Dealing With the Big Issues, Nabeel Qureshi, Truly Bad IFD, Thoughts from the Reformation Tour

Responding to Evil, Tragedy, and the Sovereignty of God

So how do you do this? I don't remember. It's been so long, especially the... Hey, do you see what somebody gave me in Germany? I was in Worms, and these two guys actually were just from Worms, and they heard I was going to be there, so they were just sort of walking around, waiting for me to show up.

And one of the things they gave me was Lutherol. Was Martin Luther Luther heute verordnen würde. I thought they were pieces of gum or something, but they're not. They're little pieces of paper with quotes from Martin Luther to cure what ails you.

So it's called Lutherol. There you go. I didn't want to forget that. But I wanted to thank the guys for showing up. And I got two of the little guy back there next to the big Martin Luther. And I've been given a cobble before.

It's a little what are they called? Some type of a play toy type thing. But he's right up there next to the big Martin Luther next to the Borg sphere. So I was asked to make sure he would be visible on the dividing line.

Barely. Well, he's right next to Martin Luther's right hand. Left hand from your perspective, but Martin Luther's right hand. Anyway, so much to get to, but of course a difficult day. Everyone woke up this morning.

Well, unless you're up late I'm not a late night person these days. I'm still trying to adjust to the nine hour shift back. Picked up a little something that really nothing much of anything but just enough to, you know, you had the sore throat and then I had a little last night and it's pretty much gone.

I hope. We'll see. I could come back with a vengeance. But nine hour jet lag shift back here to Playmobil. Yeah, that's someone's channel. Playmobil. Nine hour shift back here to Phoenix. And so we wanted to get a program in.

We hadn't done one in quite some time. And of course we pick a day where we have the Las Vegas shooting and it does sort of, in a way dovetail with some of the things that we need to talk about anyway.

The Christian Mind of Christ in a Secular Age

The day before I left for the tour in Germany, we did a 75 minute long dividing line that was lost. It was not recorded. It just had never happened to us before. And I'm going to try to get back I'm going to try to recover some of that material eventually.

The one thing that I think I had spent the most of the time on was the issue of Nabeel Qureshi's death. At the same time, I hadn't had the opportunity yet to address the hurricane in Houston, the hurricane in Florida, just so many things that have been going on recently.

There actually is somewhat of a relationship between all of these things. Starting off with basically, I guess we'll put all of them together, how do we as Christians respond to tragedies as a whole? Whether they are massive natural tragedies, massive human tragedies in the shooting in Las Vegas.

When I say tragedy, obviously there are two completely different things. A natural disaster is part from a Christian perspective. What I'm going to address today is basically along the lines of we have as Christians what we believe to be a revelation from God.

Basically, you can measure where a group is going to be going by how much they believe this actually is a revelation from God or how much they seek to accommodate this revelation to external sources such as what is popular in society or whatever else it might be.

We are supposed to have something called the mind of Christ. It's not a phrase you hear repeated a lot amongst Evangelical Christians or Reformed Christians, the mind of Christ. It should be. We always talk about the necessity of responding in a way that is glorifying to God.

What does that mean? It means having a consistent Christian worldview. What does that mean? That means viewing the world as a Christian should view the world so that we respond in a way that's glorifying to God based upon His revealed truth specifically in the person of Jesus Christ and explain to us in the abiding witness of the Spirit of God and the Word of God called Scripture.

Why should we have to have that continually pressed upon us? Because the world is seeking to conform us to its image. We want to be conformed to the image of Christ. We don't want to be conformed to the image of the world.

There is a battle going on. There is a conflict going on in being conformed to the image of the world over against being conformed to the image of Christ, having the Word of God operating within us, etc.

To what do we expose ourselves more often? To the consistent teaching of Scripture? The explication of that Scripture in the church, in the fellowship of believers where we've gathered to be obedient to God's command and to be encouraged in the things of God?

Or are we much more often exposed to the thinking of the world, the music of the world, the art of the world, the literature of the world, the social media of the world? Which has a greater influence upon us?

