Responding to Arguments Against Christianity

Would you give a warm TLC welcome to Mr. Gregory Kochel. Thank you, good introduction. Thank you. Wow, what? You guys are a lot of fun. I just tell you this morning we had a great time. I actually got to sleep in a little bit while Dr. Hazen did the first session. I came in the middle of Dr. Morland's session and then I had a chance to share some things with you.

But you know there's a problem with these kind of seminars. We do these a lot in different parts of the country. The problem is that you guys sitting there get all this good information and it just, after a while it just starts filling you up and you feel like that guy in the Far Side cartoon. You know he's in physics class or something and he raises his hand and he says, Professor can I please be excused? My brain is full, you know. You just don't know what to do with all that information.

And so a lot of times there's a missing piece when we get all of this great information, the apologists, the philosophers, the historians, it's good stuff, but how do you get from the content to the conversation? How do you get from the scholarship to the relationship? That's what I want to address tonight. I want to give you that bridge from one to the other and that's why I see some of you with no paper and pens. I'm glad to see that. I hope you jot some of these things down because I'm gonna offer you some very, very practical things.

But before I get into the material proper, I want to say something that some of you are gonna find a little bit surprising, maybe even shocking. Given that the enterprise that we're involved here with this conference, Reasons for Faith, there's a sense in which this is kind of evangelistic. That is what we're trying to help people to see is that the smart money is with Jesus of Nazareth and this is where they should be placing, in a certain sense, their spiritual bet.

But the thing that may be surprising to you is for me who does this training and does the teaching and talks to a lot of people about my spiritual convictions, I virtually never have it as a goal. When I get into a conversation with somebody that I hope will lead to spiritual things, I never have it as a goal to lead that person to a faith in Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, I don't even have it as a goal to get to the foot of the cross.

And the reason this is surprising is a lot of times you've read an evangelism book, you take a course or a seminar, there are a lot of good ones out there. Sometimes the attitude is, listen student, we're gonna tell you some things that are gonna help you to communicate more effectively about your own convictions about Jesus, but if you only have like five minutes or three minutes, or one question was, what if you have 30 seconds in an elevator? That came up this morning.

And I was thinking, if I had 30 seconds in an elevator, I'm gonna take a deep breath and then get out, 'cause your time's up. I can't do anything in 30 seconds, all right? But when you have a small amount of time, they'll say something like this, if you only got a few minutes, just cut right to the chase, get right to the foot of the cross, give them the gospel. Because then if at least you've been giving them the things that really most important, and of course, there's a point there because the gospel is the most critical, that Jesus gave his life so that we can be rescued from our lives and from the anger that God has against those who break his law.

Okay, but the problem is, is when you try to give people the simple gospel nowadays, it ain't that simple anymore, is it? You can talk to them in the best way that you know how about your own convictions, and a lot of times, it isn't that it falls on deaf ears, it falls on uncomprehending ears, because they don't know what you're talking about. And a lot of times they've also gone, as I do through the airports, you see these bestsellers from the New Atheists and Bart Ehrman who came up today in conversation during the Q&A, and lots of people who are writing bestsellers that are coming from every direction to beat up on the kinds of things that many of you think are true.

Now, maybe the person you're gonna talk to hasn't read those books, but they've seen them out there and on the bestseller list, and so they think they've got something reasonable to say against us. So you've got all of these things that are against you. You think in three minutes you're gonna give the simple gospel and that's gonna make a difference? Well, I see this problem, and so what I've done is I've changed my goal.

By the way, there's one other thing that I forgot to mention, and that is if you go to evangelism class and you are told that what you need to do is get to the foot of the cross in every conversation, you gotta close the deal before you leave, I know what you're gonna do. You're gonna nod and smile and take notes and walk out and never do anything, because it scares you to think that you gotta do that, and you're thinking, man, he could do that, but I can't do that, so I'm not even going there. And so there's a huge barrier.

Now, what I've done in response to this is I have changed my goal. I don't have it as a goal, like I mentioned to you, to win that person to Christ or even to get to the foot of the cross. I have a much more modest goal, and it's one that I shared this morning when I kind of gave an example of how I open my talks when I speak to a secular audience, university or whatever. I mentioned that I'm a follower of Christ and that I think the smart money's on Jesus, and I go to some detail about how almost 40 years ago now I began to think carefully about the claims that Jesus made on my own life and the claims that he made about reality and how I was persuaded.

But I tell them, and this is the point here I'm making now, I'm not here to convince you, that is, I don't wanna convert you in this session. I've got a more modest goal. I tell them, I just wanna put a stone in your shoe. I just wanna get you thinking, that's all. I want you annoyed at something I said, but I want you annoyed in a good way. So you go out of here thinking, hmm, that Coca now, hmm. I don't believe that guy, but he got me thinking.

