Roger Marsh: Well, welcome back to Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh, thanking you for joining us today for part two of Dr. James Dobson's classic conversation with pastor and author Skip Heitzig. Skip is the founder and senior pastor of Calvary Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And today, he'll be discussing a bit more about his book called The Bible From 30,000 Feet. This helpful resource takes you through the Bible in a year's time in order to gain a solid understanding of each book in the Bible. Let's join Dr. Dobson and Skip Heitzig right now for part two of this conversation here on Family Talk.
Dr. James Dobson: Pastor, one of the last questions I asked you last time is whether you'd been to the Bible Museum in Washington, DC, and you said you really wanted to do that. That I wish every Christian would do because you get a perspective of the influence of this one book on the human race all the way from the Garden of Eden to today and the prophecies that are in there and all the different translations. And it's just a wonderful experience. This has captured your heart as well, hasn't it?
Skip Heitzig: Sure has.
Dr. James Dobson: Because this book consists of 66 books, 1,500 years of time.
Skip Heitzig: 40 different authors from every conceivable walk of life with the same and single message.
Dr. James Dobson: How could that be? These people spoke with three different languages.
Skip Heitzig: That's right.
Dr. James Dobson: Across all this time, they weren't in communication with each other. And yet, it all makes one story.
Skip Heitzig: Yeah. You know the Scripture, Dr. Dobson, that really got my attention was Daniel 9. That's called the backbone of prophecy, as you know, where Daniel through the angel Gabriel gives the exact timing of the coming of the Messiah. And then Jesus on the Mount of Olive said... He holds them accountable saying, "If only you would've known the things that make for your peace in this, your day, but they've been hidden from your eyes. Therefore, your enemies will cast an embankment around you, and Jerusalem will fall," what happened in 70 AD. But he is referencing, I believe, what Daniel the prophet said as the timetable for the coming of their Messiah and held them accountable to know that.
Dr. James Dobson: What is it, 490 years?
Skip Heitzig: 483 years from March 14th, 445 BC to April 632 AD or exactly 173,880 days from that commandment until the Messiah came on the 10th of Nissan. Exactly to the day.
Dr. James Dobson: That couldn't have happened.
Skip Heitzig: Mathematically impossible.
Dr. James Dobson: Those who are skeptical about the Scriptures and the prophecies, what are you going to do with this?
Skip Heitzig: Exactly. In fact, I've led doctors in hospitals to Christ over that prophecy in showing them the impossibility of fulfillment without a divine author.
Dr. James Dobson: And obviously, God was leading in the affairs of men all the way along. Let me keep you in the book of Daniel for a moment, and I have opened the Scripture to chapter 10, beginning with verse seven. And let me read this and then ask you to comment on it. Daniel was the only one who saw the vision. He had just fallen and had seen a vision. "And those who were there with me did not see it, but such terror overwhelmed them that they fled and hid themselves. So I was left alone gazing at the great vision, and I had no strength at all. My face was deathly pale, and I was helpless. And then I heard him speaking as I listened to him, and I fell into a deep sleep with my face to the ground." Now, he's talking about the angel, Michael, and we go on to verse 10. "A hand touched me and set me trembling on my ends and knees. And he said, 'Daniel, you who are highly esteemed, consider carefully the words that I'm about to speak to you, and stand up for I have now been sent to you.' And when he said this to me, I stood up, trembling. And then he continued."
This is the verse that I would like you to comment on. "Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God." In other words, Daniel has been praying and asking the Lord for a favor. And Michael said, "'Your words were heard, and I've come in response to them.' But the princes of the Persian kingdom resisted me 21 days. And then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me because I was detained there with the King of Persia. 'Now I have come to explain to you what will happen to your people in the future for the vision concerns a time to come.'" Now, what is confusing about that, and I'd like you to address it, is here you have Daniel talking to God Himself. And then Michael says, "I was detained there with the King of Persia." In other words, there's this warfare going on, and God Himself didn't prevent it from occurring. And then finally, Michael breaks through and said, "I've come to explain to you what will happen to your people in the future for the vision concerns at time yet to come." That I'm sure theologians have dealt with. I'm certainly not equipped to explain it except that there is this collision between good and evil, between Michael, one of the foremost angels, and the Prince of Persia. What do you make out of that?
