rare and blessed thing.

Frank Durk: Well, I’m from Jersey, so the compassion doesn’t come naturally. And I’m a philosopher, not a pastor.

Josh: You care about people.

Frank Durk: I really don’t.

Josh: Okay, okay. But, but people will ask me because we do a lot of college events, how come you don’t get mad at people who are unkind, or, you know, especially students if they get a little aggressive. And my response is, why should I expect anyone to agree with me? I mean, I’m 63 years old now. When I was 23, I didn’t agree with my 63-year-old self. So why should I expect some 23-year-old young person to agree with me now when I didn’t agree with me when I was 23? Right? I don’t know what kind of background this person has had. I don’t know what kind of life experience, what they’ve read, what they haven’t read, how they’ve been treated. I have no idea. So I think we ought to treat everybody like they ought not agree with us and then try and give them reasons to agree with us. That’s, and that’s why God’s using you. So uh, what we’re doing here in the next few minutes is this is a special episode of Live Free. This is the post-Easter, post-Easter. Jesus is risen, and we’d like to tell you why you should believe that kind of thing.

Frank Durk: Um, he’s risen indeed.

Josh: He is risen indeed, man. Uh, before we jump in here, like you’ve just, you’ve got a really interesting life in ministry. Can you just tell me your origin story? Is it kind of like, like how did I become a Christian kind of thing and like how I got into ministry?

Frank Durk: Well, you’re a, you’re a world-renowned Christian apologist, philosopher, defender of the faith. Have you been reading my Wikipedia page that my mom wrote?

Josh: World-renowned. That’s how I think of you. That’s how I think of you.

Frank Durk: It’s not, it’s, I’m not that big of a deal, man. But anyway, um, how did this start? I, I always believed in God because I knew there had to be a first cause. I grew up in New Jersey, so I was Catholic because it’s the law. You’re either Catholic, Jewish, or you don’t care, okay, if you’re in Jersey. So I went to Catholic high school. As I say, I always knew there had to be a creator, but I didn’t know about Jesus. And it wasn’t until I went through college, went into the Navy, in navigator school in Pensacola, Florida, I met the son of a Methodist minister, and I had so many questions for him. I just kept asking him so many questions. He finally said, “Look, you just need to get Josh McDow books, Evidence that Man’s Verdict: More than a Carpenter.” Right? I read those books. I realized Christianity was true. When I got out of the Navy in 1992, uh, early 1993, I met Norman Gistler, who was kind of the Michael Jordan of apologetics at the time, and he was starting a seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. He invited us down to look at it. We lived in the DC area, right after being in the Navy. I taught at George Washington University. We went down there in 1993, and a couple of months later we moved there to go to seminary. There was no internet; there was no online, you know, you had to go wherever the seminary was. So we moved to Charlotte, and we’ve been there ever since. So after uh, graduating, well, actually while going to seminary, he and I collaborated on a couple of things. The first book we collaborated on was Legislating Morality, you know…

Josh: Oh, interesting.

Frank Durk: Yeah, because I was interested into politics, so was he. I remember him giving a sermon, going, “All laws legislate morality.” And I went, “That needs to be a book; somebody should say that.”

Josh: Yes! Eureka!

Frank Durk: Right? So we did a book called Legislating Morality in ‘98, and then in 2004 we wrote I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist together. He had all the research done; I was just the wordsmith. I mean, this guy, for, has forgotten more than I’ve, I’ve ever known. I mean, he, he died in 2019, but when he died, Josh, they went back and they looked at all he had written, co-written, or updated; it was 129 books. He’s written more books than most people have seen. Who goes to the library anymore? Right? This guy was a machine; books would fall out of his head at night, you know. And so I learned from him, and so that was our collaborate effort and collaborative effort, and then in about 2006, I started a ministry called cross-examine.org to go to colleges, high schools, churches, and present the evidence that Christianity is true, based basically on the book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. So we’ve been doing that ever since. As we’re recording this now, I was just last night at uh, Sam Houston State. We’ve got a couple of more uh, colleges. We do about 8 to 10 a semester. We go to colleges; we present I don’t, I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist, and we have open mic, so people can ask whatever they want, say whatever they want, and we’ve been doing that almost 20 years now.

Josh: So in 2000, um, your ministry started impacting me at a pretty early age. In 2000, it would have been five. I was a youth pastor in Mount Washington, Kentucky. I was going to Southern Seminary.

Frank Durk: When was this?

Josh: 2005.

Frank Durk: Okay, all right. Mount Washington, Kentucky. I was going to Southern Seminary under Mohler? Was Mohler there then?

Josh: Okay. And who I appreciate very much.

Frank Durk: Oh, yeah, yeah. I love Dr. Mohler. Yeah, his podcast every day. If you want to get, if you want to get updated, the only thing that, that, that is a problem for me is he never seems to give any solutions. It’s like, I, I, I want to slit my throat, you know, like after I listen to it, I’m like, if things are that bad, Al, what do we do?

Josh: That’s a shout-out Dr. Mohler. Shout-out Dr. Mohler. We love you, but help us.

Frank Durk: Yeah, help us. Give us some more posit, what do we do now, now, now that the world’s falling apart?

Josh: You know, that’s hilarious. So it’s 2005, I’m a youth pastor up there, and I honestly, I had like my first crisis, really, my, my only like a crisis of faith when you’re a pastor.

Frank Durk: Yeah. What happened?

Josh: And dude, it was like I just, um, you know how like as you get older, it’s very natural, you’re asking new questions at new ages, and you have new experiences that prompt new questions. So there were all these questions that I had that from these new experiences that I really didn’t have like a, I never thought about that before.

Frank Durk: Well, there’s a unique pressure to that when you’re already a pastor, you know.

Josh: So then I had this go of faith. So in 2005, I pick up this book, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, and I grabbed all the seniors from my youth ministry, and I started a quote-unquote, you know, book study for them. It was, it was for me, and like, I finished the book, and I just felt like my feet were on solid ground again.

Frank Durk: Oh, good, good. Like God used you like pretty significantly in my life.

Josh: Oh, good. Yeah, like pretty, pretty significantly.

Frank Durk: Well, I, I don’t know about you, but when I preach, cuz I, I do some teaching as well, I think pastors often preach on, on what they’re dealing with, you know, a lot of times we pick messages, you know, I’d really like to know more about that. Let me, let me investigate that topic, and I’ll preach on that, and that’ll help me too. It’ll help the congregation and me. I don’t know if that’s you at any time you’re going, I need to look more into this, let me do it.

Josh: There probably was a time in my life when that was true. Now I try to just do verse by verse, and that keeps me on track.

Frank Durk: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. That, before we get into this real quick, um, you also, you’ve mentioned you briefly, I’ve heard you mention, didn’t you get fired from somewhere?

Josh: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, I got a book for you; I’m going to give you on that.

Frank Durk: I’d love that. Uh, back in uh, well, when I went to, went moved to Charlotte in ‘93 to attend seminary, I had to make money for, I had a wife and three kids. So I started doing corporate training for companies. I, I taught in the Navy, so I had a kind of a knack for doing presentations. And so for about 18 years, I was doing uh, training for Fortune 500 companies like Cisco, Bank of America. I’d go in and do leadership training, sales training, team building, that kind of thing. And in 2011, I was uh, doing some training for Cisco, not the food people, the computer people, out in San Jose, California. That’s their headquarters, and um, I got a call from the guy who hired me, who happened to be an evangelical Christian, and he said, “Frank, when does your session end?” I go, “I’m going to come over; I need to talk to you.” So he comes over at the end of the session; he goes, “We got to go to another room.” I go, “What’s going on, Steve?” We go into the other room; he starts fumbling over himself, and uh, I’m like, “Steve, what’s going on?” He starts tearing up. I say, he says, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I got to fire you.” I said, “You got to fire me for what?” He said, “Well, somebody in your, in the class googled your name and figured out you wrote the book, correct, not politically correct, how same-sex marriage hurts everyone.” And he went to the HR director who then told me, “Since Frank doesn’t agree with same-sex marriage, you need to fire him.” Now keep in mind this is even before Oberfeld.

Josh: What year was this?

Frank Durk: This is 2011.

Josh: Wow.

Frank Durk: Right. Long, long story short, um, I basically wrote the head of uh, Cisco at the time, his name was John Chambers, and uh, he uh, was on the Elect McCain Commission in 2008, the, the, the presidential election between McCain and Obama.

Josh: Oh yeah.

Frank Durk: And uh, so I wrote him, and I explained what happened to me and his company, and I said, “I appreciate your support for Senator McCain in the last election. I’m a veteran of the United States Navy, so is Senator McCain, and did you know that Senator McCain holds the same position on same-sex marriage that I do?” Are you qualified to be working at Cisco?

Josh: Wow.

Frank Durk: Next day, get a phone call from an attorney. What do you want now? I’m an, I’m not an employee; I’m a vendor; they could fire me for any reason. I said, I don’t want anything other than you call the dogs off other Christians because you claim to be inclusive, tolerant, and diverse. How is it that I wasn’t included and not tolerated for holding a diverse view?

Josh: Wow.

Frank Durk: And so, and so there’s a line. And so then he sets me up with the head of inclusion, tolerance, and diversity, a phone call that did not go well because I kept asking her, “What do you mean by inclusion, tolerance, and diversity if I’m not included, not tolerated for holding diversity?” She couldn’t answer the question, you know, why? Because there is no answer, because inclusion, tolerance, and diversity does not mean what it sounds like it means. It means if you don’t agree with the new values we’ve established, we will hurt you; you’re out. Okay? So I went public with it. My friend, the late great Mike Adams wrote the first column called The Cisco Kid, and then I wrote a column called Sex at Work. By the way, listeners, do not Google Sex at work; it’ll take you, do not Google that; it’ll take you right to Harvey Weinstein’s website.

Josh: Okay. Protip. Yes, that’s right.

Frank Durk: Go to our website, crossexamine.org, and look it up in our website, because my, my question, Josh, to everybody was, why is corporate America talking about sex at work? Are we supposed to have sex at work? What’s the point of it? Does it help us put widgets together better? Does it help us provide a service better? I guess it depends on your profession, but generally no, right? Why are we talking about sex at work at all is the question no one ever asked that question. What does this have to do with workplace productivity? Zero. Yet corporate America’s obsessed with it because Christians allow them to be obsessed with it. We never speak up; we just acquiesce; we hide under our desks; we’re the ones that are in the closet now.

Josh: Wow. So anyway, that made you radioactive for corporate America. So now I’ve been doing this full-time since 2011.

