Why I am a Christian: John Lennox (Transcript)

And we wondered, is there any ultimate significance? And many atheists will help us and tell us that there is no ultimate significance. All you are as a human being is an eczema on the face of the universe with no more significance, as one philosopher put it, than slime mold.

And ladies and gentlemen, the battle in your mind, tonight as well, is the battle over the question: WHO AM I?

I love the ancient Greeks, you know, I hope you do. They were brilliant. And they started examining the universe, and they started asking questions: WHAT’S THIS MADE OF? And they got very good at that, and so in our universities, we have all kinds of faculties exploring what things are made of, material science, and so on. What’s the universe made of? What are you made of? And we know a great deal about what we’ve made of, and we can get it repaired, generally speaking, up to a certain level.

But the Greeks asked deeper questions. And one of those deeper questions was: WHAT IS THIS MADE FOR?

That’s a harder question. And it’s a question I’d like you to face tonight. You may never have asked it before. It’s this: WHAT AM I MADE FOR, IF ANYTHING? You know so much about what you’re made of, but what were you made for?

Let me illustrate this. Suppose I were to get one of these four-by-four vehicles that I see clogging up the streets of Perth and getting in my way. And I take it home, and you’re a very good salesman, and you decide to follow me up.

So after three months, you turn up at my home, and to your utter amazement, the four-by-four is sitting in the middle of the garden, full of tomato plants. And you knock my door in great bewilderment, and you say, ‘Excuse me, Professor Lennox?’

‘Oh, I’m so glad you came. You know, this is the best greenhouse I’ve ever had, because I’ve been growing the biggest tomatoes in my neighbourhood.’ You know, there’s a thing on the front panel here called AC, and I find if I tune it just to the right spot and leave it for a few weeks, I get these colossal tomatoes.

Now what would you think? Well, I suspect you’d advise a psychiatrist, but before you did that, you might say, oh, pardon me, that’s not what it’s for.

WHAT ARE YOU FOR? Have you ever asked yourself the question? You’ve got various goals in life, and as those goals fall, you discover that somehow they don’t satisfy you.

How many people I’ve sat with who’ve got to the very top, and I say to them, ‘Where are you going to go from here? What have you discovered at the top?’ And the answer is nothing.

One famous tennis player said, ‘I got to the top, and I discovered there was nothing there.’

Have you begun to discover there’s nothing there? Dan is a fortunate young man. He started to discover it in his 20s, and we’ve got to be ruthlessly honest, ladies and gentlemen, in asking this question: WHAT ARE WE FOR?

Well, now, of course, when it comes to my four by four, I would expect the dealer to refer me to the book of instructions. And of course, you know the general rule, when all else fails, read the instructions. And the sophistication of everybody’s gizmos these days is such that the instructions are on CDs in inaccessible places, and you rack your brains trying to sort out how to get your iPhone connected and all the rest of it.

ARE THERE ANY INSTRUCTIONS FOR HUMAN BEINGS?

Oh, you say, don’t be foolish. This is the 21st century. Instructions that there were instructions for human beings, that would mean there was an instructor, and now you’re beginning to talk about God, aren’t you?

‘Are you a Professor at Oxford, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You can’t possibly expect us to raise the God question and instructions in the 21^st century.’

WHY NOT, ladies and gentlemen? Where did your iPhone come from? It’s a brilliant result of technology, isn’t it? Where did technology come from? It came from modern science. Where did modern science come from? Belief in God, ladies and gentlemen, that’s where it came from. We’ve forgotten it, of course.

C.S. Lewis put it brilliantly, men became scientific. Why? Because they expected law in nature. Why? Because they believed in the Law Giver.

You see, I’m not remotely ashamed to be both a scientist and a Christian because Christianity arguably gave me my subject. And it odd therefore that Isaac Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Babbage, Torque Maxwell, all of them were believers in God. It didn’t hinder the science. It was the powerful motor that drove it.

What’s fascinating to me? It’s even more fascinating when you realize that people like Stephen Hawking, who was just ahead of me at Cambridge and light years ahead of me in his brain power, he says, ‘You’ve now got to choose between science and God.’

Newton didn’t say that. The more he studied the universe, the more he admired the genius of the God that did it that way. His law of gravity, which he incorporated in his famous book Principia Mathematica, where he said that he hoped it would persuade thinking people to believe in a deity.

HOW HAVE WE MOVED FROM NEWTON TO HAWKING?

I want to suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen. We’ve moved from Newton to Hawking by a series of colossal and partly deliberate misunderstandings of two things. One is the nature of God, and the other is the nature of science, very briefly, because this is part of why I’m a Christian, because it makes sense of my science. It gives me a rational basis for doing it.

