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0:48
This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:51
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:52
Let's get into it.
0:53
Yesterday, this is a podcast about something that I've just delayed and delayed and delayed
0:57
and not for no good reason, but I've been wanting to do a podcast on the importance
1:02
of Robby Zacharias for a very long time.
1:05
It's something that I was even planning on doing before he passed away on May 19th of
1:09
this year.
1:10
But yes, this is a rest in peace memorial podcast to Robby Zacharias at his taking place months
1:15
and months and months after he actually passed away.
1:17
A lot of things happen this summer.
1:19
Don't know if you're paying attention.
1:20
A lot of things have happened in the run up to the election.
1:22
So, the timing for this podcast has always seemed like, "Oh, I can put that off another
1:26
month.
1:27
I can put that off another three weeks."
1:28
And then here we are in December, and I'm just now getting to it.
1:30
But yes, he died on May 19th of this year at 74 years of age after a battle with a very
1:35
rare form of cancer.
1:36
And if you're not familiar with the name Robby Zacharias, you really should be, especially
1:40
if you're a listener of this podcast.
1:41
He is one of the foremost modern apologists that we've really ever had.
1:46
This is a guy that spent, I think, over 50 years as an apologist, as a traveling speaker.
1:52
And he is an apologist that used reason-based arguments for faith.
1:55
Okay?
1:56
And the reason why I think a lot of people were drawn to him is because he leaned on scripture,
2:01
but he didn't only lean on scripture.
2:03
I know that seems like a crazy thing to say, especially if you're a Christian and you believe
2:07
that the Bible is the Word of God and you know that it's imbued with all this truth
2:11
and foresight.
2:12
But there are a lot of people that think the Bible is nonsense.
2:15
They think it's not worth the paper that it's printed on.
2:17
And so just to get in to those people's brains, to get them to even listen to the message,
2:23
you can't always come to it from a scriptural point of view because they don't agree with
2:28
how you look at the scriptures.
2:29
And so you need to come at those people in a different way.
2:32
And a lot of people like to use reason.
2:33
And one of the reasons for that no pun intended is because of the work done by Robby Zacharias.
2:38
And so what today's podcast is going to be is I'm going to go through the three things,
2:42
the top three things that I've learned from Robby Zacharias' teachings, okay?
2:46
And these are kind of larger worldview type things.
2:49
They're incredibly dense topics.
2:53
And these are topics that I've heard him talk about over and over and over.
2:56
And that's kind of the only reason why they've landed with me because they are very heady.
3:00
And I just didn't get them the first time I listened to them.
3:02
But I'm going to be putting in clips of sometimes where he's explaining these three things.
3:08
And so you're going to get a little bit of me and you're going to get a lot of Robby
3:11
in this episode.
3:12
And guys, if you stick with me until the end of this episode, I will give you my thoughts
3:16
on the recent controversy surrounding Robby Zacharias.
3:19
So there's been some allegations that have come out about him and his behavior.
3:23
But this has all come out after he has passed away.
3:26
And so we will take ample time to address that because now you can't address Robby Zacharias
3:31
without also addressing these concerns or these allegations.
3:34
So we'll certainly get into that.
3:37
But before I get into the top three things that I've learned from Robby Zacharias, I
3:40
remember first hearing his name, this would have been maybe five or six years ago.
3:45
He actually came to Edmund Oklahoma to do a talk at Oklahoma Christian University.
3:50
And someone's like, Hey, are you going to go see Robby at Oklahoma Christian University?
3:53
And I was like, I don't know who that is.
3:54
He's like, Oh my gosh, he's like the greatest.
3:56
You should read his book.
3:57
She's listening to his podcast, you know, his speeches are amazing blah, blah, blah, blah.
4:00
By the time I even really thought about, uh, you know, let me look into this guy.
4:04
Let me see if it's even worth it to try to go the thing it sold out, right?
4:07
So whatever, however many seats they had at this event, it was completely sold out.
4:11
And it's kind of one of those things.
4:12
It's like when a band comes through town, you're like, Oh, I'll just catch them the next time
4:15
they come through.
4:16
And then they pass away or, you know, they break up or something like that happens.
4:20
The band is no more.
4:21
That's kind of how I feel like right now with Robby Zacharias is I never got to see him speak
4:25
live.
4:26
The one thing that I do find pretty interesting is I did find his podcast.
4:28
It's the just thinking podcast.
4:30
It's a daily podcast.
4:31
It's kind of broken down into, you know, a little 12, 13 minute chunks of his speeches
4:34
or his Q and A's or something like that.
4:37
It's funny whenever I watch a video of Robby.
4:40
And because I've listened to him at two times speed so much with my podcast that whenever
4:44
he's talking in front of a group of people, he's way more deliberate, obviously in the
4:49
way that he talks, he's deliberate in the things that he says in his vocal pauses and
4:54
things like that.
4:55
But basically over the last several years, Robby Zacharias has been one of the most important
4:58
people in terms of informing some of the things that I think about and how I would go about
5:03
defending the faith to someone who is an unbeliever.
5:06
So I've been tremendously influenced by Albert Moller. I've been tremendously influenced
5:10
at different times by the ministries of people like Andy Stanley or Jeff Durbin or Matt Chandler
5:15
or, you know, just different folks like that that I brought in at different points.
5:19
But a lot of those people don't really get into the apologetics side of things and some
5:23
of them, especially Jeff Durbin, they, they kind of have issues with the apologetic approach
5:27
that doesn't use scripture for every single argument in every single form of argumentation.
