Greg Laurie and Harvest Ministries recommend the best-selling book, Cold Case Christianity, from former detective J. Warner Wallace. That's a book we're offering this month to our listeners, Cold Case Christianity, written by Detective J. Warner Wallace. A homicide detective investigates the claims of the gospel.
So get your own copy of Cold Case Christianity. It's our offer for this month for your gift of any size. Request yours for a limited time at harvest.org.
So I'm speaking with my friend. J. Warner Wallace. Yeah, Jay. That's very impressive.
Yeah. You need to say your name. I know, right? See, if I went with that, it would be like Gene Mitchell Laurie. Oh, that's an author.
That was a great book. Maybe I'll start going. Hello, I'm Gene Mitchell Laurie, and I'm an author. But you're Jim, right?
So, Jim, you were a cold case detective for how many years?
Well, I did cold cases for about 10. What is a cold case?
So, those are just unsolved murders.
So, if you're in Los Angeles County back in those days, and it's probably still true today, and you're working on homicides, you have the option, if you want, to pick up as a collateral duty. Any unsolved murder, because those don't close. They're not assigned to anybody. But they're sitting in like a vault, or they're sitting on a shelf, or they're sitting in my car. They're all like the TV shows that we see.
Were any of those very realistic? There's many of them, aren't there? There are. And probably they are relatively close, but the only difference is they're usually compressed in time.
So I might open a case and take 15 years from start to finish. What's as long as you work on a cold case that you solve? Let's see. I opened a case. I started looking at a case in the early 1990s that I was just tinkering with.
My dad's old case.
So I picked it up. Your father was on law enforcement. Yes, same agency, same agency, worked homicide. Wow. And he had an unsolved murder from 1972 of a 10-year-old.
And I was about 11 when that happened, so it hit our community hard, and my dad took it very hard and changed the way he parented. Like, what you're going to allow your kids to do because this poor girl was just snatched off the street. Oh, my goodness.
So, so it changed the way that he parented. And I remember, like, thinking about it for years. And so, I became a detective and was assigned a homicide. Even before then, I was assigned to a surveillance team. I said, This case is sitting on a shelf and it's not assigned to anybody.
Let me pick it up. And so, I picked and started reading through all the reports, started reading through all the interviews.
Well, ultimately, I didn't get to submit the DNA on that case until about probably 2001 or two. I was right in that range.
So, that's a few years later. And it didn't hit. It didn't show up in CODIS, which is our database for sex offenders in California.
So it just didn't hit.
So I thought, well, this is an unknown. Maybe he died. Maybe he moved out of the state. Maybe he's just no longer around.
Well, not until the invention or the use of genetic DNA, ancestry DNA. Yeah, isn't this with all these people signing up for like 33andMe? That's right. They just went into the database. I always say thank you very much.
Because now I can take all your relatives to jail because you just happened to put your database in.
So it's good for us. But that was about 2017. Wow. So by 2019, we identified her killer.
So I started that tinkering with that in the 90s. I really thought I was going to solve it in the early 2000s. Didn't get solved until 2019.
So how long does that take?
So a lot of these cases.
So you arrested this person?
Well, it turned out he had passed away about, I think, three or four years earlier. And what about your father going back to that little girl? Did they ever find the person who killed her? Yeah, so we've identified him. We identified him through his daughter genetically.
And then when we wanted to confirm it, so he had passed away, we exhumed his body and compared DNA to make sure that it is him.
So it is him. He is the killer. But we didn't get justice in that.
Well, it brings us some kind of closure from the family. I always say it's resolution. There's no closure, right? Because so much of closure is like, well, how am I processing this today? Am I comfortable?
And of course, no one ever is. I always say, we can't get closure. We'll be lucky if we can get justice. But that's what we're shooting for. But we're probably never going to get closure because I can't bring your daughter back.
So you're a cold case detective, you know, and I know a lot of police officers. And, you know, unfortunately, you guys and girls, you see the worst elements of society. You see people lie all the time to you. You're dealing with this constantly. To survive such a thing.
One has to develop a shell because you have to go home, you have a life, you have a family. You can't carry everything around with you emotionally all the time.
So it seems to me there could be almost A cynicism that one carries in life. Did you sort of have that cynicism when it came to? Believing in God, because you actually were an atheist. Yeah, no, I was very. I think, so one of the best skill sets you have, and it depends on how you're raised.
So I was kind of like you. You had a childhood. That was similar to mine. And so my mom was just my mom and I growing up. My parents divorced when I was three.
She never remarried, and we were in Los Angeles County.
So you kind of grow up quick. And she really didn't have the the bandwidth, I think, to raise a son. She needed someone she could talk to about everything.
So that means you're not going to get a childhood. You're just going to get another form of adult life at a young age.
So I always was fear. Anxious and felt like we had no protection. Felt like if she wanted, she always wanted to go to the movies and she wanted to go to Hollywood to see a movie.
Well, you know, I'm like, I remember being like six, seven years old with a woman in her early 20s. Who is my mom in Hollywood and feeling like this isn't a safe place? Like, who's our protector here? Like, who's gonna, if something happens right now and someone jumps out and attacks, who's gonna defend us? And I remember feeling that way my entire so that kind of pessimism or like, hey, there's something.
So, you became a protector in time, didn't you?
Well, right. And then you're always looking to say, hey, the next threat is around that corner. Right.
Well, if you grow up that way, you're always looking for the next threat.
So, why did you become an atheist?
Well, I think part of it was. Um No Christians in my family. Yes. No friends who were Christians. My mom grew up Catholic.
But in the early 60s, if you divorced, Your status within the Catholic Church, at least she felt that way at the parish that she was attending. She had a status change. And I thought this is such a ridiculous joke of None of this could be true. Uh especially if it's going to treat treat and I thought there was there was Sufficient explanation for the world the way it is without having to embrace some form of theism.
So I just stayed out of it. Also, I can tell you that. You don't know how many people you're going to take to jail. for the most ridiculous crimes. that will tell you on the way to jail that they are Christians.
Yeah. So so I'm like, okay, this is what it is. I had no interest. And so I just had no interest. And my wife, I think, was the one who really had the first interest in like, well, should we raise our kids this way?
Mm.
So we were I was married. Susie and I were together about 18 years before we walked into that church. And we were thinking, okay, we now we have a a six and a four or a seven and a five year old and we're thinking Susie's thinking, Well, do we want to at least expose them? I thought, no. I mean, you can if you want.
Like, my dad's a very committed atheist, and he has really as long as I've known him, he's been that way. Your dad's still living? Yes, he's he's 85. Yeah, it reminds me a bit of uh Lee Strobel. And so often, you know, Jim, the wives are the hero of the story.
So Lee Strobel, his wife, comes to faith first. And then I interviewed Daryl Strawberry. He was strung out on drugs, actually went and served time in prison. And his wife wouldn't let him go. And she just kept after him, and he came to faith.
Same for Alice Cooper, you know. His wife, Cheryl, made a strong principled stand for him to get off drugs. And it's just amazing how often the wives are sort of the unsung hero of the spiritual story. Susie, for sure. And it's not that she was a Christian.
We both became Christians at the same time. But it was open before you were. Yes. She was interested in, does the Christian worldview... Have something that's important that we need to investigate.
And my dad's the kind of person who, although he is not a Christian, he will go to church. Oh okay. He'll go to church, and he knows that he's been in church enough with maybe with his parents, who I think were always kind of like cultural, kind of like cultural Methodists. That was my grandfather and my grandmother.
So, as they got older, I would take them to church, and they would happily go, but I don't know that they really. They were definitely not Bible readers. But my dad thinks it's a useful delusion.
