Jesus Skeptic - Jesus, You, and the Fight for Human Rights, Part 1

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, Darkness cannot drive out darkness.

Only light can do that. Stay with me as we look at the ways that authentic followers of Jesus have opposed evil for centuries and the inspiration and courage it gives us to keep up that fight today. Don't go away. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Living on the Edge is an international discipleship ministry focused on helping Christians really live like Christians. I'm Dave Druey, and as many of you know, Chip's our regular Bible teacher for this daily program. But for this series, he's passed the mic to his friend, John Dickerson. John's the lead pastor at Connection Point Christian Church and is also an award-winning investigative journalist. We're in the middle of John's series, Jesus Skeptic. So if you've missed any of his messages so far, let me encourage you to catch up at livingontheedge.org or through the Chip Ingram app.

Okay, here's John with his talk, Jesus, You, and the Fight for Human Rights. There are many lights in the world, but when it comes to the sun, there's only one light of the world. There's only one light that when you see it breaking over the horizon, people in Chicago are seeing it and people in Miami are seeing it. There's only one light that brings the life and the warmth that the entire planet depends on. It's like, man, without that light, not only would we be depressed, but we would not have life. There's light and there's darkness in our existence physically, and there's light and darkness in our existence morally.

For example, in the small group that I get to be part of, there's a guy in our group named Chris. He's an X-ray radiologist at an emergency room, and it's really fun showing up at small group every week, because we always get to hear another story from Chris of some person who came in, like how in the world did that happen to that person? But tragically, one of the things that Chris has shared with us is that lately there's at least one shooting at the hospital where he works, where he's X-raying someone who has a bullet in their body, one every single night. And the reality is that is an expression of moral darkness, darkness rather than light. There's physical darkness and light, there's moral darkness and light, there's spiritual darkness and light. I wonder for you right now, what evil in the world grieves you? What evil is it that is a moral darkness perhaps or a spiritual darkness that just, it grieves you? It could be something like violent crime for an entire city or maybe it's bullying for your child or grandchild.

You know, kids can be so cruel. And I wonder today, what if there were a light, just like the sun can brighten the earth, it can brighten moral and spiritual darkness. What if there were a light that could brighten any evil, in fact could extinguish evil? Would you want to experience that?

I mean, in the same way that when you wake up and it's 20 degrees out and it's dark and you see the sun rising and something inside you says, I'm so glad the sun is finally awake. What if there was something equivalent to that for the moral darkness in our lives, for the spiritual darkness in our world? Would you want that for yourself?

Would you want that for the people around you? Well, Jesus claimed to be exactly that light. He claimed to be not a light in the world, but the light of the world. And so far in this series, we've seen that Jesus of Nazareth is a historically documented person. He's not a myth.

He's not a fable. He's more documented than Socrates or Plato or Aristotle or even Shakespeare, who's far more recent. Not only do we know for sure this guy existed, but we know that we have reliable documentation of what he said. We also know that 2000 years later, the people who follow him have become the largest movement in all of human history.

And that's according to non-Christian researchers at the Pew Research Center, that one out of three people alive today says, I'm a Christian that is a follower of this peasant prophet who lived 2000 years ago. And so that has led us to the conclusion, we should look at what this guy said. I mean, he's more influential than Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Thomas Edison.

He's more influential than Alexander the Great or Mohammed the prophet of Islam. We should look at what he said. And what we've found within his words is that he doesn't just claim to be a helpful teacher or an inspirational life coach. He claims to be almighty God. And we have to do something with that because that's either true. And if it is, then everything he said we should take to heart or it's not true.

And so we've been looking at the record of his impact on humanity. Today, we look at this quote where Jesus said in John chapter eight, I am the light of the world, not a light in the world, but the light of the world. And then he says this, whoever follows me will essentially be freed from spiritual and moral darkness or from evil. They'll be freed from addiction, freed from lying, freed from cheating and stealing, freed from abusing others. Instead, they will have the light of life. Jesus claims to be the only light that can fully extinguish evil.

I hope that gives you some hope today, wherever there's evil, maybe within yourself of some habit you can't break or evil in your family system of brokenness or evil in the world, Jesus claims to be the only light that can fully extinguish that. Now, in our series, we've been looking at the greatest breakthroughs in human existence. What I mean is what are the things that took us from the dark ages when life expectancy was 45 years, when there was no hospital to go to if you were sick, people didn't know how to read and write, slavery was a global norm, there's no antibiotic if your child got sick and so as a result, many children died before age 10. What took us as a society, as a planet from that existence to an existence where every one of us has a hospital that we can drive to, every one of us has been taught by someone else how to read, right? We didn't go to school because we wanted to.

