Do You Have a Religious Preference?

Tom:  Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him.

We’re in chapter 4 of Dave Hunt’s new book Seeking and Finding God. And Dave, chapter 4, the title is “In Search of the True Faith.” Now we covered part of it last week, the opening, but, Dave, early in the chapter you talk about “people of faith.” Now that sounds like a good thing. Okay, we’ve got these people, they’re people of faith. But it’s not necessarily a good thing, is it? Unless it’s THE faith once and for all delivered unto saints.

Dave:  Yeah, Tom, you are narrow minded and…

Tom:  Dogmatic.

Dave:  …and the title is narrow minded. THE faith. Why should there be—you mean there’s only one faith? Well, the Bible says so. There is one faith, Ephesians 4, that’s it. Well, can’t I have my faith and you can have your faith, just so long as you have faith? Faith in what? Faith isn’t a leap in the dark! But anyway, this is the idea that we have. “Well, you’ve got your faith; I’ve got mine. Let’s not be narrow minded and dogmatic about this.”

Tom:  Well we have whole programs. We have faith initiatives. We have…

Dave:  Yeah.

Tom:  … a major program to bring all together people of faith.

Dave:  Faith-based and Community Initiative, started by President Bush. So who joins it? You had the Christian Coalition—that was Jerry Falwell, years ago, and well, just people of faith—Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, so long as you’re a person of faith. “Let’s not upset people and claim that you mean there’s one true faith and other faiths are false?” I think on this program we’ve talked about Simon Greenleaf in the past briefly. He was the co-founder of the Harvard Graduate School of Law. And, in his day, the authority on legal evidence—what evidence do you introduce in a court, and so forth. He made an investigation of the claims of Jesus of Nazareth, and he decided—just as he would examine evidence in court, testimony sworn in court—and he said, “On the basis of the evidence, there is no question that Jesus Christ is who He claimed to be. He’s God. He came to this earth, became a man through a virgin birth, didn’t cease to be God. He lived a perfect, sinless life. He died for my sins on the cross,” said Greenleaf. “He resurrected the third day; He is alive,” and as a result of his investigation and the transformation in his life, Greenleaf wrote a book—interesting book—I have copy of it. It’s titled The Testimony of the Evangelist. He addressed this book to the fellow members of the legal profession. And he said, “You guys are accustomed to examining evidence, supposedly. You are willing to face the evidence and arrive at a sound and just conclusion. Well, here it is, guys, and you cannot deny it.”

And then—what made me think of this was—I think it’s in his foreword. He said, “Christianity is not just another religion. Christianity claims to be THE true faith, and, in fact, it aims at the destruction of all of the rest of them.” That was what Greenleaf said.  Because they’re false, and they’re leading people astray. So it’s not an ecumenical matter of all people of faith: “Well let’s get together, it doesn’t matter, let’s not quarrel with one another.” No, Paul disputed in the synagogues, it says, Acts:17:17Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him.
See All.... He disputed in the synagogues; he disputed with the Jews or with the Greeks. And he said, “Look guys, there’s only one way. That’s Jesus Christ. This is what He said. If He is not THE way, THE truth and THE life by which alone men can come to the Father, then He’s a liar and He’s not who He claimed to be.” 

Tom:  So, Dave, what we’re asking people is to be serious.

Dave:  Yeah.

Tom:  Get after this, in search of the true faith. If there is a true faith out there that—and if they have a false faith, to dump it, get rid of it.

Dave:  Well, Tom, the basis for it is, that’s how we started out in this book is that we are non-physical beings. When you’re body decays in the grave, you, the thinker, the person that made those decisions, made the choices, you continue to live. Now, you don’t cease to exist. You’re going to be here…around forever. Then it’s very important. You can’t just say, “Well, I’ve got a faith, you got your faith, okay, we’re all taking different roads to get to the same place.” That’s not going to work.

You’d better be absolutely certain. That’s what we’re saying. We’re not trying to jump on people or quarrel with anyone. We’re just saying, look guys, this is serious! You step out into eternity, you’d better know for sure, 100 percent where you’re going. It’s not good enough, “Well, mine is the biggest church,” or “It’s the oldest church,” or, you know, “I really like the choir,” or “The pastor’s such a personable guy,” you know, and so forth— “Our family’s been there…we were Baptists all…for generations,” or “I was born a Muslim,” or whatever, “I’ll die a Hindu, or a Muslim.”