Frank Durk: Wow, man. Well, the Lord used a redirect for a good purpose. All right, let me uh, let’s, let’s go in. You know, I got a million questions here; some of them are a little uh, obscure, but we’ll just have fun with this and see where it goes. So like, hey, we just finished Easter, you and me both go, there’s the foundation, we just finished celebrating the foundation of our faith. If Christ is not raising the dead, our faith is useless.

Josh: That’s right. We got nothing.

Frank Durk: Basis of all of our faith. So let me just, let me just start right here. If somebody like, let’s say they were at Lake Point this weekend and uh, or at any, any church that they were at, and they left going, you know what, I think I might be in, but I think I just need to consider it a little more first, like, all right, maybe I’m there, and what are the main things that somebody who’s like, I need some reasons why it’s like this is worth basing my life on? What, what’s your starting block? Like…

Frank Durk: Well, there’s two, there’s two facts you need to establish to show that Christianity is true. The first is, does God exist? If he does exist, then at least a resurrection’s possible, and Christianity could be true. The second fact is what you mentioned, that Jesus really rose from the dead. If Jesus really did rise from the dead, if he predicted and accomplished his resurrection from the dead, then Christianity is true; if he didn’t, it’s false. In other words, it’s a religious worldview you can investigate and discover whether or not it took place. It’s not just someone’s philosophy, right? It’s based in historical facts. So the book, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, we lay all that out. But here’s, here’s maybe one thing we can clarify for people. I, I usually say this; I said it last night at Sam Houston State, at, at the end of given a bunch of evidence, I, I say this, and it’s going to sound like heresy for those of you that believe that the Bible’s the word of God, like I do and I know like you do. So your listeners may go, “Well, this is going to sound weird.” I say this that Christianity is not true because a series of documents that we put under one binding we call the Bible says it’s true. In fact, Christianity would be true if the Bible never existed. And people go, “Well, how can that be?” I asked them, “Do you realize there were thousands of Christians before a line of the New Testament was ever written?” Why? Because Christianity did not, did not begin with a book; it began with an event, the resurrection. There would be no book where Jews in the first century claimed a man claimed to be God and rose from the dead, who then went and suffered and died for it, unless a man really did claim to be God and really did rise from the dead, because there’s no motive to make this up. These men, all the writers of the New Testament, as you know, with the exception of Luke, were all Jews. They’re all, they’re all Yahweh-believing, uh, Old Testament, were God’s chosen people, believers who didn’t believe a man could claim to be God; that was blasphemy; didn’t believe a man, one man would rise from the dead; uh, they knew we’d all rise from the dead at the end of time, but they didn’t think one guy was going to do all this. And here they are saying it happened. Now, thankfully, later they wrote it down so we could know about it and orient our lives according to it, but the Bible isn’t the cause of Christianity; it’s the result of Christianity.

Josh: That’s a good, that’s good. Yeah, I like that. Another way of saying it is the New Testament writers did not create the resurrection; the resurrection created the New Testament writers. You know, here’s another way of looking at it that um, William Lane Craig mentioned, he’s a Christian apologist and debates a lot of folks, he says um, the, and I’m no probability theory guy, but I think this is true about probability theory, he says um, when you look at an event and you want to know whether or not it really took place, you don’t just have to look at the evidence for the event, you have to look at the evidence you have and say, “What is the likelihood I would have this evidence if the event did not occur?” H, what is the H, would what would the resurre, if the resurrection did not occur, would we have all these Jews sacrificing themselves for a lie they knew was a lie? Would we have them creating these documents in order to deceive people? For what reason would we have the church growing out of Jerusalem when the empty tomb was known, where the tomb was known? I mean, if Jesus’ body was in there, it would have squashed Christianity. Would we have all of this evidence? Would it have, would have overturned the Roman Empire eventually if it had no basis in truth? I think, I think it takes more faith to believe that we would have the kind of Christianity that came out of the first century today if Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead.

Josh: That’s right. So I don’t know what, what, what are your thoughts on it? Why do you think…

Frank Durk: Well, so yeah, let’s do this real quick. You know, things that are like, for somebody that’s like, I think I’m there, I want to follow the Jesus guy you’re talking about, I just need a little reassurance. Okay, I’m totally with you. So it, for me, and I’m, we’ve got a whole message on doubt coming up in I think it’s like two weeks. Okay, it’s coming up very soon, but I, I found that to be true for me that when I have moments where I’m like, I got a question, one thing I, what, what faith is not is faith is not having all your questions answered. I think this is really important for people, and I got a point to this; I’m getting to the answer your question. I go, man, you know, I got a little line from one of my friends, Joey Martin, he says this all the time, if you got a lot of doubts, you make a great disciple. We literally have verses that said, “Man, some believed, and then some doubted.”

Josh: That’s right.

Frank Durk: So like, literal disciples of Jesus while he’s standing right in front of, standing right there, and they’re literally looking at Matthew 28:17.

Josh: Yeah, they’re doubting.

Frank Durk: So it’s like, for the person that’s like, “Ah, I got a couple of doubts, hey, man, that’s actually okay.” Like, that’s okay, man. You got a lot of doubts; you make a great disciple because faith is not having everything explained; it’s when some unexplainable things meet an undeniable thing. So honestly, you, you, I don’t know if you’d say this, I would say it, there are some questions about why God did X or how do I logically reconcile, you know, Y with Z that I’m like, I honestly, man, I, I don’t know yet. I’m okay with that because what I do know is I’m like, that dude got up, that guy rose, that guy rose from the dead.

Josh: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Frank Durk: If he rose from the dead, everything else falls into place. That’s it. So I’m okay, like, just like the disciples, they picked up their questions, and they’re like, I still got questions, but I’m following that guy because he rose from the dead, and he’s either going to answer them now or someday in eternity, and I’m going to carry my questions while I follow that guy. So I go back to, just to answer your question, I go back to the resurrection. The, the main thing for me, I want to know what the main thing is for you. The main thing for me is exactly what you just said. You may have something additional. The biggest thing for me is, number one, how in the world do you get what happened in the next two centuries in particular if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead? As you and I both know, there had been messianic figures claiming to be Messiahs.

Josh: Absolutely. For like a couple of dozen of them.

Frank Durk: That’s right. Right, hundreds of years, the same thing happened with every single one of them; they die, the movement immediately collapses. The exact opposite happens with, with Jesus; he dies, and then actually… Trinity, do you have that thing, the little meme, the how do the 12 apostles die? Can you toss that up real quick? We got…

Josh: This is like Joe Rogan’s Jamie…

Frank Durk: Trinity, no, no, no, not that one, not that one, the, the how did the twelve apostles die, the gray one? No, not that one either. We’ll get there. Is it, it’s that one? Okay. Now this is a little… So if somebody’s listening or watching on YouTube, this is actually really helpful to screenshot. Is it, is it already up there, Trinity? Is it? Okay, it’s fired. This is actually helpful to screenshot. I screenshotted this a while ago, so some of these are a little specious, but they’re based on um, on church history documents, and it’s, it’s every, it’s every apostle’s reported death. So you’ve got Peter, crucified upside down, Andrew, crucified on an X, X-shaped cross, James, son of Zebedee, put to death with stones and sword, obviously, Apostle John’s the only one that is not martyr, dies in Patmas in exile, Bartholomew, crucified, Flade, beheaded, Philip, crucified upside down, Thomas, Spirit, etc. You go through all 12. Well, and you, if somebody wants to screenshot that, I literally keep that in my iPhone, so when I’m having conversations on a plane, it’s like, “No, man, let me just, this is something to consider.” And I’ve literally been on planes and air-dropped that to people I’m having, I’m like, “Hey, man, I just want you to consider this because what you said is…”

Like baseline people don't die for things they know are lies. Right, right. People will die for things they think are true. This is important. Yes, it's true. Like there's there's Muslim martyrs, right? That's why I got—They think it's true, but they they don't have they they didn't witness anything like the New Testament writers witnessed the resurrected Jesus. They knew that he had risen from the dead. They didn't just hope he did.

