God in a World of Man

Does truth exist in a world of multi-culturalism? How do we value beauty and diversity while acknowledging truth? Nabeel Qureshi helps us see how God breaks through into a world of man.

This is part of a series on The Gospel Truth about Jesus.

Transcript

So what I hope we conveyed in the first session was that Jesus is the truth. The gospel message is true for all people. It doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter where you are, it is true. It actually happened, and because God entered into this world and died on the cross for our sins, the gospel message is absolutely true. It actually did happen, and it's true for everyone. So that was kind of the point of the first one.

Now the second talk, we're going to be talking about God in a world of man. And what we're looking at nowadays is a society that, especially our society, that is really focused on multiculturalism. And multiculturalism is not necessarily the same view of the United States that we had growing up. Even when I was growing up, I remember hearing that the United States is a melting pot, and that people come here from all nations, and they contribute their society, their aspect of society, as they become one with American society. That's not what things are anymore. That's not what multiculturalism is.

Multiculturalism is this idea that people can coexist with one another, never really integrating, never really integrating, keeping their own ideas for themselves and not discussing them with other people, not interacting, not being refined, not being shaped, little enclaves of belief living with one another. We have found that that does not work politically. I'm not the only one saying that. Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, has said multiculturalism has failed. She said that about her nation because people were not becoming German. They would come to her nation, and they would remain of their own nationality, retaining all their anti-German sentiments and their pro-national sentiments from before, not becoming one, and it caused the nation to fail according to the chancellor of that nation.

Now, we're talking about the same kind of failure when it comes to the religious forum. You cannot have a multicultural religious forum and everyone be right. I had a very interesting conversation in Seattle recently with a pagan feminist who was very intent on saying that whatever I wanted to believe was true, and whatever she wanted to believe was true, and what she believed she chose to believe because it was what was true for her and what worked for her. I couldn't get off the ground talking to her. We couldn't even begin to converse because she just saw the world in such a privatized way that my thoughts weren't even entering into her sphere, her bubble. And that's become the characteristic of our nation today, both in the political cultural sense and in the religious cultural sense.

Now, the underlying current that undergirds this multicultural view is actually a secular humanist presupposed naturalism. The reason why they can say my truth is true for me and your truth is true for you is because ultimately they think truth doesn't matter. There is no truth in that sense that it matters to me or to you. It's an idea that ultimately all that we have is what our five senses can feel, all that I can know is what I can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. All that I can have in my life as truth is that which I can physically grasp. That's it. That's all there is. There is no God. And that has kind of driven our society.

You look at the changes that have happened in just the past few years in our society. I remember growing up, I had no idea what a gay person was. I had no idea what it was. Someone called me gay in third grade. I had to go home to my mom. I was like, Mom, someone called me gay. She's like, what did you say back? I was like, I don't know if I'm gay or not. I don't know what it is. And she had to explain what it was to me to the end. And that's how I found out what it was. But now, this is not just a household issue. It's the hot topic. And the conclusion of our nation, almost unilaterally, is that homosexuality is perfectly fine. And according to one of the major news reports recently, I don't remember which one it was, but I saw it in the airport. It doesn't matter whether the Supreme Court has voted on it yet or not. America has voted. And they've voted in favor of homosexuality. Why? What is happening in our nation? It's this presupposed naturalism that leads us to say there is no absolute law. There is no right. There is no wrong.

What we're doing essentially as people is we're trying to coexist in the same place. And I want to exist multiculturally with you without my toes stepping on yours or yours stepping on mine. You do whatever you want and let me do whatever I want. And that's how we'll define the laws of this nation. So why is it wrong to murder? Not because it's actually wrong to kill someone, but because you might kill me. And I don't want you to kill me. And I don't want you to kill my family. That's why it's wrong to murder. And that's why I'm going to stand up for the right to be free of murder. Same for theft. Why is it wrong to steal? Not because stealing is in some sense wrong. It's because you might steal from me. And I don't want you to steal from me. I don't want that for myself. And so that's how I'm going to vote is for it to be wrong.

That is the undergirding principle of our nation's ethos today. And that is what's driving this view ultimately is a presupposed naturalism. There is no morality. There is nothing that divinely governs law, what we should do and what we should not do. And that naturalism is actually not just in the political and religious sphere. It is seeped into the scientific sphere.

