Finding Faith In The Pursuit Of Intentional Living With Michael Lane from Evidence4faith

 You didn't use one Bible verse. You didn't even read John 3.16. What kind of Christian witness is that? And I said, so you're mad I'm not using Bible verse to defend the scientific thing for God. And they said, yeah. And I said, you do know the audience we're speaking to, they're atheists. They don't believe in the Bible. If I quote the Bible to them, it means nothing. But they believe in logic. Thus I use logic to do this and showed them that. And they're like, oh, I guess that makes sense. Hey everybody, I am obviously not in the studio. This is going to be a very unique podcast that we do. I'm here with a good friend, brother in Christ, Michael Lane. We have a ministry called Evidence for Faith and this whole podcast is not going to be money related. So if you're just following Better Well for Money Tips and Strategies, this is probably the podcast that you may want to skip if you're not interested in any of the stuff that we're talking about. We always talk about intentional living, which especially talk about you are financially free when you're living an intentional life. And it's been very, very clear to me and on my heart that it's like if God's going to bless us with wealth and money and influence, what are we going to do with it? Michael has been a game changer in my life. We went to a ministry, a camp that you were very involved in when I grew up. And I remember going to class after class after class and your teachings and Bible studies were some of the few studies that I was like, man, I didn't want the time to go. Like I was looking at the clock and I'm like, I wish time would go slower because you put so much time and energy into the studies. And I have a better quality of faith and have a better understanding of why I believe in the Bible and just character because of you. And so it became very evident that there was a season in your life that you could be used better in this ministry and that we could start doing things like videos and podcasts and all these cool things on the Internet. And so overall, that's just the update of like where you're at, why we're doing the podcast. And I'm going to be interviewing Michael and just sharing his story, what he's passionate about. We'll invite you guys to support our ministry if that's something that you'd be open to doing. And then we also have some trips, i.e. we're going to Israel next year and we have other trips that come depending on when you're watching this. And so we would love if it's something that you're interested in to let us know. We're in the Florida Keys right now because one of the specialties that you do is the marine biology trip. You do this with high school and some college students and so it's really cool to see that we've gotten in the water and done some really cool things. And so with that, it's good to have you here, man. Hey, good to be here. I mean, it's warm here. There's no snow here. There's coconut trees. It's warm, but it's funny because this is the last day I'm here, the full day I'm here and it's like the windiest day. So we're like, well, let's hope that the audio works. Yeah. But overall, let me take a step back. You've been doing this trip since the 80s. 1987 was the first one. And explain a little bit about what the marine biology trip is and how it got started. Well, I used to live in the Bahamas and that's where I met my wife, Denise. And I taught biology at a private Christian school down there. And I absolutely love the ocean. I mean, I have always loved the ocean. But when I left the Bahamas and came back to the States on the last day I was in the Bahamas, I was standing on about knee deep on one of the beaches just standing in the water. And I said, I have got to do something when I go back to the States. I have got to do something to get kids to see this type of an environment to be able to experience this environment. And so I made that vow. And then in 1987, I met a man who was a teacher in a school in Indiana who was doing a program like this. And he invited me along and he says, why don't you come in and see our program. And I did. And I worked with him for a couple of years, but then I was like, I really want to do my own. There's things I want to put into this and I want to do my own. So that's how this thing actually started. I was at a public school at the time in Illinois and the school jumped on board with us like, yeah, this sounds great. And then I left that school, went to another school and they said, yeah, let's go ahead and do this. So that's how I went. And then when I went to the working at the Christian camp, we did it there. And now we're with Evidence for Faith and we're doing it there. So it's yeah, since the first trip was in 87. So it's been a number of years doing this. What's really cool is this trip is a ministry because people in most cases get high school credit. Has anyone got college credit from being here? Yes, they have. It's incredible. Like the quality of education is incredible here. And so you have people that are believers, homeschoolers, nonbelievers, public schoolers coming on this trip. They're getting an amazing experience. But I mean, I've witnessed every day we have a Bible study. Yes. And this is not just a read a verse and like just kind of like, you know, what do you think of this? It's like a study and we're going through some like incredible teaching. And I'm thinking, I can't imagine whether you're a believer. It's going to encourage you so much to embrace your faith. And if you're a nonbeliever, it's going to really get you to start questioning why you believe in what you believe in. How many people do you think have come to know Christ or rededicated their life on just this trip alone? Oh my gosh, I that is a huge number for all these years. We have so many people who came to a saving knowledge of Jesus on this trip. Matter of fact, just last night after our Bible session last night, we broke up into small groups and one of the leaders of the group told