So now I just did a podcast with Dr. Shawn McDall, who did his doctrinal dissertation on the fate of the apostles. And um, Shawn went into the original documents. He did that, oh yeah, and he just updated it really. So it just it's called *The Fate of the Apostles*. It might actually be affordable; his first one was like $100 on, you know, anyway. Uh, we just did a podcast, the *I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist* podcast, and he would agree with most of that. He would say those are—he would say Shawn said that for—we have excellent evidence in the first century that they were martyred: Paul, which it wasn't one of the 12 originally, but Paul, Peter, James the half-brother of Jesus—Josephus tells us that, by the way—and then James, the other guy you had up there, son of Zebedee. Those four, in the first century, very good evidence for; we know it. Solid. Yeah, solid. The next two I want to say are Andrew and Thomas; not quite as good evidence for, but um, still more probable than not they were crucified or they were not necessarily crucified, but martyred. And he said the next—because he had 14—the next eight, varying levels of evidence, but some of them we know nothing about, but he will he does say this, that there is no report from the ancient world anywhere that any of the 14 ever recanted, which, of course, if they had made it up, somebody would have given up the goods, right, under threat of of death, right? So they're all willing to die for it. We're not sure if they all did, but we have really strong evidence for four, pretty strong evidence for two more, not as well for the others, but nobody ever decides to recant. There you go. Yeah. So this is like—and so like this has come up on airplanes. I'm glad you brought up the Islam thing, because in airplane conversations I'll be like, "Hey man, do you think that people would die for something they knew was a lie?" And the question will be, "Well, I had just I just had to take my uh shoes off at the security gate because people did die for something that I don't think is true." You're talking about, you know, Isl—but the point is, because you clarified this, the difference is they're dying for a lie that they believe to be true. That's right. The only option for the apostles is one of two things: either Jesus rose from the dead, or they knew it was a lie and were willing to die for it. Nobody does that, right? That's right. So when you go—but like for me I'm going, okay, well, number one, what happened to the movement immediately afterwards? It exploded instead of imploding. Number two, these guys are willing to die for it. Number three, we have like—if I mean, just all you got to do is travel over there; like you go to Israel and real quick you start going like, "Hey man, uh, this stuff happened because—" like you're seeing—I'm standing where this happened. And oh yeah, uh, obviously you've got the biblical archaeological evidence for, you know, for the historicity of the New Testament. And then, honestly, a big one for me, I don't know how you—is just very frankly just like changed lives, not just in history, but like but even today, of course. Yeah, it really seems like that dude's alive. Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. I got to go back to that. It takes more faith not to believe he's alive, actually. And and that's why there's no good alternative explanation for the resurrection. You know, hallucinations don't work like, you know, people don't have group hallucinations. Like if I walked in here and say, "Hey Josh, that was a great dream we had last night," you'd go, "Yeah, what? We dreams are individual; I'd want to get a restraining order." Yeah, that's right. Yeah, what the hell are you talking about? You know, there's there's there's no way that happens. Hallucinations don't work in the empty tomb, or uh, if he was in the tomb and someone did have an hallucination, someone would have gone to the tomb and and stopped and said, "You're having an hallucination." Right. There's no theory, naturalistic theory that explains the evidence. It's the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. Now, is it possible Jesus rose from the dead? Yes, if God exists. So you got to establish that first. And you know, the greatest miracle in the Bible is not the resurrection; the greatest miracle in the Bible is the first verse: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." If that verse is true, every other verse is possible. And in our book, *I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist*, we point out that even atheists are admitting the evidence for the first verse. They're thinking the universe exploded into being out of nothing. Now they don't think it's God, but what else could it be? Did you see that cuz it went like mega viral a few years ago? Uh, it was Eric Metaxas wrote an article in the *Wall Street Journal*. Oh yeah, yeah. The one about fine-tuning and all that. Yeah. And the title of the article—it was—he framed it fantastic, uh, by the way, you should, if listener, you should go Google this because this is amazing, *Wall Street Journal*; the title of it was like, "Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God." Right, right. And his point was that, you know, the rise of atheism, particularly new atheism—and I want to talk about that here in a second because really interesting—new atheism is like imploding; it's dead. Yeah, it's old, like imp—like literally imploding. You've got dudes like Richard Dawkins—did you see that thing where he went—he came out and said, um, you know, he was he was uh he nuanced it; he was like, "I consider myself uh a cultural cultural Christian." I'm going to get to that here in a second, so we'll click on it. Uh, but Metaxas's point in the *Wall Street Journal* was the rise of atheism rose, uh, you know, I think he pinpointed like the 70s; it was kind of the beginning of the curve. And then you point—man, honestly, the the advancements in knowledge and and scientific discovery in the last 30, 40 years—all of the basis of the old the old new atheism is kind of eroding as we get more science. Increasingly makes history out. So I want to go to something you just said. Uh, so this is from John Tyson; have you ever heard this? And for the listener, this is fantastic. He says this; he says, "Atheists believe in at least six miracles." Dude, this is so good. Oh good. Atheists believe in at least six miracles: something from nothing, order from chaos, life from non-life, personal from the non-personal, reason from non-reason, and morality from matter. Perfect. Yeah, that's so good. Or mind from matter, too. No mind. Yeah, where does mind come—where does mind come from? Where the laws of nature come from? The laws of nature—laws come from lawgivers. In fact, there was a uh there's a respected cosmologist by the name of Paul Davies; he teaches at Arizona State University. In about 2007, he put a column in the *New York Times* called "Taking Science by Faith," and his question was—he's an agnostic; he's not a Christian—he says, according to him, scientists take the laws of nature by faith. Like, where do these laws come from? You're saying they're doing all the work; where do where do these come from? And he says, "Whenever I ask my materialist colleagues this question, they get all annoyed with me." He said, "My email box was filled with vitriol because they say that's not a scientific question, and nobody knows; they're just there." And he's pointing out how can you call yourself somebody that claims to be free of faith when you just have faith that these laws are there. Yeah, it's a great point. Yeah. So okay, okay. So what would you say to that? I'm trying to help the AI—I'm trying to help the Christian who's never connected a dot before. Okay, B, I want to help the person that's like, "Okay, man, something happened inside of me when I heard that dude talking about Jesus on Easter, and I'm I'm trying to get there. What would you say to the person?" And it's like, "Yeah, but you guys are talking about evidence, resurrection, and I think I'm there, but don't like little legends spring up around people as you know huge amounts of time, and you know, there's all sorts of mythical legends about people that have sprung up throughout history." Well, you know, maybe that just—that's what happened with—Well, the problem is, when you look at the evidence for Christianity, the documents aren't really the issue—not the New Testament documents—the creeds within the documents are. In other words, there were oral creeds memorized that were later written down. The earliest one, probably the most significant one we know about, is recorded in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, where Paul says that he received and passed on what he received: that Christ died for our sins, that he appeared, that he rose from the dead, and he he he mentions 14 people that saw the resurrected Christ, including himself, right? Um, or maybe 17; I can't remember the number. Anyway, uh, that creed, even atheists like Bart Ehrman at UNC Chapel Hill says that creed is very early; goes back within a couple of years of the event itself. See, dude, look at that; that's amazing. Yeah. So this is not a legend; it couldn't be a legend. And there's other creeds in the New Testament. Gary Habermas, the top guy in the world on the resurrection, is in the middle of writing his magnum opus; it's 4,000 pages just on the resurrection. He points out that there are at least 41 creeds in the New Testament. Like Philippians 2 is a creed: "He emptied himself of uh of divine—the privilege of being the divine." There's at least 41 of those that predate Paul writing them down or the gospel writers writing them down. They were like oral traditions. Yes, oral—that go back to the event itself, and they date to within how many years-ish? Well, I know it varies. Yeah, the the the first—the biggest creed in 1 Corinthians 15, which is the earliest evidence for the resurrection in the entire Bible, although Paul wrote it down in 55 AD, that creed comes from within a year or two of the alleged resurrection. So that would be 33 AD. Think about that. That would be like us trying to make up a myth or a legend about the 2024 NCAA basketball championship. Yeah, we couldn't do it. You could—everyone would laugh at you. Like, "Dude, we know, man." That's right. So so the evidence is actually—well, even let's say say you and I wanted to write a book, and we wanted to write a book about, let's say, um, 9/11, which was uh what, 23 years ago, right? Could we interview—even if we weren't there—could we interview enough eyewitnesses to tell us what really—what happened? Easy. Yeah. So the source that we're writing down is from the event itself, even though we're writing it down 23 years later, right? It's the source that's the issue, not when you write it down, although it does benefit to write it down within the age of the eyewitnesses because you can interview them, right? But the source material is the issue, not the date of the documents themselves. Dude, and this is like—just for the listener—this—so I'm trying to connect dots because this stuff has been helpful for me—that is also—it's not just, "Hey, man, there's a chronological and logical link"—that's important there—that's also a distinction from other major world religions. Yes. So, for instance, in Christianity, what you've got is you have a massive number of eyewitnesses with very clear dating to—I mean, within, you know, right there around the time of the events—all in a unified way with a cohesive story, etc., etc. Uh, that's very different than, for instance, all right, uh, Buddhism, where one guy walks out into a jungle and claims to receive individualized revelation; or Islam, where one guy walks into a cave and claims to speak to an angel—by the way, that was a demon—and and you know, all this; or uh or Mormonism: one guy finds these special golden tablets, and he gets the—Which, by the way, the golden plates—I I always go back and forth with Mormons on this—even if he did find golden plates, why are they miraculous? I mean, I can make golden plates in my garage if I have the right material. You know, why do you think that—here's here's something—can I—You can do whatever you want; you're going somewhere with this. I was just saying I just want people to understand like that helps them. Oh, my faith is different than those other claims because of these are, you know, multiple eyewitnesses—a great number of eyewitnesses testifying to the same actual events in history. It's different than other religions. But you go where you're going. No, I I wanted to point out, too, that when you look at the person of Jesus and the miracles of Jesus—not only his person, but what he does miraculously shows he's the savior—why? Because Jesus does miracles in four basic areas: sin, sickness, nature, and death. Those happen to be the four areas that cause us trouble as human beings. One more time—I've never heard that before. We—we sin, we get sick, nature can hurt us, and we die. Wow. Right. Jesus comes along—if you notice his miracles—they're in those four areas. He's sinless; he cures illnesses; he calms the storm; he has power over nature; and he overcomes death, and he can raise other people from the dead in addition to himself. He's claiming, through his acts, that he's our savior because those are the four problems we all experience. If if we didn't have sin, if we didn't get sick, if we if nature couldn't hurt us, and we couldn't die, we wouldn't need a savior, would we? That's unbelievable. So he's the savior. That's awesome. I've never heard those four before. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, those—I mean, just look—a lot of times I love backing up and look at the macro view because when you look at the macro view it makes sense of the details. You know, why is Jesus doing all these miracles? Why is he healing people? Why is he raising people from the dead? It's just to show he's God. I mean, he could do card tricks or or saw women in half, right? He's doing the things that that show he saves us from the problems we have here in this life. All right, you were saying, man, you need two things: you need to believe God exists—that God exists—and Jesus rose from the dead. If those two things are true, Christianity is true. Boom, we're there. Yeah, we're there. It's—it's a bunch of dominoes fall after that. So so one implication then—I want to—I'll make an observation and then I'm going to ask you a question. So one implication of that is like you said, "Hey, if you get those two things—honestly, nothing else matters." I'm going to get in a second—I'm going to ask like some hang-ups a lot of people have—but honestly, man, you don't have to get all the hang-ups figured out; get these two things figured out: Does God exist? Did Jesus rise from the dead? If so, nothing else really matters. Well, actually, it matters in theology—finer points of theology—but if Jesus predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead, then he's God, and whatever he teaches is true. He taught the entire Old Testament as a word of God; he promised the New Testament, so on. Jesus's authority—I think the Bible's inherent—there—on his authority if he rose from the dead. So you got to—got to establish he rose from the dead, and then historians know just by putting certain tests on the text whether or not this is an authentic test from Jesus or or statement from Jesus. We're not assuming the Bible's the word of God to say Jesus taught the Old Testament as the word of God and promised the New Testament; we just want to know if it's historically reliable. And some of the tests that we can put on a document let us know whether Jesus really said those things. So we we talked about—dude, here—here's some reasons you should believe Jesus rose from the dead. Can you talk about if somebody's like, "Man, actually, it's the first question I struggle with, man. I'm not sure God exists." Hey, hey Frank, what are some reasons I really should think God exists? Because there has to be an ultimate uncaused first cause. You can't go on an infinite regress of causes. This is the problem with atheism; they have no cause. They claim to be all scientific when science is a search for causes. When you get back to where—to any foundation for anything they believe—they have no ultimate cause. I mean, you mentioned earlier those things that Tyson came up with, right? Those six miracles—those are miraculous things, and yet they have no cause. We have a cause. And let's just uh go back to the beginning. Even atheists today are admitting—like, for example, Stephen Hawking, who was probably the most famous atheist in the world—didn't he become a theist before he died? No, not that we know of. Oh no, I'm thinking of um—You're thinking of of uh of Antony Flew. Antony Flew. Yeah, he became a theist—not a Christian necessarily, right? Anyway, Hawking said, "Almost everyone believes that spacetime and matter had a beginning at the Big Bang." Almost everyone believes that now, even him, right? Well, think about this: if spacetime and matter had a beginning, whatever created spacetime—time and matter—has to be outside of space, time, and matter because there was no space, time, and matter. So the cause would have to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing, personal in order to choose to create. You say, "Why personal?" Because to go from a state of nothingness to a state of creation, someone had to make a choice, and only persons can make choices. Also, the cause would have to be intelligent—to have a mind—to make a choice. So I always ask people, when you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of? Most people will say God, but then they'll say, "Well, how do you know it's the Christian God, Frank?" And I say, "We don't yet." I mean, this could be Allah at this point or some other theistic or deistic God, but if we investigate the evidence for the resurrection and realize Jesus really did predict and accomplish his own resurrection from the dead, then we can say that the same being that walked out of the tomb 1,999 years ago is the same being in whose divine nature created the universe out of nothing. So we get that two-step: we show God exists, then we real—show Jesus rose from the dead, then everything comes together: Jesus is the creator. Then you have the fine-tuning argument, the moral argument. Click on that. What do you mean by fine-tuning argument? All right, let me just give you one aspect of fine-tuning. Scientists have discovered in recent years—in recent decades, actually—that the universe is so precisely tweaked that if you were to change any one of a number of factors about our universe virtually imperceptibly, there would either be no universe or no universe that could support life. And there are dozens of these. Okay, let me just give you one: they've discovered that the um—if this—if the force of gravity was different by one part in 10 to the 40th power compared to the strong nuclear force—if if the if if that difference was that infinitesimally small, then we wouldn't exist. Okay, life would not be possible. Yeah. And and you go, "What's one in 10 to the 40th power?" That's one—one—that's one with 40 zeros following it. You say, "Frank, I can't get my head around that number." I said, "No, neither can I." So here's here's the illustration I use on college campuses: I say, "Take the entire North American continent—from Central America all the way to Greenland—the 51st state, right?—and stack it in dimes all the way to the moon." By the way, that was hilarious. Oh, you didn't catch it, man. You didn't catch—I was waiting—I was waiting. That's amazing. Hey, 52nd—after Canada—after Canada. Oh, that's right. That was a joke—FG, Flower of the Gulf of America. Let's keep going. Okay, so anyway, take take the entire North American continent from Greenland—from Central America all the way to Greenland—the 51st state—stack it in dimes all the way to the moon—that's 238,000 miles—and do that on a billion other North American continents; stack them in dimes all the way to the moon. No way. Yes. Yes. Yes way. Way. Take all of those dimes; put them in one humongous pile; mark one dime red; mix it in; blindfold a friend; throw them on the pile; ask him to pick one dime at random. The chance he would pick that one red dime is one chance in 10 to the 40th power. Is he going to pick that dime? No way. I've never heard that before. No, he's not going to do it. It takes a lot more faith to believe he will than to say he's not going to. Those are awful odds: one in 10 to the 40th power. And you're saying like, essentially, all the physics settings of the universe are just finely tuned, and if any of them are different, life is not possible. That's just one out of dozens of them; I just gave you one. And he changed any one of them; that's insane. Yeah. And this is why Dawkins and Hitchens—I debated Hitchens a number of years ago. I saw that. I was going to ask you about it. Well, he sounded more brilliant than he was cuz he had a British accent. But yeah, that's not fair. I think the—I think the same thing about preachers. Any preachers got a British, Australian, whatever accent—well, that's that's cheating, dude. You could read the phone book, and people would listen. That's right. People would get saved—or if you had the Billy Graham accent. I told Franklin to come over, you know—I don't have the Billy Graham accent. You got that Jersey—Yeah, I got the Jersey thing. But think about that; think about how finely tuned that is. There's only two possible explanations for that value being where it is: it was either designed to be there or it wasn't. There's no other possibility. So I'm going to—I'll repeat for listeners—and this kind of thing—like, let me tell you, especially if you're, you know, you're a Christian, you want to share your faith with people—these are the kind of things that—like what I do—I write them in iPhone notes, and they're literally like—I got an iPhone note labeled "Airplane Conversations," really, where I'm just like—if I'm—if I'm on a air—people, you know, airplane—everybody asks what you do; you're a pastor; let me talk—talk to you about—fact—isn't that sweet? Bless your heart. Well, but then sometimes they start asking good questions, really. And I like having the airplane—that's my airplane conversation on iPhone note so that I can—oh, let me get that. So this is the kind of thing I'd encourage you to write down somewhere. So I'm going to repeat the six miracles every atheist believes. Go ahead. Yeah, and because this goes—and then I I'll kind of go for one other thing here. So something from nothing, order from chaos—that goes to fine-tuning—life from non-life, personal from the non-personal, reason from non-reason—we could talk—every one of these could be its own podcast—morality from matter. Now, contained within those—I can't remember who coined this—you may know it—is they just said uh—I think it u—I think it was—this is in presuppositional apologetics, which—that's a whole different conversation—but they would go, "Hey, mind, meaning, morals." Sure. Hey, man, mind—yeah, if you do not believe in a creator, then you can't trust anyone's mind because all your mind is—this—the collision of atoms in a closed system. That's right. Yeah. So every thought you have isn't an actual thought; it's just—that's how the atoms in your brain happen to collide, and so of course you have that thought. So it's not trustworthy. Meaning uh you you just see this throughout history: people cannot exist without meaning. You—you can—I've heard Rick Warren say this: you can live for three minutes without air, you can live for a week without water, you can live for 40 days without food, you can't live for two minutes without meaning. Well, hey—