Skip Heitzig: The fact that it's written down is to give Daniel and us insight into what Donald Grey Barnhouse called The Invisible War. It's such a great title, and he outlines in that book Daniel but also the idea that if the plan of God to rescue a world depended on the existence of a nation is real, if that nation can be eliminated, then God's plan would be thwarted. And so The Invisible War all the way from the protoevangelium of Genesis 3, the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent, from that promise onward, you start seeing all this warfare take place, where Satan is doing everything he can to make sure that that seed isn't produced who's going to come and crush his kingdom. And that's all the stuff played out in the Bible, including Daniel 10.
Dr. James Dobson: What do you do with David in his experience and how God loved him? He was a man after his own heart, and yet he was an adulterer and a murderer. How can that fit?
Skip Heitzig: That's a great question, and that is part of the mercy of God that, on one hand, we gasp at. But we're so thankful for God's mercy in our own lives. Listen, God's covenants are sometime conditional covenants, where there's two parts to them. There's God's part and your part. But then there's unconditional covenants, like God says, "I will do this. I will do that." Genesis 12, "I will make you a great nation. Has nothing to do with you, Abraham. It's an unconditional covenant. It's solely dependent on my design and my desire to work through you." Other covenants like the Law of Moses, was a conditional covenant. So you see the interplay of God's unconditional covenant to produce Messiah through the nation of Israel but then a conditional covenant where Israel as a nation wouldn't be able to enjoy the blessings of God without a certain amount of obedience. But even then, God understood that they would disobey and be taken captive and then predicted I'll bring you back and give you a second chance and the new generation will have repented of the old sins.
Dr. James Dobson: Hm. Talk about David and Nathan. That's a story that I love.
Skip Heitzig: I love the story because I named my own son after Nathan-
Dr. James Dobson: Ah, you did?
Skip Heitzig: ... in the Bible.
Dr. James Dobson: And he was a prophet.
Skip Heitzig: Yes, he was a prophet. And he came to David, and he got right in his face and called him out on a sin.
Dr. James Dobson: And what was his sin?
Skip Heitzig: His sin was adultery. And he had taken Bathsheba, and he had killed Uriah the Hittite. And he was trying to cover it up for a long time. So David is in his palace, and the prophet Nathan comes to him. And Nathan says, "David, I got a story for you. There was a rich man who had many flocks, many herds, but he had somebody coming in from out of town as a guest. And instead of taking one of his many animals, he took a poor man's single little ewe-lamb and butchered it and used that to feed his company." And David said, "The man that has done this thing will surely die." And as he's getting all hot under the collar, Nathan pauses and looks at him and says, "You are the man. You have been given many blessings by God and many wives and kingdoms, and God would even have given you more. But you took somebody else's wife and killed the husband." So it was a parable to get to his own behavior.
Dr. James Dobson: Let's move now to the New Testament and the Messiah's coming. What about that whole miraculous event do you want to comment on?
Skip Heitzig: Well, Jesus came. And when Matthew writes the Gospel of Matthew, there's a frequently used phrase, and it's the one, "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet." And he's always making reference to the fact that this is anticipated in the writings of the Hebrews, that Jesus is the fulfillment of a long-anticipated desire the Jewish people have had and direct predictions that have been made in their writings about this coming one, this deliverer, this [inaudible 00:10:45] messiah. And so no wonder when Jesus is born do the angels light up the sky and proclaim glory in the heavens because he has finally arrived in the city of Bethlehem, which Micah the prophet back in 5:2 of his book announced would come. And Isaiah said, "A virgin will conceive and bear a child." So it's the culmination of redemptive history when the child is introduced into the world as our savior.
Dr. James Dobson: The story that I love, again, is where Jesus came to John the Baptist to be baptized of him. The white dove comes and rests on Jesus. I can't imagine any one of us experiencing anything quite like that that was more exciting and fulfilling or awe-inspiring than to have the God of the universe say, "I love this man. This is my son, and I'm well pleased with him." And the next verse says, "And straightway, he was led into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil." That's amazing to me. He went from the high point of His life to the low point in one verse there, and if it symbolizes anything for us, it's becoming a believer does not eliminate all the problems.
Skip Heitzig: That's right.
Dr. James Dobson: And you're still going to have to deal with Satan.
Skip Heitzig: Yeah. And there's a verse in Luke where after that temptation, it says, "Satan left Him," and the verse that always stuck out to me, "until he had an opportune time." So it wasn't over for Him. Satan was looking for the right moment to strike. And the insight I've always gleaned out of that is he and his minions are watching us very carefully for weak moments and opportunities to get at us, so it happened to Christ. It certainly happens to all of us.
