What can true crime teach us about the truth of the Bible? w/ J. Warner Wallace -Podcast Episode 207

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. Joining me today is J. Warner Wallace. We've had him on once before.

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He's probably most known for Cold Case Christianity. But I'll allow him to actually tell you a little bit more about his background.

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And then we'll be discussing his new book. And of all the books that we've had on the Got Questions podcast, books that we've promoted, this one is one of my favorites for sure.

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I was telling him before the interview that, Jim, this is not what I expected, but in a good way.

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I love your previous books, but this is so different. So Jim, welcome back to the Got Questions podcast. Well, thanks.

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I think all of us who use Got Questions as a resource, we're like, wow. When you first asked me if I could come on the podcast,

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I was like, well, I'm so honored to get a chance. Because no one overuses your website like I do.

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Like, when people email me with their question, like, what do you think about this? They want to get Jim Wallace's response.

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And I usually am emailing them a link to Got Questions because I know that there's a better response than I'm going to give them.

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So I'm just glad to be part of this podcast with you. That's great. I mean, truly,

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Got Questions, we're alongsiders. Our job is to come alongside other people to help them to help other people in providing biblically -based answers to spiritually -related questions.

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So thank you for sharing and promoting Got Questions as well. So Jim, just for our audience who may not be super familiar with you, tell us a little bit about your background and how the

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Lord has moved and worked in your life. Well, I served in Los Angeles County for the better part of three decades, just serving as an investigator, a police officer.

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I worked cold cases toward the end of my career. And that's the thing that kind of took off. And I was, maybe the first eight years on that job,

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I was not a Christian. I became a Christian at 35. And by that time, I was already involved in this discipline called forensic statement analysis, which is just an art, not a science for sure.

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But it helped me to kind of think critically about the kinds of words that people use. So when I first read the Gospels, I was thinking critically about the kinds of words.

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It's basically the same as a textual analysis of the text that maybe a biblical critic would use.

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But I didn't know anything about that. I just knew that how I would have used it if I had a suspect write down a statement.

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And that was really one of the things that I did. And as I employed those skillsets, how do you test an eyewitness?

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What are the qualities, attributes of eyewitnesses I should expect if these people who wrote the Gospels actually saw this?

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And in the end, I became a Christian because I realized that this claim about history, the resurrection, was as evidentially,

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I mean, what more was I hoping to find than what I already found? So I ended up making a decision.

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Of course, this doesn't make you a Christian, but I think at that point, I was not willing to listen to what Christianity had to say about human nature, about who

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I was, until I first believed what it was saying about Jesus. But once I did believe what it was saying about Jesus, I was willing to read it as authoritative.

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And so my first books were really, well after I became a Christian and toward the end of my career,

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I met Sean McDowell, who was an apologist also, and he was training up high schoolers.

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And I was a youth pastor by this time. And so I was training high schoolers also to encounter atheism on the campus of UC Berkeley.

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And on that trip, he said to me, you should write a book about this. And I ended up writing Cold Case at Sean's kind of encouragement, which

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I always tell him I'm grateful that he got me started in that direction, but it ended up leading to a chain of books that you're probably familiar with, books that make the case for Christianity based on those initial investigations

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I did so many years ago. But all along during this time, I knew that the stuff that I really was fascinated by is this human nature stuff.

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And it's the stuff that most people would ask me. Like for example, Shay, if you were to call me next week and say,

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I have a question for you, it's probably not, you're calling, you got the largest resource of answered questions online in the history of resources.

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You're probably not calling me to ask a question about theology or a question about apologetics or the case for, you're probably calling me because you got this person in your family now that's maybe just like an in -law or somebody who's doing something kind of sideways.

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And you're kind of wondering, is that dude, what's the deal with this guy? Like, you know, these are the kinds of questions I typically get. What do you make of my neighbor?

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What do you make of this encounter I had? Is this criminal? It's human nature stuff that people are most interested in.