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Yeah, that's why Nietzsche said, "People can bear almost any 'why' any 'how' if they have a 'why.'" If they have a why. Nietzsche, of course, was an atheist. And if there is, if all this universe is is just atoms colliding into each other, then someday, let me—I want to make your life hopeless if you don't believe—then someday, uh, our star will burn out, uh, there will be no more life, and it will not matter whether you lived like Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler. It will not matter. Exactly. So, meaning and then morals—uh, actually, I want you to do this because you're going to do it better than me—do your little 60-second sketch on why you're not saying—we're not saying that someone who's an atheist doesn't have moral—that they're not a moral person. Yeah, they could—they could know morality and and even be moral, that's—but we're saying there is not a logical basis for morals without belief. Can you talk about it real quick?

Yeah, yeah. Well, God must exist in order for there to be a standard. Because if there is no standard beyond us that we're obligated to obey, everything's a matter of opinion; it's just your opinion against, say, Hitler's opinion, or your opinion against a murderer's opinion, if there's no God. So there has to be a standard that we're obligated to obey, a standard of righteousness that we're obligated to obey. That standard is what we mean by God's nature. And this was really the founding of our country: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created and endowed by their government"—doesn't—doesn't say government—endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and governments are instituted among men to secure these rights. You know, it—we go to a lot of college campuses, Josh, and um, it's amazing, and it seems like in our country we're creating new rights every 10 minutes, and many of the people that are starting to say they have certain rights are atheists. There is—there are no rights to anything if there's no God. There's no right to same-sex marriage if there's no God, just like there's no right to natural marriage if there's no God. There's no right to abortion if there's no God. There's no right to life if there's no God. There's no trans rights, human rights, Christian rights, women's rights; there are no rights of any kind if there is no God. Now, if there is a God, why not? Because everything's just a matter of opinion. It's not a right. Something—a right is something you get from your creator, who is the ground of goodness, and we're all obligated to obey. If there's no standard beyond governments, just like we couldn't—we couldn't prosecute the Nazi war criminals by saying that they were wrong if they just claimed, "Well, I'm just obeying my government; my government told me what to do," unless there's a standard beyond their government, and that standard is God's nature. It's what—it's what Thomas Jefferson called nature's law; C.S. Lewis called it the moral law in *Mere Christianity*. Uh, now we call it international law, of course, they don't ground it in God, but that's really where it's grounded; that's what the UN would say, you know, it's international law. So unless God exists, everything's a matter of opinion.

There—there's another way of looking at it that I—I use on college campuses enough. I always ask people, um, "Hey, for you Kansas City Chiefs fans out there, how do you know that when Patrick Mahomes threw that pick six in the Super Bowl that was a bad play for you?" And they go, "The rules." No, not just the rules. "The score." Not just the score. What do you need to know to know that that was a bad play and the touchdown he threw later in the game was a good play? Because you—you have to—the only way you can know that is if you know the objective of the game. If there's no objective to the game, you can't say that the pick six takes us further away from the objective and the touchdown takes us closer to the objective. You can only say that—see—say you can only say those plays are different if there's no objective. Wow, okay. And notice in football that the objective of the game comes from outside the game. In other words, when the Eagles and the Chiefs met for the Super Bowl, they didn't establish the objective; they didn't even establish the rules; they don't even enforce the rules. Where does all that come from? It comes from the commissioner and the competition committee and the refs, and every once in a while they'll tweak the rules, they can, why? Because football's arbitrary. Well, in life, the rules come from outside the game as well, and so does the objective, but they're not arbitrary because they come from the ultimate source; they're based on God's nature, most of the rules anyway. And so the only way we could know here's the right way to live and here's the wrong way to live is if we have an objective for life. If there is no God, there is no objective; everything's just up for grabs. If Hitler wants to murder people, he can do so. If Mother Teresa wants to love them, she can love. Isn't better than hate unless God exists, unless there's an objective and a standard beyond us. I've heard somebody say they've summarized that like this: they said, "Everybody has to be able to answer the question, 'Who says?'"

That's right. That's—that's Keller from *Reason for God*. Who says? Yeah. So okay, yes. Now, man, you know, you say that murder is wrong. Who says? That's right. Who says? Or somebody may say, "I think that every woman should have the right to choose," right? Where do you—where do rights come from? Who says? Who says? Who says? If you can't answer the "Who says?" question, it really is—every—every moral assertion just boiled down to that's your opinion versus my opinion. And then what you don't want to get into is some people go, "Well, everybody knows—" Well, at that point, then you're going—"Well, then whatever is the majority opinion is morally right, is that what you're saying?" Because we've had epics in history where slavery was the—was the majority opinion, or, you know, many other different—

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also, I think people confuse something in philosophy that we should highlight. And there—there's a difference between epistemology and ontology. Epistemology is how you know something, and ontology is the study of the thing you know. And so this happened in debates I had with Michael Shermer and uh, Christopher Hitchens. I would say, um, something like, "How do you account for morality?" And they'll say things like, "Well, I—I know what right and wrong is, and I can be a moral person." Well, I'm not talking about epistemology, like how you know something's right or wrong; I'm talking about why does the thing you know actually exist? That's the question I want to know. In illustration, right out—right out beside Lake—Lake View or Lake Point—we're in Lake Point, right?—Lake Point Church, there's Highway 30, which was backed up getting over here anyway. It's morally wrong—it's morally wrong—Highway 30 anyway. There's a speed limit out there at 60 miles an hour. Suppose I were to say, um, "You say there's a traffic authority," and I say, "There's no traffic authority. I can see that the speed limit sign says 60." What mistake am I making? I'm confusing epistemology and ontology. Yes, I can see that the sign says 60, but there would be no sign that said 60 unless there was a traffic authority. Likewise, I can know it's wrong to murder, but there would be no objective moral law against murder unless there was a source, a standard—God's nature—that said, "Don't murder." So people confuse this all the time. Now, what some people will do—because these are my airplane conversations—they'll say, "Oh, man." Well, but uh, obviously we developed the impulse not to murder through an evolutionary process, and that's why—that's why our species advanced where others didn't, and so you know that—that moral impulse not to murder was part of the survival of the fittest, and so that—that—that arose from, you know, an evolutionary process. Now, I'll tell you my response to that, and then I love to hear what you do. I always say, "Man, um, so materialism, atheism can explain moral impulses, but not moral obligations." Exactly. So what you're doing is you're explaining why someone might feel—why they might have a subjective feeling in a moral direction, but that doesn't say anything about why they're obligated to obey that feeling or why I should obey your feeling when I don't have the same feeling. Exactly. We're saying there is no such thing as a moral obligation, right, unless there is—laws require a lawgiver that has to be above and outside of us. Is that a good way to say that?