And what's the greater danger? Is it not that we are going to modify our Christian worldview so that it fits into a secular society in which we live? Or that we are going to compromise very clearly on what we believe?

When it comes to these issues, as I have listened to Christians responding to both natural disaster as well as last evening, yet again, a example not of the sickness of man. This was not an ill individual.

This was not a sick individual. This was an evil individual. Right then, as soon as you can tell that you are uncomfortable with the word evil might tell you which of the two influences is greater in your own mindset.

Because the Scriptures do not hesitate to identify the actions of man as being evil when they are in fact evil. As I listened to Christians, it's one thing to listen to and it doesn't matter whether they're leftists, rightists, centrists, as long as they're secularists, the interpretation provided by individuals of these these events are pretty much all the same.

They are interpreted within a naturalistic framework. They may use different language in the sense of, it's sort of like the different language you'd see between Fox News and MSNBC. You're going to have different language.

It's more likely to hear somebody talking about sending prayers or saying prayers for people and the victims on Fox News than you would on MSNBC. But when it comes to the motivations of an individual being evil, when it comes to whether God has a purpose in these things, whether they be natural, when it comes to something like where are hurricanes going to hit, it seems to be perfectly fine then for God to be in charge.

Because we all know we have computer models that sort of give us a cone of uncertainty, right? Because we don't know. We're not in charge. We're not in control. We simply don't know where these things are going to go.

As we know, weather is a fractal phenomenon and so no one, I don't think, can ever know, Star Trek aside, exactly where these things are going to go, what impact they're going to have. People are a little bit more willing to put that off to God's in control of that.

But even then, secularists today, God's on vacation. If there's a God at all, he's a deist and he's just observing. He's not really involved. But especially when you get something like last evening, what happens last night, you really start seeing the worldview impact upon how people interpret these events.

And as I listen to even Christians responding to these things, I'm really taken aback at how thoroughly secularized many people who claim to be Christians really are when it comes to these big events, these big issues.

And it comes back to theology. And you can even have a good theology, but if you really haven't applied it, if you're not trying to really live in light of it. And some of you might say, well, it's too soon to address this.

Well, okay, which shooting do we want to use then? Which horrific act? I guess my hotel in Berlin was something like 100 meters from where the guy last Christmas drove the truck into the crowd of people.

That's far enough away from now. Half of us had forgotten about it. That's the thing we're thinking of. And let's be honest, three weeks from now we'll be thinking about something other than Las Vegas.

That's the reality. But when you think of the level of evil that lies behind someone on the 32nd floor. By the way, this is not just a modern thing. What was it? University of Texas? Was that where it was?

The tower there? The tower shooter? That was like the 60s, wasn't it? I think I may have been born then. A long time ago. You've got the shooter up there. People are already starting to try to find motivations.

I just go, hey, you know what? It's that news cycle time. You've got to put people on to say things. Almost anything that is said for the first week is primarily speculation. I can't necessarily trust everything that I'm going to be hearing or seeing or anything else.

I'm one of those folks that says, let's give it some time and make sure that some serious research is done. Even then, I tend to be a little bit more skeptical these days. All we know is anyone standing up there with an automatic weapon not a semi-automatic weapon, which you can buy at gun stores you can't buy what this guy had at a gun store.

I realize that there's a lot of really confused people about that but that's another issue we won't get into today. Anyway, you're up there with a full auto weapon fairly high caliber. I'm guessing AK probably.

That wasn't an M16. I know the difference between the sounds. Those were heavier bullets. That was probably a .30 caliber. 7 .62, something like that. Anyway, you're just pulling that trigger and you're just emptying out banana clips, probably 30 rounds each into, maybe into people who cannot fight back.

You're just committing murder. And you know exactly what you're doing. You've been planning it. We look at something like that and the secularist who views mankind as merely an animal you can't even, it's not even properly, it's not even proper to say highly evolved animal because high assumes something that the secular worldview cannot actually provide.