5:32
And so for Robby Zacharias, he's been such an important role in my life and he's been
5:36
in my ear for just hours and hours and hours and he's really formulated the way that I
5:42
see the world.
5:43
And so the top three things that I'm going to be talking about today in terms of what
5:47
I've learned from Robby are these number one is that every worldview has to answer four
5:52
questions.
5:53
So we'll get into that.
5:55
The second is explaining the existence of the moral law giver philosophically.
6:01
And then the third thing is the supreme ethic.
6:03
Okay, so every worldview has to answer four questions explaining the existence of a moral
6:08
law giver philosophically and the supreme ethic.
6:11
So we're going to get into the first one right here and I'm going to display a clip
6:15
for you.
6:16
And with some of these clips, you know, I know that there's some laws around, you know, common
6:19
usage of different clips and links and things like that.
6:22
So some of these clips are going to be a little bit shorter.
6:24
I think one of them is going to be a little bit longer.
6:26
I'm not exactly sure all the parameters here.
6:28
So if this becomes an issue later, I apologize in advance and I will make the adjustments.
6:33
But again, I'm trying to pay homage and honor Robby Zacharias and RZIM.
6:37
That's Robby Zacharias International Ministries with this, but also to bless all of you listening
6:41
to this.
6:42
So I feel like we've taken enough time doing the intro.
6:44
So let's go ahead and get into the first thing that I feel like I've learned and taken
6:48
away from Robby Zacharias' teachings and that that is that every worldview has to answer
6:52
four questions.
6:53
And so here we go into a clip where Robby explains that.
6:56
We use the term worldview a lot in this series.
7:00
What is the worldview?
7:01
You know, the interesting thing is one day I was going to speak on the subject in Hong
7:05
Kong and as I stood up to speak, one of the lenses of my glasses fell off.
7:10
I was to read a text and there I was looking at a pair of glasses with one lens that worked
7:16
and there was no lens on the other side and everything was distorted, which was ironic
7:21
because I was going to talk about a worldview in a sense as the lens through which you ultimately
7:27
look at reality.
7:29
And as we've dealt with the four issues of origin, meaning morality and destiny, those
7:34
are the particular questions that have to be answered and when they are put together,
7:40
they form your worldview.
7:41
So a worldview is a set of assumptions or assertions you have made through which you
7:48
look at every choice and every decision that ultimately comes in life to shape, especially
7:54
your values and your spiritual commitments that are made in your day-to-day living.
8:01
It is a critical thing and the problem is some people don't realize that they have a
8:06
worldview.
8:07
C.S. Lewis said about apologetics, the question is not whether you do apologetics or not the
8:11
only question is whether you have what you already do in apologetics is good or not.
8:17
And that's also the case of a worldview.
8:20
It's not whether you have a worldview or not, it's a case of whether one you do have
8:24
is a truthful worldview or a false one.
8:27
Something that important has to be tested, so how do we do that?
8:31
It absolutely has to be tested and there are two or three things I can say here.
8:36
The classical way of testing a worldview involves three steps, logical consistency, empirical
8:42
adequacy and experiential relevance.
8:45
What does that mean? Your answers have to be logically consistent.
8:49
They have to be empirically adequate, meaning you're able to verify them in situations like
8:55
the resurrection from the dead, like the archaeological claims of the Bible, like the historicity
9:00
of the Bible.
9:01
So that is the empirical component in it and then experiential relevance that all of this
9:06
is also relevant to your life, not just some kind of an abstract argument that you give
9:12
to things.
9:13
Now, there are two ultimate tests, correspondence and coherence.
9:19
To particular questions, your answers must correspond to reality, meaning by that, if
9:24
you say I came here in a red car and it sparked right in front of the building, that is a
9:29
correspondence test I will put, I can walk out of here and see if that red car is actually
9:34
there or you're spending some kind of a line to me on that.
9:37
Now if you're on a courtroom and you say I didn't commit that murder, maybe you're telling
9:42
the truth, but that does not mean you have no implications in it.
9:46
How will the attorney find out whether you are completely telling the truth or not?
9:52
They will take all of your answers, put them together and make sure they are coherent.
9:56
So there's correspondence and coherence.
10:00
Let me say something very important that is easily forgotten.
10:04
Sometimes worldviews are systemically false.
10:09
The system itself is flawed and you don't have to examine all of the details to know
10:14
the worldview is flawed.
10:16
You can see that something central to it is a flaw.
10:20
For example, the Quran says Jesus never really died on the cross.
10:24
It only appeared to the people that he died.
10:27
Jewish historians, pagan historians, Greek historians, Roman historians, Christian historians
10:33
all say that he died on the cross.
10:35
So when a particular book can make an assertion like that, that is false.
10:41
You immediately know there's something in that book and that worldview that could be
10:45
systemically flawed because it denies the very death of Jesus Christ, which is intrinsic
10:51
to the Christian faith.
10:52
So going back, logical consistency, empirical adequacy, experiential relevance, correspondence
10:59
to truth and particular statements, coherence as a whole worldview.
11:03
And if you notice a systemic flaw, there are danger signs of the rest of the worldview.
11:08
That's what I like about the Christian faith, corresponds to reality.
11:12
It coheres as a worldview.
11:13
It's logically consistent.
11:15
I can test it out and it brings relevance to your life in all of the most vital pursuits
11:21
that you and I engage in.
11:23
That's what makes Christianity not just an end time thing.
