(Opening Titles) Thank you so much for joining us for this RZIM Live event, a whole series of things
which we're putting online during this time. It's wonderful to be able to speak with Professor John
Lennox, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the
University of Oxford, who has just written a book, "Where is God in a Coronavirus World?" trying to address and pick up on some of the big questions that we have. Thank you to all of those of you who sent questions in and posted them online. There are so many, we can't
deal with all of them. We've tried to group them together into various different categories so that we can get the most out of John during the conversation with him. So John, thank you so much for joining us. It's wonderful to have you. You're an author, speaker, writer, been a scientist all of your life, so we're very grateful to
you joining us on the program and also giving this
time available to us now. - It's my great pleasure
to be with you, Michael! - So maybe if I could just
lead with this question just so we can jump straight in: Isn't atheism the easiest
and most straightforward response to the situation where we now find ourselves all immersed in so deeply? - It's a very common response, and this pandemic raises that question in many people's minds. I got to New Zealand just after the earthquake, and that was a response that many people were talking about, "this just shows us" "that this world is a random accident," "ultimately, in the laws of nature," and so we should expect
this kind of thing, And Richard Dawkins has the
famous statement about it, saying, as you look at it, it's just what you'd expect
the world to be like if, at bottom, there's no
good, no evil, no justice: "DNA just is, and we dance to its music." So that atheist response
seems to many people to solve an intellectual problem. And in one sense, it does, if it's true! That's just how it is, and
we have to put up with it. But there is a sense in which we need to probe this more closely, because although it appears for many to be a solution to the problem, it doesn't remove the suffering. And in fact, it could be
argued to intensify it, for the following simple reason. You see, if Dawkins says there's no good and no evil and no justice, then there's no point
in complaining about it. That's just how it is. But because I'm a Christian,
I probe a lot further. I have a real problem with it. But what I can see is that atheism removes any possible hope. And the hope dimension is something that Christianity has a
great deal to say about, and we could discuss that anon. - Do you think that's one of the reasons why we're struggling with
this to such an extent, because as a society we haven't thought in the West collectively
about our mortality, about the challenge of this
kind of situation for a while. Is that part of the reason why we're finding it so disorientating? - Oh, I think it is that we've never been in a situation like this before in any of our lifetimes, and it's on such a scale that Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes
of Health in the U.S. he says the thing about
this that is so remarkable is the way it is transmissible. Things like SARS that we knew about, and that was scary enough, you had to be very ill to
transmit it, but with COVID-19, you can transmit it
without being aware of it. And of course, it has pushed a large proportion of the world into lockdown. Now, it clearly raises
questions, as you say, about our vulnerability and our mortality, and these are things that have
been ducked for a long time because you can't think
of those two issues without beginning to
think of God and eternity! And here in Western Europe, we've written God out of the Constitution. Nobody thinks about God anymore. And it seems to me that whatever else our reaction should be, we've got time in a locked-down situation to begin to raise the God
question seriously once more. - Now, there's been some speculation, and we've been asking
people to send in questions, knowing that this interview
would be happening and that your book has just recently been released and made available. And some people are wondering
if there's some kind of cosmic karma principle at work here, and therefore, we're simply
reaping what we've sown, and that's why we find
ourselves in this situation. - Well, that's a very hard thing to judge. And the difficulty with
the karma principle, talking about that, is it
can end up being very cruel, in the sense that, in its extreme form, and again I met it in New Zealand: People said, "Well, the
earthquake hit people," "it killed them, that
means that they behaved" "very badly in a previous existence," "and they're being judged for it." "And - if we help them," "we are then reducing
their amount of suffering," "so they'll have to suffer
worse in their next existence!" So it's an extremely cruel doctrine, and it is rejected very strongly in the New Testament by Jesus himself. Not all suffering, according to Christ, is a result of past sins. He says of the man born blind, "He didn't sin, neither did his parents." So the 'karma judgment' way of going is totally unsatisfactory. But of course, there is a Christianized version of this, isn't there? - No, there is, and I was