Just a complex product of evolution. You look at that and when you call that person evil, on what basis can you really say that? You're begging the existence of an objective morality to give your words any kind of meaning.

You can find it horrific you can use terms, you're shocked that anyone could do something like this but it's just as has been pointed out, it's one blob of sparkly stardust doing something to other blobs of sparkly stardust that's really all it is when you boil it all down.

And so you can talk about man evolving morality and well this is bad for the group as a whole so that's why it's morally wrong and all the rest of that stuff. None of that does anything in here. We all know that's a bunch of garbage.

We all know that's made up to explain a particular scientific theory that people are absolutely dedicated to religiously but how's a Christian supposed to respond to this? Because on the one hand, we say this individual is responsible before God for what he does responsible before God and will be judged by God.

God’s Decree, Human Responsibility, and Isaiah 45

And so that immediately raises the issue could God have stopped this man? Obviously, we have to biblically say God could stop anyone from doing anything. The open theist says no. God didn't know what was coming.

He knew his possibility but he didn't know if the guy would go through with it. Which means that's why the open theist God doesn't know what's going to happen tomorrow. He doesn't know when you're going to die because your death in all probability will be the result of numerous free will choices by free creatures and God can't know that.

The open theist goes, God will do the best he can to put it all back together again. And I'm not even including process theology and all the rest of that garbage in this right now. We'll just stick with these things.

But if you're a Christian and God doesn't have a decree then when God created this world, he knew this was going to happen if you believe in divine foreknowledge. God knew this was going to happen but he doesn't have a purpose for it.

He just, you know, either you do the Molinus thing and I don't even know how you go there. Those were the cards that were dealt and somehow to get the best result you had to include this guy. I'm not even mentioning his name.

I haven't even memorized his name. I don't want to give him any fame. But somehow I guess God had to include this guy in the mix and God knew what he was going to do because of middle knowledge but there wasn't anything to do about it and somehow he just had to work it in here so as to protect man's autonomy and still get the best result.

This was the best God could do. That's the Molinus understanding. Well, someone says, how about you Mr. Calvinist? God decreed that this man would do that. There wasn't anything he could do about it. There wasn't anything he could do about it.

I was looking at the book of Isaiah and I was listening to what scripture says. This is Isaiah 45, beginning of verse 5. I am Yahweh and there is no other. Besides me there is no God. I will gird you though you have not known me that men may know from the rising and the setting of the sun that there is no one besides me.

I am Yahweh and there is no other. The one forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity. I am Yahweh who does all these. As you know, in Isaiah 45, 7, well-being is shalom.

Creating shalom and creating raw calamity or evil. I am the Lord who does all these. He's talking similarly to what you have in Amos 3. When in asking a number of questions, one of the questions that's asked in Amos 3, 6, if a calamity and that's raah, same thing.

If calamity occurs in a city, has not Yahweh done it? Well, a lot of people would say no. No. But the fundamental understanding of Yahweh in the Old Testament, this is one of the reasons that the Brian Zahns of the world don't really, they want a different God than the God of the Old Testament.

They don't want to believe this. They don't want to believe that Yahweh does whatever he pleases in the heavens and the earth and the seas and all deep places and that he accomplishes his will and no one raises a hand to say, why have you done this?

They don't want any of that. That's not something they're interested in. Okay. If you believe that God has a sovereign decree and he's accomplishing his purposes, what happened last night is a blip in history.

I mean, way up to 58, I think, last I saw, 58 dead and over 400 injured. Over 500 injured. Ever heard of the firebombing of Dresden? You've heard of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, but the firebombing of Dresden, where we didn't use nuclear weapons, but we used conflagration devices, incendiary devices that literally fried people where they lay on the streets and turned them into charred, you had to just dig them off the pavement.

It was so hot that it melted people right into the ground. There have been horrific things that have happened in human history and I think one of the problems is so few people today know anything about history.

We don't have a context to put things in. As a result, whatever we're experiencing now is always the worst it's ever been. It's not the worst it's ever been. It isn't. You can deceive yourself into thinking it is.