So he's more, and whatever you believe. And here you are, you are one of the leading apologists in America today. You're the expert we go to. to get answers, to reach our non-believing friends and family. And yet you have your father.
I don't say that critically. My mother didn't come to faith till the very end of her life. And so I understand this because I think the hardest people to reach are your family. Oh, I can tell you that one year I was going back to do a prayer breakfast in Fort Worth, and my dad's about two hours east of Dallas. And so I said, I'll call my dad and I said, I'm going to, after this prayer breakfast, I'm going to come out and see you.
He says, great.
Well, the next day before I leave, he calls me again and he says, Did you call me yesterday? And I thought, Oh, he's having memory issues. You know, he's at that time he's probably 80, 82, something right in that range. And I told my wife, I said, I'm telling you what. I am going to Texas.
And when I come back, my dad will be a Christian. I'm not leaving until he accepts the gospel, as if this could be done.
So I remember I drove out and I got to his house. And I said, Dad, I just try to leverage my relationship with him. I said, Dad, I mean, I just can't imagine being in eternity without you. And I said, you're my best friend. He says, no, I'm not your best friend.
I said, no, actually. If I'm honest with you, you are. And you may not think you are, but you are. I said, so I'm going to tell you what. And I choked him up.
So I'm gonna tell you what, tonight. You're going to go home. And I walked him through the gospel. And you're going to have this conversation with God. And he just We're in the car on the way to get barbecue in Jefferson, Texas, when I had this conversation with him.
and he looked over at me and he said, I can do that.
Well so I didn't say any more. Didn't press it any further because I have been talking to him about this. He's never, I wrote a book, God's Crime Scene, to him. He's never read it.
Okay, so I'm like, okay, what is it going to take to reach him? I don't know.
So I drive to Barbecue the next day. I pick him up, and we're going to Longview, Texas, to pick up a bike that he needs to have repaired. He was a bike rider in those days, even in his 80s.
So I thought, okay, I'm going to go get your bike.
So we go get this bike. On the way to Longview, I said, so, Dad, did you have that conversation? With God last night? He says, Yeah, I thought He's on 110 acres of piney woods. He said, I thought it was the kind of thing I should probably.
go out in the woods and have that conversation.
So I left it. I thought, oh, this is. Awesome. Maybe he's really made a decision.
Now in the years since, I realized that No, he's he's not any more interested in God than he ever was. Um Well, he hasn't told you. You know, I have a friend, Michael Franzes. He used to be a part of the Colombo crime family, was being groomed to be the next Don or godfather. And his father, Sonny Franzes, was the hitman for the Colombo crime family and was sent to prison.
In fact, when he finally died, he was over 100 years old. That's crazy. And he would get released and he would violate probation because he would hang around mobsters and be sent back to prison again. But so Michael, you know, we had so many conversations about his father. Uh, coming to faith, and he'd go and visit his father, and he loved his father so much.
And then finally, he found out after his father passed that some woman went in there who was a chaplain who shared the gospel with him and led Sonny Franzes to Christ.
So, you know, just my as I told you, my mom didn't come till much later, and tragically, she died only months after she made that recommitment.
So, we just keep praying, you know. And I think you identified an important thing. You said certain things, then you stopped. And I think sometimes, you know, we want to close the deal. Only the Holy Spirit can close the deal.
But, you know, Paul said, some sow, others water, God gives the increase. And just kind of knowing when to press, knowing when to just stop and pray and leave it in God's hands. Yeah, and I think that's so important with my dad because his personality is mine. I mean, I remember growing up, my mom was very open-minded, very focused on grace and mercy, not so much on truth and justice. My dad was always focused.
As a cop. He was always seemed to me to be like the job had poisoned him. I grew up in the arts, got a bachelor's degree in fine art, and then I got a master's degree in architecture, and then I joined my dad's profession. And within three or four years of being in this profession, I realized: okay, I get it now. I see how, why he was the way he was.
So I know his personality. Because a lot of it was built on the job and in the job. And so I've experienced that now.
So I just know how far I can go. Before I'll take any ground that I've captured and surrender it back to him.
So I try to, you know, you're right. I know that there is, I'll know if it's time for me to close something with him. I also know it's time, hey, this is a great advance. We've made so much progress in this conversation. I'm just grateful that we got this far.
I'm going to leave it there for now.
So let's go back. We got a little ahead into your life as a believer and the work you do. But so you're a cold case detective, you're an atheist. Your wife says, Do you want to raise our children without faith? And so you're open to it.
So you take your skill set. Your investigative techniques, and it reminds me a lot of Lee Strobel, who was an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, is that record?
So he took that same skill set and he was going to disprove, in his case, he wanted to disprove the faith of his wife, but you weren't going out to disprove it. No. You were saying, well, let's look at it as though this were what? Yeah, well, my son and I just had this conversation. He's also a detective, and he was raising and he was raising three generations, all named Jim Wallace at the same agency.
So there's been a Jim Wallace at that agency since 1961. Anyway, so he was, we're on this call yesterday. I realized it was two hours and 47 minutes that Jimmy and I were talking about the theological history of different ideas in Christendom, you know, different theological ideas. He's interested in authority. Like, how do we know this canon is the canon or ought to be the canon?
Or do we leave anything out? Should something else be included? That's always Jimmy's thing, right? He's been interested in that. That.
Okay, well, for me, it was kind of similar. I wasn't sure. I had no upbringing in the church, so I didn't know anything about. Like, how were these books selected? What's the Bible?
What's the history? Didn't care. Here's what I knew: this pastor said that Jesus was smart. And that was enough to provoke me. to buy a Bible.
To see what's so smart about Jesus.
So I bought a Pew Bible. They were like $6 or $7 at B. Dalton, you know, back when they had bookstores.
So I buy this Pew Bible and I get it home and I'm reading through the Gospels, looking for the red light. You knew to go to the Gospels somewhere.
Well, I knew that. Because he had quoted in this thing, something from the gospel, this message at church, something from the gospels.
So I started there. This is where he had talked about. And I looked at it and I said, oh, okay. Didn't know how the structure of the text was, didn't know what a gospel was compared to letters of Paul, or I didn't know any of that. But I did know as I read through these gospels that they varied.
Like the same event is being described in what some people might say are two different ways. And even they might even say they're contradictory.
Now, I didn't take that view because I've been working with eyewitnesses for a number of years by that time. And if you get five eyewitnesses to describe something that happened just 15 minutes ago, you will see the same level of variation between a 15-minute old event This is just the nature of eyewitnesses. We disagree typically because we come in with certain commitments to reality that drive our observations.
So if I'm somebody who loves. 1960s cinema, I'll probably remember everything on that poster on that wall that somebody else, oh, there was a poster on the wall? Right.
I think there was a mirror on the wall. I don't wasn't paying attention. Yeah. Well, no, there's actually a poster from a night. Really?
These seem like two contradictory.
Well, it's because I am committed to certain things that I've interested in. I've been interested. You saw that without even having a basic understanding of, because the gospels, as you know now, are written from four different perspectives. Exactly. You know, Matthew speaking more to the Jewish mindset, and John maybe to more what we would call secular view.
You know, these things we write that you may believe that Jesus is the Son of God.
So he's effectively wanting to bring non-believers to faith. Where Matthew, it's like lots of Old Testament references and showing how Jesus fulfilled all these things.
So, but both inspired by God. I see it as sort of looking at the same thing from different angles.
Well, I'll look at it this way: if I'm doing an interview, I am and I'm interviewing a boomer or maybe a Gen X about what he was wearing. I'm far more likely to get better information from a woman than I am from a guy. Yes. It's just if it's in that generation.