11:26
It makes it relevant for the now.
11:29
So there you go guys.
11:30
That's fairly dense.
11:31
I realize that, especially if you don't spend a lot of time digging into philosophy or you
11:35
don't really have a history in that, but that is something that I've heard him talk about
11:39
a lot.
11:40
So if you listen to his podcast, if you watch any of his YouTube videos or anything that
11:42
RZIM puts out, he talks about this a lot.
11:46
And so when you get into the correspondence and coherence theories, now we're really getting
11:50
into the world of philosophy and then you get into how that breaks down with logical
11:54
consistency, empirical adequacy and experiential relevance.
11:57
I think he did a great job of explaining that, re-explaining that and then driving at home.
12:01
But the big one that I wanted to point to, because this is what I feel like is easily
12:04
digestible and easy enough to bring up in a discussion or a debate with somebody.
12:08
And that's origin, meaning morality and destiny.
12:12
Okay.
12:13
Every worldview has to have an answer for those four questions, every single one of them.
12:17
And so if you're talking to somebody that is a Muslim or an atheist or an agnostic or
12:21
something else, they have to answer those questions, origin, where did we all come from?
12:26
Like how did, how did we get here?
12:28
Okay.
12:29
I mean, why are we here?
12:31
Like what is the purpose in all of this?
12:34
The third, morality.
12:35
How do we know what's right and what's wrong?
12:38
Where does that come from?
12:39
And then destiny.
12:40
Where do we go when we die?
12:43
Origin, meaning morality, destiny.
12:46
And some people in some of their worldviews, because if you talk to, you know, a very astute
12:50
atheist or someone who believes that we're just human, it's a humanist in that we're
12:54
all just, you know, biological entities, you know, eventually our ancestors were slime
12:58
and then they were bugs and then they were something else.
13:01
Essentially, you can probably get past origin, meaning morality and destiny.
13:06
You can probably decently work your way around that.
13:10
But then your worldview also has to correspond with reality and be coherent.
13:15
And it has to do so with logical consistency, empirical adequacy and experiential relevance.
13:20
And if you listen to a lot of Robbie Zacharias's speeches or talks, I feel like he does a pretty
13:25
good job of being fair to the worldviews that try to work their way through that matrix.
13:31
And the problem for a lot of those worldviews is they fall apart.
13:33
You saw him use an example with Islam and again, they are the only major world religion
13:37
that doesn't believe that Jesus was a real person that died on a Roman cross.
13:41
That's about as verifiable of a historical fact as anything from antiquity.
13:46
But the Christian worldview does have a great answer for all of those things listed.
13:51
And so I felt like that's at the very least a very good conversation starter because you
13:55
can memorize origin, meaning morality, destiny, origin, meaning morality, destiny.
14:00
You can definitely keep that with you to where you can pull it out whenever it's necessary.
14:04
And when you're having a discussion over a whiskey or two or something like that and
14:08
someone can't give you an answer to one of those four things, you don't necessarily
14:11
need to send them on to the correspondence or coherence theories.
14:15
Like you're going to stop way short of logical consistency, empirical adequacy and experiential
14:19
relevance, but it does at least get you into that conversation.
14:23
So that's the first thing that every worldview has to answer those four questions, the questions
14:28
of origin, meaning morality and destiny.
14:31
And the second big thing that I've learned from Ravi Zacharias and his lessons and his
14:34
teachings is explaining the existence of a moral law giver philosophically.
14:41
And this does have some, you know, attachments to the first thing that we've talked about,
14:45
so let's go to Ravi explaining how you can prove the existence of a moral law giver philosophically.
14:51
Philosophically, it's often of course put in tandem with evil, suffering evil, suffering
14:57
evil.
14:58
Why does God even allow evil?
14:59
And I've often responded that's very critical to understand the nature of the question because
15:04
when we say this evil, we assume this good.
15:07
When we say this good, we assume there's a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate
15:10
between good and evil.
15:12
When we assume a moral law, we assume a moral law giver because without the moral law giver,
15:16
there's no moral law.
15:17
Without the moral law, there's no good, without good, there's no evil.
15:20
The question actually ends up hoisting itself on its own perturbed as it were.
15:25
There's no how to defend itself.
15:27
But here's the killer point of that argument.
15:30
Somebody may say, why do you need a moral law giver to have a moral law?
15:35
And the answer is very clear in this, every question raised about evil and suffering is
15:40
either raised by a person or about a person, which means personal worth is essential to
15:47
the question.
15:49
Intrinsic worth is essential to the question.
15:52
And in a naturalistic framework, you cannot have intrinsic worth, you've got extrinsic
15:57
worth.
15:58
It's conveyed to you.
15:59
You're just a blip on the radar screen of time, you just happen to be here.
16:04
But if you're a person created in the image of God within intrinsic worth, then the question
16:08
indeed is reflective of the value that you give to personhood.
16:12
So two things, the reality of good and the intrinsic worth of a person are essential to
16:16
the question.
16:17
If the question is to be untaken seriously, those two assumptions need to be made, which
16:22
the question makes.
16:25
So of all the things that Ravi Zacharias has done, that little section right there, always
16:30
out of 90 seconds worth of audio, there's so much in that.
16:35
If I had to rank, rank order, everything that I feel like I've learned for Ravi, that's
16:38
probably the number one thing.
16:40
The reason why I didn't go with that first is because, you know, origin, meaning morality,
16:43
destiny and all the stuff underneath it, that's probably the most dense.
