00:00:00.000Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, a hero of mine, someone who I have admired from afar and read his books for quite a while, Lee Strobel, who is the author of The Case for Christ and also The Case for Heaven.
00:00:10.000If you have your doubts about the afterlife, your doubts about God, or if you're a Christian, you just kind of need a shot on the arm around these topics.
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00:01:44.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:09.000So yeah, well, it's a great, great honor, Lee.
00:03:11.000Tell us about the movie that's coming out.
00:03:14.000Well, it's based on my book, The Case for Heaven, which was inspired by an incident that happened to me 10 years ago when I almost died.
00:03:22.000My wife found me unconscious, called an ambulance.
00:03:25.000I woke up in the emergency room, and the doctor looked down at me and said, You're one step away from a coma, two steps away from dying.
00:03:32.000And so I hovered there between life and death for quite a while until the doctors were able to save my life.
00:03:38.000And this is a very clarifying experience for me.
00:03:42.000When you get in that kind of position, you really want to know for sure what happens when you close your eyes for the last time in this world.
00:03:59.000So I decided to investigate what is the evidence, both inside and outside the Bible, that supports the idea that there is an afterlife that we continue to live on.
00:04:09.000That resulted in my book, The Case for Heaven.
00:04:12.000And then we produced a documentary based on that book.
00:04:16.000It's going to be in movie theaters coast to coast for three nights only, April 4th, 5th, and 6th.
00:04:22.000I say documentary, but that conjures up images of a grainy 16 millimeter black and white thing with talking heads.
00:05:37.000And so I decided to try to rescue her from this cult that she got involved in.
00:05:43.000And I figured that I could do that if I could just disprove the resurrection of Jesus, because even I, as an atheist, recognize that is the foundation of the faith.
00:05:53.000So I took my journalism training, my legal training, and systematically investigated.
00:05:59.000Is there any evidence historically for the resurrection of Jesus?
00:06:04.000A lot of people this time of year think about these kinds of things.
00:06:07.000And my book, The Case for Christ, and also in the new book, The Case for Heaven, I deal with the evidence for the resurrection historically.
00:06:16.000I found it to be overwhelming when I investigated it.
00:06:48.000He says, I say unequivocally that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof, which leaves absolutely no room for doubt.
00:06:59.000The greatest defense attorney who ever lived.
00:07:02.000So I came to a similar conclusion on November the 8th of 1981, that based on the evidence of history, that Jesus clearly claimed to be the Son of God.
00:07:11.000And then he backed up that claim by returning from the dead.
00:07:15.000And that's when I repented of my sin, received Jesus as my forgiver and leader.
00:07:20.000And my life, my values, my character, my morality, my attitudes, my parenting, my relationships, I mean, everything over time began to change for the good.
00:07:31.000And this is something I tell people all the time, which is you should want this to be true, right?
00:07:36.000So you should be skeptical, but let's just ask what would you want for your life?
00:07:41.000You should want this story to be true.
00:08:13.000And you kind of went through some of the great claims, such as, well, maybe Jesus wasn't actually killed or, you know, maybe that his body was just stolen.
00:08:23.000And you go through those very analytically because as you went on that fact-finding mission, you were trying to say there's got to be some reasonable explanation.
00:08:36.000I mean, when you examine the evidence, you look at things like the execution of Jesus.
00:08:41.000Even the Journal of the American Medical Association carried an analysis of the crucifixion of Jesus and concluded that clearly, based on the historical and medical evidence, Jesus was dead after being crucified.
00:08:52.000In fact, before the spear was thrust into his side, he was already dead.
00:08:57.000The early accounts of the report, in other words, the early reports of the resurrection that come too quick to merely be a legend, took time for legend to develop in the ancient world.
00:09:07.000But we have a report of the resurrection of Jesus, including named eyewitnesses and groups of eyewitnesses that has been dated back by scholars to within months of his death.
00:09:18.000And then the empty tomb that even the opponents of Jesus admitted was empty.
