The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 42 – Lee Strobel

Episode 42: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show, host Dr. Jeff interviews bestselling apologetics author Lee Strobel about his new book The Case for Heaven. The conversation explores Strobel’s personal journey from atheism to Christianity, evidence for near-death experiences, and controversial theological questions about hell. Strobel argues against both annihilationism and universalism while affirming the biblical teaching of eternal punishment.

The episode concludes with insights from evangelist Luis Palau’s final interview before his death, where he encouraged Christians to “go for it, to take a risk, to tell others about the good news of Christ.”. Throughout, Strobel emphasizes that both the reality of heaven and hell should motivate Christians to share their faith with urgency and courage.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. This show’s available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, wherever you get your podcasts. Please share it with your friends. On this show, I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how our worldview changes everything.

I’m really excited about our guest today. He’s a bestselling and award-winning author who’s written many important apologetics books, including The Case for Christ and The Case for Faith, where he approaches big life questions as an investigative journalist. Today, we’re discussing his new book, The Case for Heaven, that offers compelling reasons for why death is not the end of our existence, but a transition to a new world to come. He deals with all of the tough issues in this, and we’re going to get into a lot of them on today’s show. Please welcome Lee Strobel. Lee Strobel, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Lee Strobel (00:59):
Thank you, Jeff. Great to be with you, man.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:02):
This is a lot of fun. I always enjoy the conversations that we get to have together, and today we’re going to be talking about heaven. You just recently wrote The Case for Heaven, and I’ve got a copy of the book here. I’ve turned down about half the pages. You can always tell when I’ve really enjoyed a book, how many pages are turned down, how many markers are in it. This is absolutely amazing.

And what I love about it is, you approach, what about heaven? Is there a heaven? What is heaven like? What are people’s experiences of heaven? What do different scholars say? All of these things. And you approach it in a way that doesn’t avoid the controversial questions, but that really engages them and then works through them to, all right, what difference does this make in our lives today? So I can’t wait to talk about the book.

Lee Strobel (01:51):
Great. Awesome.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:52):
But before we do it, I’d love for people to hear a little of your story. I know most of the people who are watching and listening are familiar with you and your work. The Case for Christ has been distributed around the world. And in that book, you tell a little of your own story as a convert from atheism to Christianity, but just tell us a little bit more about that.

Lee Strobel (02:14):
Yeah. I was an atheist for much of my life. My background’s in journalism and law, so I tend to be a skeptical person. I thought the idea of an all loving, all powerful creator of the universe was kind of absurd on the surface of it. It wasn’t even worth my time to check out. And I married a woman who was agnostic. I call her agnostic. I guess that’s probably right. She had some vague belief, but certainly was unable to put the puzzle pieces together.

And it was through a woman who was a neighbor. She was a Christian. She was a nurse who became best friends with Leslie, who reached out to her, invited her to church, answered her questions, and then Leslie gave me the worst news that an atheist husband could get. She said, “I decided to become a follower of Jesus.” And I thought, “Oh no, here it comes.”

(03:03):
“She’s going to turn into some holy roller or something. This is not what I signed up for.” And the first word that went through my mind was divorce. But then I thought, you know what? What if I could rescue her from this cult that she’s gotten involved in?

(03:17):
How would I do that? And I thought the basis of Christianity is the resurrection of Jesus. If I could disprove the resurrection, then I could rescue her from this cult. And I thought I could do that in a weekend. Well, I took my journalism training and my legal training and I began to investigate the historical data concerning the resurrection of Jesus. And it took me two years. And I looked into other things as well, but I focused a lot on the resurrection.

And ultimately, when I sat down on November the 8th of 1981 and said, “A good juror reaches a verdict, the evidence is in. I’ve got to reach a verdict.” I kind of reviewed all of the data I’d collected over these two years. And then I sat back and I said, “Wait a second. In light of the avalanche of evidence that points so powerfully toward the truth of Christianity, it would take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a Christian.” The scales just sort of went like that.

(04:16):
And that’s when I concluded, reached my verdict that Jesus is who we claim to be, not only claimed to be the son of God, he backed up that claim by returning from the dead. And then Leslie 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.”

And that’s when I realized, okay, believing is not enough. I had to receive this free gift of God’s grace, this free gift of forgiveness and eternal life. And when I would do that, I would become a child of God. So that’s when I repented of my sin, which took a long time and received 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.

