"7 Great Lies of Organized Religion" The Live, Uncut Version Perry Marshall's talk at Willow Creek, June 2, 2006 The Main 7 Lies Presentation (69 minutes) (24 meg, MP3)
Good evening. How are you guys all doing tonight? It’s great to have you here. This presentation I’m giving you is partly something that’s on my heart that people simply need to know about. A lot of it, though, is also a personal story of hammering things out on my own. I think that if you’re here today it has something to do with the fact that you are an inquiring, probing person. You’re curious, you want to know how things tick and what makes things work and what’s true and what’s not true. You want to go a little deeper into the big questions than maybe most people do. That’s what the TruthQuest forum has always been about and I’m one of those people. I used to drive my dad nuts because I would ask him questions about everything like, “Dad, how does a car work?” “I have no idea Perry. You asked me that last week. You asked me that the week before.” “How does a radio work?” “I don’t know. Go ask somebody else.” I bet there would be very high quotients in here today of people that just ask ‘too many questions.’ What I’m going to talk about here tonight is a presentation called the Seven Great Lies of Organized Religion. This talk started out as a Web site and it still is. It’s at www.CoffeeHouseTheology.com. This is a Web site I put up about two and a half years ago. I had two motives in putting this Web site up. This is where the personal journey comes in. One motive was I’ve seen a lot of problems in Christianity, in the church, in religion, in spirituality. They always have something to do with a free spirit that starts out being very inspired. Then somebody makes like a plaster cast of it and then says, “Okay, that’s what everybody is supposed to do. That’s what everybody is supposed to look like.” It turns into a whole bunch of rules and it gets encrusted with barnacles and after a while it’s totally unrecognizable. A lot of people confuse that with spirituality. They see that and they see how ugly it is and how confining it is and they get so disgusted they turn and run the other way. So I put together a series of e-mails, seven messages called Seven Great Lies of Organized Religion. If you go to this Web site, www.CoffeeHouseTheology.com there is only one thing you can do. There are two things you can do. You can either sign up or leave. There is just a little sign up page. You scroll down and you enter your name and e-mail address and the messages start to come. So I thought, I’m going to get people to come to this Web site and if they think this sounds interesting, the unvarnished truth about religion, Christianity and spirituality in 2006. Seven Great Myths about Organized Religion. If they want to put in their e-mail address and they want to get the series, then what’s going to happen is if they have a question, a disagreement, if they think I’m smart, if they think I’m an idiot, whatever the case is, if they reply to the e-mail I’ll get it. We’ll start conversations that way. In the last two years 50,000 people have gone through this. I think every one of them sent me an e-mail. Fortunately not all of them did, but this has provoked so many discussions and so many conversations, and so many angles. I think by now people have hit me with every imaginable thing. I said there were two reasons why I did this. The second reason was this. The second reason was deep down I wanted to know if I take the most basic, essential message that Jesus was really trying to get across and if I distill it down to the core elements and I put it out there, am I going to find somebody who pokes the hole in it and proves that it isn’t true? I wanted to know because maybe that’s the way I’m wired. I thought, “You know what? Hard questions ought to have real answers and when you poke at them you ought to find a solid center. You shouldn’t be satisfied until you get to that center. You shouldn’t be satisfied until you get an answer.” Not that we all think that we’re going to find the answer to every question in the world. However that truth should stand up for itself and if it can’t then let’s find out like right now. Can you all relate to that? Okay, if Christianity is not true, let’s find out now. Let’s not find out when we’re on our death bed or something and we wish that we had done something else, right? I want to find out so I want to put this out there. I’m going to open myself up to every imaginable objection that could come along and every single person that’s going to tell me how stupid this is and we’re going to find out. So what I’m going to present to you today is based on the theory. Like Andy said, we’re going to have a Q and A session in the second part and I’m happy to take your questions whatever they are. Bring ‘em on. Lie Number One If you live a moral life, you deny yourself pleasure, follow the prescribed ritual and then give us enough money you’ll have a decent shot at being accepted by God. That’s number one. Do you know what? I think this is what most people think religion is. Why do they think that’s what religion is? Because that’s what it usually is. Right? How many of you remember the Wizard of Oz? Great scene at the end of the movie, the Wizard of Oz is bellowing through the speakers and issuing all these commands and telling them all this stuff that they’re supposed to do. “I am the great and powerful Oz!” Then Toto runs over and finds the curtain and pulls the curtain aside. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. I am the great and powerful Oz!” But you know what? Toto exposed the whole game, right? That’s a metaphor for a whole lot of things and it’s definitely a metaphor for religion. It’s like people put themselves up on a pedestal and they look nice and they’ve got the right kind of suit and they say the right kind of things. Then they send out everybody else to do mission impossible and there they are in a hotel room with a stripper. Then you wonder why people are cynical. Shouldn’t people be cynical if that’s what’s going on? Well, some things never change. Two thousand years ago spirituality had been buried in a pile of bureaucracy and rules and regulations and you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to look like this. Everything’s got to be just so. People used this to gain leverage. If you wanted the best seats in the choice restaurants and you wanted to line your pockets with cash and you wanted respectful greetings in the market place, “Hello, Rabbi Joseph. How are you?” then that was the way to get it. Well, they had everybody thinking that pleasing God was this performance marathon. But Jesus painted a totally different picture. Jesus said, “Two men went up to the temple to pray. One was a holy man. The other one was a tax collector. “The holy man stood and prayed, ‘God, I thank you that I’m not like other men. Extortionists, unjust, adulterers, or even like this lousy tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all I get.’ But the tax collector standing far away would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but beat his breast saying, ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner.’” Jesus explains, “I tell you, this tax collector went home forgiven rather than the holy man, for everyone who praises himself will be humbled but he who humbles himself will be praised.” Beware of the holy man that hangs a bunch of rules around your neck. The humble tax collector had the right idea because he knew that the way to get right with God was to be humble before God. The way to get right was to not be full of pretense and not be full of rules and to know that he was not matching up to the standard. He had to come clean. Lie Number Two God is huge and unapproachable and He wants you to labor, struggle and live in guilt. 2,000 years ago people would not pronounce God’s name. They used the letters YHWH which is like an unpronounceable symbol to express God. God was distant and remote and unreachable. But Jesus totally turned over the apple cart. Jesus had His own words for God. They were controversial. They were scandalous. He used words like Daddy. You’ve got to understand that doesn’t sound all that strange to us but to them it was like totally bizarre. Who is this guy talking about God like he’s Daddy? Who is this ‘Your heavenly Father’? So when the religious Gestapo condemned him for hanging out with prostitutes and tax collectors and all kinds of ruffians and party people. He told a story. Here’s the story He told. He says, “There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Dad, I wish you were dead.’” (This is the Perry revised version, okay?) “’Dad, I wish you were dead. Why don’t we pretend you’re dead and give me my share of the family estate?’ So the father divided his property between them.” When that says property that doesn’t mean like he went to the bank and took all the money out or half the money out and gave it to his son. You know what it means? He sold his land. Now let me ask you a question: Are Palestinians uppity about land? Is land like really close to the jugular if you’re from the Middle East? It’s your family identity. It’s the family farm. It’s been in the family for centuries. Now, we have no concept of this but I was in rural China. I have never really been to the Middle East so I can’t tell you Middle East stories. I was in rural China at this little farm on the Yangtze River. The guy told me that his house was 660 years old. Wow! That is an old house. Now you think that would mean a lot to a family, right? So what does this son do? Sells it. A total disgrace to his family. A few days later the disrespectful son packed his bags and headed for distant lands. He squandered his inheritance on wine, women and song and he had spent everything. You know what? I’m picturing he has probably got all kinds of friends that like to gamble. It was like, “Oh, well, a hundred bucks on this one.” The money is just disappearing. “Hey, I know you’re depressed but let’s go have a party.” “You know what would make you feel better? You need a woman. Let’s go to the red light district and get you one.” He’s like, “Hey, I’ve got all this money. This money is going to last a long time.” He’s probably not even thinking about the next day. “When he had spent everything a great famine arose in that country and he got hungry so he got a job feeding pigs.” Now how did Jews feel about feeding pigs? This was like the worst, most disgusting job you could imagine. This is the David Letterman Show top ten worst jobs and the top three you can’t even really talk about in polite company, right? He’s even worse than that. “The young man would have gladly eaten the pods that the pigs ate but no one gave him anything. “But when he came to his senses he said to himself, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough to spare but I’m here starving?’ He went back to his father but while he was still far away his father saw him and had compassion and ran.” In this culture men didn’t run. That was disgraceful. “He ran and embraced him and kissed him. “The son said, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven. I have sinned against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ “But the father said to the servants, ‘Go get the best robe. Put it on him. Put a ring on his hand, shoes on his feet.’ “’Bring the fatted calf. Kill it. Let us eat and have a huge party, for this my son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and he is found.’” Jesus sums it up like this. He says, “I tell you there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who comes back than over 99 people who are already good.” The father in the prodigal son story was not concerned compared to his love for his son. Compared to how much he loved his son he was not concerned with the family’s dignity, the family’s reputation or his net worth. He was concerned about his son. That was Jesus’ picture of God. That was the picture. Now, how do you hang a bunch of rules and a bunch of rejection around that? Lie Number Three You are not smart enough or good enough to think for yourself. We will do your thinking for you. One of the things that I have discovered as I have grown up and gone out in the world is that most people actually want somebody to do their thinking for them. That’s kind of the Yin to the Yang here. I think a lot of people are very content to just accept the standard answer and not have to think about it anymore. But let’s just think about something. What was the greatest invention in the history of the world? What was it? Anybody? Any opinions? The wheel? That’s a good answer. You know what? I say it’s the printing press. I think the printing press was the greatest invention in the history of the world. Frankly, even the Internet is just a derivative of the printing press. It’s just more and more hyper moveable type. That’s really all that it is. Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1445. It was the first moveable type printing press and this started revolution. What did he print? He printed the Gutenberg Bible. Now at this time generally only the clergy had a Bible, right? The priest in the church might have one but you didn’t have one. Now that might not be as bad as it sounds because people could memorize Scripture and they did much more than they do now. They can, it’s possible. When people began to have copies of the Bible in their own hands something shifted. The burden of responsibility for knowing the truth, knowing what was true about God, what was right and wrong fell on the shoulders of the common people rather than on the shoulders of the person who is telling them about the Bible. Okay? If you don’t have a Bible and you only have access to certain knowledge you are only responsible for what you can find out. Now if you have it in your hands and you’re able to read it you’re responsible for knowing what it says. This created a domino effect in culture. It had a lot to do with the Protestant Reformation. There were some things that needed to be corrected. Not that Martin Luther was the greatest saint in the world. He had his problems, too. But the domino effect was triggered by the fact that people could own a printed copy of the Bible. They could read it for themselves and nobody would have to tell them what it was all about. Now here is another thing. The scientific revolution as we think about it hit full stride within maybe 50 years of when that happened. Do you think that’s a coincidence? My brother in law did a PhD dissertation on this very topic and there are two interpretations of history. There is a secular interpretation and there is a spiritual interpretation. The secular interpretation of history is the printing press was the beginning of the end of the church. ‘Now people are finally unshackled from all of this nonsense and they can actually read it for themselves. They can find out, “Oh yes, this is a big pile of crap,” as some people like to say. The iron grip of the church was released from mankind and then progress just started to happen.’ That’s the secular interpretation. Now the interpretation that Alan defended in his PhD dissertation was actually the opposite. His interpretation was, “No, the printing press unleashed Christianity. The printing press caused a fomenting of people thinking and inquiring and discussing and debating and asking questions and rethinking old problems. This process of thinking and exploring stimulated all kinds of other things to happen, too.” There is a book The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark which explains and defends in great detail that the reason that we have a modern, technical, intellectual culture today, with all of the things that we have and all of the innovations we have, is because with the spread of Christianity came the necessity to grapple with some really huge questions. The huge questions were, “Okay, if there is one God and God is loving and powerful and omniscient and if God became man and came to earth, what does that mean about how we live our lives? What does that mean? “Does that mean that it’s okay to have slaves or not? Does