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June 23, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
44:51
WHAT’S SO GREAT… Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep607
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Coming up, a special episode.
I'll sum up and conclude my discussion of Christian apologetics based on my book, What's So Great About Christianity?
by offering concrete reasons to become a Christian.
In the end, I'm going to argue it's not about the philosophical or scientific evidence, not even about the historical benefits that Christianity has conferred on the West.
It's It comes down to the simple question, how can Christianity improve my life?
And I'll tell you how.
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For the past several months, I've been doing, really toward the end of the podcast, each day a segment, all part of a mini-course on Christian apologetics.
Now, what is Christian apologetics?
It's nothing more than making the rational case for belief in God, and specifically belief in Christianity.
And we've covered a lot of ground here.
We've covered, just looking here at the table of contents of what's so great about Christianity.
We began with the global triumph of Christianity.
Christianity is today the fastest growing religion in the world.
I talked about the atheist assault on religion, the way in which there's an anti-religious bias and indoctrination in the schools.
I talked about the spiritual basis for limited government.
I've spoken about how Christianity introduced the idea of the affirmation of ordinary life, also the idea of human dignity and human brotherhood, the idea that we're all equal in the eyes of God.
Then we talked about Christianity and science, the theological roots of science.
I had a chapter called Christianity and the Invention of Invention.
And some focus also on the Galileo case.
Then I went on to the argument from design, talking about how the Big Bang, the universe with the beginning, I called it God and the astronomers, a designer planet, this is the anthropic principle.
I discussed evolution in some detail.
Then I switched to Christianity and philosophy.
We discussed philosophers like Kant and Schopenhauer and Hume.
One of those chapters was called Why Miracles Are Possible.
Also, the skeptic's wager Pascal, his famous argument for the reasonableness of faith.
And then, in a more recent section, Christianity and Morality.
I talked about natural law and divine law.
I talked about why man is not just a material object in the world.
That chapter was called The Ghost in the Machine.
And then I talked about how atheism is appealing, not because it is sort of more rational or It adheres more closely to the facts, but rather it's appealing because it offers a way out of morality, a way out of having to follow the Ten Commandments and other divine codes.
And then most recently I talked about Jesus among other gods, the uniqueness of Christianity.
So I'm just giving you these little signposts that we've already traveled.
And now we are at the last chapter, and this is going to be the focus of today's podcast.
The last chapter sort of puts my hair down and says, in effect, okay, let's see where we are now.
What is the real case for being a Christian?
And just as I said that atheism is not just a simple matter of reason, Christianity isn't either.
People don't just become Christians because, like, well, I'm persuaded by the historical argument, or, hey, Dinesh, you know, anthropology has brought me over.
No, those things can support your faith.
But the question is, why have the faith in the first place?
What is the bottom line?
What is the practical? What is the and therefore what argument for being a Christian?
So this chapter begins with a quote from Thomas More.
This is from the film, a great film, if you haven't seen it, A Man for All Seasons.
And the quotation goes like this,"'Finally, it is not a matter of obedience.
Finally, it is a matter of love.'" Very profound quote in my view because at one point Thomas More is being asked by a friend of his, he's like, why do you do this?
Why are you willing to risk martyrdom?
Is it really worth it?
Is it all because you just want to be kind of a good boy and follow the rules?
And Thomas More goes, no, that's actually not why I'm doing it.
Finally, he says, it's not about obedience.
Finally, it's a matter of love, the point being that if you love God, you want to do God's will.
You're not being forced into it.
It's not a matter of the wagging finger or the threats or punishment.
No, you're doing it because you're doing it out of reciprocal affection for the God who created you and has given you all that you have.
Now, There's an interesting anecdote I like to tell about the scholar and preacher John Stott.
He talks about the time where he was confronted by a man who came up to him after a sermon and said, I have a lot of questions for you, John Stott.
And John Stott answered the question, and then the next week he found the guy was back.
I got another question. And after a while, John Stott said to him this.
He said, listen, if I were to sit you down...
Answer your problems to your complete intellectual satisfaction.
Would you be willing to alter your manner of life and become a Christian?
And the man kind of blushed and kind of smiled slightly.