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And that's the stuff you encounter working investigations like this. As you, over and over and over again, the same repeating patterns of human behavior that I'm fascinated by, that as an atheist,

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I would have said, well, this is just how evolutionary processes have, we've arrived at this point. This is how we operate in the world.

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It turns out that, yeah, there's all kinds of human behaviors that if you look at them, you can confirm them through sociological studies and through research, but it turns out they're basically ancient principles that have been on the pages of the

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New Testament for 2000 years. If you wanted to know how to flourish, you don't have to study the research on human flourishing.

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You could just apply the principles of biblical Christianity and that's what

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I wanted this book to be about. And I've been wanting to write this book really from the very beginning, but I just started off in this case -making direction and that, for the most part, is what publishers expected of me.

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And I finally earned the right, I think, to say, hey, can I do this kind of different book where I'm talking about how to flourish as a human?

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Yes, it'll be tied to the evidence from cold cases, the evidence from, there's a bunch of different cases in this book, they're not all cold cases, but that's what this book was really all about for me.

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So that's how this, that's kind of the evolutionary of my thinking as an author. Yeah.

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So the book, The Truth and True Crime, What Investigating Death Teaches Us About the

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Meaning of Life. If I were to read your book, I would still describe it as a apologetics resource, but it's more how all your investigations into cold cases and to other crimes have proved that what the

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Bible says about human nature is true. So it's apologetics, but in a different, would you say that's an accurate summary?

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Yeah, I think I always say that, look, if Christianity is true, then it's foundational document ought to describe the world the way it really is.

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It ought to describe us the way we really are. And it turns out that it does. Now, is that an evidence for the truth?

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I think it's one piece of a larger cumulative case, but here's what's more important. And this really started to come out of our work in the last five years.

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It really amplified it for me that I need to stop what I'm doing and write this book because we've been starting to counsel in marriage resiliency retreats with Billy Graham Association and we started off with the injured military and then we transferred over and started doing injured law enforcement.

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Couples who are on the verge of divorce, they'll sometimes write to us a week before they go and say, no, we're divorcing.

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We try to talk them out of it. Just go to the retreat, just get there before you give up because one of them has been critically injured typically and it's changed the course of their life.

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And a lot of the attributes of human nature and how we can flourish both as couples and as singles is stuff that I have started to focus on with these couples.

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And I wanted to be able to write about that. And so a lot of the stuff that I talk about with people who are critically injured and trying to figure out like, what do

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I do now is the stuff that I'm talking about in this book. And it's not as though I have a degree in counseling because clearly

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I don't. I'm a chaplain at my agency, but I don't have a degree in being a chaplain. I just have a bunch of life experience watching how people struggle in these areas and saying, okay, every one of these.

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So there's 15 true crime stories. There really are 15 cautionary tales, 15 life hacks that if you could simply master these areas in your life, you will flourish.

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And then also these, I think, do act as 15 pieces of evidence that demonstrate that the

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New Testament is true and reliable. But here's the other thing too. And you probably are seeing this on your website as well.

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And that is that for a guy who's a boomer like me in my 60s, yes, it was important to me 25 years ago to know, is this true?

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But that's changing in a culture that's changed the definition of what's true anyway. I mean, if I said to you, this is true, a lot of people who are younger than me are gonna hear it as, well, it's true for me.

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Not that it's true, true for everyone. And so the question I think for the next generation is not just, is it true?

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It's, is it good? Is it beautiful? Is it necessary? Does it work?

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Is it valuable? Okay, I think for a lot of young people who are listening to the culture, they would say, even if you think it's true,

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Jim, it's not good. It's the source of all kinds of racism, this misogyny, homophobia, you name it.

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So I thought, I just wanted to write a book that talks about not just is it true, but is it good? Yeah.

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No, and like I said earlier, love the book, thoroughly enjoy reading it.

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I'll talk a little about this later, but my wife who loves crime dramas, I had to fight her for it so I could read it first because I've got to prepare for this interview.