that mean that I’m better than you or not? Does that mean that you’re better than me? “What kind of government does that say we should have? What should we do about how we spend our money? How does this affect all of this?” The existence of theology which considers these questions forced men and women to begin to think and engage in a process of discovery. Another thing that was unique to Christianity was a view that time is not some cyclical thing that goes around and around and around and it just keeps repeating itself. It’s not some static thing like a lot of pagan cultures believe, that things never really change. Pagan cultures generally believed that everything is just going to stay the same. I do what I do because my father did it because his father did it. In Christianity there is a discrete beginning of time in the universe. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” That means there was a beginning. The Christian world view looks at time as an arrow that goes forward, never backward. It’s an arrow of progress. Alan had to rewrite his dissertation five times. He was at Iowa State, not some Christian-friendly seminary. Most of his professors were atheists and they did not like his dissertation. He finally got it through after five rewrites and this was the dissertation that he defended: The printing press was the unleashing of Christianity because people could read and think for themselves. In a community of coming together and discussing and debating and considering it’s no coincidence that some of the great early scientists regarded their scientific efforts as a way of worshiping God. People like Boyle and Newton and Galileo and Copernicus regarded what they did as a way of worshiping God. Now how many people in this room have a Bible? Probably almost everybody. Even irreligious people probably have one somewhere. Well, the fact that we have one now makes us responsible for knowing what it is. There is no reason for anybody to feel as though someone is going to coerce you into accepting a certain interpretation or buying into a certain idea. You can read it for yourself. That’s both a privilege and a responsibility. What I would encourage people here to do is if you haven’t read it, then pick it up and read it. It has become so apparent to me, especially lately, that people get in religious debates and all of this kind of stuff when they talk about the Bible. However, they never actually read it. You know this DaVinci Code thing that’s going on? Well, if you’re not sure, how about reading the DaVinci Code and then read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Read that for yourself and say, “Do I like this Jesus that I encounter in the pages of this book? Does he seem like a real person? Do the people, the disciples, look and feel and smell like real people? Do all of the different things that go on seem real?” You don’t have to read very far to see that a lot of what the disciples do is like dumb and dumber. Every time the disciples get a chance to stick their foot in their mouth they do. Peter says, “You are Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus says, “Well, I’m going to die.” Peter says, “OK, maybe you’re not the Christ the Son of the living God.” Then Jesus said, “Get behind me Satan!” Now if you were Peter would you want everybody to know about this? Especially if you were making it up. Would you want people to know about this? Lie Number Four Women are spiritually inferior and must submit to the authority of men. This is a hot potato isn’t it? Well, I want you to think about something. In the ancient world women were chattel. You could divorce her for burning your toast. If she witnessed a crime she was not considered a valid witness in court. Women carried the water. They did all this work and men went and had their little huddles and got comfortable. It’s kind of the ancient version of he works all day, she works all day, they come home, she cooks supper, and he reads the paper. Right? Then they eat supper. Next he turns on the NFL with a bag of Ruffles and a Budweiser and spends the whole evening watching Monday night football. She disciplines the kids, does the homework, does the laundry, cleans up dinner and then at 10:00 NFL is over. She is exhausted, and he’s frisky. Is this life in America? Well, back then I dare say it was even worse. It’s not like she had a washing machine. Well, think about this. Jesus gets crucified. His body is taken down. He is buried in a tomb. Three days later some of his female friends come to the tomb. The door is wide open. Nobody is inside. They are shocked. They are even more shocked when Jesus shows up. He talks to them. He has a conversation with them. Then they run out and they tell the men. Then the men come and look and they trip over each other and investigate the tomb. Now if somebody had invented this story they never would have told it that way because who would trust a bunch of women? So what does this mean? Well this means two things. It means it is highly unlikely the story was made up because it totally cut against the grain of the culture. It also means that women were the first witnesses to the greatest event in all of human history. The resurrection of Christ is the hinge on which Christianity swings. Paul said, “If the dead are not raised we are above all men most to be pitied.” “If there is no such thing as the resurrection of