#81 Understanding the Case for Miracles + Lee Strobel

I'm so excited to have you here. Oh, that's very kind. Thank you. I mean, it's a pleasure to be with you. You were before Christ, just so people can understand the transformation that took place.

Yeah. I mean, I was an atheist trained in journalism and law. I lived a drunken and immoral life.

I was who I was. Is there like a moment that it all clicked? It really is like all the research

I did on, and I put in those last picture pieces of the jigsaw puzzle about the step back. And it was a picture of Jesus.

I'd love to know if you've had a personal encounter with the supernatural. Yeah. I mean, for me, it wasn't. Hello. Hello.

My name's Cassian Blino and I'm your host for biblically speaking and buckle up because we have Lee Strobel in the house.

This is amazing. I'm so excited to have you here, but if you are listening and you don't know who Lee Strobel is go get his book right now, but I'll tell you who he is.

He is the former award -winning investigative journalist for the Chicago Tribune and once a passionate atheist, but then you spent two years investigating

Christ and now you've written the bestseller case for Christ case for faith case for creator.

And now you're creating a case for miracles. Welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here.

Oh, that's very kind. Thank you. I mean, it's a pleasure to be with you and talk to you and your listeners. It's a, it must've been such a rollercoaster going into your investigation with what is

Christ? He's obviously fake. He's obviously not real. Obviously, whatever arguments you had, could you just like paint a picture of who you were before Christ?

Just so people can understand the transformation that took place. Yeah. I mean, I was an atheist trained in journalism and law.

Um, I figured if God is no, it doesn't exist. If there's no ultimate accountability, then the most logical way to live my life would be as a hedonist, someone who just pursued pleasure.

So I lived a drunken and profane and narcissistic, uh, self absorb, um, immoral life.

Uh, that was who I was. And, um, I was successful in my career at the Chicago Tribune. What people saw was, was me winning awards for investigative reporting.

They didn't see the other side, which I, I was literally drunk in the snow in an alley on Saturday night.

So I was headed in a very dark direction. Oh my gosh. How old were you by the way, just at this point in your life?

Uh, in my, um, gosh, my upper twenties. Yeah. I started at the Tribune at 24. Yeah. And then were there like influences of Christ in your life at that time that you were just ignoring, or was it kind of a foreign concept altogether?

Well, my wife was agnostic. She was just kind of spiritually confused. Uh, we met a neighbor who was a strong Christian.

They became best friends. Leslie went to church with her, my wife, Leslie, and, and, um, checked it out and ultimately gave me the worst news an atheist husband could get.

She said, I decided to become a Christian. And I thought divorce. I literally,

I was going to walk out. And then I thought, well, oh yeah, I didn't want to be married to a Christian. She's going to be a wet blanket on my life.

And she's going to make fun of my drinking, my friends. And that's what I thought didn't happen, but I thought the worst.

And then I thought maybe I could rescue her from this cult that she got involved in. So I decided to take my journalism training and legal training and investigate

Christianity, especially the resurrection of Jesus to try to disprove it. And I spent two years doing that, looking into the minutia of the evidence for Jesus, not only claiming to be the son of God, but backing up that claim by returning from the dead.

Until on November the 8th of 1981, I realized in light of the avalanche of evidence that points so powerfully toward the truth of Christianity, it would have taken more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a

Christian, you know, this, the scale is just tilted decisively. And that's when I came to faith in Jesus.

And over time, my values, my character, my morality, my attitudes, my philosophy, my parenting, my marriage all began to change for the good.

And now we just celebrated our 53rd wedding anniversary together. Praise God, that's amazing.

I mean, I'm sure that there's literally, like you said, mountains of evidence that allowed you to come to this conclusion and to be irrefutably convinced.

But is there like a moment that it all clicked that you kind of always go back to even when you wandered into doubt?

And it really is the resurrection. And it was kind of like all the research I did on that kind of put in the final puzzle pieces together on this on November the 8th of 1981 and then stepping back and it was like it was like I was putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but I didn't know what the ultimate picture would look like.

And I put in those last picture pieces of the jigsaw puzzle about the resurrection. I stepped back and it was a picture of Jesus that I realized that this

I cannot I have to follow this. I'm trained in journalism and law to follow the evidence and the evidence points persuasively toward Jesus being who he claimed to be.

And that's I felt I had no choice at that point but to bend my knee to him.

And it turned out my wife had been praying for me the whole two years that I was on that investigative journey, and I never knew it at the time.

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Thank you so much. Now back to the show. Do you think it was the approach legalistically or historically or contextually that you think was the most impactful for you, uh, kind of being convinced?

Yeah, it really was for me a combination. Yes. There is good scientific evidence from cosmology, the origin of the universe, from physics, the fine tuning of the universe, from bio, um, um, biological issues, the, the existence of information, biological information, and DNA.

These all point toward a creator who matches a description of the God of the Bible, but I, for me,

I like the historical evidence. Um, did Jesus claim to be God? Well, yeah, he did. He got up before a group and he said,

I and the father are one. And the Greek word for one there is not masculine is neuter, which means

Jesus was not saying I and the father, the same person he was saying, I and the father are the same thing or one in nature or one.