And then he kind of left and Stott said he never came back.
And John Stott said he realized at that point that the guy's resistance to Christianity was not intellectual.
He didn't want Christianity because he thought it would disrupt and somehow mess up his life.
And so, the point being that for many people, the reluctance to embrace Christianity is practical as much as it is intellectual.
They know what Christianity means.
They know what the evidence is.
They know how their lives will change if they become Christians, and they don't really want it.
So, let's ask that question, which is, let's address the concern of people who have this worry about Christianity, and let's look at the ways in which Christianity can and will change your life.
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Feel the difference. I'm talking about the ways in which Christianity changes your life, and I want to emphasize something I haven't so far, which is that Christianity isn't just a doctrine or a teaching.
It's really focused on a person, and that person is, of course, Jesus Christ.
Now, interestingly, Jesus Christ is not only a fascinating figure for all 2,000 years since Christ lived and died, we find that there's been this kind of ongoing, riveting fascination with Christ, even by people who don't like Christ or don't want to follow Christ.
And there are efforts not only to reject Christ, but in some cases to modify what Christ said.
People will say things like, well, Jesus, you know, Dinesh, Jesus didn't really claim to be divine.
Jesus didn't try to found a church.
So Christianity is a kind of deviation from Christ.
There's a group called the Jesus Seminar, which says that, you know, Christ's divinity is a myth, the virgin birth is a myth, the resurrection is a myth.
And so, these discoveries are often trumpeted in the media.
But what's fascinating to me is that Christ remains a big deal.
Christ is always a big deal.
And the question is, really, why?
Well, one answer is that Christ is the most influential figure in history.
Obviously, if you made a list of influential figures, you'd have Moses, you'd have Buddha, you'd have Muhammad.
But, you know, Moses, Buddha, and Muhammad have a different place, even in their own religions, than Christ does.
Moses and Buddha and Muhammad never claimed to perform miracles, at least not on their own power.
They never claim to be anything more than men.
They view themselves simply as sort of God's human messengers.
But Christ is the only person in history who has defined a whole religion around his person.
Look at the way we look at history.
Even a secular understanding of history, it's divided basically into the time before and after Christ's birth.
That's why the old terms B.C. and A.D. Why is Sunday a worldwide holiday?
Is it because, well, Sunday is the Sabbath?
No, Saturday is the Sabbath.
Sunday is traditionally held to be the day of Christ's resurrection.
So the history of the world, and specifically of the West, is really incomprehensible without Christ.
It would have been unimaginably different if Christ had not lived.
Now, the Christ that we encounter in the New Testament is really a very extraordinary figure.
C.S. Lewis once said that, listen, there are only three people in all of history We're good to go.
But, says C.S. Lewis, that if Socrates walked in the room, we could tell.
And if Dr.
Johnson, which is to say the British essayist Samuel Johnson did, mainly as a result of Boswell's life of Johnson, we could.
And Christ is a third.
If Christ walked into the room, his personality, his sayings are so unforgettable, so memorable.
And think about it. What makes Christ so interesting is he never wrote a single word.
In this respect, Christ is like Socrates.
They're extremely famous.
We know a lot about what they said because other people reported it, but they themselves didn't write anything.
At one point, of course, in the Bible, Christ is writing on the ground, but we don't know what he wrote.
Think of it. Shakespeare has created dramatic characters, but there's not a single character that says things as memorable, as unforgettable as Christ.
By their fruits ye shall know them.
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
So this is the unmistakable voice of Jesus Christ.
And we get a remarkably clear picture of Jesus through the reports of the Gospels.
Now, in previous centuries, it was believed that these Gospels were written somehow centuries after Christ and were somehow unreliable.
We now know that that's nonsense.
The Gospels were written, by and large, in the immediate generation after Christ's death.
So, the earliest Gospels were composed no more than 30 years or so after Jesus' death.
The last Gospel was written before 100 A.D. Moreover, historians have found early manuscripts of Scripture, including when the Great Find of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are copies of the Bible.
And they're able to look and see that these writings are authentic.
They have been copied dutifully and without mistakes or without any meaningful mistakes by scribes and monks over the years.
There have also been amazing archaeological discoveries.
