Liar, Lunatic, or Lord: Christian Apologetics

SPEAKER A 00:00:00 - 00:00:27 Was Jesus just a good moral teacher, or was he something much more? We are diving into the claims of Christ and the famous argument that he was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord of all. Join us as we examine the evidence for Jesus and why his identity is the most important question you will ever answer. Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Kaysie Vokurka . Joining me to discuss this is Dr. John Ashton. SPEAKER B 00:00:27 - 00:00:27 Welcome. SPEAKER A 00:00:27 - 00:00:28 Welcome, Dr. John. SPEAKER B 00:00:28 - 00:00:29 Hello, Kaysie. SPEAKER A 00:00:29 - 00:00:57 Dr. John has written this book called The Big Argument: Does God Exist? And in today's program, we're drawing on some insights from chapter 12, which is discussing the problem of evil. And in that chapter, it's mentioned about C.S. Lewis. And why does C.S. Lewis argue that we simply— we cannot simply call Jesus a great moral teacher? Yes. SPEAKER B 00:00:57 - 00:01:10 Look, this is a very important question. We alluded to it in a recent episode that people ask, why didn't God eliminate evil straight away? SPEAKER A 00:01:10 - 00:01:11 Yes. SPEAKER B 00:01:11 - 00:01:25 You know, as soon as evil appeared, the Bible account says through Lucifer, who later became known as Satan. And the thing is that God is going to eliminate evil. SPEAKER A 00:01:25 - 00:01:25 Yes. SPEAKER B 00:01:25 - 00:03:16 But there were 2 issues that he had to show. Firstly, he had to show what the consequences of evil were in the long term, how evil manifested, how it grew, how the long-term effects were, and how those effects multiplied. They didn't minimize. They didn't get better. It wasn't where it reached a peak and then got better, as a lot of people at one stage hoped that humanity would make things better of their own accord. And we can see that hasn't happened. Things have just got progressively worse and worse in many different areas. But God also promised that He would eliminate evil. It is going to happen, right? The system is going to be cleansed. So in this choice, people have free choice. And I think God had an absolutely brilliant system in that the system is set up so that God demonstrates how He is a God of love by creating the beautiful environment that we see around us, the flowers and beautiful animals and so forth. And then we see the corruption, the change, the fighting, the killing, the death, and so forth. But He set up a system where people can make a choice, whether they want to choose to be on God's side or they want to choose on the side of complete freedom that they can do whatever they want. And we know where there have been examples of complete freedom, at least to anarchy. It leads to certain people getting ahead and the rest dying and suffering and so forth. But ultimately, even those people that get ahead are taken over by somebody stronger and so forth. And so one of the things, that amazing plan is that God became one of us. SPEAKER A 00:03:16 - 00:03:17 Hmm. SPEAKER B 00:03:17 - 00:03:47 And the thing that convinced C.S. Lewis was this whole thought of God on a cross. The Creator coming and living as a human, a very humble human, and then dying a really painful death. And I guess it serves 2 purposes. What it shows is that we are so special that God did this in order that He wanted to draw us back to Himself. SPEAKER A 00:03:47 - 00:03:48 Mm-hmm. SPEAKER B 00:03:48 - 00:04:13 He fulfilled the legal requirement that was challenged by Satan that, oh, surely you won't die, in that He died in our place. So He fulfilled the claim where God said, no, you will die. He fulfilled that Himself. And that there abled the way for Him to let us off the hook so that we won't die eternally. So it's a beautiful thing. SPEAKER A 00:04:13 - 00:04:14 Mm-hmm. SPEAKER B 00:04:14 - 00:04:47 And also to demonstrate what He is like. So the people that knew Jesus and Jesus made the claim, if you have seen Me, you have seen God, you've seen the Father. And so this was a way God was able to show to people that had been, you know, so dumb, so blind over the years. They had not listened to God's teachers that He had sent and taught, the different prophets, as people said. That He came Himself to show what He was like. And that way draw people to Him. SPEAKER A 00:04:47 - 00:04:47 Hmm. SPEAKER B 00:04:47 - 00:05:00 But it doesn't really answer your question, does it? why he wasn't just a great moral teacher, in that we have the evidence from the miracles that he performed. SPEAKER A 00:05:00 - 00:05:32 Yeah, but