We live in a society that made us do it for our own good. How did the world change so dramatically when it was in those dark ages, if you will, for thousands of years, what changed it? And we saw that the top 10 hospitals in the United States, which are also the top hospitals in the world, we looked through the history of them and we saw that not coincidentally, but one after another, they were founded by followers of Jesus who said we're doing this to care for the poor. And if that seems like an unbelievable claim to you, I'd encourage you to watch part two of this series because it's documented. We're making these claims from things that people wrote down, not from opinions. Now, in the book Jesus Skeptic, there's documentation of these other breakthroughs as well, medicine, universities, the scientific revolution, and education for all.

If any of this is interesting to you, I'd encourage you to get a copy of the Jesus Skeptic book. Now today, we're gonna dig into the end of open and legalized slavery. And behind me now, you see some of the well-known champions of that.

And we're gonna look through each one of these in our time today. But first, before we do that, it's important that we set the context because when we talk about history, the last 200 years is a very small time. And the reality that if we go back thousands of years, a sad reality about humans is that slavery has been a norm in every major civilization up until the last 200 years. In fact, when Jesus lived, the world that he was born into was under the Roman Empire. We know the Romans had slaves.

It's so well documented. In fact, just this week, researchers over in Pompeii where a volcano kind of froze a whole civilization, they found these tiny little slave quarters for the slaves in Pompeii. About 40% of the population in the world that Jesus was born into were slaves.

This was not an anomaly. This would have also been the case in ancient China, India, Egypt, Greece. In fact, in a historical guide to world slavery, researchers who spent their entire lives studying slavery throughout human history said this, in the ancient Near East, as in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the pre-conquest Americas, so before the Europeans showed up, various forms of slavery and servitude almost certainly emerged long before they were systematized by laws or legal codes. So when we look at cave drawings and ancient pottery and ancient records for civilizations that have them, slavery shows up all over the world.

Here's how normal it was. Some of these quotes are gonna make you cringe, and that's good. Aristotle, who most of you would be familiar with, you'll learn about him in your philosophy class. Aristotle lived about 300 years before Jesus.

Here's how normal slavery was. And by the way, a lot of people say like, oh, Aristotle, very sophisticated, wise person, right? He once said or wrote, he who is by nature not his own but another man's is by nature a slave. Aristotle wasn't the only one. Socrates and Plato also argued that slavery is the natural order of human citizens. And if you read their writings, you'll see that they base this argument off of their observation. They say we've traveled around, and every great society has slaves, therefore, slavery must just be part of the natural order.

This is the world that Jesus came into. And it's not just slavery. Human rights as we know them today, we're born into a society where we think this is normal, but so many of our human rights, the rights for kids to not have to work, the rights for women were not the norm throughout history. Here's another thing Aristotle said, and I hesitate to even read it out loud because I'm like, someone's gonna pull a video of that off the internet and just clip me quoting Aristotle on this. He said, a proper wife should be as obedient as a slave. The female is a female by virtue of certain lack of qualities and natural defectiveness.

I mean, that's outright evil. It's outright evil, but this was the philosophy for slavery, for gender equality. Back to the evil of slavery, here's how one researcher, Catherine Cameron, who spent her life studying this, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia summarizes her work and says this, in her cross-cultural, so she looked at all the cultures around the world, historical research, all the data she could find on comparative captivity. How did different cultures do slavery?

There's lots of variation. She found that Bon's people, that is slaves, those who were physically enchained to be property of another person composed 10 to 70% of the population of most societies. So one to seven out of every 10 people in the global average was born a slave and never had any hope or opportunity of that changing. This lends credence to another researcher, Seymour Drescher, who has asserted that freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.

What does that mean? It's more rare to live in a society that doesn't have slaves than a society that does throughout human history. And we know this because even in the last 100 years, did you know that India, the country, did not outlaw slavery until 1976? Saudi Arabia did not outlaw slavery until the 1960s. Slavery was outlawed in Peru in the 1930s. China, if you went to China in the 1930s and 40s, you would still see slaves. It was still a normal part of that society.