In the university level, when I was studying, as Stuart said earlier, I was in medical school. So I did undergrad as pre-med. And then I went to med school and I studied in medicine. And the whole time I'm studying, it became abundantly clear to me that what was used methodologically as a principle had now become the fiat of our academic perspective. There is no God. We had to accept that in order to do our work.

Now, this is a fascinating turn. Because the very reason the scientific revolution could happen is because people believed there was order in the universe. That we could test things in this world because there was order given to it from above. Something beyond this universe that gave it order. If there were no God, there could be no order in this world in order for us to conduct science. That was a fundamental understanding of the scientific revolution. If God is real, therefore there is truth, therefore there is order, therefore we can test this world around us. But since miracles and divine explanations weren't involved in the scientific method itself, it has been removed entirely from the perspective of academia.

And I think that combined with a slow compartmentalization of the church from the rest of the public sphere, now we have everyone thinking that naturalism has a monopoly on truth. And that's just not the case. But as I'm coming up in the university, that's what we're being taught. That's what we're being taught, how to see the world.

Now, I was recently here in Atlanta a few months ago meeting with other apologists from around the nation. And one of them said, as she was studying at the University of Toronto, that her anthropology professor made it his stated objective to take Christians away from their faith by the end of the semester. At a state school, the University of Toronto. That isn't just endemic to Canada. It happens in the United States, too. People are making it… They've gone so far as to actually say, we're going to try to pull you away from your Christian faith. And we're paying for that with our tax dollars, by the way. I'll let you take care of that one.

So that's what's happening with our university now. And I, as I'm coming along, I'm sitting here studying microbiology. I'm seeing immunology. I'm seeing the body designed to fight off disease in such a way that it's this massive ballet orchestrated in this perfect sense. It doesn't make any concept of sense to say that this was an accident. That this did not have some kind of design. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The way it works so masterfully.

I mean, when you're in the car and a deer dashes in front of your car, as so often happens wherever I happen to live. Just dash in front of the car. Think about it for a second. All of a sudden, you feel tingling in your fingers. Blood rushes to your head. What has just happened? You've had the adrenal glands that are sitting on top of your kidney all of a sudden release some kind of chemoreceptors. Why? Because your brain has commanded it to do that because you saw something startling. Goes to your brain, gets registered, goes to your adrenals. Your adrenals release some kind of hormone into your bloodstream that has then been disseminated throughout your body. And immediately you're on high alert. And that's an accident. Well, it would be if you hit the deer. That doesn't happen on accident. That kind of thing doesn't happen on accident.

And the classic image of this is that you don't have a tornado going through a junkyard and all of a sudden ending up with a perfectly functioning 747. It doesn't happen. Chaos only begets chaos, not order. And that's not just something theologians say. That's the second principle of thermodynamics. You move from a state of order to disorder. That happens in every single system, no matter what it is. The law of entropy, from order to disorder. We believe that, but we don't let that understanding in the university seep into our perspective of our worldview. We just don't.

And so what we end up doing in the university level is we end up teaching our kids that God isn't real. Now, how do we do that? We don't say it, generally speaking. But what we do is we say that the universe came about, however many billions of years ago, trillions of years ago, through a big bang. By the way, I'm not commenting on the age of the earth. I'm just saying this is what the scientists will say. It came about through a big bang. And no one, per se, was involved in the banging of it. It just banged. And all of a sudden, you have worlds coming into existence. You have planets. You have solar systems. You have galaxies. They just came into existence. And it just so happened that one of them, the Milky Way, came into such an existence that in between two of its arms, two of its radial arms, there was an area that had perfectly the right amount of radiation to support life. It just happened to be that way. And in that area between these two radial arms, there happened to be a solar system with just one star.

If it was a binary system, life wouldn't have been possible. It was a single system, one star solar system. And in that solar system, there just happened to be an asteroid belt that would shield the inner planets from cosmic debris. It just happened to be that way. And then one of those planets happened to be perfectly far away from the star, that during the summers, it would be a bit hot, and during the winters, it would be a bit cold. But any further away, all life would freeze, and any closer, all life would melt. It just happened to be perfectly far away. And the tilt in the Earth happened to be perfect for the seasons that were needed. And there happened to be a moon that was just far enough away from the Earth to create the tidal waves, which would support life. It just so happened that all these things took place.