what your background— the background information you just shared there was really good to understand because C.S. Lewis recognized Jesus as God in humanity. Whereas if you say that someone is a great moral teacher, You're not saying that that person is God. That person is just a great moral teacher. And if that great moral teacher who was just an ordinary being claimed to be God, that's where we get the thought that, oh, that person's a nutcase. SPEAKER B 00:05:32 - 00:05:34 Yeah, that's right. SPEAKER A 00:05:34 - 00:05:53 Because, you know, he's a lunatic, because who in their right mind will say that? You know, humanity, an individual human being does not fulfill the prerogatives of what God should be, that, you know, all-knowing, all-powerful, self-existent, all of these qualities. We don't have that. That's just not in humanity to have that. SPEAKER B 00:05:53 - 00:05:54 Yeah. SPEAKER A 00:05:54 - 00:06:25 And so, yeah, either he is who he is claiming to be, Jesus, as God in humanity, or he's none of that. And so, the things which you mentioned, the miracles, the kindness, the care which he showed as a human being, That all supports the fact that he would be God. Like, if he was a lunatic, he wouldn't be kind and all of that. You know what I mean? Like, the weight of evidence of his life. SPEAKER B 00:06:25 - 00:06:29 Oh, yeah, the weight of evidence is very, very strong there. SPEAKER A 00:06:29 - 00:06:47 Yeah, so that's an interesting thing to do that. But you mentioned about Jesus' crucifixion and trial, right? And the interesting thing is that he was killed because people— because of his claim to be God. Isn't that correct? SPEAKER B 00:06:47 - 00:07:15 That's right. Yeah, yes, yes. Jesus claimed to be God. He said, you know, before Abraham was, I am. And he used the term in the Bible, I am, when Moses met God in the burning bush and Moses said, you know, God, what do I say to the people? Who are you? And God said, I am. In other words, and that is an expression we understand from that culture, that he was a self-existent one. SPEAKER A 00:07:15 - 00:07:15 Yes. SPEAKER B 00:07:15 - 00:08:10 He's outside space and time. He's not— he has no beginning. He has always been. And that fulfills a lot of the answers that we need in, you know, in terms of how we came to be here. And Jesus made that same claim. And that's why the religious leaders at the time were so upset. This guy is claiming to be God. He's clearly saying, That He was God. All right. And okay, He's raised people from the dead. He's healed blind people. He's performed all these miracles sort of thing. And it's very interesting that when He was on the cross, one of the things that they said to Jesus was, okay, if you truly are God, come down from the cross and we'll believe in you. And what they don't realize was that Jesus had to die. God had to die in order to take their place so that they didn't die eternally. SPEAKER A 00:08:10 - 00:08:10 Yes. SPEAKER B 00:08:12 - 00:08:38 fulfilled their wish, right, which is very shallow thinking, they couldn't have been saved. None of us would have been. Jesus had to die to refute Satan's original claim. When you look at the Bible, who was written by, you know, over 40 authors spanning, you know, over 1,500 years or more, and it all fits together, there's the same coherent picture. They add to it, they add to it, they add to it. SPEAKER A 00:08:38 - 00:08:39 Yes. SPEAKER B 00:08:41 - 00:08:55 It fits so well to think that, you know, 1,500 years before, Moses had a bronze snake made, a serpent representing sin, held up on a pole, and the people were to look at it and to be saved. SPEAKER A 00:08:55 - 00:08:55 Mm. SPEAKER B 00:08:55 - 00:09:25 And Jesus came and lived as an innocent person, but represented sin in our place and died on a pole the same. You know, how can you contrive that? You know, for Roman soldiers to crucify Him and this sort of thing. There are so many amazing things when people look into the fine points of the biblical account. But the other fascinating thing was the overwhelming evidence that Jesus was resurrected afterwards. SPEAKER A 00:09:25 - 00:09:25 Hmm. SPEAKER B 00:09:25 - 00:09:59 And that was attested. And that's what changed Christianity in the face of and changed those witnesses that saw that, that met with Jesus afterwards and realized this is, Jesus, you're alive. This is it. And, and actually saw Him ascending, ascending to Heaven too. And the angels physically appearing. They went off. That spread Christianity. Christianity was based on an observation of an event that actually happened that was recorded by a