So it's because there's a lot of people who are. The commitments of each person, the interests of each group, and it changes generationally. There are different things that you're interested in. And if you're somebody, for example, who just By coincidence, Happened to own the same brand shirt.
So you can tell me, no, I know what he was wearing. I own that shirt. I got it at LL Bean. It's an LL Bean shirt.
Well, that's great information to have, right? Because I'm going to do a search warrant and I know what I'm looking for now. But I may not get that unless you happen to have a personal history that causes you to pin on the shirt he's wearing. But that also means you probably missed that thing standing over there because you were looking over here.
So your prior interests dictate the way you see an environment. It's not just that. That I might describe it differently is that I missed it altogether. You know, one of the things that's dangerous, I think, about videos for police officers, and I'm in favor of body cams because I think they're generally help us more than they hurt us. But one of the worst things about body cams is that they're not discriminatory.
The same way, you develop tunnel vision, especially if you're in a crisis trauma traumatic moment, I will start to not see the things in my periphery because I'm so focused on the danger. But the camera doesn't do that. When you play it the next day, it sees everything as if it has the same level of attention. And then you could ask the officer, Why didn't you see that?
Well, I don't know. I just know in real time all I could see is this. Even though is that available to you? Yes. But I couldn't see it because of other issues that caused me to focus in.
Well, the same is true for any set of eyewitnesses, even if it's something like your grandmother's birthday. If you're going to go and you're bored in tears, you're going to have a different report of that birthday than somebody who's animated about the gifts that she got. You probably couldn't even tell me half the gifts she got, but somebody else could. And it's not because we weren't there. It's because we were there and we're two different people.
So when I read through the Gospels for the first time, I thought, oh, There's like an embedded flavor here that feels like it I would expect it to feel. Because certainly they had centuries to work these issues out. If they wanted to eliminate the differences between the gospels, it could have been done before any of us would ever be the wiser. But they left them in because this is the nature of eyewitness accounts.
So I thought, okay. And I say eyewitness accounts, here's why.
Well, John has historically been attributed as the writer of the Gospel of John, and Matthew has historically been attributed, that gospel has been attributed to Matthew. But Mark, I think there's an entire line of good evidence that that is Peter's gospel written in Rome. I think it's the first gospel, and I can make that case later. But the point is, it's an eyewitness account recorded by Mark. It's Peter's eyewitness account.
And Luke tells us that he is writing the eyewitness accounts of others, eyewitnesses and servants of the word. He interviewed people. Right.
Well, let's put it this way. When I get a case, I get a bunch of supplemental reports that contain eyewitness accounts.
Well, you know that none of them were actually written by the eyewitness. They're written by detectives who interviewed an eyewitness.
So I that's that's what they're still eyewitness accounts, even though they're not written by the eyewitness, they're written by somebody who has access to the eyewitness.
So I look at Mark and Luke, and I jump them in.
So I can now test these. Given all the parameters we use in criminal trials to test eyewitnesses. And there was like. What was the turning point? Like, what did a light go on, or all of a sudden this is it, or was it a little more gradual?
It was more graduate. Even like any case I work, I don't have a lot of DNA cases. Just that one I told you about with that 10-year-old. That's the only DNA case I've ever had in cold cases. I make cases.
By a mass quantity, a cumulative circumstantial case. It's 50 things. It's death by a thousand paper cuts. It's 50 things that point to that guy.
Now, any one of those 50 things might not seem like much, but in total, it's like, oh yeah, this is overwhelming. Who else could it be that could meet all of these 50 conditions?
Well, so it's small little pieces of evidence that don't seem like much on their own that point back to the same suspect. That's all my cases.
So here it was the same thing. I I yeah, at some point the body of of evidences was was overwhelming to me. And each one of them might seem like a little bit of nothing.
So you can look at the archaeological support. You can look at the fact that the language is consistent with people who would write in the first century in that region. Even the use of pronouns, these are all consistent. There's lots of different lines of evidence you could look at.
Now here's what I would say is the deal killer for most people. And there's these four criteria that I've talked about in cold case Christianity. Were they really there to see what they said they saw? Have they changed their story over time? Can they be corroborated even in a small way?
And finally, do they have a bias that would cause them to lie to us? That's how we test all eyewitnesses in jury trials. You could apply that template to the Gospels, you'd be surprised where they land. There's a lot of skeptics out there, and they're typically skeptical because the Gospels contain miracles. Supernatural events.
Let's put it this way. If the Gospels were just a story about a first century rabbi. who had great sermons. Nice guy. never worked a miracle, but not born of a virgin, never rose from the grave.
Just a smart preaching rabbi. Nobody would doubt the historicity of the Gospels based on the fact we have so much overwhelming manuscript evidence. Nobody would doubt anything. There's no better ancient attested on manuscript evidence than Jesus of Nazareth. But if you insert one miracle, Just one, everyone says, oh, that's got to be out.
I'm out.
So that tells you right now that this is not about the manuscript evidence or the historical evidence. It's about a presuppositional bias against the supernatural. Because people don't think the supernatural exists in a modern world. They'll say, hey, if you're doing history and you're going to insert something supernatural, you're no longer in the right genre. You're not in history, now you're in mythology.
Yeah. Because there's no d we don't have room for the supernatural in history any more than we have room for the supernatural in science.
So we've naturalized, we've kind of stripped out anything beyond the physical realm in both history and science. And there's a question I have: do we, like, we talked to, there's people we know, intellectuals in culture today who have big podcast audiences who really kind of deny supernatural claims, yet they think they are considering this notion. with their immaterial mind, We're more than just brains. Yeah. We have immaterial minds.
We're more than just bodies. We're soulless creatures.
Well, how do we explain the soullish nature or the immaterial mind in an entirely physical universe? There has to be something beyond. pure physicalism. There has to be. There's something outside of the physical realm that governs the universe.
So, what made it happen for Jim Wallace? Was there a moment, did you pray a prayer? Did you?
Well, I remember getting to a point where I was like, wow, okay, you test it in these four areas. I think it's written early enough. Because if you want to lie about Jesus, just wait till everyone knows the truth is dead. Then you can say whatever you want. I think it's written early.
And I had to make a case of my own evidence. Is there a case for early dating? Yes. I needed to know: has it changed over time? No, it hasn't.
The claims of Jesus, as crazy as they may be, Have always been that crazy. And you're 35 years old. 35 years old. Most people make a decision for Christ around 18. Right.
And so you waited. I mean, this is, you know, you're really thinking this through. Most people, I don't think, go through a process like you went through.
Well, I remember there was a New Believers class, and I wasn't a believer. Wow. But I went to it. at this church. And I remember them uh making arguments on the whiteboard and thinking, yeah.
It's okay. I mean, yeah, I can see why you might already if you already believe, you might think that's per per persuasive. But I remember being skeptical and just taking time to do it.
So I remember at one point I was laying in bed, trying to fall asleep, and I said to Susie, you know, I think I think they're reliable. I mean, I think I'm just kind of like, I'm feeling like I'm stuck with Jesus right now. No, and she had already become a believer in the church. No, I think she was definitely, though, more open to it. Because all this during this time, like, we're hit and miss, but we're for the most part trying to go to church, trying to see what these guys are saying.
But we weren't there like every week, but we were pretty relatively consistent. And so I remember saying to her, I think this is. I think I'm not sure what to do with this. Here's what I don't understand, though. I don't understand why, if there is a God, if this is true, why would Jesus have to die on a cross?
Like, I was convinced the gospels were accurate and reliable, but I did not yet understand the gospel. And that's the whole point. Yeah, but here's what was different though for me. I no longer had these walls standing between me and the gospel.