the dead we are the most deluded people in all the world.” Who witnessed that? Women. So this also means that Christianity considers women’s witness as least as valuable as men’s. Now doesn’t that have sweeping implications? Here is another thing that I want you to think about. Today we have our modern notions of equality, democracy, human rights and the idea that everybody is equal. We have the American Declaration of Independence that says, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.” That means men and women of course. Where did that idea come from? There is a book which is pretty well known at least in academic circles. I read it as part of one of my classes when I was a freshman in college. It’s called Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville was a French guy. This was written in 1835. Think about this. In the 1830’s the United States is 50 years old. It’s the world’s first democracy. It seems to be working and everybody in the world is talking about it. All the people in Europe are talking about it. What’s going on in America? What’s going on over there in the United States? Well, the French aristocracy was kind of nervous. They are like, “We kind of like being in charge here. I don’t think we want a democracy. Let’s send Tocqueville over and he can tell us everything that’s going on there.” Well, Tocqueville’s book is brilliant. Just brilliant. When you read it you immediately see that he’s got his finger on the pulse of Americans and Americans have not changed much in 170 years. Now at the very beginning of the book he traces the history of the idea of democracy. He says in America there are two ideas that dominate. There are two ideas that more than anything define what Americans are. The two ideas are equality and individualism. Tocqueville coined the term individualism. He invented that word. He needed a word to describe Americans. Now, I’m not going to talk about individualism today. That’s a big subject. But Tocqueville asked a question. “Where did the idea of equality come from?” He was a very well read man. He was a very knowledgeable historian. He had read a lot of literature and he traced the idea of equality to Galatians 3:28 where it says, “In Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, all are equal in Christ.” Tocqueville says in the first chapter of Democracy in America, “That is the first time in the ancient world that anybody ever said that.” Then he goes on to explain that this idea got planted in Western culture and began to grow and began to develop. He makes the comment that from 1100 A.D. to the present, which for him is 1835, from 1100 to the present every major event in Europe resulted in more equality whether it was intended to or not. The Magna Carta, the invention of the gun, the invention of the horse shoe, the invention of the post office and the printing press. Every single one of those things brought more equality, not less. Who started it? Paul, in Galatians 3:28. So can you really say that Christianity puts women down? What I think you can say is that an idea got planted and it took time for people to work it out. The Bible never says that explicitly that slavery is wrong but you know what? If you read the Bible closely enough you figure it out. Looking back through history I don’t think it would have been enough to just say, “Okay, get rid of slavery.” Mankind, the church and people at large needed to think this through and buy into the answer based on principles. They had to reason their way through it and get rid of slavery. It took a long time. It’s not totally done yet. But understand that our modern ideas of equality come from Christianity. Our modern ideas of human rights come from Christianity. They sure don’t come from the Greeks. They sure don’t come from the Romans. They sure don’t come from the Chinese. Powerful stuff. Lie Number Five There is no single truth. Everyone needs to explore and find the truth that works for them. Well, I don’t know that you hear this so much from ancient religious institutions but you do hear it a lot. It tends to be expressed something like this. You’ve got your truth, I’ve got my truth, you find a faith that works for you, I’ll find a faith that works for me. My question is, “How many different versions of the truth can actually be true?” If somebody says, “You’ve got your truth. I’ve got my truth,” is that his truth, your truth or both of your truth? Well, there is a simple logical reality. I don’t really like it but it’s true. It’s impossible for all religions to be true. Now, let’s just take Hinduism, to pick one example. It says that God is in everything, that everything has a divine essence. Judaism, Islam and Christianity all say, “No, divinity is not in everything. There is one God and He is separate from His creation.” Now the description of God in Hinduism and the description of God in the monotheistic religions are not compatible. There is no way both of those things can be true in the same way. It’s impossible. That kind of raises the stakes a little doesn’t it? Again, I’m not really in love with this idea. One religion is the Baha’i faith. The Baha’i faith says that--I don’t remember the names of all the prophets but as I recall Abraham is a prophet of the Baha’i faith, Mohammed is, Jesus is, something like that. There are a bunch of these religious gurus. The Baha’i faith says that they are ALL God’s prophets. I