And see, when I lower my goal there, then I don't have to, in a sense, go for the gold. Go for the foot of the cross, get that out, even if it's unintelligible to the person that I'm speaking of. Instead, I can adapt to whatever circumstance that God provides for me so that I can have some kind of a conversation that might move the person a little bit forward, maybe just a little bit. Because I don't think of myself as an evangelist. I think of myself as an ambassador.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, we are ambassadors for Christ. As though God were speaking through us, we beg of you on behalf of Christ be reconciled to God. So I'm going out, I don't have to go for the gold, I'm just trying to move somebody forward. And so I don't have to force fit the circumstances, I can be alert to try to, here's what Paul says in Colossians 4, to conduct myself with wisdom towards the outsider, making the most of the opportunity, seasoning my words with salt as it were, so that I know how to respond to each person.

So I have a more modest goal in light of Paul's recommendation, but I also have something else that helps me out. I've got a plan, I've got a game plan. And I have a very short time, probably 30 minutes left to go, but I wanna share with you the core of this game plan. It's in the book Tactics, that's what the whole book is about, but the game plan, the simple game plan for discussing your Christian convictions is not hard to grasp. In fact, the core plan has only two steps and I wanna share that with you today.

It's a game plan that will allow you to maneuver and to feel comfortable in any conversation, no matter how little you think you know, and you may be a brand new follower of Christ, but you can still use this plan. Or no matter how aggressive or intelligent or educated the other person might be. Let me give you an example of how this works out. About 10 years ago now, I was in Northern Wisconsin. Now I go there every summer because in 1960, my grandpa built a little cabin on a lake and I went there as a kid for summers and vacations and stuff. And now I take my little girls and my wife, we fly all the way over, but it's worth the trip because I can rusticate a little bit, relax, and I like to go fishing, I'm a bass fisherman.

And I could really focus in. And this particular trip, I was out on the first day with a local pastor and I caught the largest smallmouth bass of my life, which was four pounds, two ounces at the time. Now since then, I've gotten three fish over five. So I got better bragging rights, but that's a big fish. And I wanted to get a picture of that digitized so I could show it up on the screen. I should have brought it with me, could have put it up there now. So that when I taught at that pastor's church the following Sunday, everybody would see what a fishing dude I was.

So I took the film down, this was before my digital days, I took the film down to the local, like overnight photograph place. And I was with my wife and we dropped the film off and there was a gal that was standing at the counter and she's wearing around her neck a pentagram, a large five-pointed star. Now a pentagram is an occultic symbol and I recognized it immediately. And so I asked her a question. I said, "Does that jewelry have religious significance?" And she said, "Yeah, the five points stand for earth, wind, fire, water, and spirit." So okay, well I was familiar with that. I said, "What I wanted to know is whether it had religious significance to you." Because you know, people wear cross and it's just jewelry and so I wasn't sure if that's what was going on. It was a big pentagram so I thought it was kind of a statement.

And here's what she said. She said, "Yeah, it has religious significance to me. I'm a pagan." At which my dear wife standing next to me burst into laughter. Now she caught herself, you know, and then she said, "I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. I just never heard anybody admit it before." You know, she had only heard the word pagan used by her girlfriends when they called their kids in. You know, "Get in here you bunch of pagans." You know, that kind of thing. So the gal, she didn't take offense. She went on to explain that this was an earth religion and it suddenly occurred to me that I'm talking to a witch.

And I asked her. And she said, "Oh yeah, I'm a witch. We respect all life." And that's a basic tentative of Wiccan. And so I said, "Well, if you respect all life then you probably be pro-life with regards to the abortion issue." She said, "No, no, I'm actually pro-choice." And I said, "Isn't that unusual for a witch to be pro-choice given your beliefs? 'Cause my understanding is most witches are pro-life because of that." And she said, "It is a little bit odd." And then she qualifies herself. She said, "I know I could never do that," referring to abortion. "I could never kill a baby." Now these were her words, not mine.

Now I hope that one of the things you get from just listening tonight to what I'm talking about is you get an appreciation for listening in your conversations with people who disagree with you because they're going to give you things that you could use. First of all, it's polite to listen when they're talking. Secondly, you get to know something about their view. She had just told me that from her perspective, abortion was baby killing. Now I think abortion takes the life of an innocent human child. I'm willing to make a defense for that, but I don't use baby killing language because I don't want people to say, "Oh, you're just using that inflammatory language to persuade people." I don't want the rhetoric to do the work for me. I want the argument to do the work for me. But I'm not using that language. Now it's her that's using the language.