The problem with God is that many of the atheists who are my friends think that I believe in a God of the gaps, that is, I can’t explain it, therefore God did it. Like the Greek God of lightning, do atmospheric physics at the University of Western Australia and that God will disappear in a single lecture. Those gods disappear by the advance of science.

And if you think God is a God of the gaps, of course you’ll ask people to choose between God and science, but the problem is that’s the way you’ve defined God.

The God of the Bible isn’t the God of the gaps, He’s the God of the whole show. The gods are the bits we do understand, and the gods are the bits we don’t understand. He is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. And one of the major problems in the contemporary debate is that people relegate the God of the Bible to be a Greek god and then dismiss it. The argument is pseudo.

People who do that haven’t the faintest notion about the ancient gods, but let me tell you that one of the world’s authorities on ancient Near Eastern gods, Werner Jaeger, a professor at Oxford, just says this: ‘The difference is vast. The ancient gods of the Greeks, the Romans, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, are all descended from the universe. They are products of the basic primeval mass energy of the universe. The God of the Bible created the universe. That’s the difference.’

So we need to be clear about God, but then we need to be clear about science. Because you see, the problem is people say, well, we’ve got a law of gravity, says Hawking, therefore the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

Now, apart from the triple logical self-contradiction in that sentence, because we’ve got a law of gravity, because we have something, the universe will create itself from nothing, which is a flat contradiction, as will be obvious even at this time of night.

What he’s saying is, because we’ve done some science, therefore there’s no God. We’ve got a law of gravity, marvelous.

What would you think if I said to you? Well, there are two explanations for a motor car. One, the law of internal combustion. Two, Henry Ford, please choose. Well, that’s absurd, isn’t it? I find even children can see what professors can’t see. There are different kinds of explanation. There’s a scientific explanation. Why is the kettle boiling? Because the heat energy has got to such a stage that the molecules of water are vibrating that they’re spitting off steam and the pressure’s building up and the whistle’s going. That’s why it’s boiling. No, it isn’t. It’s boiling because I want a cup of tea.

Well, I’m glad you laugh, because now you’ve understood the difference between two kinds of explanation. It’s the same at the level of the universe, ladies and gentlemen. God is not the same kind of explanation as a scientific explanation. God is the reason there are any explanations at all.

When Lawrence Krauss wrote an article saying the Higgs boson is arguably more important than God, I wrote another article answering him, saying, yes, of course, the Higgs boson is arguably more important than God if the question you’re asking, if you’re giving a lecture on particle physics.

But if you’re asking the question, why is there a universe at all in which particle physics can be done, then God is arguably more important than the Higgs boson.

You see, what’s happening in our culture is people are fooling you by presenting you with a set of false alternatives, God or science, mechanism or agency, gravity or God, and all this kind of thing. And a moment’s thought shows that they haven’t a clue about philosophy.

Stephen Hawking actually says in his book, Philosophy is Dead. That’s about page three, and the whole book is about philosophy. And he proves very effectively that, at least in his case, philosophy is completely dead. And I mean that seriously. I find it astonishing misuse of science for people to argue that science and God are in conflict. They’re not.

Conflict lies, ladies and gentlemen, is between two worldviews: atheism and theism. And there are scientists at the highest level, even the Nobel Prize level, on both sides.

So what we’ve got to ask really is: DOES SCIENCE LEAD TOWARDS GOD OR LEAD TOWARD ATHEISM?

Now, I’ve made the point from history. I’m just going to make another point, because this doesn’t get us to Christianity yet, but it clears some of the fog that stands in the way of many people even beginning to see what Christianity claims.

You see, my big reason for rejecting atheism is because I’m a scientist, not because I’m a Christian. And here’s the reason.

WHAT DO I DO SCIENCE WITH?

Well, you say, my mind. Well, that’s generous, because most of my atheistic colleagues say the mind is the brain. There’s nothing but the brain stuff.

Then I ask them, ‘What’s the brain?’

And they say, ‘Well, the brain is the end product of a mindless, unguided process.’

And then I say, ‘And you trust it?’

Isn’t it ironic that people are prepared to trust what they themselves believe to be the end product of a mindless, unguided process when, if they knew that their computer, which they used for 23 hours a day, was the end product of a mindless, unguided process? Atheism doesn’t shoot itself in the foot, ladies and gentlemen. It’s far worse than that. It shoots itself in the brain, and that’s fatal.

Now, you see, the Christian, the believer in God, has a reason for doing science. It’s the reason that Galileo, Kepler, and Newton had, which is why science exploded in the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s that they expected and believed science could be done, because they believed in a rational creator.