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so give me a couple of examples just to maybe give the audience a taste of what are some things in your career as a investigator that you noticed, maybe just do two of them, that made its way into the book that you think demonstrates both the truthfulness of the

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Bible and specifically how it accurately represents human nature.

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Let me talk about something with you I hardly ever talk about then, because you do like we were talking before this started, how you do so many interviews, you sometimes say the same things over and over and over again, but the one thing

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I haven't talked about much is if you think about the kinds of cases that you see on Dateline, and I've been on my fair share of cases on Dateline, they're typically either spousal murders, there's a lot of those, and or they are kind of relational, in other words, you kind of fell into the wrong crowd, you shouldn't have been hanging out with those folks.

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So now I wonder sometimes, especially even amongst young Christians, if it's okay for me to say, he should not have hung out with that guy, because I think we're at a point now where people will say, are you victim blaming?

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No, but if you're gonna say, I cannot offer some advice about who you ought not hang out with, then we're gonna have to toss out all of Proverbs, because Proverbs is pretty much a lot of advice about what you should not do, and I'm not blaming you, because you have been doing it,

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I'm just saying, you know what, you might wanna change your course. One of those is how we develop like deep, meaningful friendships, and a lot of the friendships that I work are sideways.

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Yes, they're deep and meaningful, but they are not leading toward anything good, and you end up being killed by somebody you would have called,

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I got one story in the book about a young lady who was killed by somebody who she would have said at the time was her best friend.

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How does that happen? Well, it turns out there's a lot of studies been done on what brings us happiness, contentment, joy, and flourishing, and one of the longest studies in the history of studies, provided data that really friendships, deep friendships are the sources of most contentment and happiness in our lives, they provide a lot of flourishing.

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If you have certain kinds of friendships, it turns out though, that the kind of friendship you ought to have is so deeply rooted in theism, here's why.

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And I talk about the different studies show that if you have friendships, relationships, you are more likely to flourish, but if you have limited relationships, not just,

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I know a thousand people on Twitter, but I actually have a small group of people who really know me, so it's a smaller group, and that smaller group know me so well, they have the right to correct me.

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They are deep, deep friendships with a small number of people who have a right to call me out because they know me that well, like family.

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Well, that gets you pretty close to flourishing, but there's one more element because this woman who died in the story, she had that kind of small group of friends with deep relationships with people who know her, but they have to be virtuous.

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So you can have deep connected relationships with people who aren't virtuous. I've worked a lot of gangs where the gangsters know each other this way, but they're not virtuous, and they lead them astray.

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Now, here's what's interesting about that. What determines what's virtuous? What's right or wrong?

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What's good or bad? Because if you're working the kinds of cases I'm working, you often encounter smaller groups of committed criminals who have a different code of ethics.

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In what they think is good or bad. It's good to retaliate on that gang across the street that kind of disrespected us yesterday.

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Okay, it turns out that if you want to have the kinds of relationships that help you to flourish in life, you need to have a small number of deeply connected virtuous friends.

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And that's where theism presents an advantage because what is virtue?

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If it's just relative to groups or to individuals, you can obviously take and value something that's evil.

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I see this all the time in my work. On the other hand, if there's an objective transcendent God who is the standard of right and wrong, transcending groups, well, then if I find what's virtuous on the basis of that transcendent standard,

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I will flourish. And you see this in all the data. And this is the claim of scripture, right?

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Is that scripture has been claiming this forever. So how to develop these kinds of friends.

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Now, look, what I try to do in the book is I don't just want to say, well, here's the thing you should be careful about.

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I really want to say, well, okay, so if that's the thing I know is important, how do I achieve it? Like, how do

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I identify people like that? How do I embrace, how do I do this in my own life? I call this chasing the lead.

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And in each chapter, there's a chase the lead section. As a matter of fact, when we first did this book, I had a bunch of names for this book over the last 10 years.

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The first name I had for this book, which my publisher hated and said, no, we're not doing that, was called death lessons.

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Because I thought it's kind of like life lessons, but they're based on deaths you investigate. And my publisher says that's a terrible name.