So further in the conversation anymore now, when we talk about what we've just stumbled onto, this question of abortion, do you think I'm going to use the word abortion anymore? Am I going to use my term or am I going to use her term? No, I'm going to use her term, baby killing. She says, "I know I could never do that, kill a baby." And then she adds why. She says, "I wouldn't want something bad to come back on me." Now it's kind of like a karma thing. What goes around comes around. So she's explaining why she's not going to kill any babies. And I don't know about you guys, but that just seems like kind of an odd reason not to kill babies. I mean, think about it. I'm not going to kill any of those babies. You never know what's going to happen to you when you start killing babies.

Maybe we should, you know, just not kill babies regardless. In any event, I didn't pursue that direction. I said, "Well, maybe you wouldn't kill babies, but maybe we should stop other people from killing babies." And she said, "I think people should have a choice." Now what is the choice by her own admission that we're talking about? The choice to do what? Kill babies. By the way, it doesn't matter for our discussion whether you think that abortion kills babies. What matters is that she thought abortion killed babies, but she was still in favor of it. And so I asked her that question. You mean we should have a choice to kill babies? And she said, "Well, I think all things should be taken into consideration." I said, "Okay, give me an example of consideration that would make it okay to kill babies." And she immediately said incest.

Now I want you to see what's going on in this conversation. We're getting into a kind of a controversial issue, and I'm asking questions, right, based on her view. And what she is doing is she is trotting out slogans for her side without thinking about what they mean, given the fact that she's already admitted that abortion was baby killing. And it's beginning to sound a little ridiculous, but she's not aware of it. Incidentally, this happens all the time on the other side of the aisle, where Christians just trot out slogans that they've heard from other Christians. They haven't thought them through, and all of a sudden, bang, they're stonewalled, and they don't know where to go. So I'm not picking on people here. I'm just making an observation.

She said incest. I said, "All right, let me see if I understand your view." And by the way, we're not having a fight. Please understand this. I'm kind of jumping around and trying to keep you guys awake here on Saturday evening. I'm not talking to her like that. And when she said she is a witch, I didn't go, "Eh, she's a witch, she's a witch!" You know, I knew when I do the Monty Python thing. No, I'm taking it in stride. We're not having a fight. We're just having a conversation.

I said, "Let me see if I understand you." If I had a two-year-old standing next to me right now, and I didn't have any children then, now I have two children. One is six and one is three. And I'm 62. No, I'm 61. God, that was scary. Wow. So obviously I got a late start. I didn't get married until I was 48. So by then, you know, let's just say my wife and I, our gametes were a little tired by then. So we adopted two children out of crisis pregnancies. Those are our kids. But I didn't have my two-year-old then. But I said, "If I had a two-year-old that was standing next to me, who had been conceived by incest, then on your view, I should be allowed to kill this child." And at that point, she paused.

By the way, does that follow? If you believe baby killing is okay in virtue of incest, would that application be a fair application of her view? I think so, which is why I asked it. And then she paused. And now I got her thinking, I don't know if this is where I got the stone in her shoe or what, but she stopped, and there were no more slogans, and she's thinking about her for a few minutes. And finally she says, "Gee, I'd have mixed feelings about this." Mixed feelings about killing the, I hope so, you know. I just kind of took it in stride. Anyway, the line is building behind me, right? So what am I doing now? I'm interfering with her work product, and this is not a good thing.

So I realized my opportunity was now ended. What I didn't do is I didn't turn around and say, "Hey, I haven't got to the gospel yet. Sit down. Listen, you might learn a few things." No, I realized I'm trying to go with the flow here and be a polite person, and I did what I could do, and I was ready to move on. But I want you to see something about this conversation with my witch in Wisconsin, and that is that during that time, I asked nine different questions. I asked questions to initiate the conversation. I asked questions to clarify for me what her view actually was. I asked questions to help her to see the consequences of the view that she was advancing.

And through the whole time, well, I used to say she was doing all the work, not me, but I realized now she wasn't doing any work at all. Neither of us were. We were just having a pleasant conversation as we moved forward, and this is the value of the game plan. Broadly put, the tactical approach. Now, it's stand to reason. We have lots of different tactics. We have tactics with names like steamroller, taking the roof off, suicide, just the facts, ma'am. Those kinds of things. These are all, in a sense, maneuvers in conversation to help you be diplomatic in the way you address your differences with other people.