Dr. James Dobson: Huh. There's another verse that is in Deuteronomy, I believe, you'll have to correct me, where we're told that there is an angel assigned to every nation to watch over them, and there are also satanic forces that are also assigned to each nation. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Skip Heitzig: Yes. From several verses put together that make mention of that. Like we talked about Daniel a while back and the Prince of Persia, there's a demonic being assigned to a nation. And when I think about the Prince of Persia and at that time a superpower and a monumentally wicked empire, what must the prince of San Francisco be like or Las Vegas, the kind of places that produce such vile filth and challenge our culture? But just as there are angels assigned to those places. Jesus spoke about their angels when he was referring to children, the fact that they have their angels. And I love the thought that God also has protective beings around those most vulnerable ones.
I have a passion in writing this book or any other book, and that is they're mostly Bible themes or the explanation of a Bible book, and it's because as a pastor, I live in a culture where I realize more and more church people are biblically illiterate. They know certain Bible verses, but some of the Bible verses they know aren't even really Bible verses. We grow up in family traditions, and Christians take stories they hear or messages they've heard from people, preachers, friends. And they think that's gospel truth. What I want to do is push people deeper to get a working knowledge of the Bible for themselves. I think it was Barna who said that 19% of American Christians are engaged Bible readers. 19% are engaged Bible readers, so engaged meaning they read the Bible more than three times a week. Well, that's amazing to me because I give my life to preparing sermons and teaching through the Scriptures because I think that they change people's lives. I think God uses the Word, and I believe in the power of Scripture, the power of the text itself to change a life. And so I want to take that number and raise it up. That's the intent of this book. I want people to discover that God has a plan for them, that God anticipated them in the Bible, that it's a book written that is accessible to them. So that's the driving force behind it.
Dr. James Dobson: Do you think God knows me different from every other person who ever lived?
Skip Heitzig: Absolutely.
Dr. James Dobson: You think he knows my name?
Skip Heitzig: He knows your name. He knows the hairs on your head.
Dr. James Dobson: Does he know my thoughts?
Skip Heitzig: Yes, he does. Every thought you think before you even think them. Psalm 139, "You know my thoughts afar off. If I were to add them together, they would be more in number than the sands of the sea." So what a beautiful picture of a God who's all powerful yet very intimate.
Dr. James Dobson: Can you imagine that there are millions and millions of people out there and some of them listening to us who think that they're alone in the universe, that nobody cares, that they have no meaning and no purpose; there's no direction; there's no right; there's no wrong; there's no Heaven; there's no Hell; there's no reason for me to live; I was an accident of nature with molecules and cells working and producing the person that I am, and when I get up in the morning and I go out to do my job, it has no significance other than earning a living; my life is completely meaningless? You've met many, many people like that, actually.
Skip Heitzig: Many people. When I was first studying for radiology and my professors were all medical doctors and most of them were atheists or agnostic, I think I found one who said he was a believer, but some of them were vitriolic against the Christian faith. They were enemies of the truth, and they did everything they could to dissuade me. I remember I had a professor of integrated zoology who said, "Is anybody in my class a Christian or believe in God?" I raised my hand. I had just received Christ months before. I raised my hand. I was the only student except one girl who started to raise her hand. Then she pulled it down because the intimidation. And the professor looked at me and said, "My aim in this class is to overturn your belief system and get you to believe in science, the truth, not any of this mythology." He said that directly in front of the whole class, so I was intimidated on day one.
Dr. James Dobson: How did you deal with that?
Skip Heitzig: Well, it was a crisis, and I remember I got a-
Dr. James Dobson: Did he tug you in his direction?
Skip Heitzig: He tried to, and I understood the evidence he was producing. And I didn't know there was any good Christian evidence at the time against that or to be equipped with, so I remember going to my home, to my apartment, in San Bernardino and saying, "I'm not going to believe this if it's just a fairytale, if it can't be substantiated with facts," but it was a crisis of faith for me. It was then that I found a little book that changed my life, and it was called Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell. And it was filled with the research that he had taken to college campuses around America to deal with students who felt that very same way, and I ate it up. I memorized large sections of it. It was like gold to me, and I remember going back to my professors and back to my fellow students and purposely engaging them in conversations of faith so I could present this evidence, finding that when you give them good evidence, they start faltering and questioning their own belief system.
And it was like payday for me. It's like I struck pay dirt. Truth is amazing. And I was able to not only challenge people in their evolutionary belief system, but see many of them come to faith in Christ. One was emergency room doctor in Orange County. He became my roommate before I got married. Taught evolution in Philadelphia before he became a doctor. Didn't believe in God. Saw the evidence, was converted and is a believer to this day.