(05:04):
And that’s when I became a child of God. And then over time, my values, my character, my morality, my worldview, my attitudes, my relationship, my priority. I mean, everything ultimately began to change for the good. And now we’ve been married for over 49 years. We’re in our 50th year as husband and wife and four grandchildren. My kids are, my son is a professor of theology at Biola University with a PhD from University of Aberdeen in Scotland. My daughter writes Christian novels and now my grandchildren one by one are coming to faith. So God really transformed. He really rescued our family from the destructive path that we were on.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:51):
Yeah. And your children have testified about this saying it was dad’s change. We saw him change as a man. Yeah.

Lee Strobel (05:59):
It was so dramatic for my daughter. My daughter was five years old when I came to faith and all she had known the first five years of her life was a dad who was absent, angry, coming home drunk. And so that’s all she knew, first five years. But then starting on November the 8th of 1981, when I put my trust in Christ, over time, as I was baptized and my life began to change, she watched, she observed, she noticed.

And four or five months after that, she came up to my wife Leslie and said, “I want God to do for me what he’s done for daddy.” So she recognized the difference that God was making in her dad. And so 2 Corinthians talks about the old is gone, the new has come when we receive Christ as our forgiver and leader. And it’s certainly been true in my life.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:56):
Wow. I’m curious, because Stephanie and I watched the movie about The Case for Christ, and you were in the newsroom a lot with your colleagues, some of whom were people of faith, but maybe didn’t say a lot, others who were really skeptical. When you came to faith in Christ, how did you break that to your colleagues who were also cynical, yeah, show me the evidence kind of people?

Lee Strobel (07:24):
Yeah, that’s a great question. They were on the surface kind of supportive. It’s like, “Oh, great. Good for you. Yeah, okay.” And then I would hear rumors behind my back, they’re saying things like, “What the heck happened to Strobel’s becoming Jesus free?” But they wouldn’t say that to my face, but I did hear that that was kind of the sentiment in the newsroom. This is back in the heyday of newspapers.

So we had about a thousand people in our newsroom. And when I came to faith, I looked around and I could identify maybe a handful, maybe five or six who were evangelical Christians. There were very, very few. One of them was a religion editor whose desk was next to mine, and he encouraged me in my journey. On the other side, the desk on the other side of me was occupied by David Axelrod, who was our deputy political editor, who of course later became the advisor to Obama in the White House.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:28):
Yeah. Right. Oh, wow. I think a lot of people, I really want to start talking about the book a little bit, but I’ve got to ask this question first. A lot of people who are watching and listening to this show, Lee, right now, are in that kind of an environment where if they were to testify about their faith, people might not negatively speak to them directly, but it will definitely alter the trajectory, their career path. Yeah. It changes their relationships with other people. Can you speak to that for a minute? What do you say to those individuals to help them have courage and their faith at this moment?

Lee Strobel (09:07):
Yeah, that’s another great question. I think Jesus called us to be salt and light, salt to sort of help people see how Christianity affects and flavors and changes life and so forth, and to be light, to shine his message of hope and grace into dark areas of despair. And there can be a cost that comes from that. There’s no question about it. I think we’re going to talk, I think, later about Luis Palau, the famous evangelist who I interviewed for this book who knew he was dying. He was about to go to heaven. It was the last interview before he died.

And one of the things he said to me, he said, “When all is said and done at the end of your life, you will never regret being courageous for Christ.” And some of this is just being courageous for Christ. Some of it is just saying, “I am going to be who God wants me to be. I’m going to pursue what God wants me to pursue. I’m going to be as winsome about it as I can. I’m going to reach out with the gospel as much as I am able, but if this creates impediments in my career, that comes a bit with the territory.”

(10:24):
It’s a lot less than the apostles suffered in their day as a result of their proclamation that Jesus had risen.” So I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that. I think we just need to live out in authentic faith. And frankly, people will respond, I think, ultimately long term better to that than someone who tries to cover it up and someone who puts layers of secularism to shield from others the true spiritual nature of their life. I think people in the end respect honesty, and I think that’s the best policy there.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:03):
I see that in the world of politics a lot. You have people who have strong convictions, they are good people and they’re kind to everyone, but their convictions are clear.

Lee Strobel (11:14):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:15):
They are not the ones who are under attack from the other side. It’s the ones who are wishy-washy or who are always trying to placate others.That seems to be what creates the irritation.

