1, 2, 3.

Welcome to the Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast community.

For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to Striving for eternity dot org.

Welcome to another edition of the RAP Report.

I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, the executive director of Striving for Attorney and the Christian podcast community, of which this podcast is a proud member, are here to give you biblical interpretations and applications for the Christian life.

So what we have here today is I was on the Humble Understandings podcast and that podcast, I was asked not only to share a little bit of my testimony, but more get into apologetics.

And we dealt with a number of topics from not just my testimony, but also to deal with textual criticism, how, how to use the law, things like this.

But we dealt with many issues, and I hope that you would listen to this, but also check out Humble Understandings.

This is a gentleman.

He actually came to our church Wednesday night, listened to me when I was teaching through God's word in the.

In the Wednesday night that I teach it at my church.

And we did a podcast together.

And so really like this brother and think he's trying to do.

He's starting up his podcast.

So give a listen.

He also has another podcast, a daily bread podcast, where he reads God's word, interacts with comments.

So check out the Humble Understanding podcast.

And now you can listen to my interview on the Humble Understanding podcast coming your way right now on the Rap Report.

And so you have to understand that any Christian listening, I always have to apologize when I say this, but it's just, you have to understand the Jewish mindset.

Jesus Christ, we would refer to as Hitler's God because the Roman Catholic Church helped fund the Holocaust.

And so what you have is to a Jewish person, Jesus Christ represents the Inquisitions, the Crusades, the Holocaust.

So to convert to Christianity is like the.

Literally the worst thing you could do.

Like my.

My parents would deal better with me being a homosexual, drug addict, murderer, probably more than they would me being a Christian.

Wow.

And it's because of what man has done in the name of Christ.

And sometimes that's your.

That's the best response that you could have.

Right.

Sometimes.

Right.

Because that's better than you giving them false information.

Right.

And ultimately being able to say, I don't know also allows you to be humble.

Right.

Allows you to humble yourself in that moment and go, okay, yeah, I don't know.

And that's okay.

Right.

But I do know this.

The other nice thing that it does do is it also ends that discussion on topic.

You don't know.

Because when they keep going, you just go, I already told you, I don't know.

Yeah.

Yes.

It goes nowhere.

You want me to say I don't know.

Again, I don't know.

Right, right, right.

Let's get into a topic we can both talk about.

Exactly, exactly.

Because.

Because especially if you're evangelizing in a situation where there's a crowd, some people, the heckler will do it for the effect of the crowd.

Yeah, right, right.

So they, when they continue going on, they actually look bad when they're sitting there and go and like, hey, you know, like, whatever the topic, like, they keep hounding it.

And you're like, I already said I don't know.

What.

What do you want me to say here?

Right.

Turning on them and then they stop.

Right.

So, yeah.

So, I mean, those would be kind of, in general, the harder questions I get and some ways of dealing with it.

If you get them, each of these religious systems, there's nothing special about the founder where it could only be them.

But Christianity is different because Christianity is based on Jesus Christ being truly God and truly man.

And so if you don't have Christ, you don't have Christianity.

Being truly man, he could pay an eternal fine because he's an eternal being.

Being truly human, he could pay and be a substitute for human beings so that when he paid that fine on the cross, his eternal being, he could pay it for all eternity.

He, being a man, could pay it once in time.

Okay.

And be a substitute for you and I.

That is the thing.

If you remove Christian, if you remove Christ from Christianity, you no longer have Christianity because it requires the uniqueness of Jesus Christ being truly God and truly man.

This is why it's only religion based on the works that God does and not the works that man does.

That's the second thing makes it unique.

Right.

The third one people don't think about, though.

Akeem.

This, guys, is a humble, understanding Christian podcast where we have conversations that hopefully glorify Jesus Christ.

So let's get into this video today, guys.

Welcome, family, to another humble, understanding Christian podcast.

Today, guys, we have Striving for Eternities founder and executive director Andrew Rapaport on today's episode.

How you doing, Andrew?

Thank you for joining us on today's episode.

Thanks for having me.

Of course.

Of course.

Guys, we're going to do things as we normally do.

We're just Going to have Andrew share his testimony while it's also getting into what he's been kind of doing for the past 20 plus years.

And when it comes to evangelism and apologetics, Andrew, if you'd like to take it away and share us who you are and what you get into.

Yeah, I was born, one day I'll die.

That's the end of the story.

There you go, the end of the story.

I'm going to die one day.

No, no.

I grew up in a, in a Jewish home knowing nothing about Jesus Christ.

Got saved at the age of 16.

Actually being in a Jewish home, I anticipated that my parents would basically bury an empty casket and say I was dead to the family, which is what the first thing.

When they found out two years later, I lived in their home for two years as a secret Christian.

And what ended up happening was that they, they did find out and they decided to go casket shopping was the first thing they chose.

Yeah, so I got saved.

I got saved relatively young, which is, which I'm glad for.

And so after that, I, I guess I started doing evangelism.

I started doing what we would refer to as open air evangelism as early as I could date in the early 90s.

And the reason I say to date, because I used to, I went to a church where we had to write a philosophy of ministry for all the ministries we did in the church.

And I called it open air Evangelism.

Now folks, if you're familiar with Ray Comfort and Way of the Master, they call it open air preaching.

I didn't know Ray at the time, any of his stuff, so I didn't know what to call it other than open air evangelism.

And so I have been doing that since I can date it back to 1994.

I was doing it around 92, 93, where I would just go to the, the Jersey Shore on the boardwalk and just do some.

Just standing up in the, in public and sharing the gospel.

And you do that for well, near 40 years.

And you're going to get really good at answering questions because you're going to hear the same question over and over and over and over.

You get the point, right?

Right.

But that's how you do apologetics.

And that's, that's what I learned.

I kept learning one thing at a time and over time became something where now, 40 years later, I'm somewhat good at apologetics, I guess, because I have a lot of answers in the toolbox.

So what led you to, I guess to backtrack a Little bit.

When it came to.

To growing up in a Jewish home, how did you get from growing up in a Jewish home to then becoming Christian, then having that situation where they were willing to get a casket and what is the casket?

You know, is it an analogy?

Or was.

Were they literally shopping for a casket?

No, they literally went shopping for a casket.

What happens in a Jewish home when you have someone that converts, they'll just bury an empty casket and they tell everyone you died?

Yeah, because it's.

It's.

They would see.

They will see me as a traitor.

So you have to understand that any Christian listening, I always have to apologize when I say this, but it's just.

You have to understand the Jewish mindset.

Jesus Christ we would refer to as Hitler's God because the Roman Catholic Church helped fund the Holocaust.

And so what you have is, to a Jewish person, Jesus Christ represents the Inquisitions, the Crusades, the Holocaust.

So to convert to Christianity is like the.

Literally the worst thing you could do.

Like, my parents would deal better with me being a homosexual, drug addict, murderer, probably more than they would me being a Christian.

Wow.

And it's because of what man has done in the name of Christ that has this image now that.

That the idea of Christ himself is, you know, tied in with the Holocaust and what.

What the church brought forth and help.

Help brought forth.

When it comes to the Holocaust, that's pretty interesting.

And I didn't know that until I came across the.

The one interview you had when you kind of mentioned that a little bit.

And I was like, wow, that's.

I never heard it put like that.

Now, now you.

You understand a little more when you're like, wow, I see where the hate comes from.

Yeah, well, see, it's really fun.

I was teaching.

I was in New York City doing a training for evangelism.

And that year, because we.

We would do it every year, we take a team of people into New York and I'm training them on the different world religions that year.

So we're dealing with different religions.

When I mentioned the Judaism, I. I even said, don't bring me over to talk to anyone who's Jewish, because once you say I.

That I was raised Jewish, they're going to cut off the communication because I'm a traitor.

Okay.

And so.

And I said to them, like, this is the view that Jewish people have of, you know, of Christians or Christianity.

And this.

This guy meets this couple.

I think it was a brother and sister, but they.

They're Jewish.

And before he really gets into the conversation, he Grabbed me because I wasn't too far.

And he brings me into the conversation, and I don't start saying anything yet, but he starts evangelizing.

And the.

The guy just turns and goes, I want nothing to do with Jesus Christ.

That's Hitler's God.

I looks at me because I said that that morning.

And he told me afterwards, I thought you were just, like.

Just saying it for effect.

Like they actually said the exact words that you used.

And then.

Then he ends up making the mistake of telling this.

This.

These two people that I was raised Jewish, and they literally looked at me and said, you're a traitor, man.

And they walked away.

And I said, you never say that.

Yeah, and so this is.

So this is definitely something that you've heard often.

This is.

It's not something that you're hearing for the first time, because, you know, clearly he brought it up.

And this was just another reiteration of the fact that this is truly how they feel about Christians because of Jesus Christ, because of what Christians have done in his name.

You know, a question that Jewish people often bring up to Christians, especially more religious Jewish people, is they'll ask, you know, who.

Who killed Jesus?

Which is a really interesting question, because if you look in the scriptures, it would be the Jewish leaders that brought Jesus to be killed by the Romans.

And when.

When Pilate, you know, didn't want to have him, you know, to have.

Kill him, they cry out, his blood will be on our hands.

Right.

100%.

Okay.

So you could argue, well, the Jewish people killed him because they brought him to Pilate to be killed.

And they said, let the blood be on.

On us so that he would be brought to death.

But in modern Judaism, they're gonna say, no, it was the Romans, see, because of the fact that the Jews killed Jesus.

That's the argument on why so many.

This is the rationale that has been given on why people want to kill Jewish people because they killed Jesus.

And so they say, no, it's the Romans.

And here's a little thing.

If you ever get into speaking someone who's Jewish and they say, who killed Jesus?

You could say, well, you know, the Pharisees at the time said that their bl.

Blood should be on them.

But the Romans physically did it.

But you know, the reality.

It's neither one of them.

And then you could pause for a fact.

The real person that killed Jesus was Jesus.

He's the one that allowed himself to be put on a cross.

He laid down his life.

Yes, his life.

And so because he chose the exact moment he was going to give up his life because he's God and he can do that sort of thing.

So the real answer to who killed Jesus is Jesus killed Jesus, and it wasn't suicide.

There you go.

That's.

And that's 100.

I think that's.

There should be no point in when it comes down to it because he does say.

He said I could pick up my life and I lay it down.

And ultimately he chose to lay it down and.

And it was on our behalf.

I think that that's.

That's what drives it home.

I think I would assume for the.

