Welcome to a special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, thanks for tuning in. Coming up in this week’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Doctrine of Salvation, focusing on the question, “What Must We Do to be Redeemed?” In Religion in the News, “Getting Drunk to Talk to God” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Are Your Hymns Politically Correct?” We hope you can stay with us. Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers a wide variety of teaching materials, including books, tracts, audio and video disks, and copies of our weekly broadcast on compact disk or DVD. You may also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, which we offer free of charge. We’ll let you know how to order later in the program. Now, this week’s Cover Article. We begin a new series of revisits to our 2000 radio series based on Dave Hunt’s book, An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith . Today we focus on the question, “Is Death the End of Existence?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon:
Tom:
Thanks, Gary . Today in our feature article, we’re beginning a new series. We’ll be going through Dave Hunt’s latest book (at least at the time of this recording). The title of the book is An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith . Now Dave, if you really want to know what a book is about, that is so I’ve been told, you read the back cover and I’m going to do just that. It says: Based upon rock-solid biblical doctrine and the unsurpassed hope of the believer, An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith fosters deeper trust in and a commitment to God by defining the biblical gospel and what it saves us from; clarifying the call to discipleship, articulating the faith for which we must earnestly contend, explaining the necessity for taking up the cross, developing what the Bible says about the Trinity, the incarnation in the church, confronting the challenge of living in the last days. Well, that sounds like the kind of stuff that ought to bless our listeners. Let’s get right into it. Now you opened with a topic which everyone faces, which most everyone tries to avoid and which few want to discuss: death. But you come right out of the chute with that subject. Why?
Dave:
Before I answer that Tom, let me just mention that this is a different book from anything that I’ve written, in that it has no footnotes.
Tom:
Okay, well we’ll get letters about that Dave.
Dave:
And most very few quotes other than the Bible. So it’s entirely different, so you can read it a little faster, you don’t have to keep referring to footnotes and so forth.
Tom:
Dave, death is not a popular subject. Why would you start out with that?
Dave:
Well because it’s inevitable, except if the Rapture occurs before we die. That’s the only hope, but people have been dying ever since Adam and Eve were created. It’s a subject that isn’t pleasant and you don’t like to think of it maybe when you get as old as I am. My next birthday, I’ll be 74 coming up in September and you think about it a bit more than when you are younger. But there are so many reminders in the Scripture, in fact in those two Psalms that most people realize were written by Moses—it says a prayer of Moses a man of God, Psalm 90 and 91. He says: “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” In other words, if I think I am going to be here forever, I am not going to make the wisest decisions, but if I realize that life is brief (and it really is), James says your life is like a vapor. It appears for a little time and then is gone. You couldn’t make me understand that when I was fifteen or twenty, or even thirty. But now I can understand it because I don’t know where 73 years went. I never thought I would be this old. How in the world did I get this old? It doesn’t seem possible.
Tom:
I feel the same way, Dave.
Dave:
And I’ve got 20 years on you! Can I be the same person I was back there? And Solomon in fact, goes even further when he says it is better to go to the house of mourning than to a house of feasting. In other words, better to go to a funeral than to a party, he says because that is the end of all life and the living will lay it to heart. In other words, it will remind us how short life is. So, it’s something they say that is inevitable. Death and taxes. It’s something that we have to face. And what concerns me is, at one time Ruth and I owned and I administered a convalescent hospital [with] a lot of elderly patients and I had thought that when you are approaching death you would be concerned about it and yet I didn’t find that with many—a very few exceptions—of these dear people. They just kind of drifted off. And it seems that if you don’t face the reality of death in time, you know when you get old and you’re nodding in a chair or you’re heading for a coma in a hospital or whatever, you’re not likely to think about it. On the other hand, younger people, religious people who think that they have made some preparation in what they believe—I am staggered by the pitiful reasons they have—for example, we just came back from Europe and I was talking with the flight attendant and this dear gal, thought she believed in re-incarnation. She didn’t have any reasons for it and it took me about three minutes to disabuse her of that idea. She could immediately see that what she had been believing was foolishness, but yet that was what she had put her hope in. Other people…
Tom:
Yes, but Dave, let me stop you here. Before I was a Christian, I bought into that and it wasn’t that I really truly believed it—it just looked like something that solved the problem. Well, if I don’t get it right this time, I’ll come back again. Now I didn’t understand transmigration or any of the religious beliefs behind it, I just thought “well this will cover it.” So then, I just put it aside and went on to be merry or whatever.
