Evidence of Things Unseen // S08E08

Is the Bible opposed to science and technological progress? And in the modern world of social media and inputs, we have more inputs of information than any other generation throughout human history. So, why didn’t Jesus come in the flesh in our time, when everything he could do would be documented perfectly? In this episode, former cold case homicide detective and Christian author J. Warner Wallace joins us as he delves in to these topics discussing the importance of Christ in this age.

Guest Info:

See our season 6 episode with J Warner Wallace: https://thepantrypodcast.com/podcast/do-the-work-with-j-warner-wallace/
Check out his website: https://coldcasechristianity.com/

Verses from Evidence of Things Unseen:

Hebrews 11:1&7, Romans 11:8

“Well, it turns out that you could know enough from the fuse and fall out of history to completely reconstruct the new Testament. That’s the kind of unparalleled impact that Jesus had on human history. And that impact is best explained by his deity.”

J. Warner Wallace, The Pantry Podcast, Evidence of Things Unseen

“That just, it just was like, wow, they’re, you know, they’re in the thrawls of war and they’re going through war and God, God tells him, he says, look, you can, you can go through and destroy any tree that doesn’t bear fruit. He says, but if it bears fruit, you don’t touch it. You know, it’s these preparations. So there was destruction, they’re fighting these wars, but there’s this constant supplying and providing that’s going on.”

Shea Watson, The Pantry Podcast, Evidence of Things Unseen

“Everything works out perfect because he wants to bring us all along and he knows that’s going to take longer, but it’s so much more worth it because then we exit the timeline with him with experience that we wouldn’t have if he had just said, I’ll just do it myself”

Michelle Watson, The Pantry Podcast, Evidence of Things Unseen

Annotated Transcript:

Shea: You’re listening to the Pantry Podcast, part of the spark podcast network. Now playing on the Edify app. Hey, I’m Shea  

Michelle:  I’m Michelle, and this is the pantry podcast. Season eight road to Revelation.  

Shea:  We’re here to help you crave a healthier spiritual diet by teaching you to ask the right questions, seek the right answers in the right place. God’s word and break free. The junk food. The world wants to shove down your throat. 

Michelle: We live in a broken world. We can fall down in despair or rise up for our wedding day. This season, we’re looking at what it really means to be the bride of Christ in the end times. And the many things we can learn from the book of Revelation that will guide us today, tomorrow, and to the end of time.

Shea:  Join us and fellow listeners in 47 states and 66 countries. As we marinate on the word of God, clear the junk from our pantries and feast on real everlasting food.

Michelle: Support the show by sharing this episode with two friends that need a godly snack and becoming a partner at patreon.com/the pantry Podcast for as low as $5 a month.  

Shea: And now let’s dig into the meal. 

Shea: All right. Hey, what’s up? And it is awesome to be here. I’m excited, always, always, two years. I think two years of excited, almost a hundred episodes  

Michelle: How does it feel to be excited for two years straight?

Shea:  I don’t know. We’re almost at a hundred episodes, so it’s pretty exciting, but man, it is awesome. Everybody that listens to us, man, welcome, welcome those who are starting to come on board across the world. It is so cool to see this going global and every week, almost every few weeks or so we see a new country pop up and welcome to the show. We’re going to talk tonight about the evidence of things not seen. When we think about this, our guest tonight is like one of the perfect people to really digest in a topic like this because there’s, there’s different things that we can attest to. Now, of course, we always believe that God, the Holy Spirit’s going to knock on our hearts and he’s going to open it. You know, we’re going to open our door to him, but there’s also proofs out there. Right? And I think as we move in, in the season of road to revelation, we start to understand that we’re on a trajectory to a certain point. And at that certain point, we start to see things like censorship. We started to see things like hostility or omissions from the Bible for and many conversations. So my thing that we’re going to talk about that I’m thinking about tonight that we thought about we prayed about right, is what if the Bible was not even available, then what would we do? And I think I’m gonna pass this over to Michelle. She introduced this awesome guest, been on the show before. I’m just, again, excited.  

Michelle: Yes. So this episode was inspired by Hebrews 11:1 which says that  now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. And what’s amazing about this guest is he’s brought a lot of things most of us have not seen and made them seen to us in his latest book. And we’re just going to dive into the topic because of, you know, a lot of the things. What if, you know, that’s a good question. What if things were censored to the point where you had to piece things together by what’s around you? So we’ve originally welcomed J Warner Wallace onto the show in season six, rewired, where he talks about doing the work of evangelizing in your own home with your own children, how to answer their questions and navigate those. And he’s the perfect person for that because he’s a cold case homicide detective, well-traveled speaker, author, and he professes apologetics at Talbot school of theology. And he serves as a senior fellow at the Colson center for the Christian worldview. And of course he’s also written cold case Christianity, and there’s also a kid’s version, which we have, and we’re excited to start using with Calia when she’s a little older, he hosts a podcast of the same name and he just released in September his newest book, as well as over I think 300 pages of in-depth supplemental notes. The books called person of interest. And so we just want to welcome you back to the pantry Jim.  

J. Wallace: Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. This is a good topic. When you use that verse from Hebrews, I think that’s so important because, and recite the verse again. I want to point out what I think is so fascinating about that verse. I have to put you on the spot.  

Michelle: No, no, no, it’s fine. So now faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.  

J. Wallace: Okay. Now, now, now let’s think about this for a second. I often will hear people say, well, okay, so this faith is something you hope for, but, and it’s really this unseen. So in other words, you don’t need evidence for this, that it wouldn’t be faith. If you had, if you could see it,  this is why it’s about faith in something that’s unseen and there’s the evidence of this. Okay, well, let’s make it simple in terms of like homicide investigations. Okay. All of my investigations and most of these, no one sees the actual murder occur. If they did, I mean, that does happen on occasion. You have a video or you haven’t witnessed, but my cases are cold cases that there was no witnesses to the actual crime aside from the murderer. But the question is, how do I know what actually happened on the day of the murder?  If I can’t see it, and there was no video recording of it and there is no one to even report it because he’s not talking and there was no eye witness. Well, now I’m going to, I’m going to have to believe in something I cannot see on the basis of what I can see. And we’ll present a ton of evidence to make a case for what happened on the day that you didn’t see on the basis of what it is that’s evidential that you can see, this is all we’re doing in terms of Christianity as well. It’s not that we’re saying that I can answer every question. Now they’ll take, I’ll take a step of trust, but there’s more than enough evidence to bring you to a conclusion to point you in the right direction. And you’re going to take that step of faith at the end of the evidence trail. When I hear people use the verse, I often think, well, the first thing people think is, well, then I don’t need to make a case for this because obviously it’s the emphasis of things unseen. But it turns out that’s what we’re doing in every case is we’re making a case of the basis of what is seen for the, for the one to action. The one event that you didn’t see.  