So now I could actually. Do you think that's what apologetics do, in effect, is they take down the wall barriers, yeah. Yeah. I don't think that there's any, only the gospel has power. You know that.
Yeah. There's no power in an unapologetic argument. Right.
There's only power in the gospel. The problem is, though, there's many people who, like my dad, I think, still. Who, when you hear the gospel, when you present the gospel, you're trying to figure out a new way to say it because he's heard it so many times, and he's only hearing, I think, blah, blah, blah, like Charlie Brown and his teacher, you know, what, what, what, what, what.
So he's not hearing it. And so I, it's because he's put a ton of stuff between him and the gospel message. And I have to figure out, like, what is the stuff he's putting in there? Because if I can get rid of that, Yeah. And now you could argue that really you can't get rid of that, Jim.
That's something that God has to get rid of. Yes, but God uses us, right? That's true. I mean, clearly, God could have had it so that when we're born. We are born with an innate sense of the gospel, never need to hear it.
Or he would visit every one of us at our 10th birthday in our dreams and present the gospel fully. He can do it any way he wants. It turns out he uses us for some reason. And I think he also uses us. To, like you said, to sow that ground, to break up that ground so that somebody can plant a seed.
Because right now it's just bouncing off. And that was me. It was all those, there were people who. I'm trying to think if I ever heard the gospel. before I bought a Bible.
And I don't, if I did, I don't remember hearing it. And probably I did. But I just did not hear it because I didn't want to hear it. Called I'm Jim Wallace and You're Not, which I think is an arrogant title. No, no, no.
It's a Well, actually, it would be, I'm Jay Warner Wallace. You know why I took that name? Why? You know why, probably. Do you know who Jim Wallace is of Sojourners?
Oh, yes.
Okay. Just onto me.
So I was doing radio when I first started, and I was just Jim Wallace. And one of the radio hosts says, I can't have you on anymore with that name because if I say I'm going to have Jim Wallace on tomorrow, they all think you're that guy. Oh, my goodness.
So, and he's very different. He's a very politically active guy. Let me tell you a quick side story.
So, under Trump's first administration, I was part of this group of Christians who was going to go and look at law enforcement reform in Washington, D.C. And Trump's legal advisor, her Christian advisor, Pam, she called me and said, Would you come to this meeting of all politically active people?
So, I said, Sure, I'll come.
So, I go. Walk into the room in Washington, D.C., and I see at one of the tables there's a name tag for Jim Wallace. He spells his name W-A-L-L-I-S. Very different approach to how to think about law enforcement, very different approach to almost everything from me. We're almost in completely different ideological extremes.
But I got a chance to meet him.
So he comes in and I shook his hand. I said, I wanted you to know you're the reason why I use Jay Warner Wallace because my name is Jim Wallace. And he always told me, yeah, I told him this. And we laughed about it. And that was the last, I think, kind thing we said to each other the entire meeting because we are so different in terms of our approach to law enforcement.
But that's why I go by Jay Warner Wallace. Also, you know, like you were saying, if you don't have a good male role model. That maybe it's a stepfather, or maybe it's somebody who becomes the guy who you think, hey, that's my dad.
Well, I have a great dad, but he was not available to me a lot of the time. And the man who had the biggest impact on my life was a guy named Warner Wallace, my grandfather.
So even before I became a Christian, all my search warrants said J. Warner Wallace to tip. to hat tip my grandfather.
So I just took that name because it was. You know, G.D. Vance, our vice president, you know, his mother had huge addiction issues and he had his grandmother, who I called Mama, who literally rescued him. He wrote a book about it called Hillbilly Elegy, and a movie was made about it as well. And she saw his life was going the wrong way, and she took him in.
She's very rough around the edges, kind of a woman, very country-type woman. But, you know, he attributes basically getting through that and going on to obviously get a great education and then become a senator and most significantly the vice president. But I love to hear when grandparents step in. My mother was married and divorced seven times, and I lived with my grandmother, who he called Mama Stella, because that's a southern way of calling them, you know, their first name with mama or daddy attached to it. And it was a time of stability in my childhood that my mother was not able to provide.
But before I got up on this rabbit trail about mocking you about a book you didn't even write, I was going to say you really did write a book called Cold Case Christianity. And in this book, You identify 10, what is it, 10 principles that are of detective work? Right.
Yeah, tell me about the 10 principles, and maybe tell me if there's one that stands out above the others that we can apply when we're trying to communicate our faith with others.
Okay, so I think there's a couple things here. Yeah, I think a lot of it you might say, well, how do we think well? I don't have to say that detectives always think well, but we have to think in a way that we can then communicate to a jury.
So, however, whatever process we're going to put in place, it is eventually going to get tested in front of a jury. And if we didn't do it well, or we don't understand these basic principles, it's going to get exposed.
So, I think we try to be tight about how we think about investigating claims.
So, a couple of things I think will help people maybe hadn't thought about, well, what could you learn? I give you a simple one. There's a big difference between what's possible and what's reasonable. This idea that we are trying to make a case in front of a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, that's a lower standard than beyond a possible doubt. Possibly means there's no possible way this could be wrong.
Now, I think that I'll never say I could prove anything. And I tell juries all the time, I could never prove this beyond a possible doubt. Because I have unanswered questions. And those questions are what separate my reasonable, I'm beyond a reasonable doubt. I think he's the guy.
But I can't answer.
So I tell juries all the time, we tell them, we'll say this very commonly: we're going to tell you everything you need to know, but not everything that could be known, because we don't even know everything that could be known. We know that he did it. And we can demonstrate that for you. But until he confesses, we won't won't know precisely how he did it. or why he did it.
Because we can only imagine those things.
So you're going to have to make a decision about this. Beyond a reasonable doubt, even though you're going to have unanswered questions that would put you beyond a possible doubt, there's nothing you know, we tell jurors. Beyond a possible doubt. Even our existence in this podcast, people who are watching this right now, do they know it's really us? But the AI being as good as it is, do they really know it's us?
You don't even know. Is it possible it's not us? Yes, it is possible, but it's not reasonable. And we live in the area of what's reasonable. I tell jurors all the time: I'm going to give you a line of evidences that point right to this defendant.
Now, you're not going to point a foot to the left or a foot to the right of him. They're going to lead you right up to him, but they're going to stop short. Because I don't know everything I could know. I just know what's needed to know. And this gap between the end of the evidence trail and his position is a gap that is filled with all of your unanswered questions.
I'm still going to ask you at the end of this, though. To take the most reasonable step and render a verdict because it's pointing right to him. You cannot get hung up on your unanswered questions. And we tell people all the time: if you're the kind of person who needs to have every question answered before you can render a verdict, you're going to get excused because we can't use those kind of people. I can never answer every possible question.
Well, the same thing is true of my consideration. I've been chosen for jury duty two times, and they always reject me. I get into the box and it's like, okay. Get out of here. Yeah, right.
I don't know.
There's something that I've done.
So, a lot of it is: they're looking for people. Each side is trying to put the jury that they think is going to favor them. And most of the time, if they think that you're somebody who holds to certain objective religious truths, moral truths, then sometimes we get excluded. I get that, but that's okay. But I say the same thing about Jesus: you're going to have evidence that's going to point right to the doors.
It's not going to point to a foot to the left of Jesus or a foot to the right, but it's going to stop short of what you might like to have. And those are all of your unanswered questions about why would God allow this? How is it that God has sovereignty, yet I seem to have freedom to make choices? What's the end times going to be like? All of that stuff, those are the unanswered questions that I get.
I understand. But I have those same questions. But I know that I have enough evidence to make that step and render a verdict, make a decision for Jesus. There's more than enough evidence for this. And so, the question is: are you willing to step across your unanswered questions the same way that everyone does for everything else?