For, you know, one who is Jewish, they.

They don't believe that he was the Messiah.

Right.

In that same sense that he did die for them or anything along those lines.

Right.

Yeah.

So I guess they wouldn't accept that either, assuming that he's not God as.

We'Re recording, and I know you and I were supposed to do this in person at your studio, but I'm just realizing.

And everyone watching, I mean, you're going to see.

Anyone who watches this, they get to see clearly.

There's a difference.

You're dark, I'm light.

I'm just saying it's, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

You're.

You got this really dark background.

I got like.

I got nothing on my white back.

Yeah.

This white background, which.

Which just, you know, makes me look even whiter than I usually.

Yeah.

And I got a dark background behind me.

Nice.

But that's, that's definitely.

It's.

It's just interesting.

I mean, what was going through your mind at this time?

Because I could only imagine.

Right.

You grew up in.

And I would assume it would be similar for any Muslim that grows up in a.

In a Muslim household that becomes Christian in that same Muslim household.

I mean, if anything, I may think it might be a little worse there.

Right.

Because it may be a little worse than them staging your funeral.

It may lead to them causing your funeral or something along those lines in the Islam household.

But, you know, how did that feel to you?

Yeah, it depends on where you are for the Muslim, because.

And how.

How religious.

Because if you're in a Western country, it may not have that big of an effect.

Right, right.

But if you're in a Muslim country or you're in, you know, an area where.

Where they're practicing Sharia, then.

Yeah.

Islam.

If folks don't know what you're.

You're referring to in Islam, if you convert from Islam to any other belief, any Muslim has a legal right in Sharia to kill you.

It's an honor.

It's an honors issue because you're.

You left the faith, you're dishonoring Allah, and therefore the punishment is death.

And anyone can.

Can carry that out.

So that is why they don't have much of a conversion rate.

And this is why I.

Totally off topic, Hakeem.

But people often don't understand why baptism is so important in.

In the Scriptures.

It's.

It's so tightly tied to salvation, and a lot people start to believe that you must be baptized to be saved.

It's called baptismal regeneration.

There's certain denominations, like Chur Christ, that believe this.

Right.

I've definitely heard it very often saying that where people believe that.

Yeah, right.

And the reason Scripture does that is the same reason in a Muslim country that it is.

Baptism is equally as important.

See, in America, someone says they get saved, we give them time to see if they're really saved before we baptize them.

In a Muslim country, because stand up in public and testify that you've been converted to Christ and get baptized is a death sentence.

Okay.

Yeah.

Do.

People are not going to do that if they're not really converted.

So.

So when people say they're converted there, they.

They will rush them into baptismal orders, just like they did in the first century, where you're going to be cut off from your family, your friends, your job, everything.

Right, right.

It was a way of saying, okay, if you're.

You're really a Christian, you're going to do this.

Yeah, we don't have that in America.

And so we tend to read scripture and take it out of its context.

It's a major problem that many people have is to read the Scripture without reading it in its context, its historical context as well.

And that's one of the things.

So, yeah, for me, baptism was a major issue.

Getting baptized was a turning point of saying that was the thing.

My mother lost it when she found out I was baptized because that.

That signified a permanence.

And like, you were serious about what.

What you were doing, you meant it.

Right.

And that had to.

But for you, you doing it and you knowing how they were gonna feel and react to these things, what effect did that have on, you know, on you?

How were you feeling during this time?

Because I could.

I could.

I guess most could imagine how they might have felt.

You know, you kind of departing from the faith, in a sense.

And for you, how are you feeling knowing that your parents are kind of at odds with you now?

I mean, quite Literally shopping for a casket.

Right.

So I had.

So the way it came about was I was.

I was a freshman in college, and I came home from college, and being in college, I was able to start accumulating Christian materials.

And so that year, for some reason, they said that we had to take all of our stuff out of the dorm room.

So I packed everything up, brought it back home.

So I was.

I was away for the weekend with friends and, you know, so like, three, four day trip, and my mother went through my stuff and found the Christian material.

And so they went.

Like I said, they went casket shopping.

After that son had happened in the family that they chose not to do.

That was it you said right after she found the Christmas Christian materials, just automatically they were like, all right, now we gotta go casket shop.

Ms. Official.

They, like, question you or.

No, I wasn't home at the time.

Wow.

So they just found it.

They're like, we're gonna assume at this point he sold off to Christ.

Yep.

Yep.

And so when they.

They.

I came home and what they had done is, you know, they basically told my siblings to, you know, they knew what time I was coming home.

You know, this.

This was for anyone, you know, too young to understand.

There was a time before cell phones, and so you actually had to let the parents know where you were going.

To be, what you were going to do.

They didn't just go look to see where you're at on.

On a phone.

They knew what time I was planning to be home.

They told my sisters, and I don't think my brothers were home at that time from school, but they might have been.

But they.

They basically told the.

The kids, you know, the other siblings to kind of get out of the house.

They told the housekeeper to stay downstairs.

And I came in.

I did not expect anything.

I didn't know anything was up.

And.

And they pulled me into the kitchen to have a talk, you know, so in one sense, I had been preparing for the day for two years.

But it's like one of those things that came.

You could prepare all you prepared for.

Yeah, right.

It's still like, okay, we're doing this now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The day I read.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I really dreaded it.

For the simple reason was I didn't know if I would be able to give a good enough answer to my parents when they're asking.

And I really thought I was going to have to have really good arguments and be able to defend it.

And I came to realize it wouldn't have mattered because there was no defense necessary because the real issue then was emotional, not intellectual.

Gotcha.

Okay.

So there was no prep I could have done.

Yeah, they.

They still wouldn't had really.

It wouldn't have mattered at the end of the day.

And for you at this point in.

In your walk, is this.

It's like the beginning.

Beginning of your walk, or is it, you know, you've had a couple months.

You said the past two years.

I had two years of just me and a Bible.

When I started driving, I would.

I'd be in my car all the time.

And my folks just thought that it's because teenager, like finally has the freedom of a car.

No, it's because I found family radio, a Christian radio station, and I thought.

I thought anyone who knows family radio and knows Harold Camping, I thought that guy was the bomb.

I thought he was great.

Right, right.

He's thinking some good things.

Yeah, I thought so.

But he really wasn't.

Right.

Right.

But I didn't know any better.

Yeah, I mean, the things you.

Things you kind of come to find out the more you come to understand about Scripture.

Right at the end.

Yeah.

And I mean, I was.

So I went into college and I didn't really.

It was just the other Christians at college, I had no discernment.

I didn't know.

I thought all Christians believe the same thing, which I thought was Catholic.

I thought it was like different groups of Catholicism because that's all we under.

I understood.

Remind me.

Well, not remind, but I guess and.

And if you could tell, the people who are watching did hear it a little bit on a different podcast that you were on.

But how did you come to Christ in the first place?

What made you, you know, a Jewish, you know, born, you know, individual, growing up in that household.

And then eventually, what made you turn to Christ from, you know, Judaism?

Well, I always say it was mathematics and it really was, in a sense.

So I did not understand that this is unusual for Christians.

I went from going to believing Jesus Christ is Hitler's God to being a follower in Christ in three and a half hours.

A drastic difference.

Yeah, I mean, it's.

And it was the first time I heard the gospel, unlike so many people that hear it over and over and over again.

And so this guy Chuck, who was a bus driver, we were on a teen tour, so I was with a bunch of other Jewish kids, like 40 other 40, 45 Jewish kids, counselors, and we were just on a bus traveling the.

The country.

The bus driver was a Christian.

And I think he made it his mission.

He was going to share the gospel with every single person on that bus.

And so what he did was he was sharing the gospel with me.

And I really, I was raised believing that I was going to heaven because I'm Jewish.

I was.

That's what I was raised to believe.

And so I basically asked him if he could give me a logical reason to believe.

I'll believe because I'm a logical thinker.

And so what ended up happening is he's given me this prophecy, and I'm putting the prophecy in one of two categories, self fulfilling or coincidence.

Because if it's self fulfilling, I'm rejecting that altogether because I can make that happen.

But something that's coincidence, son, you can't control where you're born, what family you're going to be born of, things like this.

You don't have control over that.

And so I'm listening to him give this prophecy, and then he's giving me a New Testament fulfillment one after another.

And I'm running the calculations and realizing I stopped him.

I'm like, chuck, stop.

You're beyond statistical impossibility.

That's 10 to the 48th power.

And so it means it's statistically impossible for someone to fulfill all, all of these prophecies by chance.

Tell me what the New Testament teaches.

Because now I believed, okay, this is, there's something here.

This can't happen by chance.

So if this is the case, then God said these things would happen, and they are happening, then the New Testament must have been written by God.

Right.

And that's where the math comes in, the statistical possibility.

I see.

Correct.

But, but he then started to go through to teach me what is New Testament?

Well, New Testament, the major message is that Jesus Christ, God came to earth, died on a cross, was dead and buried for three days, and then rose from the dead.

And, and I literally said to him, I said, chuck.

Because he said he rose himself from the dead.

I said, chuck, dead people don't raise themselves, okay?

That's right.

People do.

So the key was the resurrection.

And if you ever read Josh McDowell's More Than Carpenter or Evidence Demands a Verdict, he gives you all of these different excuses people have for the resurrection.

They got the wrong tomb, the disciples stol, the body.

You know, he, he didn't really die, and he kind of revived after the cross and walked out.

And I'm, I actually came up with every one of those arguments to try to explain away the resurrection.

And my final one, that to date, I believe is original with me, but it was my final Argument.

I said, chuck, maybe the disciples dug underneath the tomb and snuck the body out and that's why no one noticed.

And he was like, in three days, Andrew, in solid rock, they didn't have heavy equipment.

And I just put my hands in, in my, my face, in my hands and shook my head and he's like, what's wrong?

I said, look, if Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then he must be God.

To which Chuck was like, yeah, that's, that's what I've been explaining to you for the last three hours.

Right, right.

I said, but if he's God, then I'm accountable to him.

How do I get right with him?

And so on the steps of a Dairy Queen, I prayed to receive christ as a 16 year old boy.

Glory to God.

Never look back.

And you know, I think that's, that's very interesting that you mentioned that the, the part of being now that means I'm accountable to him, right?

And it's because what I think, what it was for me as well, that brought me, let's say, to truly start to seek God, truly to try to put my hope and trust in Jesus Christ and truly accept him.

Though I grew up in a Christian home already and I was, you know, grew up in the church, I never, it's not like I took it seriously, right.