Lee Strobel (11:29):
Yeah, I think you’re right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:30):
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about heaven.

Lee Strobel (11:32):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:33):
I’m looking forward to this discussion because we all wonder what happens when you die. And this is the one fact of all of life, all right? Statistically, one out of every one person dies.

Lee Strobel (11:50):
There’ll be, by the way, 3000 people around the world who will die during the course of our conversation.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:56):
Wow. And that’s sobering.

Lee Strobel (11:59):
Yeah, it is. And Jeff, I think the fact that we’re in this pandemic, 29% of Americans have either lost a family member or they know someone who’s died of COVID. My brother died at the beginning of the epidemic and Leslie and I were having lunch at a restaurant here in Houston and the waitress was about 18 years old and we were trying to share Jesus with her and all of a sudden she started to cry.

And we said, “What’s wrong?” And she said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I almost didn’t come into work today. We just lost a family member to COVID.” And I thought, here’s a young woman, 18 years old, probably never thought about death before. She’s got her whole life ahead of her. Why should she think about death? But now it’s come knocking on her family’s door and you could see the fear in her eyes, the apprehension in her eyes, the anxiety in her eyes, the uncertainty in her eyes.

(12:52):
And so I go back to the first verse I memorized as a Christian from one John. It says, “These things were written to you who believe in the name of the son of God in order that you may know that you have eternal life.” God wants that woman, Cameron, who we’ve now become friends with, he wants her to know that she will have eternal life. And I think God wants all of us to know that and to have confidence in that. And in fact, the Bible says in Hebrews that it is Jesus who chases away this fear of death that so many people wrestle with.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:31):
There’s so many questions that come up when people are wrestling in that way. I think what I experienced as I read the book was a sense of wonder, a sense of confidence. I recently went through a cancer journey and had to face, well, what could happen? I might not live through this.

And I’ve got to say, I can’t wait to go to heaven. I think of heaven as a big class. I have so many questions. Jesus, how did you do this? How did you do that? I want to know about the creation of the cell. I want to know about the far reaches of the universe. I have so many things I’m curious about, but my appreciation for life here has been transformed because I have that new perspective. Every day has become a gift.

Lee Strobel (14:25):
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:26):
And I had a sense as you were writing the book that that’s what you wanted to have happen for people.

Lee Strobel (14:33):
Yeah, because it grew out of a similar experience with me where I thought I might die. My wife found me unconscious on our bedroom floor. She called the paramedics. I woke up in the emergency room and the doctor looked down at me and he said, “You’re one step away from a coma, two steps away from dying.” And then I fell unconscious again.

And so I had a condition called hyponatremia, which is a severe drop in blood sodium. And I lost a kidney as part of the process. And so I hovered between life and death for quite a while as the doctors ultimately saved my life. But like you, I found it to be kind of a clarifying experience. It clarified our hunger for heaven. It clarified our mission on earth to point other people to heaven, but it also… Luis Palau talked about this.

(15:30):
Here you have a guy who had shared his faith with a billion people, and yet he said when he found out he was dying and he had stage four cancer, there was no hope in this world that he would survive. So he knew he was dying. He said Satan began to whisper in his ear. “Oh, Luis, yeah, you’ve told a billion people about Jesus, but you’re not going to heaven. No, no, no, you’re not going to go to heaven.”

And the Puritans talked about this, that at this moment when our life is hanging in the balance, Satan loves to whisper in our ear. And so maybe that’s what was happening to me, but I began not to have doubts, but to be curious, is the biblical account, does it make sense? Is it rational? Is it consistent with science? And that’s what ultimately led me to write this book, The Case for Heaven.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:24):
Let’s dig into it a little bit, Lee, because there are a lot of stories out there about heaven. There are a lot of books where people talk about experiences of dying and having gone to heaven, at least one of those books where the individual shared a wonderful experience, but then later retracted it and said it wasn’t true. So there are a lot of questions that people have. Yes. And I’d love to dig into this a little bit. There’s so many different directions we could go, but one thing I wanted to focus on to begin with is this experience that people have of near death experiences where their body actually ceases to function.

(17:08):
And then they have an experience of some kind of a reality after this life. And a lot of those people discount those experiences, but in your book, you’re sharing unbelievable evidence and people, everybody’s got to read this for themselves to see some of this incredible evidence.

