The Daily Signal - #313: David Limbaugh on 'Jesus Is Risen'

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

On today’s show, we feature an interview with David Limbaugh, who discusses his latest book, "Jesus Is Risen: Paul and the Early Church." Limbaugh, perhaps best known for his work documenting the left’s failures and quest to transform America, has in recent years written a series of books on Jesus.Also on today's show:• We feature a bonus edition of letters to the editor. Don’t forget, your letter could be featured on our show; write us at [e-mail] or call 202-608-6205.• And some good news for young Americans. In a switch from just four years ago, more young people now believe they'll be better off financially than their parents.The Daily Signal podcast is available on the Ricochet Audio Network. You can also listen on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts.If you like what you hear, please leave a review or give us feedback. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, October 9th. I'm Rob Blewee, editor-in-chief. And I'm Jenny Maltipano, contributor to the Daily Signal. On today's show, we'll feature an interview with David Limbaugh, author of the new book, Jesus Is Risen. We'll also share some of our listeners' letters and some good news for young Americans. We're joined on today's show by David Limbaugh, author of the brand new book, Jesus is risen. David, thanks for being with us.

Thanks for having me. Now, for those of us who followed your work, you're probably known to some of our listeners for your outstanding books documenting the left's failures and their quest to transform America. But in recent years, you've focused on a different topic, and that's a series of books on religion and Jesus specifically. So I want you to begin by telling us what prompted you to write this new book, Jesus has risen, and what's it all about? The last book I wrote was about the Gospels, the True Jesus. This book is, Jesus is written as about the Book of Acts and Six of Paul's, the Apostle Paul's 13 epistles. So my idea when I started the true Jesus was to go ahead and get the entire New Testament in, but space limitations were strong constraints.

I let the material speak for itself and control the length, and I didn't make it artificial. so I just called Regnery in the middle of that. So can we reduce it to the Gospels? Yes. So this book I was going to do the rest after the Gospels, the rest of the New Testament books. Same thing happened. I just had to cut it back midstream. I might be lying about this not intentionally.

I mean, that's my memory that I changed it midstream. But I don't know if I could pass a polygraph, unlike some other people in the news today. But the purpose of this book is to acquaint readers, with the early church, the history of the early church, which is what the book of Acts is. And then Paul's epistles, Paul was the main apostle to the Gentiles, and he was the main Christian apostle who did more than anyone to spread the church throughout the Roman Empire. And he planted these churches, and after he planted them, they would deviate from the,

they would follow false teachers in a false gospel. And that, of course, aggrieved Paul. and he would write letters to these churches, cajoling them, urging them, exhorting them to come back to the true gospel and to not follow these false teachers and the secular influences. So that's in a nutshell what it is, and the reason I'm writing all this series is because when I became a Christian, and I wasn't initially a Christian, I was a young adult, in my 30s, I was really on fire for the Bible and theology. and I want to absorb, inhale as much of it as I could. And as I did that, I wanted to share it because I know so many people are where I was. They are now where I was.

Wanting to start by wanting to learn about it but being intimidated, not really knowing where to start. And so these books are designed to be a primer, to get people accelerate their learning curve, give them an orientation of the books, but also a deeper dive into the books too, because I don't just do. it superficially. I go verse by verse and paraphrase or summarize and try to do it in chronological order. The book of Acts already is in chronological order. But I put the six of Paul's epistles in the order he is believed to have written them, so the early ones, as opposed to the canonical order, the order they're presented in the Bible, because I want the reader to get a sense of the history. Christianity is grounded in history, primarily, of course, the bodily resurrection

of Jesus Christ. It's not just some abstract idea that that, that mystics came up with him. This sounds like God. We will form our own idea from the ground up about what God is. It's grounded in the bodily resurrection in history, actually history of Jesus Christ. And so is the formation of the early church. It's real history. Paul was a real man who wrote these books, and the Apostle Peter was there. And I want people to get a sense of that. And I think you do get a sense, as you read this, of the history and the adversity that they faced. And similar to the diversities people still face today. Well, I think it's absolutely terrific that you've taken the time to do this. And I think it's

a tremendous service for those readers to better understand and have that knowledge. David, I don't think anyone would argue that we're not living in crazy times today. So I wanted to ask you, in today's political climate, what lessons can people learn from Christianity? Well, I happen to believe that Christianity is true north. It's absolutely. truth. It is the foundation, the bedrock of all of our morality, the Judeo-Christian tradition. Of course, Christianity builds on the mosaic law, and it does not abolish it. Christ came to fulfill, not to abolish the law. He was the end of the law. He was the promised Messiah, all of the Jews didn't see it at the time. And you'll notice most of those laws have been ratified and restated in the New

