Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E212: He Tried His Hardest to Disprove the Resurrection w/Lee Strobel | Lila Rose Show

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E212: He Tried His Hardest to Disprove the Resurrection w/Lee Strobel | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  I thought, give me a three day weekend.
• 0:01
  I can disprove the resurrection. I mean, I was trained at a law
• 0:04
  school. I know what evidence is.
• 0:05
  I was a journalist at Chicago Tribune winning awards for
• 0:08
  investigative reporting. How hard would it be?
• 0:10
  What does it matter that the disciples were willing to die
• 0:13
  for their convictions? Kamikaze pilots in World War Two
• 0:15
  were willing to die for their convictions.
• 0:17
  And then somebody pointed out to me the difference.
• 0:19
  I am curious why your average modern American, let's say, has
• 0:23
  it really grappled with this? As an investigative journalist,
• 0:26
  why do you think that is? You know why I think it is.
• 0:31
  Hello everyone and welcome back to the Lila Rose Show.
• 0:33
  I'm extremely excited to share that we have Lee Strobel in
• 0:37
  studio today. Lee Strobel is someone that I
• 0:39
  have admired now for I think it's two decades.
• 0:41
  I first read his incredible book The Case for Christ earlier in
• 0:45
  the days when it was out. Since then, it's sold over 5
• 0:48
  million copies. Lee is an award-winning writer
• 0:52
  and he's also the author of over 60 books.
• 0:55
  I think the combined sale sale is now 18,000,000 copies of
• 0:59
  those books. Before that, he was a
• 1:00
  professional journalist and went to Yale Law School and was a
• 1:03
  brilliant atheist who on a special quest to discover the
• 1:07
  truth about the historical evidence for Jesus Christ, had
• 1:09
  an incredible conversion. As always, if you think this is
• 1:13
  helpful content for you, please make sure you're subscribed to
• 1:15
  the YouTube channel. Click that notification button
• 1:18
  and also make sure you're subscribed to the show if you're
• 1:20
  listening on Spotify or Apple podcast.
• 1:22
  That way you don't miss a future episode.
• 1:24
  So I'm so excited to have here, Lee, Thank you so much for
• 1:27
  joining me. Well.
• 1:28
  It's an honor to be with you. You're one of my heroes.
• 1:30
  I love what you do in the pro-life arena.
• 1:34
  It's so important and I resonate deeply with that.
• 1:37
  And you know, as we text and say, I appreciate you.
• 1:40
  Thank you, I feel appreciated and I'm extremely excited you're
• 1:43
  here in person because you've been on my bucket list to get to
• 1:46
  sit down with for years now. And Case for Christ was such an
• 1:50
  incredible read for me. I think I was 14 when I first
• 1:54
  read it and I know it's just moved a lot of people and been
• 1:57
  really important in their own faith journeys.
• 1:59
  So thank you for your work. It's incredible.
• 2:02
  It's been an adventure. It's not what I expected.
• 2:05
  Yes, and from what I know of your story, it is quite the
• 2:07
  adventure. So I'm excited to get into, you
• 2:11
  know, the Case for Christ, your story.
• 2:13
  You also have a new book out, which I should have already
• 2:15
  mentioned, Seeing the Supernatural, which is already
• 2:18
  on the New York Times bestseller list.
• 2:20
  Congratulations. We were talking earlier and you
• 2:23
  were saying that Case for Christ was never officially on a New
• 2:26
  York Times bestseller list, even though it sold 5 million copies.
• 2:29
  Yeah. It's because it's it came out
• 2:31
  over 25 years ago. And so that's over a long period
• 2:34
  of time. Bestseller lists are usually
• 2:36
  based on how many sales in a compact area of time, like a
• 2:39
  week or two weeks or something. So.
• 2:42
  But you already hit hit it this time with this book.
• 2:44
  Yeah, that was exciting. Yeah, Congrats.
• 2:46
  That's that's a big thing. So excited to talk about seeing
• 2:49
  the supernatural as well. But first, for those that don't
• 2:52
  know your own story. Yeah, it's it's very compelling.
• 2:55
  You were an atheist. Yes, before having this prolific
• 2:59
  journey. Now as a not just a Christian,
• 3:01
  but an apologist, I would say yeah.
• 3:03
  So I'd love to hear your story. You know what your child was
• 3:06
  like starting as starting out as an atheist, You know, did faith
• 3:10
  play any role in your life and what kind of was the driving
• 3:13
  force for you as a, as a younger person?
• 3:15
  Yeah. You know, I grew up in a family
• 3:18
  where both my parents were believing God.
• 3:20
  They were part of a mainline denomination where you didn't
• 3:22
  really talk much about your faith.
• 3:23
  But I grew up as a person who was very interested in in
• 3:29
  evidence and and I'm, I'm a skeptic by nature.
• 3:32
  That's just part of my DNA. And so I decided at a rather
• 3:36
  young age that the idea of an all powerful, all knowing
• 3:40
  creator of the universe is just crazy on the surface.
• 3:42
  It wasn't worth my time to even check out.
• 3:45
  I thought that God didn't create people, but people created God
• 3:48
  because they're afraid of death. So they made-up this idea of
• 3:50
  heaven and and afterlife to make themselves feel better about
• 3:53
  dying. That's what I thought and being
• 3:56
  logical, I thought, well, you know what?
• 3:57
  If there is no heaven, if there is no hell, if there is no
• 4:00
  judgment, if there is no accountability, ultimately then
• 4:04
  the most logical way for me to live my life would be as a
• 4:07
  hedonist, someone who just pursued pleasure.
• 4:10
  And that's what I did. So I lived a very immoral life,
• 4:14
  drunken, profane, narcissistic, self absorbed, in some ways
• 4:21
  self-destructive kind of a life. I mean, I was successful in my
• 4:25
  career at the Chicago Tribune. I was legal editor, writing
• 4:28
  books, doing television. And, and what people would see
• 4:32
  with me was me winning awards for investigative reporting, but
• 4:36
  they didn't see the other side. And that was me literally drunk
• 4:39
  in the snow in an alley on Saturday night, had a lot of
• 4:42
  rage inside of me. And if you asked me back then,
• 4:45
  you know, what's the deal? Why the anger?
• 4:47
  Why I I couldn't have told you. But looking back, it's clear
• 4:50
  what it was. I I was always after the perfect
• 4:52
  high, you know, I was always after that ultimate experience
• 4:55
  of pleasure. But everything let me down.
• 4:59
  And so it just, I was just angry.
• 5:02
  I had this anger. I remember once my wife and I
• 5:05
  got in an argument. Our little daughter was there, a
• 5:08
  toddler at the time, and I just blew up.
• 5:11
  I just had so much rage. And I remember I reared back and
• 5:13
  I kicked a hole right through our living room wall and my
• 5:16
  wife's crying, my daughter's crying.
• 5:18
  It's like, hey, it's just another day, you know, in the
• 5:22
  Strobel house. So it affected my family.
• 5:25
  I remember my daughter, when she was a youngster, if she was
• 5:32
  playing with some toys by herself in the living room and
• 5:35
  she heard me come home from work through the front door, her
• 5:38
  natural reaction was just to gather her toys and go in her
• 5:41
  room and shut the door. You going to be drunk again?
• 5:44
  They were yelling and screaming and kicking holes in the wall.
• 5:47
  And you know, it's nice and quiet in here.
• 5:50
  So that's the ugly truth about who I became because of my
• 5:54
  conviction that there is no accountability, there is no
• 5:57
  heaven, there is no hell, there is no God, there is no eternal
• 6:00
  life. And that's the road down which I
• 6:03
  went. You had in that whole world view
• 6:07
  that you possessed at the time you you did get married, you did
• 6:10
  have children and it it appears that you did work hard and you
• 6:13
  were, you were, you're very obviously brilliant.
• 6:16
  You were successful professionally.
• 6:18
  So it sounds like you did on an operational level to have
• 6:21
  behaviors that were good in terms of commitment and you
• 6:25
  know, hard work and things like that.
• 6:27
  How did you square sort of that driving force of your life with
• 6:30
  this sort of ideal of hedonism? I'm just going to kind of enjoy.
• 6:34
  I tried to compartmentalize it so that what people saw was the
• 6:38
  accomplishments, the awards and, and the byline, the front page
• 6:41
  of the Chicago Tribune all the time.
• 6:45
  I wanted that to be the face that I gave to the world.
• 6:48
  But people who knew me knew the other side.
• 6:50
  They knew what was really going on.
• 6:52
  And I was just headed down a dark and dismal path in my life.
• 6:58
  And you know, if looking back, had I stayed on that path, it
• 7:03
  would have been had an ugly outcome.
• 7:05
  Now you were married and I've met your lovely wife, privilege
• 7:08
  to meet her and she was a Christian.
• 7:11
  She is a Christian. She became a Christian.
• 7:12
  She was agnostic when we got married, so we were equally
• 7:15
  yoked in a sense. We neither of us believed in
• 7:17
  God. But then she met a neighbor who
• 7:20
  was a Christian and a nurse, and they became best friends.
• 7:23
  And this neighbor shared Jesus with her, invited her to church
• 7:27
  and and then after a period of checking things out, she came up
• 7:30
  to me one day and she gave me the worst news any atheist
• 7:32
  husband could get. She said, I've decided to become
• 7:35
  a Christian. And I first word that went
• 7:38
  through my mind was divorce. I was going to walk out.
• 7:40
  I I didn't want to be married to.
• 7:42
  I thought she'd be turned into this judge mental, holier than
• 7:44
  thou, you know, person who'd, who'd, you know, hate all my
• 7:49
  secular friends and my habits and so forth.
• 7:54
  But then I thought, what if I could rescue her from this cult
• 7:56
  that she's gotten involved in, you know, And I realized it
• 7:59
  wouldn't be that hard because even as an atheist, I recognized
• 8:04
  that everything was built on the resurrection of Jesus.
• 8:07
  You know, he clearly made transcendent and messianic and
• 8:10
  divine claims about himself. But So what I could do that you
• 8:13
  could do that anybody could claim to be God.
• 8:15
  But if Jesus claimed to be God died and then three days later
• 8:18
  rose from the dead, that's pretty good evidence to tell
• 8:21
  them the truth. So I thought if I, I mean, I was
• 8:23
  trained to get a law school, I knew what evidence is.