00:09:22.000And then we have nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament confirming and corroborating the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the resurrected Jesus.
00:09:33.000That is an avalanche of historical data.
00:09:36.000And Josephus, amongst many others, and one of the ones in your book that just blew my mind, such an obvious point, which is actually a point that's used against biblical Christianity, which you, and you say, wait a second, so there's female witnesses.
00:09:51.000If you were to make something up, why would you use female witnesses, right?
00:09:57.000In the first century, Josephus, the Jewish historian who worked for the Romans, and even the Jewish Talmud both say that the testimony of women in that culture in that day was not considered reliable.
00:10:42.000That gives you clear evidence that they just basically said, look, we're going to tell the story and just let the chips fall where they may.
00:10:49.000And then we have the account of the apostles and the people that willingly died afterwards, the disciples that died afterwards.
00:10:55.000The kind of whole body of work, Lee, that you've developed, I just want to say has helped strengthen so many people's faith because the monotony of secularism is a real thing, right?
00:11:07.000It's an overwhelming amount of skepticism and kind of a smart alec attitude.
00:11:12.000And your decades of work in these fields have really helped me personally.
00:13:05.000But I learned that there are 900 scholarly articles written about near-death experiences published in scientific and medical journals over the last 40 years.
00:13:17.000In fact, The Lancet, which is the famous medical journal in England, carried an analysis of near-death experiences that concluded that none of the alternative explanations account for this phenomenon.
00:13:30.000So I looked at cases, you know, because the Bible says in a couple of places, for instance, the Apostle Paul says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
00:13:40.000Jesus told the repentant criminal on the cross, today you'll be with me in paradise.
00:13:44.000So the Christian conception of the afterlife is two phases.
00:13:48.000One is the first phase that occurs after we are physically dead, in which our spirit, our soul, our consciousness continues to live on.
00:13:57.000And we live on either in the presence of God or away from God in Hades.
00:14:04.000At the time of Jesus' return and the consummation of history, we are reunited then with our now resurrected bodies.
00:14:14.000We go through final judgment and then we spend eternity in a very physical place, whether it's heaven or hell.
00:14:19.000So I needed to know: is there any evidence from near-death experiences that indeed our spirit, our soul, our consciousness, does continue to live on after our physical demise?
00:14:29.000And what I found to my shock were a number of cases that we deal with in the book and the movie where people saw things or experienced things or heard things during their out-of-body experience that would be impossible if it wasn't authentic.
00:15:33.000One study explored 21 cases of blind people, most of them blind since birth, who during their near-death experience were able to see for the first time.
00:15:43.000They saw the resuscitation efforts going on in their body.
00:15:47.000They met dead relatives and went to a place of bliss that they can interpret as being heaven.
00:15:52.000And when they returned to their body and were revived, their vision disappeared again.
00:15:58.000Medical researchers said this is medically impossible.
00:16:01.000Another study showed, look, 90, let me see, let me get this right.
00:16:07.000Over 90 cases where this kind of verifiable observation was made during out-of-body experience.
00:16:53.000And you also hear these stories of people halfway around the world that have the almost identical types of near-death experiences and they've never met each other and they've never, they're in separate cultures and they're almost identical.
00:17:07.000And then I want to ask you about Lee, another phenomenon, which some people claim that they have seen hell.
00:17:35.000And that's kind of what we're living through, unfortunately.
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00:20:15.000Yeah, and certainly there are those phenomena where people do have a sense of an out-of-body experience.
00:20:20.000However, as the Lancet Medical Journal in England pointed out, none of these alternative explanations can account for the full range of this phenomenon of near-death experiences.
00:20:32.000For instance, to have a perspective from above you, that you see things that you otherwise couldn't see, to hear things that you couldn't otherwise hear, and so forth.
00:20:44.000So, those are things that I think corroborate.