Perfect. Yeah. And I—I think you can tell people this: there's only two possibilities. We're either God-imagers—we're made in the image of God—or we're clever murderous monkeys fighting for supply—fighting for control over the banana supply. That's it. That's right. It's one of those two, right? Two choices. Yeah, that's right. We're either made in the image of God and we have obligations, or we don't; we're just going to murder one another to get what we want. Mhm. Take your choice. What do you think? Um, what do you do when you're on a college campus and somebody's like, "Dude, so what am I supposed to do with dinosaurs?"

I had that last night. Did you? Yeah. What? What do I do, man? Do nothing with them; they're dead. Hey, did you see the thing where they resurrected direwolves? I just saw that the other day. Yeah. I mean, it's like literally an episode of Jurassic Park. Exactly. Where they extracted some DNA and they were like, "This is the first video of a direwolf howling in thousands of years." So seriously, is that just—Hey, man, just figure out—did Jesus rise from the dead? You can figure out the dinosaurs. No, I'm trying to ask—why you asking that question? Are you trying to figure out why doesn't the Bible talk about dinosaurs, or where were the dinosaurs in the history of life? I think some—I'm trying to put myself in the perspective of a person trying to figure it out. I think that is, you know, that's something people toss at you.

Yeah. Well, here's what I said last night. Okay, I said, "First of all, 'dinosaur' is a word that was created like a couple hundred years ago, right? Um, the Bible doesn't talk about specific animals uh, very much because it's not a book on taxonomy. And even if it was, there's no book on taxonomy that can tell you everything about every animal, right? It talks about the land animals, you know, the sea creatures, that kind of thing, the birds. It's not going to zero down—you know, when they say, 'Why doesn't it talk about dinosaurs?' say, 'Why doesn't it talk about elephants and giraffes?' Because that's not the scope of the document, right? The scope of the document—the reason for the document, according to 2 Timothy 3, is to make you wise unto salvation and to get you saved and sanctified. It's not to tell you everything about everything. So the Bible does talk about the land animals. I—I know some people will say it talks about behemoth and Job; whether that's a dinosaur or not, who knows? Who cares? That's not the point. And whether it depends on what viewpoint you take on how old the universe is, you know, I'm absolutely convinced the universe is at least 63 years old. All right, I'm going to use that. I won't say 63; I'll say 41. But that's hilarious. I—I'll throw my mom in there; it's at least 87. All right. Okay. But I—I think the evidence is better; it's old, but I don't really care how old it is because no matter how far back you go, you need a creator. But the point is, if it's—if it's young, okay, maybe they got wiped out in the flood. If it's old, then human beings and dinosaurs didn't coexist. Does it matter either way? No. There is a God; Jesus rose from the dead; you need to trust in him for your salvation because you're a sinner; get busy."

Uh, what—what—what's your deal on UFOs? They're unidentified flying objects, right? You have such good one-liners. Hey, man, are unidentified—I don't figure out what they are. You know what you Ross thinks? You know who you Ross is? He is a—He thinks they're demonic manifestations. That's what I think. He's probably right, dude. Yeah. I'll give you—So here's for you and listeners—here's your next plane ride—what? Go download—um, it's a—it's a podcast called *Haunted Cosmos*. There's an episode called—That's not Michael Heiser's old one. I can't—No, it's not. I can't—I can't remember the—the guy's names—*Haunted Cosmos*. There's an episode called "Evangelistic Aliens," where it's my—my cousin—shout out Jordan—he sent this to me, and it's documenting—they document how over multiple decades, whenever people claim to have experiences with these quote-unquote extraterrestrial beings, that there's a—a high consistency to the things they claim having heard from these beings, and they're like overtly demonic messages. Really? It's just—it's very interesting. So even if you think it's kooky, I just thought it was interesting that—honestly, that's what I think. M—I think it's totally within the realm of possibility. There's a reason I think the New Testament calls Satan the prince of the powers of the air. Oh, yeah. I just think that's very interesting. Well, it's like in your reel, too—we—I've talked about this a bunch, too—that Satan comes as an angel of light. You know, the real you did about Biden talking about reproductive health, you remember that reel? Yeah. You know, it's reproductive rights. Yeah, yeah. You're going to label something evil good to get people to swallow—that's what Satan always does; reframes good as evil and evil as good, right? Exactly. So yeah, I don't know—oh, I don't know. What you're on college campus is that you just go there if somebody say what about you and they're undefined. I don't know. I don't—I—I give—I say what I just said about what you Ross has looked into it, and he thinks they're demonic manifestations, or they could be really aliens—that's not going to change Christianity. Yeah, interesting, right? Uh, I don't know if you know this, but there was a pretty well-authenticated case of a—some kind of craft going down in Area 51 in May of 1947, and nine months later to the day, Pee-wee Herman was born. Now, like, here's what's funny: like 50% of the people listening are like, "Who's Pee-wee Herman?" I grew up on Pee-wee Herman. I'm sorry; that's hilarious. He creeps Jana out; like, Jana cannot watch one—well, he—he did—oh, did something come out? I thought he did something—guys over there—know that wasn't—he was arrested for something like—oh, was he—was he arrested for being a peeping Tom or something? Is ruined. Oh, jeez. Okay. He rode that bike somewhere for a reason; he was a peeping Tom. Moving on. All right. Uh, okay, I'm going to toss a couple more at you. All right. So, um, we've noticed this here at Lake Point.

Mhm. By the way, here's for our listeners here; I'm going to ask him a couple more interesting questions, and then I'm just going to toss a couple—like—I call them defeaters, okay? Things that people like—"I want to believe, but I got this thing that really bothers me," and I'm—so I'm going to go there in just a second. Uh, and when you say thing that really—not a spouse? No, no, no. Mine does not bother me—the greatest blessing of all. All right. Good. Good. Same. So uh, we've got—both me and some pastor friends of mine—uh, we actually—I'll go back to this—John Tyson, who's a pastor friend of mine in New York City, he's a very intelligent—a lot of guys would call him uh, the intellectual heir apparent to Tim Keller. Tell—tell me where his church is because I always get requests for—"Do you know a church in New York?" I got one; give me another. Where is it? He's in—John's in—uh, he's got a campus in Manhattan; I think he's either two or three campuses. What's it called? It's got a—It's called Church of the City New York. Uh, heads up, and this is a PSA: I—I realized about 5 years ago, every preacher needs a preacher. I need to sit under the word of God just like every other Christian. Every Monday on my Sabbath, I make my coffee and I sit down in the morning and I listen to John Tyson with my Bible open; he's my preach—preach—every preacher—he's preaching. And then in the evening, I listen to Pastor Joby Martin. I listen to two sermons every Monday. All right. Good. So anyway, he's a—he's a wonderful, Spirit-filled, brilliant disciple. Church of the City of New York. It's called Church of the City New York. Church of the City New York. Church of the City New York. They got a campus in Manhattan, and they're crushing; they're like two or three thousand, right down there in—they're kind of like Redeemer; they're kind of growing like that; they're doing amazing. Okay. Good. So John pointed out to me, um, actually on a—on a podcast, he was like, "Man, we're seeing like uh, an a—a significant increase in like overt demonic manifestation." And this is a—a highly intellectual New York City, Manhattan dude—uh, very frankly, at Lake Point, we've seen that; we have had two like very clear examples of demonic uh, manifestation, and like, I'm not that guy. Can you—can you—can you tell us what it actually—I won't tell the story again; we—um, Pastor Paul Lewis was on this podcast, I think it was like two weeks ago, shared the story. So we had one in a prayer gathering three years ago; it was like right here at the Rock Wall campus—overt manifestation—multiple people around them see this happen; people start praying, and then something overtly changes in this person in response to the prayer; they come to their senses, and then now they're a worshiper at Lake Point. Okay. We had the same thing happen at a—a campus in one of our Lake Point and Espanol campuses uh, about two months ago—same thing. So anyway, between John—we're seeing this here; I'm hearing this from other guys. Do you have any theories on why you think that's happening—like increase in overt manifestations?

I don't, but I will say that if you look at the uh, New Testament—why does Jesus—why does suddenly all this demonic activity start around Jesus? It appears—or why is there a big increase in it? It's spoken of not much in the Old Testament. Suddenly Jesus shows up—very few in the Old Testament—because they know he is the savior. What they don't know is what is the plan? Because Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 2 that these things were hidden because if they weren't hidden, the powers and principalities of this world never would have crucified the Lord of glory. So they never would have instigated the crucifixion. They knew he was the savior, but they didn't know what the plan was. If they had instigated—if they hadn't instigated the crucifixion, then Jesus wouldn't have been our sacrifice or wouldn't have gone to be our sacrifice. This is why I think Old Testament prophecy is veiled in the Old Testament. And I—I use this analogy, bro. I see where you're going; I've never thought of this before. Finish what you're saying; this is brilliant. Think about trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together without the box top, right? You can't do it. You're like, "Well, you can, but it takes a long time, right?" But if—once you get the box top, you go, "Oh, I see where this piece goes; I see where that piece goes." The New Testament events are the box top to the prophecies in the Old Testament. Once you get the prophecy—once you get the box top down—the events of the New Testament, you start going, "Oh, now I see how Isaiah 53 and Daniel 9 and Micah 5:2 and—and all these passages fit together; I didn't see it without the box top." This is why Paul says that after they knew he rose from the dead, they went to the scriptures, and that's why Paul would go into synagogues—I love your revival—riot—revival—riot—revival—riot—in the book of Acts. He goes into the synagogues, and he reasons from the scriptures—from the scriptures—the Old Testament scriptures. How does he do that? Because he's got the box top down, and he goes, "Now you see all these pieces fit together; Jesus is the fulfillment of all this." So wait, were you saying—were you saying you think that's why the Old Testament prophecies are somewhat veiled and they're scattered all over the place? Because to—to intentionally obscure them from demonic powers. Exactly. So that they wouldn't thwart the redemptive plan of the crucifixion or redemption. That's—I've never heard that before; that's brilliant. That's—Well, that's—that's God's plan, not mine. He's saying—1 Corinthians chapter—brilliant—no, 1 Corinthians chapter 2. And by the way, I think the same thing is true; I don't—I don't know what your beliefs about last things are, but I'm open. Okay. I know we win in the end. When people ask me what's your eschatological view, I say, "Look, I'm on the welcoming committee, not the planning committee." Okay. So I'm going to use that; I just want to welcome him when he comes. That's awesome. But if we knew—suppose we knew that Jesus was coming back in, say, 2034, we'd go—"I've got time; you know, I'm going to wait until 2033; I'll start getting my affairs in order; I'll start running up the credit cards, and then I'll repent, and Jesus will take me home." But when you have to remember that he could come at any moment, it's imminent; you've got to always be ready. I think the eschaton—I think the second coming is veiled for that same reason; it would change our behavior for the negative if we knew—which makes sense of—"God is not slow as some suspect, but he's patient, not willing that any should perish"—that makes sense of that verse.