Michelle: No, I love that you touched on that because that was kind of one of the things that we thought was so interesting about bringing you on with all this evidence. And sometimes all the evidence doesn’t even really do it for people 

J. Wallace: Well, I, it doesn’t, I mean, it’s clear, isn’t it interesting that God would design it in such a way that there is more than enough evidence to believe that something is true yet you still have enough wiggle room that if you want out of a sheer act of will to deny it, you cant. So it seems to me that that’s part of God’s plan in this is that he’s not going to overwhelm people to remove their freedom so that their choices are not actually free choices. And so rather than do that, God presents enough. This is what, if you look at the gospels, I’m not making this up. This is Jesus. If you don’t believe it, I’m telling you, he says in the gospel of John, at least believe on the evidence and the miracles I worked in front of you. And when John the Baptist has got issues and wants to know if it’s true, in a sense, his disciples and Jesus knew John sent us and he wants to know, are you the one he doesn’t scold those guys. He doesn’t tell them to scold his cousin who should know better, right? I mean, he’s the guy who was there at the baptism and he saw God descended as a dove. And you know, he was there for all of this. He actually lept in the womb when their mothers met. Yet now he’s got doubts, but Jesus works miracles in front of his disciples and says, go back and tell John what you just saw. And that is such an evidential approach. So that’s why I take a similar approach. And that’s how I began to investigate the gospel of myself.  

Shea: I like how you’ve broken that down in that sense of like, even when we became Christians, you know, we, we came in, we said, Hey, okay, I’m starting to believe this. Now there are some people who sit there and unpack it and study it. And you know, like, I know you’ve done that. It’s kind of how you got there, but there’s, there’s some people who haven’t, but either way, either way, we still aren’t at that relational. You know, we don’t understand the relationship. We don’t understand that relationship. We don’t understand everything and we never will understand everything, but we start to grow because we start to unpack it. We start to see how Christ comes into things, how God comes into things. When we start to trust, we start to see, you know, faith poured into us. And so it’s kinda neat because I mean, I loved, I love old Testament history. I love getting back and just like looking at these different things, looking at Nero, looking at these different leaders and then looking at them on the outside. It’s just a neat thing for me to see.  So you do have a new book out and it’s called Person of Interest. Explain the premise because you take on a brilliant challenge with this book.  

J. Wallace: Well, we tried to do is, you know, I was first interested in Jesus. I would need you to examine the New Testament to see if it was telling me the truth about Jesus. And I did that in a book called cold case Christianity, but here, what we’re doing is taking that, just the flip of that.  we often have cases where we have a no body,  murder where, you know, a husband kills his wife or a wife kills her husband and, or a business partner kills a business partner, but somebody dies. And then the person who does it, just, it disposes of the body. So effectively, the body number is discovered. And so now different, of course they report this person just ran off. Or I don’t know where he is. I don’t have time to seen him. You know, I don’t know we had an argument last night and she never came back. So you have a missing persons report. And years later, if it’s not investigated quickly, this thing is still open. No one even took pictures of the crime scene because they didn’t think it was a crime scene. They thought it was a missing persons report. And so now I’ve got a case that’s 35 years old and I’ve got no body and no evidence from a crime scene. How do you make a case where you have an empty crime scene? Well, you do this by simply telling the jury that if on the day she disappeared, she was actually murdered, but that was an explosive event. And every bomb is proceeded by a fuse that burns slowly toward the detonation. And after it explodes, you’ve got debris everywhere. And so we make cases like this from the fuse and the fallout of the actual event. So if you’re somebody who’s skeptical about scripture and you refuse to open it, if you let’s just go, that thought experiment, you talked about, let’s just say that every New Testament manuscript was utterly and effectively destroyed. So there was no New Testament to return to every very, some evil regime has wiped off the face of the, of the, of the planet. Well, it turns out that you could know enough from the fuse and fall out of history to completely reconstruct the new Testament. That’s the kind of unparalleled impact that Jesus had on human history. And that impact is best explained by his deity. And this is the kind of thing we’re trying to do in this book. So it is an unusual approach.  I don’t think there’s anybody else who’s, who’s taking this approach, but for me as an investigator, my first question was, okay, so even if this is all true, do we really think that if you’re God incarnate, that you’re somehow going to appear in history in human history and the only ones that are going to have any, the only evidence of ever going to find it is four little gospels from Israel. Like I would expect if you are God that you’d have such a huge impact that I’d be able to find you everywhere. Well, it turns out that’s exactly the kind of impact he had. The problem of course, is most of us have never learned that. And even if you are in some part of the country, which is deeply churched, I’ll bet you, your public school education did not teach you about the impact that Jesus had on literature, music, education, arts, science, even on other world religions that are not Christian. That impact is so deeply entrenched that you can reconstruct the story of Jesus from any one of those aspects of human culture, independent of all the rest. And when you put it together, cumulatively, that’s really remarkable. If you think about it, no other person in the history of persons, can be so well reconstructed fromthose aspects of a culture. It’s just Jesus. And so that’s why I think it’s worth looking at,  

Shea: I’m going to follow on with this one. Cause I think that this is one of those deeper, deeper questions. Cause we can’t give the whole book away in one episode anyways. So like an example of that in one of those cultures, could you share one of those with us? Like something that was impacted through Jesus that had a ripple effect?  

