Sell The Sizzle

This is the Truth Network. Welcome to If Not For God. Stories of hopelessness that turn to hope. Here is your host, Mike Zwick. All right, it's If Not For God with Mike Zwick, and I've got my friends from CrossExchange back here, and I've got Daniel and I've got Manuel Pittman and Daniel Merrill.

Those two names, I don't know what it is. It's a little bit tough for me to get to roll them off consecutively, but you guys just had a pretty exciting experience. You had Frank Turek come to Elon University. Can you tell me about that, Daniel? Yeah, absolutely.

So, this past. week we were blessed to have Frank Turek come to campus at Elon University. It was the first time in 17 years that a large scale event like this was able to happen and actually 17 years ago was the last time which Frank Turek came.

So it was kind of a renewal of that of that opportunity. And so yes, Frank Turek came. We had a good turnout of people, about 250 came and had question and answers at the end with a nice lineup of different questions. And I think, man, well, you told me that most of the people who actually came were indeed Christians. At the end, I think you said there was one guy who may have been an agnostic.

Is that right? Yeah, just one. It was a lady, actually, one agnostic lady that she had some questions about apologetics, and you had an answer for them. But the general demographic of everybody that came was old and young, and they were all generally leading Christian.

So I thought that was kind of unique that they were doing that. But the lady that was agnostic, what was her question? Her question revolved around. How do I have relationships? How do I have respectful conversations with Christians that are?

antagonistic to me being an uh agnostic. Those uh she felt that too often when she had uh talked to Christians, they had become very um intense in conversation with her, trying to convince her instead of Showing her reasonable answers as it talks about in scripture with meekness and respect. I've been selling insurance for a number of years and I'm glad my my company they sent me on a wonderful trip to Arizona to the Scottsdale Princess Hotel, a Fairmont Scottsdale Princess. And it was absolutely amazing. But I was reminded that years ago, there was somebody who was an insurance teacher, and he always said this.

He always said this. He said, sell the stores. Sell this fizzle. And so when we're in insurance or when you're in sales, you're always taught to sell the sizzle and not to the steak. You want to talk about the stuff that's exciting or something that gets people emotional and stuff like that.

And typically when I'm sharing the gospel and when I'm telling people about Jesus, it's about their feelings and how they feel and what the Lord can do for you and all of that stuff. But he also said this, he says, but keep the stake in your back pocket just in case. And so for me, the Bible says in what is it, 1 Peter 3:15, it says, but be willing and always be ready to give an answer for the hope that you have within you. Because at this conference that I just went to, there was some guy who brought up the Gutenberg Bible. And there are some typical objections that I hear from atheist agnostics.

And if you do evangelism for long enough, you're going to run into some of this stuff, as I'm sure that you guys do too, especially when you're dealing in the intellectual areas of something like an Elon University or something like that. One of the most common objections that the atheist or agnostic will throw out there is that you can't trust the Bible because it has been translated so many times. How would you guys respond to that? I usually like to cite them out and say, to that, I say praise God, because we want a translation in English, we want a translation in Chinese, you want a translation in Portuguese, you want every translation we can possibly get.

So that's just the way to throw them off what they're trying to do. But secondly, to that, I think if they're thinking through it a little bit more, the Bible itself, they think that we're using the King James Version or the ESV version, and we're calling that the Bible. And that's simply not the case. The Bible, we have. Copies of the original manuscripts, and we translate those into those translations.

And so that by itself will answer that question. But the problem with the question is usually it's just a front screen for them to say, This is what I don't like about Christianity. And so once you answer that question, another one's coming. And they're just, you just got to break through the smoke screen to get to evangelism.

Well, and Daniel, I don't know if you guys have seen this, but they say many times when somebody does not want to surrender their lives to Jesus Christ. It's not usually an intellectual issue. This is what I've heard. I've heard many times it's for one of two reasons. Number one, that person may have had a bad experience and uh so i'll give you an example ted turner who started cnn uh when he was younger he actually wanted to be a missionary and his daughter his daughter his younger sister was actually dying of cancer and he prayed to the lord that the lord would heal his younger sister of cancer and he said i'll follow you wherever when that did not happen and when she passed away from what i understand he pretty much turned his back on god now years later in an interview just a few years ago he said that sometimes he'll still throw up a prayer which surprised everybody uh so the first thing is something bad happened in their lives that they can't explain or they prayed to god and it didn't work out that way and the second one which is a more common one as well is you know somebody's in high school they're a christian and they go to college And they want to have sex outside of marriage.

They want to get drunk. They want to do all of the things that they've been taught not to do. And so an easy out for them would be, well, the Bible's just not true. And then they can live however they want to live. What do you think?

