Greg Koukl and Gary Habermas anchor a Good Friday episode exploring redemption, the crucifixion's brutal mechanics like asphyxiation and humiliation, and resurrection evidence. The broadcast weaves in a pro-life appeal for $250 donations to preborn.com, a defense of Coleman Hughes against ad hominem attacks regarding his police violence study, and a commercial for Relief Factor supplements. Ultimately, the dialogue frames Christianity as aligned with universal truths while highlighting the historical reality of Jesus' suffering alongside thieves on Golgotha. [Automatically generated summary]
A lot of it revolves around redemption and the crucifixion.
You'll learn things about crucifixion that you didn't know before.
And also what the skeptic scholars say about resurrection.
All of it is part of our Good Friday podcast, and it's coming up right after this.
I want to talk to you about being pro-life, really getting into the battle here for life.
We have a spiritual and moral mandate as citizens of this country and citizens of a higher kingdom, as Christians.
That mandate is to bring about an end to the senseless slaughter.
And there's two ways to go.
We could start a revolution.
We could hate people that are engaged in abortion.
Or we can just love the mothers and the babies and help them.
Most of these moms feel trapped and they have no other place to go.
And so they easily buy into the lie that it's not really a baby.
That's why $28 will buy an ultrasound for a mom coming in just to see, you know, maybe talk about an abortion.
They give them a free ultrasound that doubles the chance of baby's life.
So pound250, say the keyword baby.
please give pound 250 keyword baby preborn.com slash Glenn. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Easter is all about forgiveness and practicing forgiveness.
Stu, I want you to know I forgive you.
Oh, thank you, Glenn.
You're welcome.
Forgiveness Without Apology00:08:46
What are you welcome?
What are you forgiving me for exactly?
Oh my gosh.
Well, see, this is good to point out.
See, he's pretending he doesn't know his trespasses against me, but I forgive him of his trespasses.
But he doesn't have to.
It doesn't change my forgiveness, Stu.
Doesn't.
I still forgive you.
All right.
Oh, it's an important lesson on an important day.
Yeah.
I got another important lesson.
You're, let's say, put yourself in this scenario.
Okay.
You're on the view.
All right.
Okay.
Yes.
And you've been on the view, right?
You've gone through this.
I have been on the view.
I have.
I have.
So you're on the view.
And it's Easter Friday.
You know, it's Good Friday.
What?
You know, Joy says something to you.
Your response is, shut up, Joy, you fat witch.
No, no, no, that would not.
No, it's again, Good Friday.
So you too, you old hag.
Okay, no, that's not the way to do it.
No, we shouldn't do it that way on Good Friday.
That's what we're trying to tell people.
We probably shouldn't do it on average Wednesday either.
You know what I mean?
No, it's true.
You probably shouldn't do that.
I will say my response was somewhat close to what you said when you were on the, when you, when you were actually on the aftermath, wasn't I maybe?
That was yeah, in the aftermath.
I think I tried to be nice the whole time.
Yeah, I certainly often went into a commercial type of response at one point or another.
Yeah well, I don't know about that.
That would be wrong of me.
There was a guy though, on the view that I think we should play.
That does demonstrate how people better than us actually respond.
Yeah, this is Coleman Hughes who, who is?
He wrote a book recently which is a great book.
It's about, basically in defense of colorblindness.
Hey, maybe we shouldn't abandon the idea that colorblindness is the goal here.
Guys like I can't believe you need to write even a book about this.
But he did and it's very good, and he went on the view and of course, I mean they had to give him the ad hominem charlatan question, which is what you'd expect 100% from the view when just praising the idea that we should be colorblind.
This is the question he got.
Your argument for colorblindness, I think, is something that the right has co-opted, and so many in the black community, if I'm being honest with you, because I want to be believe that you are being used as a pawn by the right and that you're a charlatan of sorts.
He's not a Republican.
So how do you vote?
You've said that you're a conservative.
No, you did.
You actually said that.
Uh, podcast that you did two weeks ago.
I said I was a conservative.
But my question to you, my question to you, is, how do you respond to those critics?
Those critics, stop stop, stop right here okay, stop right there.
Your shut up.
You fat witch does seem to be calling out to me.