J. Wallace: Well, it seems like the thing that is the most surprising to people, especially in a polarized political culture that we’re living in right now and social media only makes us worse. There is no kind of even dialogue or measured response on social media. Everyone’s a hammer looking for a nail. And that is just the nature of what’s become of the world. This diid not make us more social. This made us more antisocial, more tribal, and this is what’s happening. And especially when it comes to issues of faith and science, especially in a COVID world in which you got two sides which are polarized that think that people of faith are so ignorant of the sciences are so utterly unwilling to bend their knee to the sciences. Like always they’ve been holding us back. The statement had been made by a number of skeptics that Christianity has been holding back the sciences for decades and centuries. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of fact, more information about Jesus could be constructed from the history of science than from any other place. What I mean by that is that it turns out that the Christian worldview was a catalyst for the development of the natural philosophies in sciences historically. And if you look at the history of science, there is a geometric kind of proportion that just as you get closer and closer to 2022, the curve of science is even more spiked in terms of the development of the sciences, the involvement of the sciences, the discoveries of the science as well. It turns out that if you look at that history of where that all began, you will see that Jesus does not stand in the middle of that curve, or even a thousand years prior to the curve, he stands right before the curve takes off. That could be a coincidence or it could be that there’s something about the Christian worldview that acts as a catalyst for the sciences. And it turns out that all of the founders, not all, but the vast, vast, vast majority of the founders, they call them the fathers of modern scientific disciplines from modern, you know, chemistry and astronomy and biology. And you just name it, “ology”,  you’re going to find that it’s got started by a Christ follower, even all the way to quantum mechanics and computer sciences and computer languages like basic, those kinds of things were started by Christ followersl. They are the fathers of those scientific disciplines. And those folks wrote about Jesus because they were Christ followers who wrote personal letters and journals, even books about the nature of Christianity, the nature of Jesus. And from those writings of the science fathers, you can get more data about Jesus than you can from the church fathers, the Ante-nicene Church fathers is what I’m talking about, and if you look at those, that’s a remarkable cause right cause there’s a sense in which, you know, these things are not compatible. No one could be one and also be the other. That’s not true historically. Now we can make a decision that we want to step out of the sciences because we feel like, Hey, they’re being politicized and being weaponized against us, but that’s going to be a decision we’re going to have to make. And I think it’d be a grave error because it turns out that,  the history of science is replete with Christ followers and largely it’s because we have been such leaders in upper education, you know, all modern universities, as you know them today came out of three institutions and blowing up Paris and Oxford, which were initiated and begun by Christ followers. And so much science has done in the universities that the daughter universities of those three Christian institutions became the dominant set of universities that the scientists and the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th century emerged. So it’s our role in education that has given us the springboard. One of the seven things really that I think that are the catalyst, the springboard for the sciences historically. So I think most people would say that there’s no relationship and are probably surprised to find that the science fathers are actually Christians. And so, that’s something that, as you talk about it with your kids, I hope that people will share that truth and encourage our kids to continue that rich Christian tradition in the sciences.  

Michelle: I think it’s amazing how quickly an understanding of history in any of these areas can be co-opted  in favor of anti-Christian thought in the sense of, you know, it hasn’t been that long that he’s been systematically removed or demonized in these areas. And yet those people, I mean, it’s only been about two or three generations where it’s kind of like this concerted effort to kind of remove him and carve him out and make him seem like the antithesis to all of these things. And, yet when they co-op, they redefine these things and they use the goals, like I would say nefarious goals, you know, which are self-interest money, things like that. I often notice when science is pit against God, the goal of what they’re doing is also against God or the theory that they’re trying to promote, or the prediction they’re trying to conclude. They tend to align with things that are clearly against and opposed to reality, and also the word. And you mentioned social media, which is a part of technology, which is a part of science. And I think when we’re talking about end times, even if like 20 years ago, people had no idea, social media would be around when  you know, when they, when reading revelation, how could this be possible? Well, you know, it might be streamed on, you know, Twitter, it might be streamed…  

Shea: Who knew you’d be able to have conversations like these? 

Michelle:  Right. So it’s like, yeah, some components are completely there, but you mentioned social media. And I think that one would think truth would be that much more available in it. And to a degree it is, but there’s so much else available. So even though there’s truth out there, we’re seeing a lot more skepticism and we’re seeing a lot more denial and I’m interested in what you’ve noticed about like, despite all this tech that actually captures the truth where it’s like, well, there’s a video of it that actually happened. But then someone else is like, well, that was just Photoshop. You know? So what are you noticing about the role that technology is playing in people’s ability to accept and discern truth because it’s not necessarily one or the other,  