Up until the end of World War II, when the Western nations went in, is when that changed for China. Worldwide, this has been a plague on human existence, a spiritual and moral darkness all through human history. I want to skip forward to Luke 4, verse 16, because it was in such a world, a world where the majority of people couldn't read, where women were often sold as property into marriage, where slavery was the norm, where there were not hospitals or antibiotics or immunology. It was into that brutal world that Jesus said, I'm the light of the world. And those who follow me are just going to be a beacon of light in the darkness. He said this multiple times.

Here's another example. Luke 4, 16, Jesus went to Nazareth, which is where he'd been brought up. And on the Sabbath day, he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.

And unrolling it, he found the place. So he searches through Isaiah for this passage that describes the Messiah, God on earth to extinguish evil from humanity. And Jesus reads it and he says, the Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom to those unjustly imprisoned and recovery of sight for the blind to set the oppressed, that is the captives. That is Jesus whole audience knew the slave class to set them free. Messiah will free those wrongly imprisoned. Messiah will give physical sight to those who've been blind. Messiah will set the slaves free.

What a expansive, impossible, outrageous prediction. And then Jesus looks out at his friends, people he grew up with, and he makes this impossible claim. Verse 21, he says today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. In other words, I am the Messiah. I am the one who will set the captives free.

I'm the one who will break the bonds of the oppressed. Now, if you're a follower of Jesus and you've been in church for a while, perhaps you've heard this passage taught in a spiritual metaphoric sense that we're slaves to addictions and to dishonesty and to all sorts of dangerous lusts and passions. And then when we believe in Jesus, he breaks those spiritual bonds and we can now say no to those things and yes to good things.

And that's true. But what I want to talk about today is the literal fulfillment of Jesus' prediction about what his movement would do across the entire planet. You see, if you were to fast forward 1,830 years from the time Jesus said that, and if you were to be here in the United States, you'd be in a nation where half the country thinks slavery is evil and half still thinks it's okay and there's great unrest and a war is about to begin, a civil war.

And within that time, it was a great battle of ideas or ideologies. And we know the specific people who led the charge through their writings and their posters and their books to convince the entire nation that slavery is an evil because we live under a God who is just, who has made all people equal. And that was the basis of their argument.

And we know this because of their documentation. For example, this publication called The Liberator. Any secular historian, you don't have to be a Christian to look at the facts, would say that The Liberator was, if not the most, one of the most influential publications in turning people's opinions. See, there were people in the North who hadn't personally seen slavery and they're like, well, I don't have a slave.

I'm against it, but what does it have to do with me? And they needed to be educated about what life was actually like in the South and for slaves. And publications like The Liberator are what did that and in time turned the conscience of an entire nation. Now within The Liberator, you can see in the middle that Jesus is standing there, that there's a cross behind him and that there's a slave kneeling and praying for freedom and there's a Caucasian man sort of repenting on the other side and that they're on equal footing before God. Now, if you were to study the banners and the words here, I've highlighted a couple of them. You'd see that the words are on the top there above Jesus say, I come to break the bonds of the oppressed. It's the verse we read in Luke four. It's Jesus saying, me and my followers, we will set the captives free. In the ribbon beneath, you see some other words of Jesus.

It's in the King James, an older translation, but they're quoting Jesus who said in Matthew 22, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Now the reality is that this time in history, people in the United States and Europe and Western Europe were the first societies in all of history where most people could now read. And this had come about because the Protestant Christians wanted people to read the Bible.

And all of that is documented. And as a result, this King James Bible was an almost universal textbook. So when the abolitionists, those are the people who fought to abolish slavery, when they tied their argument to the word of God, you have for the first time in history, an entire nation where most people have read the Bible for themselves was a unique window of time. And they say, it's according to the Bible that we have to overthrow this, even if we're not part of it, even if it's out of sight, we have to give our lives to follow Jesus. And if you imagine a barn full of kindling and a match, the kindling was a nation that knew how to read the Bible for themselves.

The match where the abolitionists who like a spark in the darkness said, we will give our lives to end this evil and injustice of slavery. It took them hundreds of years. In fact, it started in 1688.

Here's a document well known by historians from the Quaker Christians in Germantown. So 1688, the United States does not exist yet. This is a colony. This is a new land. It's pioneers. They're cutting down trees with axes.

They're dying of cholera and stuff. And these Quaker Christians who are reading the Bible for themselves wrote the document behind me, which most historians say is the first ever universal declaration of equal human rights. That all people should be treated equally regardless of their gender or their race or what class they were born into or even their religion, that all people should be treated equally because of Jesus and him saying over and over again, you can read this document for yourself. And it quotes about eight times Luke 6 31. Jesus saying, as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. That was the Quaker's mantra. We call it the golden rule today. And in modern English, it sounds more like this. Do unto others as you would have them do to you.