going to ask you about that, because we also have a
whole string of questions about, well, is this God's judgment? Both in a positive sense,
Christians wondering, is this what God is doing, and
as a critique, from atheism. "Well, this is the kind of
crazy thing Christians believe, "and so how can you
possibly believe that?" Which makes navigating that particular challenge quite complex. - Well, I think we need to navigate it, because if we look at the Bible, which I'm going to look at
a bit in our conversation, because it's my guideline, we
do find some plagues there. And we are told, particularly the plagues in the ancient world, we are told that they are God's judgment. Now, if God tells us in scripture that a particular plague
or pandemic, indeed, was a judgment, then we
have His direct word for it. But so far as I know, we
don't have God's direct word on COVID-19, or even the Black Death! Now, what do we do in that case? I think what we do is to
see exactly what position Jesus Himself took on this issue, Michael. And there is a famous short
paragraph, the gospel of Luke, where the Lord is on the
Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and the crowd remind Him
that in that very place, there was an awful massacre where Pilate mingled the blood of people offering their sacrifices,
and killed them. Now, that is what we often call, that raises the problem of moral evil, the bad things that
people do to one another. But then Jesus turned around, and He refers to a
tragedy that had happened at the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem where a tower had collapsed. It had just collapsed,
and killed 18 people. And the Lord made the point, and here's the important
thing for us to take on board, because this is a deep principle. He said, "Do you think that
the people who were massacred" "or the people on whom the tower fell" "were sinners above all other sinners?" "I tell you, no, but
except you all repent," "you shall all likewise perish." Now there are two things there. Firstly, He's saying clearly that not all tragedy results
from one group of people being more badly behaved than others. So I take that extremely seriously. We must be very careful before we ascribe pandemics or anything else
to the judgment of God. Now what I've observed is that there may well be a message in it, because think of what
Jesus goes on to say, "Except you repent, you
shall all likewise perish." And C.S. Lewis wrote this once, "We can ignore even pleasure," "but pain insists upon being attended to." "God whispers to us in our pleasures," "speaks in our conscience,
but shouts in our pains." "It is his megaphone
to rouse a dead world." Now let me just say two more things. Firstly, suppose someone says, whether they're Christians or not, that COVID-19 is directly caused by God. How do people react to that? Well, I know how they react,
because I've heard them. They say, "Who do you think you are," "taking an arrogant moral high position" "and saying this is the judgment of God?" "What right have you to do that?" Now notice, their focus
is not on God at all, it's on the person making the allegation! They don't consider what God
might be saying through this. In other words, they
bypass the very message one would like to get across. So that way, it seems to
me, is not the biblical way. The biblical way is to say, "Look, what can we learn from this?" "Is this COVID-19 a
megaphone shouting at us?" And I think it is, it reminds
us of our vulnerability, of our mortality, of the God question, and of the fact that one out
of one of us is going to die! And if there is a God,
we have to meet Him. Those are the big issues. So we don't need to make
judgments, since we don't know. What we can do is say, "What
is God saying to us here?" - Now there have been other
people at the same time making the kind of comment saying, "Look, this isn't the kind of thing" "where we should be seeking
intellectual answers." And I'm assuming you don't believe that you have all of the answers yourself. So there's a motivation in writing, in your book, and trying to address it. So I'm wondering if you could just speak a little bit into that for us as well. Is this the kind of question
we should be asking? - I'm so glad you said I don't have all the answers, because I certainly do
not have all the answers! And I'll be honest with you and everybody else who's watching. This is the hardest question
that any of us face! And to offer simplistic answers is worse than hopeless, actually. Now you mentioned
something very interesting, and that is, we react temperamentally and psychologically very
differently to this. And again, and it's one of the reasons why I believe that Christianity is true. It deals with this differential diagnosis. Some people, like me, particularly, need intellectual answers,
but then, Michael, I'm not suffering at the moment. I'm an observer of suffering,
and it's awful to see, and I have such admiration