J. Wallace: Well, look, when you go into a restaurant and it’s in and out burger and you feel like it would go to in and out burger, you don’t have a lot of options at, in and out burger. Okay. You can have certain styles of the burger, but they don’t have like an option, like a, do you have a salad? And that’s not an option. Maybe, maybe it is now, but it hasn’t been in my recollection of in and out burgers, it’s fries and burgers. And there’s, it makes selections are easy. They’re fast. I mean, you don’t have a lot to choose from.  but if that menu had a thousand options, they would take you a long time just to look at all the options, let alone make a choice. Now, not only would it slow things down, but it would also make you less certain about what it is you think you should eat. We have a great Thai food restaurant here on the corner from us. We love it. And it’s taken us for several years to eat everything on the menu, because there’s just so much offered there. Right? You get stuck in a little groove, you order the same thing over and over again. Then at some point you’re like, I wanna try something different, but it’s because I’ve got so many options that I’m less certain about what to choose. And this is what’s happening in social media, where that makes every nuanced option seem as authoritative as the next. Most of us, because we recognize that I’m a Christian worldview. We are fallen lazy individuals by nature. Like if I can get it without having to work hard for it, I’m probably inclined to do that because my fallen nature is such that I want as much as I can get the least amount of work. And this is what happens in social media, like, you know, claims are made. And if I’m listening to my tribe, news sources, because I have a particular view of the world that I have now surrounded myself by similarly thinking to people who are in charge of news media. So am I going to like fact checked everything I’m hearing? Well, you’d have to be a pretty diligent, like hardworking. You know, it’s just easier to, I like this guy anyway. He said it, it’s gotta be true. And, and that’s really what’s happening is that we are not the kind of people who are, and this is true for all of us in the church as well, that are, are willing to take the time. It would take to actually investigate a claim. And if you’re not willing to do that, then don’t be surprised that people are going to buy all kinds of things on first blush.  You know, I heard this, I didn’t do anything to fact check it. It came from a source that I think is reliable because I like what they think anyway. And then I run with it. And I think you’re seeing a lot more, there’s the danger. And that’s why this is not the kind of world that would actually be more favorable to the message of Jesus. If God was timing this just right, you might think, well, he would time it right now. So that the word about Jesus would get out across all these platforms. But the problem is that even if you was here and it was videotaped or not videotaped, I don’t do that anymore, but they recorded it.  Who would believe it? I mean, if you’re watching Marvel comic shows or Marvel movies, you know, that pretty much anything I think up, I can convince you actually happened visually.  And that’s the problem. And I don’t like that. We are so polarized just in 10 years of social media, just really in about 10 years of social media. If you look at the rate of depression, the rate of it, just trace it back. You will see a lot begins at the beginning of social media. It all kind of like starts around 2010-ish. And if you think about it, this is not helping us. I think it’s actually, I don’t know how to reverse that. My wife and I always talk about this. This is an aside, but Susie always used to talk about this way, this, the virtue of privacy, the virtue of that, in other words, that privacy ought to be a choice that we make, because we think it’s the right choice to make. I don’t know about you. And if you’re guilty of this shame on you, I’m just going to say it anyway. I don’t know anybody now, whose kid has a birthday that they don’t post it on social media, happy birthday to so-and-so, really? I mean, now we’re taking it for granted because we don’t do it, but doing it for it, but almost a decade. But you know, when I was growing up, nobody knew my birthday except my immediate family. And there was no way to tell anybody else about it. That was okay. But now it’s like, it’s not, I don’t truly feel a certain way unless I publicly proclaim it. If it’s my anniversary with my wife, I have to tell the world what a great wife she is. I really, I mean, we used to do these kinds of things privately. Now it has to be a public statement or what it is not true. I mean what are we doing here? And we have voluntarily surrendered our privacy to the world and not just birthdays and things like that, but it used to be, you could drive by your neighbor’s house for 10 years and not really know every nuance of his political positions, right? So although he might be completely opposed and might have voted differently than you and hold a different worldview than you didn’t know this. And so you greeted him on the front, on the front lawn and had, you know, talked about sports and loved each other, all good, but now you’re following him on social media and you know what that guy posted. Hey, we have surrendered our private thoughts to a public platform. You might as well be walking around with a big message board on and help your head. Here’s everything I believe about politics. Here’s everything I believe about your stupid religion. Here’s everything I believe about everything, because there’s no mystery anymore. We have surrendered, all of that for the sake of what, what, and it’s all it’s really about trying to build a platform. Cause even, you know, I’m an author, it’d behoove me to have the largest social media platform I can have if I want to get the ideas in my books in front of people. Right? But there’s the danger is that it becomes about, and all of us do this. I mean, you would much rather have a hundred likes on your next Instagram posts than ten . Your kids would. So what we’re basically saying is we’re all building platform. We all want to be internet influencers. We all at least want more interaction than less. And there’s the problem. So I think this virtue that we call privacy, which we’d never really considered a virtue, but it is, and making the conscious choice, not to be public about everything to be, to run against the stream on that issue. Now, Susie been really good about, you know, I have adult children, so they’re all grown and they’re out, but I don’t, I don’t connect to anything on them on social media. I just feel like that’s not the place I recognize Social media for me is about talking about Jesus and the things that I’m learning about Jesus and writing about Jesus. And that is it.  Right now we run. And so if I see a great picture of God’s handiwork in nature, I will post those things, but you’ll notice Susie and I usually are not in them in any way. I want that privacy. So I think that we have to kind of return to that. And if we do, we will stem the tide on some of the stuff we’re seeing in culture.  

Shea:  As I sit here and think about that, the trap door, people want more interaction. Now, not everybody’s an influencer, not everyone is going to get like all the people asking them questions and interacting with them. And so they’re looking for this interaction and they get like a handful of 12, 24 here, but you’re really looking for people to reach out and to speak with. And maybe it is time, you know, for people to start even, okay, guilty as charged. Hey, look, you know, let’s, let’s just throw, throw guilt where it’s at, I’m guilty.  in that sense of, you know, being on social media and then people will sit there and say, Hey, you know, people need to know a little bit more about you, not just your Jesus thing. And so you ended up like, okay, let me throw out a few pages of the, you know, my wife and I together or something. You know, some people think that I’m not just this dude, you know, preacher from a soapbox.  But as you sit here and talk but really like actually convicts me to go back to just what you said, my social media, be my platform to share and share the gospel.  

J. Wallace: So we’re really far off the rails right now.

Shea: So far! 

J. Wallace: I would say this too. So like I get it. We will often say it this way. I want to grow my platform so I can reach more people for Jesus. In other words, I want to grow the platform so I can preach the gospel. But honestly, at some point it flips and we’re just preaching the gospel to grow a platform and we have of all people. So, so I had a website called please convince me for about eight years before I wrote my first book. And I took all that content, redirected it. So if you type it in, please convince me.com and it redirects you to cold case christianity.com. So it’s all there during those eight years, just wasn’t sophisticated enough to know how to track my traffic. I don’t, you know, I was working as a youth pastor serving as a youth pastor working as a detective. And I, and I was just posting my Sunday message various forms on this platform. Not even knowing if anybody was reading it at the end of it. I had a book publisher do all the statistical work on it. They realized we had a pretty decent sized platform. And that’s why they gave me a book, a chance to write a book all based on platform. I had no idea what the platform was. I was too busy. I was working. I had cases in trial. I mean, that was the last thing on my mind. Since then, because I’m writing books. It’s never the last thing on my mind. Now, here’s what I would suggest for those eight years. I was willing to do that every single week. I never missed a week, podcast, article every week. I did that for eight years before I wrote a book.  

Having no idea if anyone was listening to the podcast, having no, there was no way for me to tonight, but now I’m sure there was a way to know. I just wasn’t sophisticated enough to know it. Now the question is, if they change social media and on YouTube, you have no idea how many subscribers you have. You also have no idea how many likes you have or now have no idea how many viewings each video is getting. If you have no way to know how many downloads you have in the podcast, or how many visitors you have to your website, it’s just not available. Would you continue to do it? I think we would. I hope we would, but I know a lot of folks who if for example, it couldn’t be monetized. What if it can’t be monetized? This, this has, has to be a lot labor of love without any idea of it’s reaching anyone. To me, this is like what getting up every day and you do your Bible study, or you do your daily devotional or your reading and scripture, or you got your prayer life. This everyday expression of what I’m discovering about Jesus is just my routine as a retired detective. And so I would just challenge all of us who are doing this publicly and know what our stats are to stop opening up that analytical page and just bang out the stuff you bang out every week, because you feel like this is what God has called me to do. And then he’ll think that for me, it was so liberating not to get caught up in that extra dimension of what we call ministry, which is to me, this is your common daily walk. I mean, why are we calling it ministry to begin with? It’s just what we’re called to do. And so that’s why, you know, you gotta get in that place where you can, you can actually make those kinds of choices.  