Oh, yeah. I've never thought of that either. Yeah. And he's going to come back when the full number of Gentiles come in, which is Romans 11, but when is that? I don't—no one knows when that is, right? That's amazing. Yeah. We just got to wait; we just got to be ready at all times. Always be ready, 'cause your master can come home at any moment. All right. Let me—let me—let me turn it here. So you—who are—that you debated—you did—you debated Hitchens. I debated Hitchens a couple of times, Shermer a couple of times, um, Jeffrey Lauder, the founder of the Internet Atheist, and several other people. And I debated my wife, who's annihilated—annihilated me every time that I've debated. Yeah, totally annihilated. She got some Jersey in her, too. Oh, she is—she is sharp as a tack, which is why sometimes I quote Rodney Dangerfield, who said, "My wife and I were happy for 20 years, and then we met," 'cause she will completely dope-slap me, Josh. Oh, man. She is smarter than I am. All right. So what—here's what's really interesting is you talked about how like the quote-unquote new atheism—when I was in college, that was like a thing. It was a thing. Where'd you go to college, by the way? Union University, Jackson, Tennessee. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We've done Summit there. Yeah. Yeah. Union dude. I had—it was an unbelievable experience for me. So—so all right, let me ask you this: there's all these people, and I'm going to list some names here in a second. There's all these people, whether they're like public intellectuals or podcasters or whatever, that in the last 5 years, it seems like a—the quote-unquote new atheism is gone. I mean, it is dead—dead.

And in fact, let me say something. I went to UT Dallas. I go to UT Dallas a lot to present. The guy over there, that Alan Hanline, the guy who invites me there this past September when I went, he said, "Hey Frank, spend more time on the New Testament. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. We're having a hard time finding atheists on campus." Dude, nobody's an atheist anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, one, you have you have this, but then you also have these people that are like, just like respected secular thinkers, and there's like a mass amount of people either converting to Christianity or at least expressing interest in it. I'm going to list some names, so these are people who either have converted or are expressing overt interest that five years ago would have said, "I'm an agnostic secular person." Joe Rogan, Tom Holland, Russell Brand, Ayan Ali Hersy--by the way, that is a very interesting story for our listeners, go Google Ayan Ali Hersy, very interesting--came out of Islam, went to atheism, now a Christian. Very interesting story. Jordan Peterson, Louise Perry. Do you know Louise Perry's story? Louise Perry, dude, she wrote this book, wait, wait, wait, the sexual revolution lady, that lady is, she a Christian now? No, she's expressing interest. She publicly stated that she was like, had started visiting church. So, if people don't know Louise Perry, uh, overt secular agnostic, fourth-wave feminist, right, that ended up going, dude, the whole sexual revolution thing failed. Yeah, so she's this secular British feminist that writes a book called *The Case Against the Sexual Revolution*, and dude, if you read--I didn't plan on talking about this--I read her book, in her book, so she's going, "Man, here's why secular feminism didn't work and all the things and the sexual revolution failed." She gets to the spot in the book where she goes, "Do you know what actually would work? What would be really good for women is uh, is monogamous lifelong marriage." And I'm like, well, like we've been saying that for at least 5,000 years. That's a great idea. Let me, let me, let me piggyback on that for just a second because people always say, you know, is Christianity anti-woman? In the first century, if you were a Roman male, you could have sex with whoever you wanted to, even if you were married, but your wife had to remain faithful to you, right? And here's Paul coming along saying, "No, men, you need to be faithful to your wives." Okay, now think about this. Feminism today wants women to act more like men, non-monogamous, where Paul says, "No, men, you need to act more like women," monogous, monogamous. That's pro-women, super pro-women. It was totally against the culture at the time. Amen.

So, if, if I'm getting this right, because I, in message prep about two years ago, in first-century Rome, if like you said, no legal penalty for a Roman man to commit adultery, in fact, it was just like prostitution was just a thing. That's right. Um, but if I remember right, it was either destitution or threat of death for a woman that committed adultery on her husband. Talk about a double standard, huh? Exactly. And then Paul comes along, I think it's 1 Corinthians 7, it's like, hey, hey, talking to the men, hey, bro, actually your body belongs to her, right? Like, so to your point, like how radically subversive. You, Christian man, your body belongs to her. She might not want it, but especially if you keep eating that water burger every day. Oh my gosh, I love you, Frank. All right, so let me get back to my list, and I want to ask you why you think this is happening. So, Joe Rogan, Tom Holland, Russell Brand, Ayan Ali Hersy, Jordan Peterson, Louise Perry, Richard Dawkins, why are all these people going, "You know what, man, I actually think we need to consider at least some form of Christianity?" Two words: increasing evil. That is causing them to start to reconsider. Think about Richard Dawkins in the UK. Islam's taken over the UK just by birth rate, dude, peop--all right, if our listeners aren't aware of this, you need to be aware of this. That's what Frank just said is 100% true. So anyway, go ahead. So he's realizing that he would rather live in a Christian society or a society dominated by Christianity than he would in a society dominated by Islam. The problem with Richard Dawkins is most of his life he's been fighting the only bulwark against Islam, because secularism, team Jesus. Yeah, that's right. Secularism isn't going to oppose it. You know, there's no--do you see what you see what they're doing over there now? They're allowing Muslim rape gangs in the UK to go unprosecuted, and yet they're arresting Christians who are silently praying outside of abortion clinics. I didn't see that. It's crazy, Josh. What's going on? So you think it's increasing evil? They go, "Oh, wait, I need to go find some logical justification for the morals that I know are true." That's right. Yeah, they, they, if for no other reason, it's pragmatic. I mean, Douglas Murray is another one. Douglas Murray identifies as gay. He's been an atheist, and yet he is the one that has been talking about how he has Christian values, just like Tom Holland, who might be a Christian by now--not the Spider-Man actor, the *Dominion*--he wrote *Dominion*. Yeah, he wrote *Dominion*. I think, I think, and Ali, same thing. She was forced to look at Christianity because of the encroachment of evil, and she realized also that atheism offered her nothing. I mean, just from a pragmatic point of view, you know, what, what, what are atheists going to say? You're going to die, become worm food one day, have a nice day, right? That's it. There's, there's, there's no meaning to life, there's no purpose to life, there's no standard for life. Everything is just molecules in motion. You can't live with that long term. So I'll give a, I'll, I'll uh, piggyback on your theory, and I don't want to know what you think about it. All right, so I think um, in Britain or, or in I should say in Western Europe, I think the encroachment of Islam is making a lot of these public intellectuals, secular public intellectuals, I think they're going, "Whoops, uh, that, that's not where we want to go, so now I need to go find some logical grounds to oppose that." That's right. I think in the United States now, if we're not careful, we could have the same thing in the United States, but I don't think that's the thing in the United States right now. Um, here's my theory. I think, um, I had a mentor one time say that in every generation--this is a Jesusy dude, saved during the Jesus revolution of the 70s, spiritual mentor of mine--he said, Josh, in every generation the devil overplays his hand, m, and I think in, in the United States, I think it's not the encroachment of Islam that's making people go, "Oh, I need to find something that opposes that, can logically, you know, oppose." I think it's the uh, I think it's the encroachment of secular progressivism.