Debbie and I encountered some of these in Israel.
The tomb of Caiaphas, the high priest who interrogated Jesus.
An ancient plaque honoring Pilate, the Roman prefect who decreed Christ's crucifixion.
Skeletal remains are shown that Roman crucifixions were performed in exactly the manner outlined in the Bible.
So, summarizing the evidence, the writer Jeff Sheeler, he goes, quote,"...the picture that has emerged overall closely matches the historical backdrop of the Gospels." The irresponsibility of the current administration continues to amaze me.
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Let me now talk about some of the specific benefits or advantages to becoming a Christian.
The first one is quite simply that Christianity makes sense of who we are in the world.
All of us need a framework to understand reality.
And part of Christianity's appeal is it is a worldview that makes everything fit together.
Science and reason are seamlessly integrated in a Christian framework.
Why? Well, because modern science emerged out of a Christian framework.
Christianity has always embraced both reason and faith.
And while reason helps us to discover things about experience, faith helps us to reach things, to discover things that transcend experience.
So, for limited, fallible human beings like us, Christianity provides a comprehensible and believable account of who we are and why we are here.
Christianity also infuses life with a powerful and exhilarating sense of purpose.
While atheism in most of its current forms posits a universe without meaning, Christianity makes life a moral drama in which we play a starring role and in which the most ordinary events take on a grand and cosmic significance.
By the way, modern life is characterized very often by a kind of gray disillusionment, but Christianity gives us a world that is enchanted once again.
This is not a return to the past or denial of modern reality, but it's a reinterpretation of modern reality that makes it more vivid, makes it more meaningful.
Another way to put it is we now see in color what we previously saw only in black and white.
Now, what produces this shift?
This change of orientation, well, Christians live subspecie eternitatis, and that phrase means in the shadow of eternity.
Now, life can be really unfair.
This is for many people a source of a good deal of cynicism and frustration.
In the Gorgias and other Platonic dialogue, Socrates Attempts to prove it's better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
But the proof is kind of a failure.
Why? Because, hey, there are bad people in the world who prosper.
There are good people who undeservedly come to grief.
But Christianity produces a shift, an enlargement in perspective.
That prevents us from becoming jaded by this realization.
Christianity teaches that, hey, this life is not the only life, and there is a final judgment in which all earthly accounts will be settled.
So the Christian knows that subspecie eternitatis, from the perspective of eternity, it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
So the guy who's a cheat, who's a...
He's an adulterer, who's a philanderer, who's a bad guy.
He may be a successful man of the world, but the Christian goes, hey, subspecie eternitatis, this is a lamentable figure.
And by contrast, the poor peasant who crawls to the altar on his knees, a failure by all the world's standards, is the one who is preparing to receive his heavenly reward because in the shadow of eternity, he is the truly fortunate one.
Here we understand better the meaning of the phrase, the last shall be first.
What does it mean? It means that the standards of worldly success and divine reward are quite different.
Without the perspective of eternity, this necessary shift or inversion of values would be lost to us.
Seeing things in a new light, the Christian can face life and whatever it brings with a sense of peace and hopefulness that are admittedly rare in today's world.
Now, contrary to what secular critics say, the Christian does not and cannot hold that our life on earth is somehow unimportant.
Indeed, it's of the highest importance.
Why? The reason is actually obvious, even though it often goes unnoticed.
It is this life that determines our status in the next life.
So our fate in eternity depends on how we act now.
So when we live subspecie eternitatis, far from being a way to escape the responsibilities of life in this world, this was one of the critiques of Christianity coming from people in the 19th century, this is actually a way to imbue life with a meaning that will outlast life itself.
It's to give life a much greater depth and significance because it is part of a larger narrative of purpose and of truth.
Christianity also offers a solution to the cosmic loneliness which we all feel.
You know, however successful a secular life, at some point the thinking person realizes, well, is this really all there is?
In the end, we seem to be all alone.
I mean, think about it. We come into the world alone, and we leave the world by ourselves.
We are also told in Christianity that we have our own unique and individual soul, so we are alone in that sense, alone in making the moral choices we do.
Well, Christianity, in a way, removes this existential loneliness.
Why? Because it links our destiny with God Himself.