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s funny. We’re all like susceptible to it. Like we fight it all the time where we don’t look at our stats all the time. And when we look at them, the first impulse is, man, I wish it was higher. And the second and it’s, for me, it’s almost immediate. And I, I mean, that’s better than not, but it’s still not the best, is but 10 or 20 or, or, but 1, you know, whatever. But so someone heard it and then I stopped and I pray for those people, but it’s very telling what the first thought is. And as we go and we, and we’re diving into this, cause this is actually, I mean, we said we were far off the rails, but this is exactly where it kind of goes when you’re talking about now. You know, and one of the things that I think this kind of feeds into that when I looked at, when I first came to Christ apologetics, I thought that was the answer, because I mean, I was coming right out of the world where proof is everything. And you know, w w what’s your source, et cetera. And so I come right out the world right out of college. And I think I come to Christ by faith. Like I read revelation, which is why this season so special. I read revelation. And I come to Christ because I saw the grace of God. But for some, I instantly translated that even though I felt the grace of God, and that’s what led me to him, the love of God. Instantly I thought that’s not enough for other people. They need proof. And so I think apologetics is it. And then I came across you and a few other apologists, like, you know, Lee Strobel and all these people who are writing all these, like they did all the footwork. You don’t have to do it yourself, read their book, you’ll come to Christ. And then I realized that doesn’t work. And it brought me back to the realization, the humbling realization that no amount of proof is what does it. And yet what’s interesting is I mean, people, even back then the first people like they got proof, right. Proof was, was a portion. But with all the extra proof, there are believers. There’s so many of us and we have access to all this information. So we have all this proof in our arsenal and we already believe so it should only strengthen our confidence and our courage to, to say it to just state it plain, not, I think not, this is what I believe.  But instead knowing that this is the God that it doesn’t matter what I believe, but it matters. God is God. And he did make this earth is up. And yet we still go out like, kind of like, not everybody. Right. But there’s a lot, like, there’s a less authority in people’s voices when they state the word. And what do you think are some of the contributing factors, not over time, unless you see a theme that carried on, but like, for those listening right now, for our generations that are currently here, what are some of the things, and I’m sure social media, from what we’re talking about, it seems like that’s one, why despite more evidence at our fingertips than ever before, plus our faith. Why are people so, well you know, this is what I think,  when, when they’re, when they’re living their daily life. Why are, why aren’t people professing and declaring it like it’s nobody’s business.  

J. Wallace: Well, and you said a couple of important things there, you know, you’re right. You’re absolutely right about, you know, how to look in the end.  What is the role that all this data and information plays anyway? So it, God has the power to need it to news, none of us in any way, either to preach the gospel, we could all just be born with the innate understanding of Jesus and the gospel as part of our innate understanding. It’s not that God doesn’t have the power to create us that way he could, or he could come to every one of us in the first 10 years of life in a vision that compels us to believe something that, that we, we cannot resist. He certainly has the power to do that. Instead, he’s using a message that is delivered by usually another human.  And the question is, what’s the message? Is the message. Just, you know, the, the, for a lot of people, it’s just the plain gospel, which is great for people like me. It’s going to have to be a little more because that’s the kind of person I was. Maybe you felt the same way coming out of college, where you felt the world has got a certain standard, a certain epistemology, how do we know something is true? And you needed to have that presented to you in that way. And God comes to us and reaches us in the way that we need to hear it. Here’s what I will say.  Before I even answered that question, I wrote a book called cold case Christianity. The first chapter, it has a story about a guy who was involved in a gunfight. And he was an officer who had pulled over a drunk driver.  And this drunk driver decided he was not going to jail that night. He happened to have a gun in his waistband, and he pulled the gun out on the officer and the officer was flat-footed and he knew that he was too late to do much. Now I’m talking to him after it’s all over, because I’m working the officer involved shooting, and he ended up trusting in something that he had seen earlier. He, he had, we’ve all seen our Bulletproof vests on the range where you test them and you shoot a bullet into the vest and you see that it stops the bullet. Well, he knew he was wearing his Bulletproof fast. Now, if he actually decided, you know what,  I have, he’s got the drop on me. I can’t get a takeaway moving too far away. I’m just going to tense up my stomach muscles and take the first round.  I know I’m wearing my vest. As long as it hit me in the head, I’ll be able to get my gun out and return fire. And in that moment, he went from belief that the vest would stop a bullet because he had seen it that in her range to believe in the vest to save his life, because he had to actually trust it to do what he knew it could do. And here’s the difference. Do you honestly think that if he’d never punched a round into a vest on the range that he would have had that kind of confidence to sit still and just trust the vest? It turns out that your level of trust in anything is directly proportional to the degree to which, you know something as evidently true. He knew that bullet would be stopped by the vest cause he had seen it evidentially with his own eyes in the range.  And that’s what gave him the confidence to be still and trust the vest. So it turns out for most young people who just think it’s true, that any good sort of evidential reason for it to be true, they just always trusted it to be true. Something is going to hit them in the gut. At some point, some aspect of life is going to challenge and shake their entire foundation unless they know evidentially it’s true. It’s harder to run from it. And I can say my own son, who is a doctor, there was that season of, you know, biochemistry and all that stuff he was doing where he, you know, he wanted to live his life the way he wanted to live his life. And he’ll say this, he said it in courses with me at Biola, he’s helped me teach classes. And, and he’s 31 now, and he’s an anesthesiologist.  And I will tell you that when he was in school, he said, you know, I know I can run so far, but I knew from everything I learned as a kid, that this was evidentially true. So at some point I knew I was going to have to reckon with it. Right. I knew I’m coming back to this because I knew that it was true on the basis of all this stuff that I had been talking to him about for years. And a lot of it, you know, as we talked about DNA and how, you know, Anthony flu, for example, the skeptic from the 20th, 20th century, he was also provoked by the evidence of DNA as it was I,  and so my son, David worked in DNA labs where he was doing DNA genetic therapies. And so he always knew that he was always felt compelled that that mind is still the best source for DNA. That evidence of DNA held him in seasons, where he was inclined to run for a little bit and live his own life. But he always knew eventually I’m going to have to come back to this cause it’s true. And,  and that’s why I think it’s important for us to have a view that is grounded in something we can actually point to aside from. Cause let me tell you, if you said, no, look, I I’ve heard the gospel. I believe the Bible is true. I don’t need anything else. I believe it’s true. Let me change the words. I believe Joseph Smith and I believe the book of Mormon. I read it and I believe it’s true. This kind of an approach where we don’t examine whether or not the claims of our script, the claims of the scripture actually match reality, leads people to error, unless you’re inclined to believe that Mormonism is true. Right? So, so I think it’s important for us. It doesn’t just confirm what is true. It protects you from what is untrue, right?  