And it just so happened that that atmosphere in the Earth was perfused with oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and carbon, such that when electricity would strike the Earth, it would happen to produce amino acids. And those amino acids, even though statistically speaking, we understand it would take trillions of years for this to happen. It just so happened that it didn't take trillions of years for those amino acids to form proteins, and for those proteins to then form life. Oh, don't ask us what the explanation is for life. We don't even have a model to go from not life to life. We don't know how it happened. We don't know what it happened. It just so happened. And then that life slowly evolved from single-celled organisms into us.

That is what the university is teaching us. That is what we're being sent out into the world with. Now, what does that mean for us? What does that mean when we see the world as students having been taught at the university level, many of us with professional degrees, graduate degrees, coming out into the world, what have we been built with as far as intellectually speaking? We've been taught that we are a cosmic mistake. That we are an accident. That we're a byproduct of the universe, no more valuable than the ground that we walk on. No one intended us to be here. We had no purpose for being here. And when this world ends, everything we ever did on it will have come to nothing. And when our lives end, all of our experience, all that we could have derived from this world, all of it will have meant nothing. If we run into any difficulties in life, there's no real hope. You just happen to be here anyway. Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. That's what it means. That's what we're being sent out with.

Now, if I'm being told that I am a purposeless lump of carbon, how do you think I'm going to see you? How am I going to frame my view of how I should treat other people? How am I going to frame my view of how I should treat myself? If I'm going through a difficult time, what reason is there to keep going? The only thing I can get out of this is good experience anyway. And if my experience is difficult, why keep going? Why not take my life? Really, why not? There's no benefit for me to stay around. Is it any surprise to us that when the secular humanist movement started gaining sway in society, suicide levels have steadily increased? Is it any surprise? That's how we're being taught to see the world.

Tragically, we find the foundations of this forming in the 19th century through people like Nietzsche and nihilism. And that has come from the philosophers into the artists, and from the artists it has gone into all of us. And what happened in the mid-20th century? What kind of thinking led Hitler to do the things that he did? Well, we know he was heavily involved in the eugenics movement. He had read what was happening with eugenics. Are we familiar with this? This is the idea that since we are just a society of lives, we need to create an environment and a society which will enhance those lives that are the strongest. Because all we can do as a civilization is survive. That's all we can do. Just like animals that reproduce in the wild, all that they're trying to do is survive. That's all we're doing. We think we're doing more, but we're not. So let's try to survive as best we can. And like we do with shrubs, we take off the parts of the shrubbery that's taking life-giving nutrients. We take it off so that the rest of the shrub can have more of the nutrients, and that part will be killed off for the sake of the rest of the society. Let's do that with our people. The ones who are weak, the ones who have the poor genetics, let's just take them off from our society so that the rest of us can grow stronger, and so that our society can grow stronger.

Now, by the way, if there is no morality, then that's perfectly okay. If the people who we talk to today, like my friend who I met up in Seattle, if she is right and there is no ultimate morality for all of us, then Hitler and the Nazis were perfectly fine doing what they were doing. Because all they were doing was trying to build a stronger society, right? From their perspective. Now, we know that involved the horrific death of millions of people. But they're just purposeless lumps of carbon, right? They don't mean anything. At least not from what the university is telling us. Where does life gain its value? Why should I care for another person? Oh, yeah, it might make me feel better, and that's why I'll care for other people, because it makes me feel better. But there's no true altruism here.

This perspective that God doesn't exist, that this world has just come about by accident through blind evolution, this perspective leads to destruction. And that is what we're teaching ourselves. That's what we're teaching our society. That's how we're teaching us to see ourselves. This is what has formed our framework. This is what we're working with when we go out into the world.

Now, you tell me whether or not this world is right for the gospel. They need to hear the gospel message. Because when you introduce just God into the system, everything changes. Okay, so we're going to move now from a basic perspective of the university to theism as the solution. And we'll start off with just basic theism. What happens when you've introduced God into the equation? All of a sudden, everything changes. Just introducing God into the equation, everything changes. Now this universe didn't blindly come into existence. Now we have an explanation for how everything happened to be so finely tuned that life would exist. Now it makes sense. Before, it made no sense. We have to accept it with blind faith. Now we have a reason. The faith isn't blind.

