Parent Compass Radio

Real Christian Families: Today, you are going to hear the case for heaven. So if you had any questions or any doubts about heaven or how to get there, today in this conversation by the end, your questions should be answered.

We have with us the New York Times bestselling author, and he's sold 14 million books, Lee Strobel, who's the author of The Case for Christ and now, new book, The Case for Heaven. So welcome Lee, we're so excited you're here.

Lee Strobel: Thank you. I am too.

Real Christian Families: You absolutely did not believe in God or Christ.

Lee Strobel: Right, I was an atheist for much of my life. My background's in journalism and law, so I tend to be a skeptical kind of person. It wasn't until my wife came to faith that I decided to take my journalism training and legal training and really investigate the credibility of Christianity.

Real Christian Families: So you set out to prove that Christianity is just make-believe.

Lee Strobel: That was my hope because I wanted to get my wife back to the days when she was an agnostic and I was an atheist and we were happy that way. So I focused primarily on the resurrection of Jesus because I figured if I could disprove that, all of Christianity crumbles. I looked at other things as well, but that was the central focus of my two-year investigation.

Real Christian Families: What did you prove or not prove? Did you not prove Jesus was real?

Lee Strobel: Well, through historical sources, I think the evidence is clear and compelling that Jesus not only claimed to be the Son of God, but then he backed up that claim by returning from the dead. Jesus said at one point, "I and the Father are one." The Greek word for "one" there is not masculine, it's neuter, which means Jesus was not saying I and the Father are the same person. He was saying I and the Father are the same thing. We're one in nature; we're one in essence.

The audience understood what he was saying. They picked up stones to kill him because they said, "Well, you're just a man and you're claiming to be God." So Jesus claimed to be God, but so what? I could claim to be God. Anybody could claim to be God. But if Jesus claimed to be God, died, and then three days later rose from the dead, that's pretty good evidence he's telling the truth.

Real Christian Families: You proved to yourself, who did not believe—you set out to disprove—you proved to yourself, who did not believe, that you feel there's evidence that Jesus is real.

Lee Strobel: Not only real, but that he claimed to be God. He died and rose from the dead and thus proved he's telling the truth when he claims that he's divine.

Real Christian Families: What are the key points that prove this?

Lee Strobel: Four areas. First of all, his death. How do we know he was dead? Well, even the Journal of the American Medical Association carried an analysis of his death and said, "Clearly, the weight of the historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead even before the wound to his side was inflicted." We have five ancient sources outside the Bible that talk about the death of Jesus. So it's clear that he was dead.

Secondly, we have early accounts that he rose from the dead. In other words, reports that come so quickly you can't write them off as legend. It took time for legend to develop in the ancient world, but we have a report of the resurrection of Jesus, including named eyewitnesses and groups of eyewitnesses, that has been dated by scholars to within months of his death. That's like a newsflash from ancient history.

Then we have the empty tomb. The evidence for that is even the opponents of Jesus admitted the tomb was empty. Then we have eyewitnesses. Most of the things we accept as being true about the ancient world are based on maybe one or maybe two sources of information.

For the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the resurrected Jesus, we have no fewer than nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament confirming and corroborating their conviction that they encountered the risen Christ. That is an avalanche of historical data.

Real Christian Families: I loved the book, and what you're speaking to is what made the difference to me in reading the book. I came to Christ earlier, so I just know he's real because I've powerfully experienced him in my life. Through the things that you speak of that I thought were so powerful from your book, one, the mountain of evidence, more evidence than any other book that has stood the test of time.

Then another thing that seems minor, but was huge to me, was that the Bible says it went dark, and all the historical places in the world at that time corroborate that it went dark.

Lee Strobel: Well, we do have reports from ancient history that confirm that there was a darkness that fell over the earth at the time of the crucifixion of Jesus. People tried to write it off as being an eclipse of the sun, but we know historically there was no eclipse of the sun at that point. So we do have that kind of corroboration.

There was a guy named Thallus, who was an historian who wrote a history of the Eastern Mediterranean world, and he mentions the darkness. Now, his writings have been lost, but we found somebody responding to that and recounting that. So even that has been corroborated.

Real Christian Families: It sounds like it was an eclipse of the SON. But the other thing that's powerful—and I know I have friends that have come to Christ, and you mentioned it and alluded to it, but you didn't add the part that if there wasn't an empty tomb, if he didn't rise from the dead, why did these scared-out-of-their-mind disciples turn around and die speaking their faith, which you have shown by fact they all went out and told everybody else and everybody else is believing it, still today?