Shea: That’s kind of like if you were to look at sanctification and the three aspects of sanctification, you know, it’s positional, experiential, l, and then of course, glorified, of course we’re in heaven. But in that experiential period of, of that sanctification, you’re unpacking these promises, you’re unpacking what Jesus has said. You’re unpacking and understanding and coming to this beautiful conclusion, you know, that we’re for, for a lot of us, we come to this beautiful conclusion that, wow, this is truth. And wow, I need this.  But I, I want to go back because something you said earlier, and we’re talking about internet and we’re talking about all of these different things, even Joseph Smith and like, okay. Angels and they come and talk or, or internet comes and tells us something like, this is the way this is this, you know, the little theological debates that we have or even historical debates or, or any of those things. When you start to research for, for this, for these books, how do you go about it with, because there’s so many things, I mean, type in salvation and there’s going to be like 900 people defining salvation for type it type of tithing and you get another 900!

J. Wallace: Well the good thing is that,  it’s one thing to find, you know, what is the definition of a term, right? Because then it comes down to what is the source you’re trusting for the definition. That’s different, for example, than what happened yesterday at 12 on the corner, right? Because now that’s an event that I don’t my opinion about a definition. It doesn’t really make a difference. What makes a difference is what historically happened on that corner, on the basis of whatever evidence we could use to reconstruct the events that happened on the corner. So events in history and a historical timeline, and this is why timelines are so important to juries. And this is what we’re doing in this book, or person of interest is we’re just looking at the historical timeline of a crime leading up to the disappearance of Tammy Hayes. This is the woman who was killed in the book. That’s the story of the book. And every chapter we trace through that cold case, murder investigation, and then afterwards, what kind of fallout, what kind of behavior on the part of her husband gave him away. And so we’re looking at the fuse and it’s a timeline issue. So I will have to do in order to investigate that I have to go back and find evidence or talk to people or try to reconstruct what happened historically in the years, leading up to her disappearance. And in the 30 years since. That’s a little easier, right? It’s not like I’m saying, I’m asking somebody, what did she say on that day? Not what do you think she meant by what she said on that day? I will. And that’s my decision to make. I just want to know the words.  Now you might interpret her words differently than me, but I just need to know what is the data? What is the, what are the words? And that’s what we’re doing with historical reconstructions, right? So it’s less dependent. Now, we’re gonna, I’m going to make an inference. The defense is also going to make an inference. I want to say that this data leads the best and most reasonable inference is that he’s guilty. The defense will find a way to reshape that and give you a different inference, but why he was tell jurors in the end, my conclusion is not evidence. His conclusion is not evidence. The evidence is evidence you’re allowed to come to your own conclusion, using your common sense. Now I’m going to show you what I think is the best inference, and he’s going to do the same, but in the end we don’t get a vote on the jury. You get to vote. And so in the end, that’s going to be your choice and what you’re going to do in order to do that, by the way,  at the end of the trial, the jury cannot say, can you, can I get a typed version of the closing argument? No, the argument is not evidence. If you’re looking for that piece of evidence that was shown to you in week 10, oh, I can bring in photographs of that for you. So you can look at it again. The evidence is the evidence, but the opening statements and the closing arguments are just that they’re just the opinions and views of arguers. They’re not evidence. So we’re looking for, when we’re doing this kind of research is like, what are the facts? Not what are the opinions about the facts? And it is harder, right, to find that. But luckily, you know, a lot of the stuff with the categories we’re talking about here, art, music, literature, education, science, and world religions, that data is out there and you can, you can reconstruct it.  

Michelle:  Yeah. And the other thing that you alluded to, and I know it’s in your book is, you know, the perfect timing. So last week we were talking about, we brought two other podcastsers on, we talked about for such a time as this and kind of like, we’re all made for whatever time that we’re in, including Jesus in the flesh. And you go through some amazing examples of why he was, he came at that time and that he didn’t come like you said earlier, you know, when there were 50,000 smartphones in the vicinity to document everything they ever said. And before I ask you to go into that, the thing, when I heard that, I thought about how, when my daughter tried she’s two and a half, she tries to help me with things. And I know that when she helps, it’s probably cause she’s two and a half.  She’s still learning. It’s going to slow me down and I could do it a lot faster without her. And that’s kind of like, God, like he could do it a lot faster without us, but because he wants to bring us into this sanctification and this walk and this experientialness, his perfect timing looks different than just everything. Snap, it’s all done. Everything works out perfect because he wants to bring us all along and he knows that’s going to take longer, but it’s so much more worth it because then we exit the timeline with him with experience that we wouldn’t have if he had just said, I’ll just do it myself. So can you walk us through a couple of the most, the things that hit you hardest about like, whoa, that’s another reason why he came when he did come and not before or not after.  