16:45
So if you can get past that, you can get on to these next two.
16:48
But explaining the moral law giver is very, very important because probably the number
16:54
one pushback that you will get from people that are non-Christians as to why God could
17:00
not exist.
17:02
Or probably does not exist is the problem of pain.
17:05
You've heard people talk about the problem of pain a lot.
17:07
How could a good God let bad things happen to good people?
17:12
And you've heard that question asked in many different forms, but that's essentially the
17:16
nexus, you know, that's the core of the question is how could a good God let bad things happen
17:20
to good people?
17:21
And then you can start saying, well, okay, what do you mean by bad?
17:25
What do you mean by good?
17:26
And automatically the answer to that question infuses some sort of a morality.
17:31
And that morality came from somewhere.
17:33
Now, some people might just say that that we've evolved to be moral, right?
17:37
You know, it's what's good for the goose is good for the gander as it were, except the
17:40
gander is actually monkeys in this argument that people use.
17:44
But at that point, you need somebody to basically establish where does morality come from?
17:49
Because you can't say that something is good unless you know what bad is and vice versa,
17:55
right?
17:56
And you know how to differentiate between the two by having some sort of moral law.
18:01
And this is where I used to get hung up is like I was with you for the first three.
18:04
It's like, okay, in order to know what bad is you have to know what good is in order
18:08
to know the difference between good and bad is you've got to have a some sort of a moral
18:12
law.
18:13
But then I felt like there was a chasm between the moral law and saying that just because
18:16
there is a moral law, there has to be a moral law giver.
18:20
Because at least on its face, at face value alone, you can say, all right, I can maybe
18:24
buy that over millions and millions and millions of years, monkeys evolved to be nice to one
18:29
another.
18:30
So I'm going to take on everything else along with that worldview, all the sheer craziness
18:35
and the odds of getting a world that we have right now, I can probably push that out a
18:40
little bit further and say, yeah, okay, I bet monkeys evolved to play nice.
18:44
But there isn't as big of a gap as I originally thought because the first several times I
18:49
heard Robbie give that answer.
18:50
He didn't give the last part about the moral law giver, right?
18:55
The reason why we can we can lean on that is because every time that question is brought
18:59
up, it's brought up by a person or about a person.
19:02
So personhood and the worth therein is important to the question because otherwise the question
19:07
does self defeat as he said, because if there is no moral law giver, then there is no moral
19:11
law, then you can't differentiate between good and evil.
19:15
If you can't differentiate between good and evil, what is good and what is bad?
19:18
We don't have any idea.
19:19
The question self-destructs.
19:21
So that's one that if this is not really landing automatically, I would highly encourage
19:25
you to go back and re-listen to that clip right there to get a little bit more of that and
19:30
see if you can maybe, you know, I know it's kind of like philosophy, guys, I promise I'm
19:36
not a philosopher like sometimes with philosophy, it's like grab trying to grab a fist full
19:40
of water.
19:41
It's almost impossible.
19:42
It seems impossible.
19:43
But I feel like, especially with these first two things that I brought to you that these
19:46
are accessible.
19:47
They may take you actually sitting down and writing down what he's saying, like not word
19:51
for word, but writing down the larger points of what he's saying so that you could get
19:54
it in your brain somehow because I think, especially these first two are incredibly,
19:58
incredibly important.
19:59
So again, we've gone over the fact that every worldview has to answer the four questions
20:02
of life, origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.
20:05
The second one is explaining the existence of the moral law giver or of a moral law giver
20:09
philosophically.
20:10
And so the last thing I'm going to go over today, there's, I could have done dozens of
20:13
things, but we got to, you know, stay within some sort of parameters here is the supreme
20:17
ethic.
20:18
And so I'm going to go ahead and play this clip for you.
20:20
And I'm going to go ahead and let you know that I'm going to just play the entire thing.
20:23
I'm not going to edit out the question because you can tell the guy that's asking this question.
20:27
He's, he says he's going to play the devil's advocate, but you can even just tell by his
20:31
posture.
20:32
He's got his arms crossed.
20:33
He's thinking he's got a zinger.
20:34
And if any of you have listened to Robbie Zach Rice for any length of time, again, this
20:37
guy was on the road for over half a decade, half a decade, I believe, or sorry, not half
20:41
a decade, half a century rather half a decade is not that impressive half a century rather.
20:46
And so there weren't a whole lot of questions that he hasn't been asked, right?
20:49
And some questions might be asked with some different semantics and some different, you
20:54
know, language being used, but they're fundamentally a lot of the exact same questions.
20:58
But I just want to play this for you because he gets into what the supreme ethic is.
21:03
And I just absolutely loved how he answered this question.
21:06
So here we go.
21:08
This question is for Ravi.
21:11
You mentioned the story of that.
21:15
I think you said he was Jewish and he was shot by at that, I think it was a concentration
21:21
camp or something like that.
21:23
And I'm going to play the devil's advocate for a bit and pretend I'm Sam Harris.
21:26
No pun intended, of course.
21:30
You stated that God was watching.
21:32
God watched the gentleman pull the trigger.
21:36
If God was watching, why didn't he make that trigger not work?
21:40
Why didn't he make that poor individual just pass out?
21:44
He was digging the grave.
21:46
I believe Sam Harris would ask that type of question and demand an answer.
21:52
Yes, I appreciate that question.
21:56
The playing the devil's advocate, you said that why didn't God keep the man from pulling
22:01
the trigger rather than allowing the man to pull the trigger and then watch over him and
22:07
bringing about some kind of judgment.