for our health services and people who are mucking in, and taking a huge risk with their lives, but I'm observing it. There are people suffering it! And an intellectual response isn't necessarily the way to help them when their emotions are torn to pieces. So let's take those two things, the intellectual and the emotional. There is a story about a
family tragedy, a very, in one sense, a small
tragedy, in John's Gospel. It's the story of a man called Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha. Now you might say, "What's that got" "to do with a global pandemic?" The answer is, "Everything!" Because, you see, the
suffering in a pandemic consists of millions of small tragedies. And each tragedy, for the family, that is their tragedy,
that is their catastrophe. Saying goodbye to a loved
one without being able to touch them and give them a last hug and say goodbye properly, that is horrendously emotionally tearing. So let's use this story
in the small as a cameo to illustrate what's going
on in the large scale. Jesus and His disciples were nowhere near where Lazarus and his sisters
lived, and he fell ill. And the sisters, realizing that Jesus had been a frequent visitor to their home and He was very fond of them, just sent a message and
said that Lazarus was ill. And of course, they expected Him to come, and He didn't come! In fact, Lazarus died in the meantime, and it was only when
he died that Jesus says to the disciples, "Let's go to Judea." They thought that was crazy and suicidal, but nevertheless, He went. So He arrives in the graveyard of Bethany, and Martha, one of the sisters, meets Him. And she just very bluntly said, "Lord, if you'd been here, my
brother wouldn't have died." Now just think of that,
what was the problem? His distance, He seemed utterly
remote, He wasn't there! "If you'd been here." And you could hear the
cry of many hearts today on that level, "God, where are you?" "Are you in self-isolation, if you exist?" "Why don't you come near?" So there's the issue of nearness, and because the Lord had remained distant and allowed Lazarus to die, that raised a very big question as to two things, one, did He really love them? And secondly, even if He did, had He the power to do anything about it? Those are the two big
questions being asked today. So what does Jesus go on to say to her? "Your brother shall rise again"
is the first thing He says. And that is a wonderful encouragement, certainly to Christians like myself. He didn't just say,
"Lazarus will rise again," although that, of
course, is what He meant, but He was talking about a relationship that has been forged during this life. Your brother will rise,
there'll be something left of that relationship,
the precious part of it, that will endure on into eternity. Now, that's a huge statement! Atheism denies that
utterly, by definition. How is that possible? And now Martha comes in with
her high-powered intellect. She'd obviously read
quite a bit of theology and been well-taught. "I know," she said, "that he will rise" "in the resurrection at the last day!" That was good Jewish biblical teaching. And she paraded it rather
proudly, I suspect. Now this is within four
days of Lazarus dying! She's not emotional at all. She's intellectual,
philosophical, theological. And now Jesus comes in
with something utterly new. "I am the resurrection,"
He says, "and the life!" "If a person believes in
me, even though he dies," "yet shall he live," well,
this was utterly astonishing. And this begins now to show us why this story is in the Gospel. It's telling us about
the identity of Jesus, filling in what it means
that He's the Son of God. "I am the resurrection,"
well, what would that mean, what could that possibly mean? And it's about to be shown to us, what it could possibly mean! And then Mary thinks, because she has a sister, breaks off the intellectual debate and goes and finds her sister and says, "Mary, the teacher's here
and He's calling for you." So Mary stumbles out
to the very same place, the graveyard, she's weeping copiously, and she says the very
same thing as her sister. "Lord, if you'd been here," "my brother would not have died." But it's now very different. Jesus is deeply moved
by this, when He sees, standing there, what death has done, the process of dying and all of that, has done to this little family. He sees Mary weeping and what does He do? Enter into a long
philosophical, no, He weeps. And this, Michael, shows me the profound sensitivity of God, if you like, by dealing with needs as they arise. Martha's need was to understand the nature of the resurrection and to learn
something dramatically new. Mary's need was to see Jesus's tears. And in these days of COVID-19 tragedy, a hug, if we were allowed to do it, or a friendly touch, or weeping, would speak volumes to some people, much more than any attempt to talk about resurrection or anything like this. And that tells me that this kind of answer,
differentiated answer, has got such a ring of truth about it. Now, later on, of course, John in his book of
Revelation is going to tell us even more - that there's
a new world coming, a world, a new heavens, new earth, on which there's going
to be no crying, no pain, no death, and then it ends
with this wonderful promise, "And God will wipe away