You see, faith lies behind science, both faith in God, and then the next step, faith in the rational intelligibility of the universe that springs from a belief in a rational God. I hope you’re with me so far, because these arguments are enormously important. And you’ll notice they’re dead simple. There are no tricks here. These arguments are very simple indeed, but the fog is such that when a high-powered person says, God is a delusion.

As Stephen Hawking put it the other day when interviewed, he said, ‘Belief in God religion is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark’, and I was asked to comment, so I did in light fashion: ‘Atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the light.’ You shouldn’t that. Statements like that don’t prove anything.

You see, the big problem that comes out of that is this, that statements by scientists aren’t always statements of science. Can I repeat that? Statements by scientists are not always statements of science. You get Carl Sagan, very famous, with his TV series, Cosmos, the universe is all that there is, was, or ever shall be. It’s not a statement of science. It’s a statement of his atheistic belief, that’s all it is.

Now you see, ladies and gentlemen, once we clear that fog, we can come to the central thing, because what we got next to see is that God isn’t a theory, He’s a person.

And that brings me to the other way of accessing knowledge about God. We can read certain things from the universe, I believe. We can see there’s a rational intelligence behind the universe. The Bible itself claims that. Paul said in one of his most famous writings, ‘the invisible things of God, that is His eternal power and Godhead, that there is a God, are perceived, are clearly seen from the things that are made.’ Nature isn’t neutral. It’s got the signature of God written all over it, but that’s as far as you get.

But you see, think about it logically. Where are we? We’re persons. We’re not just theories. My wife isn’t a theory, I can guarantee you that. She’s a person.

Are we to imagine that the source of our being is less than personal? Of course not. That flies against every analogy we know. And the God who now reveals Himself in the Bible.

Now here’s the important thing, ladies and gentlemen. The moment I mention the word reveal, all people get very allergic and nervous of saying, we believe in rationality, we believe in reason. We don’t, quoting Richard Dawkins, believe in holy books. As if you didn’t need your reason to read a holy book.

Revelation and reason don’t contradict each other. Have you ever met anybody that can read the Bible without using their reason? Of course not. That’s not the issue.

The issue is this, ladies and gentlemen: IS THIS UNIVERSE A CLOSED SYSTEM OF CAUSE AND EFFECT OR IS IT OPEN? And if it’s open, here we are thinking, feeling, rational beings with all the emotions and richness of our capacity for music and love and art.

Is there a God who’s revealed Himself? The claim of the Bible is there is.

Now here’s the thing. I could analyze you with a scanning, tunneling microscope of the most extreme advanced character and never get to know you. The only way I’ll ever get to know you is if you talk, you know, and reveal yourself to me. And that’s the only way you’ll ever get to know me.

Now here’s the exciting thing about Christianity, is that the claim is: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…’

‘And God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our own image.’ Do you realize what that means? The stars and the galaxies that you see so clearly sometimes overhead in Perth, they’re not made in God’s image. They show His glory. You were made in God’s image. Just think of the value that gives you. I think that’s powerful stuff, to be able to tell men and women that they’re of infinite value and dignity, made in the image of God and therefore creative with all those talents and gifts.

But the sad thing is we find a world that’s broken and bruised. It looks as if a bomb had hit it.

Dan talked about an explosion in his own heart. It’s a good metaphor. It’s a bit like Christchurch Cathedral, isn’t it? Traces of beauty we can see, but lots of damage through earthquake or Coventry Cathedral. Traces of beauty and damage through bombing. And the world presents us with a mixed picture. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that we’re made in the image of God. It just points out that.

We see that. It’s a living memory, but we feel a disjointedness between the concept of being made in the image of God and the perfection and the mess and the stuff that keeps foaming up like vomit inside our own personality and destroying us from the inside. And every one of you young people know you’re only one click away from disaster at any time of the contemporary age. One click.

HOW DO YOU BATTLE WITH IT?

I grew up in a very different world. I was so protected that I see my children, my grandchildren, surrounded by a sea of intellectual sharks and moral sharks, wanting to destroy their lovely personalities. How could you recover that?

And here’s the brilliance of the Christian message: God became human.

Now ladies and gentlemen, one of the biggest arguments in our society is our human being special. Your famous Professor Peter Singer, whom I’ve debated, thinks not. I think he’s wrong. And one of the most powerful arguments for humans being special is that God became one. How about that? That’s big stuff, isn’t it?

You see, Dan pointed it out. He said the claims Jesus made were incredible. We miss them if we don’t sit and reflectively take them seriously. He stood in our world at the age of about 30 and said, ‘I AM THE TRUTH.’ He didn’t simply say, I say the truth, although that’s true. He said, I am the truth.