22:10
I would say this to you, that the supreme ethic that God has given to us is the ethic
22:18
of love.
22:20
It is the peak of all intellectual and emotional alignment.
22:28
This thing we call love, which places value upon the other person of worth and as something
22:36
to be protected.
22:39
It was interesting of all people.
22:41
It was Oscar Wilde who won his deathbed in his forties.
22:46
By his lover, by his side, Robbie Ross, he turned to Robbie and he said, "Did you love
22:55
any one of those little boys for their own sake?"
22:59
It was an incredible question to ask by a man who was a hedonist on his deathbed in
23:08
his forties.
23:09
And he said, "Robbie, did you ever love any one of those little boys for their own sake?"
23:14
And Robbie Ross said, "No, I can't say I did."
23:19
He said, "Bring me a minister.
23:22
Bring me a minister."
23:25
And it was in his magnificent poem, The Ballad of Reading Jail that Oscar Wilde said, "Only
23:31
Christ was big enough to cleanse his heart and forgive him for all that he had done."
23:39
The point even the hedonist realized was that in pleasure also value and love are the supreme
23:49
ethics that can be treasure, but you can never have love without intrinsically weaving into
23:59
it the freedom of the will.
24:04
You cannot have love without the freedom of the will.
24:08
If you are compelled by some machine to a certain decision, you can never love.
24:14
You can comply, but you will never be choosing to express that sentiment and the reality
24:22
of love.
24:23
If love is a supreme ethic and freedom is indispensable to love and God's supreme goal
24:30
for you and for me is that we will love him with all of our hearts and love our neighbors
24:35
as ourselves for him to violate our free will would be to violate that which is a necessary
24:41
component so that love can flourish and love can be expressed.
24:45
If you are asking for God to always stop the trigger, why not God stop everything else
24:50
next time you hold a cup of boiling water, he makes it frozen water instead.
24:55
Next time you are about to cross the street and you are going to be hit, he pulls your
24:58
leg back.
24:59
What you are asking for is a different entity than humanity.
25:03
As wonderful as it may seem that in stopping that you think he is protecting you from that
25:09
which is destructive, the greatest denial that you are asking for is the freedom of
25:14
your will to be able to choose and to love God with all your heart and all your soul.
25:19
And you have got love as a supreme ethic and the freedom of the will to choose that love,
25:24
all of the other contingencies come in and can become explained why it is possible to
25:29
either choose or to reject so that love can ultimately range supreme.
25:34
If you want compliance and some kind of a mechanical response, your question itself
25:40
will self-destruct.
25:41
You are asking the question because you are free to ask it and you are free to ask it because
25:45
you are free to love and when you love him in spite of all of the countries that you
25:50
see around us, you are trusting him for having the supreme wisdom and the knowledge to ultimately
25:56
bring a pattern out of it all.
25:59
We think for example, we know so much.
26:03
The story is told in the Eastern folklore of this man who lost his horse that ran away.
26:09
And when the horse ran away the neighbor came to him and said, "You know, bad luck isn't
26:14
it?
26:15
Your horse is gone."
26:16
He said, "What do I know about these things?"
26:18
Few days later the horse came back with twenty other wild horses and the neighbor came and
26:22
said, "Amazing.
26:23
It's not bad luck.
26:24
It's good luck."
26:25
You have got twenty more men says, "What do I know about these things?"
26:28
His young son is going and taming one of the new horses that young horse kicks him and breaks
26:32
his leg.
26:33
The neighbor comes and says, "Terrible isn't it?
26:35
Your son's leg is broken bad luck that these horses came."
26:38
The fella says, "What do I know about good luck and bad luck?"
26:41
Few days go by and a bunch of thugs are coming looking for recruits to join their gang and
26:46
they're looking for all the able-bodied young men and they're about to pick this young man
26:49
but find out his leg is broken and they say, "We don't want him, we're going to move on
26:53
to the next house."
26:54
So the man comes and says, "Good luck, his energy, his son's leg was broken."
26:57
In one little series of episodes we don't know what lies ahead.
27:02
Why don't you wait till you stand before God face to face and you will find out there were
27:06
reasons why he didn't stop that trigger so that you will see the heinousness of evil
27:11
and see the majesty of love and good managing to navigate yourself but as a pilgrims progress
27:17
to come to the celestial city.
27:23
So the supreme ethic and the supreme ethic is love, right?
27:27
Not this kind of frou-frou love like junior high love but like actual real love and what
27:32
this brings up as I was re-listening to this because I've heard him give this answer a
27:35
lot is the C.S. Lewis quote in mere Christianity where he's basically talking about the type
27:41
of worlds that God could have created and how useless it would have been to give personhood
27:48
to give his image to an image-bearer that would be incapable of love because essentially
27:54
if you were creating a world where nothing ever goes wrong, where nothing ever goes not
28:00
according to plan, you're basically building a world that is robotic, that is going to operate
28:05
robotically.
28:06
And I think the word that C.S. Lewis used in mere Christianity is automatons.
28:10
It's like what what good would it be to create humanity which is basically automatons where
28:15
you're you know, unless you're a Sam Harris type person and you do think we're basically
28:19
automatons.
28:20
We're just dancing to our DNA.
28:21
I'm not sure if that's his quote or that came from one of the other four horsemen of
28:24
new atheism but essentially that's that's what we're looking at.
28:27
The only world where love is possible is a world where we have free free will because
28:33
just think about it, you lovingly choose to love people in your life.