Testament, most, if not all. Some people argue about the Sabbath. But my point is, these are God's perfect laws, but man can't live up to those laws, never could live up. You can't attain your salvation through works. That's Christian theology. Some people may differ with that. But because of that, Christ came along, Christ, through his incarnation, God sent his son to live a perfect life and to be sinned for us. He became sinned for us so that his perfect life and then his death, his sacrificial death on the cross, we could impute his righteousness, his perfect righteousness, and be declared righteousness in God's eyes for salvation purposes if we place our faith in him. Now that doesn't mean we become immediately righteous, in fact. It means as a judicial matter, we're declared

righteous for salvation purposes. But then we begin, we're indeweled by the Holy Spirit. upon our conversion. That's what it means to be reborn or regenerated. Everybody thinks that's some freaky right-wing crazy thing. Oh, you're a Southern Baptist nut, and you think you're reborn. No, it's biblical. It means you're regenerated with the Holy Spirit, and you begin to walk in Christ steps and become more Christ-like through a process of sanctification, the process of becoming more holy, not through your own power, but through the power of the Holy Spirit. But those Christian principles are foundational to everything we do, and a long way to getting around to your question, I believe they're foundational to the formation of this country and what give us liberty.

And the fact, our entire desire to base this society, our founders demand that we have rights or we have these inherent human rights. How could they be inherent if they don't come from God and the God of the Bible? Because it makes no sense. We don't have time to go into why it makes no sense for it to be any other God. It's the God of the Bible, one true God. So I think to the extent that we get away from those principles, we lose our freedoms, and we can see it happening every day. So we need to fight to return to those principles.

And that means fighting for our religious liberty and fighting to preserve the constitutional balances that we have, the protections that it ensure that we retain those liberties. David, you write that it's truly miraculous that Christianity became the world's most popular faith. Why do you call it one of history's greatest stories? Because, you know, the Paul, the Apostle Paul was, as I said, an ardent Jew, and he was the most unlikely person to be an evangelist because he was steeped in the rabbinic law and Jew by birth. And he was persecuting Christians. And then on the road to Damascus, he was blinded by a light. And it turns out it was Jesus Christ who immediately converted. him. He was blind for three days, and then Paul from, he became the biggest evangelist, and he became

the persecuted instead of the persecutor. And it's unlikely that that happened. There's so many paradoxes about Christianity. The Jews expected a Messiah who would deliver them politically and militarily, and anyone who was hung on a tree is a cursed. And so how can this guy who comes along and doesn't even stand up for himself. He doesn't even speak a word in his own defense at his trial and allows himself to be crucified and hung on a tree, so to speak, figuratively. How can he be the Messiah?

He didn't do anything for us. And what they missed is that he was a curse. He became a curse for us so that by taking our sin, as we said, we could be saved. And it's just such an amazing story that God chose to intervene in history and provide a way of salvation to human beings, imperfect, flawed, fallen, depraved human beings, who he created knowing we would be flawed and fallen as long as he gave

us free will. And that the only way we could be reconciled to him for God preserved and allow God to preserve his perfect holiness and justice would be to send his son to die for us and experience his son would experience the separation from the father. Imagine the agony, the contrasting agony from the bliss that they experienced together in the Holy Trinity in eternity past. They knew in advance being omniscient that if they created us, we would fall, and the only way we could be reconciled. The only thing that makes sense if you study this, it sounds weird that he would send

his son to become a human being. It is so gloriously, amazingly weird, but it is true. true, that that's the only way we could be saved, and he was willing to do it anyway. We can't even imagine the kind of love that would take, the sacrificial love. But when you remember, Jesus is in the Garden of Gisemite, bleeding, sweating blood. It's because he's separated from the Father, and he's experiencing the Father's wrath, real wrath. This isn't some theoretical wrath. This is real wrath, because it has to be real for it to cancel our sins out. And so he's experiencing that, Father, take this cup for me.

In other words, do I really have to do this? And I used to think, that just shows that Jesus isn't God. He would have taken himself other God. I didn't understand his dual nature. Perfectly human, perfectly God. Fully human, fully God. And so he says, I mean, we now see through his suffering, his humanity. In his humanity, he was saying, don't make me do this.