I think you're right. Yeah. So honestly, here's what I'm seeing right now and uh, at Lake Point and just around, is whether it's a red state or a blue state, I think this is still true: you have tons of lost people who, for the first time in my lifetime, they're looking at Christian, in particular Christianity's sexual ethic and its family ethic, and for the first time in my lifetime they're going, "I think the Christians are the sane ones." So like when I was growing up in high school, you know, the Christian sexual ethic was like, uh, ew, like that kind of vibe. Now I think you got a bunch of lost dudes that are sitting around going, "Well, I don't want my son to become a chick, and I'd kind of like him to marry a girl." Mhm. But who's going to tell him? And they really, Christians are kind of the last ones that are like, "Hey, you should be a dude and marry a girl." And there's great blessings that come from that, have some grandkids for me. Yeah, man. So I think maybe in Western Europe is the encroachment of Islam, maybe in the United States it's the advance of secular progressivism. What do you think? No, I think you're act, you're right on it, because as you say, overplayed their hand. There's a tipping point where they just went a just too far, and the election brought that out. That one of the most effective ads Trump ran was that ad when he was talking about how, uh, it's a video of Kamala Harris saying, "Yes, I want to use taxpayer funds to give sex change operations to people in prison." Yeah, and then, then the, the narrator comes on and says, "She's for, she's for they/them. Donald Trump is for you." And people go, "Yeah." And I don't want my kids indoctrinated in that stuff. I mean, I'm sure you saw our mutual friend Charlie Kirk's interview with Gavin Newsom. He got Gavin Newsom to real, to at least admit, because he's trying to move to the center now, that men in women's sports is crazy. Can you imagine LeBron James in the WNBA? They'd score 400 points. Yeah, like, why, why do we even have women's sports? Like, why don't we just say, okay, just mix it up, everybody? Women would never get in. Makes sense. So yeah, it's just common sense. You don't even need Christianity to know this. It's natural law stuff, but people recognize, and I love what you guys were saying in that podcast you did with Josh, the, the other research podcast, when you're talking about how conservative values might be an on-ramp, on-ramp to Christianity. Yeah, this is a really interesting discussion. So, you know, man, it's hard to back up enough for listen, listeners to this podcast to get it, but there is data, and I have a theory, I've got a lot, I've got theory for this, but there is a lot of data that what is generally described right now, even if you're not talking politically, just talking morally, socially, the data shows that conservatism is an on-ramp to faith, yes, and that what is generally described as progressivism in 21st-century America is an off-ramp. Mhm. And that's just data. You know, as a leader, I, I got a theory, you know, as a leader, reality is undefeated. That's right. That's reality. So I think, you know, this is a whole different thing. I think that's because in general, what is described as conservatism is based on natural law, and that there is a natural congruence between creator and creation. Yep. And uh, progressivism, by its very nature, is designed to quote, progress past what they view as a historic Christian ethic, and that does not go very well. No. Anytime you're disagreeing with Jesus, you're not progressing, you're regressing. Amen. That's why I don't, I hate the, I hate the term progressive Christian. A, it's not progressive, it's regressive. Secondly, you're not a Christian if you're disagreeing with Jesus. That's right. You know why? I mean, it's crazy. People say, "Well, Frank, who are you to, to define what a Christian is?" I, I just, I just do a little uh, thought experiment. Let's suppose we were all with Moses going to Mount Si. He goes up on the mountain, he comes down from Mount Si with the ten commandments, and he goes, "These are the ten commandments from Yahweh." And we go, "Moses, we don't like those 10, we have our own 10." Should we call ourselves followers of Yahweh? Of course not. Call yourself something else, but don't call yourself a follower of Yahweh. The same thing is true with Christianity. Oh, we're going to call ourselves Christians, but we're going to disagree with Jesus on just about everything he and the apostles say. What are you calling yourself Christians then? Yeah, that's right, Frank. You know what I really like about you? You're Jesusy with a little bit of Jersey. Oh, there's plenty of Jersey in there. There's plenty of Jersey. All right, let me, let me toss a few things out for you here, and then we'll, we'll, we'll start moving on here. Um, let me toss out a few defeaters that people have where it's like, is people are like, "Dude, I want to believe, but man, I just can't get past this thing, you know?" So let's talk, let's do, we'll do these rapid fire. You don't got to feel like you got to be, you can be as long as you want, but if you want to do them quick, you can. All right, all right. Um, we'll start, we'll start with hell. All right, so I, I literally, I had somebody say this one time, they're like, "Hey, man, so doesn't the Bible say like, no one can be righteous, but then God sends you to hell if you're not righteous?" So they said like, "Man, Christianity is like if God tells everybody they have to run one mile in 10 seconds and then sends everybody to hell because they couldn't do it." Yeah, just be perfect, that your heavenly father's perfect, but if your creator also gives you a free way of avoiding the penalty, how is he unloving? He's offering it to you. Yeah, you can't be perfect. God is the standard of infinite justice, so we can't allow unjust people to go unpunished. So what does he do? He's also infinitely loving, he doesn't want to punish us, so he punishes an innocent substitute in our place. That's Jesus, who comes to earth, adds humanity to his deity, and he allows us, the creatures that rebelled against him, to torture and kill him so he could take our punishment upon himself, and then all he says is, "If you repent of your sins, accept me, I'll forgive you and give you my righteousness." It's free. You don't have to do anything. How is that unfair? It's not, it's not unfair, it's actually gracious. And I always tell people like, you're, you're only going to get two things in the afterlife, you're either going to get grace or you're going to get justice. I don't want justice. Do you want justice? Nobody wants justice. Let me say something very, hell no, hell no. I mean that, I mean that literally, hell no. I don't want justice. If I got justice, I wouldn't make it to heaven, quite obviously. So there's people out there screaming for justice. Every college campus I go to, they're screaming for justice. I say, "Are you sure you want justice? Because if you got it, you wouldn't like it, right? Let's fight for justice here on earth, but in the afterlife, if an, if an infinitely just judge is going to judge us, we're not going to make it. We need somebody to step in and take the punishment for us. That's what Jesus does. That's awesome, man.

So what do you do? Um, do the man on the island. Yeah, but what about the guy who never hears about Jesus? Well, the Bible says that uh, well, there's, there's a couple of answers to this. Um, one is, is that he is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. Go. So if you, if you take a step toward the light that God has provided us, like he's given us two revelations, his works and his word. Okay, everyone has his works, creation, conscience. We, we know there's got to be some kind of moral creator out there. If you take a step toward that, God will give you the information you need to be saved, because he wants to be saved. He wants us to be saved more than we do. Okay, he'll get us the information, and sometimes he'll send a missionary, sometimes he'll, he might send an angel, like he does in Muslim countries. A dream. Yeah, a dream, a vision. That's my theory on this. If people don't know this, there are mass Muslim conversions. Literally, Lake Point's partner in Ghana, his guy name, his name is Muhammad. Yeah, Jesus. He's our international partner. Jesus appears to this earnest Muslim man in a dream. Wow. And shares, he shares the gospel with him in a dream. Guy wakes up, gives his life to Jesus. He's now our evangelical, Bible-believing Christian uh, partner in Ghana. He led 24 Muslim men to Christ three weeks ago. Wow. So to your point, Frank, that's what you're saying. So, anyway, you finish here, and, and then the, the other option is if, if uh, the guy on the island never gets the word, let me put it this way: we all know people who hear the gospel and don't believe it, right? It could be that people that never hear the gospel wouldn't have believed it anyway, because what Paul says in Acts 17, that God has, has uh, appointed places where people should live so that people would reach out and find him, though he's not far from each one of us. It could be that God has so pre-arranged the world that those that don't want the gospel wouldn't have believed it anyway, even if the gospel came to them, and by not getting them the gospel, he's reducing their culpability, just like when Jesus spoke in parables, right? He reduced their culpability. In fact, at one point, I think it's in John, he says, "Now that I've told you, you're more guilty." That's right. If I hadn't told you, you wouldn't be as guilty. So God is gracious. He doesn't want to punish people. He wants people to be saved more than we do, but even God can't steer a parked car, right? If people don't want Jesus. In fact, I had this happen. I was at the University of Michigan debating an atheist, and he asked me, he said, he said, "My mother was a survivor of the Holocaust. She lived a life full of pain and suffering. Toward the end of her life, uh, she was offered the gospel, but she rejected it, and then she died. Is she in hell right now?" So I said to him, I said, "Eddie, I don't know where, I don't know where your mother is right now. I don't know if she had a deathbed conversion or not, but if she didn't accept Christ before she died, then God is too loving to force her into heaven against her will, because see, what's the assumption? Everybody wants to go to heaven. That's not true. There have been people who've been running from Jesus their entire lives. Jesus is in heaven. What's he going to do in the afterlife? Going, is he going to go, "Hey, where you going? Get over here, you're with me now." Right? That wouldn't be loving. So he quarantines them in a place called hell, because God can't force himself on people. He can't do it. He's not going to do that. So I know this is going to sound weird maybe for your audience, but hell means God is love and man is free, because God's not going to force himself on people. People can freely do what they do, and hell is actually a place of justice. The people that are in hell are justly there. Nobody's getting an unfair deal, and people are punished at the right level of punishment based on what they've done, because God is just. A lot of Christians do not know that, that there are different degrees of punishment in hell, and, and uh, degrees of reward in heaven. So keep going. Yeah, no, I, I'm just pointing that out that nobody in the afterlife is going to say, "God, I got a raw deal." They're going to be where they're going to be based on either justice or grace. I don't want justice, I want grace. There's two things that I would add to what, what you just said. One is, it is Romans chapter 2, where it says we'll be judged according to the level of knowledge. Yeah, that's uh, that's when he talks about their consciences either condemning or accusing them, with them. Yeah. So number one, we're going to be, the Bible just says you're going to be judged according to the level of knowledge that you have. So if you go, man on the island, little knowledge, less judgment, right? But fair, right? The other thing is, to what you just said, Frank, I think this is so important, people understand. Thessalonians says that what hell is is this eternity apart from God, separation from God. So why in the world would somebody who spent their entire life avoiding Jesus, not wanting to have anything to do with Jesus, why would they want to be in heaven? That is all about Jesus and relationship with Jesus and proximity to Jesus. Really, C.S. Lewis pointed that out. Is really all hell is is the continuation of the trajectory that you had on earth. That's right. If your entire life was, I avoid Jesus, don't like Jesus, well, then that's what you get in eternity. You know, dating is a good illustration of this, by the way, because I, at Michigan, I asked the ladies in the audience, I said, "Ladies, have you ever had a man pursue you whom you did not want to date?" And one lady yelled, "Yes." And I said, "Is he sitting next to you right now?" I said, said um, because that happens, right? And I, I, I asked the ladies, I say, "Suppose this man keeps asking you out, he keeps asking you out," and you finally said, "Look, I like you, but only as a friend." Oh, man, ladies, why don't you just stick the knife in and turn it? Every man has heard the dreaded friend rejection. And I always tell the men, I said, I say, "Man, whenever you get the friend rejection, move on. She's not interested. In fact, I have some shocking news for you: she doesn't even like you as a friend." That's right. Because, because if she did, she'd be interested. Ladies, am I right? Look, they're in here right now, they're saying, "I'm not lying, they're just trying to be nice, right?" Well, suppose it doesn't deter him, suppose he keeps asking out, and he says, "Look, I love you so much, I'm going to force you to love me." Ladies, run screaming from the building. Can he force you to love him? No. The only way he could love you would be to leave you alone. If he truly did love you, that's what God does for us. He sends us cards, letters, and flowers. He sends us creation, conscience, Christ, the Bible. He sends us Josh Howon and Lakeoint Church. He sends us a dream or a vision, and if we keep saying no, no, no to all that, God will give us up to our own desires, and that is to be separated from him. That's amazing. All right, let's do a couple of these rapid fire here. Yeah, rapid fire. Yeah, but uh, but Frank, what about all the horrible things done in Christianity's name? What about the Crusades? What about the Inquisition? Here's what I say: when somebody plays Beethoven poorly, who do you blame? That's great. You don't blame Beethoven, right? You blame the player. So when somebody plays Jesus poorly, who do you blame? You don't blame Jesus. News flash: Christianity is not Christians. Christianity is Jesus. Keep your eyes on Jesus. Also, I think keep in mind that the crusaders were, first of all, they didn't have a Bible. How many Bible verses did they know? Probably very little, right? This was in 1095 AD. Secondly, the Crusades were a military response to 400 years of Muslim aggression in the Holy Land. Hey, actually, Trinity, can you pull that up? You know which one I'm looking at? This is, I, I, dude, I did not realize this until like this year, cuz you grew up just hearing Christianity to the Crusades. So pull up that the Muslim conquest. Yeah, you got it there. Look at, look at this. So I didn't realize this until this year. So all the red dots in the top are all the Muslim conquest battles of, they were the previous aggressors. Yes. The bottom, those tiny sparse few, are what get labeled the Crusades, a defensive response against the 400 years of Muslim. So a lot of people, they isolate the bottom without the context of the top there. I just want you, you got to know the context. I just had uh, Bill Federer on my podcast to talk about the Crusades. Bill Federer has, knows more about history than any hundred people I know. Amazing. He went through all of the uh, Muslim conquest prior to the Crusades. Now, none of us, you and I and Bill Federer are not saying everything that was done was wrong. No, no, no. We're not saying that, because there were some atrocities done. However, we're put, we're giving you the context to tell you why they were done. They weren't done to, to convert people to Christianity. They were done to militarily take back lands the Muslims had taken, including the Holy Land. Yeah. And I, this is a whole different podcast. I am a firm believer in just war theory. Oh yes. So Augustine, all the things. I'm definitely not a pacifist. Let's say one other thing about hypocrisy. When people call you a hypocrite, I think, I think here's what you ought to say: you're right. So what does that prove? You know, do you know that everyone's a hypocrite? Do you know anybody that perfectly lives out what they believe? Nobody. Atheists don't, nobody does. In fact, in my debate with Christopher Hitchens, one of them, I said, "Christopher, you're right, I'm a hypocrite. I can't live up to what Jesus told me to live up to, but if I could, I wouldn't need him."