Right for his response and right, and and that wasn't even what I would be yeah yeah no no, no.
But just just buried deep inside of me, hearing that question phrased that way shut up you fat witch does seem to be an option.
That's what we're trying to say on this day.
Is that's the wrong option?
That's not what you should do.
It would feel like you're only human.
I don't think, even though Jesus was part human, I don't think that was an option that he felt, but you me probably would feel that way.
But here's how he responded.
I think it's very important the quote that you just pointed out about doing something special for the Negro.
That's from the book Why We Can't Wait that I just mentioned.
Yes.
A couple paragraphs later, he lays out exactly what that something special was.
And it was the Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, a broad class-based population.
He also says you must include race.
No, he didn't.
He says it doesn't.
Yes, he does.
Okay, well, everyone should go read the book Why We Can't Wait.
Let's not get sidetracked by that.
Yeah, give me a while.
I don't think I've been co-opted by anyone.
I've only voted twice, both for Democrats.
Although I'm an independent, I would vote for a Republican, probably a non-Trump Republican if they were compelling.
I don't think there's any evidence I've been co-opted by anyone, and I think that that's an ad hominem tactic people use to not address really the important conversations we're having here.
And I think it's better, and it would be better for everyone if we stuck to the topics rather than make it about me with no evidence.
But I want to give you the opportunity to respond to the criticism.
I appreciate it.
There's no evidence that I've been co-opted by anyone.
I have an independent podcast.
I work for CNN as an analyst.
I write for the free press.
I'm independent in all of these endeavors, and no one is paying me to say what I'm saying.
I'm saying it because I feel it.
So what he's saying there is, shut up, you fat witch.
I think that's what I heard.
I think that's what I heard.
Just in a very nice way.
Yeah, you know, and it's like he's good at just dismantling it with reason, right?
Like, there's no evidence that this guy has been co-opted by the right.
These are arguments that we all used to agree on.
They were, I mean, outside of the KKK, if you were not wearing a white hood, most people would say, hey, we shouldn't focus on skin color as much.
And now 50% of the population, or at least 50% of our major political parties, have embraced an idea that we should only focus on race and gender and other readable characteristics.
Yeah.
Like, it's horrific that that has happened under all of our watch.
At least if you're on the left, you've let this happen and you should be on the side of Coleman Hughes and pushing back against it.
And there are very few that are.
You know, it's amazing to me that the Democrats get stuck in about 1968.
You know what I mean?
It's like they just stopped seeing new things.
You know what I mean?
It's just like, yeah, well, you know what?
That's why blacks should be able to go to school with whites.
And you're like, yeah, okay, we've believed that for now, 40, 50 years.
Maybe even longer.
We've been on that.
Yeah, we've been on that train.
You know, white people, again, there are still some Klan members out there that don't agree, but there's also Joy Reed.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah, but that's the thing.
Like they have decided when we, like the, oh, in the 1960s, hey, blacks should be able to go to school with whites.
The left has reversed that.
They now say they should have safe spaces away from whites.
I know.
They've legitimately gone the opposite way, and they're acting as if we're the crazy ones.
I know.
I know.
And we learned that my generation, I am the last of the boomer generation last year.
And I grew up in a time where I didn't see color.
We didn't do that.
You know, I mean, it's not, yes.
When you're in a bad section of town, bad section of town, you might look over your shoulder.
Does that because it's black?
Why?
Because I said a bad section of town, you all of a sudden assume that it's a black neighborhood?
Who's the racist here?
Who's the racist here?
You know, you just don't do that.
We have gotten to a place or we were at a place to where we wanted to see people for the content of their character, thought that was right.
And in many cases, that's the way we judged the world.
And it's as if all of these radicals, as if 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2000, well, 2008, I think was the end of that.
I mean, it's like none of those years happened.
Like all of the things, all the progress we made didn't happen.
We're still in 1965.
In what world?
In what world?
Yeah, no, it's true.
And you see the way that these people retreated.
Study on Police Violence00:05:19
There was another interview that happened.
It was a speech, I think, happened recently.
It was part of the free press, which Coleman Hughes also mentioned in that clip, where they interviewed a guy who did a study, an academic who did a study on police violence against blacks.