No, let’s get down to the facts. Give me your reasons why you believe that when you step out into eternity you are going to be in a good place, not a bad place.

Tom:  Dave, you write, “It is undeniable that there is neither truth, meaning, nor purpose without an intelligent Creator, who, for his own reasons, made the universe and each of us in His image.” That’s where we have to go, don’t we?

Dave:  Well, it starts with God. That’s where the Bible starts: “In the beginning God….” All of the so-called religions, whatever they are, they do claim to deal with some…what they would call a “higher power,” “Supreme Being.” Higher power? Higher that what? Power isn’t going to do it. A power or a force cannot create personal beings. So we have to start there.

Is there a God? Did the universe happen by chance? I mean, if it did, there’s no purpose or meaning to anything. Forget it. But you look around the universe, you just cannot deny it. Everything cries “Design, Designer, purpose, plan, meaning.” I mean, I majored in mathematics as pre-law at UCLA, and I can tell you mathematics describes the universe.  There are processes in the universe, whether it’s in living or inanimate things—like just the living cell, or the motions of the atoms, the motion of the arc of an arrow, whatever it is, it all works out mathematically. It’s not random. There’s a purpose, and there are laws that govern. And the laws—the law of gravity didn’t decide one day to become a law of gravity. There has to be a lawgiver. And just as there are physical laws, you couldn’t imagine, then, that there wouldn’t be moral laws and spiritual laws. So we’re going to have to conform to those. You can’t even play a game, as we often say, without rules. Well, if God created this universe, He’s the rule maker, and we’d better find out who this God is, what His rules are.

I talk to so many people, Tom, and they say, “Well, I think I’m doing okay. I’m not such a bad person.” And I say, “By whose standards?” You just decide…you’re driving down the highway, and you think… you’re doing 90 miles an hour, but you say, “Well, I’m in perfect control of this car. I think I’m doing okay.”

Well, if you’re on a German autobahn, you’re okay, but if you’re driving through a 35-mile zone in a residential district, you can’t just make up your own rules. There are some rules, some lawgivers, even to function in this life. Well, to function in God’s universe? Forever? Doesn’t He have the right to make rules?  So we better find out who this God is and what rules has He made?

Tom:  Dave, what you’re saying, it makes sense. So why is it, for example, in academia, they’re saying, “Your truth is your truth, and my truth is my truth, there is no truth.” They’re supposed to be in search of truth. Yet professors tell their students, “Well, I wouldn’t be so intolerant to…not to give this person their due for this and that person his due for that.” Dave, it’s now considered presumptive and triumphalistic to suggest that there’s only one true faith and that all others are wrong. You just don’t hear it today.

Dave: Well, Tom, as I said I majored in math.

Tom:  Dave! I majored in art, but I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4!

Dave:  Good for you, Tom!

Tom:  Okay? I knew.

Dave: Okay, but you don’t change mathematics, okay?

Tom:  Right.

Dave:  Now art, okay that’s up to everybody’s idea. But you don’t get to heaven by art, I’m sorry, Tom. And you found that out eventually.

Tom:  Well, no, my point was that I understand a little math...

Dave:  Right, right.

Tom:  …some logic here and there, and that’s what it demands.

Dave:  Right, right, right. Physics? There are laws of physics. You know, you step out of an airplane at 37,000 feet. “Well, birds can fly. Why can’t I? Well I know that granny said there’s that old-fashioned law of gravity, but I don’t believe in that.” Well you’ll find out granny was right.

And I remember sitting next to a guy in an airplane. He was one of these…he was a business man, if you can imagine—quite successful businessman, I forget where. But he thought you just create everything with your mind. And I said (chuckling), “You mean you created this airplane with your mind? Let me get out of this thing! Supposing you get a little forgetful, is it going to fall apart? Come on! You hire employees, you have certain rules, they’ve got to do things a certain way. You created all this with your mind? But what about other people’s minds? It doesn’t make sense.”