It's not like I truly understood, truly what was going on, what it meant to have a relationship with Jesus Christ, any of that.

Right.

I didn't understand the depths of any things.

But I think as I mentioned on yesterday's podcast episode, there was a point where I was in this level of despair.

And once I found the protection that God offered in scripture with Job, with Abraham, right?

When he came into the city with his, with his wife and you know, he's trying to say, oh, this is my sister and, and then God going into their dreams and, and making them, you know, fearful and to the point where they literally just gave him stuff and sent them away.

Right?

And to see that and to see Job's and to hear the prophecy coming from that, that God's a self proclaimed prophet or whatever he may have been, he may have been a false prophet, but I think God could have.

I believe God still used him to give me that word to connect to the story of Job about this hedge of fire being around me that connected to the story of Job and the hedge of fire that was around him that truly had me go, wait a second, there's true protection right here, right round and about at all times, right?

And Then I came across many other scriptures where it talked about this protection that God had over his people.

And I think with that it brought me to a point to want to seek him more, want to look into the things of God more, because this was true power, this was true protection, this was true.

And with that did I come across the scriptures about accountability and about all these different things.

And I think that's where it got serious for me.

That's where I really started to go, whoa, I need to lock in now.

This is something I truly need to.

I will be, you know, made to have and have to have an answer for some of these things.

And ultimately I know that I can't justify myself, right.

And I know there's only Jesus Christ that can justify me.

And I think in that space is really where I was able to lock in to Christ because of that understanding that I would have to be held accountable for all that I've ever done.

Yeah, and a lot of people don't understand when they share the gospel, they leave Christ in the grave.

In other words, they don't get to the resurrection.

The resurrection was what vindicates everything.

It proves that, that Christ, that he is God, that he can forgive us of sin because he said he would raise himself from the dead, three days later he did it.

And I mean, look, if you ask if there was anybody to take advice from or to try to take seriously, you know, is one who says, you know, that they will be.

I mean, he quite literally talked about it prior to this happened in the first place.

He says that the temple will be torn down and risen up again in three days.

And obviously, of course, as we've seen, he was talking about himself, right?

We talked, he talked about as, as was Jonah was in the belly of the well, right.

As he would be in the belly of the earth, right?

So we see this, this whole, this thing reiterated even before it takes place, even before he's crucified, before he's, you know, put in the tomb and then risen again three days later.

So it's definitely something that, that he definitely made sure that we understood.

He was, you know, proclaiming this, this truth claim.

And actually I'm gonna do it right as, as God is.

He is a God of his word 100%.

And this is something that when you look at some of the other man made religions, and I'm making a distinction between divine religion and man made religions, but what you see is they don't have the kind of prophecy we have in scripture.

You know, you had your Your guest Cody on part two and he talked about horoscopes and things.

Right.

And he's right with the way they do horoscopes.

They make them so general.

I had a girlfriend in college where she was very into the horoscope.

But Andrew comes right every day.

What I need her do is read all, what is it, 12 or 13 of them.

I made her read every one of them every day, not just hers.

And she, they're so general every day all of them come true.

Right.

And they all could apply to herself as well, probably.

Correct.

And that's what she, that's when she gave it up.

It's, it's sort of like your, like Cody was saying is that there's, we do pattern matching.

Right.

So we're looking to go.

Oh yeah, hey, that's it, that's it.

Well this is the difference is when other religions give a prophecy, it's so general that anything can, yeah, that could fit.

Oh yeah.

Oh this is speaking of that.

And people are looking to make it fit, right.

Or they do self fulfilling ones.

Right.

So there is a, you know, one where it's like, okay, this is the leader who's going to take, take over after, you know, after the, the like after Muhammad's gone.

Here's who's going to take over.

Well, who's, who do you think you're going to put in charge?

Like type of thing?

Right.

You'd have to do something like that because otherwise the whole thing is just proven wrong.

So, so you have self fulfilling ones where people can make it come true.

And so when you look at the prophecy in scripture and this was when my parents, when they found out I was a Christian, they brought me to the rabbi to talk me out of it.

And the one thing the rabbi had trouble with, where he ended the conversation was when I asked him the prophecy of Daniel.

Now in Daniel, in chapter nine of Daniel, he gives an exact timetable.

He says, okay, there's going to be a decree to rebuild Jerusalem.

And after that decree you're going to have this many years for the building of the temple and then this many years and then Messiah is going to come.

Right.

And so you have an exact timetable of when Messiah is going to come.

Well, we know when that decree from Cyrus was given, that was 2,500 years ago.

And you have less than 490 years.

Oh, I said to the rabbi, so where is he?

Right.

He had to have come 2,000 years ago.

And that's when rabbis just stick to your faith, you know, type of Thing, but it's an exact timetable.

You Daniel.

This is why they, the liberals want to give Daniel a much later date.

They want to push Daniel into the Roman era.

And the reason being is because Daniel mentions during the Babylonian captivity he mentions that there will be another empire that's going to take over the Babylonians.

They, he doesn't mention them by name for good reason because then Babylonians wipe them out.

Mention that they're going to be two empires that join together, the Medes and the Persians.

Right.

That's what we know in history.

But then he says that they're going to be taken over by the Greeks.

And he mentions the Greeks at that time.

The Greeks weren't even a big player.

Then they're going to take it over by the Romans again, they weren't a big player, they were very small at that time.

And so he mentions them by name saying this, these are the next great empires.

They're going to take over this area.

And that's exactly what happens.

So you don't have that with the other prophecies in other religions.

I mean Cyrus was named hundreds of years before he was born.

Yeah, I mean this is specific historical prophecies that are being fulfilled.

Things that you could track and go, wait a second, this was written when, okay.

And then these things took place when.

And you could kind of line that up and go, oh, this is literally talking about this.

There's no denying it kind of thing.

Right.

Less, less general as some of the other prophecies that we see in other religions.

Yeah.

Because the whole thing of prophecy, the purpose of prophecy is a couple fold, but primarily it's so that we would be able to vindicate the new writing of scripture because it's going to fulfill prophecy.

We're going to be able to vindicate prophets.

So you have Messiah coming on the scene, the most important thing ever.

Things point to his first coming and we can look at that and say, okay, look, these things were fulfilled.

One of the things with prophecy in the Bible is that it often has a near term and far term prophecy.

So it'll be something that happens within the lifetime of the prophet with a further prophecy that goes out.

Why?

So that you knew that this prophet was actually a prophet because if he got anything wrong, you'd stone him.

Now this is different.

True.

Those that say there's prophets today, they don't hold themselves to the same standard.

They kind of, I mean their own numbers.

If you're new apostolic reformation, if you're familiar with that word of faith, if you're familiar with that.

The prophets that they claim they're prophets today, they hear from God, God gives them prophecies.

They argue that they have an 80 to 85% success rate.

Well, God demands 100%.

Now they will try to explain that differently.

And we see, I mean, we see that in scripture, right?

He says that, you know, a prophet's, you know, you know, you know, someone who's claiming to be a prophet is not a prophet when their prophecies don't come to pass.

Right, so we understand that and that.

And what you're supposed to do is stone them.

In other words, you put an end to their prophecy.

And so you have to know if the prophecy is going to be true.

So what you do is you give a near term, one that they could see happens within their lifetime.

Now you can trust the one that's a thousand years from now.

And so unlike the prophets of today, you know, in 19 or 2019, every single one of the so called prophets that were prophesying all prophesied that Trump was going to get reelected in 2020 and he was going to be in the White House.

And they got that wrong.

And every one of them missed Covid.

I mean there was not a single person that prophesied the biggest event.

Now there's one guy who claims he did, he did, supposedly.

It's just that he didn't say anything about.

It was like this thing that was so generic that there's just going to be sickness coming upon the world.

One of those vague prophecies, just like we've been talking about.

Other guy that claimed that he had done something in 2017.

And I guess it was discovered that the video was actually made in 20 and they put a 2017 on the.

Bottom, not changing the date just for the sake of the prophecy.

I'm not thinking that's accurate.

Sorry.

Right.

You see, that's the thing is that you knew who the real prophets were because they gave specific prophecies.

That is what's missing in the man made religions.

If they have prophecies, those prophecies are so general, anyone can fulfill them.

You know, it's kind of like Cody was saying that, you know, it's just, you're going to look for the pattern to match it or it's, or it's self fulfilling.

It's something that they can make happen.

And therefore, look, it's a prophecy.

And so you will have that, you'll have some that will argue that they'll, they will claim something's a prophecy to Here's a for instance.

In, in the Talmud, there is a passage for the.

For folks that don't want a Talmud, the Talmud is so in, in Judaism you have four authorities.

You have the written law, okay?

You have the, as Christians would call the Old Testament, okay, We call it the Tanakh, but you have the Tanakh, then you have a commentary on that written law, and then you have an oral law, and then you have commentary on that oral law.

The commentary on the oral law is known as the Talmud.

And that is really what most of the rabbinic scholars study is the Talmud.

In the Talmud there is a, in Deuteronomy there is one passage.

It's a very interesting phrase.

It's the only time we see the phrase where it refers to a false prophet as the son of your mother.

Now, interesting, interesting.

It is interesting.

And so with the rabbis after the fact, right?

This was never seen as a specific prophecy.

It was talking about false prophets, how to identify false prophets.

So it was always like a general explanation, but after Christ, they go back because remember, the Talmud is being written after the time of Christ and much of it's reactionary.

So they look at that verse and the rabbi claims that that was now a prophecy of Jesus claiming to be born of a virgin, saying the son.

The son of the mother.

Wow.

So they will.

They now say, I've had this where, you know, I had a rabbi who told, who brought this to me and said, look, in the Talmud we know that Jesus was a false prophet because here we see it referenced in Deuteronomy and challenge is, okay, where do we see this passage in Deuteronomy ever being a specific prophecy and not a generalization of false prophets before the time of Christ?

And you don't see that, but we see it in the Talmud.

I said, yes, but the Talmud is written after the fact.

Right, exactly.

The liberals want to do with Isaiah with Daniel.

They want to put it after the fact because there's so much prophecy.

In fact, here's an interesting thing about Isaiah.

Have you ever heard Akeem of the Isaiah scroll?

I have not.

Okay, so at the Dead Sea, we found the Isaiah scroll.

Now the Isaiah scroll, the importance of this is that the liberal scholars said there were two, even three.

I've heard up to four Isaiahs who wrote the book of Isaiah.