And the study came out in an interesting way, not the way the media would have believed it would come out.
Now, the man who's speaking is, I don't have his, I misplaced his name, but he's an African-American gentleman who is describing a study he did in academic circles to talk about violence against African Americans by the police.
Listen.
I collected a lot of data.
We collected millions of observations on everyday use of force that wasn't lethal.
We collected thousands of observations on lethal force.
And it was in this moment, 2016, that I realized people lose their minds when they don't like the result.
So what my paper showed, you'll see tomorrow, like some of you, was that, yes, we saw some bias in the low-level uses of force every day pushing up against cars and things like that.
People seem to like that result, but we didn't find any racial bias in police shootings.
Now, that was really surprising to me because I expected to see it.
The little-known fact is I had eight full-time RAs that it took to do this over nearly a year.
When I found the surprising result, I hired eight fresh ones and redid it to make sure they came up with the same exact answer, and I thought it was robust.
And then I went to go give it, and my God, all hell broke loose.
It was a 104-page, dense, academic economics paper with a 150-page appendix.
Okay?
Jeez.
It was posted for four minutes when I got my first email.
This is full of doesn't make any sense.
And I wrote back, how'd you read it that fast?
That's amazing.
You are a genius.
And I had colleagues take me into the side and say, don't publish this.
You'll ruin your career.
I said, what are you talking about?
I said, what's wrong with it?
Do you believe the first part?
Yes.
Do you believe the second part?
Well, it's the issue is they just don't fit together.
We like the first one, but you should publish the second one another time.
I said, let me ask this.
If the second part about the police shootings, this is a literal conversation.
I said to them, if the second part showed bias, do you think I should publish it then?
And they said, yeah, then it would make sense.
And I said, I guarantee you, I'll publish it.
We'll see what happens.
So it was, you know, I lived under police protection for about 30 or 40 days.
I had a seven-day-old daughter at the time.
I remember going and shopping for it because, you know, when you have a newborn, you think you have enough diapers, you don't.
So I was going to the grocery store to get diapers with an armed guard.
It was crazy.
It was really, truly crazy.
For just saying the truth and saying, hey, maybe police aren't intentionally trying to commit a genocide on African Americans.
Like something that I think everyone in their heart actually knows.
But the evidence showed that it was true.
And because he published actual evidence about actual things that go on in our country, he had to live under police protection for months.
Let me just leave it at this.
Shut up, you fat bitch.
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Now back to the podcast.
This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
The Story of Reality00:10:44
Okay, you're standing in a bookstore and you're looking at the rack and all kinds of titles are facing you and one sticks out, The Story of Reality.
How do you not pick that book up?
The story of reality.
It's written by Greg Kukul.
Sorry, Kochal.
It's a story of really what is meaningful, how we got here, how the world began, how it ends, and everything important that happened in between.
It's author, the author of The Story of Reality, Greg Kochl, is with us now.
Greg, how are you?
Hey, Glenn, it is so great to talk with you today, especially this particular day on this particular topic.
Thanks for having me.
You bet.
So first, let's start with the story of reality.
How does it start?
Well, the subtitle Title is How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important That Happens in Between.
And as a follower of Jesus, I am looking at the way the world is laid out as God describes it in scripture.
There is a beginning, there is an end, and there are things that happen in between that are really critical, and they have to do with what happened with human beings in the beginning, the whole problem of evil, how God plans to solve that through his Son, Jesus of Nazareth, and the ramifications that have for us at the end of the age.
You see, this is a story.
What's really compelling about the story, though, and a lot of people don't realize this, Glenn, if they look at the Bible or they think of Christianity, they have all these little bits and pieces that are like pieces to a puzzle, but the puzzle's never been assembled.
And what I've tried to do here, and anybody could do this who goes through the account in the scripture, is to put that together piece by piece, following the plot line from beginning to end, so people can get a picture of the entire story.
But the unique thing about this story, Glenn, is it doesn't start with the words once upon a time.
It's not a fiction, it is the true story of reality.
And what I've tried to do in this book is to show the elegance of the story, the greatness of the drama from the beginning to the end, so people understand how the world actually works, what reality is really like, so they could live in tune with it, especially in tune with the author of reality, God himself, through his son, Jesus of Nazareth.