Do you understand how a tumbler lock works? I don't, yet I put my key in them every day. Yes. Because I don't have to have every question answered to know that this is going to turn this lock.
So the same is true for everything we do. But when it seems like we get to the issues about surrendering our life and our will and our moral, all of this to God, and we're like, oh, no, no, no, no, I have to have a perfect case without any questions in my mind. Really? About what else do you have that kind of a perfect case for?
Well, Jesus said, people don't come to the light because they don't want their deeds to be exposed.
So sometimes they'll wrap it in a so-called intellectual argument that will often collapse quickly when you push back with some facts. And really, the reason is they don't want to change. They don't want this thing to happen in their life. But the very thing they're resisting is a thing that could transform them in so many ways. And it's not even logical why a person would say no to something.
Like they'll say, I don't want to hear what the Bible says. But they won't even read it. They won't even just give a cursory glance at it. What do you think that is?
Well, part of it is it's about, I think it's all about commitments. What are your prior commitments?
So, for example, the same people who would say, I could never look at something like the Bible as authoritative on my life still embrace authoritative views from any other number of sources.
So there's none of us are the makers of authority. We're trusting somebody, and it's always something other than scripture.
So I think that once you realize that, yeah, everyone stands on the authority of a teaching. If it's what you learned in college from secular books, you're standing on that authority. Or it's what you're going to learn here from this ancient.
Now, I will say that I do think that people are shifting. I think that maybe my age is a boomer. I think that probably. We were more concerned about is it factually true? And so, books like Evidence That Demands a Verdict, those are kind of wheelhouse kinds of books.
Josh McDowell. Yeah, Josh McDowell, those kinds of things, I think, are like probably where we would have been, say, 50 years ago. I think this generation really wants to know: is it good? Forget about it. True is a whole other issue.
True is I need to know is it true? But it's their definition of good, isn't it? It's their definition of true, also. What is good and what is true? What is good?
Well, here's what it means: it means that that's that a long time ago, right? Yeah. What is truth? Yeah, exactly. And so part of it is that I think if we are convinced that what culture says.
Is what's good, then we're going to become more convinced that Scripture isn't. Because it turns out culture is is going so far astray from the biblical world. For instance, uh the Bible would tell us to Marry a person of the opposite sex or remain in a monogamous relationship with them. That's contrary to what they think you should be able to do because maybe you're not even sure if you are a man or a woman. And why can't people of the same sex marry and fall in love and all that?
So their version of truth would be contrary to what the Bible actually says. We're watching this show on PBS, All Creatures, Great and Small. It's funny that you saw that it's a show that's about eight years ago. I really like it. I like it too.
And I thought, wow, isn't it interesting that this show made in the UK, which is always about 50 years ahead of us in terms of its secularism? That's true. Isn't it interesting that this show would be allowed to be produced? Yes. Without importing any current mores into the show.
It feels like, well, I think they can argue, well, yes, but we're writing about, we're just writing from the book. There's a series of books from this veterinary James Harriet. And so there's a series of books, and it's depicting England or Scotland or wherever it's set in the 1940s. And this is the way the world was in the 1940s.
So you almost have an excuse to go back to something that we've lost. That it shows you that, yeah, if you compare sitcoms about families in the 1950s with sitcoms about families today, you are not even going to tell that we're on the same planet.
Well, the ones we grew up with, you know, the Donna Reed show, Father Knows Best, or Leave It to Beaver. It's so funny. I was a kid without a dad, and when Beaver's dad would lecture him, I would like listen for information because even though he's an actor, Hugh Beaumont, playing a father, you know, I'm going, okay, maybe I can get some direction here.
So, father, what is the Chuck Connor? Rifleman.
Okay, I'm just going to. We just had this conversation, my wife and I. I grew up. Looking at Leave It to Beaver and The Rifleman as the sources of my paternal idea. What is it?
I started re-watching The Rifleman, and it's a beautiful. A series, not just about a guy with the rifle. That's in there, of course. But it's about a father and a son. That's absolutely.
And he always is giving wisdom. In a couple of episodes, he even quoted scripture to his son. And I thought, wow, what a different world we live in today.
So there's the shift. And his gun's cool, too. Right.
And you would have said in those days, growing up, people admired. They said, wow, wouldn't it be cool to be that kid being raised in that way in that setting in that environment with those values?
Well, that's gone. But you're talking about young people today. Our generation maybe would be more interested in facts, but this generation wants to know if it's good. Is it good? Yes.
Is it good? And here's the problem.
So here's what I would say. I think very. I think most of us when we ask, is it good, what we really mean, is it good for me? Yeah, that's true. One, two, three, four, five.
And so the question is, will your worldview give me one, two, three, four, five? I think part of the the problem uh the the project now is going to be to help them to see is that one two three four five even good itself do you why would you want those things so so it's even Deeper, it's that Christianity speaks to our desires, not how our desires are expressed. It speaks to the desires themselves. And this is why I think that for me, my writing is trying to do both. Look, if it's not true, Right.
Then why can how can we even say that it is it something untrue, good? Yeah. I think by nature there is a connection between these two things.
So I think we have to make a case. Is this evidentially true?
Now we can talk about what does it speak to, what does it say about life, about marriage, about identity, about what is life to begin with? What does it say about those things? It's going to have to be true first, because the idea that we can build our worldview on a fiction of our own. Has consequences, and we've seen those consequences in our culture in the last 20 years. If we can't even agree.
on what good is, then we we kind of Well, let's illustrate. Let's say here we have a boomer, and here we have. A Gen Z young person.
Okay, and let's say you're going to engage each of them in a conversation. Let's say they're separate conversations. How might you start a conversation with a boomer, and how might you start a conversation with someone who's Gen Z?
Well, I think it's a both and not an either or.
So I always come at it and say, hey, this is what's great about it: Christianity is both true and good. Yes. Is that not only is it true, and it's demonstrably true, that we can look at it as something that actually happened in history. Jesus' life, his death, and resurrection are historical facts, that it turns out that the Christian worldview is the source of all beauty of art, literature, music, science, education, and world religions are dominated by a Christian influence. Not because we're the most powerful, but because we are, it's true and good.
Yes. And so people, once they see it and they recognize it as true and good, then that, and yes, could it be abused? Absolutely. Do you remember that movie, The Book of Eli? Yes, it's a very Senzo Washington.
And he's in this movie, and he is a guy who is trying to get the last Bible in this dystopian future world. He has possession of a Bible. And the bad guy in the movie. Wants the Bible because he thinks this is, I can use this to control people, and it's a power. I want it because the power that's in that book.
Well, it's because any. substantial substantive Worldview can be distorted by people and used evilly. It's like the same, the knife you use to cut your bread can also be used to kill somebody. Is the knife bad because it can be used to kill somebody?
So we see that, yes, that Christianity has been distorted by many who would call themselves Christians and to do evil. I get that. But It is the source of the things that help us to flourish. If you just adopted the views that are in scripture and you married because of the view you hold, you identified yourself based on the view that's in scripture, you actually learned what to worship and value based on what is taught. You would have a happier life.
Oh my gosh, every aspect of human flourishing that we can measure in secular studies benefits if you simply do it the way it's described. You go to church more often, you're more healthy, and longevity, everything. Everything. I mean, here's to give you an example of this. Just the idea, I've talked about this before, just the idea that humility is this hidden resource for humans.
That if they can just adopt a position of humility, every metric of human flourishing improves from health, longevity, depth of relationships, how much money you're going to make, how smart you're going to become. Everything benefits from humility and only one worldview. Promotes humility. Have you ever thought about that?