What? You mean if you ask the truth about this universe and you reduce it to atoms and elementary particles and ask what’s the truth about them and keep on asking, you’ll come to Jesus Christ who will stand in front of you and say, ‘I AM THE TRUTH.’ Is that big enough for you?

The thing that I find sad about my atheist friends is the tininess of their world, ladies and gentlemen. They don’t have a God to begin it. It was some kind of spontaneous combustion, and we could talk about that. I’ve written a book about it. And they don’t have a God to sum it up. They live in a tiny space, and the space for each individual is 70 years, give or take a little bit. And then the silence, they believe, and the blackness of an eternal tomb. What sort of an existence is that?

Richard Dawkins, when I put a tomb, said, yes, it’s bleak, but that doesn’t mean it’s false. I said Richard is bleak, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

HOW WOULD WE KNOW THAT THIS WORLD ISN’T A CLOSED SYSTEM? Because in space, time, and history, God incarnate, Jesus Christ, was crucified, died, and broke the death barrier by rising again from the dead. That’s why I’m sitting here. You see, you can’t believe that stuff as a scientist. I mean, after all, miracles are violations of the laws of nature. Come on, you can’t believe that stuff. David Hume proved it long ago. No, he didn’t. So easy to see he didn’t, you know.

And Lewis, again, pointed it out brilliantly in the 1940s. I’m staying in a hotel in Perth. I put $100 into my drawer last night. I put $100 tonight, and tomorrow I find $50. What does that mean? That the laws of arithmetic have been broken, or the laws of Western Australia? Oh, I’m glad you laughed, because you see the difference between the two uses of the word law.

We get so hung up on this. We think laws in science are somehow causes, or they’re like a law that’s passed by the government that you violate. Notice the word violate. That’s nonsense.

How did you know a thief had taken $150 out of my drawer? Because you know the laws of arithmetic. That’s how people realized that something spectacular had happened when Jesus reappeared from the dead, because they knew that dead people don’t just come wandering about after they died. If they didn’t know that dead people normally remain dead, they wouldn’t have been remotely surprised to see Jesus. And when He appeared from the dead with such enormous authority and power, enough to transform 11 men into men that conquered the ancient world and brought the message of Christianity throughout the world.

There’s evidence in history that the thing is real. As a famous saint and historian put it, there’s a resurrection-shaped hole in history. But that’s long ago, ladies and gentlemen.

And so I come to the next set of reasons. WHY I’M A CHRISTIAN? Because it works, ladies and gentlemen.

You see, Christianity is testable. You say, no, it’s not testable. You only get testable things in science. No, you don’t.

Jesus Christ promises you that if tonight you take all that stuff that’s plugging up your conscience and your heart and repent of him, and deliberately as a step say, Lord, You died for this. I don’t understand how it works, but You died for this, to take all that mess upon Yourself. I don’t know how You did it, and I don’t know why You did it. But I see that You did do it, and I’m prepared to trust You. He promises you that you will tonight receive forgiveness, receive eternal life, a new quality of life, and that will make, in times, such a difference to you as it’s made in Dan.

How many hundreds of times I’ve seen marriages saved, where people were fighting each other out on the courts, and suddenly they come to encounter Christ, and they realize that both of them are desperately wrong, and they seek forgiveness, and they repent, and you’ve got a marriage to the foundations of a happy home, and some more children have a chance, a half-decent chance of a life.

How many times have I seen drugs that are poisoning someone’s brain, got rid of? Back to sanity, back to life, back to meaningfulness. You know, when you see that, you begin to think there’s something in this business. People who’ve been friendless, and lonely, and isolated.

Ladies and gentlemen, the trouble is we’ve believed a colossal lie. It’s been going on for millennia. It’s that God is somehow against us. Christopher Edson said to me in a debate, he said, ‘Who would want a great North Korean dictator in the sky watching you?’

I said, ‘Christopher, you make me very sad. Who would want a woman in their house watching them all the time?’

‘My wife is in the house all the time.’

I said, ‘Christopher, if the person watching you is not a North Korean dictator, but someone who loves you, it’s wonderful to have them in your home and in your life.’

Ladies and gentlemen, don’t believe the lie that God is out to repress and suppress all your human flourishing. On page two of the Bible, you’ll see how that entered into the world, how the enemy said to the first humans, God has said in the day you eat that, you should surely die because He knows you eat it, you’ll be as God’s knowing good and evil. And they fell for it, and they’ve been falling for it ever since.

Just ask yourself, do you think of God as an enemy? If you do, you believe the lie. It’s as simple as that. And the wonderful thing to discover is God’s forest.

‘God so loved the world…’

Listen to those words, they’re magnificent.