Or at an elementary level, treat others the way you want to be treated. That was their whole thesis. You've been listening to the first part of our guest teacher, John Dickerson's message, Jesus, you and the fight for human rights from his series, Jesus Skeptic.

Chip and John will join us here in studio with some additional thoughts and application in just a minute. If someone were to ask you, how do you know Jesus actually lived? Or can we really trust the Bible?

What would you say? In this new series, pastor and journalist John Dickerson answers those questions using evidence from multiple reliable sources and the well-documented impact of Jesus' followers throughout history. John builds a credible case for the Christian faith. Our hope is that this series will help you confidently say, Jesus is real, the Bible is true, and I can prove it.

For more information about Jesus Skeptic, go to livingontheedge.org or the Chip Ingram app, or call 888-333-6003. Chip's with me in studio now. And Chip, before we go on, you wanted to take just a minute and share something with our listeners.

So why don't you do that right now? Thanks so much, Dave. Well, we finished our mid-year match as of July 7th. Thank you to all of you who prayed and gave. A lot of folks like me tend to wait to the very last couple days to send in their gifts, and the team is working to get everything processed into the system as quickly as possible. But I didn't want to wait to tell you how deeply I appreciate your partnership and what a difference every dollar given during this match will make in the ministry.

Pastors trained, young people reached, the Word of God taught, helping Christians live like Christians here and all around the world. Thank you so very much. Well, as Chip said, we'll have all the information about our mid-year match on our website soon.

So keep an eye on livingontheedge.org for the details. But we want you to know that we are celebrating every gift we received and are really excited to see how it will impact the work God has called us to. So from all of us, thanks again for your support. Well, with that, let's hear some final thoughts on this message from Chip and John.

Thanks, Dave. John, it's good having you here again, and I just can't tell you how much I appreciate you sharing with the Living on the Edge family. You know, the first half of your message focused on one of the biggest blights in world history—slavery.

And honestly, we're still dealing with the fallout of that evil today. Yet in the face of this darkness, you've repeated Jesus' challenge for us to be the light. Could you take a few minutes and share some real practical ways that we can be the light for Jesus in these dark days?

Yeah, thanks, Chip. That is a hard question and such an important question. I mean, how do we today be the light of Christ? And one of the things that saddened me, one of the realities of this research about the history of slavery in the world is that there were some so-called Christians who were on the wrong side of slavery. And some of them went to church on Sundays and carried Bibles, but they didn't actually read those Bibles and do what the Bible said.

It was the Christians, those Quakers that we learned about, and many others who took the Word of God literally and said, if Jesus came to set the captives free, that's what we're going to do. And so we have no hope of shining the light of Christ unless we're actually obeying what He said to do. And it's so important for every one of us who would call ourselves a follower of Jesus to make sure, am I truly reading the words of Jesus in the Gospels?

And am I allowing the Spirit of God to convict me, to prompt me to really be doing what Jesus said? And then the second thing I would say, how do we be the light is that we, as Jesus once said, not hide it under a bushel, not hide it under a basket. Let our light so shine. And what did Jesus say?

That men would see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. So we need to be living among people who aren't yet believers in a way that they see, notice, our actions in a way that points them to God. And the way we do that is by never forgetting that the solution to the world's problems is Jesus. We live in an age where things get labeled and get stereotyped and get pre-judged. And sometimes as followers of Jesus, we're labeled and pre-judged.

And we can easily fall into trying to defend ourselves with words and getting into debates and arguments about this label or that term, or I'm for this group or against that group. Instead, we shine the light through our actions and by letting both our actions and words profess that Jesus is the light of the world, that He's the solution to the world's problems. Encouraging words, John.

Thanks. Well, just before we close, our mission at Living on the Edge is to help Christians live like Christians. And one of the best ways we can continue to do that is through programs like this one. So when you hear a message that's especially helpful, we hope you'll pass it on to others.

You can easily do that through the Chip Ingram app or by forwarding them the free MP3s that you'll find at livingontheedge.org. And don't forget to include a note about how it made a difference in your life. Well, join us next time as our guest teacher, John Dickerson, continues his new series, Jesus Skeptic. Until then, this is Dave Drouie saying thanks for joining us for this Edition of Living on the Edge.