And at this point, we can understand that life actually means something. That if God has put his image on people, if God has created people, then the very value that God has, which is eternal, ultimate value, becomes imputed to the people that he creates. Now people are valuable. Now I have a reason to treat my brother as I treat myself. The secular humanism stuff, I have no reason unless that just makes me feel good. But now I have a real reason because God has created us that way. And now we have moral order. Now we know how to live and why to live. And I don't murder you because God has told me not to. There's a reason why God has told me not to, but the fiat itself is important. Now we have a reasonable way to live our lives. And also, personally, we have hope. If God is real, that means there's more to this world than just what we have. And so if I do have to wrestle with depression, if I do have to wrestle with abuse in my own life, if I do have to wrestle with anything difficult to grapple with, and these things are truly difficult, there is hope. Because there's someone greater than this whole world. And it's to him that we're going to return. He has it all under control. There is something greater. There is something greater than human suffering.

And by the way, the reason the problem of evil is so poignant and powerful to non-believers is because they see evil, evil that takes away from their joy, as the worst thing that could possibly be. But we know, as believers, that evil can actually be minimal compared to the glory that God gets at the end. And his purposes and plans for us. So even though I'm suffering for a little while, I might be being refined into something absolutely wonderful for the afterlife. They don't have that. And that's why evil, the problem of evil, is magnified in the perspective of people who don't believe in God. Because it's a very person-centric worldview. Whereas a theocentric worldview, the problem of evil is not a problem, really.

So all of a sudden, God becomes the solution to our internal struggles, to our issues with the world around us, to suffering. All of a sudden, God becomes the answer to babies that die early. Or to the mentally incapacitated who can't quite grasp their lives. God is the answer because he can restore them in the afterlife. All these questions have answers when theism is introduced into the equation.

But it doesn't stop there. Because there's more to this world than just plain theism. So in this world of man, God has come and he has provided order. God has come and has provided hope. He's provided reason. He's provided morality. But who is that God? And what is his characteristic? And what does that mean for us?

Now I'm going to give you an Islamic perspective for just a moment. Because growing up, that's what I believed. Islam. And Islam gave me a very strong theistic worldview. I was, every single day of my life, I was devoted to remembrance of Allah. So I was a very devout Muslim. For those of you who don't know my story, I regularly prayed the five daily prayers. I regularly prayed dua to remember God. Memorized recitational prayer that, apart from the five daily prayers. I did that regularly. I studied Muhammad's life and the Hadith. It all mattered to me because it gave me a coherent perspective of the world. And through that, I satisfied a lot of my internal desires. I didn't have this yearning for something out there. I had filled it with Allah. I had filled it with Islam. Actually, that's more of an accurate statement. Most Muslims don't fill that yearning with Allah. They fill it with Islam. The system, not the person. And so I had things to hold on to. I wasn't hurting like that. But at the same time, I saw the world in a very different way than I do now as a Christian.

As a Muslim, I believed that God was kind of a lord over our lives. And not in the Christian sense, but more in the tyrannical sense. That he can tell us what to do. He can be very arbitrary about it. And in fact, his arbitrariness is actually one of the six articles of faith in Islam. The last article of faith is God's divine decree. Basically, whatever he wants goes. And he can be perfectly arbitrary if he wants to. He's Allah. He can do that. And so if he has written for you to go to hell, it doesn't matter what you do or who you are, you will go to hell. And as Abu Bakr said, Abu Bakr was the first khalifa according to Sunni Muslims. As he said, even if I had one foot in heaven, I would fear the deception of Allah. In other words, I would be worried that he would still pull me out and send me to hell. Because Allah is arbitrary. He can do that. He can do whatever he wants. And because of that, we're not following a God who's got some kind of moral framework that he has to work with. He basically chooses who can go to heaven and who can go to hell. There is no necessary payment for the punishment of sins. There is none. That concept doesn't make any sense to Muslims. If you share the gospel with them and you say, someone has to die for your sins. Your sins have to be paid for. They will say, what do you mean? Why can't God just forgive my sins? That's actually the biggest hang-up for a lot of people in understanding the gospel. It requires a lot of explanation. What do you mean? Can't God just forgive the sins?