The reason they say that is because they, they basically put people in different time periods.

And what they claim is that these different Isaiahs are writing as if it's future, but they're really doing it after the fact.

Very Much like the guy who says he's a prophet in 2020 having a prophecy about COVID and it was really specific and he just stuck a 2017 on label right on the video.

So that's what they claimed was happening because they recognized that it's impossible to give that specific of a detailed proph and have it occur and there not be a God.

Right.

I mean, the prophecy is what proves that God is in control here.

And is the Isaiah scroll a.

Is it one of the manuscripts that, that was used to put together scripture?

Or is it one of.

Or is it like the Gospel of Thomas for example, like those other ones?

So what it is, it is a scroll of Isaiah that we found in the Dead Sea.

And the importance of the Isaiah scroll is that it predates the earliest copy we have of Isaiah by a thousand years.

So the reason the liberals could argue that there were different Isaiahs that wrote after the fact is because the earliest copy we had of Isaiah at that time was like from 5, 600 AD.

And now we found that one that you said came how long prior?

Thousand years.

A thousand years?

Yeah, yeah.

Before Christ.

Years before Christ.

Right, right, right before all these events occur.

That's the thing.

And so all of a sudden it shows that.

Yes.

And here's the interesting thing with it, because people like to say, oh well, the, the Bible's been changed.

Well, we have this scroll that's a thousand years earlier than, than the earliest copy we have.

And it was identical, every word.

There you go, you look at that, you go a thousand years of copying.

Now there were some copies where we have different textual variances.

We can get into what textual variances are.

Be a whole program in itself.

But the, when we, we do have some of that, but we, in this case, we have this Isaiah scroll that was found and it's like, wow, look at this.

We found the entire scroll.

Because sometimes what we found in, in the, in the Dead Sea.

And I've actually been at Qumran, I've been in, at Cave 1 where they, where they found the first Dead Sea scrolls.

And so the, the thing was, as, as they find this one, they'd usually find pieces of maybe partial copies of a.

Is, you know, Ezekiel or Isaiah or Daniel.

They don't always find everything intact in one scroll that they could open.

Remember, this has been, they've been in clay pots for hundreds of years.

Right, right.

So what you have is you have a case of someone now being able to say, well now this predates all of the events and that, that was a real problem for them because their whole argument was it's after the fact, pretending to be prophecy.

Well, now we know this was pre of the events, therefore this is actual prophecy and very detailed prophecy at that.

I think that's, that's.

And I think that's the great.

I mean, I think that also makes you look back at some of the arguments in regards to these things and go, did you really know what you were talking about?

As you could, if you could see that now that we have, you know, something to say, you know, other than what you're saying and other.

Something that you were really claiming this whole time.

You know what I mean?

Do you really know what you're talking about?

Right.

Because clearly we could tell that we were correct in regards to saying that Isaiah was written by Isaiah.

Yeah.

One of the things I love to do, Akeem, and if you ever get a chance to do this with me, you'll have fun with it.

But I, I do trips down to the museum of the Bible and I'll do.

I usually go with different small groups.

And the advantage is, well, I have a voice that can carry.

I'm an open air evangelist for a reason.

Right, right.

And so though they, because they're trying to show the influence of the Bible, they're not, they have it a different way.

They're not outvertly sharing the gospel.

They'll do it by having, you know, they have the Puritans preaching the gospel, they have Billy Graham preaching the Gospels.

They have different floors where you're hearing the gospel over and over and over.

They don't directly confront people with it, which is fine.

They're a museum and that's what they're looking to do.

But you get a lot of Jewish people, you get a lot of Muslim people, a lot of different religious backgrounds that come through there.

Because the central text that they all use is the Bible.

And so there is this area where they have the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And whenever I'm going with a group, what I do is I stand right behind me is the Isaiah scroll because they have it in this cabinet all lit up and I stand in there's.

It's like in this semicircle type of thing.

So I stand right there, right in this one spot.

And because of the way it is, I know that the arch they have there, my voice actually carries.

And so I give the background and the history of the Isaiah scroll and its importance and its finding in the Dead Sea.

It's, it's really funny because anytime, Akeem, if you Go to a museum and you're sitting there and someone's giving a tour.

What a lot of people do is they just try to get a free tour by just kind of being on the outskirts of it and just listening.

In on the side.

So I get that, and I get a lot of the people.

So I'm giving it, you know, just the people I'm there with.

But I've had.

Where I've had groups of 50 to 100 people that all stop and listen.

And I.

And I get this big gathering there, and I'm like.

And.

And then I preach the gospel.

Yeah.

I wonder if they ever think, like, you know, we should give this guy a job.

You know what I mean?

He's doing it so well.

I'll tell you what happens in a moment, because here's here.

So I had this one time, and what I do is I explain what it is that Isaiah is talking about.

He was talking about a messiah that was going to come, and I explained Christ's death, burial, resurrection.

So I share the gospel.

The one time.

This is probably the second or third time I had done that.

And as we're leaving the museum, one of the security guards goes, sir, can you.

Can you come over here?

And, you know, I walk over and he says, sir, I was.

I was there when you were talking to that crowd, you know, by the Isaiah scroll in the Dead Sea section.

And I'm going, okay, am I getting in trouble here?

And he.

That's what it sounds like.

Yeah, it's out.

I was, like, expecting.

Because you're not supposed to do it.

Like, their tour guides are not allowed to do that.

And he just goes, that was great, man.

Yeah.

He was like, well, you've been waiting for something like that.

We wouldn't be allowed to do that.

It's the museum rules.

Right.

So is that a separate place than the.

The Ark, The ARC encounter?

Well, yeah, I'll definitely love to check out both of those places.

If you consider Washington, D.C. where the museum of the Bible is and, you know, basically Kentucky, where the Ark and the Museum of the Creation Museum, if you consider them the same area, then yeah, it might be.

But I think there are several states.

They're completely different places.

But, yeah, no, that definitely sounds like a place.

Both of the places, honestly, sound like places worth visit.

Definitely taking a visit to.

I haven't been to either one.

So let me give you.

Let me give advice to anyone that goes to the Creation Museum in New York.

Here's my suggestion.

This is what I tell people.

If you have three days.

Plan a three day trip.

If you have, if you can only do two days and if you do one day, I'll give you all three.

But start at the museum.

If you're, if you have one shot.

If you're just doing one day.

I know the arc is really cool, but go to the museum.

You're going to learn a lot more at the museum.

And there's a lot there.

Very entertaining.

Kids love it.

It's great.

If you're there for two days, I would start.

Always start at the museum.

Start at the Creation Museum and then go to the Ark.

Explain why if you have a three days, I would say do two days at the museum and one day at the Ark.

Now there's a reason I always say start at the museum.

One, the museum is more informative.

You're going to have a lot of reading.

There's a lot to lear learn.

You can spend two days getting through the museum.

And by the way, if you do two days, you can get both planetarium shows.

Just saying.

I was just about to ask that.

Actually, I was about to ask.

It must be two days worth of things to do in this museum to be at the museum for two days.

Yeah, I've gone through it in a day.

But I can, I can promise you I didn't read everything because you just toward the end, you, you have to rush through.

There's, there's a lot there.

There's a.

They have, they break it up with different.

Like you go into a theater and they, they'll teach through.

Through different kind of theaters they have.

And they have, I think, like, like a half dozen of them throughout.

So it kind of breaks it up so you're not just sitting and reading.

And I think that's the reason so many kids like it, because the parents sit and read and the kids look at things and, and then they go in and sit into a theater and you know, it's interactive and then they, they move on.

And so they really built it.

Well.

They also have, each day they'll have talks.

So they'll have different people come in and speak.

But the reason you want to do the museum first is because that's where you're going to get a lot of learning.

You're going to understand that then when you go to the museum or sorry to the Ark, you go with the knowledge you just got from the museum.

The Ark is a lot of walking.

And so if you start at the Ark, I've had, I had someone that didn't listen to me.

They started the Ark and then went to museum and they were so tired that they didn't because.

Because of all the walking the day before.

So you start at the museum, then finish up at the Ark.

Because the arc's a lot of walking.

There's not as much reading, not as there's some interactive, but not as much.

And so it's.

But it is overwhelming when you sit and see the size of it and, and things like that.

So if you, if you do go that.

That's my suggestion.

Definitely, definitely, definitely want to check it out.

Also, I've heard of Sight and Sound.

Definitely sounds like a amazing spot checkout.

I don't know if you've ever been there.

I know Bobby and cutting all that far from yes.

Yeah, I've been to science several of their.

Their shows.

Very good, very enjoyable.

So here, little tidbit of fun, but I actually worked many years ago for the guy who.

He and his cousin are the ones that started Sight and Sound.

And so he worked, he worked there before.

It is what it is now.

They used to do like it was a projector and it wasn't live action.

They started doing the live action and then a place burned down and the guy who I worked for ended up leaving and his cousin took it on and built it to what it is today.

It was a place.

It initially burned down at some point and then they rebuilt it to what it is now.

Yeah.

Wow, that's.

I didn't know that.

I didn't know that about it at all.

They do these dramatizations from the scripture.

I mean, obviously, you know, some of the stories, we don't have enough information, so they, they, they openly admit they have to embellish some.

But, you know, and that you're always going to get that when you do films about biblical things like the Chosen, for example.

Well, I think they embellish things.

See, that'd be a good example because.

And I. I'll freely admit I haven't watched the Chosen yet because I haven't had a need to.

We have writers at Striving for Eternity that have watched it and you know, articles on it based on what they've said.

That.

And this is exactly what I was going to say is a difference is what they try to do at Sight and Sound is they embellish, but the embellishment does not go against what scripture says.

Okay, okay, I see what you're saying.

Where in the Chosen, there's some things that if true.

Right.

That are an embellishment and go against scripture.

Same with, like, the Shack.

The Shack was a novel.

I get it.

I think they made it into a. Yeah, the.

The one that became a movie with the women that was like God and Christ was.

Yeah, See, and that's the issue is that God is portrayed.

Or the Holy Spirit is portrayed as a woman.

Right.

When he has a male pronoun.

Yeah.

You know, and I. I haven't seen it, but I definitely heard of it.

I mean, heard about it.

I've seen a video.

Videos or reactions to the movie itself.

And yeah, it definitely sounds.

It sounds like it's way out there in regards to you.

I did read the book and I did watch the.

The.

The video.

The movie.

People were talking about it.

But here.

Here's the thing.