If I was perfect, I wouldn't need a savior. That's like our whole message: I can't be the person that I know I should be, so I need Jesus to forgive me, save me, and help me. And when people say, "I can't go to church cuz there's too many hypocrites down there," I always say, "Come on down, pal, we got room for one more." You know, I put that I had that in a sermon three weeks ago, did you? And then it's it's like saying, "I can't go to the gym because there's too many out-of-shape people down there." Right? Like, well, the reason they're going to the gym is to get in shape, right? If they were perfect, they wouldn't need to go to the gym. That's so these these saints—oh, by the way, when people call you a hypocrite, you can also say, "You're right, number one, number two, you know, you've just given evidence for God." Why? Because why is hypocrisy wrong, right? You're assuming a moral standard, and it's wrong to be a hypocrite. Why? If there's no God, there's nothing wrong with anything. You're actually giving evidence that God exists by saying something's wrong—hypocrisy. That's that's fantastic. All right, I'm gonna do two more. Go ahead.

Um, yeah, but Frank, I read the Old Testament—God commands genocide. I I would say, um, "What do you mean by that?" And what and and give me some evidence. The uh, man, I read about—he just told Joshua and Israel to go in there and slaughter all the Canaanites—the slaughtering of the innocents, Frank. How in the how could that be true? He also said that he ought to slaughter um all the Israelites that worshiped the golden calf. So was it genocide or was it synocide? [Music] I've never heard that before. That's a good—cuz he unpack that—unpack that. Well, there's judgment in the Old Testament, quite obviously, and people will say, you know, "Well, how come the God of the Old Testament is so different from the God of the New?" First of all, they're not, but secondly, in for context, we need to realize that the Old Testament is covering thousands of years; the New Testament is covering maybe 60. There's a lot more time to mess up in thousands of years, right? So there's going to be just wars in the Old Testament because God is getting the promised people in the promised land to bring forth the promised Messiah, and he has to do it through free creatures. So he's pushing out people who are going to pollute the Israelites, and the whole Old Testament is pretty much, "Quit worshiping false gods," right? Um, "Stay true to me." And the reason they got pulled away from God so much is because of these other people in the land who were sacrificing their children to Molech and doing all sorts of evil things.

You know, it's interesting, Josh, because this just happened—I was down at uh, where was I at? I was at uh uh Mississippi State just last week, and a a guy got up to the microphone and he said, um, basically, "Why, you know, why does God kill people in the Old Testament?" I said, "Where are you on the abortion issue?" And he said, "Oh, I'm pro-choice." I said, "Can I ask you a question? Why is it that when God decides who lives and dies in the Old Testament that that's immoral for him, but when you decide who lives and dies with regard to abortion, that's your moral right?" What did he say? He just said he just uh, "I don't know what to say." Yeah, he what what is there to say? Wow. He he finally just said, he said, "I'm done," and he left—he left the microphone. Because see, the problem is is we think we have the right to murder people; God doesn't have the right to move people from one life to the—look, if Christianity is true, people don't die, they just change location, right? They go from this life to the next life, and that's up to God when that happens. Judgment happens a lot in the Old Testament because there's a long period of time that that God's dealing with, but there's a lot of judgment in the New—Jesus is the one that really amplifies the talk of hell, and the whole book of Revelation—if you think Genesis so-called genocide in the Old Testament was bad, take a look at the book of Revelation, right? You said something I I've never heard you say that—I'll probably remember that verse in my life. What is that? Hey, was it genocide or synocide? The reason that connects a million dots for me and for the anybody that's listening is the the only reason people really struggle with this is because we forget at the emotional level, the wages of sin is death. Yes, yes. Once you internalize that at an emotional level—the wages of sin is death—all of a sudden that that moral problem goes away. So a lot of times what when somebody says that there's a slaughtering of innocence in the Bible, I always say, "Hey, man, I got good news and bad news." Number one, good news—in every one of those instances, all the innocent ones were spared. Good news; bad news—there were no innocent—there were no innocents. That's right. And then and then I'll and this is where I always try to go is I go, "Man, actually, there's only one innocent guy in the whole Bible." And so the only slaughtering of innocence in the entire Bible didn't happen in the Old Testament; it happened in the New Testament, and man uh, God did not do it to man; man did it to God when we crucified the Son of God. And so it's like, "Hey, man, there's your slaughtering of the innocents." That's right. That's excellent. Yeah, yeah, flip that up back on them. Also, you can you can talk about, "By what moral standard are you making this claim?" Because if there is no God, nothing's right or wrong; there's nothing wrong with murdering everybody in the Old Testament. Now it's not murder for God when he takes their lives because God is the author of life; he can resurrect. It's murder for us. That's right, because we don't have the authority to do that.

Last one: if somebody just says, "Hey, man, dude, I I tried Christianity; it just didn't work for me. I don't know. I I I you know, I was trying it, and the whole time I was going to church, trying to be a Christian, I just wasn't happy; I was kind of miserable, and just didn't work for me." What do you—It's not supposed to work; you're supposed to you're supposed to supposed to deny yourself and follow him. What's this work business? I didn't become a Christian because it works; I became a Christian because it's true. I mean, you might be you might be martyred. Can you say that sentence one more time? I didn't become a Christian because it works; I became a Christian because it's true. Right? It's not supposed to work temporally necessarily; it might—God's sovereign—God can do what he wants. But this whole prosperity gospel nonsense is just that—it's nonsense. When people say, "Well, the reason you're not healthy and wealthy is because you don't have enough faith," I say to them, "Well, the apostles and Jesus weren't healthy and wealthy." Don't tell me they didn't have enough faith; they were martyred for what they believed. It's not about getting benefits here on earth that you say, "I'm becoming a Christian because I want to drive a fancy car and I want to you know be seen as uh somebody at church," and I—no, that's not the reason you become a Christian. You become a Christian because the savior, the God, the God who created you came to earth to save you from your own iniquity, and he's offering you a free ticket to the kingdom—why wouldn't you take it? And then after you have accepted him, Jesus says, "If you obey me, if you love me, obey my commandments." Then you do good good works as a result of that. And yeah, I don't think people in third-world countries who are Christians ask questions like that, Josh, do you? I do not think so. They don't even ask if God—why evil, you know? They just know they need God because blessed are those who are poor—poor in spirit; they they know they need God. Yeah, that's right, man. We're trying to use God as a vehicle to get something else; that's not why we come to God. Yeah, man, I honestly, too, I think I'm 100% by everything you just said, and then I also say, man, you said something earlier—you you're giving me good one-liners here that are going to come out in sermons—is is that thing, "Hey, remember, Christianity is not Christians," and some people like, "Man, when I was going to church, it was really blah blah." Well, hey, man, the people that you were around were not Jesus, and there could have been some things that you were around that were not ideal. Don't judge, you know, don't don't you know don't judge your experience, you know, ba based on how it was when you're around those people. And then I I'm going to read this—somebody I wrote this down years ago—somebody said this—may have been Keller—"Does Christianity work for me?" is the wrong question. Gravity exists whether you think it works for you or not. The real question is, "Did Jesus come out of that tomb?" Cuz if he did, reality always works better than whatever unreality we try to console ourselves with. You know what? Yeah, you—there's a lot of things that work that aren't right—like lying, like drugs, like premarital sex or adultery; they might work for a short time, right? For whatever we mean by work—what outcome are we trying to get? They may feel emotionally better for a short period of time, right? Yeah, and too often I think we're we're looking for some sort of buzz—that's not really what Christianity is all about—a new buzz. That's right, Frank. Um, I'm really honored that you came—you did not have to do this. I try to expose my people to the people that God's used in my life. I'm literally holding—this is the copy of your book that I had in 200—I think it would have been 2005 or 2006. So I read that guy when I was struggling, and God using my life two decades before I would ever meet you. Excellent. I am very grateful for you. I'm I'm blessed. It it had an impact, and my co-author, Dr. Giser—I mean, he really came up with the outline; I mean, he was brilliant, man, just brilliant. So I was just blessed to work with him, but I'm glad it's been helpful. We're grateful for that. Yeah, thanks, Frank. Would you uh would you mind praying for people just real quick? Just pray us out.

Oh, absolutely. Father, thank you for Lake Point, thank you for Josh and this entire fabulous team here. Um, there's so much going on here at this church, not just locally but even around the world. We pray that you would be glorified in it; we pray that people would come to know you, and not just know you but make you known and be and be and become disciples—not just believers. You told us to make disciples, not believers, so help us to do that important work. Thank you for Josh and his his boldness to speak the truth to every issue—we're to be Christians 365, 24/7, on every area of our life. Help us to spread your truth, and one day we'll hear, "Good well done, good and faithful servant." Yeah, pray you'd bless everyone here in Christ's name. Amen. Amen. Hey, thanks for joining us today. For more biblical teaching and worship, join us for our Lakeoint Church online live weekend services on Saturdays and Sundays here on this YouTube channel. We would love to connect with you personally, also. If this podcast was helpful to you, don't forget to subscribe, like, share, comment, and hit that notification bell to be the first to get these podcast episodes once they're out. For more information about all of our digital resources of Lake, visit leppoint.urch/livefree. We'll see you next time. [Music]

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Answering Christianity’s Toughest Objections (with Dr. Frank Turek) | Live Free with Josh Howerton

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