So, for example, atheism does not promote humility. Why? Because it's work-based. If you have to work to get it, I'm going to do these five things, I'm going to earn an education. I'm going to do these five things, I'm going to earn a promotion.
It's the meritorious nature of atheism that builds pride, not humility. Because what happens is, I do these five things and he gets the job. Wait a minute.
Now I'm mad. Why? Because I think I'm better than that guy.
Now every other theistic worldview is also based on merit. Hmm. I do these ten things. I'm going to be right with God. I do these four things, these eight things.
I'm going to be right with God. Only one world you says no. No, it's nothing you can do. Not about what you do. It's about what's been done for you.
It's hard for people to accept. I know, because we are wired for pride. We are wired to compare ourselves to others. We are wired to say, I did the 10 things. This guy didn't.
I deserve more than this guy.
Well, only one to you says, no, I'll tell you what, neither one of you deserves any of it. Yeah. But I'm going to give it to you anyway. One thing I pointed out is there's going to be good people in heaven, excuse me, bad people in heaven and good people in hell. And because we think, oh, heaven is for good people.
And if you live a good life and do X amount of good things, you will get to heaven. If you live a bad life, you will end up in hell.
Well, that's actually not true because you could live the best life imaginable, but a life without God. And even the Bible says, Jesus speaking, many will come to me on that day and saying, Lord, Lord, did we not cast out demons in your name and do many wonderful works in your name? And he said, And I will say to them, depart from me, I never knew you. But then bad people in heaven, because if you turn from your sin, even on your deathbed, God would forgive you. Case in point, the thief on the cross.
And he probably was worse than a thief because the Romans didn't generally crucify thieves, they crucified murderers. He is probably an insurrectionist.
Well, we might even call a terrorist against Rome.
So he's being crucified for a capital crime. Yet Jesus says to him, when he says, Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. Jesus says, Today you'll be with me in paradise. Let me do a lightning round with you, okay? And speak in the vernacular.
Okay. Like I'm just someone and we're at a Starbucks and we start a conversation. And I'm going to hit you with the things people often say. But I need like kind of like kind of quick ones just so people get a sense because they can get your book, Cold Case Christianity. And you've written some other books.
Tell us the titles of your book.
Okay, so I wrote the Cold Case Christianity. I wrote a book called God's Crimes. which just looks at the evidence for God, forensic faith, how to develop a Evidential faith. Right.
Person of interest is about the impact of Jesus on culture and the truth and a graphic novel, a comic book is coming out, which I'm excited about because we both have a background in art. And so you're going to now take what you're doing and put it in a graphic novel format. But anyway, okay, so they can get your books and get more details. But so, you know, you're talking to me about God. And of course, I probably will start with this.
Wait, hold on. How could a God of love You know, allow all the horrible things happening in the world, the wars, the injustice, people born with disabilities. If God is so loving and God is so good, why would He allow this?
Okay, well, a couple of things. I'd say that the answer is more complex than a small, short answer, but I will say this is one thing I know for sure as a cold case detective. If you think God is loving, that means that he would probably be the kind of God who would create a world in which love could exist. A loving God would create a world in which we could experience love. But do you really want that kind of world?
That's a dangerous world because it requires a dangerous prerequisite. Yes. To love, I could take my gun out and say, Do you love me, Greg? And you'll say, yeah. You don't mean it.
But you'll say it. Good, but it's not true love because love can't be coerced. In order to love somebody, you have to have the dangerous prerequisite, which is free agency. Oh my gosh, do you want a world in which there's free agency? Because it's logically impossible to create a world With free agency where people can love, without creating a world with free agency so people can hate.
It's a logical impossibility. If you want love in this world, you have to create it with free agency. I can't just program you so you'd never do wrong. Because you wouldn't be free. I could program my phone to say I love you every morning.
It doesn't mean it loves me. It's been programmed to say that.
So it's not genuine.
So, I could create humans this way, but it wouldn't be genuine life. You want love? That means you have.
Now, here's what a loving God does: he gives you this dangerous thing called free agency, but he tells you how not to abuse it. He gives you a rule book with 10 rules, for example, about how not to abuse your free agency. That's what that rule book is: it's a rule book about how to manage your free agency. If you choose to ignore it, That's not on God. I've given you the dangerous thing you wanted, free agency.
I've given you a guideline. not to abuse it. If you won't follow the guideline, You're going to see all kinds of crazy. Yeah. And we typically do.
And the world, as a result, is broken along with us. And so it's not just that we have a We sin against each other. Or we make bad choices against each other. It's that we also neglect our environment until we have wildfires that kill half of us. We do all kinds of things.
That's called California. Yeah, it's called California.
So, I mean, this is just the nature of the world we live in because you want to be in a world in which you can love. And God wants you to love Him genuinely. That means He has to also create people who could reject Him. freely also. Yeah, but you mentioned the Bible, Jim, and I'm still playing the role of a non-believer.
I'm not seeing this as a pastor, or it'd be very alarming. Yeah, you mentioned the Bible, for sure. But the Bible is full of contradictions. It was written by men, and it is not a book that can be trusted.
Well, okay, so absolutely, we've got a record of something that's happened in the past that's been recorded by men.
Now, even if you rejected the idea that these were divinely inspired men, okay, fine. Let's just go forward with that idea. Let's just say it's a record of something that happened in the past that's been recorded by men. That's every case I've ever worked. Can you actually come to a conclusion, a true conclusion, about what happened in the past if it was 30 years ago?
If all you have are the records of men, well, yes, if you test those records, I don't believe eyewitnesses. My innate skeptical nature is to distrust every eyewitness until... I test them. I always say, don't trust an eyewitness, test an eyewitness. But if you test the eyewitness and he passes the test, then you're a fool not to trust him.
So that's what was me. I needed to know: are those gospels recording something true about the past?
Well, how would you test them? Were they written early? Do they have any corroborative evidence? Have they changed over time? And were they written by people who were trying to lie to me for some biased purpose?
If they pass the test in those four categories, then you're a fool not to trust them. And that's the same thing. And most people have to say that. And people that would see the Bible's full of contradictions. Probably have never read the Bible.
Right.
Well, listen, you know that your kids can watch the same party and come home and tell you four different stories. You wouldn't say, you're full of contradictions, there was no party. No, you just say, what's going on here? Like, what were you looking at, Jim? What were you looking at, Greg?
Two different things.
Okay, I get it now. And what we see in scripture are constantly descriptions that, well, okay, if there are two angels, well, there is also one angel.
So if I only describe one of them because he's the one who's answering my question or addressing me, they'll be surprised I didn't mention the other one. It doesn't mean I'm contradicting. It just means that I'm focused on this one, only one, because he was speaking.
So that's the one I record.
Now, here's the beauty of criminal cases. I get this report from detectives from 30 years ago. The witnesses, If I'm lucky or still alive. But not always.
Sometime they get the report, witnesses are dead now. The guy who recorded it, he's also dead. This is from 50 years ago. Yes. Well, now I have a report.
About a claim made by an eyewitness, the eyewitness is gone, and so is the report writer. That's the Gospels. If you can solve that case, you can solve the gospel. You just simply have to apply the same approach.
Now, in the end, will there be sufficient reason, if you want it to be, that you could reject them? Yes. It's like at every criminal trial. There's always hung juries. Yeah.
And then you just try it again, and then you might win the second time. But what happened here? There was a hung juror the first time, there might have been two who didn't agree. Totally get it. Our human nature is that we've been provided that kind of freedom.