• 8:25
  I was a journalist at Chicago Tribune winning awards for
• 8:28
  investigative reporting. How hard would it be to prove
• 8:32
  that someone does not return from the dead after three days?
• 8:34
  Can't be that hard. I thought, give me a three day
• 8:36
  weekend. I can disprove the resurrection.
• 8:39
  So I took my legal training, my journalism training, and I began
• 8:42
  to investigate what is the data from history?
• 8:45
  Again, I tend to be evidentially oriented.
• 8:47
  I tend to be factually based. And so I explored and
• 8:51
  investigated the historical data and I ended up taking me two
• 8:55
  years, a year and nine months of my life to delve into that
• 8:59
  evidence until finally one day, November the 8th of 1981, which
• 9:05
  is a Sunday afternoon, I, I said to myself, you know, a good jury
• 9:09
  reaches A verdict and the evidence was in after two years.
• 9:13
  I mean, I had this mountain of evidence I'd collected and I
• 9:16
  thought, I'm just going to go through it one last time.
• 9:18
  I got to reach a verdict. So I kind of reviewed all the
• 9:21
  evidence. And back then, it's microfilm.
• 9:23
  You know, this is way back when, before your time and, you know,
• 9:27
  books and documents and so forth.
• 9:29
  I kind of reviewed it one last time.
• 9:30
  And I kind of stepped back and said to myself, you know what?
• 9:33
  In light of the avalanche of evidence that points so
• 9:36
  powerfully toward the truth of Christianity, it would take more
• 9:39
  faith to maintain my atheism than to become a Christian.
• 9:43
  And the scales went like that. And that's when I reached my
• 9:47
  verdict in the case for Christ, that Jesus didn't just claim to
• 9:50
  be the Son of God, He backed up that claim by returning from the
• 9:53
  dead. And then I didn't know what to
• 9:55
  do because I thought, OK, am I done?
• 9:57
  Is that it? And I just go back to my life
• 9:59
  the way it was. But then I remember the verse
• 10:01
  that blessedly pointed out to be John 112 says, But as many as
• 10:05
  received him to them he gave the right to become children of God,
• 10:09
  even to those who believe in his name.
• 10:12
  So with my analytical mind, I looked at that verse and I
• 10:14
  realized, oh, that forms an equation of what it means to
• 10:16
  become a child of God. Believe plus, receive equals
• 10:21
  become. So I said, I get it.
• 10:23
  I believe based on the date of history that Jesus is who he
• 10:26
  claimed to be, the unique Son of God.
• 10:28
  But that wasn't enough. I had to receive.
• 10:30
  Receive what? Receive this free gift of
• 10:33
  forgiveness and eternal life that Jesus purchased for me on
• 10:36
  the cross when He died as my substitute to pay for all of my
• 10:39
  sin. And when I would receive that
• 10:41
  free gift of grace and prayer, repentance and faith, I would
• 10:44
  become a child of God. So I got on my knees and I
• 10:49
  poured out a confession of a lifetime of immorality that
• 10:53
  would absolutely curl your hair. And at that moment, I received
• 10:57
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• 11:00
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  You know, it was funny because as soon as I received Christ, I
• 12:10
  prayed this prayer. I've I've received Jesus And
• 12:13
  Leslie threw her arms around my neck and she's crying and she
• 12:16
  said I almost gave up on you 1000 times.
• 12:18
  But she said I met a woman at church.
• 12:20
  I told the women at church about you.
• 12:22
  And I said I don't have any hope for my husband.
• 12:24
  He's a hard headed, hard hearted legal editor of the Chicago
• 12:27
  Tribune. He's never going to bend his
• 12:28
  knee to Jesus. And this one woman named Sylvia
• 12:31
  put her arm around Leslie's shoulder, kind of pulled her to
• 12:33
  the side and said, oh, Leslie, no one's beyond hope.
• 12:37
  And she gave her verse in the Old Testament, Ezekiel 3626.
• 12:41
  This is moreover, I will give you a new heart and I will put a
• 12:44
  new spirit within you. I remove from you your heart of
• 12:47
  stone and give you a heart of flesh.
• 12:50
  And so that whole 2 years that I'm on this investigative
• 12:52
  journey, what I didn't know is my wife, that whole time, every
• 12:55
  day by herself was praying that verse for me.
• 13:00
  And over time then, as I now would receive Christ's gift of
• 13:03
  grace, as I was baptized as a new believer, as I learned to
• 13:08
  read the Bible with fresh eyes, as I learned to pray, as I
• 13:11
  learned to worship, my life began to change.
• 13:14
  My values changed, my character changed, my morality changed, my
• 13:17
  relationships changed, my marriage changed my parenting.
• 13:20
  All these things over time began to change for the good.
• 13:25
  So much so that my little daughter Allison, who I
• 13:29
  mentioned earlier, she was five years old when I came to Faith
• 13:32
  and all she had known the first five years of her life was a dad
• 13:36
  who was absent, angry, kicking holes in walls, coming home and
• 13:39
  drunk. That was her whole life, first
• 13:42
  five years of her life. But starting on that Sunday
• 13:45
  afternoon, she started to watch. Something's changing with my
• 13:48
  dad. Something's different with my
• 13:50
  dad. Something's new with my dad.
• 13:52
  Never interviewed a scholar like I did or investigated
• 13:55
  archaeology is just fine. But she could watch.
• 13:57
  You could listen. And she did.
• 13:58
  And it took about four or five months.
• 14:00
  And then one Sunday, she came up to Leslie and she said, mommy, I
• 14:04
  want God to do for me what he's done for Daddy.
• 14:07
  And that's when she came to faith in Jesus.
• 14:10
  At age 5, she's now married to a seminary graduate.
• 14:13
  She's a novelist. She writes books of fiction and
• 14:15
  children's books, all with about revolving around the gospel.
• 14:19
  And then my son, same thing. And he is ended up getting his
• 14:22
  PhD in theology. He's a professor of theology at
• 14:25
  the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and teaching
• 14:29
  future pastors about Jesus. So God changed our family.
• 14:33
  He rescued our family. And we just celebrate our 12th,
• 14:37
  our our grandson's 12th birthday and they named him after me
• 14:42
  middle name. Anyway, it's good enough.
• 14:44
  Good enough for me. Which shows you how God healed
• 14:47
  our family through all that. So I have so many questions even
• 14:51
  about that. And it's so beautiful to see the
• 14:54
  work of God, you know, and, and the way you just express it so
• 14:57
  freely and you're willing to even say like, I was this
• 14:59
  hedonist. I was, you know, sharing that
• 15:02
  and then God saved you from that.
• 15:04
  I mean, it's, it's and he can do that for all of us.
• 15:06
  I mean, that's. The power of.
• 15:08
  The power of grace and our lives and the lives of our the people
• 15:11
  we love that we were willing to pray for.
• 15:12
  So right there is just such a beautiful take away.
• 15:15
  But I've got to ask about the journey.
• 15:18
  And, you know, spoiler alert is detailed in the case for Christ
• 15:22
  book. But I do think it's so it was
• 15:26
  just an incredible approach because you're you are
• 15:28
  approaching it, like you said, with a legal mind and as an
• 15:30
  investigative journalist. And you were this kind of, you
• 15:33
  know, dyed in the wool atheist. So I think the personal
• 15:37
  conversion stuff is super compelling because there are
• 15:39
  atheists who try to, you know, be really good.
• 15:41
  Like they don't drink. They're really faithful and
• 15:43
  loyal and like they're, you know, really loving and their
• 15:45
  behaviors, like they would think that's the, you know, even
• 15:48
  though this morality is not by a creator God, I'm going to live
• 15:51
  this way. So you had this kind of two fold
• 15:53
  track of like you believed like ideologically atheism and then
• 15:57
  you were kind of acting it out. There was sort of a consistency
• 16:00
  in that sense between, between the two.
• 16:02
  But I'm curious, can you walk us through?
• 16:05
  You have in the book as an example, you use the letter E to
• 16:09
  sort of walk you through why you believed, why you came to, I
• 16:14
  wouldn't say belief because it was for you a matter of
• 16:16
  evidence, Why you saw evidence that proved that not only Christ
• 16:21
  was a historical figure, because I think pretty much everyone
• 16:23
  agrees, yeah, Christ existed. Jesus Christ, this guy, you
• 16:27
  know, in Judea, Bethlehem, you know, this part of the Middle
• 16:32
  East existed, that there was something special around him,
• 16:36
  his teachings. He had followers.
• 16:39
  Maybe he was crucified. If he was crucified, this idea
• 16:42
  that he rose again was a, you know, deeply held belief by his
• 16:46
  followers. But it's not factual because if
• 16:49
  somebody actually rose from the dead and claimed to be God, then
• 16:53
  there's something that we have to contend with there.
• 16:57
  So I'd love to hear the process you undertook.
• 17:00
  Yeah, for me, although I looked at other aspects of history and
• 17:04
  science and so forth, the resurrection was the key.
• 17:07
  And so the the the four things that I found that really
• 17:11
  convinced me. And, and again, this has become
• 17:12
  a lifelong study now, but I summarize it with four letters
• 17:16
  to begin with the letter E. So first execution that Jesus
• 17:19
  was truly dead after being crucified.
• 17:22
  You know, we have not only multiple sources in the Gospels,
• 17:25
  but we've got 5 ancient sources outside the Bible that talk
• 17:28
  about his execution. No less of a source than the
• 17:31
  Journal of the American Medical Association, which is a secular
• 17:34
  scientific peer reviewed medical journal, carried an
• 17:38
  investigation into the death of Jesus and their conclusion was
• 17:41
  quote Clearly the weight of the historical and medical evidence
• 17:44
  indicates that Jesus was dead even before the wound to a side
• 17:48
  was inflicted. Wow.
• 17:50
  Even the famous atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Ludeman
• 17:53
  says it's indisputable historically that Jesus was
• 17:56
  truly dead after being crucified.
• 17:58
  So first he is execution he. Was dead and the the narrative
• 18:01
  against that would be well, he didn't actually die, you know,
• 18:04
  and then so his resurrection isn't real because he never was
• 18:06
  dead. That's right.