We want to see our engagements with people who don't agree with us to look more like diplomacy than D-Day, okay? And a lot of times it's the other way around. But there is one tactic that is the core tactic of everything that we do. It's the easiest tactic imaginable to employ yourself, to stop a person, in a sense, in their tracks, even though they're coming on pretty strong, to turn the tables, to put you in the driver's seat, and that's the goal of the tactical approach. You want to be driving this thing. You want to be in charge. You want to manage without manipulating. You want to control in a good way without coercing. And this central tactic is the best way to do it.

And the tactic has a name, and the name is Columbo. Some of you, I hear you chuckling already, because you remember when Lieutenant Columbo was a regular on TV. Remember Peter Falk? He just passed away to his reward, such as it is, just a couple of months ago. Broke my heart when I learned it. But you know, he's the actor who would show up in the crime scene wearing an old trench coat. It looked like he slept in it, you know. I got mine at the Salvation Army. You always want to check the pockets whenever you buy. Wait a minute. What's this? Oh, perfect! Because Lieutenant Columbo had a cigar, right? He'd show up. Now this is just a plastic one, so don't get worried. I go to Baptist church and half the people faint, you know, and I do this. I said, don't worry about it. You know, I don't like these things either. The real ones, whenever I get a real one, I just destroy it by fire. I don't leave anything behind, you know.

He also has a pad of paper. He can't use the pad of paper though. Why not? Why can't he use his pad of paper? You know, he never has a pen or a pencil, right? He's always got to bum one off of somebody else. So here he is, he shows up at the crime scene and he's scratching his head and he's rubbing his forehead. He's got his hand in the back like this and he's poking around in the corners of things and he's mumbling to himself. And this guy doesn't look like he can think his way out of a wet paper bag. This guy's stupid, but he's stupid like a fox, right? Because he's got a plan.

At some point he pauses and he puts his hand to furrowed brow like he's deep in painful thought. And then he'll say something like this. I don't know. There's something about this thing that bothers me. Do you mind if I ask you a question? Right, and he asks that question. He gets the answer back. You're very intelligent now. One more thing. And then he one more tings him to death, doesn't he? Question after question after question and people get annoyed. And he says, I'm sorry, it's 'cause I'm asking all these questions, but I can't help it. It's a habit. And this is a habit that you ought to get into.

The key to the Colombo tactic is that the Christian goes on the offensive in an inoffensive way with carefully selected questions that productively advance the conversation. Let me say that again. The key to the Colombo tactic is that the Christian goes on the offensive in an inoffensive way by using questions. Now there are a lot of ways to do this, but let me just tell you something about questions in general. Why are questions valuable? Because when you ask questions, first of all, you're being polite. You're drawing the other person out. You're engaging them as an individual. Hopefully you're listening too. And that was the point I made earlier. You're asking questions to listen, to discover, to learn about this person. To realize that there are genuine flesh and blood, real human being. They're not just another opportunity to get a mark on your belt, your spiritual belt, got another one. No, you're listening. That's polite.

But the second thing about questions is that questions allow you to control the conversation in a good way. In other words, when you are asking the questions, you're in the driver's seat of the conversation. Now there are two uses to Colombo, there's actually three, but I'm only gonna cover two right now, is the core of your game plan. And each of these uses has a model question that you can use. This is why you don't need to know anything, but the basics of the game plan to get rolling on this tonight. Without any stress, without any strain.

By the way, I have a rule about getting in arguments with people on spiritual things. It's had two parts. Here's the first part. If I get mad, I lose. Okay? If they get mad, this is the second part. If they get mad, I don't get mad, they get mad. I lose. If anybody gets mad in the conversation, I'm gonna lose for what I'm trying to accomplish. Getting a stone in their shoe, helping them to think about things that really matter in a different kind of way. So I try to avoid getting people mad. Now sometimes you can't completely avoid it. Jesus got some people mad. But you wanna make sure that it's the message that's getting them angry and not the messenger. You know, sometimes we're the problem in communicating. Okay?

So I have these two uses of Colombo with two questions that you can employ, because they're general questions right away. So what's the first use of Colombo? Here it is, to gather information. To gather information. What does Colombo do when he first shows up in the crime scene? He checks things out. I'm sitting next to a fellow earlier this year on an airplane. We ended up getting a conversation. You do this, I do that, whatever. And we ended up, because of what I do, this comes out and he started talking about his own spiritual life. Or lack of it, actually. Turns out that he's not a Christian, but he used to be. He actually used to be a preacher's kid. But he used to be a preacher's kid because his dad's no longer a preacher. Indeed, his dad's no longer a Christian.