Every generation wants to think it's never been this bad. The fact of the matter is the history of man's ability to engage in these things is long. You go, okay, fine. We'll take that as a given. You mean God has a purpose in all this?

To which I respond, biblically, when that tower fell in the days of Jesus and Jesus made reference to it. Remember how he made reference to it? He didn't say, oh, that terrible tragedy. I'll have to question the goodness of God that something like that could happen because this tower is being built.

It collapses. That happened more in the ancient world than it happens today, but it still happens today, too. Jesus made reference to it. We're talking about the incarnate Son of God. And he responded to it in the proper way, in the right way.

We need to respond to it in the same way Jesus did. He didn't view it as something that was outside of God's control. Jesus taught a sparrow doesn't fall. A sparrow doesn't fall without God's knowledge.

It's not just, oh, he's observing everything. Jesus believes in the absolute sovereignty of God, the kingship of God. Jesus believes every word of the Old Testament because it was he by his Spirit that gave it to us.

If you're a Trinitarian, you believe that. And so Jesus' response to what seems to us to be a random tragedy was to remind us of the brevity of life and the judgment of God. You think you're better than those people that the tower fell on?

You're not. Repent and believe. Repent and believe, or you'll likewise perish. What does all this come to, in my thinking? What I didn't hear many Christians—and you know what? Brother Piper gets really ravaged on this one.

He's consistent on this subject, and it infuriates people. But John Piper, over and over again, refers to the reality that if we have a biblical worldview, if we allow Scripture, if we allow what we believe about God to determine how we interpret what happens in the world, which is what Christians should do, what most people do is you look at what happens in the world and you create a God to try to fit what you see around you.

You're not big enough to do that. You're not smart enough to do that. You don't have enough information to do that. This is where medieval man, man before the not-so-much enlightenment—by the way, using the term enlightenment, I know it's just historically been used for a long time— that is so arrogant.

It should be the some other term, but enlightenment assumes we're just so much smarter. No. Medieval man knew something that we don't know, that we've forgotten, and that is we are not big enough to be the center of our thought process about the world.

We are creatures. We need something outside ourselves. We need a God who made us. They understood that. We don't. The result's been chaos since we've forgotten that. And so when we look at what is happening around us and we ask, what is God's purpose?

We cannot demand of God specific revelation about his purposes in each event. When John Piper talks about God's judgment in natural disasters or in things like this, a lot of times people misinterpret that to say, well, so you think you know that there was something really bad going on in Houston, and that's why this storm blew up so quickly and caused such devastation.

And there was something going on in Puerto Rico and Florida with Irma and all the rest. It wasn't Irma in Puerto Rico. It was the second one. Maria. So you think there's specific things in those areas.

No. No. I can't know. I mean, if I were to say that God's judgment has to come where the worst sins are, I don't know where they are. I can take a wild guess, but only God knows the hearts of men. And because we can't say, hey, this is the sin that caused this act of judgment, then a lot of people go, we can't know that at all.

We can't. We shouldn't talk about God's judgment. Jesus did. Jesus warned us that we are going to face the wrath of God. We are going to face judgment. A day of judgment is coming, and there is punishment for sin.

And so because we can't know specifically what's happened is the vast majority of Christians, when you look at a hurricane, they won't ever mention the wrath of God because, well, we're naturalists. And the fact is, hurricanes have been hitting the plot of land that Houston is built on, or New Orleans, or Florida as a whole for a very long time.

In fact, back in the days of Moses, there were hurricanes hitting what would eventually become known as the United States of America. Now, there weren't very many people around. We don't have any record of them, but I can guarantee you there were Cat Ones and Cat Twos and Cat Threes and Cat Fours and even Cat Fives.

Oh, yeah. And they blew over trees, and they may have killed natives, but we don't know anything about it. We don't have any barometric pressure readings to be able to compare them with or anything else.

But they were going on, and you say, well, how can that be about God's judgment? How could the falling of the tower be about God's judgment? We live in a fallen world, and God allows these things to happen.