You know, I. I find it very interesting.

Again, this is a sidebar, Akeem, but might be fun for the audience.

You ever notice that the.

The people who demand that everyone respect pronouns the most are the very people that don't want to respect God's pronoun?

Pretty much.

Yep.

Yeah.

You know, they're like, yeah, she or whatever it is.

No, but he can.

He's.

He's a he.

I mean, quite literally a father.

Right.

Quite literally.

In every sense.

Do we see him being.

Point.

Portrayed as a man, as a male.

Masculine 100.

So here's how you deal with that, folks.

If.

If you're.

If you have someone that starts referring to God as a she, just ask that person.

Would you want me to respect your pronouns?

I've never had a time that someone doesn't say yes with like, an emphatic like they demand, then why don't you respect gods?

And see, you know what's interesting about that?

I could almost.

I could almost see the mind of someone in that space.

And when it comes to what their response would probably be something like that.

And I think the reason that people probably go in that direction with it and kind of try to call God out of who he is.

Right.

Is because they.

In a sense, there's a lot that I've heard where it comes into the space where they're like, all right, well, God is, you know, all things, or he's this or he's that or all the gods, the nations believe also the same God that we're all believing in.

And ultimately, you know, if I call him or her, he still got.

You see how they.

They kind of.

They kind of.

Since they're all over the place already, it kind of just stays all over the place in their explanation of it all the.

That I heard And I'm saying the best because it gave me the most.

I laughed the most at it.

This guy that was guy by guy dressed as a girl, but this guy who tried, who said, well, fact is, is that God is a female.

And people change the Bible to make.

And I was like, okay, so what's your evidence for this?

We all know it.

Okay, so you don't have evidence for this, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Things folks, we do not have to be afraid of what people say when they contradict the Bible because they don't have an answer generally.

And all you got to do is ask them support your case.

Don't they say it for effect.

And they want you to have to defend that God is a male in pronoun.

Right.

They want you to defend it.

Don't.

They made the statement.

Yeah.

Them defend it.

Just say, okay, I'm making it up.

I mean, I literally say that I was, I was in.

Down at the, in the Jersey Shore and I had this guy that Akeem.

We're sitting there and there's not often that I'm doing open air and I just don't know what to say.

But this guy was going off on the, the first.

The original religion was actually a Celtic religion from Ireland, which I'm going, like, how would it be like in Ireland when they.

Like, that's not where people first were.

Right, right.

So, but that aside, like, he was going on for 20 minutes and I'm sitting there just.

I have no idea how to like, I want to get the conversation to the gospel.

Yeah, yeah, you.

You're ready to, to lay the.

Like, how am I going to get this?

And so literally I looked at him and I just, I don't know why I said it, but I was just like, are you just making this up as you go along?

And he goes, yeah, kind of.

And you know, you know, what's the funny part about that?

I think that a lot of the time things, you know, when they're, you know, when they're asking you to kind of, you know, come up with these reasonings and proofs behind what you believe.

A lot of the times, the understandings and things that they believe in and lean towards or philosophies they hold, they don't necessarily have any true, you know, belief or reason that they believe that in the first, there's nothing, there's nothing solid behind that that usually they're able to point to either.

Right.

So it's almost like you're asking me this, this question that technically in your space, in your Worldview in your mindset, you can't answer for yourself.

And that's very interesting because.

Because I. I can point to something in.

In regards to what supports what I'm trying to say.

But for you, it's more so I don't.

They almost lean towards.

I don't have to explain it because it doesn't matter.

And it's almost seems like a cop out, right?

It's.

Look, here's a simple thing.

Let me give it.

When I teach how to evangelize, a little thing I teach people is learn how to ask good questions.

And the reason being is when you ask a question, first off, it changes the way someone thinks.

Okay?

This is what Socrates recognized.

It's called the Socratic model.

If.

If I'm just looking to throw darts at what you say, Akeem, I don't really have to consider it.

I just.

True.

I just listen for something that I can pick on, and then if it doesn't work, I just pick on something else.

But the goal is to constantly keep you on the defensive.

But when I ask you a question, you know that I might pick on you for anything you say wrong.

So what are you going to do in your thinking process?

You're trying to bulletproof your argument.

So what people do is they process answering a question different than if they're just challenging someone that's saying something.

And the other thing that a question does is it makes them have to answer.

So you can completely control and guide a conversation through questions, and you don't have to answer a single thing.

You put them on the defensive.

And that's what I do.

So I had a guy, New York City, as an example, I always use.

He's just shouting really loud, there is no God because there's evil in the world.

There is no God because there's evil in the world.

There is no God because there's evil in the world.

And so I just looked at him.

I said, sir, just explain to me, how could there be evil without God?

His name is Jason Cross.

He heckled me for.

For over a decade.

So he would come out every week for.

For 13 years.

He was regular there, heckling, wow, devoted.

Yeah, we got.

We got to know each other well.

But he.

This is something I would see him use regularly with evangelists.

And they would make the mistake of trying to get into explaining evil and how God is good and yet there's evil in the world.

And they try to explain this away.

Right.

But what is his purpose?

His purpose is to make me have to defend something That I didn't say, right?

So I said, I just turned to him, I said, how can you have evil without God?

Well, he didn't know an answer to that.

He was like, he looks at me and says, tell me what evil is.

I said, I didn't say it exists.

You did.

So you tell me what evil is and then tell me how you can have evil without God.

He's like, no, no, no, you tell me what evil is.

I said, okay, evil is the absence of good, and good is defined by the nature of God.

How can you have evil without God?

And this guy threw up his hands and walked out of the crowd, right?

Because he had no answer.

So this is something he had used over and over and over again.

But when he was challenged, he had never thought it through.

He never had to.

This is the thing that people do against Christians is they just, they throw jabs and they don't really hear, Right.

And so, so I'll pick on Cody a bit, you know, and sorry, Cody, if you're listening.

No, he, I will say this.

Cody was a great guest.

Definitely, definitely was.

He.

He's really good because he listened.

Right?

That's exactly what I'm about to say.

Right.

But he, he was criticizing some of Christianity, but he also showed he really has really no knowledge of it, even though he attended church.

He really doesn't understand the very basics of Christianity.

And, and yet people will criticize it.

But this is what's common with folks.

They.

They criticize what they don't understand.

If you're going to do debate, if you're going to do apologetics, which kind of fits in the same realm, you need to be able to argue the other person's side as well as they can.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So you, you have.

I, I was on a. I used to work at Bell Laboratories, and there was a guy who is long before YouTube, but he had a TV show.

I think it might have been on public broadcast network, but he had a tv, an atheist TV show.

And because he found out that I was a Christian, he wanted to have me on and he wanted to have a debate.

I said, hey, what?

Let's make it fun.

I'll do.

I'll come on debate you.

And we do under, you know, with two conditions.

I want you to argue for Christianity.

I'll argue for atheism.

You bring 10 people whose lives were radically changed for the people better because of atheism, and I'll bring a hundred for Christianity.

I'm not going to do that.

I said, why?

You can't find 10 people.

He goes, no, I can't find any reason to.

I wouldn't be able to make a case for Christianity.

Christ.

Right, well, that's why I would want you to do it, because I'd want your audience to see that you, you have a whole show criticizing Christianity, but you don't even understand it.

I will criticize atheism, but I understand it.

Make your case.

You can't make mine.

Which goes.

And that's something not enough people take the time to do.

It's actually the reason I wrote the book.

What do they believe I wrote that?

That when you deal with someone that's Jewish or Catholic or Muslim or Mormon or Jehovah Witness, you understand what their arguments are, what they actually believe without misrepresenting them.

You just believe in 70 virgins.

No, that's actually not something that every Muslim believes.

That is something that's in a hadith, but it's not in the Quran.

That's a great point because.

Because I definitely there.

There's two parts to this.

I've.

I've came across this.

And let's see what I was telling you earlier about the daily breads that I do every day, that's one of the things that I see.

Very often somebody will point out something in regards to Christianity and I'll go, wait a second.

But that's not the case.

Or that's not what.

That's not what we believe in Christianity.

That's not even a thing.

Whilst on the other hand, when it comes to our conversation that I was having with Cody, the first episode, for example, a lot of the time and throughout that first episode, most time, you see me kind of just listening majority of the video.

And I think it's really.

Because that's exactly what I was trying to do.

I was trying to better understand first what he believed, because initially I didn't even know.

Initially I knew he was an atheist, but I didn't know what his philosophy or what he leaned into until we got on the episode.

So once we got into that space and I'm finding out about it, I wanted to.

Instead of having to argue against or, or speak against something that I didn't necessarily know what it was or fully what he held to in that philosophy, I wanted to fully know what that was.

And I think that's why we did a part one and part two, so we can address things a little better on the second one where we were more so then targeting the steel man versus the.

The straw man.

Yeah.

And that's and you made that point about the steel man.

And that's important to do.

You know, it's like.

But the thing is, like, Cody, I don't think, you know, I challenge him to go back and re.

Listen to part one and.

Because there's a couple things.

Like, he talked about having faith in stoicism and then was criticizing religion because it.

You.

It requires faith.

I was like that he was saying that he became the reason he was a stoic is because you're accepting life as it is, and it's freeing to just say, you know, not that there's some control thing or that there's nothing, but just you accept it where you have control.

You have control and just accept that and move on.

But then later, he criticized Christianity for believing in God because that was just kind of saying, well, hey, this stuff's out of my control.

So I was like, but that's what you said was why you were a stoic.

Right, Right.

It was almost a different way of dealing with the fact that I can't understand or I don't.

I can't deal with the situation.

So now instead of me leaning into God, I'm just gonna go, well, I can't understand the situation.

It is what it is kind of situation.

It is.

He's.

He was honest, and that.

That's what I liked about him.

He seems.

At least I don't know him personally.

You do.

He seemed like a really honest person in what he was saying.

Yeah, definitely.

We all have blind spots.

We all have presuppositions.

We all have biases.

And one of the first things I teach people when it comes to how to.

How to interpret the Bible, how to do debate, you have to know your presuppositions.

You have to know what your biases are, because where you may be biased, you have to be able to look at this and now question that more to make sure that your bias is not affecting things.

And so what happens is, I think he was being honest with why he came to believe in stoicism, but he wasn't seeing that he has the same things with.

You know, it's the same argument he has against Christianity because the bias.

That's probably.

I'm saying probably because I don't know for sure.

I've never had a conversation with him, but if we did, that'd be one of the things I'd probably talk to him about.