Now let me ask you a question. Do you think there's some baggage here? Can you imagine if what, I would have just tried to jump in and figure, well, I don't have a lot of time to talk to this guy, I'm just gonna get right to the foot of the cross. What was his response gonna be? Been there, done that, no thanks. Mind your own business. But as it turned out, using the tactical approach, which entails the idea that I'm treating him like a valuable human being, at the end of our conversation, he actually gave me his email address so that I can email some articles that I'd written that pertain to an objection that he raised. Now is that trust? I'll tell you what happened.

What happened is I began asking questions to gather information and what began to appear before my eyes as a kind of spiritual topography. It's like I began to see in my mind's eye, as it were, a little bit about this man's life and the condition of his soul and the journey that he's traveled and all of that stuff. And this has allowed me, now listen to this, it allowed me because I could, in a sense, see the topography to maneuver around the minefields and everybody's got them. If I had just been barging in there like a bull in a china shop, there would have been all kind of problems. He would not have been in a position to be even open to listen to what I had to say.

But because I started gathering information by using questions, this changed everything. Now what is our model question for the first use of Colombo? Remember the first use of Colombo is to gather information. Here's the question. Now what do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? Now this is a very general question. There's a lot of variations. The point is that you're drawing somebody out and trying to get an understanding of their understanding. And so when the witch from Wisconsin is wearing this jewelry, how did I begin the conversation? I began it by asking what do you mean by that? Wasn't that essentially my question? I saw the jewelry. What do you mean by the jewelry? Is the jewelry have spiritual significance? Something like that. And off we went.

And when there was something in her statements following that that were ambiguous, I asked what do you mean by that in a way that helped me to uncover her real meaning. I had a person call me on my own radio show once and said, can you recommend a good book on Buddhism? I said, why do you want a book on Buddhism? He said, 'cause I got a Buddhist who I work with that I like to talk with about my own convictions. And I said, don't buy a book on Buddhism. It'll cost you money, then you gotta read it. And chances are what you read won't be the Buddhism of your buddy anyway. I said, better yet, save your money, take him down to Starbucks and buy him a latte and say, I hear you're a Buddhist. I never met a Buddhist before. I don't even know what they believe. Would you mind telling me about your Buddhism? What do you think that guy's gonna do? He's gonna sit back, suck up his latte and tell you all about it. And be flattered that you would take the interest.

And see, now you are getting a free education about the Buddhism that is held by the Buddhist you wanna talk with. And you're doing it in the context of building a relationship with that person. All because you asked the question essentially, what do you mean by that? Now this is true of all kinds of different things. A question that came up today is, if God's a loving father, how is there evil in the world? Now that's a tough one to answer. But I have a question before I'm gonna wade into that. It is not clear in my own mind that there is a conflict between the idea of God being a loving father and there being evil in the world. Not in my own mind. I've thought about this a lot too. Most people who raise this question have not thought much about it. That's all right. Let's give them the chance to think a little bit more about it.

My question is, tell me what you perceive or understand to be the essential conflict that you now want me to resolve. I don't see the conflict, spell it out for me. That's basically what do you mean by that? Somebody says, well, everything's relative. Well, you should never let a statement like that just go, you know, hang out there or try to answer it because there's a lot of ambiguity. What might be one ambiguous term there? Like an unclear term. How about relative? How about everything? And by the way, if everything's relative, isn't everything's relative part of everything? Isn't the statement part of everything? That would make the statement what? Do you see any problems there? I'm not gonna go in and try to get all philosophical and everything before I get some questions answered. What do you mean by relative? What do you mean by everything? They're the one who made the statement.

Now, a trick here and I gotta move quickly 'cause I'm almost out of time. Sometimes when you ask the question, what do you mean by that? You're gonna get what I call the Simon and Garfunkel response. The sounds of silence, right? Because, and by the way, this is on both sides of the aisle. You ask for clarification from people that presumes that they've thought enough through it to be able to clarify, but a lot of times people haven't. And when you ask them, what do you mean by that? Then they're wondering, I gotta think about that for a minute, you know. Well, that's good because your question is getting them to think harder about this claim that they just made when maybe they haven't thought about it at all. That's progress for you.

Okay, let me move to the second step. The first step is using questions to gather information. Our model question is, help me out. What do you mean by that? Okay, here's the second use of Colombo. I call it reversing the burden of proof. Reversing the burden of proof. Let me explain the term, it's not too complicated. The idea of burden of proof is the responsibility to give evidence for review. Now, here's the key part. The person who makes the claim bears that burden. The person who says something is so, especially when it's a controversial thing, it is their job to defend their view. It is not your job to defeat it if you disagree with it.