But there was just one quotation in the book on page 66 that I loved. It talks about a researcher named Janice Holden who studied 93 near death experienced patients who claimed to make multiple verifiable observations while out of their physical bodies. She said a remarkable 92% of the observations were completely accurate. Think of that. Nearly everyone was totally correct. Another 6% contained just some error, only 2% were completely erroneous.

Lee Strobel (18:00):
Yeah. It’s really, Jeff, you’ve put your finger on a controversial, but a fascinating area. I was a skeptic about near death experiences when I went into this. I thought it was kind of a new age thing. I thought it was just oxygen deprivation to the brain, the dying gasps of a brain causing hallucinations or whatever. Well, I found out there are 900 scholarly articles that have been written about near death experiences and published in scientific and medical journals over the last 40 years.

This is a very well researched area, but as you said, there’s been some fraud. There have been people who made claims that they later recanted and said were not true. So my attitude was, I’m not going to believe anything that can’t be corroborated. I want external corroboration. And I was shocked to find out how many cases can be corroborated. For instance, there was a woman named Maria who died of a heart attack in a hospital.

(19:06):
She’s clinically dead and yet she describes how her spirit separated from her body. She describes how she watched the resuscitation effort. She described how her spirit floated out of the hospital. And then when she was revived ultimately and came back to life and her spirit was rejoined with her physical body, she said, “Oh, by the way, on the roof of the hospital, on the third floor landing of the hospital, there’s a man’s tennis shoe and it’s dark blue and it’s left footed and there’s some wear over the little toe and the shoelace is tucked under the heel,” and they went up and sure enough, they found it exactly as she had said.

Now, how do you explain that if she didn’t really have this experience of her consciousness continuing to exist after her clinical death? Keep in mind that the apostle Paul said to be absent from the bodies to be present with the Lord.

(20:03):
Jesus said to the repentance criminal on the cross, “Today you’ll be with me in paradise.” This means there’s really two aspects to heaven. The first is the present heaven, which is the intermediate state, which means that when we die, our spirit, our consciousness, our soul separates from our physical body and continues to exist in a personal way, either with Jesus in paradise or separated from him in Hades.

And then the second phase is when Jesus returns at the consummation of history where we are united with our resurrected bodies where we go through final judgment and then we spend eternity in a very physical place, whether heaven or hell. So this question of whether or not our consciousness does survive our death is very important. Now keep in mind that these people who report these things were not irrevocably dead. They were clinically dead. They had zero brainwaves.

(21:00):
They had zero heartbeat. They had zero breathing. Many of them were literally declared dead and headed for the morgue. So they’re dead, they’re clinically dead, but they’re not irrevocably dead. And that explains a lot. Why is it that so many, even non-Christians do not face a horrible judgment? Well, the Bible says we’re appointed once to die and then the judgment. Well, this isn’t irrevocable death. This is a clinical death. So I think that’s important. I think it’s important that 23% or 24% of the cases are hellish, are negative, are terribly horrific.

(21:42):
I think that’s important too. But the most radical thing I learned, I interviewed an expert by the name of John Burke. Actually, John Burke and I have been friends for about 30 years. We were both pastors together many years ago at a church together. So I’ve known him for many decades. John is not only a pastor now of a church in Austin, Texas, but he has studied a thousand near death experiences over the last 35 years.

And his conclusion, which he backs up verse by verse, is that when you look at what actually takes place in most near death experiences, the core experience that people share, and you look at what actually occurs, not how people interpret it, but what actually occurs, it is consistent with Christian theology. That was very important to me because I don’t base my theology on near death experience. I base it on what the Bible tells me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:34):
That’s right.

Lee Strobel (22:35):
But it is corroborative. Near death experiences are corroborative that the Bible is telling us the truth.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:43):
I find that also fascinating. I think I was with you. I was pretty skeptical of this. And I think it was Gary Habermas from Liberty University who first started talking about it. And I thought, wow, if Gary takes this seriously, I probably should reexamine it.

Lee Strobel (22:57):
Well, Gary Hebermas, as far back as 1994, he and J. P. Moreland, another very respected Christian philosopher, wrote a book about death and they talked about near death experiences back then. So I think that’s very important. The other thing, Jeff, that’s really persuasive to me is that the prestigious British medical journal, the Lancet, carried an analysis of near death experiences, which concluded that, and this is key, none of the common alternative explanations for near death experiences hold up to scrutiny.That’s pretty powerful. Something’s going on there.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:37):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can read more about that. When you pick up the book, The Case for Heaven, you can read that. And I think it’s in one of the chapters earlier in the book, which I was so glad for. But then we get about halfway into the book and you have got to address a question that naturally comes up. If there is a heaven, then people recognize there must also be a hell because not everybody’s going to go to heaven.