And so he's kind of arbitrary. But what does that flow down into then? It means for me as a Muslim, I'm afraid my whole life for whether or not I will end up in heaven. It means I have to, for myself, do as many good deeds as I can. And in this honor-shame society, I have to kind of hide my bad deeds so that that doesn't affect my reputation and that doesn't affect my status. And so all of a sudden, I'm not able to air that. I'm not able to give that light. And we know the Bible tells us that it is in light that sin is defeated. And so here I am trying to hide my sins. They only grow while they're being hidden. And I'm coming up with this cognitive dissonance, trying to be this outwardly good Muslim. And internally, I'm hiding all the shame. And yet, at the same time, I'm just trying to do good and do good.

And I have no idea at the end of times whether I'm going to go to heaven or hell. No clue. And my motivation to do any good is not because I ought to for the sake of others or because I love God or I love others. It's for me. I want to do good so I can go to heaven. Ultimately, that's what it is. And that's exactly why we see people doing what they're doing. For example, the bombings in Boston. Why do Muslims all of a sudden go and do what seems ostensibly horrific to most of us? Even to plenty of Muslims, it seems horrific. But some of them will go out there and do these things. Why? It's because they're trying to get to heaven. And they see the enemy as worthy of killing. There's no other question about what they ought to do. That's what they're seeing. So they do it. That's what they're being told. So they do it. That's the path that they know to please Allah. So they're doing it. There's no ought about it. Unfortunately, it's very difficult for a lot of Westerners to grasp.

By the way, just as a quick aside, I have read so many books about Islam while trying to prepare myself to be able to minister to Westerners. I want to be able to recommend books. And there's no book that came anywhere near as close to understanding the Muslim mind as a book called Understanding the Muslim Mind. It's by Ed Hoskins, M.D. He also has one called Understanding the Muslim Heart. From there, we can see how this honor-shame principle affects Muslim thought and how the arbitrariness of Allah affects the worldview that we have.

So there is no suffering for my brother. Now, given that my brother is an enemy in Islam, you don't suffer for your enemies. It makes no sense. Chapter 60, verse 1 of the Quran says, Do not love your enemies. So Allah is telling the people, the Muslim, the ummah, not to love their enemies. In fact, that verse says, You might want to love them, but I'm telling you not to, because they are my enemy. And if they're my enemy, you should hate them too. That's what they're being taught. Where's the good Samaritan? It doesn't exist there.

So theism isn't by itself the answer. Yeah, it's the doorway to an answer, but there's so many different types of theism. They can all teach different things. And the one that I believed did not create an environment, did not sustain an environment that would heal the world. It did not. And we see that. We see that around the world today. You go to Islamic countries, there's no concept of forgiveness. In a sense, that would put you in a lower position. You might forgive to put yourself in a higher position, but you would never forgive to lower yourself. That doesn't work. That's a Christian thought.

Why do you think it is that we have this conflict in Israel and Palestine, where constantly people are vindictive in one crime after another after another, from both sides, is causing a conflagration that's never going to end. Now, what if we introduced the gospel into this equation? What if we introduced the Christian message? Now, the answer of the gospel is powerful. First off, Jesus tells us that while we were still his enemies, he had come to die for us. Not in so many words. We get that in other words later. But that's what he did. So when he tells us the story of the good Samaritan, when he tells us, pick up your cross and follow me, when he tells us, lay down your life for your brother, John 15, he's not just telling us by fiat, as the Muslim God does. He's living it out first. He's giving us the perfect example of what it means to live the gospel. When God entered into this world and became a man, he showed us what it meant to be the perfect man. How to live our lives perfectly. There's nothing arbitrary anymore when we have a perfect example in God.

Now, all of a sudden, I'm not supposed to be worried about my life. In Islam, I'm constantly doing good things for me. For me, for me, for me. Worried with anxiety that I'll go to heaven at the end. In Christianity, no. It's for freedom's sake that God has set us free. And he releases us from that anxiety. He comes down here and he shares with us eternal life so that we can then not worry about ourselves. Not be the one who's constantly trying to grab more and more and more on the way to the grave. Far from it, we can lay down our lives for the sake of our brothers because we have eternal life. That only comes through the gospel. It doesn't come through anything else.