Now, the reason this is so important is because lots of times we as followers of Christ have had to field a challenge that was in the form of a statement and then the person just settles back like this and expects us to do all the heavy lifting. When really the first responsibility is upon them to make sense of their claim, it is not on us to defeat their claim. Let me give you a real quick example of this. I was on KFI, it's the ABC affiliate, CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, secular station. And I was there doing, as a guest to talk about intelligent design and creation, whatever. And so I made some statements and they opened the lines for the callers and one caller called in and starts invoking big bang cosmology on me.

Well, I know a little bit about this stuff and I know enough to know that though this is controversial in Christian circles, I think big bang is on my side. Because the way I figured, if you got a big bang, you need a big banger, you know? [audience laughing] Somebody's gotta pull the trigger. By the way, that's the cosmological argument for the existence of God in one nifty, little easy to remember statement. Big bang needs a big banger. And by the way, it's common sensible, right? Well, this guy wasn't gonna buy it. He's going to tell me how you can get a big bang without a big banger.

Here's what he said, I got it written down exactly. He said, "Well, I don't think it is because you could start with a base of nothing and you could say that there was nothing but an infinite continuous moment." And then one tiny little insignificant thing happened, a point happened in the nothingness, okay? And then that point expanded, which is extremely simple, requires no intelligence, so no intelligent God had to intervene. And all we need is a little tiny imperfection in the perfect nothingness and that imperfection expanded, became variegated, increasingly complex, and then you had galaxies and planets coming out of this thing.

So if I understand his view correctly, you first start with nothing. And nothing is like a placid pond. And then from somewhere you get something. He didn't say, but he did say that was just a little tiny piece of something. So maybe it's easier to get that little tiny piece of something but any event, this little tiny piece of something falls into the pond of nothing and then that really annoys the heck out of the pond. Who starts bucking and weaving, it starts spewing out planets and the like. So now I got to answer this guy, right? And I'm thinking, is he on drugs or what? You know, see.

But I had an advantage and that was the way he started. In fact, I pointed that out to him. Notice the way you started. You started by saying, you could say that. I said, you're right. You can say anything you want. He spun a fairytale. It is not my job to disprove his fairytale. It is his job to defend it, first off. And I wasn't gonna accept the burden of proof to go after that crazy thing. It was his job to give me reasons to take his story seriously, which he hadn't done. And this is the key here. In the immortal words of Desi Arnaz, they got a lot of 'splaining to do themselves. You know, who is Desi Arnaz? I could see it in your eyes. Lucy, you cannot be on the show, that guy.

In any event, the point of the second use of Columbo is that we are not going to take the responsibility of disproving every single crazy claim that people can bring up against our view. We can ask questions for clarification. We can respect the claim, but part of respecting the claim is asking the person to give reasons why we should take it seriously, and that's the second Columbo question. Here it is. Now how did you come to that conclusion? Now how did you come to that conclusion? Once again, don't be surprised if you get the Simon and Garfunkel response, because the question presumes that they came to a conclusion instead of they're just emoting or just saying what they've been socialized to say.

And again, this is true of both sides of the aisle. Christians do this all the time. Listen, if you make a controversial claim about religion or ethics, then it is your responsibility to be able to demonstrate that you've thought enough about this controversial opinion that you've had that you can give some reasons why other people ought to take it seriously. That is the way people treat us much of the time, and they ought to, but it also works for the other side. No more free rides.

I feel bad. I've got to say goodbye because we're out of time. Notice how I play to the audience to get five more minutes, but he's not gonna let me do it, right? So I gotta close in prayer here though, 'cause that's one of the rules. But I just want to close the concept before we, we're gonna have a little conversation personally, but listen, the Colombo tactic is meant to keep you in the driver's seat of conversations so that you can be a good ambassador and move forward as much as God allows you to do so.

I don't have it as a goal to lead someone to Christ in a conversation. Well, sometimes people say, well, don't you ever get to the gospel, when do you? And here's my answer. I get to the gospel whenever I want, whenever I want. Whenever I consider it appropriate and reasonable in those circumstances that the person will be able to understand what I have to say, it will seem somewhat compelling, it'll be a stone in their shoe, then I go there. And if I don't have that opportunity, I don't go there. I take what God has given me and I use my game plan. My questions, what do you mean by that and how'd you come to that conclusion? To be able to manage every conversation that I'm in and to do something fruitful and productive, no matter how little I happen to know in the conversation, no matter how aggressive or knowledgeable the other person happens to be.

If you don't remember anything else from our time together, remember this, whenever you get in a tough spot, always what? Ask questions, absolutely. Lord, thank you so much for these wonderful people. It's been so fun talking with them tonight and this morning and I pray Lord that you will take this mini lesson of an important concept and by your spirit, you would make it theirs for these followers of Christ or anyone for that matter, that they will engage these important issues Lord by asking the right questions and listening for answers that make sense. Use this church, Father, use these fine people for your kingdom's sake, amen.