You know, I have always been convinced that if, you know, the 10 commandments were called, you know, today were just called Mo's 10 safety tips.
Everybody would do them because it's all common sense.
Reality is what it is, and we have completely detached from universal truths.
And that is God.
Everything is a pattern.
It's math.
It's a universal truth.
You do this, and this will happen.
There are things that you just cannot change, no matter how much you want to.
And we reject it because it's Christianity or it's God or it's church or whatever.
Do you see what I mean, Greg?
I do.
I think the biggest reason is: look, everybody wants to do their own thing, ultimately.
What is the slogan of the age?
You do you.
And that means you don't bend your knee to anyone and certainly not God.
And so people are going off doing their own thing.
And of course, when you break the rules, when you don't live according to reality, things are going to go south on you because reality has a way of bumping into you and injuring you when you don't, right?
When you don't take it seriously.
One of the things that I've noticed, though, I've been a follower of Jesus for 50 years, and I'm a defender of Christianity.
I'm an apologist by trade, okay?
One of the things that I noticed about the story of reality, as it's described in scripture, is that so many points comport with common sense.
And this is what you just mentioned a moment ago, Glenn.
So many things that we see in Scripture, if we're willing to acknowledge it, fit the world the way we actually experience the world, all right?
Even the idea that human beings don't want to bend their knee.
And by the way, that is the classic definition of truth.
When you have a point of view or a belief or idea that actually fits the way the world is, that means your view is true.
And this is one of the things I'm totally convinced about the story of reality.
It is true.
And there are ramifications to getting it right.
And that's why I wrote the book, The Story of Reality.
And isn't that what the whole message of the Bible is?
Because it's really basically the same story over and over and over and over again.
You read the stories and you're like, okay, different place, different people, but I'm seeing the same thing I saw three chapters before.
I mean, how are we missing this?
You know, people making the same mistakes.
Time changes.
Human beings don't change.
We learn from the very beginning something very special about human beings.
God made human beings to be in friendship with Him, and He made them like Him in a very important way.
The story says we are made in the image of God.
And that's not our physical bodies.
That's our invisible selves, our souls bear his mark.
And Glenn, this is what informs every single moral obligation that we have towards other human beings.
We don't have the same moral obligations to Fifi and Fido that we have to other human beings.
Some people have that confused nowadays, but most of us get this.
But why is it like that?
We realize that's the case, even without the Bible.
Yet the story of reality, God's story, tells us why.
Because God made us to be in friendship with Him.
But you know what?
God man got himself in a heap of trouble, didn't he?
He didn't want to bend H rebelled against God, and that is what caused all the problem.
People complain about the problem of evil.
The story tells where that came from.
That's in chapter three.
And the next 66 books are meant to explain how God solved that problem.
And he solved that problem by coming to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to rescue us.
And this weekend, of course, is one of the most important weekends in our calendar, reflecting on exactly what he did to accomplish that end.
You know, I'm struck now by the biggest problem that I think we have.
And it's really simple.
We will not recognize or bend our knee to truth.
We want it our way.
We want to do it our way.
And as a former, you know, a recovering alcoholic, I have to tell you, it doesn't end well.
It never ends well.
And this weekend is all about forgiveness, forgiving yourself, forgiving others, and humbling yourself just as Christ did.
I mean, there was no more humiliating death at the time than being nailed to a cross.
It was the most humiliating thing a man could go through in that culture at that time.
He humbled himself.
Our country would be fixed if we could humble ourselves, ask for forgiveness, make a list of all the things we in the country have done, and just say, you know what?
We don't want to live like that anymore.
Help us.
We'll do it the way you want us to do it.
And our country would be fixed overnight.
But people think that's too easy.
Well, it's not too easy when you think about human nature, Glenn.
And you're right.
Jesus humbled himself.
He came down from heaven.
That's an act of humility right there.
And then he served human beings.
That's another act of humility.
And then he died, as one translator puts it, Philippians chapter 2, where Paul's writing, the death of a common criminal.
So Jesus is the model of humility, okay?
And I think you're right.