Dave:
Yeah but the point I am trying to make Tom is you didn’t have a good reason for that nor did this lady and yet death— I remember the scientist some years ago, giving his testimony. He was at Stanford Research Institute which became SRI, he was a physicist, a brilliant guy and he was so unhappy that he was ready to commit suicide, although the friends that—he was an atheist—the friends that he would invite over to his cocktail parties, he would say wow, you must really have a great psychiatrist, you throw such wonderful parties and he’s dying inside. The only thing that kept him from suicide was that he had a Christian grandmother that was praying for him and she had warned him that there was place called hell out there. Now he didn’t believe that, but he kept thinking “suppose Granny’s right, suppose there is a place called hell and you get out there and you can’t get back. I better hang on a little longer. In fact he met Christ through reading the Scriptures and his life was transformed. Now he knew where he was going and he was going to heaven now, not because of anything that he had done, in fact in spite of what he had done, but because Christ had paid the penalty for his sins and in his last visit to the psychiatrist he said, I don’t need you, you need me. I’m not coming here to pay you if you don’t want to listen to the gospel. The point I am trying to get at is suppose there is a place called hell out there? When you die and I go into the three possibilities….
Tom:
Let’s do that. Before we get to that one, what are the popular ideas that people…?
Dave:
Well, let me just finish now Tom—When you die—unless one of these three ideas will bring you back or give you another chance and we can dispense with them pretty readily—it’s pretty serious. In other words, people will make it a choice of the church, or of the religion they believe in— well I was born a Hindu, I’ll die a Hindu, or I was born a Catholic, or Baptist, or whatever, I’ll die a Baptist and you try to ask them well what do you really know for sure about this? Well, I like the choir, or the pastor is so friendly, or the people are so friendly—I mean they have reasons for their hope of eternity that I wouldn’t be comfortable with buying a refrigerator or a used car. They would be much more careful about that and yet they are going to launch out into eternity, so that was, getting back to your question, way back there—that was why I began there. Because that’s what we have to face and really that’s what so-called religion is about. Every religion believes there’s something after death and they’ve got their theories and so forth—let’s call it faith. And this is called An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith , so let’s get serious about where we are heading.
Tom:
Well, lets talk about the popular views. One that you mentioned is that when it’s the end it’s the end. Just extinction—that’s it. When the lights go out, the lights go out. What about that one? That’s based on materialism.
Dave:
Materialism. In other words, material bodies die and that’s it for the body unless there’s a resurrection, so there’s no doubt about that. But nobody can sensibly imagine that they are just a lump of protein molecules wired with nerves, you know, a piece of educated beef steak that has learned to make programmed responses to this stimulus like Pavlov’s dog. You can’t explain a sense of truth, justice, morals, ethics, purpose and meaning in terms of electrical current in your brain.
Tom:
Or chemistry…
Dave:
Or chemical reactions in the brain. There’s got to be something else in there.
Tom:
So it’s absurd that just the physical exists.