‘God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes on Him should not perish but have eternal life.’

I mean, those words are magnificent. And you see, ladies and gentlemen, I’m a Christian because Jesus doesn’t compete with anybody on this score. There’s nobody else in all of history offers me credibly forgiveness and eternal life. So I’m not insulting any other religion by taking it from Him when nobody else offers it. Do you see that? It’s very important you do see it. This is a huge thing.

WHY AM I A CHRISTIAN? Do you know the biggest thing in all my life? Even as a professor at Oxford, whatever that means, is that I’m loved, ladies and gentlemen, loved at a level that I will never begin to understand, a love that has power over death. I love my father, but I’ve lost him. No, I haven’t. I’ll see him again. Because Jesus is risen. It means death is not the end. That gives real hope. That gives us a real message.

And also, ladies and gentlemen, it brings back into the world a concept that’s rapidly disappearing, and that’s the concept of morality and ultimate justice.

Listen. Don’t get on the atheist bus before you know where it’s going. WHERE’S IT GOING? Well, listen to Richard Dawkins describe the bleakness of the universe. This universe is just exactly what you’d expect it to be, he says. If it bottomed, there’s no good, there’s no evil, there’s no justice. DNA just is, and we dance to its music. That’s all there is to life, ladies and gentlemen.

The terrorist bombers, the young man from my country who proudly held in his hand the head of a journalist, in all our papers today, is just dancing to the music of his DNA. Who could blame him for that?

Ideas have consequences, and if you teach a generation of young people in Australia or anywhere else that all forms of behavior are acceptable, that we’re simply animals, they’ll start behaving like that, they have already. How can you blame them?

And if Hitler gets all the power, all he has to do is blow his brains out when he’s cornered. He never faced justice, if there is no justice.

And you see, this is another reason why I cannot conceivably accept atheism. I’ve been to Auschwitz many times. The vast majority of people who’ve ever lived will never see justice if atheism is true. The vast majority of people currently alive on planet Earth will never see justice because they won’t get it in this life. And there’s no other life of which they could conceivably get it.

IS THEN OUR CONCEPT OF JUSTICE AND MORALITY AN ILLUSION? No, it is not, because ‘God has appointed a day in which He will judge the world by the Man He has appointed and given evidence to all men, not just to believers, by raising Him from the dead.’

It’s a magnificent thing that there’s going to be a judgment. The people aren’t going to get away with it, but that makes some of us tremble, doesn’t it? We’re not going to get away with it, are we? And that’s why the Christian message is utterly unique, because Jesus stood in our world and He said, ‘Truly I say to you, whoever hears My word and believes on Him that sent Me has already eternal life and shall not come into judgment, but has already passed from death to life.’

You say, do you really believe that? Yes, I do. Why? Because of who Jesus is, ladies and gentlemen. He invented the atom. Richard Dawkins knocked me once for believing that Jesus walked on water.

And I said to him, ‘Jesus invented water in the first place. Maybe it’s not such a big deal that He could walk on it.’

I’m done. You’re going to have time for questions, but I appeal to you young people. I want you never to forget this evening, because, you see, I’m telling you what so many people, when they reach their 50s and 60s, wish they’d heard when they were 17 and 18. Don’t waste your life. Invest it in reality, but you’ll only believe in reality if there’s evidence. You’d probably come with a Christian friend tonight. Squeeze the guts out of them to get the information out of them what Christianity is and means. Plague them. It’s so important to be sure.

I understand people who are not sure, but you can be sure. Why? Because it’s not you simply seeking God, God seeking you. And He came into the world to find you. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you met Him tonight? Thank you very much.

Thank you.

MODERATOR: Well, thank you, Professor Lennox. We are going to have some time now to look at the questions that you’ve sent in. And so John will take us through those, and then I’ll be back up to finish the night. So I’ll leave you with John again.

JOHN LENNOX: Good. Well, thank you for these questions, ladies and gentlemen. Why do so many kids who’ve grown up in church drift away from God and church? The main reason given in our country is because they don’t answer our questions.

Let me speak to those of you who do go to church. We need to get our act together. We have been scandalously lax in not facing the questions of a younger generation. Many in the older generation think they’ve settled all the things, and a new raft of questions have come up to which I find even many ministers and churches have no answers. And if you’re talking irrelevancy in a church on Sunday, you lose everybody. Of course, you lose them. Because they watch TV, it’s professionally done, they see answers, they see wonderful discussions of science and of music and so on. So we’ve got to get our act together. So that’s one of the main reasons.

There are other reasons, of course. People sometimes discover, rightly, that Christ makes moral demands, that they’re not prepared for them. They think they can run the automobile that is human life without the instructions, and they don’t realize that the instructions are written by Somebody who loves us. And we have a great task to do, to repair that, to show living Christianity to our young people. Have them into your home.