28:38
You're making a conscious decision for those of you who are married, you're you're making
28:42
a decision to love your spouse in a lot of ways like there's no such thing as falling
28:46
in love because that that you know implies there's some sort of an accident that happened
28:51
like you trip fell and you landed in love.
28:53
That's not really how this works.
28:55
You're choosing to do the things that help bring about love that help foster love that
29:02
help grow love.
29:04
And so I really liked his answer to this guy because I felt like the guy's question was
29:09
fair but I don't think he thought it was going to go in that direction because most
29:13
of the people in this really attaches to the previous thing that we talked about, you know,
29:17
the problem of evil, right, you know, bad things happening, you know, bad things happening
29:20
to good people and you know, I know it's good and bad and that's bad.
29:23
I can tell you that's bad.
29:24
This extrapolates it out even one degree further in that when bad things happen, but you know,
29:32
just take your definition of bad, right?
29:33
So we're not going to use a definitive moral law here.
29:36
Just your definition of bad when you decree that something that's happened is bad.
29:44
You're also assuming the judgment seat of God and you're also assuming to have knowledge
29:49
that you don't have because you hear about something bad that happens on the news, something
29:55
bad happens to someone in your life, something bad happens to you, right?
29:57
It comes right to your doorstep and you feel like you're experiencing this and you know
30:01
enough to say whether or not this is a good or a bad thing, but you don't have the requisite
30:07
information to be able to make a call like that because you don't know what's coming
30:12
down the road because of things that have happened.
30:14
I mean, on last week's episode when we were talking about suicide when I was talking about
30:18
the advice that I got from a counselor, buddy of mine and how he said, you have no idea
30:24
what the toughness you're going to be doing right now that you're developing right now.
30:28
The resilience that you're building right now is going to be used for later because maybe
30:32
you're really going through it.
30:33
You know, 2020 hit you.
30:34
You got sick.
30:35
A family member may have passed away.
30:37
You lost your business.
30:38
You lost your job, something like that, but down the road, if you're able to get through
30:42
this tough time, that toughness is going to be used for something.
30:46
That's going to use that for something down the road.
30:48
You just don't know yet because you don't have the knowledge.
30:50
You're not omniscient.
30:51
You're not omnipresent.
30:52
You're not omni-anything.
30:53
You're just you.
30:54
You're just a dude.
30:56
And so I think it's important to think about those things through those lenses.
31:00
And again, I would highly encourage you guys for any of these three questions or any of
31:04
these three things that we went over, the first one being every worldview has to answer
31:07
the four questions of life, origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.
31:10
The second explaining the existence of a moral law giver philosophically in the third thing,
31:14
the supreme ethic, which we found out was love.
31:17
Go back and listen to those again.
31:19
Because if you listen to his messages, if you go to his podcast, I'll have those links
31:22
for you here at the end of this show in the show notes, you're going to get a lot of that.
31:27
But you may not get it every single time, but I've tried to distill everything that
31:31
he produced into the most, if you're not going to become a Robbie Zacharias person, if you're
31:35
not going to follow him and his ministry and do all those different things, these are the
31:39
things that you can go away with.
31:40
This is the Spark Notes.
31:41
I'm giving you the Spark Notes on Robbie Zacharias.
31:43
So I would highly encourage you to go back and look through those and develop through
31:47
those with me and with other friends of yours as well.
31:51
Before we get out of here today, we obviously have to address the elephant in the room.
31:55
For those of you who don't know who Robbie Zacharias is, you're very likely not to have
31:59
heard about what's going on here in the last month or so.
32:01
But if you are a Robbie Zacharias person, even I hadn't even, as I was preparing this
32:05
podcast, I was made aware that he had some allegations around him.
32:09
So here's what I understand about what's happening currently with Robbie Zacharias.
32:14
Again, he passed away in May, but a month or two ago, there were some women that came
32:19
out that alleged sexual assault from Robbie Zacharias.
32:23
I'm going to get most of the details correct.
32:25
I'm going to do as much as I can to stay as close to the facts that we know at the time.
32:29
But his ministry, RZIM, is based out of Atlanta.
32:32
In that area, apparently he was a part owner of several massage parlors and the allegations
32:38
are that when he would come to the massage parlors two or three times a week to receive
32:42
a treatment, you know, massage treatment or whatever, that he would expose himself to
32:46
these women, that he would masturbate in front of them, that he would ask for things that
32:50
went beyond a massage, then there were even allegations that he had actually put his hands
32:55
on women in a sexual manner, right, felt him up, felt him up under their skirts or, you
32:59
know, felt their butts or felt their boobs or whatever, that that's some of the things
33:02
that he had done.
33:03
There were allegations that there were women there that said, Hey, if he comes in again,
33:07
I don't want to, you know, be in there.
33:09
I don't want to be his masseuse because, you know, he's going to ask me to do these things.
33:12
I'm not comfortable with it.
33:13
You know, blah, blah, blah, all these things.
33:14
So that's the, that's the long and the short of what I understand on the sexual assault
33:18
allegations.
33:19
There was also a sexting scandal that he was a part of.
33:23
But then, you know, there was a lawsuit that was settled out of court.
33:26
I think this was back in 2016 or 2017.
33:29
The details are very, very strange.
33:31
It just as easily could be true as it could be that they were trying to extort.
33:36
Obviously, it's very hard to get a realistic read on that situation.