He decrees that these things would happen, whether they are natural in the sense of outside of man's control, or whether they are these... I heard of a guy named Herod. I heard of a guy named Herod and Bethlehem.

Little children. Do you happen to recall that that was a... oh, that was a prophesied event. If it didn't happen, God's knowledge itself would be falsified. God prophesied it, not because he looked in the future and said, oh, God had a purpose in it.

And when he lifts that hand of restraint, because that's how this type of stuff happens, horrible rulers like Herod would do the Bethlehem kill the kids thing much more often than they do if God did not restrain them.

And if you actually believe that, then you've got to believe all of it. So, God decrees these things to happen for a purpose. And if we take Jesus' example, what we should do when we see these things is be reminded of the fallen state of the creation and the need for every single one of us to repent and believe.

And we should be calling our fellow citizens to repentance and faith. Oh, that sounds so out of step with the world. Yeah, it is. It is. That's what Jesus did. That's what he calls us to do. And think about it.

Here are all these folks. Some of those videos started coming out this morning. One of the very first ones, the guy in the tent. Yeah, I saw a guy in one of the VIP tents, and they're crawling around because bullets are ripping through the fabric and stuff like that.

And there in the middle of all of it goes this guy. He's still standing up. He's not even running. And he has not put his beer down. He's got a big old plastic cup of beer, and he ain't losing it. He may lose his life, but he ain't losing his beer.

There's priorities for you. I just sort of watched it like, wow. No one's going to notice that, but I did. Here are these people. How many of them had given any thought that day to eternity? Very few.

The fact of the matter is none of us have any promise of tomorrow. We always say that theoretically when we talk about getting in our cars and driving down the road, and that's true. But all of us expect to get home.

But here's people who seem like a safe place to be, and then all of a sudden, death rains down upon them. And it takes a while for people to even figure out what's going on. You don't expect anything like that.

The Christian message is we should always be prepared for something like that. Not in the sense of whipping out your sniper rifle and returning fire, but we don't have any promise of tomorrow. The great power that was exhibited in Jonathan Edwards' Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God was in the vivid revelation it gave of the reality that mortality is that we are walking on a rotten bridge over the yawning chasm of hell.

And that is where every single person is outside of Christ. They're walking on a rotted bridge right over the yawning chasm of hell. That is the proper way of looking at it. And it brought such conviction because it brought the reality of one's mortality and the reality of God's judgment.

And so, as Christians, we see something like this. We pray for the victims. And what do you mean we pray for the victims? Everybody says that. What does that mean? Well, for believers, we pray for their comfort, their witness.

For unbelievers, we pray that for the survivors, the gospel will come to them and that they will bow the knee before Christ. But a lot of people like to say, well, but what about those who weren't? Today's the day of salvation.

There's no post-mortem salvation. There's no praying for folks once they're gone. It's the point when a man wants to die. That's what makes the gospel so vitally important now, not somewhere down the road.

When we look at these things, if you are embarrassed by the reality that these things demonstrate God's righteous judgment against sin, that sin is, Romans 1, God's wrath is being revealed, not will be revealed, it will in its fullness, but God's wrath is being revealed every single day against the ungodliness of man.

You say, but I can't hold that together with the idea of God's decree. Well, that's why you need to have Joseph's mindset. You need to understand why Joseph was right when he said, you meant this for evil, God meant it for good.

God is big enough to be holy, to be omnipotent, omniscient, and the absolutely free king of all that takes place in his creation, and still hold man accountable for acting upon the desires of his heart.

God's big enough. Don't try to bring him down so he's small enough to fit into your categories. He's big enough to answer these questions. As we look, as we will over the next few days and weeks, maybe come to have more knowledge of motivations, the reality is that God was not taken by surprise.

If any believers were cut down in this event, can't every believer read the 139th Psalm, my days are written in your book? Is that not true for all believers? All people? We don't know what tomorrow is going to bring to us.