What happens with humility, though, is it doesn't happen on a national scale.
It happens when individuals do it.
Now, when a lot of individuals do the same thing, then something happens nationally.
That's what's called revival.
But the humiliation that the humility that we're to observe is the precise thing that is necessary before God, who's the first one we've offended.
You know, in Psalm 51, David's great prayer of contrition, he said, God, against you and you only have I sinned.
Now, of course, he sinned against Bathsheba.
You know, he sinned against her husband Uriah, but he saw that the sin was against God.
And when we individually come before God and beat our breast and we say, as Jesus described in the parable, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner, that's when it changes for every single one of us individually.
And the more we do that as a community, the more that transforms the community, which like it did in the Mediterranean region, the whole known world at the time, when Christianity slowly began to take over that region as people did exactly what we're talking about.
You're listening to the best of Glenn Beck.
Check out the full show podcast to listen to the rest of this interview.
Gary Habermas is with us, Liberty University apologetics and philosophy professor.
Gary, welcome to the program.
Glad to be with you on such a wonderful day that deserves some celebration, as you've already noted.
Ensuring Jesus Was Dead00:10:15
Yeah, you know, I mean, I don't, I guess today does as well because this is the atonement.
But Sunday is the real celebratory day.
I don't think we take enough time on Good Friday to really understand what this man went through.
Yeah, absolutely.
He was, you know, the movie The Passion, people, it was called all kinds of things by people who didn't like it.
Pornographic violence was one of the phrases I remember.
But there is a reference in ancient history to people being beaten for punishments.
And the ancient source says that they whipped the men until their organs fell out.
And that even surpasses the passion.
But all I'm saying is, and that was only the prequel to the crucifixion.
So this is a very serious event.
And what we portray is not overdone.
And when they crucified people, they weren't on big tall crosses like we see.
They were street level and almost eye level.
So people coming into the town would know this is what happens to people if you do these things, right?
Correct.
Because the men were talking to each other.
And if you remember the scene at the end where Jesus is pierced with the spear, now he's already dead.
And by the way, I'll just add, we have a Roman reference that says the same thing, that the centurion could allow the family to take the dead body of the crucified person.
When they were taken down, they were dead.
And they were given one last blow.
And the Latin word that's used means it's a military term for using an axe, a spear, or a sword.
But anyway, my point is, if you're low enough that a person could stab you with a Roman short spear, yes, you're closer to the ground than a lot of the depictions.
So I thought that it was unusual to take the body and bury it, because from what I learned about crucifixion, part of it was the dogs would come and eat some of the flesh, and it just made it more grisly for visitors.
Hey, come to our town.
Don't end up like this.
Yeah, and birds, too.
But of course, your point about the dogs, that shows you how much closer they are to the ground.
Correct.
By the way, Romans often did leave victims on the cross.
Thousands were crucified outside Jerusalem in the Jewish war, 66 to 70 AD.
However, Josephus, the Jewish historian, tells us that Jews had such respect for bodies that even crucifix victims, I mean, criminals, if they were, even criminals' bodies were taken down and buried.
So Jewish tradition is an exception to the stain on the cross.
Do you have any idea when they started crucifixion?
How it started, when it started?
Yeah, it goes way back before the Romans, back to the Assyrians, and even before that, and was practiced around the eastern end of the Mediterranean.
But all the way up in Italy, you remember the story of Spartacus and the slaves and crucifying the people down the Appian Way near Rome.
And they were talking about lighting people on fire and being, in particular, Nero, lighting them to be torches in the night.
So that's just kind of how, you know, it's not enough to be beaten up.
It's not enough to be hung and then burned.
So I can't think of a worse way to die.
Is there anything in particular that you read in the scriptures about this day that you can really truly show the evidence in the scriptures and go, that we know is absolutely true because of X, Y, and Z?
Yeah, there's actually a couple.
I co-authored an article 2021, four years ago, three years ago, with two other people, one a neurologist, MD, PhD, and another researcher.
And what we did was we didn't try to prove how Jesus died.
We simply did a head count of medical views.
And by far, the most common view, double all the other views put together, was that in crucifixion, the victims asphyxiate.