And then the next second he turns around, if it is your will. He's perfect in every way, but he was perfectly human. and he had to be perfectly human in order for us to live in order for us to be redeemed through his sacrificial death on the cross. To me, that's totally miraculous in every way. And there's a lot of mundane things involved in it because human beings are mundane, but we also have a glimmer of God because we're made in his image. And there's that tension between we're made in God's image and yet we're fallen. And by the way, we wouldn't have these inherent rights.

When people say this didn't come from the Christian God, well, why God created us in his image, and that's why we have inherent rights. Because we're worth, I mean, if he made us in his image, obviously we have the kind of rights that need to be preserved by our political documents. David, you've touched on this a little bit, but could you elaborate about what it was like for the apostles and other early followers of Christianity, what struggles they face, and how did they persevere? They experienced incredible adversity, you know, when they were with Jesus.

They weren't really firm believers. And even we saw after Jesus was crucified, Peter denied him three times. And, you know, what? He was totally with him the whole time. He was with the son of God. He had to know who he was. And yet he still wasn't sure because all his religion through the whole time told him otherwise. Even though he'd been told, that should give you by the way.

the way some encouragement, when you have doubts, remember the people that walked with Jesus, who he hand-taught firsthand, had still had doubts until they witnessed his resurrected body. And so, but then after that, they were transformed from cowards to bold proclaimers of the gospel. And they went out, and when the religious authorities, when the Sanhedron told them to shut up and quit preaching and stirring people up against the religion and causing chaos in our civil. order, Peter said, sorry, who do I answer to you, the secular authority, or the religious authority, the God, I mean the God of the universe. I have to answer to my God. And so he went on in defiance and disobedience to the authorities and went ahead and preached. I guess the answer is

that we should be emboldened by their perseverance. They're willing to stand up for God, for the God of the universe, for absolute truth, for their Savior. And so you have to remember ultimately God's in control, and you have to do what you ultimately believe is the right thing and not pander to people, not pander to human beings to get their approval. You stay true north with biblical principles and following God. That's my view on it. David, Jesus has risen as the name of the book, and obviously it's attracting a lot of attention you, based on your Twitter feed and the media interviews you're doing.

And your recent books as well have been popular. So why 2,000 years later is there such an interest in this great figure in our history? Well, because people know instinctively that God created the universe. Romans, the book of Romans, which is one of the six epistles I cover in this book. Paul talks about the gloriousness of God's creation tells us that there's a God. And so we have no excuse. People know innately. and the people that, and I think, and somebody else asked me about this, the secular left,

there's a hole in everyone's heart, a void. And we fill that either with the God of the universe or with something else. And so if you're a secular liberal, you might fill that up with environmentalism, or social justice warriorism, whatever they do. But notice how passionate, they're religiously passionate and irrational about the things they believe because it is their religion. Thank goodness our religion, while it is grounded in faith, it is based on solid evidence and grounded in reason as well.

And so Jesus Christ is the only person who ever lived life backwards from the cross back because his whole life was about the cross. That's why he came to die for us. He split history in half. History was the time was reorganized. Now, political correctness is also distorting that now, B.C.E. But it's after Christ was born. That was the whole thing.

So I think the reason he's still popular is because he is, in fact, the son of God. Christianity wasn't spread by the sword like some other religions. I mean, there may be some spotty evidence of that, but it was spread by persuasion, by the sheer truth of it. And if people start studying the Bible, and this is my main incentive to writing these books, is to get people, get them a little primer in an orientation of the Bible and learn about it, but mainly with the goal of reading the Bible itself, because if you read the Bible itself, you will encounter the true Jesus and you will be amazed at the kind of person he is. You can't even call him.

He is a person, but he's also God. And you can't help but notice that in the Gospels. And you can't help but notice that in the book of Acts and the epistles, because these people who encountered him were transformed by him and convincingly make the case to the point where you have to believe it. you read it with an open mind. And that's why the book I'm writing about now covers those books. What happened after Jesus died, he sent his Holy Spirit to the new believers so that they

would be empowered with the Holy Spirit to go spread the word of salvation for all of mankind who are willing to believe in him. David, what is the main message that you would like for readers to take away from your book? The main message, you know, really, let me dodge the question this way. I don't have a central message. I am really, truthfully, writing about the Book of Acts in these six epistles. And I would have written more had I had space. The Bible is its own message.