Do you, you know, do you have a bias here?

Do you see that you're making the same argument for stoicism?

That you're making against Christianity.

Maybe he just, it's could be the language and he may flesh out more, you don't know.

But I think that was, that's the great part about, you know, when having him on it was, it was the fact that he was able, he was open to be able to address some of the things that, that I wanted elaborated on or wanted to flesh out some of the things that we were talking about.

And I think we were able to do a little bit more of that on the second episode.

I'm still, obviously there's still plenty of things that, you know, we could have fleshed out more and more things to be elaborated on.

But.

And definitely he was definitely honest in the sense of being able to at least admit certain things and, and be able to talk about these conversations.

Well, let me just, I'm going to do this here because in case I never get an opportunity to talk to Cody, maybe he'll watch this.

Here'd be a thing, this will be helpful for the audience as well.

I mentioned the difference between divine religion and human man made religion.

And I think there's an objective way to evaluate religions to know which one is man made and which one is not.

Okay.

So I argue that there's only two religions in the entire world.

Okay.

There's man made, there's divine.

Because every man made religion has one thing in common that they all have, but there is a way of recognizing it.

So if you get my book, what do they Believe?

In the back, I have a, a, a short addendum on the uniqueness of Christianity.

And this is, this covers what I'm going to give you right now.

Covers it quickly.

There's three things that makes Christianity unique and separate from every religion.

The key element is that what we know about humans is we love to brag, right.

We love to say how good we are.

You are correct.

Yeah, we're, we're going to find a way that we're going to earn things for ourselves.

We're going to claim we earn things we didn't really earn even.

Right?

Right.

Right.

If a king loses a war, he's going to talk about the individual batt battles he won.

The winner gets the right to, to write the rules.

Right.

And so he, he gets to tell the stories that, I mean, we say this because in a time when books did not last before an Internet where now you can't get it, get rid of anything.

Right?

Right.

If you got, if you burn the books, which they would do regularly, you burn all the history you don't like, then your history is the only one that survives.

Right?

And so that is part of human history.

So what we know is that people love to brag about their own work.

So if you find a religion that adds human effort to getting right with God, you know it's man made.

Christianity is the only religion in the world that says you cannot do any good works, you cannot do anything to earn righteousness from God.

It comes from God alone.

Okay.

So all the religions will say that there's aspect of faith plus works.

That's what Catholics would say.

Mormons would say that you have grace after all you could do.

So you do your works and then grace comes in to fill the gap.

Islam, which would say you do one good deed counts for 10 bad.

I mean everyone, even if you want to say Hinduism and Buddhism, how do you get in a better life the next life?

Karma.

Right?

That whole having to do things better.

The works that you do in this life, right, Every single one of them.

But Christianity is about what God did on the cross.

It's not about what we do, it's about what God did.

So what makes Christianity unique?

Okay, because of the cross.

Christianity is the only religion that is not a set of moral teachings.

Christianity is based on a person, not a set of teachings.

And this is why some, they say all religions are the same.

All man made religions are in one sense because they're all set of morality.

Do this, don't do that.

Because that's how you earn righteousness in a man made system.

Right.

While in Christianity he says even your best works are but dirty rags in my eyes.

I mean he quite literally says it's a free gift of grace so that no man can boast.

Right?

Correct.

Not of works.

And this is, this is the thing.

So you can, you could have Mormonism without Joseph Smith.

Okay, you could have, and Muslims are not going to like this.

You can have Islam without Muhammad and they're going to say no, no, no you can't.

And I'll ask them, is there anything special or unique about Muhammad that only Muhammad could bring the teachings from Allah to humanity?

And then they have to say, well no, okay, so you don't need Muhammad.

Anyone could have done that.

Allah could have worked through anyone.

Each of these religious systems, there's nothing special about the founder where it could only be them.

But Christianity is different because Christianity is based on Jesus Christ being truly God and truly man.

And so if you don't have Christ, you don't have Christianity being truly man.

He could pay an eternal fine, because he's an eternal being.

Being truly human, he could pay, be a substitute for human beings so that when he paid that fine on the cross, his eternal being, he could pay it for all eternity.

He, being a man, could pay it once in time.

Okay, and be a substitute for you and I.

That is the thing.

If you remove Christian, if you remove Christ from Christianity, you no longer have Christianity because it requires the uniqueness of Jesus Christ being truly God and truly man.

This is why it's only religion based on the works that God does and not the works that man does.

Okay.

That's the second thing makes it unique.

The third one people don't think about though, Akim.

And it is the fact that only within Christianity, because of what Jesus did on the cross, can you have a God that is both just and merciful.

Muslims, anytime, they say Allah, Allah most merciful.

But how can he be just?

Because.

Right.

How does Allah let people into paradise?

Just by forgiving them.

They're good to go.

The Muslim, they're good to go.

And they don't even know why.

But they have to do work, make up for the bad things they do.

And the thing is, they don't even know for certain that they're making it.

Into heaven because they don't know if they did enough good.

And they don't know if Allah is just going to give that favor.

Right?

So justice, justice is that when you commit a crime, you are going to pay the full extent of the law, right?

Mercy is you're going to be let go from the punishment of the law.

So one is you're going to pay the law, the other is you're not going to pay the law.

Those are mutually exclusive.

And so only in Christianity can you have a God that's fully just and fully merciful.

Because the full punishment of sin was paid by Jesus Christ on the cross.

All of it was paid.

But now because God paid it, being a man, he can offer it to us as a substitute.

And now we can have mercy because the full payment was made.

That's how God could be fully just and fully merciful.

And you only can have that within Christianity, though.

Every religion would say God is just and merciful.

Well, I can't, I shouldn't say every religion because there's, there's, there's different religious systems that, that wouldn't have different view.

But, but the, the religious systems that are based off of the Bible would all say that God is just and merciful.

And yet those are mutually exclusive.

And they, they cannot be able to harmonize those, but Christianity can.

100.

I mean, that was, that was well put because that, that is something I usually like to point out when it comes down to it.

Which religion, which world religion deals with the justice, right, for the victims, that deals with the, the sin, the wrong in the world, right?

And we only see that in Christianity.

We don't see any other religion.

I mean, quite literally we was talking about Hinduism when it comes to karma and having to do a certain amount of goods to outweigh the bads.

But does that get justice for the ones that were wronged in that situation?

No, it doesn't.

But we see in Christianity that once again Jesus Christ took the wrath that we deserved.

He paid the fine, he paid the wages that we were in turn having to pay.

And on him was the justice done.

The punishment was taken by Him.

And I think that's where we see it dealt with.

And then we're also seeing him able to show us mercy, him able to let us go free as a judge, you know, as the fine is paid by Jesus Christ being our benefactor and us being able to go free justly, right?

Not just him saying, oh well, you're good to go because you know, you said, sorry, go free, right?

But then the people that were done wrong, the, the laws that were broken, how are those dealt with if it wasn't, if the fine wasn't paid, if the wages wasn't dealt with, you know what I mean?

And I think that's 100 what I like to lean into as well when it comes to pressing which religion is it ultimately.

Another thing that I do like to point out as well is that you see in these other three, in these other two major world relig that they mention Christ, they mention Christ, they don't give him the deity that he is, right?

But they do mention Him.

And how they mention him, they say in Islam, for example, they say that he was a good prophet.

In Hinduism they say he was a good teacher, right?

And we see that both of those religions point to Christ.

He is a way, he is a good teacher.

He is this, he is that, he is that guy.

But we see Christ point to himself.

He doesn't mention Muhammad, he doesn't mention Buddha.

He doesn't mention these other gods, other nations.

Instead he goes, I am the way, way, the truth and the life.

No man comes to the Father but by me.

You can point to me because you're right to point to me.

I am he right?

I am the one who in the beginning was The Word.

And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Right.

So ultimately it makes sense that he's only pointing to himself and they are pointing to him as well, because he is the way.

They may have many ways that.

That ultimately don't lead to God.

Right.

But they know, they also acknowledge in the smallest sense that they do at least that Jesus Christ is the way.

No, and the thing that, you know, you hear a lot from folks and, you know, even Cody was, Was doing it, though he may not be aware of it, was to.

Excuse me, was to argue that he doesn't.

Can't comprehend a God that would do this or that.

You hear this a lot when you evangelize people that'll say, well, I can't see how God could send someone to hell.

As if, like, God should just forgive everybody.

But then at this time, and I can't remember if Cody had said this in part one, vaguely think he might have, but.

But I hear it so often by people, they'll sit there and say, but you're telling me that someone who could be this vile person, a murderer, so wicked, and then at the last minute of their life, they repent and they get to go to heaven.

But doesn't.

I thought so.

It was in the first episode, I believe.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and, and the irony of, like, they don't.

What that shows.

Okay, so you think that this murderer.

And when, when I heard that, I was actually thinking, yeah, there was a guy that was a murderer.

He got saved not the last minute of his life.

And he wrote most of the New Testament.

His name's Paul.

Right, right.

Thinking exactly that, 100%.

But the thing is, look at those two arguments and realize you're saying that God should forgive everyone because everyone is so good.

But then you look at this wicked person and you say, well, that sure person must be punished.

Right.

The reality is that we just don't see how wicked we all are when we have to be absolutely perfect to God's standard.

Every one of us breaks that rule and we just justify it when we're doing it.

It.

When I share the gospel, I'll usually ask people because I want to go through the Ten Commandments, the law, so people can see what a sinner is.

And I'll ask them, have you ever told a lie?

And they say, yes.

And I'll say, what does that make you?

And they will often say, sinner or human?

And I'll turn and say, if I lied to you, what would you call me?

And it's amazing.

Because they almost always get it right.

They go liar.

Right, Right.

But when it's themselves, it's a whole different thing.

Right, right.

And I point that out.

I go, you notice how it was hard for you to call your a liar, but it was easy for you to call me a liar.

We, this is the issue.

We justify what we do.

We, we say sinner or human.

Because that just puts us into the whole human category.

When you do it, it's specifically a liar.

And, or they'll say this because I've used, I've used, I've heard it, heard Ray Comfort use it a lot.

And I think I've taken that as well and applied that because I've noticed that it has that same reaction where you kind of go, right, but what I've noticed is when I ask the same questions, when I ask them, have you, you, you know, are you a liar?

You know, have you ever told a lie?

They're like, yeah, how many lies have you ever told?

Oh, it's numerous.

Right, but they're like everyone's told a lie.