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So I couldn't use that. And then I had chasing leads, but I felt like that was a marketing book. So the chasing leads section though is still in every chapter.

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And so I hope that there's advice in there, right? That'll help people to learn how to develop those kinds of virtuous friends.

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One last thing. This is a wisdom book. And you think about what wisdom is.

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It turns out that wisdom also requires theism as its grounding, because even secularists, there's a chapter on wisdom here.

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Even secularists will say that one of the pillars of wisdom, and there's a study, an

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Ivy school study on wisdom and a foundation that says that no, one of the pillars of wisdom is a moral pillar.

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So for example, if I said, well, is there a wise way to do a kidnapping? I suppose there is, if what you mean by wise is there's a way to be successful.

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Is there a wise way to do a drive -by shooting? Well, it turns out you might ask the question, well, is it ever wise to do a kidnapping?

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By nature, is it wise to do a drive? In other words, there has to be a moral foundation to begin with.

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And here we are again, we're stuck with, well, who gets to decide what is moral, what is virtuous?

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Because again, I've got gangsters who would say, no, there is a wise way to do a kidnapping. There's a wise way to do a robbery. There's a wise way to kill somebody.

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Okay, hold on, time out. That's because they're using their standard of moral truth rather than the standard of moral truth.

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And that's why, again, Christianity does provide a lot of the same counsel you might get from the gangsters, but it grounds its moral claims in the transcendent righteous nature of God.

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And that's why I think that, so there's a lot of chapters in the book where I just talk about like, where are these 15 attributes of human flourishing?

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But several of them, really, you could not properly ground in anything other than theism.

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That's why I wanted to be able to communicate in the book. Yeah. What was the biggest aha moment where even like in writing this book, you'd never fully put together, wow, this particular case really confirms this aspect.

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Was there a moment like that? And if so, what was it? Well, there's a couple. The probably the biggest one,

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I talk about it in almost every interview, but I wanna talk about with you too, is that I didn't, if I just said to you, hey, there's one virtue, one attitude, one approach you can take as a human, one attitude you could adopt that would elevate every metric of human flourishing.

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I mean, you think of it, I mean, in terms of longevity of life, physical health, mental health, deepness of relationships, quality of relationships, your home life, how you work as an employee, how you work as an employer, your degree of education, how well you learn, how quickly you learn, how well you score on tests, how well you're able to discern truth from falsity.

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What would it be? I think most of us, if you said, well, there's one attribute that I could adopt that could accomplish all of that.

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Yeah, according to the studies and according to what I see in my casework, it's the same thing over and over and over and over and over again.

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And the studies on this particular attribute are about maybe three or three and a half decades of studies.

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And so I've been reading, they're all in the book. And I think if I asked you though, if I asked most people, if you asked most people,

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I think they would probably not come up with it. Like they wouldn't think, well, what is it? Okay, what could it be?

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I think it's, and once you say it though, everyone goes, oh yeah, that makes sense. So it was an aha for me.

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And it is the quality called humility. Humility will elevate every attitude, every aspect of human flourishing more than any other single behavior.

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Because it turns out that every act of stupid that you ever investigate as a detective is driven by this thing called pride.

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And on that platform of pride, of course, stands the pursuit of money, sex, and power. And so that pride platform, well, the antidote for pride is humility.

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So it shouldn't be surprising to us that this would be such a powerful resource.

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The problem, of course, is that I didn't see it because my pride would not allow me to see it.

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And this is the problem for most of us is that, yeah, it'd be great if we had humility, but most of us just, and you can't pursue it.

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I always say this, that Mike Adams, who's not with us anymore, was a good friend of mine. And he used to tease that he was gonna write a book called,

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How to Become Humble in 10 Easy Steps and How I Made It in Eight, you know? Because it's like this idea that you can't pursue something without becoming proud about how you pursued it.

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And this is the exact opposite of what you're trying to pursue. So it turns out that it's not a pursuit, it's a realization.