How many of my children’s friends would come into the home and they would just say to my sons and my daughter, your home is so different, why is that? Be a witness. Engage. All of these things are so vastly important, and I’d be tempted to preach a sermon about it, but I’m not.

What do you think about the academics and theologians who insist the passion narratives are legendary in character, that nothing can really be known about Jesus’ resurrection?

I don’t think very much about them, simply because that ancient historians who know more about ancient history aren’t in that category. You’ve got a very famous ancient historian here in Australia. His name is Edwin Judge. If you want to answer that question, read Edwin Judge. Ancient historians don’t doubt the existence of Jesus. I’ve never met one, because the evidence is much more powerful than many people think. The evidence is far stronger for the authenticity, say, of the Gospel of Luke than it is for Caesar’s Gallic Wars, which some of us studied in school, to our pain or our delight, in my case, delight, but we’re not taught that.

Most people have no idea of the documentary evidence for the authenticity of Scripture. Now, if the person who asked this question is really interested in it, they will follow that up. There’s a lot of literature here, but start with Edwin Judge, who as an ancient historian is world class in his thinking.

What do you think about Christianity being the enemy of free thinking? Well, I think it’s entirely wrong, but it is an impression that some Christians have either deliberately or unwittingly given. Ladies and gentlemen, it should be obvious if you’ve ever read the commandments that the first commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your mind, soul, heart, and strength, to love the Lord with your mind. How did that commandment get lost in some spiritual traditions? You are insulting God if you don’t love God with your mind. That’s one of the reasons Christianity goes dead in so many professional people. They love their business with their mind. I even know some people that know the football scores for the last 50 years off by heart. But when it comes to the Bible, they don’t know it. They haven’t got to know it. They go to church. They say their prayers and so on, but they’ve long since lost any cutting edge of witness because when they open their mouths about their faith, it’s inarticulate, and it’s so puerile that their colleagues see it, and so they’re silenced forever.

And you’re living in a society, and so am I, where the biggest pressure is to privatize our faith. Keep it to yourself. You want to believe in Jesus? That’s nice for you, but don’t you bring it into the public space. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to bring it into the public space. You need to get the courage to do the same thing. Your public space isn’t necessarily this size. It’s the person you know at work. Or are you living in a silent world when it comes to Christianity and a loud world when it comes to music and football and everything else and politics?

Just analyze your conversations of the last week. How much time have you invested in dissecting the previous prime minister of Australia? And how much time have you spent discussing God with people? That’ll tell you something.

How much time have you spent looking at a screen? And how much time have you spent looking at Scripture? We’ll never reach this generation if we play religion. And some of you young people, and I challenge you, if you’re going to influence this world for God, you need to take Scripture seriously and God’s Word seriously and get into it and spend hours in it. Immerse your lives in it. And then you will not have people around you saying, why is Christianity the enemy of thought?

I grew up in a home where Christianity was the most expansive, most intellectually searching belief system that I could even imagine. And when I met the others, I found them so cramping that it just wasn’t true. Forgive me, I might wax eloquent about that, you see.

How do you feel about the Western world moving away from Christianity? How do you respond?

Well, you know, it’s like the starfish. There are millions of starfish stranded on the beach and the man is going along and he picks up one and he throws it back. And somebody says, well, you’re not helping much. It makes no difference. Well, he said, it does to that starfish. And that’s the way to start, ladies and gentlemen.

If we don’t break the barrier of silence individually, we’ll never do anything. We are brilliant at leaving it to the pastor and leaving it to the other person. This is not my task. The New Testament doesn’t imagine a silent, non-evangelizing Christian. We’re not talking about the gift of evangelism like Billy Graham. We’re talking about the command to answer people’s questions. And the apostle Peter says, always be ready to give an answer to those that ask you. He envisages dialogue. Have you noticed that? And our task is to provoke dialogue. Right.

As you brought up C.S. Lewis, Aslan defeated the white witch in the famous book, ‘Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe’,what was the link between that and Jesus? Why actually did Christ have to die as if it were a rule that he had to obey?

It wasn’t a rule He had to obey. He laid His life down freely, ladies and gentlemen, because He loved you and me. And why did He have to die? Because sin is a killer. Haven’t you realized it yet? Sin is the biggest problem every government in the world faces today. Now, we think of sin usually in a couple of areas, like sex and so on.