The idea that God is not arbitrary affects so much more than that. It gives us an ability to live without fear. Truly free from fear. When we say, death, where is your sting? We can say that because we know where we're going to end up. And for me, I remember when I became a believer, I literally had to give up a lot. And I wanted to die. I didn't want to be here anymore. Because being a Christian for me was the most painful decision I ever made by far. But what I had been released from, from that point, even though I wanted to die, and later God showed me that's not the way to go. You need to take this life and pour it out for others. It's not about you.

But what he had released me from at that point was this attachment to this world. What he had released me from was a desire to serve myself and to keep living and to not be willing to pour myself out and literally pour myself out for the sake of someone else. Because we have no fear, we can have true courage and we can live the true Christian life. That is what it means in 2 Timothy 1:7 when it says, we have not been given a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power. It is when we're released from that fear that we have real power. And that happens only because we know we can be with God forever. That only happens through the gospel. No one else gives us that kind of confidence.

It is because of the gospel that we can heal this world. Now I'm telling you, if one or the other side in the Palestinian conflict embraced the idea of the golden rule and embraced the idea of unadulterated forgiveness, the situation would be solved. They might be trodden. They might be kicked out of their land. They might be killed. But the situation would be solved. And they would not have to fear in the middle of any of that. They would be with the Lord forever. It solves everything. It solves everything.

Now, the gospel message also solves the problem of evil. If we think about it. Because up until this point, the question, why is there evil in this world? If a good and loving and all-powerful God exists, why would he allow evil to exist? Apart from the logical answer that philosophers are giving, thanks for the work of Alvin Plantinga and others like him, we have great philosophical answers to the question, why God allows suffering. And really, it's not a valid argument against the Christian case anymore.

But the gospel answers, that's the theistic side, but the gospel answers the emotional side of the problem of evil. Even though God allows suffering to continue in this world, he doesn't do it in a removed sense. As if he's watching the world suffer and tear itself apart and says, I'll let you go ahead and do that. Like the Islamic God does. I'll let you go ahead and fight amongst yourselves and we'll just see what happens at the end of time. That's not what God does in the gospel. In the gospel, the Lord rolls up his sleeves, steps off his throne, enters into this world, and takes part in the suffering in order to solve it. That message doesn't come from anywhere else either.

And not only does God enter into the suffering as just a person in the world, he enters into the suffering in a more profound sense than I've ever seen for anyone else. Here's the perfect man who lives in a meager, meek, lowly existence, is raised in a way that no person, no king would ever choose to be raised, and yet the king of this universe chose to be raised in that way, born in a manger to two kids who have been accused of an adulterous relationship. That's how our God stepped into this world. So he suffered the ignominy of a child who's ridiculed for his parents and for his lineage. He suffered that. He had to suffer the shame of his mom being called a prostitute. He suffered that shame. He knows what it's like. Illegitimately.

It was not something he deserved, but he suffered it. As he goes and he works with his hands to become a carpenter, he suffers the shame of being a lowly person in society, being trampled upon as he does meager, menial work. Yet the whole time, as we see, he is devoted to God. There's no blame that can be pointed to this man. None. And then he's healing people, and he's loving people, and he's giving himself to people, and that's all he's doing with himself. And then later he's betrayed by the 12 people who spent the most time with him. We can't be betrayed, us, as believers, and say God doesn't know what that's like. No, God does know what it's like. He rolled up his sleeves, and he came in.

God was not only betrayed by people who had followed him, but he was betrayed by one of them with a kiss. How much worse can it get? Oh, it gets worse. Because then because of that betrayal, they put him on the cross. Now, I don't know how many of you have actually studied the crucifixion with some depth. There is a little booklet that totally revolutionized my view of the crucifixion. It's written by a scholar named Martin Hengel. It's about the crucifixion, and it is called Crucifixion. And it gives all the historical details about what the crucifixion is. And I'm just going to share some with you briefly right now.

The idea, the concept of crucifixion, was so horrific that Cicero said of it, let no Roman even hear the word crucifixion. It was never meted out to a Roman citizen. It was too horrific for that. It was only reserved for those that Rome considered the worst of enemies. So usually for high treason. Usually for high treason. Or sometimes to totally humiliate people. And in the process of crucifixion, what they would do is they would strip you naked. Their whole purpose is to humiliate you. So any pictures you've seen of Christ on the cross with a loincloth, that was for your sake that that loincloth was there. Over his whole entire body, all crucifixion victims are flogged. And not just as we see floggings in, for example, Indonesia even today. You can watch some of those, by the way. If you want to go online and watch a flogging, you can do that. I'm not suggesting it, but you can. After just the first few hits with a solid wooden pole, the skin begins to tear. About two or three hits, it begins to tear. After about eight or nine hits, the muscle begins to turn into pulp.