00:20:49.000There was a girl named, I think her name was Katie, and she drowned in a YMCA swimming pool, massive brain swelling, zero brain waves, zero, no heartbeat for 20 minutes.
00:21:13.000And when she is revived, she said, by the way, I was conscious the whole time.
00:21:17.000So one night when my parents came to the hospital to visit me, I followed them home.
00:21:22.000And then she described what they cooked for dinner, what the children, her brothers and sisters were playing, what toys they were playing with, where her father was sitting, what clothes they were wearing.
00:21:33.000I mean, things that she could not have otherwise known.
00:21:35.000She even drew a drawing of the emergency room as she was taking when she was clinically dead and accurately placed everything in that drawing.
00:21:44.000So these are things I think corroborate the fact that something extraordinary does take place upon our clinical death.
00:21:53.000So what you've described so far is extremely compelling.
00:21:56.000However, it doesn't get all the way to heaven, right?
00:21:58.000So this might explain that we are a mind, body, and soul or spirit.
00:22:03.000So walk us through then the actual heaven aspect, because some people would say, okay, Lee, I'm with you.
00:22:08.000I think there is a spiritual domain, but who's to say our spirit just doesn't get released back into the oversoul?
00:22:59.000Those are really the only three choices.
00:23:00.000And then I look at the logic and the livability of each of those worldviews and conclude that theism is the one that survives logic and livability the best.
00:23:10.000Then you go on to Revelation and you say, you know, different worldviews have different books of revelation.
00:23:20.000I look at the reliability of scripture and say that it's unmatched by any other world religion's scriptures.
00:23:28.000Then I look at the evidence for the resurrection and I touched on that a little earlier, but there is clear and compelling evidence that Jesus didn't just claim to be the Son of God, but he backed it up by returning from the dead.
00:23:40.000And then ultimately the gospel that Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, that no one comes to the Father except through him.
00:23:48.000And so we go on this pyramid and I reason through it all to come to the conclusion that, okay, if Jesus claimed to be the son of God and he backed that up by returning from the dead, then he's an eyewitness to the afterlife.
00:24:02.000Not only that, but he is the son of God who created the afterlife.
00:24:06.000And so we ought to look at what he says about what heaven is like.
00:24:10.000And one of my favorite metaphors that Jesus uses in talking to the disciples is he uses the metaphor of home in talking about heaven.
00:24:18.000And so I don't know if you've ever traveled internationally to maybe a third world country that was very primitive and difficult.
00:24:24.000I know that as a new Christian, I went to India for quite a while to do ministry.
00:24:28.000And, you know, you're living in very basic conditions.
00:24:57.000So talk about, I don't know if you go into this in the movie or not, but the importance of really trying to get people to think deeply about an afterlife because that's something that, you know, is on everyone's mind.
00:25:10.000Everyone, whether we like it or not, is thinking about their death at least past the age of 30 on a daily basis, right?
00:25:17.000And whether they realize it or not, it's like everything's building up to the fact that we're not going to be permanently here.
00:25:23.000There's scientific pushes to try to make us live forever here.
00:26:06.000And yet now you can see the anxiety in her eyes, the apprehension in her eyes, because death had come knocking on her family's door.
00:26:14.000And so I think it's ever more relevant today to say, wouldn't you want to know with confidence, with a degree of certainty that what happens to you after you close your eyes for the last time in this world?
00:26:27.000And I think the movie is going to encourage believers.
00:26:30.000And I think it's going to challenge people who are skeptics.
00:26:34.000So talk a little bit more about the promises that we know about heaven.
00:26:38.000I mean, someone might be saying, okay, how do I get there then?
00:28:24.000But, you know, that's where reincarnation got its attractiveness because reincarnation says not only can't you do enough good deeds in your lifetime to earn your way to God, you've got to go through a multitude of lifetimes, maybe an infinite number of lifetimes to try to earn your way to God.
00:28:43.000And yet you don't know what you did wrong in the previous life.
00:28:46.000You don't know what bad karma you're waking up, making up for.