Dr. James Dobson: If there's one thing I would like to come out of this conversation today, it's right here at this point. We're talking to people who just have decided that life has no meaning and that God does not exist and he does not know me and doesn't care and there is no God. If these words are going out and are describing somebody who's listening to us, maybe a college student, maybe somebody who has been under the influence of the kind of man that you talked about, I want to urge them to go get a copy of the book you just mentioned. Millions of people had their eyes open to what is the evidence that demands a verdict.
Skip Heitzig: A verdict. Josh and Sean McDowell, his son, together re-released this book. It's greatly expanded. It's easier to read than the first version, and it's filled with the kind of evidence that it can match any skeptic. Any skeptic. I would challenge someone who would be listening, who would think, oh, no, I know far too much, read through this book. And one of the great things, it highlights some of the classic atheists who have come to Christ, people through history who have not believed, people from different walks of life and the common experience of salvation and what God can do to change them.
Dr. James Dobson: Well, we're coming toward the end of this second program, and I want to make sure we get the essence of what you're saying here. I put it into my own words, and then I want you to express yours. It is the fact that this book is not only a history book that goes back for 6,000 or more years and describes God's relationship with man and the Jewish people and the other things in the Scripture and the coming of the Messiah. It is relevant to you and me today.
Skip Heitzig: That's right.
Dr. James Dobson: What we live, what we think, what we are afraid of, what we're depressed by, what we are confused by is all answered in this book.
Skip Heitzig: Every human being comes into this world and has questions. Everyone at some point questions, "Why I am here," the big issues of life, "Where am I going? What's the purpose of my life? Is it our purpose and meaning?" The Bible answers that. It anticipates that. There have been thousands of generations of people who have struggled with those same questions, and the Bible gives solid answers. I love what Peter said, that God has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him. It's like life is jumbled up and doesn't make sense until you put God in it, until you include him in it and have a relationship with Him. Then it's like it's the missing piece to the puzzle that unlocks the meaning of life.
Dr. James Dobson: The name of the book is The Bible From 30,000 Feet: Soaring Through the Scriptures. Skip Heitzig is the author and pastor of a huge church in Albuquerque. And this book is a tool that I do hope our listeners will get. We read the Bible. Sometimes we understand it. Sometimes we don't. This gives you a view from 30,000 feet.
Skip Heitzig: 30,000 feet.
Dr. James Dobson: What a great title and a great concept.
Skip Heitzig: I think there's a great advantage to be able to see how all of God's Word over that vast panorama of time, how it fits together, how something anticipated is fulfilled and how God ties bows on different parts of history and makes sense of it. And then you can make sense out of your life.
Dr. James Dobson: Does a relationship with Jesus Christ still apply to today?
Skip Heitzig: Absolutely, even more so than ever. I came to Christ in 1973. He changed my thinking. I still live for Him. I still love to read through the Scriptures. It never gets old to me. A day without the Bible is a lost day for me. It's a wasted day.
Dr. James Dobson: Thank you so much for coming and being with us. I appreciate your new friendship, and I hope we can extend it.
Skip Heitzig: Thank you, Dr. Dobson. A privilege to be here.
Dr. James Dobson: Get this book, folks. Thanks for being with us.
Roger Marsh: That was the conclusion of this two-part conversation featuring Skip Heitzig and our own Dr. James Dobson here on Family Talk. By the way, if you missed part one or any of today's program or if you'd like to learn more about Skip Heitzig's ministry, please visit our broadcast page at drjamesdobson.org/familytalk. It's so helpful to have a resource that can make challenging content easy to understand.
When it comes to marriage or raising a family, where do you turn for practical guidance? Well, here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we have a resource for you. Dr. Dobson has taken his more than 40 years experience and knowledge and put it into one eight-disk DVD collection. It's called Building a Family Legacy. It's created by Dr. Dobson, and it helps shed some light on some challenging topics that can be tough for marriages and parents. For a suggested donation of $50, you can order your copy today. To do so online, just visit drjamesdobson.org. That's drjamesdobson.org. Or you can give us a call at 877-732-6825 and express your interest by phone. Again, that's 877-732-6825. I'm Roger Marsh. Thanks so much for spending time with us today, and be sure to join us again tomorrow for another edition of Family Talk. Until then, may you have a peaceful and blessed remainder of your day.
Announcer: This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.