• 18:07
  So. He's.
• 18:08
  Fabricated in some. Way that's right he fainted on
• 18:10
  the cross and the cool damp air of the tomb.
• 18:12
  We hesitated him. Well, there is no evidence
• 18:15
  anywhere of anyone ever surviving a full Roman
• 18:17
  crucifixion and even as I say the journal American Medical
• 18:21
  Association concluded based on the date of history that he was
• 18:25
  truly dead. Second E is for early that we
• 18:29
  have early reports that he rose from the dead.
• 18:31
  In other words, I used to think OK, I got to give you the fact
• 18:33
  he was executed. He's dead.
• 18:35
  OK gotcha. But clearly the resurrection is
• 18:38
  a legend, and I figured it took time for legend to develop in
• 18:41
  the ancient world. So I figured, you know, a couple
• 18:43
  generations later, 50, a hundred, 150 years later,
• 18:46
  stories were invented, mythologies were spun, and
• 18:49
  that's where the idea of the resurrection came from.
• 18:52
  But we have preserved for us a report of the resurrection of
• 18:58
  Jesus Christ in the form of a creed of the earliest
• 19:00
  Christians. And this creed says Jesus died.
• 19:04
  Why? For our sins.
• 19:05
  He was buried on the third day. He rose from the dead.
• 19:07
  And then it mentions the specific names of eyewitnesses
• 19:10
  and groups of eyewitnesses to whom he appeared, including 500
• 19:13
  eyewitnesses at once. Well, this creed has been dated
• 19:16
  back by scholars to within months of the death of Jesus.
• 19:20
  And was the 500 eyewitnesses, was that the Ascension or the
• 19:23
  Pentecost? This was at or.
• 19:25
  Not it wouldn't have been Pentecost, excuse me, of the
• 19:27
  Upper Room or the. Ascension.
• 19:28
  No. These are the people who
• 19:29
  encountered Jesus subsequently to his death.
• 19:31
  So in other words, the very first Christians got together in
• 19:34
  the very first century and formulated this creedal
• 19:37
  statement based on facts that they knew to be true, including
• 19:39
  named eyewitnesses and groups of eyewitnesses, including the 500
• 19:43
  who at some point after his death and before 4 Pentecost,
• 19:46
  they encountered the risen Jesus.
• 19:48
  And to have it be that immediate within months, that historically
• 19:53
  that's that's absolutely mind boggling when you consider the
• 19:56
  first two biographies of Alexander the Great by Aryan and
• 19:59
  Plutarch, written 400 years after his life.
• 20:02
  And they're generally considered reliable.
• 20:03
  Well, here you have something goes back within months.
• 20:06
  This is this is historical gold. So you can't write it off as
• 20:10
  being a legend. Third E stands for empty, the
• 20:13
  empty tomb. Now some people will say, well,
• 20:16
  I'll tell you why the tomb was empty.
• 20:17
  The body was never in it in the first place because they don't
• 20:20
  bury execution victims. So the Romans would throw the
• 20:23
  bodies of the dogs, and that was part of the horror of being
• 20:26
  executed, that your body got eaten by wild dogs.
• 20:31
  But guess what? We have evidence that some
• 20:35
  crucifixion victims were indeed buried several years ago.
• 20:38
  They found the remains of a crucifixion victim, with still
• 20:42
  the spike driven through his heel bones and pieces of the
• 20:46
  olive oils of the cross still attached, and he had been
• 20:48
  buried. Do we know the circumstances
• 20:50
  We've. Probably done.
• 20:51
  It was apparently one of the people who was crucified as part
• 20:54
  of the uprising in 70AD when when the temple was destroyed
• 20:59
  and and Jerusalem was destroyed and many people were crucified
• 21:04
  back then. And he's not the only
• 21:06
  crucifixion victim that whose remains have been discovered.
• 21:09
  So, and I interviewed scholars who said that the the the burial
• 21:14
  of Jesus as reported in the Gospels is totally consistent
• 21:17
  with Roman and Jewish custom at the time and, and makes sense.
• 21:21
  But why? How do we know what's empty?
• 21:23
  Well, I found sources inside the New Testament and outside the
• 21:27
  New Testament that said that when the disciples began
• 21:30
  proclaiming that Jesus had risen, what the enemies of Jesus
• 21:33
  said was, oh, well, the disciples stole the body.
• 21:37
  Well, they're admitting the tomb's empty.
• 21:40
  They're trying to explain how it got empty.
• 21:41
  They're conceding implicitly it's empty.
• 21:44
  There's it's like if you're a teacher and a student comes up
• 21:46
  to you and says, a dog ate my homework, that student's
• 21:49
  admitting I don't have my homework, but I can explain what
• 21:51
  happened to it. The dog ate it.
• 21:53
  So the enemies of Jesus are admitting the tomb is empty.
• 21:56
  They're trying to explain how it got empty by the disciples
• 21:58
  stealing the body. Well, nobody believed the
• 22:02
  disciples stole the body then or now.
• 22:04
  They didn't have the motive, the means, or the opportunity.
• 22:08
  And so everybody in the 1st century, whether they're
• 22:10
  believers in Jesus or enemies of Jesus, explicitly or implicitly,
• 22:14
  everybody's conceding the tomb is empty.
• 22:17
  And then the 4th E stands for the word eyewitnesses.
• 22:20
  You know, when you study ancient history and we find a fact that
• 22:24
  we believe about ancient history, maybe something about
• 22:26
  Alexander the Great or whatever, and you dig down into that fact,
• 22:30
  what you generally discover is there's one source to confirm
• 22:34
  it. Maybe if you're lucky, two
• 22:36
  sources to confirm that fact. And yet we believe it based on
• 22:40
  the data that we got, These two good sources or one good source
• 22:43
  telling us it's true. Well, for the conviction of the
• 22:46
  disciples that they encountered the resurrected Jesus, I found
• 22:50
  nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament
• 22:55
  confirming and corroborating the conviction of the disciples that
• 22:58
  they encountered the risen Christ.
• 23:00
  That is an avalanche of historical data.
• 23:04
  Easter is a season to celebrate Jesus Christ, resurrection and
• 23:06
  go deeper into our faith. That's why I'm a big fan of
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  by over the years to help us deepen our relationship with God
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  and our freedom as God's sons and daughters.
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  Hollow App also has thousands of prayers, prayers, meditations,
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  sleep stories, and even worship music.
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  Some of the content is for kids, a lot of it is for adults.
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  Really, anybody and everyone in the family will find something
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  app. So during this Easter season, I
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• 23:51
  And you can try the Hollow app risk free and completely free
• 23:54
  for a full 3 months at hollow.com/lila.
• 23:57
  That's hollow.com/lila. That is an avalanche of
• 24:02
  historical data. So the the case for the
• 24:06
  resurrection is very strong. In fact, when I was a student at
• 24:09
  Yale Law School, one of my heroes was a man who became
• 24:12
  known as the greatest defense attorney in the world.
• 24:16
  He was literally in the Guinness Book of World Records.
• 24:18
  He won more murder trials in a row as a defense attorney than
• 24:22
  anybody in history. 200 over what was it, over 240 murder
• 24:26
  trials in a row. He won before the jury.
• 24:29
  Iran appeal. You know you know who to call if
• 24:31
  you commit a murder. Exactly.
• 24:33
  I mean, greatest defense attorney.
• 24:34
  So I admired him because he was brilliant and he knew what
• 24:37
  evidence is he was knighted twice by Queen Elizabeth.
• 24:40
  He became appointed to the Supreme Court of his country.
• 24:44
  His name was Sir Lionel Luckoo. And and like me at the time, he
• 24:48
  was a skeptic about the resurrection is before I was a
• 24:50
  Christian. And so I admired him.
• 24:53
  Well, some one day somebody came up to him and said, Sir Lionel,
• 24:55
  you're the greatest lawyer in the world.
• 24:57
  Have you ever taken your monumental legal skill and
• 25:00
  applied it to the historical record for the resurrection and
• 25:03
  come to an informed verdict about whether Jesus rose in the
• 25:06
  dead? And he said, no, I haven't, but
• 25:08
  I will. So Sir Lionel Luck, who this
• 25:11
  incredible legal mind spent years investigating the
• 25:14
  resurrection, I'll recite to you one sentence he wrote that
• 25:17
  summarized his conclusion. He said, I say unequivocally
• 25:22
  that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is
• 25:24
  so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof, which
• 25:29
  leaves absolutely no room for doubt.
• 25:32
  This from the greatest defense attorney, whoever lived.
• 25:35
  By the way, I told that story. I used to be a teaching pastor
• 25:37
  at Saddleback Church in Orange County, California.
• 25:40
  And I told that story one Sunday morning and a woman came up to
• 25:43
  me afterwards and she said, I'm your new neighbor.
• 25:46
  I live a couple houses down from you.
• 25:48
  We haven't met yet. You and your wife are just
• 25:50
  moving into the neighborhood. I said, oh, great to meet you,
• 25:52
  we have to get together and have dinner at sometime.
• 25:54
  And she said, yeah, she said. And by the way, I'm Sir Lionel
• 25:57
  Luck, who's sister. Pretty cool.
• 26:01
  Pretty cool, she not only confirmed the story, she showed
• 26:04
  me some of his private papers. So he had passed.
• 26:06
  He had passed his private papers where he had investigated, by
• 26:10
  the way, he before he died, he resigned his legal positions and
• 26:14
  became an evangelist. Wow, yeah, he said.
• 26:16
  What's more? Beautiful.
• 26:17
  How beautiful. I think to the modern mind, your
• 26:20
  average modern mind today, who thinks about is Christianity
• 26:23
  true or not in terms of like, did Jesus rise from the, you
• 26:27
  know, was he crucified, died and was buried and rose from the
• 26:29
  dead? You know, it's easy to sort of
• 26:31
  conflate all these different religious beginnings, right?
• 26:35
  The story of Muhammad receiving, you know, the Quran or, you
• 26:38
  know, these prophetic visions, whatever, the story of Joseph
• 26:41
  Smith receiving the Book of Mormon.
• 26:43
  OK, these Christians 2000 years ago, they, you know, have this
• 26:46
  whole, you know, lore about what happened with Jesus and it
• 26:50
  changed their life and all this like Christianity started like,
• 26:52
  you know, spreading the Roman Empire, right?