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And for most of us who focus and think about the gospel, about the grace of God offered through the gospel, that keeps us in a position where we know that, yeah, this is why it's a free gift, so that no one can boast.

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Well, that's exactly the antidote. And it turns out of all theistic views, of all spiritual views, pretty much every spiritual view has, if you'll do these things, you'll achieve this goal.

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Whereas this view says, no, no, you can't do any of those things to achieve salvation. It's grounded in you submitting all of that.

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So it's what's been given to you freely. You can't claim it for yourself. This is not a transaction with God.

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Well, that view is so deeply rooted in humility, so much so that Paul tells the

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Philippians that they are to have the attitude of Christ Jesus, who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God, a thing to be grasped, but humbled himself.

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So that view is so unique to Christianity that it offers the one, why would it surprise us that the one solution, the one attitude that provides for a human flourishing at the greatest level is if we are designed by this creator, would you surprise you then that the one system that describes the creator in this way is the true system because it turns out it's the one attribute that we are in the, and this is why, and again,

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I think it's in part of this cumulative case, death by a thousand paper cuts, that makes the case for the reliability of the

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New Testament. In reading your book and watching crime dramas or whatever, the humility thing that you were just talking about really, really strikes home for me because you watch these things and it's like, how could this person be so stupid that they thought they were gonna get away with this?

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And it's pride, and most times it's they, oh, I'm smarter than everyone else.

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No one, I've got a foolproof plan. There's no way they'll catch me. Just thinking that, so you're really smarter than the entire police department that's gonna be investigating this.

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You're really more intelligent, or you really thought of everything that no one, it's like there's an arrogance, there's a pride to even think that you can get away with some of the things.

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I've seen it in parents and children where a child will think, oh, I'll do this, but they'll never find out.

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It's like, okay, really, you're seven. Your parents combined are way more intelligent than you at this point.

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They're going to figure it out. The stuff that I thought I got away with as a child that my mom later tells me, like, no,

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I knew that you did that. So pride, over -evaluating your own intelligence or your own wisdom or your own ability to be sneaky in such a way, it's led to the downfall of many criminals, for which

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I'm sure you are very grateful. And there's another way it kind of manifests itself too. So you work these guys who knew they did this crime, and they spent 30 years now living as though they didn't.

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And it's not just that they thought, well, I got away with it. I'm smarter. I covered my tracks well. It's that they don't on a daily basis struggle with it.

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Like they've put it out of their mind. They are so self -focused that they only see, and I have met people like that who, you know what?

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They aren't like drinking and struggling with this fact they murdered somebody 30 years ago. They've been living like it's no big deal.

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It's just not even part of their life anymore. Well, why? It's because we are, because pride by its very nature is self -focused rather than other -focused.

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You're not thinking about what you did to somebody else. You're just thinking about, am I gonna have a good day today? It's so self -focused.

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It's interesting, because even, you know, if you look at, this is another different chapter in the book, but I noticed this a lot working in cold cases is that people think that there's just no way that guy who's been so unbelievably good for 30 years could have done this 30 years ago or 10 years ago, whatever it may be, however old the case was.

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Like there's just no way to reconcile this guy, this good guy I'm seeing today with the evil guy you're describing in this case.

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There's no way. And this is probably true for every case where the suspect does not confess and claims his or her innocence, right?

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They're sitting in court and the whole battle for the jury is could this person really have done that? Well, if you understand the nature of humans, it does help you to assess this.

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Because I think part of the culture is trying to sell us that as humans, we are innately innocent, born innocent, born good, corrupted by our environment, by our upbringing, by systems, whatever it may be.

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And if that's the case, then yeah, it's a different approach to humanity. But if the biblical worldview is true, that we are innately so deeply fallen and that we are the enigma of man is one of the chapters in this book.

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Do we have good data to support the idea that we are, even though most of us, like you're saying, who are parents, like we know you don't need to teach your kids to be impatient and selfish.

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That's the thing you gotta teach them not to be because their base nature is to be self -focused.