00:28:50.000And so you have no idea how to improve.
00:30:09.000In fact, my daughter, when she was a toddler, if she was playing with some toys by herself in the living room and she heard me come home from work through the front door, would just gather her toys and go in her room and shut the door.
00:30:23.000Are you going to be yelling and screaming and kicking holes in walls?
00:30:25.000You know, at least it's nice and quiet in here.
00:30:28.000And yet, four or five months after I received Jesus as my forgiver and leader, and he began to change my attitudes, my character, my morality, my life, that same daughter, watching the transformation in her own dad, went up to my wife and said, mommy, I want God to do for me what he's done for daddy.
00:30:49.000And she received this free gift of grace at age five and is a devout follower of Jesus today.
00:30:56.000Same thing with my son, who got his PhD in theology as a professor now at Bioli University.
00:31:09.000And I hate to think of what my life would have ended up like had I continued to go down that dark road.
00:31:16.000Well, what's so fascinating about your story is that you wanted to find the truth.
00:31:22.000And that's kind of what got you on this journey, which is what I tell people all the time.
00:31:27.000Say that just if you have an openness to the truth, that's a phenomenal start because I find, and I've asked this question throughout, some people don't want this to be true, quite honestly.
00:31:39.000They want their own kind of belief of themselves being the most important person on the planet, their own God, if you will, to be true.
00:31:47.000Because this can be, if you believe there's a heaven and you believe there's only one way to get to heaven, which is not earn your way to heaven, that's really humbling, actually.
00:31:55.000Really humbling in more ways than one.
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00:33:10.000Yeah, I'll tell you, let me say one thing before I say that, and that is one of the other breakthroughs I think in this area of near-death experience was my interview with John Burke, who you'll see in the movie and also in the book, a Christian pastor who studied a thousand near-death experiences.
00:33:26.000And his conclusion that he backs up verse by verse is that if you look at what actually happens in near-death experiences, it is consistent with Christian theology.
00:33:35.000Now, having said that, the question about hell is very interesting.
00:33:39.000We actually have in the movie, you'll see this and in my book, accounts of people who have had hellish experiences in their near-death experience.
00:34:31.000And this experience, he was later revived.
00:34:34.000And this experience was so real to him that he not only renounces atheism, he not only resigned his tenured professorship at the university, he not only became a Christian, he became an ordained pastor and is now pastor of a small rural church to this day.
00:34:50.000So, yeah, we have well-documented stuff that these people who have no nothing to gain by talking about this.
00:34:58.000I mean, who wants to say, oh, yeah, I died, I went to hell, frankly.
00:35:01.000I mean, it's the last thing somebody wants to admit.
00:35:04.000And yet, some of these people are willing to talk about it.
00:35:08.000And, you know, I think the best thing about heaven is that it's real.
00:35:13.000The worst thing about hell is that it's real.
00:35:16.000But the very best thing of all is that through this free gift of grace offered through Jesus Christ, we can, our pathway to heaven is open.
00:35:26.000The doors have been flung open to anybody, anywhere at any time in any culture who receives this free gift of grace.
00:35:35.000So, Lee, just in closing here, what was the thing you learned most about this film?
00:35:39.000Like, just from a... your own personal perspective, looking back, you say, wow, this either changed my mind on something or I have a better understanding of something.
00:35:48.000The thing I take away the most, I interviewed Luis Palau, the famous evangelist, who shared his faith with a billion people before he died.
00:35:55.000I had the last interview with him before he died.
00:35:58.000And he looked at me before he died and said something I'll take to my grave and beyond.
00:36:04.000He looked at me and said, Lee, when you get to the end of your life and all is said and done, you will never regret being courageous for Christ.
00:36:18.000And hearing that from him is something I'll always carry with me.
00:36:22.000I hope in my own small way, I can be courageous, just as your viewers and your listeners can take small steps to be courageous, especially this Easter season, to reach out to someone, invite them to church this Easter season.