would love to believe that. I really would love to believe that. That would be a kinder, gentler version of the world as far as I’m concerned. But you know what? Those prophets said things that are diametrically opposed to each other. I don’t think that you can reconcile that with logic and reason. You can’t. Now there are always more wrong ways to do just about anything than right ways. If you want to drive to O’Hare airport there are more wrong ways to get there than right ways. If you want to write a computer software program there are more wrong ways than right ways. Truth raises the stakes. It puts a sense of urgency on all of our questions. It shows that if we’re not careful we can fall for half truth. On the other hand if you do your homework, if you research the facts, if you study things, if the facts add up, if your heart tells you that you’re doing the right thing there is nothing wrong with you saying, “I figured out the truth.” Or at least, “I figured out part of the truth.” There is nothing wrong with that and you should. The fact that you should do that does not in any way make it right to be unkind or mean to people who have done the same thing and they’ve come to different conclusions than you. It doesn’t give us the right to fly airplanes into buildings or anything like that. What it does is it gives us the right and the opportunity to discuss and debate and explore. C.S. Lewis, I think, was talking about this when he said, “You don’t need to defend a lion. You just need to let him out of his cage.” In our culture it’s politically incorrect to talk about this in polite company. Now in the process of answering all these e-mails that come in from people I’ve learned why we have a taboo about discussing religion. It’s because some people aren’t mature enough to do it in a civil way, if you catch my drift. I get all kinds of people who tell me I’m an idiot. They don’t seem to have any sense that they should use any manners or anything when they express themselves. So now I know why we don’t talk about these things in public. But do you know what? We still need to talk about them, okay? Sometimes you’ve got to have thick skin and deal with a little shrapnel and try to get down to the bottom of things. That’s what TruthQuest is all about isn’t it? Spirituality gets locked up in a cage. People don’t talk to each other. People might have great ideas and great inspirations. But then nobody finds out about them because they’re afraid to talk about it. People have bizarre silly ideas that would never fly in a logical discussion but they never, ever find out they’re wrong because they never talk to anybody about it and find out. I mean look, we all have our limitations of perspective and we all have our blind spots. Usually other people can see our blind spots a whole lot better than we can. I know that’s true of me. If somebody tells you they have the truth they are not being arrogant. They are either right or they are sadly deceived. However, you can’t put down somebody for being deceived and you can’t fault somebody for being right. So the real challenge is discerning the difference. Lie Number Six The Bible is out of date, inaccurate and overrated. People in the 21st century are way too smart for that. Now, at first blush that doesn’t sound like an organized religion kind of thing to say until you start investigating. But
then you’ll find out there are an awful lot of churches and
an awful
lot of denominations and different people. They’ll tell you
exactly
that in hushed tones. They’ll pretend that they respect the
Bible but
they really don’t. Think about this for a minute. If you were a religious leader wouldn’t it be easier to keep people under your thumb and get them to follow your agenda if there was no external standard of reference that you could hold them accountable to? If somebody rejects an external standard of reference and they just say, “Come, my children. This is what I think you should do.” He’s the standard and it’s just his opinion. Isn’t it easy for him to do anything he wants to? When I was growing up my pastor would say, “If I ever start teaching stuff that’s wrong and it’s not in the Bible and I start distorting the Bible, you come and you confront me. If I don’t listen to you, you throw me out.” That’s how I think a church should operate. You hold the leaders to a standard. You make them walk their talk. How do you know what the talk is? You read it. Mortimer Adler, one of the greatest literary scholars, spent decades researching a book called The Great Ideas. In the research of this book he and his staff read every major piece of literature that’s ever been written in Western history. He distilled it down to 102 ideas that are important in Western culture. In the very first chapter of this book he talks about what he calls “the 20th century delusion.” The 20th century delusion is the fact that modern people think that we are more enlightened, wiser and more sophisticated than people that ever lived before us. Do we have more technology? Sure we do. Do we have more medicine? Sure we do. Do we have transportation and all of this kind of stuff? Sure we do. But are we wiser? I learned something about this when I was in college. I took this class called English Authors Before 1800. This went from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Samuel Johnson. I was astonished at how sharp some of these