all tears from their eyes." Now you know, if either of us are crying, we normally wipe away our own tears, because if anybody else tries it, they're likely to poke
our eye and hurt us. The eye's the most sensitive
organ in the human head. What sort of God is it, who in the end will wipe away the tears? So here is the promise, and
it is a spectacular one! But now to the reality, how do we know that Jesus can do that? And of course, He comes to the grave and He says, "Roll the stone away," and Martha, practical,
intellectual as ever, says, "Lord, he's stinking by this time" "I wouldn't do that if I were you" And He said, "But didn't I say to you" "that if you believed,
you'd see the glory of God?" "Remove the stone," and
then in a loud voice, He tells Lazarus to come right out of the grave, and the dead man, festooned no doubt with
spices and the grave cloths, stumbles out of the tomb and is seen by everybody to be alive. What a voice Jesus has. Now John has said earlier in his gospel, so that we would get this, that our Lord's voice is unique because it is the voice that will in the end operate the resurrection. And therefore, the promise for Christians is that if, as He said to Martha, "If you believe in me,
though you die, you live," "and he that lives and
believes in me" (or she) "shall never die," and
as my final point here, it's interesting to compare those two. Most of us will die, but there is a life, eternal life, that we can
receive through trust in Christ in the here and now, that never dies. But then Jesus told His disciples later in the Gospel that He would return! And of course, if we happen to be alive when He returns, we never die. So this new life that He
offers through trusting Him is not something we get in the
last day after the judgment. It's something we receive, not by meriting it,
none of us can do that, but by receiving it as a free gift. It's why Jesus died on the cross Himself and rose again, or
rather, more accurately, God raised Him from the dead to prove that He was who He claimed to be, the Son of God, the Savior of the world. Sorry, that's a long answer, but it seems to me that this
is a hugely important question. - Yes, no, it is, and I think
that's very, very helpful, and we are much more complex human beings. We have that, emotional side, psychological side, spiritual side, all of those things need to be addressed in a situation, a time like this. I'd love to come back to one of those things you just picked up there, and ask a few questions about hope, and also how we can cope,
as well, with the situation. But if I could backtrack just a little bit before going forward again to that, because a lot of other
people are asking questions, and I'm sure you've heard them as well, "Well, why have viruses at all?" "I mean, what kind of God, Supreme Being," "would design a world, universe," "with those kinds of things in them?" - Yes, that's perhaps the most common question from skeptical and atheistic people. It goes back to David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher. If God is all-good, then
He can't be all-powerful, because He isn't doing anything! And if He's all-powerful,
He can't be good, because He's not doing anything, either. And so we argue, and we all did it, especially those of us
who have been students, the midnight oil, asking, surely a good God would, could, ought, to have done this and that. Why couldn't God have made a
world that doesn't fracture? Now, as I hinted earlier, there are two questions behind this. There's first of all moral fracture, as happened when Pilate slaughtered those people sacrificing in the temple, but then there seems to be a concomitant breakdown in physical nature. So we get thorns and thistles, and this is a huge topic
that the Bible addresses, and there are very deep
questions associated with it, but sufficient to say, what we observe is, fractured moral nature and
fractured physical nature. And so we asked, "Couldn't God make fire" "that heated but didn't burn,"
and all this kind of stuff. And there's a trite answer to that. Let's take it at the personal level first. Could God not make creatures that didn't sin, didn't do wrong? Well, of course He could;
we call them robots. And He could have made an automatic world, but then we wouldn't have been in it! And that's the problem, Michael. When we say, "Oh, we long for a world" "where none of us could do any wrong," well, there'd be no humans in it! Because the most precious thing about us, is our capacity to choose. We're thinking of its negative side, but if you want to have love, then you've got to have a certain capacity to say yes or no! If you remove that and
make us all automata, then no human beings in the world. So we're wishing ourselves
out of existence. So what do I do with all this? I say, "We're never going to
solve that question," why? Because as we look now at physical nature, we see a mixed picture. I often call it beauty and barbed wire, but I might as well call
it beauty and COVID-19. We see a mixed picture. And no religion or philosophy
that doesn't accept that will ever wash with
the majority of people. So we've got to accept that! Now, I accept it, so what do I do? I say, "There's another question