• 26:56
  And so they kind of like, I'm not speaking for, but it's just
• 26:58
  sort of like say, yeah, this is, this is.
• 27:00
  And you know, there's a lot of good things about Christianity.
• 27:02
  There's some bad things about Christianity.
• 27:05
  You know, overall probably not good for Western civilization,
• 27:07
  but there's some bad stuff too. But it's not a question about is
• 27:09
  it true? It's a question of is it, is it
• 27:12
  OK or is it good? Right.
• 27:15
  And I am curious your take on even just the comparison between
• 27:19
  the kind of Islamic origin story or the, you know, the the
• 27:23
  Mormon. Now, I don't want to offend
• 27:25
  maybe our Mormon listeners, but I do think there is a very clear
• 27:28
  distinction between the story of Joseph Smith, obviously, and and
• 27:31
  in the Book of Mormon is a core part of the Mormon, you know,
• 27:34
  faith. So I'd love to hear your
• 27:37
  distinction between the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus
• 27:41
  Christ versus the evidence for yes, there was a Muhammad.
• 27:44
  There is a Quran that he, you know, somehow wrote with an
• 27:47
  Angel, told him or, you know, he designed it himself.
• 27:49
  You know, that's another question.
• 27:50
  And then, of course, the Book of Mormon.
• 27:52
  Yeah, it's a great question. And there is no other historical
• 27:56
  phenomenon like the resurrection of Jesus.
• 27:58
  People try to equate other things to it, but they fall
• 28:01
  apart upon close examination. For instance, I have a good
• 28:04
  friend who's a Muslim, and I remember he came over to my
• 28:07
  house and we're grilling steaks and and I said, you know what,
• 28:09
  let's just set aside religion. Let's just look at history.
• 28:13
  And I said, here's what I have from the 1st century that tells
• 28:19
  me that Jesus didn't just claim to be the Son of God.
• 28:21
  He backed it up by returning from the dead.
• 28:23
  And I went through the historical data right there in
• 28:26
  the 1st century that this is true.
• 28:28
  And then I said, now let's look at what you have.
• 28:31
  What you have historically is, is what 600 years later, this
• 28:37
  guy in a cave says an Angel told him it wasn't true.
• 28:43
  Now let's just weigh the historical data.
• 28:45
  Where does it most logically point?
• 28:47
  I think it points toward the truth of Christianity.
• 28:50
  I think somebody, you know, centuries later in another part
• 28:53
  of the world who comes to conclusion that, that, oh,
• 28:56
  that's just not true and then gives a gospel that is contrary
• 29:01
  to the one that is supported by the data from the 1st century.
• 29:05
  I, I think I win. I think the historical data
• 29:09
  carries a day. Now, it's interesting because I
• 29:13
  studied Islam when I was an atheist because I didn't know
• 29:16
  what I was going to find. You know, maybe that was true.
• 29:19
  And so I, I read the Quran, I investigated Mormonism, I
• 29:23
  investigated different faiths to try to determine what, where
• 29:26
  does the evidence point? And that's what led me to faith
• 29:28
  in Christ. But it's interesting when you
• 29:32
  read the Quran, it specifically denies the very things you need
• 29:37
  to affirm if you're going to be a Christian.
• 29:40
  In the in the Quran, Surah 4 verse one 56157 right in there
• 29:45
  says Jesus didn't die on the cross, so therefore there's no
• 29:48
  resurrection. It says that no one can bears
• 29:51
  his sins of another. It says that God does not have a
• 29:53
  son. So the very things you need to
• 29:57
  affirm to be a Christian are explicitly denied in the Quran.
• 30:00
  Well, what's that based on? Somebody who says that an Angel
• 30:05
  in a cave told them this was true centuries after the actual
• 30:08
  events took place. I just don't think that has the
• 30:11
  historic credibility. And similarly in the Book of
• 30:14
  Mormon, I'm no expert on the origins of Mormon as some of my
• 30:17
  friends are, but I remember at the time investigating it and
• 30:21
  looking into it and, and finding that the the circumstances
• 30:25
  surrounding the claims of Joseph Smith are far weaker than the
• 30:29
  claims that we see surrounding the 1st century revelation about
• 30:34
  the resurrection of Jesus. So I I just think there's no
• 30:37
  comparison between other faiths and the historical data that
• 30:42
  Jesus didn't just claim to be the son of God backed it up by
• 30:45
  returning from the dead. I think your final point of the
• 30:48
  ease, you know, execution early empty eyewitnesses, the
• 30:52
  eyewitnesses 1 is so compelling because when we were talking
• 30:55
  about, say, Joseph Smith or Mohammed, there weren't other
• 30:58
  eyewitnesses that received the same divine revelation.
• 31:01
  But when you look at the truly divine revelation walking among
• 31:06
  you, I'm risen from the dead to hundreds and hundreds of people
• 31:10
  who then are eyewitness and telling their testimonies.
• 31:13
  Or you look at the divine revelation of the Gospels and
• 31:17
  the four different gospel writers telling their
• 31:20
  perspective on the same events, and people say, well, there's
• 31:23
  differences between the gospels, right?
• 31:25
  But they make sense when you consider the different
• 31:27
  perspectives that the people were coming to the events with.
• 31:29
  Absolutely. Right there.
• 31:31
  It's like, no, nowhere else in human history, like you're
• 31:34
  saying, has there been an account of events that have that
• 31:37
  kind of multiple perspectives sharing the same story.
• 31:41
  That's right, they have 9 ancient sources concerning the
• 31:43
  conviction of the disciples that they encountered the risen
• 31:46
  Jesus, two of them outside the Bible by people who sat under
• 31:50
  the teachings of the eyewitnesses themselves and
• 31:53
  report what they said. I mean, this is, this is a
• 31:56
  powerful case. There are very few things in
• 31:59
  ancient history that have that much affirmation from, from
• 32:03
  disparate sources like that. So I just, I found, I found it
• 32:08
  to be totally convicting and totally convincing.
• 32:12
  And then you look at things like the transformed lives of the
• 32:17
  disciples. You know, I used to think, wait
• 32:21
  a minute, people would tell me, oh, well, the disciples must
• 32:23
  really believe that the risen Jesus appeared to him because
• 32:26
  they were willing to die for that conviction.
• 32:28
  Now, how some of them did die, actually die, gets a little bit
• 32:32
  lost in the midst of history. But their willingness to die, I
• 32:35
  found nine ancient sources, 8 of them outside the Bible.
• 32:40
  They talk about their suffering. They live lives of deprivation
• 32:43
  and suffering as a result of their proclamation that Jesus
• 32:45
  had risen. Why were they willing to do
• 32:48
  that? Because they learned in Sunday
• 32:50
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• 32:51
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  A terrorist in the 20th century or 21st century who crashes an
• 34:03
  airplane into the Twin Towers. Why is he willing to die that
• 34:08
  way? Because he sincerely believes
• 34:10
  with all of his heart, if he dies that way, he's going to go
• 34:13
  to paradise to be with his Maker.
• 34:17
  So I used to say, well, what does it matter to The disciples
• 34:20
  were willing to die for their conviction.
• 34:22
  So what? Kamikaze pilots in World War Two
• 34:24
  were willing to die for their country and for their
• 34:27
  convictions and so forth. And then somebody pointed out to
• 34:29
  me the difference. Here's the difference of all
• 34:33
  human beings who've ever lived in history.
• 34:35
  The disciples were in a unique position.
• 34:38
  They were there. They touched the resurrected
• 34:40
  Jesus. They talked to him, they ate
• 34:42
  with them. Of all people who've ever lived
• 34:44
  on the planet. They knew the truth.
• 34:46
  They knew whether this was true or whether it was a lie.
• 34:50
  And knowing it was true, they were willing to die for it.
• 34:54
  That tells me something about the veracity of their claims,
• 34:57
  because a terrorist today who says I'm going to kill myself
• 34:59
  and kill a bunch of people because I believe I'll go to
• 35:01
  heaven if I do that. They don't know for a fact that
• 35:05
  they will. They just believe it.
• 35:06
  They have faith in it. That tells me nothing about its
• 35:09
  truth. But because the disciples were
• 35:12
  there and knew the truth about whether Jesus returned from the
• 35:16
  dead and were willing to die for it, that is affirmation that
• 35:20
  they really were reporting what really took place.
• 35:23
  I think about Saint Thomas, you know, doubting Thomas and you
• 35:27
  know, Jesus, what did our Lord say?
• 35:28
  You know, blessed are those who do not see but still believe.
• 35:31
  That's right. So you know, we we are not
• 35:33
  direct eyewitnesses, obviously you and I, but they're like
• 35:36
  you're saying they were and some of them were a kind of unwilling
• 35:40
  eyewitnesses because they were they were they had seen the
• 35:43
  horror of their Lord sacrificed on a cross and they thought this
• 35:46
  is was not supposed to even though he had warned them.
• 35:48
  It's like not supposed to end this way.
• 35:50
  It's terrifying. Where's God?
• 35:52
  And they were most unwilling to believe.
• 35:54
  And it was Jesus literally saying, look, look at my hands
• 35:57
  like this is me. I think God intentionally left
• 36:01
  behind an incredible amount of historical data on the
• 36:07
  resurrection as a way of saying, yes, blessed are you, you
• 36:12
  weren't there, you didn't see him.
• 36:13
  But I'm going to leave behind. I'm going to make sure there's a
• 36:17
  preservation of historical data to anyone who sincerely seeks
• 36:21
  it. I think they're going to find
• 36:24
  and you know, we say it in Jeremiah, we see it in Hebrews,
• 36:26
  Old Testament, New Testament, Those who wholeheartedly seek
• 36:29
  God are going to find him. And I think God left behind this
• 36:32
  trail of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
• 36:36
  For those who say I, I need, I need evidence, I need facts, I
• 36:40
  need data. And guess what?
• 36:42
  It's there. One of the things we often talk
• 36:44
  about on the podcast is the scientific evidence, the
• 36:47
  evidence for for ultimately what are also articles of faith, but
• 36:52
  just how God does work, not just in the supernatural, but in the
• 36:55
  natural. It's supernaturally, but we can
• 36:58
  actually detect it and see it and, and and and and touch it
• 37:00
  and talk about it in different, different cases.
