FLASH EPISODE: Satan's Dare with Senator Jim DeMint
Charlie is joined by Senator Jim DeMint, the former senator from South Carolina, who has written an important new book, "Satan's Dare," that wrestles with perhaps the most profound issue of our time: the death of truth. As what's false becomes more elevated and celebrated, the truth of God's creation becomes further obscured in our culture, our education system, our media, our politics, and much of the Christian church, Senator DeMint's book works to bring life's most provocative questions to the forefront in his newest, and perhaps his most important book. As Senator DeMint writes, "Christians – in fact every thinking person – need to ask the hard questions and seek the answers that will expose the truth and confirm their faith." Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Scientific Evidence for the Bible00:08:34
Hey, everybody.
Today in the Charlie Kirk Show, Senator Jim DeMint has a very important message, and he's talking about something that I think is so important for all of us, which it's about a book that he's written called Satan's Dare.
And it's a really interesting topic.
I think you're going to enjoy it.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you want to support our program, you could do so at charliekirk.com/slash support.
That's charliekirk.com/slash support.
I want to thank those of you that have supported us and continue to get behind us generously and enthusiastically.
Dylan from St. Charles, Missouri.
Thank you for your support.
Sabra from Missouri as well.
Thank you.
Kathy from Hawaii.
Thank you for your support.
Norman from Alabama.
Thank you for your support.
Jeff from Tennessee.
Thank you.
James from Coronado, California.
Thank you.
Ryan from Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Thank you.
Also, Lauren from Los Angeles.
Thank you for your support.
And Kristen from Howell, Michigan.
Thank you.
And Pamela from Vancouver, Washington.
Thank you.
Thank you for supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support.
Email us your thoughts, everybody.
Freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com and we will see you in December at AmericaFest at tpusa.com slash A-M-F-E-S-T, tpusa.com/slash A-M F-E-S-T.
See you there.
Biggest speakers in the movement, Tucker Carlson and more, tpusa.com/slash AMF EST.
Jim DeMint is here.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Hey, it's Thursday, everybody.
So it is ThinkerThursday, T-H-I-N-K-R.org.
Thursdays.
Thinker.org is amazing.
It's a place where you can consume timeless information, big ideas, and books very quickly and seamlessly.
Thinker.org/slash Charlie will allow you to consume information like The Case for Christ, a journalist's personal investigation into the evidence for Jesus, one of my favorite books ever written.
Lee Strobel uses his award-winning journalism and skills to interrogate Christianity's central claim about the resurrection of Jesus by conducting hours worth of interviews with leading New Testament historians, theologians, and philosophers.
He began his project as a cynical skeptic that ended two years later with the conviction that Jesus Christ was exactly who he claimed to be.
The case for Christ provides some of the arguments and evidence that led Strobel to judge the resurrection as a reality.
You'll be able to go into the gospel of Jesus Christ and be able to learn ideas.
Some of the insights, the embarrassing honesty of the gospel accounts is a mark of authenticity.
The accounts of Jesus were not, after the fact, mythical fabrications, but news flashes in terms of timing.
Accounts outside of the Bible corroborate key details of the story of Jesus and the fact that there was a body in the tomb and that there wasn't, that needs explanation.
Circumstantial evidence doesn't prove the resurrection happened, but the supernatural explanation is the most compelling.
I think you'll enjoy it.
Check out thinker.org/slash Charlie.
There's some phenomenal books as well, such as Politics in the English Language by George Orwell and so much more.
T-H-I-N-K-R.org slash Charlie.
Check it out right now.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Today is a friend of mine, Senator Jim DeMint, a great American who has a new book out called Satan's Dare.
Very interesting, just kind of reading the overview here.
Senator, thank you for joining our show.
Why did you write Satan's Dare?
Well, Charlie, it's a novel, but as Josh McDowell said, there's more truth in it than just about any other nonfiction.
I'm just convinced that America is declining because the Christian church is declining.
This country was founded on Judeo-Christian ideas, which come right out of the Bible.
And I don't see too many Christians today who have the confidence in their faith to defend the truth of the Bible.
And so, this is a story of people who are dealing with suffering and tragedy in their lives and asking a lot of questions.
But there's several debates in the book between science and the Bible.
But the whole point for me is to prove that the Bible is true, and science actually proves that it's true.
And everyone I've talked to who's read it said they came out with a lot more confidence in what they believe.
And even skeptics are asking some more serious questions.
So the connection with politics is we're dealing with symptoms in Washington and the symptoms of no truth, a loss of freedom.
We're told that truth and freedom begin with the knowledge of God.
And so we just need to remember that if we want to keep our country.
Well, tell us more about kind of the book.
I know it's written from a fictional standpoint, but just kind of talk more about that and kind of all the different themes that you incorporate.
Again, the book is called Satan's Dare.