33:40
But let's just say, you know, in a macro sense that there are allegations out there on him
33:44
that are, you know, frankly, some of them are absolutely gross and crazy.
33:47
Um, here, here's the thing with where I sit right now.
33:50
So he's dead.
33:53
And there's one party that's alleging that he did these things.
33:56
The only evidence that they're presenting is, is their word, which again, this is going
34:01
to strike some of you as shocking, but I'm not a believe all women guy, you know, hashtag
34:05
believe all women.
34:06
I'm, I'm not a hashtag believe all anybody like by any stretch of the imagination.
34:11
Okay.
34:12
So we, we have people whose only evidence that they're bringing is their word.
34:15
But here's the thing is their word might be correct.
34:18
Like this may have happened and it may have not happened in the way that they described
34:22
but sort of happened or it could have not happened at all.
34:26
And just to be frank with you, it would not surprise me one bit.
34:30
If something like this happened, and some of you are going to be like, Kyle, you spent
34:34
a half hour going over how, how great you thought this guy was and everything like that.
34:37
But the thing about me is I pretty much assume everybody, the people that I don't know and
34:44
people that I do know are capable of just about anything.
34:48
You know, I know my wife more better than I know anyone else on this planet.
34:51
So there would be certain things that she could do that would be absolutely shocking to me.
34:55
But everyone else, even your best friend, you don't know your best friend as well as
34:58
you think you do.
34:59
You just don't.
35:00
They're capable of some insanely dark and depraved things, right?
35:04
And some of you, I'm not having to convince you of this because you know this to be true.
35:08
So there's not a person on the planet, not an athlete that I'm a fan of, not a politician
35:14
that I like, not a pastor that whose podcast I listened to, that I would be surprised
35:18
that they would be capable of doing any type of a gross thing, whether it be cheating on
35:22
their spouse, you know, feeling somebody up, rape, murder, like there's not really anything
35:27
that would absolutely shock me at this point, which I don't know what that says about me
35:31
or what that says about the people that I have an outlook on, but I just assumed the
35:35
gravity in most situations, okay?
35:37
But at this point right now, RZIM is doing a supposedly independent investigation about
35:45
these allegations.
35:46
Now, I'm very cynical about the fact that they're going to be doing an honest investigation.
35:52
And that's with no knowledge of the people running the investigation.
35:55
I'm literally just making up a worldview based on this exact situation where I'm like, I'm
36:00
not assuming they're not going to be saying that the namesake of their ministry, their
36:05
international ministry was doing sexual assault of people in the area of their ministry.
36:12
I can't imagine that we're going to see that on the cover of Christianity today's website
36:16
or on the front page of their website where basically says, you know, RZIM finds that
36:20
RZ was a brutal rapist or something like that, I just, I can't imagine that happening because
36:25
these people, they don't, like those people that work there, most of them aren't brands
36:30
into of themselves.
36:31
It's the fact that they have an attachment to RZ the name RZ and RZ international ministries
36:36
that anyone is even listening to them.
36:39
But here's the thing, these allegations might be true.
36:42
These allegations might be false that there's only two ways it could go.
36:46
They are either true or they are either false, right?
36:50
I don't think that we're ever going to know for sure.
36:54
Unless somebody can produce some sort of video evidence where we can see these things happening
36:58
and I know it's crazy like, oh, can you have video evidence of everything?
37:02
This is inside a business.
37:03
I can't really imagine that they would have security cameras inside a massage room, but
37:07
you would think maybe that there has been other sexual assault allegations at other facilities.
37:11
So this is maybe a common practice.
37:13
I really have no idea.
37:15
But unless there's hard evidence presented of this type of a thing, I don't think that
37:20
we can know for sure.
37:22
So now I have to get into this whole part of the conversation where it's, do we throw
37:26
the baby out with a bath water?
37:29
Because knowing what we know now, which is essentially that we probably will never know
37:33
for sure, are you willing to throw out all of the contributions that Ravi Zachariah has
37:38
made to the Christian community, to Christianity in general, the kingdom of God based on allegations
37:45
that have been unsubstantiated or really, and otherwise maybe aren't knowable as true
37:51
or false.
37:52
Are you willing to do that?
37:54
I would suggest that you not do that because we don't know.
37:59
But then I want to go even a step further there is let's say that we find out that these
38:04
things were true.
38:06
Let's say they do provide video evidence of he's of him doing these absolutely horrible
38:11
heinous and gross sinful things.
38:15
Those actions would not subsequently erase the contributions that he has made.
38:23
Now, if he were alive, those actions and those sins should go, it shouldn't go unpunished.
38:30
He should receive punishment and judgment for that on this planet.
38:34
And then subsequently, as he goes and meets his maker and makes his case essentially for
38:40
why he should get into heaven, which again, guys, some of your heads just explode there.
38:45
I'm not assuming that we just go up there and we start presenting our case to God as
38:49
if we're in court.
38:50
But I think you understood the allegory I was trying to make there.
38:52
But at the same time, even if these things were proven true, it doesn't make the things
38:58
he said on stage any less useful for you.
39:02
If you're thinking about going into apologetics, if you're thinking about going into the ministry
39:05
or if you're just thinking about being an intellectually sound Christian thinker, he's
39:10
someone whose information you need to absorb.
39:14
And this is where we kind of get into the macro conversation about canceling people after
39:19
they've passed away.
39:20
Right?
39:21
So yeah, people wanting to cancel Thomas Jefferson because he was slave owner.