• 37:03
  So I want to get into your, your, your latest book that
• 37:07
  just, you know, explores some of that.
• 37:09
  Actually, I was telling you earlier, Father Robert Spitzer
• 37:12
  in the show, talking about some similar themes, like the
• 37:13
  existence of the soul, near deaths experiences.
• 37:16
  It's just super fascinating stuff.
• 37:19
  But I am curious if you have any sort of theory about why it is
• 37:24
  that so many people today, you know, your average modern
• 37:27
  American, let's say, hasn't really grappled with this.
• 37:33
  Maybe they kind of would even identify as a Christian, like if
• 37:37
  they were asked on a survey. But they're not like, it's not
• 37:39
  like, oh, Jesus Christ resurrected and he has certain
• 37:42
  commands for how I should live. And I need to try to do that
• 37:46
  because this isn't about this life.
• 37:48
  It's about an eternal life. And what does it mean for me?
• 37:50
  Like there's, there's consequences for what this means
• 37:52
  for all of humankind, you know, all mankind.
• 37:55
  So I, I don't know, I'm curious. You have like a, you've talked
• 37:58
  to so many people, you've traveled the world, you've
• 38:00
  spoken, you've done, you know, written so many books.
• 38:02
  So you've you've had a lot of conversations as an
• 38:05
  investigative journalist. Why do you think that is?
• 38:07
  You know why I think it is Romans one, verse 20 says that
• 38:11
  there is plenty of evidence. In fact, it says there is so
• 38:15
  much evidence from nature, from what we see in our world to
• 38:20
  convince us that God exists. It says there's so much evidence
• 38:23
  that we are without excuse. But what happens?
• 38:27
  Romans also says we suppress the evidence and the imagery in the
• 38:32
  Greek there is like a pedal so that when the evidence becomes,
• 38:36
  begins to be recognized by us and maybe there is a God, we
• 38:40
  suppress that we push down that pedal, we we deny it and so
• 38:44
  forth. And this is what I did as an
• 38:46
  atheist. I had my reasons for not wanting
• 38:49
  to find God. I was, I was a very happy drunk.
• 38:53
  I was a friendliest guy in the bar.
• 38:55
  I buy everybody drinks. I I did not want to be held
• 39:00
  accountable. I was talking to you earlier
• 39:02
  about how I helped set up an abortion when I was in college
• 39:07
  for a woman friend who's the father had run out on her and I
• 39:12
  helped set up that entire abortion and had no compunction
• 39:17
  about it because I told her the baby's near way you get rid of
• 39:20
  it as easy as that had no guilt over it.
• 39:24
  Why? Because I suppress the fact that
• 39:26
  there is a God against whom I had sinned grievously, and so I
• 39:30
  didn't want there to be a God in many ways.
• 39:32
  The other thing, Lila, is their psychological principles at work
• 39:37
  here there's a guy named Doctor Paul Vits, a professor of
• 39:41
  psychology at New York University.
• 39:43
  He studied the lives of all the famous atheists through history.
• 39:46
  Camus, Sart, Nietzsche, Freud, Voltaire, Wells, Foyerbach,
• 39:50
  O'Hare. Every single one of them either
• 39:53
  had a father who died when they were young, divorced their
• 39:55
  mother when they were young, or with whom they had a terrible
• 39:58
  relationship. And the implication is if you've
• 40:01
  if your earthly father has abandoned you or disappointed
• 40:05
  you greatly or whatever, you don't want to know about a
• 40:08
  heavenly father because he's only going to be worse.
• 40:10
  He's not going to hurt you worse.
• 40:12
  You think he's just a magnified version of your earthly father.
• 40:15
  And so there's this phenomenon where people whose father
• 40:19
  divorced their mother when they were young, they feel abandoned
• 40:22
  by him. They grow up and often they turn
• 40:26
  to atheism because they don't want to find out.
• 40:27
  They suppress the evidence. Same kind of evidence I would
• 40:30
  find convincing. They don't confined all the
• 40:32
  loopholes, all the reasons not to believe it, because they
• 40:34
  don't want to believe it. And by the way, CS Lewis had an
• 40:39
  antidote for this. If any of your people watching
• 40:42
  know someone who's in that position, CS Lewis said, imagine
• 40:47
  what the perfect father would be like.
• 40:49
  Oh, we can all imagine that Perfect father would be loving.
• 40:53
  He'd be kind, he'd be gracious. He'd be your biggest
• 40:55
  cheerleader. He'd pull you up in his lap and
• 40:58
  give you a hug. That's your heavenly father.
• 41:01
  Your heavenly Father's not just a magnified version of your
• 41:03
  earthly father who let you down. He is something different.
• 41:07
  He is unworldly, and he's the good father that we all hunger.
• 41:11
  After. I had a very difficult
• 41:13
  relationship with my father. My parents had three kids in a
• 41:17
  row. My dad poured himself into their
• 41:20
  lives, and then they were kind of done.
• 41:22
  He was anyway with having kids. But then several years passed
• 41:26
  and my mom found herself pregnant with me and that was
• 41:31
  not good news. And so we didn't never had a
• 41:33
  good relationship, he told me on the eve of my high school
• 41:36
  graduation. I don't have enough love for you
• 41:38
  to fill my little finger now. We were in the midst of a big
• 41:42
  argument at the time and so forth.
• 41:43
  And. But could that have been a
• 41:47
  factor in me pursuing atheism? Yeah, I think it probably was.
• 41:52
  Doesn't always happen. Doesn't mean that if your father
• 41:55
  dies when you're 5 years old, you're going to be an atheist.
• 41:56
  Doesn't necessarily mean that, but it can set that up.
• 42:00
  And I think in my case, it was one of the factors.
• 42:03
  So I think, Lila, the biblical principle that our tendency and
• 42:07
  our sinful nature is to suppress the evidence because we want to
• 42:11
  be God. We don't want to give over our
• 42:13
  sovereignty to some Heavenly Father.
• 42:16
  We want to be God. And so we can look at the same
• 42:19
  evidence and I can be convinced by it.
• 42:22
  And a skeptic will find the most absurd ways of trying to explain
• 42:26
  it away and be happy with that because they don't like the
• 42:29
  implications that they're going to lose sovereignty over
• 42:32
  themselves. Or they're, they're even just
• 42:35
  afraid. Maybe they don't even trust
• 42:36
  their own sovereignty. Their wound is so deep and
• 42:39
  their, their fear of God and an unhealthy fear of God.
• 42:43
  Like you said, they have the wrong image of God as they have
• 42:45
  the wrong image of themselves and their sonship or
• 42:47
  daughtership. And so they're, they're running
• 42:50
  from him. And it's so tragic, right?
• 42:52
  It's so tragic when God is there with open arms.
• 42:55
  You know, like the parable, I mean, it's the parable, the
• 42:57
  prodigal son, right? That's right.
• 42:58
  Like, he left his father and he didn't, you know, for whatever
• 43:02
  reason, he didn't have the right view of his father.
• 43:04
  He rejected his father. He chose the life of
• 43:05
  dissolution. But he came back and, and, and
• 43:09
  and his father welcomed him back.
• 43:10
  Yeah. I also think you're very
• 43:12
  fascinating what we were saying about all of these very famous
• 43:15
  brilliant atheists, because it's like the more brilliant you are,
• 43:19
  the more you have the capacity to articulate a worldview and
• 43:23
  sort of invent A worldview and then and then persuasively
• 43:26
  communicate it, right? Like that takes a a really big
• 43:29
  bright mind to be able to develop a worldview, articulate
• 43:33
  it back to other people. And it doesn't have to make
• 43:36
  perfect sense. And it, and in fact, most of
• 43:38
  these, you know, they are illogical to say this world is
• 43:40
  just without God. It is just objectively.
• 43:42
  I would argue like you're saying, it is objectively
• 43:45
  illogical, but you can make it sound compelling because it's
• 43:48
  very developed. It's a.
• 43:50
  System that seems very like a lot of thought was put into
• 43:53
  this. The sentences make sense, you
• 43:55
  know within, even if the premises are all flawed.
• 43:58
  I remember reading Skeptic magazine, so I interviewed its
• 44:00
  editor, Michael Shermer, for a book I was doing.
• 44:02
  He's one of the most famous atheists in America.
• 44:05
  And I'm reading the magazine and there's a woman in there.
• 44:07
  She was a doctor. And she said, what would it take
• 44:10
  for me to conclude that a miracle has happened, that God
• 44:13
  exists and it's done a miracle. She said, well, if a chicken
• 44:19
  learn how to play chess and learn how to read and beat a
• 44:23
  Grand Master at chess, maybe I would start to think perhaps
• 44:28
  something is there and you go, really, it's like, and I say
• 44:34
  this because I was the same way. I would ratchet up my skepticism
• 44:37
  when I was an atheist to unreasonably high levels.
• 44:40
  Yeah, I remember once. Like where did the human come
• 44:42
  from? Right?
• 44:43
  It's like, exactly why do you need the chicken to do that
• 44:45
  exactly? Humans like if, if, if I saw in
• 44:48
  the sky, God, I'm here God, you know, if God wrote that in the
• 44:53
  sky, my explanation, Oh, those are drones.
• 44:55
  You know, they got drones now that can do that, you know, or
• 44:58
  it's it's an optical illusion. I would have found some way to.
• 45:02
  I remember once there was an atheist who wanted to kind of
• 45:05
  have a little debate with me, and I said, tell you what, I'll
• 45:07
  debate you if you can prove that your name, let's say Bob Smith.
• 45:10
  Your name is Bob Smith. He said, well, that is my name.
• 45:13
  I said, yeah, you got to prove it to me.
• 45:15
  Well, I'm showing my driver's. Well, drivers, those can be
• 45:18
  counterfeited. I'm not going to believe a
• 45:20
  driver's license. What about a passport?
• 45:22
  Well, those can be counterfeited, too.
• 45:23
  I'm not going to believe a passport.
• 45:24
  Well, I can bring my wife in. She'll tell you my name.
• 45:26
  Oh, like I'm going to believe this witness who has something
• 45:29
  to gain by believing I don't believe her.