Yeah, the title comes from the first chapter of Job, where Satan dares God to remove Job's blessing, saying that if he did, Job would curse God.
And one of the theories in the book is that we have to go through this physical world to prove Satan wrong.
We all have tragedy and suffering in our life.
And if we continue to praise and worship God through the whole process, we prove Satan wrong.
We defeat Satan in a sense.
And so the characters in the book are actually two pastors who suffer terrible tragedies in their lives.
And they're asking questions.
One becomes the world's most famous atheist.
The other clings to his faith.
And these two end up in a debate.
And they're debating science versus the Bible and what's true and what's not.
And they discuss a lot of different theories in the Bible.
But the whole point is to convince readers that what they believe is true if they're Christians and hopefully to challenge skeptics.
But it's a love story because couples go through this together, but they're asking a lot of questions that I think a lot of Christians are afraid to ask.
So let's go through some of the specifics.
It says that it's a story of love, tragedy, suffering, failure, mercy, justice, and redemption.
And it follows a diverse group of characters.
And the book uncovers hard questions believers and non-believers face together.
It leaves readers with questions like, why did God create a world filled with suffering and pain?
And how do people receive eternal life?
It also provides a framework for Christians to search for truth, including how there are science, statistics, and common sense, all prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that God created the physical universe.
Let's focus on that one.
What are some of the things that you touch on this book that show that science, statistics, and common sense shows that this universe was created by God?
Well, that's actually an easy one, even though a lot of people are denying it today, is because statistically, it is impossible for the complexity of life and even physical matter to have been created by accident, just out of some big bang.
The big bang defies physics in the sense that you can't create energy and light out of nothing.
But we just bring in a lot of scientific evidence here of what actually happened and how the Bible is consistent with that.
And we look at different interpretations of the Bible.
Is it six-day creation or is it six periods of time and align that with what some of the most credible science says?
But you come away from this knowing that, I mean, it's hard to look at anything in this physical world and say that happened by accident.
I don't think so.
And the fact that you say it might have evolved over billions of years without any intelligent design or planning, that is just so improbable that it's hard to believe that people actually believe it.
The Truth of Easter Resurrection00:02:11
But Charlie, we're teaching that in our schools.
We're not teaching our kids that there was a God who created this earth.
He's sovereign over all things.
Nations can't rise without his support.
We're teaching them this happened by accident and that they are accidents of an evolutionary process.
And that has a fundamental change on how we see ourselves and particularly our country.
Our founders told us that this constitution that they gave us would not work except for a righteous and religious people.
We can't throw religion out when this whole country was built on biblical Judeo-Christian ideas.
So we can not only prove that God created this earth, we can prove that he continues to have a role in everything that we do.
Well, and so you write in this here, why you wrote Satan's Dare, that sometimes Christians actually get this wrong.
You went to a sermon on Easter Sunday and you were moved that the pastor said it didn't actually matter if it was true, only that we believed it was true.
And it reminded you of a sermon this Easter Sunday when Raphael Warnock, the pastor, said the meaning of Easter is more transcendent than the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Why is this a problem?
Well, it's kind of how the left thinks today.
And when we start thinking that way in the church, that it doesn't matter if the Bible is really true as long as we believe it, that's ridiculous.
And as Paul in the Bible says, if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, then we're basically pitiful people here believing something that's not true.
But today, truth has lost its value in America.
The left is saying, if you believe it, it's true.
That's not true.
We have to know what truth really is.
And the Bible tells us that truth begins with the knowledge of God.
And Jesus said, if you know the truth, then you will be free.
You will be set free.
And we talk a lot about freedom in America, but we don't connect it with truth and where truth comes from.
And so, again, while the book is not political, I think folks will read it and see the love story.
Finding Confidence in Faith00:08:46
I think they'll see themselves in the character, characters in every situation in the book, because we all go through a lot of this.
But the end of all of this is I want a group, a remnant of Christians around the country who have bold confidence in what they believe.
And they're not going to sit still anymore for people teaching their kids in schools things that aren't true, things that are statistically impossible.
Yes, that's well said.
And so many Christians, though, are kind of falling prey to this, unfortunately, and pastors as well.
And so writing this book, you know, kind of being once the most conservative senator in the Senate and then now getting into kind of the novel world.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
That's an interesting development, kind of going from being, you know, the fighter in the Senate for conservative values to writing novels.
Yeah, well, I'm still in the fight here in D.C., as you know, with the Conservative Partnership.
And our job is just to support conservatives here.
And part of that's a ministry because you'll find that most of the strong conservative fighters here are also strong believers.
But I've been working on Satan's dare for more than 10 years, started out with just a lot of research on science, biblical evidence, archaeology.
And my publisher told me after a couple of years of showing him what I was doing that this was just too much in the weeds, that I needed to develop a story around it with real characters asking the questions.
questions and resolving it themselves so that the people could relate to it.
And it still took me a long time.