that needs to be asked." And that other question is this, granted that it's like
that, which we have to do, is there any evidence anywhere that there is a God that
we could trust with it? Now that's a huge thing to ask of anybody, especially now, where we're
asked to trust people. You and I are sitting
locked down, why's that? Because we've trusted the government. We've trusted the medical
statisticians and epidemiologists. We're asking for people who will show real leadership and trust, and we encourage them and pray for them and all that kind of thing
and we've got to trust them. But is there a God whom we
can trust with this question, that in the end we can leave it to Him, not in some blind, leap-of-faith way, but because there's evidence
that He's trustworthy? Now this story that I've talked about, about Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, gives us some insight
into the heart of God, that is, if we believe, as I do, that Jesus is the Son of God, but the cross of Christ, which
is the heart of Christianity, and we're talking at Easter time, it's the heart of
Christianity, and this is, if Jesus is the Son of
God, this is God suffering! This is a God who suffers,
and what does it tell me? Well, at the very simplest reading of it, it tells me that God
has not remained distant from our human suffering but
has Himself become part of it. And then the hope bit, you mentioned hope, the hope bit comes with the
fact that it didn't end there. If the story had ended there, we'd never have heard about it, nor would we have had
the story of Lazarus. But God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day of that
ancient Easter time, and that changes everything, in the sense, Michael, that it tells me
that death is not the end. Now of course, you and I know, and there's loads on the RZIM website, and my website, dedicated
to the whole question of evidence for the resurrection, but just taking that, that, to my mind, is the fundamental key to
everything to bring us hope. It's no guarantee that we won't die, die, even, of COVID-19,
but it is a guarantee that those that put their trust in Christ rather than their own
merit, they will one day, as Christ was, be raised from the dead. - Yes, and I think it's
a fascinating point. When we talk about losing
something, we feel sad, because we feel we'll never see whatever it is we've lost again. And that's what I guess
we feel when we say, "I'm losing someone,"
or, "I've lost someone." But of course, this
speaks a different message into that situation. What do you think are, therefore, if you like, the practical out-workings? If someone were to come
and say, "Well, John," "actually, I'm a Christian,
but I'm now wrestling" "with feelings of despair and fear." "What are the things I could
latch onto at this time," "or maybe share with somebody else" "who's open but asking questions?" I mean, you've already
said so much into that, but are there a few other
thoughts you have there, too? - Well, it's no accident that through the centuries, and remember, we've had pandemics before. We had the Black Death,
there was no modern medicine. And if you go back even further
to the Plague of Justinian, and these plagues, we get
it easily out of proportion, killed millions of people. Absolute millions of people. Now, we don't know in the end
what COVID-19 is going to do but we hope it's peaking in
most countries fairly soon. So the world has been through it before, and Christians have faced it before. And it's quite, it's noteworthy, really, that a great deal of the comfort they got was from the poetry of the Old Testament, the Hebrew book of Psalms. And for people who are feeling fearful, and some of us are feeling fearful, it's important, I think, to read some of those beautiful Psalms. "The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want." This idea of the good
shepherd leading the sheep and caring for the sheep
and all this kind of thing. And I remember in New Zealand, people using Psalm 46, "I will not fear," "though the mountains crumble
and fall into the sea." It felt almost directly relevant to them. And in addition to that, what did Christ promise
people who trusted Him? He promised them forgiveness of sin, but He also promised them peace with God. We may not have much peace with ourselves, and we may be concerned
about the epidemic, and pandemic, and so on, but to listen to Jesus say, "In the world you have tribulation," "you're going to have problems," "but my peace I leave with you." Not as the world gives, the
world can't give us peace. It can give us medicine, and
we're utterly thankful for it, but deep peace, peace that transcends the fears and the death is something that God is prepared to give us. And I think that openness of heart that's thankful for what we've
got, if we've got anything, that opens to God's granting of peace in our everyday lives and
our relationships and so on, that can go a long, long
way, because after all, Michael, fears are in our
mind and in our heart. It's what's going on in our head, and we need to fill our minds,