All right, this is just after a few hits. Now this is with a stick. The Romans didn't use a stick. The Romans used a flagrum, which is a whip that was made of multiple leather cords. And at the end of each of those leather cords were shards of bone and little metal dumbbells on these little leather balls at the end of this whip. And what they were designed to do, this is devious, what they were designed to do was that the metal balls were designed to hit the skin and cause vasodilation, bring blood to the surface and pain receptors to the surface to magnify every bit of pain that you feel. That's what the metal dumbbells were there for. And then the shards of bone were designed to reach into the skin and rip it off, multiplying your bleeding and your pain. With each hit.

Now the Jews had a law. The Jews had a law that no one could be flogged more than 39 times. It's found in the Old Testament. So Jews would count up to 39 and they would stop to make sure that they didn't go over on accident. The Romans would spite the Jews by flogging more than that. So regularly, especially if they were crucifying a Jew, they would flog someone with more than 39 hits in spite of who they were and their identity. According to Martin Hengel in his booklet, there are records of people's intestines falling out during the process of the flogging.

There are records of veins and arteries being laid bare. And this is just before the crucifixion. And then ultimately, they would take the victim, if they weren't dead, because many people died in the flogging. And they would have him carry his crossbeam. And then they would take him and nail him through his arms. Not through his hands here, through the radius in the ulna, right here in the interosseous space, there runs a median nerve. That is the major sensory motor nerve of the hand. They would take a nail and they would drive it right through that nerve. If you've ever tapped your funny bone, imagine sending a nail through it. They would immediately destroy both hands. Now Jesus' hands had done nothing but heal and work. And this is God we're talking about. And here he is being pierced on the cross. Can you tell me we've ever suffered any pain that our God hasn't suffered?

And his skin, now devoid of, on his back, no skin whatsoever, his back is devoid of skin. He is forced to lean up against wood that's splintered. And for every single breath he takes, because he's hanging, he has to push up in order to exhale. And then he'll inhale as he hangs again. So in order to do that, they drive a nine-inch nail through his feet so he can push off something. Scraping his back against the wood every single time he breathes. With each breath God took in those moments, he felt more pain, I'm telling you, than we will ever feel. And all this for the very people who were crucifying him.

Now you tell me a message where God enters into the suffering of man that comes anywhere near the gospel. There is none. The gospel changes everything. God loves us so much. When we understand his suffering, when we understand the betrayal, we can see how much it is that God loves us, that he would enter into this world for us and go through all that for us. And what message is it that tells us God loves us that much? You can talk about the love of God. You can say God loves you.

And I used to say that as a Muslim. I say God loves me because I'm a Muslim, but I never would ever imagine God would suffer to that extent for me. God doesn't love me that much. No one loves me that much. Does he? Can God love me like that? Can God be my father? Well, the Quran never teaches that God is your father. In fact, God vehemently denies being anyone's father. He begets not, nor is he begotten. The section of the Quran, I was told to recite the most my entire life. The father has no son. God has no son. And Jesus is not God. 17 times a day. Every day I would recite that. God is independent by all. He has no son. And he is no one's son. God's my father? This gospel message changes everything.

And so when we're talking about God in a world of man, when God came into this world as a man, that changed everything. Whether you're an atheist or an agnostic, secular humanist, whoever you are, the fact that God exists changes everything. It brings you to this point where there's hope, there's meaning, there's purpose, there's a way out. But the gospel goes even further and provides an idea of love, of compassion, of self-sacrifice, of ultimate hope and purpose, and total lack of fear and courage. That message doesn't come through anything else.

And because we saw in the first session, we know it's true, we're not holding on to that as some kind of platitude to help ourselves grow and to exist in this society. This is the truth. God is that beautiful. Hallelujah! We don't have to convince ourselves of a falsehood. God is that beautiful. No matter how much we look at him, no matter how much we look at the world around us, we are overwhelmed by the truth and glory and beauty and love of God. That is the gospel message. And it changes everything.