And in the book, you gave a very surprising statistic that there are a whole lot of people, a very high percentage of people do not think that they’re going to go to heaven. Yeah. I just thought that would, because I always thought, wow, what should people believe? Well, probably most people, I would think, would say, sure, people like Adolf Hitler and others, they go to hell, but everybody else does it.

(24:28):
If you run a few stop signs or say cuss words or whatever, that’s not enough to condemn you to hell, you’re probably going to go to heaven. But you’ve found that people don’t have that hope nearly as much as I thought they would.

Lee Strobel (24:40):
Yeah, that’s true. A lot of people believe in heaven. I think it’s 84% of American adults believe in heaven. In fact, quite a few atheists and agnostics believe in some sort of afterlife, interestingly. But as you say, not everybody believes they’re going. And so I think I had to address the question of hell. I think it would have been irresponsible writing a book about the evidence for the afterlife to ignore what is very controversial.

And it’s controversial within the church because I talk about how some pastors today are teaching what’s called annihilationism, which is the belief that we don’t have eternal conscious experience in hell, but that non-believers, the unrepentant are snuffed out of existence, either at death or after a short period of punishment. That’s an increasingly popular position. In fact, there’s a lot of pastors who secretly hold that position, but they’re afraid they’re going to lose their job if they come out and say it. So I wanted to deal with this stuff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:50):
Now, I don’t want to give away too much of the book, but you give people who have that annihilationist viewpoint, their say in the book. They have a fair hearing, but ultimately you don’t find it to be a persuasive account of how scripture describes hell. And I’m curious if you can give us a little insight into your thinking.

Lee Strobel (26:09):
Yeah. It’s interesting. I was interviewed by a secular newspaper reporter about the book and he said, “By the way, I’m an annihilationist.” And he said, “I just want to thank you for presenting our position in an accurate and fair way, in a balanced way. Thanks for doing that. I agree. I mean, I understand that you don’t buy into it, but thanks for at least being accurate with it.”

So that meant a lot to me because I think it is a secondary issue. When you look at the fact that John Stott, probably the evangelical Pope of the 20th century, toward the end of his life, embraced denial-ationism. It’s kind of hard to call it a heresy if John Stott is endorsing it. So it is a secondary issue, but again, I just don’t believe it stands up biblically. And one of the reasons is you can look in both the Old Testament and the New Testament.

(27:03):
If you look at Daniel chapter 12, verse two, it says, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” So there’s a parallelism there. There’s some coming to an everlasting heaven and some going to an everlasting hell. If heaven is everlasting, then hell has to be everlasting.

Same with Jesus in teaching about the sheep and the goats in Matthew chapter 25. He says, “Then they, referring to the unrighteous, will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” So there’s a parallelism that you just can’t gloss over. If heaven is eternal, then hell is eternal. Even Augustine said 1600 years ago, he said, “As the eternal life of the saints shall be endless, so too, the eternal punishment of those who are doomed to it shall have no end.”

(28:02):
So I think there’s enough biblical evidence against annihilationism for me to not be able to endorse it or to embrace it. Seventh day Adventists believe in it as a denomination. So there are quite a few people who do. And frankly, there’s a growing number of young pastors who do. Now, Jeff, I think this is driven by the question of whether hell is fair, the fairness of God. They’re questioning the fairness of God. Is it fair that people would be in eternal hell?

And I think the counterweight to that is to say, wait a second, here’s another truth about hell that I personally found very helpful. And that is that hell is not a one size fits all experience. And we see this indicated in Matthew chapter 11 when Jesus said that certain cities would suffer more than others because they refused to repent despite the fact that he did miracles there.

(29:06):
You look at Luke chapter 12 where he told the parable about certain servants who will be treated worse because they knew what their master wanted and didn’t do it, versus those that didn’t quite get the message and didn’t do it. So I think the implication, and by the way, again, Augustine believed that there will be different levels of punishment in hell.