Our deepest relationship is with Him, and it's a relationship that is never-ending and always faithful.
So, the secular person may wonder, well, what's that relationship really like?
What are you talking about, Dinesh?
What is the experience of relating to God?
Well, it's an enduring experience of the sublime.
Now, in ordinary life, in love, in other ways, we feel the sublime.
But typically, the feeling of the sublime is momentary.
It's you're out in nature.
It's when you see the ocean.
It's sometimes when you're just talking to a friend.
You're spending time with your wife.
You have this feeling of the sublime.
But my point is, Those experiences are rare.
They don't often last for a long time.
But for the Christian, the sublime is a part of everyday life.
And Milton terms this a joy that even surpasses the Garden of Eden.
He calls it a paradise within the happier far.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the practical benefits of Christianity.
And another benefit of it is that it helps us to cope well with suffering and with death.
Now, death is something that comes to us in any case.
Everybody's got to cope with it.
And Christianity gives you a way of coping that I think is much better than if you are approaching death, you may say, unequipped.
Time Magazine some years ago reported on a case of a woman who had a series of tragedies and These tragedies piled up one on top of the other.
They were almost hard to believe.
Her husband was laid off.
She had a miscarriage.
A month later, her first cousin was diagnosed with cancer.
Then two hurricanes struck her hometown.
And finally, one of her best friends died of a brain tumor.
This would be enough to cause a normal person to just give up.
But here's what the woman is quoted saying in Time Magazine.
This is what struck me and I underlined it.
She goes, That's that last sentence that caught my attention.
She hasn't lost her joy.
Well, joy under these conditions is not really natural.
And this is the woman's point, that only the supernatural can produce enduring joy in the face of life's tragedies.
When we're in pain, feeling hopeless, Christianity lifts our spirits.
We don't know why we are in this situation, what caused this.
And of course, lots of people go, well, why did God do this to me?
Why did He allow this to happen?
But even if you don't know the reason that it happened, it is consoling to realize, hey, there is a reason.
Even if I don't know what it is, God knows what it is.
So, it's not that the reason doesn't exist.
It's simply unknown to me.
Maybe human knowledge is too limited and fallible to know it, but that doesn't mean that divine knowledge, the God's eye perspective, doesn't know what that reason is.
Maybe God is trying to teach us something.
Maybe He wants to draw us closer to Him by intimating to us a sense of our mortality.
Christianity gives us the hope that when someone dies, we will see that person again.
Then there is, of course, the matter of our own death.
Now, ordinarily, we do our best to avoid thinking about the subject.
Mortality is not exactly a popular subject of conversation.
Many of us have a certain anxiety or resistance to going to funerals.
Why? Not just because it is, well, there are people over there and this guy died, but it's like, that guy died?
Well, that's going to happen to me one day.
So, funerals remind us of our own extinction and the notion that we will one day cease to exist.
Well, it's a source of anxiety and terror.
In fact, there is a train of philosophical discussion, I think, culminating in the 20th century philosopher Heidegger, talking about how death produces in human beings, even while they are alive, this ongoing sense of uneasiness.
And this uneasiness becomes a definitional feature of human life because we are mortal and because of the inevitability of death.
And then you have this really strange saying by Paul in the Bible.
He writes, Wow!
How can you adopt that kind of what seems to be almost a ridiculous, even a flippant attitude?
Well, for Christians, it's because death is a temporal end, yes, but it's not the final end.
So the secular person says that you've got two stages.
You've got life. And you got death.
But for the Christian, there are really three.
There is life, there is death, but there is also the life to come.
So this is why for the Christian, death is not so terrifying.
And finally, Christianity enables us to become better people.
It enables us to become the better people that presumably we all want to be.
Because the decent and honorable things that we do are no longer just a matter of thankless routine.
I'm doing it out of habit.
I'm doing it out of duty.
This isn't just a morality that I made up for myself.
Rather, I'm pursuing a higher destiny as human beings.
I'm becoming what human beings are meant to be.
So Christianity doesn't just make us aspire to be better, but it shows us how to be better.
So, in marriage, for example, Christianity teaches that marriage isn't just a contract.
It isn't just a bargain.