people were. They wrestled with tough questions and they got down to it. They were wise. Our 20th century and 21st century cultures are no wiser than any other time. We’ve got just as many dysfunctions as people ever had. We just have more sophisticated dysfunctions. It used to be that if you wanted to watch a fight you would have to go to your neighbor’s house and look through the window. Now you just turn on Jerry Springer, right? The book of Proverbs in the Bible was written 3,000 years ago. The book of Proverbs has saved my butt more times than anything I can think of. “A soft answer diffuses anger but harsh words stir up evil.” “A friend loves at all times and a brother is born for adversity.” “The fool hates to be corrected by his father but a wise son listens to advice.” I think what’s so clever about Proverbs is he takes these incredible profound truths and crunches them down to these little sentences with two parts. “A soft answer turns away wrath but harsh words stir up anger.” Two ways to go. Two ways to have this next phone conversation we’re about to have. Which way do you want it? You get to decide. Solomon lays it out for you. Thirty-one chapters. A great book to read one chapter a day for a month. In my professional life I spend most of my time with entrepreneurs and business people. In the entrepreneurial business world people talk about books like Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill or they talk about How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. You guys have seen books like this, right? Proverbs is head and shoulders above all that stuff. There is absolutely no contest. Not even close. If I had to take one business book to a desert island I’d take Proverbs. It’s brilliant and it’s 3,000 years old. Now Solomon who wrote Proverbs said there is nothing new under the sun. Some people kind of snicker at that. But he doesn’t mean there are no new technologies or no new innovations. That’s not what he means. What he means is there are no new situations. There are no new ethical and moral quandaries. It’s all the same stuff. I think it was Chesterton who said, “News is old things happening to new people.” Another thing. People ask me things like, “Is the Bible a translation of a translation of a translation? Is it a copy of a copy of a copy and nobody knows what the original was? Is this like the game where you whisper something to somebody in the room and it goes around and comes back and you whispered to them, ‘Go to McDonald’s,’ and it comes back to you, ‘The butterfly flew out the window,’ or something like that.” Well, for a long time the oldest existing copies of the Old Testament were dated 1100 A.D. Most of the events it described happened in 1500 B.C. So skeptics wanted to say that it was all written, all of these prophecies about Jesus and stuff, they want to say they were written very long after the fact. In some degree it was hard to argue with that until a boy threw a rock into a cave in the Qumran Valley and they discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then they found fragments from most of the books of the Old Testament dating to before Christ. Most of them were somewhere between 100 and 200 B.C. The text in those scrolls was for all practical purposes identical to the stuff they had from 1100. It had been preserved pretty much exactly. This is remarkable! This proved that they didn’t make this up in 500 AD or some such thing. There are prophecies; I’ll give you an example of a couple. Isaiah described the crucifixion of Jesus with remarkable precision 700 years before it happened. Daniel in 550 B.C. predicted the rise and fall of the Babylonians, the Persian, the Greek and the Roman empires in sequence with remarkable details, including the names of the rulers. That was 550 B.C. It’s really astonishing when you go look this up. Let’s take the New Testament. We’ve got 5,000 ancient manuscripts dating from the second and third centuries. Some of them date back to around 100 A.D. We have writings of early church fathers, people like Polycarp, Ignatius, Origin, Clement and early church fathers. It all converges. It all tells a common story. I think the only reason that people really doubt the Bible is that it talks about miracles. It talks about people rising from the dead. It talks about blind men being raised. It talks about lame men walking. The resurrection of Jesus, was it a conspiracy? Chuck Colson was a guy who got arrested in the Watergate scandals. Here is what he said. “Watergate was a conspiracy to cover up perpetuated by the closest aids to the president of the United States. One of them, John Dean, testified against Nixon to save his own butt only two weeks after informing the president about what was really going on. Two weeks. The real cover up, the lie, could only be held together for two weeks and then everybody else jumped ship to save themselves. And what’s more, nobody’s life was at stake.” Now let’s say that the disciples went into the tomb. Never mind the soldiers and all that stuff. Never mind the big rock. They went into the tomb and they got Jesus’ body out. They cut it into a thousand pieces and they fed it to the fishes in the Sea of Galilee. Then they went around and said, “Jesus rose from the dead. Hey everybody, follow us.” Okay, so let’s say they did that. If you read history these guys were stoned to death, sawed in two, crucified