whole lot of witnesses. SPEAKER A 00:09:59 - 00:09:59 Hmm. SPEAKER B 00:09:59 - 00:10:26 And so that's super powerful evidence that Jesus was God. And this, and in this way, God resolved the problem of evil in that you You make a choice now. I have come. I'm the Creator of the universe. I've come and I've died in your place. You have a choice now. You can believe in Me and have eternal life, or you can continue to live in your sin and doing evil. SPEAKER A 00:10:26 - 00:10:26 Hmm. SPEAKER B 00:10:26 - 00:10:52 It's an amazing, beautiful choice because God is saying, yes, I'm going to come again. When I come again, everything is going to be destroyed. All the bad people are going to be destroyed. But the earth is going to be remade beautiful, perfect, and there won't be sin because we will all be changed. Why? Because we have chosen the free will of love. We have chosen to freely love. SPEAKER A 00:10:52 - 00:10:53 Yeah. SPEAKER B 00:10:53 - 00:10:59 It's a beautiful picture, and it's the only one that really explains evil and how evil can be dealt with. SPEAKER A 00:10:59 - 00:11:23 Yeah, yeah, that's right. It really thoroughly, completely deals with the problem of evil and gives us hope in the process, which is tremendous. There's one other thought here. You know, if Jesus' claims are true that he is God, what impact does that have? And how does it fundamentally establish the foundation of creation science? SPEAKER B 00:11:23 - 00:12:04 Right, so Jesus said that in the beginning, God created male and female, Adam and Eve. They were created right in the beginning. Now, a lot of people espouse, who are, for example, believers, espouse theistic evolution. So if we look then and they say, yes, the Earth is millions of years old, we had all this evidence of all these animals living in survival of the fittest, fighting, the one that was, you know, fittest survived and overpowered the others. He went on to breed and produce his offspring, become dominant and so forth. Then obviously we have sin and death long before Adam. SPEAKER A 00:12:04 - 00:12:05 Right. SPEAKER B 00:12:05 - 00:12:14 So, and also it means that evil was there long before the fall. of Eve. It just doesn't fit. SPEAKER A 00:12:14 - 00:12:28 So it makes the history of evil redundant as the Bible describes it, the idea of theistic evolution basically makes that whole story a fable about how sin and evil came into our world. SPEAKER B 00:12:28 - 00:13:02 Yes, yes, that's right. And it doesn't fit. It's an inconsistent story that doesn't fit. And Richard Dawkins pointed this out in a discussion with a leading theologian one time I remember watching, because the theologian And was saying, well, you know, we accept that there was theistic evolution and so forth. So that means that the story of Adam and Eve was a myth, right? And yes, so forth, it's made up to explain that. And so Dawkins very cleverly comes back, so Jesus died for a myth. SPEAKER A 00:13:02 - 00:13:04 For nothing, yeah, it makes no sense. SPEAKER B 00:13:04 - 00:13:14 You know, unless there was a real Adam that really sinned and that conversation took place, Jesus' death on the cross doesn't make sense. SPEAKER A 00:13:14 - 00:13:15 Yeah. SPEAKER B 00:13:15 - 00:13:38 But one of the amazing things is that the situation of Jesus on the cross was predicted unknowingly by David in Psalm 22, and also by Hosea in passages over 1,000 years before, or in the case of David, 1,000 years before and 700 years before, described the actual scene where God would die for the people. Hmm. SPEAKER A 00:13:38 - 00:13:53 Interesting. Yeah, thank you for drawing that link about the foundation of creation science, because that can be something which, you know, you might espouse a theory but don't necessarily draw the dots of the implication of what that means theologically. SPEAKER B 00:13:53 - 00:13:55 Yes. SPEAKER A 00:13:55 - 00:14:12 And when you reason it through, you think, okay, something doesn't add up here. And so we need to make sure that everything is consistent with one another, and certainly the fact that Jesus If we, if we take Jesus to be as he claimed to be, everything does make sense. SPEAKER B 00:14:12 - 00:14:12 It does. SPEAKER A 00:14:12 - 00:14:13 It makes perfect sense. SPEAKER B 00:14:13 - 00:14:14 Fantastic. SPEAKER A 00:14:14 - 00:14:30 And it's, um, yeah, good for us to dive into that. So thank you for sharing. Have you ever struggled with doubts about God's existence or known someone who has? What helped you through it? Share your thoughts and stories in the comments. Your journey could inspire someone else searching for answers.