• 45:31
  And I can ratchet up my skepticism to unreasonably high
• 45:35
  levels to the point where I will not accept any evidence that
• 45:39
  your name is Bob Smith. And that's that's what so many
• 45:43
  atheists do. And I go, you know what?
• 45:45
  Look, just look at the evidence as you would for any important
• 45:49
  issue in life and see where the evidence points.
• 45:53
  And I think we've got about 20 lines of evidence to point
• 45:55
  powerfully and and convincingly toward the truth of the
• 45:59
  Christian message. Well, and the case for Christ,
• 46:01
  it wasn't even the case for God, the existence of God.
• 46:04
  It was it was a matter of divine revelation.
• 46:07
  Like Jesus is revelation that he came in in flesh and he, you
• 46:10
  know, was he was born of a virgin, he was crucified, he
• 46:12
  died, he was buried like that. This is divine revelation in the
• 46:15
  person of Christ. But to your point, like there's
• 46:17
  a historical record for it, which is so it's just so mind
• 46:19
  blowing to think about. OK, I want to talk about seeing
• 46:23
  the supernatural and I, I there's a lot of want to discuss
• 46:26
  there with the time we have with you.
• 46:27
  So you looked at these different experiences that people have had
• 46:32
  or this phenomenon that has existed that is not explained by
• 46:39
  any sort of natural. What would be the correct
• 46:43
  wording here? There's not a there's not a
• 46:45
  human explanation. For no naturalistic explanation
• 46:48
  that makes sense unless you manufacture some ridiculous
• 46:51
  thing like we just talked about. Yeah.
• 46:53
  So I looked at what is the evidence that there is something
• 46:56
  in our world beyond what we can see, touch and put in a test
• 46:59
  tube. And that's like the existence of
• 47:01
  this a spiritual realm. Yeah, a spiritual A.
• 47:03
  Supernatural realm, do we have a soul, for instance, I have a
• 47:05
  chapter on that with the interview with a PhD from
• 47:07
  Cambridge University, I think convincingly establishing that
• 47:12
  we have a soul and but beyond that, miracles.
• 47:17
  And I didn't just look at miracles that were a story that
• 47:21
  you're in Sunday school class or see on the Internet.
• 47:23
  I wanted stuff that was published in peer reviewed
• 47:25
  medical journals, things like that.
• 47:28
  So I, I have a series of those kind of cases that are
• 47:31
  documented by medical researchers where there is no
• 47:35
  reasonable alternative natural explanation, where there are
• 47:39
  multiple eyewitnesses with no motive to deceive, or we have
• 47:42
  medical documentation that take place in a spiritual environment
• 47:45
  and so forth. So I look at miracles.
• 47:47
  I looked at near death experiences.
• 47:50
  I looked at this one category that's fascinating, our deathbed
• 47:54
  visions. Those are different than near
• 47:57
  death experiences. In a near death experience,
• 48:01
  someone is clinically dead, so they may have no brain waves, no
• 48:05
  heartbeat, and so forth, but they're going to be revived at
• 48:07
  some point. But on a deathbed vision, this
• 48:09
  is a vision someone has just before they pass.
• 48:13
  And in Acts Chapter 7, Stephen, who's described as being full of
• 48:16
  the Holy Spirit just before he's stoned to death, sees the
• 48:19
  heavens open up and sees the Father and the Son together.
• 48:22
  That's a deathbed vision, Lila. These are incredibly common. 10s
• 48:27
  of thousands of these have been investigated.
• 48:30
  In fact, one team of researchers investigated 3000 of them and.
• 48:35
  And just to be clear, this is sorry to interrupt, but this is
• 48:37
  somebody who has a deathbed vision.
• 48:39
  They are able to communicate it to someone before they pass,
• 48:41
  obviously. And so that's like, there's all
• 48:43
  these accounts of people saying I saw XY and Z, and then, you
• 48:46
  know, an hour or a day later, they're dead.
• 48:48
  Right. These are people who are about
• 48:49
  to die, but they're able to share what to took place before
• 48:53
  they pass. In fact, it was interesting.
• 48:56
  Who's collecting those, by the way?
• 48:57
  Well. It's fascinating.
• 48:58
  There were, there were some some scholars from Cambridge and and
• 49:02
  Harvard and Oxford universities in the 1900s who began
• 49:08
  collecting these cases and investigating these cases and
• 49:11
  documented literally thousands upon thousands of them.
• 49:14
  Well, what's interesting is people became more interested
• 49:17
  more recently in these and a team of researchers went to a
• 49:20
  huge Hospice facility in New York State.
• 49:22
  Because a lot of people who are about to die, if they have this
• 49:25
  vivid vision unlike anything they've ever had, they're
• 49:29
  embarrassed to share it because they're going to think I'm nuts.
• 49:32
  They're going to think I'm crazier.
• 49:33
  I'm, I'm, I've got dementia or something.
• 49:35
  So a lot of people are reluctant to say something.
• 49:38
  So these researchers went to this huge Hospice facility in
• 49:40
  New York and said to the all the dying people there, if you have
• 49:44
  a vivid vision unlike anything you've ever had before you die,
• 49:49
  tell us. We just want to know. 88% of
• 49:53
  them had a pre death vision. What were the themes?
• 49:57
  What were they like? Yeah, was there?
• 49:59
  What were the common themes? Common themes are very common
• 50:02
  that people see angels coming for them.
• 50:05
  Now in in Luke chapter 16 verse 22 where Jesus is telling the
• 50:09
  story about Lazarus and the rich man who both died and the rich
• 50:13
  man went to Hades but the beggar Lazarus went to be in the bosom
• 50:18
  of Abraham in a place of bliss. It says angels escorted him
• 50:22
  there and people who are dying see angels coming.
• 50:26
  I'll give you an example. Charles Templeton was the pulpit
• 50:30
  partner, Billy Graham. They were best friends.
• 50:32
  Everybody thought Templeton would be the great evangelist.
• 50:35
  He's more articulate than than Billy.
• 50:37
  But he lost his faith at a liberal seminary and and became
• 50:41
  an atheist. Most famous skeptic in Canada,
• 50:44
  wrote an ugly book called Farewell to God, My Reason for
• 50:47
  rejecting the Christian faith. And we became friends because I
• 50:50
  interviewed him from my book, The Case for Faith.
• 50:53
  Anyway, most people don't know this, but he did come back to
• 50:55
  faith before he died. And so here he is on his
• 50:58
  deathbed, and he calls out to his wife, Madeline.
• 51:00
  Madeline. Madeline, can you see them?
• 51:01
  Can you see them? What are you talking about,
• 51:03
  Chuck? The angels, they're here in this
• 51:05
  room. Oh, they're so beautiful.
• 51:07
  They're singing is so wonderful. Their eyes.
• 51:09
  Look at their eyes. Oh, I'm going to heaven.
• 51:11
  I'm going to be with the Father and just before he died.
• 51:16
  And what's interesting is there are documented cases where
• 51:19
  people will see in this next realm, in this vision, something
• 51:23
  they did not know to be true. For instance, a woman named
• 51:26
  Doris, she was in London, England.
• 51:28
  She was dying. And very well documented case,
• 51:31
  she's on her deathbed. She sees the heavens open up.
• 51:33
  She sees angelic beings. She sees her father, who had
• 51:37
  died several years earlier, kind of welcoming her to this next
• 51:41
  World. But then she gets this puzzle
• 51:43
  look on her face. She said, wait a minute.
• 51:46
  Why is Vita with my father? What?
• 51:48
  What's Vita being there? Why?
• 51:51
  Why would Vita be there? Makes no sense.
• 51:53
  Why? And then she died.
• 51:55
  Well, Vita was her sister, and her sister Vita had died a
• 52:00
  couple of weeks earlier. But nobody had told Doris
• 52:03
  because she was so sick. They didn't want to kill her
• 52:05
  with the news. And her sister had died, so they
• 52:07
  kept this news from her. And yet in this deathbed vision,
• 52:10
  she sees her deceased sister in heaven.
• 52:13
  So I think there's something there that's a kind of
• 52:15
  corroboration. The other thing that's
• 52:17
  interesting is children who are dying.
• 52:19
  Little children, 4 or 5-6 or seven-year old children who are
• 52:22
  dying will often see angels coming for them.
• 52:25
  But they don't see the kind of Angel you would think they would
• 52:29
  see if this was merely a product for their imagination.
• 52:32
  Because to a child, what does an Angel look like?
• 52:35
  They have big wings, right? And feathery big wings.
• 52:39
  That's what children's cartoons of angels look like.
• 52:42
  That's not what they see. And the Bible doesn't say that
• 52:46
  all angels have wings. So what's interesting, there was
• 52:48
  a well documented case and a doctoral dissertation of a
• 52:51
  little girl who was dying. And she said, mommy, mommy, can
• 52:53
  you see them? Her mommy said, what do you
• 52:54
  mean? The angels?
• 52:56
  They're here for me. Oh, my goodness.
• 52:57
  Look, they're so beautiful. Look at their eyes and their
• 53:00
  voices and, oh, they're coming for me.
• 53:03
  And her mother didn't want to disappoint her, so she said, oh,
• 53:05
  yeah, yeah, I see them. I see them.
• 53:08
  Look at their big wings. And the little girl said, oh,
• 53:11
  mommy, you don't have to lie. They don't have wings.
• 53:15
  And she went on to describe them in vivid detail.
• 53:19
  Now, you would think if this was just something conjured up by
• 53:21
  her previous experience and imagination, it would be like a
• 53:24
  caricature of an Angel with wings.
• 53:26
  That's not what these children see.
• 53:28
  So there's some very interesting phenomena in these deathbed
• 53:31
  visions. The other thing that's
• 53:33
  fascinating are visions and dreams that are happening in the
• 53:37
  Middle East. In countries where it's often
• 53:40
  illegal to share your faith in Jesus or, you know, dangerous to
• 53:44
  share the Gospel, people are having supernatural dreams of
• 53:49
  Jesus and coming to faith. This is incredibly common, so
• 53:55
  common that of the Muslims who become Christians over the last
• 54:00
  couple decades, there've been more than in the 1600 years
• 54:02
  since Muhammad or 1400 years since Muhammad, 1/4 to 1/3 of
• 54:08
  them report having a Jesus dream before they come to faith.