,And there is a function in this physical universe. I mean, things work a certain way, and we didn’t invent it. And yet people insist! Well, you’re asking, Tom, I know you know why, but why do they persist in this? It is irrational, and these are supposedly intelligent university professors. But when it comes to chemistry, when it comes to math, when it comes to physics, electronics, or getting to the moon, they recognize you’ve got to follow certain laws, certain rules. When it comes to whether there is a heaven or a hell, or how to get there, they don’t want to obey anybody. They think they can do it, make it up as they go along. Tom, it makes no sense!

Tom:  But, Dave, people respond to it and say. “Look how tolerant this person is. You see, all roads lead to the same place.” Now isn’t that tolerant?

Dave:  Yeah, right, sure. No it’s not. That’s more narrow-minded and dogmatic than anything Jesus ever said. “We’re all taking different roads to get to the same place.” I don’t know why people don’t think. That’s broad minded? They are saying you’ve got to go where they’re going. They’re saying there’s only one destination. What? Jesus wasn’t that narrow minded and dogmatic. He said there are two destinations—heaven or hell. You’re not forced to go to either one, take your pick.  But wherever you go, you’re going to have to get there by the rules. The rules of the road, okay? And Jesus said, “Broad is the road that leads to destruction. Many there be that go in there at. Narrow is the gate, strait is the way that leads to life. Few there be that find it. Strive to enter in at the strait gate.” And Solomon said, “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man and the end thereof are the ways of death.”

Why would it seem right unto a man, but it isn’t right? Because you don’t make up your own rules. We have to follow what God has said.

Tom:  Dave, you have a quote in here from Time magazine. It’s terrific. As many times as I’ve read Time, I don’t think I’ve ever seen something that makes a point the way this—well, I’ll read it to you:

“As I checked in for a test at a local hospital, the admissions lady inquired, ‘What is your religious preference?’ I was tempted to repeat what Jonah said, ‘I am a Hebrew, ma’am, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven.’ But that would have gotten me sent to psychiatry rather than x-ray.

“In ancient times they asked, “Who is your God?” A generation ago they asked your religion. Today, your creed is a ‘preference.’ According to Chesterton, Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.’ When it is believed that on your religion hangs the fate of your immortal soul, the inquisition follows easily. When it is believed that religion is a breezy consumer preference, religious tolerance flourishes. After all, we don’t persecute people for their taste in cars. Why for their taste in gods? Oddly though, there is one form of religious intolerance that does survive the disdain bordering on contempt for those for whom religion is not a preference but a conviction.”

Dave:  Yeah, and when it’s a conviction—and there are various people who have convictions—we’re still going to have to decide which conviction is right. But if you have a conviction, at least you’re willing to discuss it and willing to examine the evidence. But this idea of tolerance, Tom—tolerance is, you know, I’ve been trying to write books and poetry and various things for many years. And I still don’t understand language very well. Language—and my wife, who majored in English you know, Tom, she’s a bear, as you know.

Tom:  She’s tough!

Dave:  She will pull us right back because grammar, the structure of a sentence is set up in order to mean something. And sometimes I think I’ve got a pretty logical mind, and I think that I’ve got it all worked out. “Oh no,” she says, “Now wait a minute—look at this. You’ve got to get these subjects and pronouns and nouns and verbs and so forth in the right tense, in the right place, because you have to be clear on what you say.” All right? God is very clear on what He said. And He says it in His Word. And we have to follow His Word. And Jesus Christ is called the living Word. This is the instruction manual, right? 

And we’ve got this thing called evolution out there, Tom. It drives me crazy.  Because I don’t know how any intelligent person—and I’m not trying to look down on people, but Tom! How can you imagine…you know, I remember when I was at UCLA. I’ve got to take an evolutionary course, you know. You had to do it. And they’re trying to tell us that an eye, you know, it started out as an irritation on the skin, and over billions of years, I don’t know, probably millions of years, or hundreds of millions of years, it finally, through a process of survival of the fittest, natural selection, finally we developed this eye. And I raised my hand, and I say to the professor, “Come on, you know better than I do how complex the eye is with the millions of rods and cones and the nerves and connection and the lens we can’t even duplicate. Furthermore, how is it going to help you survive? Natural selection, survival of the fittest—the thing won’t help at all until it works! Now, how are you going to go through this whole process by chance and head in the right direction, and you’re going to produce this incredible mechanism, and more than a mechanism, to the brain, which is beyond our comprehension. You can’t build a computer like a brain. You can’t believe that! You can’t believe that!”