Right.

They like to pander to the crowd, has told a lie though.

As if that justifies the fact that you've told a lie.

You don't go and rob a bank and go, well, everyone's robbed the bank.

Right.

You see how you're still going to be held to have response or take accountability for it.

The guy that robs the bank has some excuse why if he's caught red handed, he's got an excuse why he did it.

Right, right, exactly right.

Was it, it's this weekend that they were going to, they were going to have the, the national day of, of looting by, because their SNAP benefits are being cut off.

And so they were, they were.

Yeah, I don't think it was supposed to be one of these days.

Yeah, I don't know.

I haven't watched news today to see if that happened.

But you know, it's like we're gonna, we're gonna have to, you know, if we don't get our SNAP benefits, we're gonna rob to, to, you know, to, to get our money.

Now how many grocery stores do you think they, if they, if they went through, how many grocery stores do you think they actually went and, and stole from?

Probably none.

Right, right, right.

Weren't going to get bread or chicken or say they're not having this, the food.

Right, right.

Going to the electronic stores to get.

Let me go take a tv.

Let me go take a. Yeah, right, right, right, right, right, exactly.

Some new Kicks, you know, I mean.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

Things food stamps isn't going to pay for.

Right, right.

But this is how we justify the things we do.

And so that's why I find that argument so interesting that if it's.

If God should forgive everyone, I can't understand how God can't forgive anyone.

But then if you get someone that I think is bad, God should punish them.

Right, right.

And then, see, and then ultimately it's yourself, the judge, right?

You make yourself exactly.

What's right to you is right to you.

What's wrong to you is wrong to you.

And then how do you see that working out if everyone's to have their own, you know, perspective on what's wrong and what's right?

I mean, there was a time when I was in Canada where I was in a bar with my wife and her friends, and I ran into some guy that was really, you know, fully just drunk.

And I was talking to him about, you know, these things, and I actually got into, you know, know the, you know, I like to call it the Ray comfort, but it's really the, you know, presenting those Ten Commandments or the four Commandments for the Ten Commandments.

And I. I like to bring those things up.

And so when I bring these things up to him, he gets to a point where he's kind of, you know, saying that, you know, all why.

Why is all these things not right?

And so I go, so if someone came in here with a gun and shot somebody, or shot you, you know, is that good?

Is that, you know, genuinely good?

Would people accept it as good?

You know, like, yeah, why not?

Right?

So you see how for him, it doesn't matter.

You could kind of do whatever you want and it'd be good, right?

In a sense, that doesn't deserve punishment.

But for the next person, they could go, well, that was out of the question.

It should be punished.

You know, whatever the case may be, if we were to leave it up to us, we'd be a lost and destroyed world, right?

But because it's up to God who judges, who truly judges.

This is why we're able to live in this fallen world and still have some type of order, right?

Because the God who is sovereign, who is.

Who is the judge of the world is in charge.

He is sovereign over all things.

And that's why we have the order that we do.

Good thing we're not in charge, because this world would be destroyed already.

You know, one of the things, and this is a good practice when you evangelize is I Used to do a similar thing.

I tell a story but make it personal.

So instead of someone goes in the bar shooting up the place, they shoot him.

So I used to tell a story because what people will often do is because they try to justify.

I came up with an illustration.

Illustrations are good fruit to make points.

Rights.

Right.

And help people.

It's like a parable, right?

Yeah.

And so I have an illustration I use often, which is so.

And I had to morph it.

I used to just tell the parable without making it personal.

It's because people will say that, you know, judge should let people off.

God should let people off.

So, you know, I say, you know, they'll say, well, okay, maybe I've done these things, but I haven't murdered anybody.

And so, yeah, judge.

Should a judge let someone off?

Because, okay, hey, he raped someone, but he didn't murder them.

Them.

So should they be off on rape and people.

Some people would say, yeah, who cares?

But so then I would turn.

Make it about them.

They raped you or your mother or your sister.

Right, right, right.

Then they always will say, no, that's wrong.

They have to judge the.

The worst.

Throw them under the prison.

Prison is what they say.

An illustration I do is you have a doctor, basically, when he's going through medical school.

He didn't have a way of paying for medical school.

So what he did was he robbed your family, he stole your, Your property and, you know, took.

Took the, the.

The money that your dad had for rent.

And now you're out on the street and, you know, took all your possessions.

But he did it so he could pay for medical license.

And now to make up for it, he, he gives free health care to the poor and he gets caught 30 years later.

Should the judge let him off from stealing from you because he had a good purpose for doing it?

And people are always like, exactly.

You're right, though, that I could see how making it personal definitely hits harder because I, I know plenty of people that when I've mentioned something along those lines and I made it about someone else, they'd go, oh, yeah, no, he's good.

He did it for a reason.

He had a reason behind why he did that.

But if you made it personal, they'll go, whoa, no, no, that offended me.

I don't like that.

And so, no, no, don't come under the prison personal.

That one.

I used to always say, yeah, it's okay.

But once I turned it to.

He robbed you.

Now all of a sudden, it's.

It's like, no, no, no, no.

He doesn't get away from with that.

He doesn't rob me and get away with it.

Right, correct.

It's because back to what you said, people want to make themselves God and they do that.

Even Cody was doing that by, by he's saying, well, this doesn't make sense to me.

I can't accept this.

He's setting himself up as the judge, not looking for what is true, but what he wants to be true.

That that's the difference that people are doing.

They set up a standard.

Well, if God exists, he's going to do this.

I'll give you a thing.

They used to have these atheist rallies called reason rallies, and it was every four years, it was in D.C. and they wanted to show that the atheists were a force for a political individuals.

Okay.

So the first one they did, it rained a lot, but we brought about 150, 200 Christians to evangelize them.

They had maybe a thousand people there.

The, the next time they did it, they were saying they were going to have 30,000 people.

Okay, okay.

They had, they had 5,000.

Because when we were setting up, I'm like, if they really have 30,000.

I called up Ray Comfort and I said, hey dude, let's get out here and do something together.

Right.

Because we're going to do a training anyway.

Well, we brought over a thousand Christians.

In other words, we made up 20% of their rally.

Right, right, right.

And so the thing was that I would go around, there's a question I would ask.

I would ask these professing atheists.

These are, I mean, these are atheists all traveling into D.C. for atheism.

And I would say if I could give you enough evidence to convince you to your satisfaction, question that God exists, would you worship him?

And they would say no.

Right, right.

Isn't any evidence.

I said, that's not the question.

If, if there was the evidence, the evidence to convince you to your satisfaction, would you worship him?

Right.

And he'll say no.

I said, it's not an evidence issue, so I'm not going to bother arguing evidence.

It's not about evidence.

Right.

You know.

Right.

And I think most of the time that that is what the case is.

Right.

It could be something else.

I've, I've heard you mentioned before.

It could be some type of hurt, hurt that they've had with when it came to the church.

Right.

It could be, it's more so potentially emotional versus, you know, actual physical evidence and being able to prove whatever, you know, the case may be and I think that's, that's definitely something that I've noticed because you could tell also that there's a lot more emotion involved versus someone that's just thinking logical, that just wants a logical response or answer.

You can tell that how they're reacting and kind of going into this conversation is more so emotional.

This is hitting me and causing offense to me personally versus me going, I just can't accept that evidence.

So what else you got?

Right?

Instead you see anger come out.

You see this emotion that's like, okay, something deeper.

It's not just a surface level logical evidence that you're, that you're actually looking for.

And let me, let me give you another thing.

You mentioned, you know, Living Waters, right?

So I have a friend who works there, Mark Spence, he does this great thing that he'll do with people.

We're talking about the justice issue, right?

That somehow God should let everyone free, but.

But he should punish the really wicked people.

Mark will say, all right, I got a question for you.

If God was going to judge all evil at 12 o' clock midnight, where are you going to be at 1201?

Right, right.

Yeah, it's like, yeah, you do evil.

We already went through the commandments.

You've already broken God's law.

And so that's again, what is he doing?

He's making it personal.

He's making them have to give an account for it.

So it's a, that's a really helpful thing to do.

But at the same time, you got to be careful not to make it too personal.

I mean, you want to make it personal about what God says about that, them, right?

So you want to.

And that's what, I like to say that a lot too.

Where you.

Where I'm offend, Where the God's word offends.

I'm not trying to offend you with what I say though, and how I say what I say, right?

So I'm not trying to target you and make you feel like I'm attacking you personally.

But if God's word offends you, if that is what causes the offense, causes you to go, oh, well, you know, that hit me a little deep.

Then that's fine.

Because God's word is going to do that.

And that's exactly what we want, if anything, Anything.

Right.

I want God's word to convict you.

Not for me to offend you because of how I said something or because of what I said that was outside of God's word.

But let God's word cause offense, you know, ultimately Is usually what I like to kind of say.

That's a good word.

Definitely.

And I think, I think with that, what I'll ask, I guess the last couple things before we wrap up is, is what are, what are some of the, the hardest, some of the hardest questions that you've gotten in this, in this, you know, what, 40 plus years of evangelizing.

What are some of the, those, let's say, I don't know, two or three of the hardest questions that you've probably gotten.

What were some of your responses to those things?

Generally the hardest question that I get is one that I never heard before.

Right.

Because I don't know how to answer something where I have to do somewhere.

I got to look into it and research it and start to, you know.

Now some of them, you get hard questions that are from the Bible where people will say, you know, well, the Bible says this.

Okay, here's a simple trick on that.

I don't have time to study it when I'm up in the open air and being challenged.

So what do I do?

You mentioned something about verse, verse seven.

Let's back up to verse one.

Just, just read the context.

Because even if I haven't studied it, the context usually shows that this, this wasn't what, what you're claiming.

Right.

And so I remember being, being in New York City and a guy said that, you know, the, the Bible says that, you know, anyone that, that got to keep it family friendly the way he has said.

But basically if, if a, if a man loses his ability to, to reproduce that he should be.

Be stoned to death.

What is that?

Yeah, right.

And then you go, and so you back up to verse one, you read through it and now you realize, oh, it's talking about people who are getting themselves cut off to be part of a false God.

Right, right.

Really isn't a general thing.

It's people that are giving themselves over to a fault, you know, to be.

To being a priest in a false d. To a false deity.

That's a little bit different.

Right?

That's a, that's a great point.

Context is, is key because I, I've gotten similar questions.

For example, I think yesterday or day before yesterday, someone on the live asked something similar.