Yeah, and I mean, each of us have our Human nature that is informing our questions and informing the way that we receive the truth of God. And so, because of that, recognizing that when we're going out, sharing the gospel with people, engaging people, their intellectual objections underlying that, like you said, comes down to number one uh their own Understandings of the nature of God and how their experience with Christianity, but also their own sinful nature, their own. desires that are informing those questions. And one thing I think is also important, just to get just briefly to jump back to something that Manuel was saying, when it comes to the The text of scripture, though we don't have the autographs, which are the original. Panned writings of Paul and Matthew, etc., of the Gospels, we have very early copies of those autographs, of those original pinned writings.

And so, just for clarification to anybody who's listening, when we talk about having early manuscripts of the authoritative writings of Scripture, Understanding that compared to many other religious and philosophical and including historic texts out there outside of scripture, that the reliability, the transmitted text of God's word is well attested.

So I just wanted to say that for clarification.

Well, and if you think about it, you know, some of the writings that I've heard of is maybe Caesar or I'm trying to think Plato and many of these other writers, they were not written about. They didn't have people writing about them until sometimes, I think, hundreds of years after they had passed away. And not only that, but they said they may have like five manuscripts or something like that. Christianity has. Many more.

Many more. Thousands more. Yes. Thousands more. But I think the difference is that when you're talking about the writings of Plato.

You know, you don't hear people. Saying, hey, we can't trust these, or any of these other people who were written about hundreds of years later. Even I think, you know, if you look at Islam, that's not as authentic as even as Christianity, right? That is right.

So, like, when you talk about the Quran as well as the sayings and biography of Muhammad or the founder and leader of the Islamic religion, I mean, the biographies of Muhammad and his life are actually well written 200 years after the time that he lived, not by eyewitnesses, but by people that were lived 200 years after the time that he lived. And actually, even in their own religious writings, the Hadiths or the sayings of Muhammad and his followers, it even attests in there that one of the caliphs or the religious leaders of the Islamic faith actually took the different variations, significant variations in the Quran. As well as the biography of Muhammad, specifically the biography of Muhammad, and actually burned the copies that didn't. Accord with his particular perspective and then codified the current what we know today as the life of Muhammad.

So When you compare the life of Christ and his historic nature as compared to that of Muhammad, whether you're talking about like. Uh what's the guy that wrote Dominion? Um help me out, manual. Uh I was trying to think of you talking about Dominion. Dominion, uh the guy from England, the historian.

Um I can't remember his name. But anyway, there's a historian over in England. that um basically uh he he He's a Greco-Roman historian that Peter Tom Holland. That's his name. Tom Holland.

There's a historian in England named Tom Holland that his focus is in Greco-Roman history. Spider-Man. Yeah, not Spider-Man. Thank you. The historian.

There's a historian named Tom Holland that's a in England based in England that focuses on Greco-Roman and early world history. And he because he grew up in the Anglican church but left it many years in his life, that he decided to research Islam and through doing that realized the inconsistencies in the credibility of the, even in the life of Muhammad and in the religious nature. And so in 2019, I think it was, he decided because though he wasn't himself religious, he decided he grew up in the Anglican faith. He wanted to apply the same The same analysis to Christianity. And so he wrote the book Dominion, which actually shows that there is a first-century person that is attested both internally and externally out of scripture known as Yeshua Mashiach that was crucified, and that ultimately those Um His religious and teachings were affected the whole Roman world.

And even the way we think about crucifixion and the idea of suffering and taking on for the impoverished have reoriented the way we think in the West and our ethics as well. Yeah, you know, the Bible says that the fool says in his heart that there is no God. And when you really look into it and you break it down, you were, and we talked about this the other day. And I actually, all I did was a single, simple Google search of what, you know, how do you respond to somebody who says, well, the Bible's been translated so many times you can't trust it. Said that Google said that that's not true.

98 to 99% of the Bible is 100%. It's word for word. I mean, accurate, other than maybe a few words. And you said there's two passages, manufactured, that are. Iffy, but other than that.

Yeah. The two passages in question that are worth navigating but doesn't really take anything away from the biblical text of its theology or what it's teaching would be the woman caught in adultery, which since is a passage that just jumps around different places, places in John, places in Luke. And then the other one is the ending of Mark. A lot of the earlier manuscripts do not have the ending of Mark.

Now, the ending of Mark definitely happened because you can read the book of Acts and you see it very clearly what they're talking about. And then the woman caught in adultery. That one could be a real story. Whether or not it is or it isn't, it does not take away from what the Bible's teaching. But what it does do is give us insight on how people in the early century thought about Jesus and how he cared for not only a woman, but a sinner.