And the audience, they got it. They said, you're just a man. You're claiming to be God. So Jesus claimed to be God, but I could claim to be

God. You could claim to be God. Anybody can claim to be God. But if he claimed to be God died and then three days later rose from the dead, that's pretty good evidence.

He's telling the truth. Right. So that was the clincher for me. Wow. Yeah.

I, it really is just logic. That's the same way that I approached it was God. If you objectively are so amazing, so cool.

Let me know, because then I'll have no choice but to follow you. And so we want to be Christians that are falling because we're here for a reason, not because we feel obligated or compulsion.

You know, the best stories are the ones that are true. And it turns out this is true and it makes it the best story of all time.

One of the stories that I listened to from another podcast that you were on was you were doing investigative journalism for a home in Chicago during Christmas time.

And you said that they lived in like a hovel and you go in and then you come back and they were, you know, there was so much

Christmas presents that people donated. And then you just kind of realized that they were saying, you know, when we have plenty, how can our neighbors have nothing because they're giving away their presents at that point.

And that was kind of a moment for you, where you realize why have a good paying job and a very nice home? And yet I'm lacking compared to them.

Yes, that's exactly right. The Delgado family, a 60 year old perfected Delgado who was crippled by arthritis and the two grandchildren she was raising.

They had nothing. I did an article about them. Tribune Reader showered them with stuff. And I interrupted on Christmas Eve, them packaging it up to give it away.

And you quoted her exactly. She said, how can we have plenty when our neighbors have nothing? This is what Jesus would want us to do.

And I was just blown away by that. And I said, well, do you appreciate all this stuff that has been given to you?

She said, oh yeah, this is wonderful. This is a gift from God. But she said, that's not his greatest gift. His greatest gift is tomorrow.

That is Jesus talking about Christmas. And, um, and as an atheist, I said, well, here's a family that had nothing, virtually no possessions in the world to start with.

And yet they had faith in God and that God had not abandoned them. And they had a sense of peace and joy and gratitude, even in the midst of that.

And I'm comparing myself and saying, you know, uh, I've got the loneliness of ambition and, and, and I'm shackled to the material rather than the supernatural.

And, and it just made me question my life, uh, that my heart was as barren as the hovel in which they live.

And so they had a huge impact. I mean, because I saw Jesus in them the way that they cared for their neighbors, even though they could have hoarded this stuff or sold it.

No, no, no. They wanted to bless other people as they had been blessed. And they were like Jesus. And that opened my heart to Jesus, even as an atheist at the

Chicago Tribune. And that I would say was one of the links in a long chain of events and circumstances that ultimately led me to faith seven years later.

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Take a breath, slow down and dwell in the good things. Now back to the show. Whoa. It really does add up.

I feel the same, that you know that God's worked on me and that I see God working on others currently.

It's so exciting. Um, so now that you found him, is there a way that you may be experiencing?

Cause this was a minor experience and it all adds up, but we're going into the realm of the supernatural and I'd love to know if you've had a personal encounter with the supernatural before we learn more about your research.

Yeah. I mean for me it wasn't so much that I had one, although I have had a couple of instances that I can only attribute to a supernatural influence of God.

But to me as a skeptic, I'm looking for cases that aren't just things you can read on the internet, not just stories people tell at a party.

I'm looking for cases where the four things are true. Number one, we've got solid medical documentation from the

Mayo clinic or other reputable sources. Number two, uh, we have multiple incredible eyewitnesses who have no motive to deceive.

Number three, there is no natural explanation that can account for this logically. And number four, if it takes place in the context of prayer.

And if those four things are true, I think it is logical and rational to conclude that God has intervened supernaturally in somebody's life.

And we have those cases that we present in this movie and they're awe inspiring. Is there any one of those that stands out the most?

Oh, they all do. But one of my favorites is a woman who was blind for a dozen years with, uh, an incurable condition, juvenile macular degeneration.

Nobody's ever been cured of it. She went to a school for the blind. She learned how to read Braille and she married a

Baptist pastor. And one night they're getting ready to go to bed. And the pastor comes over to her. She's in bed.

He puts his hand on her shoulder and he begins to cry. He begins to pray. And he says, Lord, I know you can heal my wife. I know you can do it.

And I pray that you do it tonight. And with that, she opened her eyes to perfect eyesight.

So our husband, for the first time, she said after years, yeah. She said after years of darkness,

I could see perfectly. It's a miracle. And I believe it was a miracle. That case is documented by multiple medical researchers and published in a peer reviewed medical journal.

What do you do with that? What do you do? There's no other case in the medical literature anywhere of anybody being spontaneously healed, uh, of juvenile macular degeneration that way.

And it happened to come right at a moment of prayer. Give me a break. I think the most logical explanation is

God did something miraculous. That I mean, yeah, no doubt.

I, um, I've worked with Billy Hallowell to promote some of his work. Yes. He's talking about miracles.

And it's the same case. It's just it's years of suffering. And then it happens in an instant and God moves suddenly.