if I can put it this way, with something outside of themselves. Could I read just another little lesson from that story of Lazarus? Because it's fascinating;
I missed it out completely. I said that Jesus had stayed in Galilee and allowed Lazarus to die. Now that is a very big
statement, because you see, God, if there is a God, is
still allowing people to die. And that raises deep
questions, as we've seen, about His love and His power. Now, He let Lazarus die and He stayed in Galilee. And then He suddenly said,
"I'm going to Judea." Now, they'd been looking for Him up in Jerusalem to kill Him! And the disciples said, "You're crazy," "absolutely crazy, man,
it's suicidal to go there!" And then He read them a lesson. He said something very odd. "Are there not 12 hours in the day?" "If a man walks in the
day, he doesn't stumble," "because he sees the light of this world," "that is the sun in the sky." "But if a man walks at night he stumbles," and then comes the enigmatic,
almost humorous statement, "He stumbles because the
light is not in him." Now, when I stumble out of
bed in the dark of the night, sometimes I wish there was a light in me. And being an amateur
astronomer, I often have a light affixed to my forehead,
which does a good job. But Jesus is pointing to a profound thing, and that is, as we sit, we are profoundly dependent on a light that's outside ourselves. It's not only outside ourselves,
it's outside our world. It's called the S-U-N, the sun. And our world spins around
and we go from day to night and if the sun were to be extinguished, that would be the end of
life in a very few minutes. So what was Jesus saying to them? They thought it was suicidal, going into the danger, the risk area. Keep your social distance, you see. Now, we have to do that today because it's vastly
important to avoid infection, but Jesus was unique, He could
go where the trouble was, and not be infected by it; we can't. So He says, "I'm going to Jerusalem." And they thought they
should stay in safety. But you see, if they had,
they wouldn't have learned that He was the one who
could raise the dead. And what He was telling them
was almost this, I think, "Look," He said to them, "Where are you getting these ideas from? "Is it inside your own
head, in your own brains? "Or are you dependent on a light
that's outside your world?" And the lesson, of course,
John explains elsewhere, Jesus said, "I am the light of the world." "If a man follows me, he
shall not walk in darkness." Christ is a moving light! And if I'm here, and the light is there, and the light moves,
and I stay where I am, I'll end up in the dark. So what He is saying is we are looking, you and I, Michael, for light on COVID-19. Where will we get light on it? Well, I know of only one place that gives a satisfactory answer. I said before - I have
no simplistic answers. But what I am trying to do is to point to a person who is Himself the answer, and will give us the illumination we need. And He did say, "If a man follows
me he'll never see death," and that's exactly what
the story of the raising of Lazarus and Christ's
own resurrection tell us. - John, thank you so much,
that's been very helpful. I know your book is
available both in print and also as an e-book,
it's available this week-- - It is indeed!
- And you have a copy there. - There's the very first copy of it! - Oh, and if I could and we're allowed to, I'd drive round to your house and pick one up from you! John, that's such a great
place to land there, to find light in every
sense, both emotionally, intellectually, spiritually,
psychologically. We're looking for some
fixed anchor points. I know as I read through your book, which I found very helpful, by the way, as you come towards the end,
you make a little comment that Spurgeon made
about, again, coming back to this whole theme of the
trustworthiness of God, how do we trust Him, even
when we find ourselves challenged in so many ways? I don't know if you can remember
that he talks about just finding that peace -
- The easiest way to remember it is to
look it up and make sure I get it absolutely right, because it is a lovely statement. So forgive me if I read it. "God is too good to be unkind," "and He is too wise to be mistaken." "And when we cannot trace His hand," "we must trust His heart." - I think that's fascinating. It comes from a faith,
as you've been saying, that's borne out of what
God has revealed of Himself and what we can know and
therefore can rely on, when we find ourselves
caught up in a situation where there's so much we don't know. John, we're very grateful for your time and also for your insights.
- Well, it's my pleasure! Thank you very much for inviting me on! - If you're interested in John's book, it's available online as of Easter Monday, and it's also in
approximately 20 languages and possibly even climbing, so it should be available
right across the world. Thank you to you, also,
for not only joining us, but also for sending in your questions, which has made it possible
for us to do this. And do look out for further events which will be coming
out through RZIM Live. We really hope that this
has been of help to you, and we also pray that you'll know God's peace during this time.