Dave:
Well Tommy, a young man that’s sitting in the back of a courtroom let’s say and he doesn’t like the decision that the judge has just come up with and he says angrily, “There’s no justice in this world!” Well what is he referring to? The absence of something that he says doesn’t exist. If he’s never seen it, how does he know it’s missing? You can’t explain ethics and morals and so forth in terms of chemical reactions and electrical processes in the brain. You can’t even explain thoughts. Your brain doesn’t even think. If your brain thought, you would be the prisoner of your brain. You would be running around doing whatever your brain comes up with you have to do it. We all have a pretty good idea that we do make choices, not always rational, sometimes based on lusts and greed and so forth, but we are not running around following our brain, but we’re telling our brain what to do. We have more non-physical thoughts (thoughts are not physical). For example, you say to me justice or truth. I know what you are talking about, but justice isn’t physical. Truth is not physical; I mean what does it weigh? What’s the texture? What’s the color? What does it taste like? What does it smell like? It has nothing to do with the physical universe in which our bodies function. So we have thoughts about something that isn’t physical. That bugged Lenin and that’s a very famous problem in….
Tom:
Right, the communist, atheist, the materialist, not John Lenin, but Vladimir Lenin.
Dave:
Right. It’s a very famous problem in philosophy—Lenin’s dilemma. Lenin as you said, was a materialist. Nothing exists but matter. In fact, he was right when he said you can’t think of anything that doesn’t exist. Try it. Well, I can think of pink elephants, but pink exists and elephants exist. If you think you can think of something that doesn’t exist, in this physical universe, come up with a new prime color to the rainbow. You can’t do it—so that all we can think of is supposedly all that we know out there. What has affected us. Ahhhh, but what about God? Where did that idea come from? You’ve never seen anything in this universe that looks like God that feels like God, that even comes close to the human concept of God and that bothered Lenin to his dying day. He couldn’t solve that problem. So the thoughts that we have are not physical [and] cannot be explained in terms of any process going on in the brain. In fact—
Tom:
Dave, can I—am I over simplifying here? So the only way we could possibly know about God is Him revealing himself to us.
Dave:
Exactly, exactly.
Tom:
In other words, man did not—could not, according to Lenin, could not make up God.
Dave:
That’s right. And Lenin couldn’t get away from that. Now the Bible does tell us [in] Romans chapter 1, that the power and the eternal wisdom of God are revealed in the things that are made. You can’t—we’ve got not too far outside our kitchen window is a mother goose, Canadian goose sitting on eggs. Now how do they even know enough to lay all the eggs first and then start hatching them? Otherwise, you would have them popping out at different times and there would be chaos. Or how does—sometimes I look out and I see a spider spinning a web. Where did this come from? You can’t—well look, with the electron microscopes we have now, we are able to probe into the molecular level of life and it is so complex. It is incredible. We’ve probably quoted it before, but you remember Richard Dawkins, one of the leading evolutionists, he acknowledges that the nucleus of every cell has—this is just the nucleus—has a digitally—these are his words—a digitally organized database larger than the 30 volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica . So you couldn’t be a rational person and say this happened by chance. Some one planned this and designed it and so forth. You cannot escape it—alright? But that doesn’t tell me about God’s love. That doesn’t tell me about God’s character. It tells me of His power and His genius. So as you said, that must be revealed to me and the fact that I have a sense of perfect justice, of truth and so forth indicates that. Now…
Tom:
The point here is there is something beyond our physical makeup that we have to acknowledge.
Dave:
It’s inside of us. Right, right, the Bible calls it the soul and spirit. In fact, we’ve quoted Robert Jastrow you know, who said that some beings (he’s an evolutionist) out on some of these planets, could have evolved beyond the need for bodies. They would be what old fashioned religious people call spirits. So even he believes that there could be non-physical entities. Wilder Penfield, one of the world’s leading neurosurgeons and experts on the brain—he says the mind is separate and distinct from the brain. The mind is non-physical, the brain is physical. He says the brain is a computer that is programmed by something independent of itself and that is the mind. Your brain doesn’t even think. But your brain is a computer which you use, I use to operate this body to interface with this physical universe [in]which our bodies function.
Tom:
The mind or the spirit. Can we say that?