He doesn't move quickly. And I'm sure that if you could like what I love to do at Biblically speaking is like pretend we're there in that first century.

Pretend we're in the gospels when they're occurring. Is there a miracle that you personally love that Jesus kind of encountered?

Mine personally is the bleeding woman. I love the bleeding woman. But any one of those that you hold on to? Yeah, I think

Lazarus, um, you know, who is a dead for a while. I mean, in his grave and, uh, you know, people say, hey,

Jesus, why didn't you show up earlier? You could have saved him. You could have prevented all this. And what does he do? He raises him from the dead.

I mean, that's pretty dramatic right there. I love that so many miracles that Jesus perform.

And, you know, if God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow and forever, then we should expect that if miracles and you know what?

Here's another thing. If we've got solid documentation of miracles occurring today, that gives extra credibility to the stories of the miracles in the gospels.

Because if they can happen today, like the woman who was healed of blindness that I just mentioned, we've got documentation, we've got witnesses.

And so, um, well now all of a sudden, Jesus healing the blind doesn't seem so ridiculous.

Yeah, exactly. I was thinking rubbing the dirt on the eyes. You know, we read that and it seems like an ancient text and yet here it is happening alongside modern medicine.

Yes. Yes. It is absolutely astounding. And, um, so you see those stories in the movie and I get to chat with my friend,

Manny Sandoval, whose family immigrated from Guatemala, and he grew up in a Pentecostal home where there was an anticipation of the miraculous taking place.

I grew up as an atheist, as a skeptic. So we were able to have this conversation from kind of two different perspectives.

And, uh, as we take a road trip and in 1967, Ford Bronco down route 66, uh, beautiful cinematography.

And, um, um, and then you see the actual reenactments of some of these miracles.

And, um, he brought some to the table. I wasn't even familiar with that are mind blowing. So I, I walked away just encouraged by the whole project.

And my, my hope is that Christians are encouraged by the film. Their faith is deepened, but then they invite someone who's spiritually confused to come see the movie the next day with them.

Um, and then have a conversation about what happened and what, what do they think of that?

And maybe then invite him to Christmas services at church. You know, people are more spiritually open during the

Christmas season. Let's seize the opportunity to share these kinds of messages with them. You timed this out perfectly with all of the

Christmas services and the Christmas cheer that we're feeling. Um, yeah,

I mean, I can't wait to see it. It's only out for a few days though, but it's across the nation, right? Isn't it

December 15th to the 19th, 18th to the 18th through the 18th. So four days, 15, 16, 17th and 18th.

If you go to, um, um, the case for miracles, a movie .com,

you can see the trailer. You can put in your zip code, find out what theater is showing it locally. I've got about 10 of them around at my place in Houston that are showing it.

And, um, and then make plans to go. You can buy tickets right there. Um, I bought a bunch of tickets

I'm going to give away. So I am, I plan to invite a bunch of folks that, uh, may be spiritually curious and are looking for answers.

And, and I think at Christmas time, it's a perfect time to do it. Uh, God willing, these conversations just take root.

Um, but I'm, I'm so excited to see it. Just one last question is what surprises you the most about the supernatural?

I've had a lot of conversations about the unseen realm, but kind of doing the work that you've done, experiencing it, seeing it, what do you think is the most shocking that we should be aware of as believers?

Well, one of the areas of investigation I did for my book, seeing the supernatural, uh, was deathbed visions.

Uh, these are incredibly well -documented. These are cases where people are on their deathbed. It's like Stephen, it's biblical.

Stephen in chapter seven of acts, he's about to die. He's about to be stoned to death. And he looks up and he sees the heavens open up and he sees the glory of God and Jesus there in heaven.

Um, and people who are about to die very often, we'll have a peek into what's to come.

And often they will see something or someone that they didn't know would be there.

So this isn't just something coming from their imagination. They're seeing someone in heaven. They didn't know had died.

Um, we have many cases of that. In fact, my father -in -law who was an atheist, I led him to the

Lord just before he died. And on his deathbed, he saw his sister who he didn't know had died a couple of days earlier.

Nobody had told him yet. And yet he saw her alive, uh, in, waiting for him in heaven.

So, um, um, these are well -documented. And in my book, seeing the supernatural, I document them.

They study 5 ,000 of them and show that these are not hallucinations. They're not just product of someone's imagination.

There's something supernatural going on. Uh, been doctoral dissertations written about them, fascinating area.

And I'd never really looked into that one before and was shocked at how common these are.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. I, I can't wait to watch more in the film. And just the way that you approach it is so opening to so many people that are new to the faith or curious about the faith.

I you're doing God's work, literally. And I'm so grateful for the time, Lee. Thank you so much. That's very kind.

It's been a great adventure. I wouldn't give it up for the world. Uh, I thought journalism was where it was at.

I loved having a front row seat to history. And I look back and I say that was nothing compared to following Jesus, wherever he leads.

Cause it's taken me to places. I never thought I'd be same.

Look at me with you right now. Never thought that this would happen in my life, but here we are. That's awesome.