But Charlie, you've written a lot, but when I got to the end of it, I feel like I lost my friends because I got to know the characters so well over so many years.
But I think people will enjoy reading the book, but they'll also get a whole lot of profound truth out of it and a lot of just thoughtful questions that we all need to ask and pursue those answers.
I think that's very important.
Can you talk about also kind of just more broadly for Christians out there, why it's important that we continue to remind ourselves of these ideas and that even the faithful need to dive into this as well.
So talk about that.
Well, we can't be afraid to ask questions.
I say in the book several times is truth is never afraid of questions.
And there are a lot of questions about creation, about things like the flood, a lot of different things in the Bible.
Is there really an Adam and Eve?
And it's, you know, the atheist in the book calls our beliefs Santa Claus God because it's we want to believe it's true, but we know it's not.
And he kind of defines faith as trying real hard to believe something you know ain't true.
And I'm afraid that too many Christians are kind of at that point.
They're afraid to go beneath the surface because they don't know the answers.
And I think the book will just show them that you can ask questions, you can find a lot of answers.
And even if you don't get all the answers, your faith is confirmed as you know more and more about what God's plan is, why we need to go through this world.
How do you get to the new heaven that is talked about in the Bible?
And I think it's a fascinating journey for Christians.
And even some who read it, who were Jewish or non-Christians, found that it challenged them to look more closely at what the Bible really says.
Well, I think that's the most important thing.
And so why the title?
What's the story behind the title?
Well, the title came from the first chapter of Job, where Satan dare's God.
But what I do is I translate that into, I think Job is really analogous to every human being and that we all go through this life.
And one of the theories of the book and the debate is that by going through this life and continuing to praise God no matter what happens to us, we prove God right, we prove Satan wrong, and we answer Satan's dare in effect.
And through this journey, we come up with a lot of the reasons why God's people have to go through a physical world that always ends in death and why the blood of Jesus is so essential to take us to the next world.
We try to not just do this on kind of faith of something you can't get your hands on, but real answers to these questions that come straight out of the Bible.
But sometimes they're non-traditional interpretations of the Bible.
So, you know, I found some people who are pretty traditional in how they look at the Bible don't like some of these theories.
But the characters come up with these theories honestly by what they see in the Bible and trying to find alignment with what we believe is true in the scientific world.
And I just came away from my years of working on this with so much more confidence in what I believe and the truth of the Bible.
And it helps me in what I do in politics as well, because I try to challenge Christians to get engaged in politics.
And some of them say it's too dirty.
I don't want to get involved.
But this is our stewardship.
We were given this beautiful garden called America.
And it's our job to take care of it and pass it along to the next generation.
And I'm afraid too many Christians don't see that as their responsibility.
And part of that is just a very liberal, progressive church that has crept in in a lot of places that just doesn't believe the Bible anymore.
They don't teach it.
And that's what I'm trying to change here is I'm not going to walk away from politics.
I'm just going to try to invite a lot of believers to get more engaged in helping to run this country.
Well, I love that.
So one last thing I want to ask you just about the conservative movement.
Some people in the conservative movement say we should forget our faith tradition.
We need to become a secular conservative movement.
What's your thought on that?
Is it important that the conservative movement remains faith-centered?
It has to be.
Like we talked about before, there's really no America without God.
And we were told from the very beginning that the Constitution that provides us freedom does not work unless you've got a righteous, a religious people, God-fearing people.
All our rights come from God.
If we forget that, Charlie, I think the biggest danger we have today is the left has become a religion.
Everything they want to do is doctrine.
And they really do want the government to be our God.
They want us to be dependent on government.
And every program they pass makes us more dependent.
And that's going to draw a lot of people in if they don't have a strong faith and believe that their life is in God's hands, that the Bible is the truth.
It tells us how to know God, how to know each other and ourselves.
And so faith and freedom are two sides of the same coin, and we can't have one without the other.
I totally agree.
Any closing thoughts, Senator, about the book or this topic in general?
Again, it's Satan's Dare.
I want everyone listening to go pick up a copy.
Any closing thoughts?
Well, Satan's Dare is on Amazon.
It's in most bookstores that I've checked out.
And I would just encourage people, particularly believers out there today, is look at what Charlie Kirk's doing with the churches.
And hopefully you'll get a chance to go to one of those programs because people have come away so inspired.
But we have to have a confidence in our faith.
And Satan's Dare will give you a lot of the answers to questions that maybe you're afraid to ask.
So I would be very grateful if Americans would read it and get involved in not only their church, but their country and their communities, and mostly continue to prove Satan wrong by praising God no matter what happens.
Amen.
Well, thank you, Senator.
Great work on the book.
Everyone, check it out.
Satan's Dare.
So deeply appreciate it.
Thanks, Charlie.
Thanks.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And please get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.
God bless you guys.
Speak to you soon.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.