Okay, save your applause for the end. Let's get right to the question and answer. So Greg, take a seat.

Well, he's gonna ask me the question now.

Yes, and we had about six come in. First, you mentioned, so what kind of picture of God are we presenting when we say that Jesus came to rescue us from God's anger?

Well, the simple answer is it's an accurate picture of God. Now I know people often will say, well, I believe in a loving God, but imagine if you were at home, and you came home, like I came home from this trip, and I found that my house had been broken into, my wife had been assaulted, my children had been assaulted, or if yours had been, would you be appropriately angry? And you go down to the police station to sign papers and stuff and you say, where are the people that did this to my family? And the government, the police, they say, well, we let them go. What, scot-free? Yeah, why? Because we're a loving government. Now would you count on such a thing? Absolutely not, because you have an intuitive sense that when people do bad things, that you don't let them off scot-free. They have to answer for it, this is justice.

And it doesn't matter how much the judge loves the person in the dock, the judge still has to, even if it's his own son, the judge still has to carry out justice. What's great, unbelievable really, about the Christian message, is that in this case, the judge exacts the full penalty from the criminal, but the judge himself takes the robe off and gets in the dock in the place of the criminal and takes the punishment upon himself. You see, it wasn't just God punishing Jesus, Jesus was God. So he was taking the punishment on himself that was to us. We all have a deep sense of justice built into us, and it gets offended all the time and we talk about it. We also all know that we are also offenders of justice, that we are guilty, and that we deserve punishment. The message of a loving God is he's made a provision so that he can be just and loving by giving forgiveness through Christ.

Next question ties right into that. In several words, it came in this way. There are Christians who hold to the theory that all will be saved eventually, universalism. There are some who believe in conditional immortality, maybe the condition is you must be with Jesus, otherwise you are annihilated, view two. Or view three, the traditional view, eternal life or judgment view. Where are you and why?

Well, to put it simply, when you read through not just the gospels, so the things that Jesus himself taught, but also those that Jesus taught to follow after him, what they wrote, you have one of two choices at the end of history. Either perfect justice or perfect mercy. Perfect justice means punishment for everything that you ever did wrong and God misses nothing. Or perfect mercy, which is forgiveness for everything you ever did wrong and God misses nothing. These alternate views are wishful thinking. They are not legitimate views in light of what Jesus taught and in light of what the others taught.

I would like to think that there was no place of conscious torment where people were punished for their rebellion against God without end. I would like to think that. I'm emotionally sympathetic to that. Or that they just got destroyed and so there was no conscious torment. But neither of those alternatives are reasonable alternatives given the specific things that Jesus taught. Jesus talked about the separation of the sheep and the goats and he said the sheep will be with me forever. The goats will go to a place of damnation and torment that will never end. He described it as a place of wailing and gnashing of teeth. He talked about the place where the fire does not go out and the worm never dies. He talked about it as a place of utter darkness. He gave an accounting of it where the person there was talking about the torment that he was experiencing in that place.

Jesus didn't believe this view that when you die apart from forgiveness that you just disappear or that everybody makes it to heaven. If I'm a follower of Christ I must follow him in that view as well even if I don't like it. I don't like it by the way but I'm not the one making the rules. What I think is most important is given the reality of the justice of God I think we ought to be wise about the reality of mercy and forgiveness that comes through Jesus Christ. We should take that offer. For those people who think well I don't believe that a loving God would ever send me to hell forever. My question is simply this. Are you willing to stake eternity on that conviction? Because that's exactly what's at stake.

Okay and a follow up was that being the case why do the sermons throughout the New Testament, Acts and the Epistles seem to be silent on that topic given the what is at stake? In other words the sermons in the book of Acts typically don't bring up this.

They don't bring up hell?

In the way that the gospels do. Why are the sermons yet recorded seemingly silent on the topic?

Well they aren't silent if what you mean by that is that they don't speak to the consequences of disbelief or unbelief I should say. They do speak to that. In fact I actually went through for a separate reason I went through every single time the gospel was preached in the book of Acts. It happens 13 times either to individuals or groups. And because I'm looking for where the love, how they communicated the love of God. And what's really curious is that the word love is not found anywhere in the book of Acts. Not a single place. Now I'm not saying it's not manifest there it is. But that wasn't the nature of the message of the early preachman. If you look at every single one of the messages it was a message of warning. And that there was rescue for guilty people. That and I'm thinking now specifically of the Areopagus I can remember specifically there. And also in Acts chapter 10 when Peter's talking to Cornelius they said that God has appointed a man who is going to judge everybody.