It is, in fact, a sacrament.
It is a covenant. And a covenant is something that goes beyond a bargain.
Why? Because it goes beyond the two parties involved.
It's actually a covenant with the two parties, but also with God.
So, the operating principle of Christian marriage, and this really should be the operating principle of Christian life, is the notion of agape.
Some people say agape.
It is sacrificial love.
And the basic idea here is that families function better, marriages function better, life functions better when you love someone by looking out for what it is good for them to be or what it is good for them to do.
You're looking out for the good of the other person.
A lot of times when people talk about love or being in love, they don't mean that.
They mean what's in it for me.
But Christian love is what's good for the other person that you are supposedly in love with or that you love.
Now, so agape isn't really human love.
It is God's love shining through us.
It's a bountiful resource.
It's available for the asking.
The way that you get it is called prayer.
You ask for it.
Ask and you shall receive.
And when you make agape the ground of your marriage, your relationships, you find that the whole system works better and you are a lot happier as a result.
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Agape or agape.
We want to be good citizens. And it's hard to find a more inspiring model of genuine compassion and charity than Mother Teresa.
By the way, I never met Mother Teresa.
I knew about her in India, but she lived in a different part of India than I did, Calcutta.
I grew up in Bombay, now called Mumbai.
But there's a very story about Mother Teresa that has sort of stayed with me over the years.
This man walking on the street, he sees Mother Teresa in Calcutta and she's embracing a leper.
And the man is, well, he's a little shocked and he's, frankly, a little grossed out.
And he goes up to her and he says, I wouldn't do that for all the money in the world.
And she says, I wouldn't either.
I'm doing it for the love of Christ.
And so this was her motive.
And this does seem to have been the motive of many of the most astonishing acts of heroism, of sacrifice, of charity that have ever been done.
Now, we want to raise the level of our personal lives and bring our conscience, our inner being, our impartial spectator, into harmony with the way that we live.
Christianity gives us a reason to follow this interior guide.
It is not simply our own voice speaking to us, the little Dinesh or the inner me.
It's the voice of God Himself speaking through us.
We want to be good because virtue is the stamp of God in our hearts.
And one way we relate to Him is by following His way.
So, we come back to Thomas More.
In the final analysis, we're good not because we have to be, not because we're ordered to be, not because we must be, but because we want to be.
And even seemingly incorrigible criminals, alcoholics, drug addicts—we know this from—it happens now, but it's happened through the years—have reformed their lives by becoming Christians.
Earlier in the book, I quoted Steven Weinberg's claim.
He said, for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.
But actually, the opposite is true.
For really bad people to do good things, that takes religion.
And ultimately, we are called not just to happiness and goodness, but also to holiness.
Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
So what counts for God is not just our external conduct, but also our inward disposition.
Holiness does not mean performing the obligatory rituals on the outside.
It means staying clean, staying pure on the inside.
And yet, holiness is not something we do for God.
It's something that we do with God, which means we can't do it without Him.
God supplies the holiness that then defines us or shapes our lives.
In order for us to be more like Christ, we actually need Christ within us.
In the words of that disheveled prophet John the Baptist, standing waist-deep in the river, He must increase and I must decrease.
And Paul says the same thing, by the way, in Galatians 2.20.
It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.
And this is really Christ's counter-cultural challenge to us in a society based upon self-esteem and self-fulfillment, on looking after yourself and advancing yourself.
Christ calls us to the heroic task of self-emptying.
He must increase and we must decrease.
And this we do by allowing Christ's empire, his reign, an ever greater domain in our hearts.
goodness and happiness flow out of this.
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I've now made my case for Christianity as clearly, as eloquently as I can.
And before I sum up, I want to say a few words about the resurrection, which is, after all, the central event in Christianity.
And the resurrection is not presented as a metaphor or an image.
Or a story. It's presented as an historical event.
So I want to talk about the historicity of the resurrection.
Now let's note that the resurrection is absolutely critical in Christianity.
Here's Paul in 1 Corinthians 15-17.
If Christ had not been raised, our preaching is useless, and so is your faith.
So the resurrection is the...
Defining event, the most important event in Christianity.