So, let’s think of it. It’s messing up. It’s our innate human capacity to make an absolute mess of things. It’s the biggest problem. It’s a killer. It’s killing people in Perth tonight, and they’ll be dead before the morning. I can’t explain to you how Christ’s death deals with it. I can’t tell you what gravity is, ladies and gentlemen. Nobody knows what it is, so don’t expect me to be able to explain something that’s infinitely deeper. But I believe in Christ’s death as effective because it works and because it makes sense.

SO, WHAT IS MY VIEW ON EVOLUTION AND CREATION?

Considerable and extensive. And I’ve written a book on it called God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? And I’ve written a second book on it called, that’s the main title. The subtitle is Seven Days That Divide the World. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a huge topic. We’d need a whole evening on it. If you’re serious, just Google my name. I have dozens of lectures on this. But you can’t, whatever you believe about evolution and creation, you cannot deduce atheism from evolution. But if you want to know why, just have a look. We can’t go into that in detail.

WHAT IS THE BIGGEST FAITH SHAKER YOU HAVE FACED AND HOW DO YOU ANSWER IT?

It’s an important question because, you see, the way faith grows is by questioning it and exposing it to its opposite. Precisely because I grew up in a strong Christian environment. I’m not like Dan, you see. I have no idea what it’s like to be a young adult and not be a believer. He does. So, those of you who are like that should listen to him and talk to him. I don’t know what it’s like, so I needed a guide. C.S. Lewis was a major guide. But what I spent my entire life doing is exposing my faith to questioning.

What is the biggest faith shaker?

Well, it could be suffering, couldn’t it? That’s the hardest question, I face. I arrived in Christchurch two days after the earthquake. I preached at the biggest service that had been held in Christchurch for many years on the Sunday after. I had to meet people who’d lost their relatives.

Now, this is the hard question, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a very hard question. And there are no simplistic answers to it. And the trouble is, you see, that my heart goes out to people that have rejected God because of pain and suffering, who can’t make any sense particularly of what one might call senseless pain. And many people become atheists because of it. And I can understand that up to a certain extent. And they just say that’s the way the universe is. It shows there’s no mind behind it. There’s certainly no love behind it. You can talk about intelligence behind the universe if you like, but please don’t talk to me about a personal God. Understand that.

But it’s not good enough, ladies and gentlemen. Firstly, if you become an atheist because of it, you’re faced with an intellectual problem immediately. What is evil? Richard Dawkins takes the logical consequences of his belief system and he says there’s no good, there’s no evil. And yet he endlessly talks about the problem of evil. There’s a disconnect there. He doesn’t realize which something that Nietzsche realized, but Nietzsche then was a real atheist and he understood the consequences.

And Nietzsche said if you get God out of the equation, you’ll end up by getting all values out of the equation. And you’ll get good and evil out of the equation. They’re running out of our society now. There are staggering surveys of North American young college-aged kids who simply, on the basis of clever questioning, reveal they have no idea of what good and evil are. Now that’s a serious side issue.

But you see, atheism doesn’t get rid of the suffering, does it? In fact, it could be argued it makes it 10,000 times worse because it gets rid of all hope. I have a problem with pain and suffering because I continue to believe in God.

But you see, ladies and gentlemen, this brings us straight. The only place in the whole of the universe I see a way into this question is the cross. Because at the very least, if that was God on the cross, what’s He doing there? I never forget being in one of the largest synagogues in the world and I was trying to help a young Jewish lady understand the Yiddish that the rabbi was talking. And my Yiddish is very poor and I speak German, so I was doing my best. I’m afraid I was taking translator’s license and we were in an exhibition of the festivals of Israel beginning with the Passover and so on.

So I took a little bit of liberty since I didn’t understand everything to explain that this had found fulfillment in Jesus, the Messiah. So I was gently adding to what was being said. And eventually I hadn’t noticed that in the middle of the room there was a big montage and it was the Gate of Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei, ‘work will set you free’. And she stood, she was a very intelligent architect, put her hands out like this across the door and she said, ‘What does your religion make of that?’

And I said, ‘I wouldn’t insult your memory of your parents who were gassed behind those gates by giving you some simple explanation.’ I said, ‘You know, you’ve asked me and I’m going to answer your question but it’s going to be very difficult. You know that I believe that Jesus — Yeshua was Hamashiach, the Messiah’. And she nodded with her hands still out like this.

I said, ‘The next bit is even harder because He came to be God incarnate.’ And I said, that’s very hard for you to accept but just try and follow me and try and just accept for a moment that that might be true. You know He died on the cross and she nodded still with her hands out like this. I said, ‘If that’s God on the cross, what’s it saying?’

I said, ‘At the very least, it’s telling me that God has not remained distant from the problem of human suffering but has Himself become part of it.’