• 54:12
  But here's the thing, and again, I'm I look for evidence, I look
• 54:15
  for corroboration. The phenomenon is not people
• 54:18
  going to sleep as a Muslim having a dream about a Jesus and
• 54:22
  come awakening as a Christian. That's not how it works.
• 54:25
  There's corroboration. Here's how it works.
• 54:27
  There's a case of a woman named Noor, Muslim, mother of eight
• 54:30
  children in Cairo. She has a Jesus dream.
• 54:33
  Jesus appears to her. They're walking along a
• 54:35
  lakeside. She's mesmerized by Jesus.
• 54:38
  She feels the love and the grace coming from Jesus like nothing
• 54:42
  she'd ever experienced in her life.
• 54:43
  And she said, Jesus, why are you appearing to me?
• 54:45
  I'm just a poor mother of eight children.
• 54:48
  And Jesus said, my friend will tell you tomorrow all about it.
• 54:52
  I said, who's your friend? And he gestures to someone she
• 54:55
  didn't notice was walking with them along the Lakeshore.
• 54:57
  She'd been so mesmerized by Jesus.
• 55:00
  She oh, there's a man with them and he says, my friend will tell
• 55:03
  you the next day she goes to the crowded marketplace in Cairo and
• 55:06
  she sees that man from her dream and she goes up to say you're
• 55:10
  the one. What are you talking about?
• 55:12
  Same glasses, same face, same clothes.
• 55:14
  You're the one, he said. Did you have a dream about Jesus
• 55:16
  last night? Yes, he was an underground
• 55:20
  church planter. He didn't want to go to the
• 55:22
  crowded place in in Cairo on Friday afternoon because it's
• 55:26
  chaotic, but he felt God had an assignment for him.
• 55:29
  He went that day. He meets nor, but here's the
• 55:31
  key. He pulls her aside.
• 55:33
  He opens the Bible and he shares the gospel.
• 55:37
  That's the corroboration. It's the external affirmation.
• 55:41
  This is not just something coming from someone's
• 55:42
  imagination. Although frankly, A devout
• 55:44
  Muslim has no incentive to have a dream about the Christian God
• 55:47
  that might lead them into apostasy and a possible death
• 55:50
  sentence. Let's face it.
• 55:51
  But still this external corrupt. I'll give you one real other
• 55:54
  quick one. There was a guy named, we call
• 55:55
  him Omar, who hated Jewish people.
• 55:58
  He grew up in a refugee camp. His goal was to kill as many
• 56:01
  Jewish people as he could and in the Middle East.
• 56:05
  And he said, I'm going to I'm going to join Hamas.
• 56:08
  So there was some Hamas people in his community, and he was
• 56:10
  going to go meet with them to join this terrorist
• 56:12
  organization. He's walking down the street and
• 56:15
  he's confronted by this vision of Jesus.
• 56:18
  And Jesus looks at him and stops him and says, Omar, this is not
• 56:22
  the plan I have for your life. I want you to turn around.
• 56:25
  I want you to go home. This is not what I have for your
• 56:28
  life. And he's just totally freaked
• 56:31
  out. So he turns around, he goes
• 56:33
  home. Later that day, a Christian
• 56:36
  family was moving into his apartment building across the
• 56:39
  hall from him. And he went over to meet him.
• 56:42
  And he told him about this vision he just had.
• 56:45
  And that Christian opens the Bible, shares the gospel with
• 56:48
  him. He comes to faith in Christ.
• 56:50
  And today, Omar himself is an underground church planter in
• 56:53
  the Middle East. Wow, These are so common that in
• 56:56
  Cairo you can go sometimes and and get the local newspaper and
• 57:00
  there'll be an ad and the ad says, call this number and we'll
• 57:05
  tell you about the man in white you met in your dream last
• 57:07
  night. Well, that would probably be an
• 57:09
  easy thing for authorities who are, you know, going out,
• 57:12
  although it's not probably illegal.
• 57:15
  No, not in Cairo. So then it's fine.
• 57:16
  Yeah, that. But that's that.
• 57:18
  OK, there you go. It could be dangerous.
• 57:20
  Yeah, not not there though. I was like that.
• 57:21
  That would be a tricky thing to say if you're.
• 57:23
  I don't know what country it would be where you can't, but,
• 57:25
  you know, share maybe Saudi Arabia, but.
• 57:27
  Tom Doyle, who's the world's leading expert in this, my book
• 57:30
  Seeing the Supernatural. And he said, Lee, I could pick
• 57:32
  up the phone right now and call Syria, Iraq, Iran and give you 5
• 57:36
  more stories. Wow.
• 57:37
  These are happening all over the Middle East, so that's another
• 57:41
  kind of supernatural encounter that I talk about.
• 57:43
  And seeing the supernatural to try to show that these aren't
• 57:46
  just things conjured up by people's imagination.
• 57:48
  These are externally corroborated.
• 57:50
  I think the, you know, devil's advocate that's a skeptic might
• 57:54
  say, and I'm, you know, you've talked to many of many a skeptic
• 57:56
  is OK. You know, there's something it,
• 57:59
  there is something supernatural about the human person.
• 58:02
  The soul probably does exist. There is a spirit realm.
• 58:04
  There is good, there is evil, you know, and there are good
• 58:08
  spirits generally. It's hard to know exactly.
• 58:10
  It's not a science we don't do. And also some people have these
• 58:14
  near death experiences or visions, others don't.
• 58:17
  Some people have these visions before death and others might
• 58:20
  not. Some people see different things
• 58:22
  like some people might see Mother Mary or they see Jesus or
• 58:26
  they see an Angel or whatever, right.
• 58:27
  So, so therefore, you know, it's inconclusive what it means.
• 58:32
  Everybody personally, you know, we're in the age of post
• 58:34
  relativism, post modernism, relativistic society.
• 58:37
  To each your own, you know, like do your yoga and like have your
• 58:41
  spiritual experience. What do you say to that?
• 58:43
  I say that it's a cumulative case.
• 58:46
  So yes, I would not base my conclusion that Christianity is
• 58:51
  true based on near death experiences, even though they
• 58:53
  are consistent with the Christian message.
• 58:55
  I wouldn't base it on deathbed visions or visions of Muslims or
• 58:58
  miracles even, but when you the case is cumulative.
• 59:03
  So I look at the scientific evidence from cosmology,
• 59:06
  physics, biochemistry, genetics that points toward a
• 59:09
  supernatural creator. And then I look at the evidence
• 59:11
  for the resurrection that points toward Jesus being the unique
• 59:15
  Son of God, proving it by returning from the dead.
• 59:17
  Then I look at some of these supernatural experiences and you
• 59:21
  have to put the whole thing together to come to a reasonable
• 59:24
  conclusion that this is consistent with the Christian
• 59:27
  message and therefore supportive of the fact that God does exist.
• 59:31
  That Jesus is his unique son. And therefore the message of
• 59:34
  Jesus is not just the suggestions of a wise sage, but
• 59:39
  it's from God himself. And therefore we would be wise
• 59:43
  if we would follow those teachings for the way we live
• 59:45
  our lives. I think that's a beautiful
• 59:48
  response there because these are all meant to be when we share
• 59:51
  the stories of these things, encouragement, yes, that's
• 59:53
  right. And encouragement, reminders,
• 59:56
  affirmations, you know, sometimes even exhortations to
• 59:59
  faith. But to your.
• 1:00:00
  Point, there's so much, I mean the body of evidence
• 1:00:03
  historically like you were describing earlier and then just
• 1:00:06
  like the real world experience that each of us have in the
• 1:00:09
  depths of our souls. Oh my goodness.
• 1:00:11
  And you know, I talk in my book about direct experiences of God,
• 1:00:14
  where cases where the most unlikely characters have this
• 1:00:18
  direct experience with God that they weren't looking for that
• 1:00:22
  transformed their life. And I'll give you a quick story
• 1:00:25
  about one of them. Evil Knievel the great
• 1:00:27
  motorcycle daredevil, right? Oh, OK, And that's his real
• 1:00:29
  name. Real name was Robert.
• 1:00:31
  OK, but they call. Him, They call him evil comedo.
• 1:00:34
  He was in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most
• 1:00:36
  broken bones of any human being. He's a guy that.
• 1:00:38
  Wouldn't want to be his mom. Wouldn't want to.
• 1:00:40
  Be his mom would be. Very, very tough.
• 1:00:42
  No, no offense, Eva Midfield, but that would be that would be
• 1:00:44
  painful. We thought my son broke his leg
• 1:00:47
  recently. Thankfully it wasn't broken, but
• 1:00:49
  you know, it's rough. That must be hard.
• 1:00:52
  But you know, here's a guy, he was a cultural icon.
• 1:00:55
  He was a multi millionaire, but he was a womanizer.
• 1:00:57
  He was a drunk. He was a gambler.
• 1:01:00
  He he God was irrelevant to him. And yet he's standing on the
• 1:01:04
  beach in his later years. And he said, Lee, God spoke to
• 1:01:08
  me and I'm not talking about through my ears in my heart.
• 1:01:12
  I I heard it in my heart and God said, Robert, I've rescued you
• 1:01:17
  more times than you'll ever know.
• 1:01:18
  Now you need to come to me through my son Jesus.
• 1:01:22
  And he I said, what do I I didn't know who Jesus was.
• 1:01:26
  And so we called the only friend he knew who was a Christian and
• 1:01:28
  said, who's Jesus? I just had this incredible
• 1:01:30
  experience. And he said, get the case for
• 1:01:32
  Christ. That looks nice.
• 1:01:33
  I got my book. You read it anyway.
• 1:01:35
  Evel Knievel This cultural icon had 180° transformation for
• 1:01:42
  Christ, totally his values, his characters.
• 1:01:44
  And your book helped with that. Yeah, ironically, yeah.
• 1:01:48
  And amazing. He was so transformed that when
• 1:01:50
  he was baptized, he told this story.
• 1:01:53
  The pastor ripped up his sermon and said you all have heard the
• 1:01:56
  gospel. Anybody wants to come up right
• 1:01:57
  now, receive Christ and be baptized, Come on up. 700 people
• 1:02:02
  came up and on his tombstone. He died about a year and a half
• 1:02:05
  later. We became friends before he
• 1:02:06
  died. But on his tombstone stone he
• 1:02:09
  had written believe in Jesus Christ.