Now, God's given us more than enough evidence, but He's not going to overwhelm you. God's a gentleman. He's going to respect your free agency. Because then you're going to love him genuinely when you decide to love him. How important is it when, like I've often said, when I'm preaching, it's a monologue.
But when I engage people with the gospel, it's a dialogue. Take Jesus and the woman at the well. You know, he went back and forth with her and he listened to her and he responded to her. Really, the same is true of Nicodemus as well, and even to some degree with Pontius Pilate.
So I think that, you know, when you're talking with someone about Christ, like one-on-one, not, you know, I think sometimes Christians will, you know, they'll just, it's non-stop talking. They won't come up for air. They won't give the person an opportunity to respond. Do you think it's important to like, like you asked a few questions of me? Would you do that if you were talking to someone and say, well, let me ask you this.
I'll let them answer. Absolutely. And then you respond appropriately to what they just said.
Well, I think part of it, too, is like, we get a chance. You and I get a chance to talk. Talk about the gospel a lot. I get a chance to write about it. I don't feel like every interaction I have with somebody, I have to get, I've had pent-up gospel conversations that all have to get out right now.
So I have to overwhelm you with everything I've ever learned about this. And I think as I get older, too, there's a part of me that says, okay, I want to be sensitive to what God is doing in this moment, not just what I could say in the moment. When I was younger, I think it was a little different. I was like, hey, I had a sense of urgency, as we probably should, right? Because if the gospel is a cure for what's killing us and not just an opinion about God.
then we should be urgent with cures. And didn't your wife ever win an argument with you? Oh, gosh, blow her out of the water. No, she has. I think both of us, you know, Kathy's probably the same way.
Is that we marry the people who we consider to be like the one person who could tell me that you're flat wrong, Jim. You know, and she's the person who I'm, who's the first, I don't know about you, but for me, Susie is the first reader of anything I write. Yeah. And she's the first one who says, this is not good. Oh, yeah.
When I first wrote Cold Case, I had a completely different approach. And I thought, I'm not going to, who cares about this detective thing? I'm going to go this way. And I wrote a chapter and I showed it to her, and she says, Yeah, it's kind of boring. I thought, okay, I'm never going to write a book.
I've never found you to be boring. No, I think the way you use your story, you know, because one of the most powerful tools we have in our evangelistic toolbox is our testimony. And everybody is a testimony. Yes. Now, some are more dramatic than others.
Like, take you and contrast you with Michael Franz. His testimony is he was an organized crime. That's right. That's not your testimony. You were an enforcer of the law, but each of you can take your life and use it as a tool.
Even the Apostle Paul, who is a great orator and communicator, would often start his talks with, Hey, let me tell you what happened to me on the Damascus Road. Yeah. And, you know, because that was his testimony. And I think that each of us find our story, because, you know, not everyone relates to you, not everyone relates to me, but you're going to find someone out there that will really relate to you. But ultimately, the power is not even in our testimony, it's in the essential gospel.
Here's what I've Discovered doing this as an evangelist is there's a place for apologetics, there's a place for answering difficult questions, there's a place for making a logical case for Jesus Christ being the Son of God. All of that is important, but ultimately, there is an innate power in this simple message of the gospel that we must be very careful to not complicate, water down, or change in any way, shape, or form. You know, Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation. Years ago, I was having lunch with Billy Graham, and I said, Billy, if an older Billy could speak to a younger Billy, what advice would you give yourself? And he said, I would preach more on the cross and the blood of Christ because that's what the power is.
I found that to be true. Yeah, you know, it's so interesting that you say that because I was listening to Tim Keller sermon, and he mentions that Dick Luke. Who's an Anglican rector? He talks about how when Billy went to Cambridge, maybe the first in the 1950s, he had several nights there, and the first two nights were flat, he said. But in the third night, in front of all of these intellectuals, and Dick Lucas was in the audience with other bishops from his denomination, Anglican bishops or whatever, and he said Billy abandoned his plans.
He had written all the messages in advance, and he simply focused on the sacrificial system from Genesis all the way to the cross. It was blood, blood, blood, blood, blood, blood, blood. 400 students gave their lives to Christ that night. And there it is.
So I think that you're absolutely right. The old Jim Wallace would have said, well, if a church says, Jim, can you come to our church and talk about the case for Christianity? I would say, sure. And I would go and I'd make this four-point case, and I'd show you how these conditions are met, blah, blah, blah. And that would be the end of it.
I won't do that anymore. If we're going to do that. And remove, hopefully, barriers for people who are in the audience who maybe who would or they're there with their spouse. They've been coming with their spouse, and it's always been want, want, want for them, because they just are not interested. And they've had these intellectual barriers.
Fine. If we don't preach the gospel at the end, Of that case, we have missed the opportunity because there's no power in the case. The power is in the gospel. The case just made the gospel available for people who have pridefully built these walls. I was that was me.
I had any number of objections that would keep me being God. Keep me in charge of what my moral order was, whether I was being successful or not. I was the judge of all those things. I needed something to knock those down so I could realize who I really was. And you know, when I finally that happened for me, I was convinced the Gospels were now accurate.
And I thought, it's time to read the letters of Paul. And I had read the letters of Paul, but I mean, really, read them. And I remember reading through Romans and 1 Corinthians and reading about the natural and spiritual man and realizing. But wow That's me. I would never have been humble enough.
The natural man cannot understand the natural God. And I realized that I was now, I realized I was a sinner in need of a savior. But now I knew there was a Savior because I had done the work in the Gospels to know that this dude is who he said he was.
So now I was able to kind of connect those two dots. But I think if you'd have started in the letters of Paul, for me, I would have said, yeah, this is all fiction. Even if this was true, this is fiction.
So, even if I am broken and I do need to be fixed, or I do need forgiveness, there is no, this is fiction. Once I knew this wasn't fiction, I realized that I could meet this need now with a real savior. I love that.
Now, if you were to, going back to your days as a detective, if you were going to solve a case, because you would often work with partners, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. If you were going to solve a case with a biblical character helping you, who would you choose? Oh, that's a great.
No one's ever asked me that question.
Well, of course, you want Solomon, probably, first of all, because he's the wisest man. You want Solomon's going to get tech deals? Give me his wisdom. Yeah, of course. That's true.
God had charged me. But you said biblical characters. And so I immediately thought, well, that's God.
So now we're going to have to have somebody that's a biblical character.
So I thought, if it's, and I happen to be, I'm going to tell you something on the side. That's a good answer. Yeah, I want to give you something on the aside to hear, though, because you've talked in the past, and I'm actually attending, I come every Tuesday night, I come here to a law enforcement first responders small group here at Harvest. And I listen to all of your, I travel on weekends this weekend. I'm in Dallas, for example, out of church.
But I listen to your messages because. This is, you know, we are here in Southern California with you. And I love it. And you mentioned one time, um, It was not that long ago. It was a sermon on biblical reliability.
And you mentioned how you have several Bibles, and often you would write in the margins. There's even pictures hanging up downstairs in the church here about the margins where you make notes. I do that too. Crazy. I mean, that's me too.
And I'm always looking at little investigative things. You're always talking about, well, maybe there's a five-point sermon in there or a three-point sermon in there in your notes. I'm looking at it in terms of, oh, look at that. That word would not be there if this was not historically true.
So I'm looking at and trying to pick that stuff apart. One of the people in our small group mentioned that she had just come across her mother's Bible.
So, now what I did is I went out and I have three granddaughters, three grandkids, two granddaughters and one grandson. Nice. And they're very young. The oldest is two.
So these are young kids. But I bought a Bible that has got a journal Bible. It's got a wide, wide margin with very faint lines. You can keep your letters straight, you know. And so now what I'm doing is I'm in scripture.