39:24
Yeah, people wanted to cancel, you know, Martin Luther, because he was an angry person or just
39:29
pick pick someone from history.
39:31
By modern standards, we're not going to assume that that person is going to be able to check
39:35
all the boxes, certainly not all of the woke intersectional boxes.
39:39
And I'm not saying that in past times, you know, sexual assault was just, you know, winked
39:43
and nodded at, I'm sure it was to more more so to a degree than it is now here in 2020.
39:48
But at the same time, I think we have to be fair in our judgment of people and the things
39:53
that they've been able to contribute.
39:55
So I think if you're making a, this might seem like a weird example, but if you're making
40:00
a Mount Rushmore of the game of baseball, the people that you're probably going to have
40:04
on there, you're probably going to have Babe Ruth, you're probably going to have Willie
40:07
Mays, you're probably going to have Hank Aaron, and you're probably going to have a guy named
40:10
Ty Cobb.
40:11
If you don't know anything about Ty Cobb, he's legitimately one of the best baseball players
40:16
all around ever in the history of the game.
40:19
He was also a heinous individual and absolutely reprehensible human being.
40:26
There's even really good evidence that he murdered people, right?
40:30
Like he was just a horrible, horrible human being.
40:33
But that does not negate the contributions he made to the game of baseball.
40:38
They're not going to lower his batting average because he wasn't a very nice person to women
40:43
or really to anybody.
40:45
And so when we bring that back to something like this with Robbie Zacharias, just because
40:49
Christianity today, just because this random website, just because this random YouTuber
40:54
is trying to cancel Robbie Zacharias, you have to ask yourself, do they have the goods
40:59
to prove that he should be canceled?
41:01
Because if they don't have the evidence that these things ever happened, then they are
41:04
simply allegations, unsubstantiated allegations.
41:08
You can make that about anybody.
41:09
You could go over to your neighbor's house and claim, ah, you, you like kittens on fire
41:14
in your basement.
41:15
Whether that's true or not, it's just an allegation.
41:17
Anyone can make an allegation about anyone at any time for essentially any reason.
41:21
That's essentially where we're at, but even if we do get the proof, does it negate all
41:26
the things?
41:27
Should we not listen to him?
41:28
Should we not learn from those things because of his sins?
41:30
I will say for me personally, you're going to have to deal with that one yourself.
41:33
But for me personally, I'm not willing to do that, but I will log that away in my brain
41:38
understanding that if he's doing a lesson on sexual propriety or on sexual purity or any
41:45
of those types of things, some of those things that he's saying needs to come with a grain
41:49
of salt.
41:50
If you send in those areas, it doesn't mean the things that he's saying about those categories
41:54
are untrue in any way, shape or form.
41:56
So I know presented all that great information for the first half hour.
42:00
And then this is kind of a Debbie downer thing before we let you guys go.
42:03
But we got to be honest about where things are at.
42:05
Again, I don't think there's going to be this big breaking news thing where we see this
42:09
evidence that's come through that proves anything at the same time.
42:12
I don't think that we should be throwing anybody out their contributions to humanity based on
42:17
their past deeds.
42:18
Okay. All right, guys, before we go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost.
42:21
As you know, by now we are a men's ministry and our mission is cultivating manly resilience.
42:25
And specifically we do that by providing content like this podcast that helps you forge spiritual,
42:29
mental and physical toughness.
42:30
So a few things for you today.
42:32
I've got an article from the New York Times.
42:34
Yes, I'm giving you a New York, New York Times article, but I thought they did a really
42:38
good job on his obituary.
42:40
So it's entitled Robbie Zacharias preacher who used reason to defend faith dies at 74.
42:45
So I've got that here for you.
42:46
I've got a link to his podcast, just thinking.
42:48
So basically anywhere where you get podcasts, I think there's a lot of different podcasts
42:52
called just thinking.
42:53
But if you type in your search bar, just thinking in RZIM, you'll be able to find it.
42:58
Also I've got a Amazon link to all of Robbie Zacharias's books.
43:00
That's something that we didn't really talk about here in this podcast.
43:03
I do have one of his books on our hundred books that every modern Christian man should
43:06
read list, which is on our website.
43:08
Just go to undaunted dot life backslash book list.
43:11
And then I've also got his Sunday special discussion that he did with Ben Shapiro and
43:15
the Ben Shapiro show.
43:16
So if you didn't get that one, that is an incredible conversation between those two.
43:20
So I highly recommend you give that a look.
43:22
All right, guys.
43:23
Thanks so much for listening to the podcast.
43:24
I really do appreciate it.
43:25
If you would subscribe on Apple podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, Google podcasts or Stitcher
43:28
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43:31
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43:36
I'm currently booking speaking engagements for all of 2021.
43:39
So if you want me to come speak on your podcast at your men's event, at your team, at your
43:42
business, hit me up info at undaunted dot life, that's I N F O at undaunted dot life.
43:47
The website is www dot undaunted dot life.
43:49
You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter at undaunted life or Facebook dot com backslash
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on Dontalife.
43:54
Check out our free devotionals on the you version Bible app just search undaunted life
43:58
under plans.
43:59
And as always, we want to thank the band August Burns read for allowing us to use their
44:02
entire music library for our content.
44:04
The in Toronto track on this podcast is our song defender, which is off their latest record
44:08
entitled guardians.
44:09
The links are in the description.
44:11
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson, remember, keep cultivating manly resilience, keep forging
44:16
spiritual, mental and physical toughness, keep seeking the lion of Judah.
44:41
Nice.