Lee Strobel: Well, we have seven ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament, most of them outside the New Testament, that confirm that the disciples lived lives of deprivation and suffering as a result of their proclamation that Jesus had risen. How some of them actually died gets a little bit lost in the mists of history, but that's not the point. Their willingness to die is the point. They were willing to die for their proclamation that Jesus had risen.

We have incontrovertible evidence of that. Why would they do that? Because they heard on the news that Jesus rose from the dead? No. Because somebody told them? No. Because they were there. They touched him, they talked with him, they ate with him. Of all human beings who've ever lived, they knew the truth. Knowing the truth, they were even willing to give their lives for it. That tells me something about the veracity of their claims.

Real Christian Families: Would they die for a lie?

Lee Strobel: Exactly. Nobody willingly and knowingly dies for a lie.

Real Christian Families: So you proved to yourself all this evidence about Jesus Christ, but you needed to take an additional step. You needed to act on that information because your wife had become a Christian and you were really mad at her, as the movie came out and said. So what was that step you needed to make, that personal choice?

Lee Strobel: My wife pointed out a verse to me, John 1:12, that says, "But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name." I looked at that verse and I realized it forms an equation of what it means to become a child of God: Believe plus Receive equals Become.

I believe based on the data of history that Jesus is the Son of God. He proved it by returning from the dead. But that's not enough. I had to receive. Receive what? Receive this free gift of forgiveness and eternal life that Jesus purchased for me on the cross when he died as my substitute to pay for all of my sin. When I would receive this free gift of his grace, then I would become a child of God.

So I confessed my sin, I turned from that, and in a prayer of repentance and faith, I received this free gift of forgiveness and eternal life that Jesus purchased for me on the cross. Over time, my values, my character, my morality, my attitude, my relationships, my worldview, my philosophy—all these things over time began to change for the good.

Real Christian Families: I hear your five-year-old daughter even noticed it. What's happened to Daddy?

Lee Strobel: She did. All she had known up to that point was a dad who was absent, angry, getting drunk. That was my life. I was successful, but on Saturday night, I'd be drunk in the snow in an alley. That's all she knew. But starting on November the 8th of 1981, when I received this free gift of God's grace, she started to watch. Something's changing with my dad. Something's different with my dad. Something's new with my dad.

It took about four or five months, and then one Sunday morning, she came up to my wife and said, "Mommy, I want God to do for me what he's done for Daddy." That's when she prayed to receive this free gift of God's grace. She became a child of God.

Today, she's a strong follower of Jesus. She's written half a dozen novels, books of fiction, that all have the gospel woven into them. Same thing with our son. He's a PhD now in theology and a professor at Biola University. So God changed our family. He rescued our family and really transformed each of us one by one.

Real Christian Families: And this is available for anyone. So anyone listening today, don't wait another minute. This is joy incomprehensible. It's happened to me, it's happened to Lee, shock of all shocks, because he was not going to have any of it.

So definitely take the time and make a prayer giving your life to the Lord. Confess your sins, he's waiting to forgive you, and it's a free gift into his kingdom. You have a new thing to prove to us, right? The Case for Heaven.

Lee Strobel: Yes. After I almost died 10 years ago—

Real Christian Families: You almost died?

Lee Strobel: Yeah, my wife found me unconscious, called an ambulance. I 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." I hovered between life and death there for a while. I had hyponatremia, which is a severe drop of blood sodium. It's an unusual condition, but it would have proven fatal if they hadn't been able to save me.

It's a very clarifying experience to almost die. You want to know for sure what happens when I close my eyes for the last time in this world. I believe the Bible because I'm a Christian. I believe what it tells me, but at the same time, I've got this skeptical gear too. So what do I do? I go out and I investigate. Now my new book, The Case for Heaven, presents the case that indeed we can spend eternity with God in heaven, and the new motion picture is a creative, visual exploration of that same evidence.

Real Christian Families: I really loved The Case for Christ movie, so I bet this would be similar. I hear there are people that have almost died. Did you find evidence of heaven?

Lee Strobel: Yes, absolutely. We found evidence of people who have almost died. In fact, they have clinically died. There's no brainwaves, there's no heartbeat, there's no pulse. Some of them have been declared dead and are being wheeled to the morgue. Yet they say later, "I was awake the whole time."