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I love how Luther used to put it, that we are so turned inward. We are so that we corrupt everything, including even the stuff we do for God.

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That we, even the good virtue, it turns out that this self -focused nature of us actually is the foundation for altruism also.

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That we are doing those things because we know it benefits us in some way, nothing else, how we look to the public around us.

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So deeply fallen are we, that we don't really even get credit for anything good we do because the good things we do, we do for the wrong reason.

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This is, I think, his view then of why salvation has to come from God, is that even our good deeds are just entirely transactional.

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I'm doing this for this other selfish purpose that I have. And if that's the case, and this is what you see this in criminal trials.

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I remember I had, I don't think, I can't remember, I was just thinking about this yesterday. Did I mention this in one of the chapters?

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But I had a case where this defense attorney who I became very good friends with, we had a suspect and I agreed.

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I mean, this guy was the nicest guy you'd ever met. Now he did kill his wife 30 years earlier, but if you talk to this guy, he was just a sweet man.

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Just like, you know, I liked him. I genuinely liked him. My partner liked him even more.

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And the defense attorney is like, yeah, I like him too. And there's no way he did this. I'm just telling you, this guy's the sweetest guy I've ever, I've worked a lot of guilty suspects, he said, but this guy is not one of them.

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This guy is a sweetheart. Well, yeah, sure enough, at the sentencing hearing, he got convicted and at the sentencing hearing, he confessed to the entire thing and gave us the location of his wife's body.

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Well, okay, it turns out he was the guy, even though it didn't appear to be the case.

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And we have, I think all of us have to kind of reconcile it, but why is that? Why is that so? Why would it be that we are so enigmatic?

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Why would it be that way? How do we explain that? I think the Christian worldview has a great explanation for it.

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And I think once I held that view in my head, I don't want to say I was, you couldn't say it's kind of pessimistic, right?

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Like you look at somebody who looks so glowingly beautiful and you realize, no, this is the same nut job that we all are.

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I look at myself and say, yeah, am I capable of doing this? Every one of us is capable of doing that horrific thing.

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Now that's a negative, but the positive is that when I look at this guy, I don't anymore see him as completely unredeemable piece of trash.

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I don't, because I'm that same unredeemable piece of trash. To be honest, we're all that guy.

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And if, but for the grace of God, none of this gets righted. So I think it does, it can, that negative approach can help you.

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And this is one of the things we talk about in the book is like, how does it, how do we leverage that toward flourishing? It turns out that a proper view of who we are can be leveraged toward flourishing, but we have to have the proper view first.

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So Jim, truly the truth and true crime. It's a fascinating read. I couldn't put it down and I don't say that very often.

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I mean, I know we don't do book interviews if I don't think the book is a worthwhile contribution, something that people should read, but truly recommend this book highly.

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It's fascinating. It's applicable. And it really made me think a lot of things like, wow, there are just so many illustrations in everyday life.

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There's no, don't have to be investigating crime that demonstrates the truthfulness of what the Bible says about human nature and how to flourish in this world.

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So earlier you said, if I were to ever call you and ask you a question, it wouldn't be about apologetics or theology.

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I might disagree with that, but I do have a question for you that's along the lines of what you were saying earlier.

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So my wife has a fascination with watching crime dramas on TV or investigative reports or listening to crime podcasts.

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So my question for you is, do I need to be concerned that she's planning something or how would you explain this fascination with true crime?

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Well, you know, Gaffigan has this hilarious, the comedian has this hilarious standup bit he does about Dateline, where he talks about how they've switched over to murder, spousal murder, because everyone, you know, they were the perfect couple.

29:25

And then of course, at some point in the show, he's killing her. And so the question is like, you know, he laughs about how he would be watching it on his anniversary with his wife.

29:33

And he was, she was upset because he was like taking notes. I don't think that people watch these, honestly, to take notes.

29:39

Most of us don't do that. But there have been people who have speculated why so much of true crime is actually, the larger audience for true crime shows and novels are female.