They were like, the Bible says this about this in this, you know, just so you know, it says.

And I go, well, I've listened to the Bible about three to four times.

I'm reading through the Bible currently with everyone live.

So I know for the most part what the Bible says and that specific thing that you mentioned.

I don't remember being in there, but I will go and take a look at that.

If anything, we can go and find that out.

But also, ultimately, what does the rest of the context say?

Right.

Because I think that, once again, is key to really understand what is going on here.

If you just take this one verse that says this specific thing when you don't know what's going on throughout the whole of that chapter, I mean, that's where you kind of.

You may be lost in interpreting what you're reading.

Right.

And ultimately that interpretation could be completely wrong, especially if you don't know what the rest of it says around those verses.

Yeah, just watching politics, I mean, we have, we have videos of people, politicians today, and yet still media will tend to take a clip and they'll cut off.

If you remember, you know, they were saying that.

I know this is going to shock some people.

Remember the term cheap fakes.

Remember those?

Oh, the.

No, no, no.

Deep fake was when they, they take, they take video and it's a, it's a computerized video that makes it seem like someone is saying something that they didn't actually say.

And it's not actually live.

Right.

Deep fake was what they called it when Joe Biden, before the debate that he had with Trump where people would play a clip.

Clip of Biden walking around clueless.

And they were, they were saying that these are cheap fakes.

In other words, they were, they were clipping it, if you see the full context.

And so the media would play longer clips and it only made it worse.

But right.

So they were saying, oh, these are cheap fakes.

And then he had the debate and that word, that word went away right after that because everyone realized he was on stage.

And everyone.

You get that, right?

You get that with, with Trump where they'll take, they'll take a clip, he says, and they'll say, oh, see, he's saying that, you know, white supremacists are good.

Right after he says, they're really like.

They say, oh, well, some are good.

When he says that the white supremacists were bad, but there were other people that were, that were.

Okay.

It's like, oh, just clip that part.

Right, right.

So you're taking it out of context.

Definitely.

You can very easily be taken out of context.

And Akeem, do you like being taken out of context?

I do not.

I actually make a very good point to make sure you know exactly what I'm trying to say.

Well, God doesn't like to be taken out of context.

Either.

Exactly.

That's one of the things.

The harder questions I have is when someone asks me something, and it's, you know, be somewhere.

I haven't studied it.

I haven't, you know, some Old Testament verse, and.

And I'm in a position where they're looking for an answer live, right?

And so the trick I have for that is read context or do like you did.

Say I'll.

I'll research it.

I'll have to study it up.

You know, let me give you the.

The audience.

I want to give you guys a.

A tactic that will help you in any situation.

I do a program every Thursday night called Apologetics Live.

Anybody can join any Thursday night.

They just go to apologexlive.com, you scroll down on the website, there's a little duck icon.

You click it, you join, and people come in, they debate me.

I don't know.

I'm gonna have a debate that night.

But they are.

They planned for it, right?

Yeah.

So you can come in, ask me anything.

I start the show by saying, I can answer any question that you have about God in the Bible.

I know that's true.

I've been doing this for years in New York City.

I stand up, I go, I can answer.

Answer any question you have about God in the Bible.

Someone asks me a really tough question, I go, I don't know.

I said, I don't know is actually an answer.

I answered it.

Right.

Satisfactory.

I'm saying, I can answer it.

And.

But remember, you can always say, I don't know.

Yeah.

And I got that from Cliff.

I've seen Cliff time and time again, say, you know what?

I don't know.

But I can't tell you this.

Right?

And so I've started applying that as well, right?

Where it's like, because you don't want.

You're not just gonna make up something, right?

So ultimately, if you truly don't know, be okay.

And that.

See, and that's.

I think it stems from just, you know, being humble and being able to be like, wait a second, I. I don't know.

And sometimes that's your.

That's the best response that you could have, right?

Sometimes.

Right.

Because that's better than you giving them false information.

Right?

And ultimately, being able to say, I don't know also allows you to be humble, right?

Allows you to humble yourself in that moment and.

And go, okay, yeah, I don't know.

And that's okay.

Right.

But I do know this.

The other nice thing that it does do is it also Ends that discussion on topic.

You don't know.

Because when they keep going, you just go, I already told you, I don't know.

Yeah.

Yes.

It goes nowhere.

Yeah.

You want me to say I don't know again, I don't know.

Well, you know.

Right, right, right.

Let's get into a topic we can both talk about.

Right, exactly.

Because.

Because especially if you're evangelizing in a situation where there's a crowd, some people.

The heckler will do it for the effect of the crowd.

Crowd, yeah.

Right.

Right.

So they.

When they continue going on, they actually look bad when they're sitting there and going like, hey, you know, like, whatever the topic, like, they keep hounding it, and you're like, I already said I don't know.

What do you.

What do you want me to say here?

Right.

Turning on them and then they stop.

Right.

So, yeah, so, yeah, you know, I mean, those would be kind of, in general, the.

The harder questions I get, and.

And some ways of dealing with it, if you get them.

Definitely.

That was.

That was pretty good.

That was definitely.

Because once again, that's.

That's something I. I've definitely started using as well, that being able to just say, I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's.

It's.

It's definitely a great tactic and relatively simple, relatively easy to use and apply.

And it does.

It does more than, you know, than you would think, based.

Especially based on what you were just saying about it.

You know, it definitely shuts it down and goes, all right, move on, moving on.

What's next?

You know, what else you got that we could actually talk about now that I think we.

We definitely came to know you a lot better, and definitely.

I think we got a lot of good information in on this podcast episode.

Now, before we close out, Andrew, I just wanted to ask if there was anything that you'd like to say to those who are watching before we get into closing remarks?

No, I.

There's a lot we could have discussed.

I mean, yeah, we could get into textual criticism.

We could get into, you know, apologetics philosophy.

But no, I think.

I think.

I hope that this was helpful for folks to.

To really just see how.

Go out there and.

And share the gospel and defend the faith.

Some.

Just some tactics to use in doing that, 100%.

And I think that.

That it was.

It was great.

You definitely.

I mean, you already.

You already gave him a lot, really, honestly, throughout this whole process.

And honestly, I. I think we could definitely always do, you know, another part as well, a part Two and even I definitely want to at some point get.

Get a couple people together.

Part two is going to be when you're going to grill me.

Huh?

Like.

Like.

Right, right.

Yeah.

I'm going to have to log in, Matt, find all the hardest questions I can find just for the sake of the people, but definitely being able to get into some things that maybe we didn't get into today.

And.

And some of that might be some.

The textual things that, you know, people may have questions on in regards to some of those things.

But also I do want to do some episodes where we.

We have topics.

Topics, right.

We have specific topics and we kind of get into the conversations about those topics or even episodes along the same lines of having a topic conversation, but more so having a panel of people that's able to really kind of express their thoughts on it and kind of have everybody kind of, you know, talk or almost.

Almost debatey, but not really.

Right.

More conversational, where everybody of a different mindset is able to kind of talk about these conversations and come.

Come at it from a different standpoint, you know what I mean?

And potentially, you know, come to this resolution when it comes to that topic, Topic, whatever it may be.

But I do thank you, Andrew, for coming on today and sharing all this information with us and more information about who you are and I mean, thank you once again for coming on now.

Thank you guys as well for joining us as we were able to have this conversation as we were able to dive in to things that Andrew has been getting into, as well as more about his life and who he is and how he became a Christian today, as well as a lot of the apologetics that we were able to receive today on today's video.

So thank you guys once again for joining us.

Us as we had this conversation.

Oh, that's about it, guys.

Andrew, dude, would it be okay if I prayed for you before we headed out?

No, you can't do that.

All right, you know, it's okay.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, thanks for having me.

You'd be surprised.

There was.

There was.

There was at least some.

Maybe an atheist might say that, but.

But yeah, let's just say that may be very factual and maybe the case, you know what I mean, in certain situations, but definitely, definitely.

All right, let's get into it.

Heavenly Father, we come before you this day, Father God, to thank you for allowing us to come together to.

To just have a conversation in your name, oh Lord, to be talk.

And.

And I pray that, oh Lord, that we glorified you.

Through this conversation today, I pray the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth were pleasing before you as well as that we were able to glorify you in the face of those who may be watching.

And oh Lord, I just ask if there was anything that I said today that was not according to your will, cast it out as far from our minds, as far as the east is from west, oh Lord.

But if there's anything today that had substance, anything that we said today that has substance, may those things stick.

May those things that are according to your will be applied to our lives in the ways that we should apply those things, oh Lord, and Father God, just ask, oh Lord, that you continue to use Andrew.

O Lord, I thank you for him and thank you for allowing him to come on today.

Oh Lord, I ask that you continue to bless him in his family, oh Lord, continue to grow them, continue to push him forward in all the ways in which you will for him to serve you, O Lord, and may you continue to bless his life and ultimately bless many others through his life.

Father God, I just like to say thank you Lord Jesus, I love you Lord Jesus, I just ask that all come to repentance and trust in you.

Said none shall perish for all come to repentance.

Father God, I just ask that you feed those who hunger your bread of life, get those who thirst your living water, enrich those who are poor with your heavenly riches and heal those who are sick physically and spiritually.

Father God, I just like to thank you for those who came along to talk to have this conversation with us and listen into this conversation.

Oh Lord, just ask you bless them and their families in a mighty way.

Lead them in God in all the ways in which you see fit.

And if they know you not, bring them to loving relationship which you say may know you full to sin and truth.

I praise in Jesus name as I say thank you Lord Jesus.

I love you Lord Jesus.

Let your will be done, Lord God, in Jesus name I pray.

Pray.

Amen.

Thank you there, Andrew, once more for joining us on this conversation today.

Well, thanks for having me.

Of course, of course.

All right guys, God bless and have a great and blessed night in Jesus name.

See you guys next video.

God willing.

All right guys, I'm out.

Jesus is Lord.

Reflect on his teachings and let his words guide your path.

Embrace his love and share it with others.

May his light shine upon you always at the end of every podcast.

I want to leave you with this thought.

Take what we said today with a grace, grain of salt compare it back to God's word and may he lead you to the best understanding of it.

Remember, the Gospel of Jesus Christ tells us of his birth, his life, his sacrifice and his resurrection.

It's a message of love, hope and redemption.

Reflect on these words and let them guide your heart and mind.

May the truth of the Gospel inspire you, comfort you, and lead you to a deeper understanding of faith.

Until next time, God bless you and your families and keep seeking the truth.