upside down and beheaded. Eleven of the twelve disciples were all martyred that way. Now don’t you figure that if they pulled this off as a hoax, that somebody would have said, “Okay, alright, don’t chop my head off. You don’t have to saw me in half. I’ll tell you what really happened.” If somebody is about to chop your head off are you going to keep defending your silly story? What do you have to gain at that point? One thing that is really hard to argue with historically is that the early church and the early disciples were convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead. Somehow or another they got convinced that that happened and they started the greatest mass movement in the history of civilization. Lie Number Seven If God was really so powerful and good He wouldn’t allow so much evil and suffering to go on. Now this is not an organized religion question. This is an everybody question. My wife and I, We’ve got little kids at home. We can’t both go, but one of us goes to the jagged edge every year. We do that as much as we can. So we’ve been to places like Sao Paulo, Brazil and Mozambique and Nairobi, Kenya. These are really poor places. Mozambique is the 18th poorest country in the world. I was in Kenya a year and a half ago. I went to see a guy who runs a foster program for AIDS orphans. Now most Americans don’t really grasp this. Every day in Africa 6,000 people die of AIDS. Every day! So imagine not two World Trade Center towers, but four. Going down every day. Not in a blaze of media glory, but in silence. Many of these people leave behind children. George took me around and showed me all of these AIDS orphans that he’s helping. I met a seven year old boy. I have a seven year old, right? I’ve got a seven year old boy at home and this is a seven year old boy dying of AIDS for lack of a one dollar bus ticket to get a free shot. If you took all the parties and all the successes and all the humor and all the comedy shows... then if you took all of the suffering and all of the agony and all that other stuff, there is no comparison. Is there? I think it’s only fair for us to ask, "Why does God let it go on?” Don’t we all wonder? It would not be possible for me to write on this piece of paper here, “Why is there evil and suffering in the world?” “A, B, C, or D.” “Class, the correct answer is C.” If you had an answer like that would it make you any happier? Well, I don’t think that God gives us an answer but he tells us a story. The story goes like this. A certain Jewish rabbi threatens the Jewish Gestapo. He threatens their cushy jobs and their clout and their political power and he asks them very hard, penetrating questions that they don’t really want to answer. They decide, “We’re going to get rid of this guy.” They manage to hijack the local justice system to the point where he gets turned over to the Romans. He’s given the cruelest punishment, the cruelest torture ever devised in the history of man. I don’t think I have to tell any of you how awful a crucifixion is. It’s awful. Well, Jesus gets nailed to a cross and He’s between two criminals and there’s a conversation that takes place. I want you to listen closely to this conversation. One of the criminals hanging beside him scoffed, “So you’re the Messiah, are you? Prove it by saving yourself, and us too while you’re at it.” But the other criminal protested. A different book says that he initially was going along with the first guy but then he came to his senses. It says the other criminal protested, “Don’t you fear God even when you are dying? We deserve to die for our evil deeds but this man hasn’t done anything wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” and Jesus replied, “I assure you today you will be with me in Paradise.” Stop the camera. What you have there is a picture of the entire world right there in that little conversation. People are going to do one of two things. They are either going to blame God for all their problems and be mad at God for not bailing them out, even though we create most of our own problems ourselves. People either blame God for their own problems and vomit all over Him and get mad at Him. Or… we say, “You know what? I got myself into this mess and God came down and lived in this mess with us and experienced this mess with us and suffered with us, even though he was innocent just like those AIDS orphans are innocent. Jesus suffered with us.” We can accept that as his gift to us and ask him for mercy, which he gladly, gladly gives. Which way do you want it? You get to decide. Again, I don’t think that we are going to get an answer written on a chalk board saying, “Here’s why there is evil and suffering in the world, I’m going to show you exactly why.” There are a lot of things that we can discuss about this question and they are all interesting. However, what it really comes down to is, “I don’t know, but I know that God was not so distant or so great or so removed from us that He would not come down and experience what we experience.” You know what this does? This makes Jesus the brother of everybody who has ever suffered. Everybody who has ever endured injustice, everybody who has died of AIDS even though they didn’t do anything, Jesus becomes that person’s brother and companion. It means that God understands where we are at. So I want to leave you with that thought. Click here for the Q&A Session
©2007 Perry S. Marshall |