And the tears just burst from her face as she still stood forming a cross and she said these words which I shall never forget. She said, ‘Why has no one ever told me that about my Messiah before?’

He didn’t only die, ladies and gentlemen, He rose from the dead. That’s what gives me hope. There is to be a judgment. God will see that justice is done and he will do it and it will be seen to be done. Atheism is nothing of that. I said that to you earlier.

So I think there’s a way in but we must do it with sympathy. It can take years to work off the loss or the abuse. We may never really get over it but to discover a God that loves us and is prepared to surround us with His love and to promise us one day a new body to replace the one that’s been abused. That’s a magnificent thing to be able to tell people.

There’s a related problem and I’m going to stop with this because my time’s up. HOW CAN I BE CONVINCED THAT CHRISTIANITY IS THE ONLY TRUTH ABOUT GOD? Why should it hold more credibility than Buddhism or Hinduism?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, you have to decide that on the basis of evidence. Which of them really makes sense and answers your questions? On a historical level, if we simply take Judaism, Christianity and Islam, my Jewish friends believe that Jesus died and did not rise. My Muslim friends believe that he didn’t die. I believe He both died and rose. Those three things cannot be simultaneously true.

So you’ve got to ask yourself the question. But the reason I’m a Christian is because you see religion in general is generally depicted as an entrance gate followed by a way, which I’ll draw a wiggly line, followed by a judgment. You know the kind of thing, like the University of Western Australia. You get in through some exam, some ceremony and you’re on the way and your professors or gurus or imams or priests to help you. But even they can’t guarantee you’re going to be accepted at the end.

And however kind your professors at university are, they cannot guarantee that you’re going to be accepted at the end. Why? Because the basic principle is your merits. And how many times have I sat with someone from religions, including Christianity, by the way, who said that is what my religion teaches? It’s not what Christianity teaches, ladies and gentlemen.

And here’s the utterly revolutionary thing. Christianity is not a system of merit. And that’s why I can know tonight before I leave this place that God has accepted me. Because Christ has died for me.

I often illustrate it. I met my wife the first day at university. She was 16, but that’s a different story. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Anyway.

Now, of course, I wanted to marry her eventually. So I came to her one day and I presented her with a cookbook. And it’s full of laws, you know. If you’re going to make an apple cake, thou shalt take so many grams of sugar, thou shalt take so many kilos of flour, thou shalt take so much water and you should boil it and mix it and so on.

So I said, now Sally, it’s going to be like this, you see. I couldn’t possibly accept you now. I mean, if you follow the prescriptions in this book for 40 years, let’s say, then I think about accepting you. So how about becoming my wife? Do you think I did that? Why are you laughing?

Do you know that’s how millions of people think of God? You wouldn’t insult a fellow human being by suggesting your relationship with them was based on merit, would you? And yet millions of people think exactly that of God. If I try and keep the rules, then perhaps one day you will accept me. That’s slavery, ladies and gentlemen.

And it’s one of the biggest reasons that people are running away from religion. Because Christianity has been interpreted like that, and it’s the exact opposite.

You imagine my wife, having tried this for a year or two and really taking it seriously and wanting to bake an apple cake, and she suddenly realizes that if she doesn’t do it perfectly, she’s back to her mother. And she turns the knob up to 1000 degrees centigrade, and out comes a burnt offering. It’s exactly what happens.

And people that try to keep the rules become cramped, they become narrowed, they feel oppressed, and they say, God, I’m not remotely interested in You. And they miss the whole point of a God who so loves them, He spreads His arms out and across and say, you can’t make it old chap on your own. I’m prepared to die for you and give you a free pardon right now.

Ladies and gentlemen, do you know why my wife is such a good cook? Because my acceptance on her doesn’t depend on it. I don’t go around the world talking about God like tonight in order and hoping that one day God will accept me. I do it because He has accepted me.

Do you see the difference? And you will know, those of you who are married, that the essence of a marriage is that security of acceptance that’s independent of the minor vagaries of the way we behave. Why would we insult God by suggesting to Him we could merit it? And you see here, Christianity isn’t competing with anybody because it’s utterly unique.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is five past nine. I have sinned massively in going five minutes over my time. Thank you very much indeed.

Thanks for watching John Lennox’s Why I am a Christian. We hope you enjoyed it. If you want to get in contact with us or to find out more information, please visit www.credopet.org. This was reproduced with permission from John Lennox. For more resources, see www.johnlennox.org.

For Further Reading:

John Lennox: 7 Days That Divide the World (Transcript)

AI, Man & God: Prof. John Lennox (Full Transcript)

Where Did The Bible Come From and Why Should We Care: Tim Mackie (Transcript)

A. W. Tozer Sermon: The Deeper Life (Transcript)

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