So in other words, Adolf Hitler is not going to have the same experience in hell as my next door neighbor who may be an atheist, for whom heaven would be hell, because he hates the idea of God, but he’s not going to have the same experience in hell as Adolf Hitler. And to me, that’s reassuring. The Old Testament says, “Will not the judge of all the earth do right?” In other words, is not God fair? And I believe he is fair, and I believe that no one will be able to walk away from judgment and legitimately be able to shake their fist and say, “That was unfair.”

(30:03):
We will all ultimately see the fairness of God. So that helped me deal with the hell being eternal. I just don’t buy into the annihilationism because I don’t think they can make a heirtight biblical defense of it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:20):
The other issue that a lot of people are thinking about in the last few years, I guess it was probably 15 years or so ago, Rob Bell wrote a book called Love Wins. And he seemed to indicate that his belief, which at the time contradicted what his church said it believed on their website, which I think ultimately led them to part ways. But he seemed to think that God will ultimately, even after death, persuade people to accept him and that ultimately everybody will be saved. Am I giving the argument?

Lee Strobel (31:03):
Yeah, he definitely leaves that impression in the book.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:04):
Yeah. Well, a lot of people think that.

Lee Strobel (31:09):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:09):
And I’m curious what you discovered as you researched it.

Lee Strobel (31:14):
Yeah. I deal with that in the book as well, because you’re right. There’s a lot of people. There’s actually a new book out that vociferously makes the case for universalism. And I think there are many pastors that are buying into that. I think this is less supported than annihilationism, number one. Number two, I think it is a primary issue. I think it is heretical and I think it’s dangerous. And so this is on a different level. Annihilationism is sort of a secondary issue. This is not. This is a primary issue. And you know what? Jeff, you can make a philosophical case for it, but you can’t make a biblical case for it.

(31:52):
You look at Psalm one verse six, it says, “The way of the wicked leads to destruction.” I mean, how much clearer can you be than that? And then the Daniel verse I mentioned earlier, it talks about those awakening to everlasting life and others to shame and everlasting condemned.

I mean, the New Testament talks about whosoever believes will have eternal life. There’s just a proliferation of biblical teaching that just does not support the idea that we’re all saved. It does support the idea that the offer of forgiveness is available to all, but it’s a gift. Grace is a gift and some people receive it and some people don’t. So the potential is there for everybody, but the truth is not everybody will receive God’s offer of salvation.

Dr. Jeff Myers (32:50):
Frank Turek is a mutual friend of ours and someone who speaks at Summit Ministries on a regular basis. And when a student asked him once about this, won’t God ultimately win by persuading people even after death? He gave them the example, he said, now if there was, he turned to the young women in the class. He said, “If you had a boyfriend and you said, ‘No, I’m going to break up with you.’ And he said, ‘I am going to win you over.’ Would that be comforting or would that be creepy?”

Lee Strobel (33:29):
Oh, that’s very good.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:29):
All of the young women in the room said that would be extremely creepy, that it would seem to indicate that he believes he is powerful enough to take away your freedom to choose to not have that relationship.

Lee Strobel (33:43):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:44):
And in the book, I’m looking at page 149, you quoted Michael Card about hell, and he said that God simply speaks the sentence that they have passed upon themselves.

Lee Strobel (33:58):
Yes. The idea that God sends people to hell is not accurate. We send ourselves to hell. It is a judgment that we’ve already brought upon ourselves. But that’s not to say it’s not a difficult topic. It is. I recognize that. But I think when we put it into context, when we understand it, it does make sense. It is consistent with God’s character and so forth. But I felt like I needed to deal with it in the book.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:31):
A lot of people ask me one of a couple of questions that relate to heaven, but that also are big stumbling blocks for them in their faith. And one is how could a good God allow pain and suffering? Yeah. And one thing that you are able to point out in the book is that in many ways, the doctrine of heaven is an answer to that question, that God will defeat pain and suffering. But the second one they ask is, what about people who have never heard of Jesus?

Lee Strobel (35:01):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:01):
And I’m curious to hear how you answer that question.

Lee Strobel (35:05):
It’s a great question. And I deal with this in the book, especially toward the conclusion. And there’s several ways to look at this. One is that Romans 1:20 says that all of us know from looking at creation in our heart of hearts that there is a creator behind it, but we suppress that truth. We turn away from God anyway. All of us have a moral law, moral standard, written in our hearts by God, but we violate that standard. And we know that deep down, that we’re sinners, that we’ve fallen short. We know these sorts of things.