None of us has a guarantee. On the one hand, as one missionary said, until God has determined the day of my, until the day that God has determined for my death, I cannot die. That's true. If you think about it that way, that's true.

If God has said that I am going to live and serve him until such and such a day, all the powers of hell cannot change that. I can't die. But the reality is, once I come to that day, I can't live. God's in control of that.

And that knowledge is not given to me. That knowledge is not given to me. So I must live each day with my focus upon being a servant of Christ and being ready to meet him. That's really what the imminent return of Christ should mean to us, is that whether he returns and gathers all of us together or he returns in bringing me to himself in my own personal death.

We should be ready. We should be ready. Now, as I said before I left for Germany, I had taken the time to talk about Nabeel Qureshi's death, and I did so in the context of, again, the theology that the Bible gives us of those who are in Christ and his purposes for them.

Nabeel Qureshi, Christian Witness, and the Meaning of an Early Death

We cannot help but consider Nabeel's youth. Just a couple years older than my son. And that's why when I heard the diagnosis initially, I was just, initially I was like, oh, so young. And yet, immediately I thought of a 16-year-old that I visited with in one of the first few weeks I worked as a hospital chaplain who was in the cancer ward at the hospital.

16 years old. A very aggressive form of cancer. It may have been stomach cancer. 16 years old. Half the age of Nabeel. And at that time I was about Nabeel's age. And I could not help but think how blessed I had been to have as many years as I had had.

And now we contrast Nabeel's death with so few years to serve Christ. So few years. I think of Keith Green, one of the great influences upon me. Yes, I know all about his theology. But he was a bright and shining light.

And seven years. Seven years is all he had. And then we compare and contrast that with a man who died and went to hell. Hugh Hefner. 91 stinking years old. We're reminded of the psalmist, are we not? Psalm 73, I think.

Ah, the evil seem to live a good life. Their death is easy. Man was about to lose his faith until he entered into the temple and the presence of God and realized eternity is going to reveal all these things and justice is going to be done.

God does have his purpose and he's still on his throne. But you look at someone like Hugh Hefner who God allowed in his sovereignty to live a life of debauched rebellion and to bring many other people with him.

He is going to be held accountable for what he did in this life. And God gave him a long life to store up an incredible amount of wrath. That's frightening. That's frightening. And it does strike us as odd.

Why would God give Nabeel such a short period of time to do good and Hugh Hefner such a long period of time to do evil? Well, if you think about these things, make sure to think about these things as a Christian should and that is we always approach our Heavenly Father with an attitude of respect, awe, and trust.

And that means when we don't have an answer to everything, the default position must always be the judge of all the earth will do right. And if I can't see the answer it's because of my own ignorance and finitude.

Not because of anything lacking in God. We are so often arrogant when we approach God. So often arrogant. Especially with these issues. Is it possible? Is it right to think that it's a blessing upon a people when godly men have long lives of ministry but it's a curse upon a people when evil men have long lives.

Now, you've got to be careful. I know some men who've had long lives of ministry. R .C. Sproul, John MacArthur, Piper's getting up there. You know, there's so many names that we won't know in this life and yet we'll have such rewards in Heaven.

The fact is, God has His purposes. He says He does. He asks us to trust Him that He has these purposes and that it's all going to result the praise of His glorious grace. And so when we think about someone like Nabil, we can be thankful for his witness.

We can be thankful for his life, his steadfastness. We can certainly given the apologetic context, learn something about the responses that people have had to this. I did get one Muslim on Twitter, only one for me, telling me this is a sign from Allah and I need to repent and embrace Islam.

And I've said many times, if I do, you know, I'm such a cyclist that the proper way for me to go is an old man getting run over by a truck. I don't think coming down off Mount Evans at 70 and missing a turn, I suppose that would be fitting as well, but however I go, every religion on the planet is going to take credit for how I go.

They're all going to take it as a sign. Any group I've ever addressed. See? Of course, when their leaders die, it's not a sign of anything, but there you go. There obviously have been Muslims who have responded in very negative ways.