I want to facilitate the reader in understanding that message. Well, if you want to condense it, of course, it's what I've been saying. Jesus Christ is the son of God who died for our sins. We're fallen. We can't save ourselves. in order to be saved, we accept his free offer of grace, faith in him for eternal life remission of our sins. That's the message, but it's not my message. It's the message of Jesus Christ as presented in the Bible and as I tell about in this book. It is a message of hope. Again, the book is called Jesus is risen Paul in the early church written by David Limbaugh.

David. It's great to have you on the Daily Signal podcast. Thank you very much. It's eventually going to be the David podcast. That's what you're saying. That's where I was going with it. David Signal podcast. Thank you so much for having. Thank you. You can get it anywhere. The book is called Jesus has risen. And we'll be back with our next segment soon.

Hi, I'm Kelsey Harkness, co-host of Problematic Women, a podcast in Facebook Live that showcases strong conservative women, current events, and the hypocrisy of the feminist left. Subscribe and tune in for our weekly episodes every Thursday on iTunes, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcast. Thanks for sending us so many letters to the editor. Today we have a bonus edition given how many thoughts that you had about Judge Kavanaugh. Ginny, who's up first? Well, first up, Karen Calloway writes, quote, the Me Too movement was started to give women a safety net to tell what has happened to them. However, as with all good things, it has branched out to be, damn the genders and full speed ahead.

No matter what people believe, it is only the directives of the Me Too mission and beliefs that are acceptable. If they want to do something good, do it in secret, not out in the world of bias. And Randy Leandecker of Curville, Texas, writes, quote, the Democratic Party and their sycophants in the media have been searching for accusers among the leftist sympathizers, anyone willing to make the most absurd statements in an all-out effort to stop Kavanaugh from becoming a Supreme Court justice. It is a vain attempt just like their smear campaign against Justice Clarence Thomas.

Decent people do not attempt to destroy the reputation of an honorable person for any reason. evil people do that. To make matters worse, they are doing it as a tactic in their practice of gutter politics. These people should be ashamed of themselves, but evil knows no shame. As a positive note, the Democratic Party has revealed its own lack of character and integrity in the process. Your letter could be featured on next week's show. Send an email to Letters at DailySignal.com or leave a voicemail message at 202-608-6205. And we do thank you for sending those letters.

Ginny, I have to say, in the time we've been doing this podcast, I can't remember an outpouring quite like we've seen with Judge Kavanaugh. This has really fired up our daily signal readers. It really has. People have a lot to say and they want their opinions heard. We'll be right back with a good news story. Are you into storytelling podcasts that help explain some of today's toughest policy issues and debates? Every week on the Heritage Explains podcast, we interview experts, intermingling media clips,

and personal stories to help simplify issues from a conservative perspective. Find us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, Rob, there is a new study that was released, and it has some good news for young Americans. It says that for young Americans, aged 15 through 26, they're expected to be better off financially than their parents, and 60% of their parents actually agree with them. Now, this is interesting because only half of 30-year-old Americans in 2014, under President and Obama made more than their parents. That's right, Ginny.

I think it really speaks to, again, this booming economy we're seeing under President Trump and the steps that he's taken to really focus on jobs and helping people get back to work. I remember it wasn't so long ago when after the 2008 recession hit, you had a lot of young people who were being mocked and made fun of because they were staying in their parents' basements and not moving out and couldn't find jobs. And it's really encouraging to see that that has completely turned around. Not only have they found jobs, but they now think that they're going to be better off than their parents. And remember, one of the shortcomings of President Obama, and I think Mitt Romney made this case,

obviously not as effectively as he probably could have in that campaign in 2012, is that it's really one of the first times in history where young people didn't think that they were going to be better off. And that was a shame. So it's encouraging, I think, to see that people are now having a change of heart. This is very much the American dream. You're a dad. I'm sure as a dad, you want your sons to do better. than you did. And that's something that all Americans can celebrate. Well, I grew up with that attitude.

I mean, I remember my father telling me that he wanted to see me, you know, be more successful than him. I mean, I just think that that's something that as a parent, you just, it just goes along with instilling in your children. And just by the very nature of our economy and technology and everything else that comes, I mean, I really do think it is possible for this to happen. Unfortunately, I think what we saw during the eight years of Obama were so many government regulations, so many burdens on the economy, a failure to dream big in terms of what was possible with free trade agreements or the business climate in general, that that really had a lasting impact. And I really hope that future generations, college students who are graduating, high school students who are maybe pursuing vocational careers, look for opportunities and look for that, you know, next best thing that can really put them ahead of their parents. Yeah, this is very hopeful and definitely a testament to the great economic conditions right now. Well, we're going to leave it there for today.

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