And therefore, it makes sense that we would be separated from God. We walked the other way from him. We’ve suppressed the evidence of his existence and so forth. But on the other hand, the Bible says, in Jeremiah, it says in Hebrews that those who sincerely seek God will find him.

(35:56):
So I believe anyone, anywhere, at any time who calls out to the one true God for answers, that God will find some way of bringing them this message of hope that they can respond to.

And I think of the example I talked about in my book, The Case for Miracles, this phenomenon that we see all over the Middle East and countries where it’s illegal to share the gospel. It’s illegal to tell people the good news about Jesus. And yet, what is God doing? He’s appearing to them in dreams and revealing himself to people. And we have so many examples of this that there’s an ad that runs regularly in the Cairo newspaper that says simply, give us a call and we’ll tell you about the man and white you met in your dream last night.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:43):
Wow.

Lee Strobel (36:45):
So God will find a way, I believe. But here’s the other thing, Jeff, that’s interesting. I talked about this in the book too. Martin Luther of all people believed that there is potential for salvation after death. And there’s actually been a brand new book published. I bought it. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s an academic book from Intervarsity Academic called Postmortem Opportunity. And I explored this in this book, the question of whether or not for those who live on some remote island someplace, might God allow for them to hear the gospel after they die?

(37:31):
I think it’s highly speculative. The Bible says in Hebrews were appointed once to die and then the judgment. But interestingly, if you look at the next sentence, there’s a big time gap between point A and point B in that next sentence. So it doesn’t say immediately you face judgment, just they were pointing once to die and then there’ll be judgment.

So could it be that either those who did not have an opportunity to hear the gospel in their lifetime or children who were too young to understand the gospel when they died, or people in Nazi Germany who were told a false gospel, who were told that the Nazis represented Jesus, might they be allowed to hear the true gospel even after death? It’s fascinating. And Martin Luther wrote two letters where he talked about this kind of thing and indicated that he believed it.

(38:29):
So is it biblical? Can I point to a verse? No, I think it’s highly speculative, but I explored in the book and I think it’s worth considering, but I think in some way, because I do believe, for instance, that children who die will be in heaven. And I base that on various verses that are suggestive of that, but nothing that comes right out and says it. But some believe that God will enlarge the intellect of children to the point where they can decide before they die or right after they die.

But if Romans 1:20 says, “We can really tell by creation that God exists,” children can’t. They don’t have that cognitive ability. So it’s unfair to judge them for something that they can’t even really understand. So these are difficult issues, but again, I go back to will not the judge of all the earth do what’s right. I think we have a loving God, a fair God, a just God, and that ultimately we can trust that he’s going to do the right thing.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:41):
Yeah. I love that discussion. And there’s so many more issues that you bring up in the book. I mean, you even addressed questions like, how old will we be in heaven and all of those kinds of things, which I think are fascinating, but I know our time is short. So I wanted to draw our discussion toward the conversation you mentioned earlier that you had with this great South American evangelist, Luis Palau, and anybody who had heard him or knew of him respected his life, he seemed to finish his race well.

Lee Strobel (40:15):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (40:16):
But he died from lung cancer and he had never smoked or anything like that. So it wasn’t like he brought it on himself and his suffering then toward the end of his life became a lesson for all of us. Yes. There’s a wonderful place on page 220 where you ask Luis Palau, but if you could send a message back from heaven, okay? So you get a heavenly text to your fellow Christians, what would it say?

And this is Luis Palau, as you mentioned, his last interview before he went to be with the Lord, and he said, I don’t know if I can read this without breaking down. It’s so powerful. What would the message say? And he says, “To go for it, to take a risk, to tell others about the good news of Christ, remember that it’s the job of the Holy Spirit to convict them of their sin. He’s your partner. Let him do his work in them. You bring them the best news on the planet, that there’s redemption, that there’s a relationship with God, there’s heaven, and there’s an eternal party that’s waiting for them.”

Lee Strobel (41:32):
Yeah. And it’s so powerful. And what a motivator it should be for all of us to say, if heaven is true, I think the best news about heaven is that it’s real. I think the worst news about hell is that it’s real. And both of those truths mean that we should go for it. My goodness, there are people who are headed for an eternal destination, people we love, people we meet on the street, our next door neighbors, we ought to go for it. We got to look for opportunities to be salt and light, to be stronger salt and brighter light and share this message of hope and grace.