Now, since the 19th century, there are biblical critics and scholars who have refused to accept the biblical account of the resurrection because they say, the resurrection was, this story is given to us by people who are very biased in These are people who maybe wanted to promote the resurrection as a kind of part of Christian propaganda.
But it is interesting to note that Christ's followers, by their own admission, did not expect the resurrection.
In fact, three days after Christ's death, they brought spices to his tomb to anoint his body.
They were mourning his death.
They felt that their project had been a failure, that Christ had been, in a sense, in the end defeated.
But only then did they notice, the women did, that the stone was rolled back, the tomb was empty, and by the way, the fact of the empty tomb was admitted by the Roman guards, by the Roman authorities, and also by the Jewish authorities who said, they told the Romans that when they were asked to account, what has happened here, the Jewish authorities basically said, Christ's followers must have stolen the body.
The significant thing about this is it's an acknowledgement or admission of the empty tomb.
Well, the apostles were also deeply skeptical about resurrection, about reports of a resurrection.
In fact, the Bible tells us that Christ had to appear before the apostles many times, on many different occasions, before the doubts were dispelled.
Here's Paul writing in 1 Corinthians 15, 6.
He goes, Christ, quote,"...appeared to more than 500 of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, although some have fallen asleep." Now, to me, this is an interesting example of apologetics in itself.
The Bible, for the most part, is not Christian apologetics.
The Bible declares things and doesn't try to prove them.
But here is Paul trying to prove a point.
He's appealing to witnesses.
He's doing what you do in a courtroom.
Hey, there were 500 guys who saw this.
So, it's not one guy. It's not two guys.
It's 500 guys.
And Paul goes, well, some of those guys are dead.
Others are living. You can go talk to them right now.
So, Paul is appealing to direct historical evidence, the testimony of multiple witnesses who actually saw Jesus alive after his resurrection.
So, while there are people who are critics and skeptics who have said, well, maybe the resurrection was kind of a hallucination, people thought that they saw something, never in the history of hallucinations has there been a case where 500 people all saw the same person and were all equally mistaken.
That's simply unheard of.
That's actually preposterous.
Now, what was the impact of the resurrection on the early Christians?
This itself is highly significant because some people have the idea that the apostles spread this piece of propaganda.
Well, Dinesh, they knew it was a lie, but they were trying to get their religion off the ground, and so they needed a spectacular opening, and so they decided, let's go with Christ's resurrection.
Well, let's think about whether that makes any sense at all.
The disciples, when they first saw Christ after His death, their whole being was transformed.
They went from being dejected and downcast to being joyful.
And then they began this incredible project of Christian conversion.
They launched the greatest wave of religious conversion of all time.
The number of Christians, by the way, was about 100 at the time of Christ's death.
It increased to 30 million by the 4th century.
This is when the Roman Emperor Constantine converted.
And these conversions, these early conversions before Constantine occurred in the teeth of opposition, in the teeth of persecution of the greatest empire in the world, which is the Empire of Rome.
So, the early Christians did not hesitate to identify with Christ, a man that the Romans branded as a traitor and a criminal.
And the significant point is that the early Christians were willing to endure imprisonment and torture and exile and death rather than renounce this commitment.
So, think about this. Why would you do this for something that you knew to be a lie?
You might decide, well, let's come up with a lie.
It's going to work well for us.
It's going to help us to grow as a group.
But when you're up against the rack, when you're up against the knife, when you're facing the lions, you're tempted to go, okay, listen, if you want me to admit it, I'll admit I made the whole thing up.
This is not really true. I just said it.
No one did that.
All these guys went voluntarily to their death.
And what I think this shows is the sincerity of their belief.
So, again, you can reject the resurrection and say, you don't think it happened, but that the disciples thought it happened, of that there is no doubt.
I want to conclude this special episode by doing, well, something of what pastors do at the end of a sermon.
And that is what they do is they call people to a point of decision to, well, it's time to kind of take your stand.
And it's time to take your stand because you've listened, you've heard, you've maybe thought about, you've had a chance to sort of come to terms with this information.
And it's decision time.
Decision time can be, it's time to cast a vote.
It's time to decide if you're going to take a job or reject it.
It's time to decide if you're going to make a proposal of marriage or not.