29:51

It's a pretty disproportionate group. As a matter of fact, a lot of the old networks have become entirely true crime to address that audience.

29:59

Oxygen, for example, has had a season where it's mostly true crime. So I thought, okay, what is that?

30:04

And one commenter speculated that this is what she said she thought it was. She thought because the vast majority of victims are female.

30:15

And that is true. Well, let's put it this way. The vast majority of suspects are male. That we know for sure.

30:20

And so if a spousal murder is probably gonna be a lopsided, even when a woman decides to kill her husband, she's usually enlisting the help of men, maybe a boyfriend or whatever it is to do the job.

30:31

So it turns out that this one commenter was saying, well, it might just be that we are watching this as kind of like a roadmap as to how not to be victimized.

30:42

Because in the end, sadly, often we're the ones who are victimized. So that could be part of it.

30:49

But I do think this, I think all of us have two interests when we watch true crime. Number one, and it's all based on pride.

30:55

One could be self -preservation. How do I avoid being a victim? That's about me. The other is, I think

31:01

I can solve this before they do. And if you notice, when you do Dateline episodes, and I've done a bunch of these, they'll always wanna, look, they could tell the story in one section, 10 minutes, the whole story.

31:11

But what they do is they kind of wanna unwrap it and make the mystery evolve for the viewer.

31:17

And they're just challenging us as viewers to solve it. So that's what I thought was interesting about writing this book.

31:23

Because it turns out, I'm trying to make this overall cumulative case for human flourishing in 15 steps. And I'm gonna give it to you one step at a time.

31:30

But I think if you were to look at the overarching, and I could have done 40, but I wanted to focus on these 15.

31:37

These are attributes that if we adopted them, we're gonna have our best life now, period.

31:44

And this is not just based on scripture. That's based on secular data. But it turns out that does match what scripture says.

31:52

And so I just wanted to make that case in steps. And a lot of times there are, we try to tell these stories in a way that we unwrap them for you in each chapter.

32:01

But really the focus isn't so much that we're trying to get blood guts on the pages. We're really just trying to show you how our human nature is, it peaks through.

32:10

And it usually peaks through at the worst possible moments. You don't know what's in this cup until you hit it hard.

32:17

And then suddenly that's what pops out. And for a lot of us in life, you don't know who we really are until we are in that moment where we have the opportunity to do something really bad.

32:25

And then you get to see who we really are. So that's why I thought those were decent platforms for examining human nature.

32:32

So thank you for the assurance. I generally have absolutely no concern that my wife has any ill intent towards me.

32:39

But thought has crossed my mind. I was like, why are these so fascinating? And I occasionally watch them with her and I am definitely of the,

32:47

I want to think I can figure it out faster than they're intending. But so thanks for the rebuke that that comes from an inward sense of pride.

32:57

I think you're right. Well, that's not a hard one to call, right? Because probably much everything we do,

33:03

I could say that comes from an inward sense of pride because pretty much everything we do does. So I think that's why we have to, that's why the gospel by the way is the best cure for every kind of stupid because every kind of stupid is driven by our pride.

33:15

So that's what I hope people get out of the book. Yeah. So again, the book is The Truth and True Crime. It's a fascinating read and it is a remarkable examination of how human nature matches exactly what the

33:27

Bible says it is. So J. Warner Wallace, Jim, thank you for joining me today on the Got Questions podcast.

33:33

Again, I highly recommend this book. We'll include links where you can learn more about the book and also Jim and the ministry that God's called him to, but also just where you can acquire the book because it's well worth reading and it will give you some insight into how crime demonstrates the truthfulness of the

33:52

Bible. Thanks for having me, brother. I really appreciate you. As always, you're the number one resource, so I just appreciate being on your podcast.

33:59

All right. Well, thank you for that encouragement as well. So this has been the Got Questions podcast with J. Warner Wallace on his new book,

34:05

The Truth and True Crime. Got questions, the Bible has answers and we'll help you find them.