J. Wallace: Yeah. So, so a couple of things about that,  you know, it’s interesting that you talked about the value that your daughter could have mixed to take too long and, and, and you could do it faster.  It’s kind of like monetary systems, right? Like we, we are a gold-based monetary system because there’s a finite amount of gold and that gives it value that doesn’t change. I cannot create more gold.  You know, when you have a finite quantity of something, that’s where it has value. You and I, we say, well, you need to do this faster because we know that we have a finite net. We think of ourselves as having a finite number of minutes in the day and a finite number of days in our lives. Of course God doesn’t have any of those,  you know,  limits it’s, he’s got an infinite number of days and an infinite number of minutes. So there’s no urgency with God, you know, but he does. It’s like anything else, if you prepare a meal for the a guest, there are certain steps you’re going to take, you’re gonna go to the market, you’re going to buy the stuff you’re gonna make the cake with. Heck before you bought that stuff, they had to harvest that wheat and grind it into flour. There’s a certain number of processes. And by the way, as those processes were occurring, a certain amount of destruction was occurring. I had to knock down all those fields of wheat and grind up all that flour. I had to destroy a lot of stuff in order to get the thing I needed to make the next step. And by the time you get those ingredients in your house, and now you’re making a mess and some things are going to be destroyed in order for you to make that beautiful cake.  And then finally you to serve the cake on the night, on the night of the dinner. So it turns out that you had to do a number of steps and a lot of those steps were relatively destructive. Same thing happens with God’s timing in terms of the appearance of Jesus. There are a number of preparatory steps that God takes to set a table. And unfortunately, some things are going to get destroyed along the way, because it’s the rise and fall of cultures, the rise and fall of belief systems, even the life and death of a succession of prophets, predicting Jesus, all of these things occur over a timeline, preparing a small window of opportunity, which we call the red zone in one of the chapters. And it’s that asset thing that Paul is talking about in Galatians, right? Where he’s talking about,  that fullness of time in which God arrives as Jesus. So what is it that makes that time the fullness of time? Well, I think there are several things. And what we talk about in the book is the cultural fuse of the rise and fall of empires, the technology of writing of alphabets, of the papyrus development of language development, of an empire that begins to control the whole known world, and then can disseminate this information that builds roads and infrastructure, the kinds of things that Paul and the disciples will take in order to spread the word of Jesus. It turns out these things happen in just the right time frame and I’m not gonna be able to, this is a visual book and there’s over 400 illustrations in the book. So this is a book that you have to see. It’s like a graphic novel and the charts that show you the shrinking red zone until finally there’s a window of opportunity.  That’s only about a hundred years long. It’s from about 29 BC to about 70AD. And Jesus happens to fall right in the middle of that third, middle third of that period of time and has a reason why he falls there. And it’s not just, you know, that yeah, if you fall in the digital age,  there’s so much more pluralism and so much more skepticism today, given the age which we live in, that there wouldn’t have thought before when I was growing up, you had three major networks to learn about anything. You had the nightly news on CBS, ABC, and NBC. That was it. There was no cable. Well then you added the cable shows and now you’ve added an infinite number of bloggers and news outlets online. And they’re all on demand. I can pull that up whenever I want it. And I can watch that story whenever I want to watch it. Well, this is why we have, we have so many choices, so many perspectives, and by the way, no one is making that distinction. No one is saying, well, here’s the news, but I’m going to give you my spin or they’re going to give you their spin as the news, right? That’s a very different approach. So it’s really hard to be able to be certain. So I don’t think certainty is anywhere nearly as easy to come by today, as it would have been in the first century. That’s number one, number two. And I learned this from just, you know, studying the story of Jesus. It turns out the people who watch our digital content, who listen to our podcasts.  But more broadly, the videos you might, let’s say we do this video together and we get 10,000 views on this video that does not mean that 10,000 people have downloaded the video to their home hard drives. Right? And matter of fact, none of them have. They’ve probably been for the most part, just watched it on their phones. They watched it online. And when it’s all over, it’s just a click away from being destroyed. Books though, manuscripts, papyrus. The message. In other words, a hundred thousand copies of my book, 10,000 copies of my book will occupy 10,000 geographic locations around the globe. Unlike the viewing on the video. In a digital age, you’re not occupying geographic space in a non-digital age, everything occupies geographic space. And that means it’s so much harder to destroy. I’d have to know every location where that data is being held. Look, we’re finding manuscript, evidence of Jesus every day, right? In the most unlikely places. Why? Because it’s not a digital, it was not a digital world. It’s a world in which information had to be physical. And that occupies space. This is why I tell anyone doing this kind of work that we want to do digital media, but we also want to write books because it turns out one is so much harder to destroy than the other. So if you want longevity in culture or in history, you want to have something that’s geographically located. So that’s, I think part of the difference now, now you asked, you know, I think the question was,  I forgot I did all that and forgot your question, but remind me of what we were talking about in terms of I’m so sorry

Michelle: You know, I’m so enraptured that I forgot my own questions here.  

J. Wallace: Oh you were asking about what was one of the best, the biggest things that, yeah. So I do think that what I’m fascinated by is the cultural fuse that burns. And I talk about not just the empires that rose and fell, but I also talked about the spiritual abuse, which is really about the mythologies worshiped by non-Jewish groups throughout history. And I also talked about the Jewish prophets, but, but the thing that fascinated me the most was that, like we talked about this, this window that was caused by the Roman empire coming in, and that Pax Romana that 200 year period of peace in which things that were being destroyed all around the world,  there was a lull in that activity and the Roman empire took that money that used to be spent on war games on war and they turned it into infrastructure. And so the roads, the very roads that are mentioned in revelation, the roads that John is talking about, those cities, the seven churches, well, it turns out those seven churches, at least two of them were unavailable to Paul to even start because there was no road available until the Roman empire built that road about a hundred to 200 years before he actually walked on it. So it turns out that there,  that, that there’s a necessity. And what’s interesting about it is that there’s a long, thousands of years of history, of brutal warfare, right? Destruction of all kinds of stuff. And you might think, well, yeah, God uses all that stuff. And so you might feel like in a part of your life right now, where it’s more destruction than it is, you know, the rising of an empire, but it turns out God is probably going to use that the same way He used human history to open up this window of opportunity that would not have been there. The Romans learned so much from the empires they destroyed. They basically conquered. That they, they actually had a certain level, for example, of religious tolerance. They recognize that, Hey, if I let you worship the gods that you started off with, you’re less likely to be rebellious. So that that’s what gave Christianity a decent headstart is because at least initially they didn’t think it was going to be a problem. They’ll let the Christians worship Christ. And so that’s something they learned before that other empires would, you simply destroy every God you’ve ever worshiped along with your people group as you’re conquering your land. So I think this Pantheon of Roman gods allowed at least initially the Jewish and Christian, you know, now of course they recognize pretty quickly that Jews and Christians were not going to bow to their gods. In addition to this, this God, and that’s where the rub started. But at least initially to start in an environment of relative religious tolerance was helpful.  