You can't live life constantly in a stage of indecision.
This, to me, is the silliness of the person who says, I'm an agnostic.
Well, you can be an agnostic, but being an agnostic should propel you into a quest of discovery because at some point you do have to make a decision.
And the point to remember here is that this is a decision that is consequential because not only does it affect you in dramatic ways, it changes your life which way you go, one way or the other, but it's also over the figure of Christ who is admittedly a very divisive personality, in fact the most divisive figure who ever lived.
To look at Christ, to listen to Christ, it doesn't seem that Christ should be decisive, because Christ is saying things that are so gentle, that are so peaceful, so kind.
This is a guy who never harmed a fly.
He certainly never harmed any other person.
So you think... Why would somebody like this be divisive?
Well, it's so telling, isn't it, that a figure like Christ, nevertheless, is a figure of major division.
Even Christ who lived a blameless life and whose teachings about love and peace are universally praised.
Nevertheless, if you bring up the name Christ, you're going to get hate mail.
And it's not just hate mail toward you, it's hate mail really toward Christ.
Go to a dinner party or picnic and start talking in a serious way about Christ.
Immediately you get a reaction that's either going to be, you know, gushingly enthusiastic or coldly hostile.
The point being that Christ's teachings are challenging and if we accept them, they change our lives.
If we reject them, they provoke in us this seething animosity, this willful desire to exclude Christ from our lives or at least to kind of amend and rewrite Christ in a way that doesn't make us feel uncomfortable.
This is happening even in the churches.
Throughout history, people have tried to twist and trim Christ's words to suit their predispositions.
It's a strategy of evasion and sly revisionism that is quite common even today.
We hear from milquetoast Christians and even others, Christ spoke about love.
Well, He did, but He also spoke about divine condemnation.
By the way, hell is mentioned at least three times in the Sermon of the Mount and innumerable times in Scripture.
We hear from those who wish to avoid conflict at all costs that Christ was a peacemaker.
But Christ said in Matthew 10, 34,"...I come not to bring peace but the sword." So, Christ is always being cut down to size.
Here's Richard Dawkins.
He says,"...the historical evidence that Jesus claimed any sort of divine status is minimal." Really?
Well, here's the Gospel of John, chapter 8, verse 58, and Christ talking, quote, So Christ is not only saying that he lived before Abraham, but he's using the term...
The term I am is God's own self-description as revealed to Moses at the burning bush.
Christ also says, I and the Father are one.
What does it mean to say that?
It doesn't mean if the Father is God, God the Father, then Christ is saying, I am one with the Father.
Or whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
So the disciples got the message.
They routinely referred to Christ as ruler, Messiah, Son of David, King of the Jews, King of Israel, Lord and Savior.
Remember that Jesus also, on a number of occasions, corrects and updates the Jewish scriptures, thus claiming for himself the authority of divine revelation.
He also purports to forgive sins.
Now, listen, ordinarily, if someone does you wrong, you can forgive them, but you're forgiving them for a sin that they committed against you.
But notice what Christ is doing.
He's forgiving sins committed against other people.
And who can do that? Christ also says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
I am the resurrection and the life.
So, the Jewish leaders at the time understood what Christ was saying.
He was claiming to be divine.
He was claiming to be the Son of God and God, part of God Himself.
And they realize this is blasphemy.
If Christ merely said, I am a follower of God, that wouldn't be blasphemous.
Lots of people in Christ's time said the same thing.
It's the claim that you are God that is the blasphemy for which Christ was crucified.
That's the basis on which the Sanhedrin issued their death sentence against Christ.
And so, the point I'm trying to make is that it's impossible to come across Jesus and be neutral on Jesus.
You have to take a stance.
But I'm urging you to take the stance because it makes sense to be a Christian.
It's good for you. For the Christian, human joys are a small foreshadowing of the joys that are in store.
Terrestrial happiness is valuable in itself.
It's also a foretaste of eternity.
As the book of Revelation says in 21-4, God will wipe away every tear.
There will be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away.
It is in this spirit that the Christian awaits the final moment of destiny, relishing the gift of life while every day proclaiming, Even so, come, Lord Jesus, we are ready.
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