We're not just a body; we're a body and a spirit. The Bible describes what happens when we die: our spirit separates from our body and goes into what's called the intermediate state, where we're either in the presence of Jesus or not, until final judgment and our resurrected bodies being reunited with our spirit and then we spend eternity in either heaven or hell.

So there's this intermediate state where our spirit is separated from our bodies. How do we know that that's possible? How do we know that's true? The movie, The Case for Heaven, and my book explore what evidence there is that indeed our spirit, our soul, our consciousness, does survive our physical demise.

We have corroboration of that. I'll give you an example. A woman named Maria dies in the hospital, but she says later, "I was conscious the whole time. My spirit separated from my body. I watched the resuscitation efforts as they're trying to resuscitate me. I'm watching that as my spirit is hovering near the ceiling and then I went out of the hospital."

But then her spirit returned to the body, she was revived, and the first thing she said is, "By the way, there's a shoe on the roof of the hospital. It's a man's tennis shoe. It's dark blue, it's left-footed, there's some wear over the little toe, and the shoelaces are tucked under the heel." They go up and they find it just as she described it. How could she know that? Only if she authentically had an out-of-body experience.

We have documented many of these cases of people who were clinically dead, and yet their consciousness lives on. There have been 900 scholarly articles written and studies done of near-death experiences over the last 40 years. This is a well-researched area. Lancet, which is the famous medical journal in England, said that no alternative explanation can explain away this phenomenon.

We even have a study that showed that 21 blind people, when they had their near-death experience, were able to see, many of them for the first time. They were blind since birth. A woman named Vicki dies in a car accident but then she's revived and she says, "I was conscious the whole time and I watched. I saw people for the first time trying to resuscitate me. I saw plants, I saw birds." As one researcher said, this is medically impossible.

The other important thing to know is that John Burke, who's a Christian pastor who studied 1,000 near-death experiences, says that if you look at what actually occurs in a near-death experience—not how people interpret it, but what actually takes place—it is consistent with Christian theology. So in this movie, The Case for Heaven, and in my book, I explore these amazing cases where we have actual corroboration that these are true experiences.

Real Christian Families: That's so exciting. So how do we get to heaven? Is there a guarantee? Are we to be a good person? If we're a good person, do we get to go?

Lee Strobel: Every other religion in the world is based on what I call the DO plan, spelled D-O. You have to do a bunch of things to try to earn your way to heaven. You've got to use a Tibetan prayer wheel, you've got to go through a series of reincarnations, you've got to give alms to the poor, you've got to go on pilgrimages. Maybe if you do enough things, maybe you'll make it to heaven—probably not.

Christianity, in contrast, is spelled not D-O but D-O-N-E. It's done. Jesus said, "It is finished." In other words, his death on the cross was as our substitute to pay the penalty we deserved for all the sins that we've committed, and he offers forgiveness and eternal life as a free gift of his grace.

Christianity is the only religion on the planet based on grace. We can't earn it, we don't deserve it, we can't merit it, but God offers it out of an expression of his love. We just need to receive it in a prayer of repentance and faith.

Real Christian Families: What I love about that is the guarantee is in Jesus Christ.

Lee Strobel: That's right. And the Holy Spirit, when you receive this free gift of God's grace, over time, the Holy Spirit will confirm with your spirit that yes, you are adopted as a child of God.

Real Christian Families: Will you pray for the people watching?

Lee Strobel: Yes. If someone wants to take that step and receive Jesus right now, you don't even have to say this out loud, but you can if you'd like because God knows your heart. Just pray and let me offer that prayer.

Just pray, "Lord Jesus, as best I can, I believe that you are the Son of God. You proved it by returning from the dead. Right now, I confess the obvious, which is I am a sinner. I want to turn from that and in an attitude of repentance and faith, I want to receive your free gift of forgiveness and eternal life."

"Thank you for loving me so much that you endured the torture of the cross so that we could be reconciled forever. Help me to live the kind of life that you want me to live because from this moment on, I am yours."

Now Father, we know that when someone prays that kind of prayer in repentance and faith with a sincere heart, we know that they have, in the words of the Scriptures, been born again. They have been born anew. They are now your child and will spend eternity with you in heaven.

We pray that their faith would be nurtured, that they would grow in a solid confirmation that they are your child, and we look forward to spending eternity with them in Jesus' name, Amen.

Real Christian Families: Amen. Such a privilege and joy to be here with you today, Lee. Thank you for being here.

Lee Strobel: My pleasure. Great to be with you.

Real Christian Families: Thank you.