And what happens is when you stretch out in that condition, and by the way, the closer your hands are to your head, the closer your arms are brought up, the faster you asphyxiate.
And of course, when someone starts asphyxiating, you say, well, then, how soon is it over?
Well, believe it or not, medical doctors, even in Nazi Germany in the Middle East, crucifixion is still performed.
And they did experiments where they didn't hurt the person.
They didn't use nails, but they did it.
And the men in one experiment lost consciousness in a maximum of 12 minutes.
They lost consciousness.
You say, well, then, how would it explain the three hours?
It would be over fast.
Well, the issue is you could push down on those nails in your feet.
And when you push up, anti-gravity, but you had to push up to breathe.
And that allows you to unfreeze the muscles, the intercostal pectoral deltoid muscles that you work out in a gym, the ones around your lungs, you can free them.
And so you can stay alive on a cross for more than a day by pushing up, sinking down, pushing up, sinking down.
And that relieves the asphyxiation process.
That's really why they break their legs, right?
When they want them to die, they just break their legs.
You're exactly right.
And that's not the only blow.
And by the way, not just in the Gospels.
I just wrote a huge, almost 1,100 pages, work on crucifixion and resurrection.
And I assembled a number of secular examples of people all the way up into Rome and Italy where ankles were broken.
Now, there's almost no reason to break an ankle.
I mean, if you're going to beat the guy up, hit him with a board, shoot him.
One guy was threatened with an arrow.
One guy had a skull crushed with a mallet.
All kinds of things happen.
But why break ankles?
And of course, it can cause shock.
But it seems the main reason is to make the person go down low.
We're done.
We want to go back to the barracks and play cards or something.
And they break the ankles, and it's over.
Now it's over quickly if the person can't push up.
By the way, the other reason is the spear wound in the side that I already said, where the Roman source says, this guy is already dead.
We took him down.
We laid him on the ground.
His family wanted the body.
And so we pierced him one more time.
And you go, where?
In the thigh?
No, Roman soldiers didn't have anatomy lessons, but they knew where to stab a person to drop them the quickest in battle.
And it makes sense they would stab him in the chest.
You know, you don't stab the skull.
So where are you going to go?
Probably in the heart, lung region would be normal.
And that's stabbing the chest of Jesus is there.
So you got asphyxiation as being a possible way of dying.
You've got the broken ankles that you pointed out and is backed up on archaeology.
And you've got the spear wound.
There's three right there to make sure that Jesus was dead.
So there's also something else, the humiliation of it all.
I mean, this is why I had a guest earlier this week that was saying, you know, if this is all made up, they were really bad at making this up because in the ancient world, the worst thing that could happen to somebody, and certainly not the Messiah, if you're telling a story and making it up, is to nail them to a tree.
That is the most humiliating thing you can do.
And then they mocked him.
Now, I'm sure the mocking was usual, but the crown of thorns was unique to him.
Yes.
Right?
Yes.
Believed to be a criminal.
He was crucified as a criminal.
And I will add this.
This is not always true, but crucifixion victims were often crucified nude.
So if you want to add to the humiliation, the point you're making there, that wasn't always done, but that was a common way to do it.
Do we think that that's the way he was?
We have no idea.
There's an in-between view, you know, and that's what's often in the paintings.
They would have a garment put around their waist, almost like when you go to play football or something, you've got too many clothes on, you take the sweatshirt off and you tie it around your waist.
Jesus could have had one of those deals where they just tied a modesty cloth.
We don't really know if that portion was done or not done or how much he was.
He wasn't clothed totally.
I mean, he was either clothed with a modesty cloth or not clothed at all, most likely.
When he was crucified, you know, we always see him up on Golgotha, and he's up at the top of a hill, and it's just the three of them.
Is that likely to be that way, or was he with a whole bunch of other crosses all around him?
No, it seems like the three is historical.
I've done so much reading on this and studied it for decades, and I don't even see, let's put it this way, I don't think scholars even bring it up.
I don't remember if I've ever seen the question of whether there were more than three crosses.
And I think they generally think that just like the gospel said, it makes sense that two guys were thieves.
Jesus was in the middle, and they talked to each other, and one of them says, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
And Jesus said, today you'll be with me in paradise.