Shea:  You know, that just goes right back to the cake, the birthday cake, you know, the destruction that leads up to God’s plan. You can watch that through even that as the Israelites or yeah, I went through, you know, from the beginning, you know, they were conquering these nations. I, I, there was a verse that I came across the other day. That just, it just was like, wow, they’re, you know, they’re in the thrawls of war and they’re going through war and God, God tells him, he says, look, you can, you can go through and destroy any tree that doesn’t bear fruit. He says, but if it bears fruit, you don’t touch it. You know, it’s these preparations. So there was destruction, they’re fighting these wars, but there’s this constant supplying and providing that’s going on. That like you were talking about the Romans, I’ve always thought that that was just a beautiful story of how that infrastructure was put in place. You know, all these wars, they, they, they gather up all their resources. There’s this period. And then they just start building and making things available. 

J. Wallace: This is what I love too, is this the way that the roads were built because they have, they’re trying to push certain things down those roads and they’re trying to push armies. And they’re in the military machines, down those roads and the formations, they were marching in and the types of machines they were pushing just to not allow for a lot of turns and twists. And so you couldn’t go around a lot of things you had to go through and over things, as straight as you could. And so this is why you have one of the greatest periods of tunnel building, In   antiquity is cause you really, they were, there was a purpose. Now look, they during this, this,  this was not as though they were saying, Hey, let’s build roads. So that if son Jewish Sage rises to prominence as has,  followers can, can tell everybody about no, they were thinking, Hey, while this is a lull in the activity, let’s get these roads in place so we can push more armies down them for the next war. Okay. So this was really preparation for what might come defensively more than anything else. And it turns out this was what we were, God uses all of these motives, even your worst motives on your worst day or the worst motives of the people you think that are not for God, and they’re not, he uses all those motives to achieve his. Can you imagine having enough intellectual ability to gain every single aspect of the puzzle to know that if I would do this, this is going to know every domino that’s going to fall for all eternity. That’s the kind of power that God has.  

Shea:  And then what’d he do? He deconstructed the Romans. So they built it all up. And then the empire falls over time. There was a time period there, but they did fall  

J. Wallace: And thinking about this. I mean the systems in place that are in place that are education, for example, a lot of what happens in Europe has to happen after the fall of the Roman empire. Right. You know, it’s been said that really, I think in one of the chapters of the book, I talk about this, that if not for the libraries that were kind of put together by the monasteries. Monasteries, you know, saw libraries is kind of like their armory, like afford some armory, right? It’s all full of weapons. Well, for us, for our monastery, it was awful a books. And if you were a monastery within the Roman empire, you were collecting more than just Christian documents and manuscripts. You were collecting all of the Roman manuscripts, all of the Greek manuscripts that you have a lot of manuscripts. These were repositories for the global knowledge has been said this matter of fact, that we wouldn’t know half as much as we know about Rome, about the Roman empire.  Cause once they, they were sacked in so much was destroyed. It was the information that was still available through the libraries and the monasteries that allowed us to recover what happened in Rome. So I think a lot of what, you know, this, this, and by the way, that’s because Jesus does not tell us. And then maybe we ought to kind of get close to the end here. But this is a good place to end probably as is that the idea that Jesus does, what the great commission is not to tell us, go out and make converts. That’s not as his goal is to go out and make disciples, teaching them everything I have taught you. That is a teaching worldview that he inaugurated the highest values in education. Because, well, look, I can’t teach them from the book they don’t read. Well, then you better teach them read. Well, I can’t teach them to read because they don’t even have an alphabet. Well, then you better invent an alphabet. This is what was happening within Christianity and every people group, they reached that it couldn’t read, didn’t have an alphabet. So, so if you think about it, this, this whole notion of, of saying that all of this begins and ends with you teaching others. What I have taught you means that from day one, you have inaugurated an educationally based worldview. It’s not based on power. It’s based on information transferred to a process of education. And that is to me,  what really accounts for a lot of the other stuff we’re seeing in culture and why the civilization that emerges out of that Christian worldview is the one we are living in today, right?  

Michelle: They say that some people are like, we’re already in world war three. And it’s the information warfare. Like it’s not guns and bombs. It’s literally the war on information. And it makes so much more sense with what you just said, that the war would be on information because that is where truth resides.  

J. Wallace: This is one more thing about that. Now you got me wanting to and I have to turn a corner here really quick, but I will tell you this, that you’re, you’re absolutely right. That Christianity, it turns out as a worldview describes the world the way it really is. And the more you live in this world, and you experienced successes and joys, you’ll find that they come from the traditional Christian, judeo-Christian values, right? It comports with the way things really are. So that when we got to defeat Christianity is to convince, try to convince us that our eyes are deceiving us. That what we think is true is that it’s very rude, untrue, because it turns out if what we see is what is real well, that’s going to be best explained by a Christian worldview, the way to defeat it is try to convince us that what you’re seeing is not what really is, is what you think in your mind. I can redefine everything is not based on anything that’s empirically, observable, or objective. It’s all based in subjective opinion. Well, that’s how you defeat a worldview. That best explains the objective reality as you did not have objective reality. And so that’s where I think we’re headed to anyway.  

Shea:  Awesome. No, I think that man, we’ve unpacked a lot. I think anyone who hears this,  temporary digital, no, just kidding.  

Michelle: Download it at the  Pantrypodcast.com. Put it on a USB drive, put it in a Faraday cage somewhere underground. Try that for doomsday prepping   

Shea:  I can just write a paragraph and put it somewhere

Michelle: Print out the show notes and put them somewhere.  

Shea: Hey, look seriously on a serious note though, but get out there. Buy his books. I’m telling you will not be disappointed. I love how he unpacks things.  Jim is just awesome when it comes to this, I love having you on the show. I’m not even gonna finish this off. I think we’ve said,  plenty. 

J Wallace: Thanks so much for having me. 

Shea: We always enjoy these conversations with you last time, just for our listeners. Go back, listen to the last. So he turned around and started interviewing us about our own parenting and everything. It was, it was brilliant. It was awesome.  But hey, Jim, it was a pleasure having you on the show. We’re so thankful. and I’ll let Michelle roll it on out.  

Michelle:  Yeah. So again, the pantry podcast.com print out the show notes, download the episode. You heard it here first. But if you have any comments, any questions, if you want to continue to just help others grasp these amazing concepts we’ve covered today, just share this episode. So until next time. Bye.

Shea: Always so full. We love it. Thanks for listening to the pantry podcast. Subscribe to the show, wherever you listen and check out other great shows on Edify app and eternity ready radio.