Dr. Jeff Myers (42:10):
Yeah. Lee, I’m thinking of a lot of the young adults who are watching or listening right now, people who are in their 20s and their friends are part of this, what George Barna calls the don’t generation. They don’t know, they don’t believe, and they don’t care. Yeah. How do you introduce talking about heaven? How do you even introduce the possibility that God is real? I know you talk about this in the book and you kind of lay it out in a pyramid. What would that conversation look like?

Lee Strobel (42:45):
Yeah, I mean, it’s dependent on so many things. You have five minutes to interact or is this a relationship that’s long term where you can kind of spread it out over time. And so I think there’s different ways we can do it, but I think the key to it is that we pray, and I pray this every day. I say, “God, lead me to opportunities to tell other people about you.”

Whether it’s an ongoing relationship or whether it’s Cameron, who I mentioned earlier, this young lady we met who was our waitress who lost a family member to COVID. She’s now a friend of ours and we see Cameron all the time and have built a relationship with her. She’s spiritually confused, doesn’t know what she believes. I just gave her a copy the other day of the heaven book. We’re looking forward to some great discussions from that.

(43:32):
And so I think it’s being heads up and asking God for those opportunities and then having the courage to do what Louise said, which is to go for it. And you know what? If we decide now that we’re going to go for it when God opens opportunities, it means we’re not making that decision in the split second when that decision actually comes up. In other words, when God opens an opportunity.

I’ll give you an example. When I was a new Christian, my boss at the newspaper where I worked in Chicago came up to me one day and said, “Boy, Strobel, you really held it together today. It was a wild day, but man, you really held it together. Now, I heard that you go to church. Golly, that kind of surprises me. What’s this Christianity thing to you?”

Dr. Jeff Myers (44:20):
Wow.

Lee Strobel (44:21):
Well, I had never shared my faith before, but I took a quick breath and I said a quick silent prayer, God help. And then I just opened my mouth and said, “Do you really want to know?” And he said, “Yeah, I do.” And I said, “Let’s go in your office.” And we went into his office and closed the door and we talked for about 45 minutes and it was probably the most inept sharing of the gospel and the history of Christianity. Nobody ever trained me to do it.

I told him my story going from atheism to faith and I did my best, but it was rather inept, but he listened to every word. He took it seriously. And when I left that office, it was as if my entire life had been a motion picture filmed in eight millimeter, black and white with scratchy sound, but that 45 minutes was like technicolor with Dolby stereo.

(45:20):
And I said, “I need more of that in my life.” And so I think when we make the decision now, God, I’m going to pray. I’m going to say, open up opportunities for me to engage with others about your message of hope and grace, but I’m going to decide now when you do that, I’m going to act. I’m going to seize the opportunity. I’m not going to waver and think about it at that time. I’m deciding today when that moment happens, I’m moving forward. I’m going to seize that opportunity. I think that’s one thing we can do that’ll have a big payoff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:52):
Wow. Lee, thank you. I’ve loved this conversation. I’m so grateful to have you on the show today and so thankful for your relationship with Summit Ministries. Yes. And I hope the book does really well and leads a lot of people to be confident, leads a lot of people to experience salvation through Jesus Christ, and it’s world changing. Thanks so much for your time today.

Lee Strobel (46:16):
I appreciate you. I appreciate what you do with Summit. Wherever I go, I talk up Summit. I think it is the best program of its kind in the universe. And I am so proud of you and what your team does there. It’s just awesome. And it’s an overused word, but not with Summit. It is awesome.

Dr. Jeff Myers (46:34):
A special thank you to Lee Strobel for joining us on the show today. You can follow him on Twitter @LeeStrobel, that’s S-T-R-O-B-E-L, @LeeStrobel. And you can find the new book, The Case for Heaven, which I thought was wonderful. I hope that you enjoy it. You can find that and his other apologetic works wherever books are sold. In the Bible, the gospel writer, Luke, says he carefully investigated everything in order to write an orderly account. That’s what we should do, carefully look into the claims of faith so we can stand on a firm foundation because we can trust God. We’ll see you next week.

(47:15):
Hey everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview.

For nearly 60 years, Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more. If you want to live out a biblical worldview in today’s world and you desire to instill a lifelong faith in the rising generation, visit summit.org/thedrJeffshow for more information.

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(48:19):
Be sure to share this show if you have enjoyed listening to it and leave a review, if you would, on the site where you download the show that helps more people know about the Dr. Jeff Show, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.