Because usually in the first century you would not really want to put a story about a woman who not even be a credible witness at certain times. The Bible in multiple places elevates the position of a woman unlike other cultures during the time. And so the fact that not only was this story probably not in the Bible, but the fact that it was a later edition about a woman who's being granted forgiveness is a beautiful thing that only the people that were influenced by the Bible and inspired by the Bible would probably think about that Jesus would do. Yeah, and if they were, if the disciples and the apostles, if they were going to make up this story, they made a lot of mistakes by making it up. Because nowadays, you know, and thank God I've got my daughter Ann with me here, and I've got my wife and my mother who have been great influences in my life and also my children's.

And in America, we hold women up on a pretty high level. And we say that women need to get more pay and they need more respect and all of that. But during the time of the Bible, if you were going to say the first people to see Jesus were women, you would have made a big mistake if you were making this up. Is that right? Yes, I mean, absolutely.

In the time of the New Testament, it was seen as the woman's testimony, that the man's testimony was two times of more worth than the woman's. And you see this throughout scripture. And actually, I had a conversation one time in evangelism with a particular lady who talks about women's rights and all of those things, and about the Bible puts down women and actually. For a first century Jewish audience, as well as Greco-Roman audience, the gospel is very subversive. It's very counter-cultural to the time, both within the Pharisaical Jewish culture of first-century Judeo, but also to the Greco-Roman culture.

And so. Yeah, it's an important thing. And actually, just jumping back briefly to Tom Holland, the historian, Tom Holland, he talks about, as well as also, there's a Christian theologian in England named Glenn Scribner who talks about this, is that. Our understanding, not an in everything, because we can't say that everything is now defined through Christianity. There is things that are clearly not Christian, things that are.

But the way that we see about human rights or about um Various different aspects of the importance of even the term the right to do something, the right to love who you love, or the right to do things, the moral ought of something. Really comes out of, though it has become divorced from Christianity, it really comes out outside of this idea that each individual has an innate worth and value, as was referred to in the Constitution and by the Founding Fathers.

So, just as a point of. Thinking about how does this idea of the nature of scripture and its elevation of the value of women, it's not just speaking to a first-century audience, it also informs us of how these these truths have affected Western culture and actually is very diametrically very different from even from other cultures outside the West, like in India or in Islamic countries where they they put down the the the the value of women, the innate value of a female. Yeah, and the uh It even says in Galatians, and you may know a little bit more about this, but it says that there is neither male nor female in Christ.

Now, I think some people probably take that a little too far with a transgender thing. I don't know. But how do you take that, Mammal? Yeah, that particular passage, there's a bond-free. Male, female, rich, poor, we're all one in Christ.

That's the passage.

Now, that's not saying that there is no such thing as a slave, there is no such thing as gender, there's no such thing as Jew and Gentile. Because if those things didn't exist, then the rest of the book of Galatians wouldn't even matter because they really focus on the uniqueness of being a Jew and a Gentile. Being one in Christ, yes, but they are different things and they have to be for the sake of conversation. But what is unique about that passage is at the foot of the cross to be a member in Christ's community. Community, that's gone.

The slave dynamic, you'll get the book of Philemon, the whole book of Philemon about reconciliation between a master and a slave. And it's in Christ. It's not the negation of a certain role in society. It's the magnification of man and man and us being united in Christ.

So, with male and female, we still need that because God created that in the Garden of Eden. That's good, but we can't ignore that part at all. And we need that unity in Christ.

So, our unity in being human and being image bearers of God, that is one in Christ. And we serve that body in our unique roles. And so, that's what's important. Yeah, and so Lee Strobel and Gary Habermas, I'm not sure. Habermas.

Habermas, you guys are helping me out tremendously.

So, Gary Habermas have. Deeply, deeply studied the resurrection. And if you ask many theologians, they say, What is the one thing that separates Christianity from everything else? And they would answer the resurrection. And that was something that was pretty rock solid.

And we have. Pretty good evidence to show that the resurrection indeed did happen. What do you think? Yeah, I'll answer on this one. This is one of my favorite topics at all.

Resurrection theology is something that I've been really thinking about from authors like Michael Heiser, Dr. N.T. Wright. And looking at the resurrection in light of Christian history is a huge idea. Because when you look at ancient history, there have been plenty of sons of God in the idea of the Babylonian mythology and even some Assyrian mythology, specifically Greek and Roman.

They have a lot of sons of God. Hercules was a son of God. Perseus was a son of God. But what is unique is that this carpenter's son from Nazareth. He actually dies and becomes a hero.

That usually doesn't happen. Like, death is the end. Death is where it stops. For any hero in mythology, that's where death is when you realize that your movement is either finished or it's continuing along in somebody else. To say that someone resurrected from the dead and is alive, and he was once a carpenter's son, now elevated to this place of God Himself and calling people to Himself.

radical idea. And for people to say this even is a reality And be willing to die for it. That does not happen in the first century. Like, they would either give that up because it's a weird speculation or a lie, but the fact that these people were willing to not only believe it, evangelize it, and die for it, any view of a court system and going before a court and giving a testimony of something. This is based on testimonial evidence, based on eyewitness testimony, these things are solid.