Now I don't know what people who hold this other view think the apostles meant by when that God was going to judge them. But we have big vivid pictures of God's judgment in the Hebrew scriptures. And we have Jesus describing it. So I think the most reasonable thing to think of is that they were talking about the judgment that was described in these other places. They certainly weren't soft peddling things because they never talk about the love of God in those places. They are enjoining people to escape the wrath that is to come which is the language from John the Baptist. So I don't think that what appears to be the absence of hell language in the book of Acts is meaningful in the slightest because these people were schooled under Jesus who spoke of it regularly and they do offer warning even in the book of Acts. They just didn't mention the word hell.

Okay, here eight people asked this question. They want to know the third question. Maybe could state it quickly. Third question.

All right, I will briefly tell you but this is more complicated because with the first two uses of Colombo gathering information and reversing the burden of proof, there's a model question that can be used because you don't need to know anything. You don't need to know anything to use those questions. In fact, those questions are kind of an acknowledgement of your ignorance, right? So you're getting an education which is a great advantage of it.

The third use of Colombo is to lead, dot, dot, dot. It's to lead. Well, wait a minute, what's the dots for? Where do you lead? That depends, doesn't it? It depends on what you're trying to accomplish and in this case, you have a particular goal in mind and you think of your goal like a target and your questions are like arrows aiming at that target but you've got to know what your target is.

In the case of the witch in Wisconsin, so she's advancing this idea about killing children is okay if incest is involved in the mix and so I think there's a problem there. I think that leads to absurd conclusions but what did I do? I asked her a question that was really meant to make a statement, wasn't it? So are you saying if I have a two-year-old here that was conceived by incest, then I should be able to kill this child? That's a question but it is meant to help her to see the logical conclusion of her ideas which isn't good. So I'm making a point there with my question. I'm actually exploiting a weakness or a flaw with the question.

Sometimes the question is used to explain your view. I think by the way of an attorney and the witness stand dealing with somebody, he can't make statements when he's dealing with a witness but he's trying to get somewhere with his questions, right? So he's using the questions in order to persuade the jury of something even though he's not making statements. Well, that's this third use of Colombo. You're using the questions to lead. You could preach your point of view at somebody else or you can ask some questions. Let's just go very quickly back to the one you asked me earlier about a judgment.

I had a fellow when I was at Barnes and Noble giving a talk on the book that just came out and he said, "Why do I need to believe in Jesus?" I said, "Well, let me ask you a couple questions." He said, "Okay." I said, "Do you believe that people who do wrong things ought to be punished?" He immediately said yes. He said, "Well, since I'm a prosecuting attorney." Yeah. Well, I got lucky on the attorney business but most people believe that if you do bad things then you should be punished for it. That's justice. Second question. Have you ever done any bad things? What do you think he said? Yeah, I guess I have. I'm agreeing with him on both points. We're not at odds but I've used questions to surface his sense of justice and his own awareness that he's a law breaker. So I don't have to tell this guy he's a sinner, right? He already told me.

I said, "You know what I call this?" We both believe that people who do bad things ought to get punished and we both believe that we've done those things. That sounds like bad news to me and that's exactly the way he took it. Notice that he wasn't thinking about any of these things when he walked into the Barnes and Noble but I used the questions to direct his thinking to cause certain things he deeply believed to surface and then I could use those things to help give an answer to his question. Jesus is the only way of salvation because he's the only one who solved the problem for people who are in the dock like you and I. He took the punishment on himself. There's an example using Colombo in the third way to lead toward a particular goal.

Wow, okay, how about this 30 second answer? People wanna know how to combine this with the help of the Spirit as you do this and I don't know if you can tie in that one there on that one but--

How do you keep conversation going if the person refuses to take the burden of proof?

And tie that into my own spirit.

The role of the Holy Spirit in all of this.

The Holy, pardon me?

Role of the Holy Spirit.

The role of the Holy Spirit. Here's my view on this. I believe it's 100% God and 100% man. What I mean by that is I am 100% responsible for my side of the deal. And that is to be a faithful communicator and a gracious communicator of the truth, as I understand it. God is 100% responsible for all of his side of the equation. And that is to do everything else. And I'm not sitting here thinking, gee, I wonder what the Holy Spirit's doing because I know I don't have to worry about the Holy Spirit doing his job. I'm focusing in on what I can do with an attitude of trust that God's gonna do what he's supposed to do.

So I speak the truth as graciously and clearly as possible and then I let the chips fall where they may knowing that that's in God's province.

Wow.

Make sense?

All right, yeah, give Greg a warm, warm round of applause. Thank you for that. Thank you very much.