Then he’s trying to tell us how flying squirrels developed. Well, Tom, I’ve said enough about that.

It’s irrational. But why do they cling to it? Two reasons, Tom. We’ve quoted Sir Fred Hoyle, remember? He gives you the mathematics. It is off the chart. It is impossible. Sir Fred Hoyle, not a Christian, a mathematician, an astronomer, he says, “Everybody knows evolution is impossible. They know that it couldn’t happen by chance.” He says, “Why do they keep teaching it? Because it’s academically respected. If you don’t, you lose your job.” But what he doesn’t mention is because if you don’t cling to evolution, then you are admitting that there is a God, who is way beyond your intelligence, who put this whole thing together so incredibly that it blows our minds and we will never fathom at all, I don’t care how good our computers get, and they don’t want to submit to Him.

Tom:  Well, that’s it. Accountability.

Dave:  Right.

Tom:  You have to buy into, as it were, that worldview. You’re confronted with a Creator God.

Dave:  Of course on the other hand, Tom, as we’ve been saying, there are many people who believe in God. They say they believe in God. And yet, Tom, the true God of the Bible—well, you say the true God of the Bible—“How dare you say that! What about the Qur’an?”

Well, I can give you plenty of reasons why. In fact, Tom, I’ve been calling for an international debate for years. Let the Muslim experts come. You give us your reason why Muhammad is the true prophet. Why Allah is the true God. Why the Qur’an is the true word of God. And we’ll give you our reasons for the Bible, for Jesus Christ, and for the God of the Bible, and so forth. And let’s let the world decide. Let’s have a level playing field. Lay out the facts. And no threats—“If you don’t confess that there’s no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet, off with your head.” Come on, guys! Stop that kind of nonsense, and let’s just face the evidence. Okay? And come to a conclusion on the basis of the evidence. But there are people who can get very emotional about this.

I was sitting next to some Catholics on the plane, and they got very emotional. I wasn’t trying to offend them. They asked me if I was a priest, and I said no, but I am an author, and I happened to be working on A Woman Rides the Beast at the moment. And I said, in fact I’m just quoting a woman here from…who wrote me a letter and she was a Catholic for all of her life, and after 32 years of marriage and five children her husband got an annulment! And I said, “Let’s be honest—that’s divorce under another name.” And I said, “You know, a church that can’t even get that straight, I wouldn’t trust them in what they tell me about how to get to heaven.”

Well, I didn’t know they were Catholics, but they got very offended.  And they said, “Okay we don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Tom, we’d better face it. It’s not a question of being embarrassed or offended. Let’s fact the facts. Let’s face the evidence. You’re going to step out into eternity on just a hope or a prejudice—it’s very dangerous.

Tom: Dave, you mentioned it last week and I think the week before, it’s tolerance. You appeared intolerant to those people. They want somebody that’s tolerant. I mean, just as a doctor is—would you expect a doctor to be tolerant of disease? A professor, you were talking about professors, would you be tolerant of somebody who cheated on the exam, or used the book in the….

Dave: Or has most of the answers wrong, and he still gives him an A? Or the police to be tolerant of crime? It doesn’t make sense Tom. We’ve got to get these words straight. What they really mean.

Tom:  Well, the other thing, going back to the quote from Time magazine—people have preferences. There a whole mentality that’s out there today: “Well that’s his preference.” But will preference get you to heaven?

Dave:  You may have a preference when it comes to getting to the moon. I don’t know what your preference would be, but if you don’t follow the mathematics you are not going to get there, and you will not survive.

Tom:  Or if your preference is flapping your arms…

Dave: That’s right.

Tom: I don’t think that’s going to work.

Dave: It isn’t going to work, Tom, so you make a good point. Preference, tolerance, it doesn’t make sense. Now if it’s in art or music, okay, let’s be tolerant, alright? Up to a point Tom,  (chuckling). But when it comes to getting to heaven, just like getting to the moon, it isn’t going to work, and it doesn’t make any sense. So let’s find out what the Bible says, what God says. And then let’s follow Him. That’s what this program is all about. Search the Scriptures daily.