But let's also be honest, there have been Muslims who have not responded in a negative way and who have expressed their sorrow at Nabil's passing. If you ignore the ones, then you can't really pick on the others.

You've got to be honest about the whole thing. But one of the issues that had come up in this issue, in this event, the last time I saw Nabil in person was years ago. In fact, unless I'm mistaken, I could be mistaken, but my recollection is last time I saw Nabil was right before he and David got arrested in Dearborn.

We were at ABN together and they said they were going to the Arab Festival that afternoon and I still had to record some programs and we had actually discussed Reformed Theology over lunch. And then they had left and I think that's the last time I saw Nabil.

And when Nabil started writing, he came under attack by his critics who were saying he was never truly a Muslim because he was Ahmadi. And I've had one person say that I threw him under the bus. I didn't.

What I did is I, in a way that I hoped would be heard and taken, Nabil had said my book on the Trinity was very helpful to him, very formative for him. And so we had had, when we were together, a good relationship.

And so I had said, sitting right here, I had said, this is what I would suggest to Nabil Qureshi. Use this as a positive thing. Use these attacks as a positive thing. What you need to do is when you give your presentations, start off by saying, now, Sunnis, some Shia don't even accept that I was a true Muslim and this is why.

I was an Ahmadi Muslim and here's where the Ahmadi differ from Sunni Muslims. And then go, however, my path to coming to know Jesus is pretty much identical to the path any Sunni Muslim, any Shiite would have to follow because here's what I did believe and these were the issues about Scripture, about Jesus, about all the things that a Sunni has to get over, the Ahmadi has to get over as well.

And use that as a positive thing, to be able to then introduce the things that separated you from faith in Christ, that separates the Sunni Muslim from faith in Christ and these were the issues I had to deal with.

Here's the conclusions I came to. You turn it into a positive. You take away the objection and you turn it into a positive. So that's what I had suggested. And to this day, I think that's wisdom. I think that would be the way to handle a situation like that.

So it wasn't a criticism. It was brotherly counsel to someone who quite literally is young enough to be my son, was quite literally young enough to be my son. And so some people have misrepresented that incident as if I was somehow criticizing Nabil or something along those lines.

In fact, I wasn't. Likewise, at one point, I played a clip where Nabil and Ravi Zacharias were both speaking at the same event. And even though Nabil was on the platform, I focused on what Ravi said about Roman Catholicism.

And I dealt with that particular issue. Look, I recognize that God saves all sorts of different kinds of people and I do not demand that you look like me and do everything I do and believe everything I do about everything.

I'm sorry for people who think that everybody has to wear the same clothes and sing the same songs and be identical and everything. I don't. I will defend the consistency of my own approach because I think that's very important.

I just feel sorry for people who assume that if I disagree with what Ravi Zacharias says about Roman Catholicism and explain why, that somehow means everything he's ever done is bad. It doesn't work that way.

It doesn't work that way. We pray for Nabil's family. We pray for David Wood. Let me say something about David. I've said on this program that David's testimony video is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen.

And David does deal with certain Muslims who tend to it's sort of like the pal talk level stuff. And David knows I don't agree with how he responds to some of them, basically egging them on. I don't think that's wise.

I wouldn't do it. But David stands before his Lord, not before me. I'm not his judge. David has to answer just like I'm going to have to answer. And I'm not his judge. And if I say I don't think that's wise, it does not mean I think the man should be kicked to the curb.

It doesn't mean I don't pray for him. He's brilliant. Do I agree with all of his arguments against Islam? No, I don't. I don't. I think sometimes there are arguments that he presents that one of my issues, and we're going to get into this when we start talking about the Laikona thing, is we've got to be painstakingly consistent.

We can't utilize forms of argumentation that are used against us just because it's used against us while I'm going to turn around and use it against you. I don't think we can do that. And I think that when you make your arguments, you should do it in such a way where you are expecting your audience, you're presenting the best form of the argument, assuming that your audience is going to give the best response from the other side.