• 1:02:12
  I mean, there's a guy who is headed at 1000 miles an hour
• 1:02:16
  away from God, and God for whatever reason chose to reach
• 1:02:20
  down, talk to him personally, turn him 180°, change.
• 1:02:26
  What do you do with that? You believe, you believe and you
• 1:02:31
  thank God for for the gift of faith.
• 1:02:34
  Thank you, Lee, because I, I've cheered it briefly beforehand
• 1:02:37
  and I know I was messaging you on act saying let's do this,
• 1:02:39
  whatever it is, get this show. But I, you know, when I was 14,
• 1:02:42
  I read case for like case for Christ.
• 1:02:45
  Maybe I was 15. I was during a journey.
• 1:02:47
  So I was raised in a Christian family, but I was trying to
• 1:02:50
  decide what do I believe? You know, like there's that
• 1:02:52
  process that many of us have not everyone, but many, especially
• 1:02:55
  those raising it with a Christian family.
• 1:02:57
  And I remember there was AI think it was a speaker,
• 1:02:59
  Christian speaker of some kind saying that, you know, God,
• 1:03:02
  every a friend of mine, their, their brother died of a brain
• 1:03:05
  cancer, you know, young brother, 8 years old.
• 1:03:07
  Another preacher I heard was saying that, you know, every day
• 1:03:10
  people die and if you don't tell them about heaven, they'll go to
• 1:03:12
  hell. So a fundamentalist view of
• 1:03:14
  Christianity, it's not quite fully correct there.
• 1:03:17
  And so I was hearing these things that I remember just
• 1:03:19
  being, you know, is this true? I think God is God.
• 1:03:22
  If, if, if anybody's real, it's God, not me, like, because I had
• 1:03:25
  to be created by someone. So that kind of made sense when
• 1:03:27
  I explored it. But that is, is Jesus Christ
• 1:03:30
  God? And what does that mean?
• 1:03:32
  Right. And so I just think your work,
• 1:03:34
  your scholarship on it, quite frankly, has been so fundamental
• 1:03:38
  for so many people, including myself.
• 1:03:39
  So I want to just thank you and, and, and tell you how meaningful
• 1:03:43
  it is. I know you hear this all the
• 1:03:44
  time. And then I, I love the journey
• 1:03:46
  you're on to continue to explore, you know, and I know we
• 1:03:49
  were talking earlier, but the Shroud of Turin is another, yes,
• 1:03:53
  one which, you know, I don't know if you're going to write on
• 1:03:55
  that in the future. And who's a scholar?
• 1:03:57
  Yeah, named Doctor Jeremiah Johnson and a story.
• 1:03:59
  And who's an expert on the Shroud?
• 1:04:01
  And I'm very close to concluding that it's authentic.
• 1:04:05
  I mean, I'm very close. It's the evidence is really
• 1:04:09
  powerful and persuasive. And, you know, years ago you
• 1:04:12
  wrote it off because they said, oh, well, you know, they they
• 1:04:15
  tested the fiber and it dated back to the Middle Ages.
• 1:04:18
  And now we find out that that was a patch.
• 1:04:20
  There was a fire. Yeah.
• 1:04:21
  There was the nuns put on, that was put on.
• 1:04:23
  We had Father Spitzer and the show.
• 1:04:25
  This detailing that was fascinating.
• 1:04:26
  That's right. So the evidence is very powerful
• 1:04:29
  for. That, well, if you have the
• 1:04:31
  time, I'd love you to apply the analytical tools you have to the
• 1:04:35
  shroud. To the shroud, obviously you're
• 1:04:36
  going to do that, it sounds like, but also to the tilma,
• 1:04:39
  because this is a historical event, Our Lady of Guadalupe
• 1:04:42
  appearing to Juan Diego. You know, we're here in Southern
• 1:04:43
  California. So there's a lot of and we have
• 1:04:46
  our an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe here in the wall here.
• 1:04:48
  But you know, studying the tilma, it's fascinating stuff.
• 1:04:52
  There's, there's scientifically studies.
• 1:04:54
  They can't detect how this could have been made by human, you
• 1:04:58
  know, human hands, human minds. So curious at some point, I'd
• 1:05:01
  love to hear your take, if you think it's real or not.
• 1:05:04
  And the other one is Eucharistic miracles, which is another, you
• 1:05:07
  know, tricky one, but there's been a lot of study, science,
• 1:05:10
  scientific study, but I love your eyes on it as a, as an
• 1:05:13
  investigative report. I need to check that out.
• 1:05:16
  The there's so much out there. I when I make the case for the
• 1:05:19
  resurrection, I don't use the shroud because it is more
• 1:05:24
  controversial because it now you got to kind of build that case
• 1:05:28
  to kind of establish that it is supernatural and so forth.
• 1:05:31
  So I don't use it in my case, but I, I think there's good
• 1:05:36
  evidence that it's authentic and, and those aren't the only
• 1:05:39
  miracles that God has done. And then again, there are
• 1:05:43
  demonic counterfeits as well. I have a book, a chapter in my
• 1:05:47
  book, seen the supernatural about the demonic.
• 1:05:50
  And you know, what is it that demons are capable of doing?
• 1:05:52
  What is this the Satan can accomplish and do and to deceive
• 1:05:56
  us and to point us in the wrong direction.
• 1:05:58
  And so we have to be really careful.
• 1:06:00
  And I have a section of my book about how do we discern what is
• 1:06:03
  from God and what is not from God.
• 1:06:05
  And one of the key things I think in that is, is Scripture
• 1:06:09
  is, is understanding the Scripture to the point where we
• 1:06:12
  can compare phenomena to scriptural data.
• 1:06:17
  Because if something is real, it's not going to contradict
• 1:06:20
  what we're told in scripture, right?
• 1:06:22
  So in my book. Divine revelation won't
• 1:06:24
  contradict itself, ever. God does not contradict exactly.
• 1:06:27
  And so I look in my book about ghosts, and, you know, my
• 1:06:31
  conclusion about gross ghosts is, you know, a technical
• 1:06:34
  definition of a ghost is a spirit, someone who's died, but
• 1:06:37
  their spirit refuses to enter into the afterlife.
• 1:06:40
  I don't see that in the Bible. I don't see an example of that
• 1:06:44
  in the Bible. I'm more skeptical about ghosts
• 1:06:47
  than I am about, say, deathbed visions and things like that.
• 1:06:51
  And you can, you can interpret ghosts through the lens of it is
• 1:06:54
  a demonic thing trying to scare somebody or there is a soul that
• 1:06:58
  is that, you know, God permits through his grace like a
• 1:07:00
  message. Because I do think that's, that
• 1:07:02
  can be real. Like I have a sense my yeah, my
• 1:07:05
  grandmother is, you know, telling me she loves me or, you
• 1:07:08
  know, I see like in these near death expansion, she they see
• 1:07:10
  the family member. Yeah.
• 1:07:11
  And there's a form of communication.
• 1:07:13
  So God can permit that in his holy will.
• 1:07:15
  He can't wishes. What, what concerns me are cases
• 1:07:18
  where someone will have an encounter with a dead person who
• 1:07:21
  visits them, a ghost so to speak, and tells them, oh,
• 1:07:25
  everything's great, I'm doing fine, you know, love the kids
• 1:07:28
  and everything. And if God's not real kind of
• 1:07:30
  thing. But they live an ungodly life
• 1:07:33
  and and the message to them would be, oh, I guess he, he
• 1:07:36
  didn't care about God. And so I guess I won't need to
• 1:07:39
  either I think. Meaning it's it's out of the
• 1:07:41
  context of, you know, you need to.
• 1:07:42
  Jesus Christ is Lord. Exactly.
• 1:07:45
  Yeah, to me that's evidence of of counterfeit, the amount of.
• 1:07:48
  Counterfeit. Like a psychic is saying.
• 1:07:50
  Your mother is saying everything's fine.
• 1:07:52
  Yeah. Exactly, and I have a section of
• 1:07:53
  my book debunking psychics interesting as a result too.
• 1:07:57
  Because the Bible tells us, don't get involved with that.
• 1:07:59
  We are having, I think an ex psychic on the show soon.
• 1:08:02
  Oh, to share kind of her, her tricks, you know, former and
• 1:08:05
  former life tricks. So it's fascinating stuff.
• 1:08:08
  There are hot readings, cold readings, warm readings,
• 1:08:10
  different techniques they use to convince you they know more than
• 1:08:13
  they really do. And and so I have that in my
• 1:08:15
  book, Seeing the Supernatural, but that'll be a fascinating
• 1:08:19
  discussion. We'll come back.
• 1:08:20
  We'll do the shroud. Yeah.
• 1:08:21
  And if you, if you have the time, Tilma, I'd love your take
• 1:08:24
  on that and also the Eucharistic miracles.
• 1:08:27
  There's so much you dig into. Yes, yeah.
• 1:08:29
  So thank you, Lee. This has been a true pleasure.
• 1:08:32
  Where can people find your work? Lee at least least strobel.com
• 1:08:35
  is my website. I'm very active on X.
• 1:08:39
  Yes, very good XX Follow guys. That's right.
• 1:08:42
  So it's like being a journalist again.
• 1:08:44
  It's like headlines, you know, short, you know, snippets about
• 1:08:49
  what's going on. So if people, you know, see, I'm
• 1:08:53
  at Lee Strobel on X and I'll try to follow you back.
• 1:08:56
  And I've made some, we've connected on X, right?
• 1:09:00
  I've made some really good friends on X.
• 1:09:02
  I've never met in person. But it's not just the cesspool
• 1:09:04
  that people say that it is. There's good stuff happening on
• 1:09:07
  X. I agree.
• 1:09:09
  Thank you so much Lee, truly congratulations on on your just
• 1:09:12
  incredible work and thank you for letting God use you in so
• 1:09:15
  many peoples lives, including mine.
• 1:09:18
  Thank you. Thanks so much everyone for
• 1:09:20
  listening to this episode of the Lila Rose Show.
• 1:09:22
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• 1:09:24
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• 1:09:35
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• 1:09:37
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• 1:09:39
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• 1:09:43
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• 1:09:56
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