And so to doubt the resurrection is actually doubting any idea of justice and how we even think of the concept of law, order, and testimony. Yeah, and the Bible actually says if there is no resurrection, we might as well go out there and party, have a good time, because this is it. But indeed, there was a resurrection, and Jesus was resurrected, and he's alive today. He's seated at the right hand of the Father. And I was talking about this this morning at breakfast at Wednesday in the Word over at Stanleyville.

But I said that the difference between anybody else is that Muhammad is dead. You can go to his grave. All of the other Buddha is dead. You know, all the other great religions out there, I don't, I use great in quotations. Their leaders are dead, but we have a risen Savior.

Absolutely. And also, I think as we understand. Think through what is the meaning and importance of the resurrection. It's like Manuel was talking about in these ancient cultures, in these dying and rising myths, as it can be understood. One of the also important distinctions is that Christ just didn't die and then physically and then resurrect spiritually.

He resurrected physically. And in 1 John, it talks about that we've touched the Lord. We've had communion with the Lord in His resurrected self. And I think that's really important. Also, How we think about what history is.

There are certain people in the past that, in the 20th century, that claimed to be Christian, but when it came to the resurrection of Christ and his resurrection, they would, in one hand, sound like they affirmed it, but in another hand, sound like they denied it. And what they were doing was that they were saying that he resurrected, but in a different way. plane of reality of different um A different dimension of reality. And so, what we're saying, and what historic Orthodox Christianity is saying, is that Christ conquered over hell, death, and the grave, not just in a meta, not just metaphorically, not just in a spiritual sense, but in a In a spiritual, physical sense, both physically and spiritually, that his resurrection, which also continues with the idea of the glorified bodies for all who are in Christ, that we won't be just resurrected in some type of ethereal spiritual way, but will have glorified bodies that will no longer have the stain of sin within them.

So, seeing the narrative of Scripture, the importance of the resurrection of Christ, not just Back 2,000 years ago, but how it relates to also that Christ is now seated at the right hand of the Father. In his resurrected body. He just didn't kind of dissolve that resurrected body when he went to heaven. He is seated at the right hand of the Father. In that resurrected body, and how we understand its relationship to today.

Yeah, one of my favorite passages in the Bible is 1 Corinthians 15. And in verse 51, it starts, it says, Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump, for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall we be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is in the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

And when I read that, I get excited. How about you guys? Amen. Absolutely. One thing I think is interesting about thinking about resurrection is when you look at Eastern religions, things like that, it's all about getting out of this body, right?

This body is bad. This body was hurting me. I got all these desires that are wrong, and I need to get rid of this body. But the Christian narrative is actually not just that I'm going to somewhere new, it's a return because the Garden of Eden was good. He said man and flesh and creation is good.

That's why Jesus and his resurrection came, resurrected in that same body. And that's what he's promising for us, that this world, our bodies, is a resurrection, it's a recovery of that which has been tainted by sin, set free. And I think that's what's beautiful about resurrection theology, that this body, God did make it, and it's a good thing that I have a body. It's a good thing that I'm engaging in this universe, but it's also the joy that God's going to make it clean. Amen.

And one of the differences, I believe, between Christians and everybody else is that if we really believe this, we don't fear death. That's why we give up our lives. And you guys are out on a college campus. I mean, you know, I couldn't say this probably 20 years ago, but every time you go out there and you share the gospel, you could lose your lives. You know, when I'm on the radio and I'm sharing some of the stuff that I share, I could lose my life.

Tomorrow is not promised, but we have a hope and glory. We have an eternal hope. And when you realize. That this life is so short and eternity is so long. And when you realize that the hope that the Lord has given us, and I talked about this this morning as well, as Christians, we are able to extend forgiveness to others because we realize how much Jesus has forgiven us of.

And I tell you what, I wake up in the morning and yes, I have some tough days. Yes, I have some tough times. I'm sure you guys don't, right? But, and we all do, but when I have those tough times, I have a risen, glorified Savior, Jesus Christ. And I say, you know what?

Oh, death, where is thy sting? Oh, tough time. Hey, it's not that bad. It's only for a moment because I've got Jesus. And in the final 30 seconds that we've got, share with us.

If people want to find out more about you, I know they can follow you on Facebook. It's go ahead. Yeah, CrossExchange. We are on Facebook, Cross Exchange.

So Cross and the literal X, and then change. We're on Facebook, Instagram. We have a website. And where else, Daniel? Those are our three primary areas on social media.

You can also meet with us in person. We have a weekly group Bible study on Thursday nights in Elon at 7 p.m. You're welcome to come, attend, reach out to us, and our website is crossexchange.org. Crossletterxchange.org. Thanks a lot guys, if not for God.

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