Writing my notes, not for me anymore. But to that grandchild, oh, wow. And it's probably a 10-year project because, you know, if you think about having to go through every page. And you're very artistic, too. You mentioned you're an artist, but I've seen your actual illustrations in some of your books.
And, you know, it's funny, you'll know what I'm talking about. But in those old Bibles, I used a rapidiograph pen, which is generally used for art.
So it's very, very fine point. Yes. Now, I can't read things when I write things. Oh, I know.
So I'm trying to do it before I can't do it anymore. But a lot of it is, yeah, I'm using these, you know, these acid-based or non-acid-based. They don't bleed through the paper. Oh, yeah. So they're 0.005.
So they're tiny, tiny fine lines. And I'm just trying to get my notes in there. But that all came because you happened to preach that message about the same time that this lady was showing us her Bible from her mom, where she had notes about her own kids. And I thought, I'm going to do this.
So now this has become a 10-year project. And I mention it because I'm in the Old Testament. I'm in 1 Samuel with my grandson James. And I'm in 1 Samuel. And I'm just looking at all the Old Testament.
So you're not encountering these Old Testament characters. But even like, isn't it interesting that people like Solomon and Samuel and Eli, like one generation in, their kids are sideways. I know. And you're thinking to yourself, wow.
So I think at this stage for me, a lot of it is: I want books like Cold Case to be the kind of book. And I've written them all from a crime perspective because I think that's what gets people to go, oh, yeah, that makes sense now, because that would make sense in our criminal trial.
So that should make sense against the gospel. And I think it helps people to kind of grab the idea. And I want my kids to, but if you notice this. Like my grandkids My kids have not read all my books. Like my kids, the value I have for my children is not in the books I wrote to strangers.
The value I have in my grandchildren is in The time I spent with them. That's right. And I'm thinking, well, you're just, what do they call you? Opa. Yeah, you're just OPA to them.
That's right. And you know, later when they get older, they'll figure out you're Jay Warner Wallace. But right now, you're OPA. That's it. And but those are such important impressions because they'll remember he had time for us, he took us to ice cream.
You know, he always told us stories. Right.
You know, and it's very important to be a grandmother. No doubt, right? No doubt. And a father. And I think the problem is, you're talking about J.D.
Vance, he was just talking about the order of loves and the order of charity. I think as men, we are so consumed with how we appear to this outside ring of strangers because we're wired with our testosterone to conquer the next mountain, to make us, to protect our families, to provide for our families.
So we're going to do all that stuff out there. And we hope we've done enough at the inside ring of our family. Yes. I need to flip the identity and say, okay, I hope I've done enough in the outside ring to help people examine Christianity to see if it's true. But have I done enough at the inside ring?
That's a good question. Because I've been concerned for so many years with the, I think I've got the order of affections wrong. And so I have to really kind of rethink that. And that national discussion that's kind of been circulating in the last couple of weeks has helped me to rethink it in my own life. Because the reality of it is that, yeah, if you know that your people that you love the most who are closest to you are not even familiar with the work that you thought was legacy, then it wasn't legacy.
It turns out these were the people who were legacy, and I have been ignoring that virtue. You know, George H.W. Bush, the first President Bush, was once asked, you know, what his greatest accomplishment in life was. He could have said, well, I was the ambassador to China. I think he may have directed the CIA.
He, of course, was vice president, and he was president. And he said, the greatest accomplishment of my life is my children still come home to see me. And I like that because that's a man who understood the value of family. That's right. And, you know, I love how it says of David: he served the Lord in his generation.
It's all we can do. You know, and then we pass it on. We pass it on to the next generation. The Christian life is like a relay race. We carry the baton for a time, and then when we're done, we hand that baton on to the next generation, and they carry it and hopefully do the same.
And so, you know, but I just want to commend you for the incredible work you're doing and the impact that you have had. To people on the outside, but it's great that you're thinking about your family. Last question, Jim.
So, let's say someone's listening to this right now, and maybe they're an atheist or at the very least a skeptic. And what would you, if you're sitting over a cup of coffee with them and they said something like, I want to know what's true, but it's so hard for me to intellectually accept it. It's like you were saying of yourself when you were early. Younger, you know, you read that the natural man receives not the things of God. You were trying to wrap your mind around it.
What would you say to a person who's grappling with this but wants? believe. Isn't it interesting that we think that if I have to understand more in order to believe, that's kind of the claim. I need to know more. But it turns out if there is a God of the universe that has the power to create everything in the universe from nothing, that kind of power is scary if you think about it.
And that means he'd have to have infinite wisdom along with the infinite power because he has the power to eliminate all misconception. That's power. And that means that you're trying with your finite mind. To be able to conceptualize a God of the universe, if there is a God of the universe, you should be. really ready to accept the idea, but there's going to be a lot of mystery.
There's going to be a lot of stuff you can't figure out if there really is a God we're talking about. Otherwise, that thing you created in your mind is too small. It's not the God of the universe. It's something you think I can actually dissect and know how he thinks and understand how he thinks and how he operates in the world.
Well, if there is a God like this, How he operates in the world being timeless and knowing what that domino is going to do 15 generations from now, knowing how this is going to affect another series of thousands of people, you're not going to know that.
So, part of it is that we, even as atheists, we have constructed an idea of God that is completely in our own minds. Yeah. That is so small that we think, unless I can understand it, and what I've learned as a Christian. is that if obedience is important to me as a parent. when I ask my kids to be obedient, because I know better in that situation when you're three, I need you to obey because there's a danger involved here.
If there's a God who's separated from us in terms of intellect, in terms of capacity, it's a far bigger separation than me and my three-year-old. I'm asking my three-year-old to trust and obey because I know better. If there's a God like that who's asking you to trust and obey, if my three-year-old said, I'll obey you, but first I need to know every reason why you're asking me to do this, that's not true obedience. It turns out true obedience is when you obey not knowing. The wise yet.
Well, am I willing to obey this not knowing the whys yet? That's really the question. And I think that if there is a God, I should expect there to be a lot of stuff I don't understand. And I can't use that as an excuse.
Well, then there can't be a God. No, no, no, no, no. If there is a God, this is exactly what you would expect. That this is going to be something that you're going to struggle with. It's actually an evidence for God, not an evidence against God.
So, I think that part of it for me is realizing that if there is a God, I am by comparison so limited in my understanding. That I'm going to have to get comfortable with that limitation. And then, of course, there's enough been revealed to me. And again, look, there's a lot of views that people have about God. Test them.
I welcome my kids to test those things. I didn't become a Christian until I was 35. And I became a Christian because I tested the claims. But I'm also at least fair. I mean, as far as criminal cases, I've had a lot of cases I wish were better, but I took them to trial.
I still took them to trial. They were good enough. to win the case. It was clear to me he was the guy. Dude, I wish I had a better case.
Yeah. So if you feel like, yeah, I wish I had a better case than this. There's still enough. More than enough. I can still take that case to trial.
And you can too. It's just being comfortable with what you don't know. Thanks so much. Great to have you in. God bless you.
Thanks for having me, Craig. I appreciate it. Hey everybody, thanks for listening to my podcast. Before you go, I wanted to let you know about the important work we're doing here at Harvest. You know, we've had the same goal these last 50 years, which is simply this.
We want to know God and we want to make Him known. And we do that in a lot of ways. Documentary films, animation, radio, television, large-scale evangelistic events, and more. If you want to be a part of what we're doing to fulfill the great commission, you can support us with whatever you can give at harvest.org slash donate. Again, that's harvest.org slash donate.
And thanks so much.
Whisper: parakeet / 2025-07-03 05:01:35 / 2025-07-03 05:04:05 / 3