Dave:
Absolutely, Tom no rational person can deny that. So the man that sticks a gun to his head, pulls the trigger can be assured of only one thing. He stopped the function of his brain cells. He ended the life of this physical body, but the bullet passed—didn’t even touch the soul and the spirit. That goes on forever. Physical things, you know 2 nd law of Thermodynamics, physical things wear out— the law of entropy—and we can see that in the universe around us. That’s how we know the universe hasn’t always been here. If it had been here forever, the sun would have burned out by now. So there was a time that it didn’t exist and so forth. But the spirit and the soul—we have no reason to believe that they wear out. Therefore the most important question any person can face is: Where will I spend eternity?
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
But to suggest that when you’re dead, you’re dead and that’s it—we’ve got no rational basis for that. Everything we experience of life says that’s not true. Something inside of you is going to go on after the death of that body.
Tom:
The other options—you know we’ve only got a few minutes left in this segment, so we’ll continue with this next week and as we’re going through the book, we’ll just keep touching upon these subjects as time permits. But the other option Dave, is well when I die, it will all be just bliss. It will just be the white light and perfect acceptance. I’ll keep evolving upward, I’ll be more brilliant than I am right now and that’s what I have to look forward to. Is there any evidence for that?
Dave:
And these people, they do believe then that there is a spirit and soul, okay? Give them credit for that. They believe that it survives the death of the body. There are a lot of problems with that idea—that we just move on into graduate school, that we just continue to learn our lessons and so forth. Hitler’s fate is no worse than Mother Theresa’s. It doesn’t really matter—
Tom:
Well, this white light is not going to be as white as others—its dark gray and other…
Dave:
Yes, well they never say that. Everybody—these people that have these near-death experiences—NDEs—and they go through this tunnel and they see this bright light, then there’s nothing but love and acceptance—and they come back and they say well I didn’t even want to come back, you know death is a myth, you don’t really die and you just move up and so forth—a lot of problems.
Tom:
Yeah—no judgment, no accountability.
Dave:
Right, I mean that’s just the wonderful thing! You can be a murderer and a thief and so forth, but then you escape it all when you die. I mean that makes suicide sound wonderful. You know—let’s escape everything. No, no that violates the very sense of justice that we have. The Bible says that it is appointed unto man once to die, after this the judgment. And we wouldn’t let someone get away with this on this earth. To imagine then that you leave this earth and you can escape all the consequences—that doesn’t make sense, furthermore….
Tom:
Well we’d object to it, most people would say well wait a minute, this guy was a jerk, how does he either get away with it all, or how does he become a non-jerk—what’s the change? If he hasn’t changed here on earth, why’s he going to change later?
Dave:
Exactly. The one basis you would think for keeping people in line, at least some people think this, would be the death penalty, that there are some serious consequences or imprisonment or whatever and now suddenly when you die you escape all of this and you are out in the realm somewhere, you’re just floating around and everything is peaches and cream, and you are just accepted and you’ve got no incentive for progressing. It doesn’t make sense from that basis as well. Furthermore, there are people who do come back from these near-death experiences and they’ve experienced hell. Now they don’t remember it generally, but if you talk to them right away, in fact some of them—I’ve known doctors who have resuscitated people, who’ve suddenly had a massive heart attack, and they’ve gone into a coma and then they’ve brought them back and they come out of it screaming that they’re in flames, so I can’t trust these experiences because I get contradictory.
Tom:
And as you said we don’t know if they are valid, if it actually happened, or if this was something that just went on in the brain or a circumstance of the physical nature that he was going through.
Dave:
Right, right, so I wouldn’t trust this “when you’re dead, you’re dead” idea. I would investigate it a bit further and I guess we are running out of time and we better investigate it further in the next program.
Tom:
Dave, we’ll pick up on this, as we said we are going to continue through these issues and your book, An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith , we’ll get it next week.