me this morning. They said, I didn't see you after the thing, but I got to tell you what happened. We've been doing a series, as you know, called Give Me a Reason to Believe. And it's all about reasons to believe in the Bible. So we started off with the historical accuracy using artifacts and manuscripts, showing that the Bible is real like that. We talked about evidence that the resurrection really occurred. Last night we were doing one on the prophecies of different kingdoms that God, through His word, predicted would come and go. Well, before that we did Messianic prophecies and saw how Jesus fulfilled these. Well, last night after the one with all the different kingdoms, one of the students, high school students said to my teacher, says, as they were talking about, says, I've come to realize something. So much of this Bible stuff is real and it's documented. I'd never heard any of this before. And he said to her, I really think this has got to be the real answer to everything that this is real. But how many people have come to that over the years? I don't know, because every year I write a whole new Bible series for this. And just praying for God to put something in my heart to help these. And I knew we had a number of people who are not walking with God or not even born again Christians on this trip. So that's why it gives me a reason to believe, I thought, is where the Lord was leading me. One of the studies that I witnessed and I actually recorded, you talked about an impossibility. Or maybe you have to fill this in. It's like this is something that science says is absolutely impossible. We talked about it is possible if you flip a coin for it to be heads a thousand times, a million times, even a billion times. That's a possibility even though we know probability that's literally impossible. And then you showed how there is over 200 prophecies in the Bible that were fulfilled. And you went through 25 in detail. We went to the scripture, this is the prophecy, and then this was the fulfillment on the prophecy. And we looked, we witnessed in real life, you first laid the ground of like how these things were written before. Because that's, you know, people are always throwing curveballs and saying the Bible is not true and all this stuff. So the first thing that you do is lay out that the Bible is written. It was written by multiple authors and it was written, you know, in the past. And what they said in the past came true. And the probability of that happening is scientifically impossible. And you've done that day after day after day. We've looked at multiple areas and that's what I love so much about your studies. You love Jesus. You're like, it's fun to see worship him, but you worship him through actually teaching and studying his word, looking at history, teaching about him from a non biblical standpoint. And I love how all these areas flow into maybe the Bible is true. And if the Bible says is true, we should like that our whole life changes. And you just start implanting those in our brain, not from a standpoint of just get the feeling or just trust. But here's give me a reason to believe and trust. And I just, obviously I'm getting really excited about it because it became really clear to me if we are going to make a difference in the kingdom of God. There's a lot of great ministries out there, but there's not a ton of ministries focused on apologetics and creating evidence from a non confrontational way. But just like, here's the facts and giving people equipping them to really know why they believe is true. Right. Like on the first night when we were talking about the different manuscripts, I related to story where I was invited to go to a major university by navigators. Was invited to come on the campus. They had an auditorium set up and I talked about they asked me to talk about how we got the Bible and is the Bible accurate. And so I brought all these artifacts like ancient scrolls that have been found and manuscripts of the Bible. And well, as I was standing back there was a guy, a professor of history who he didn't know who I was. He didn't know I was a speaker, obviously. And he said, I'm here tonight to listen to this guy because I teach on this. But he says, I don't know if you're aware, he did not know I was a speaker. And he says, I don't know if you're aware, but the Hebrew people didn't even have a written language until 425 BC after the Babylonian captivity. And I go, really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he's just going on and on. And then I get up there and I show that the Hebrew people through these Ostracons, broken pieces of pottery with Hebrew writing on them, dating back hundreds of years before that. And now just even just recently we use this this week just a month ago was a new discovery on Mount Ebel of a little called the Curse Amulet from Joshua chapter 8. I mean, this is back in the time of Moses and stuff. And it's written in a proto-Hebrew. The Hebrew people did have a written language. The guy afterwards came up after the thing was over and he says, I gotta tell you, this was phas- fantastic. I've learned so much. And he asked me a few point of questions. I gave him answers and he says, I can't even refute this because you're showing me archeological evidence that supports all this. And he says, I'd love to talk more, but he says I need to leave. And I said, oh, you got an early class. He says, well, I do have that. But I gotta go back right now. This is fresh in my mind and rewrite my lecture. So I was like, wow, cool. Tell the story about when you went to the atheist club. Oh my gosh. That's what I want you to know is a lot of people, they have their bullet points, but you like every study that you've done, you've done hundreds of thousands of actual studies that through this ministry were digitizing and giving you guys the ability to consume it so that you can have a better understanding of why you believe what you believe. But one of my favorite stories is when you got invited to go to an atheist club and you all let you tell the rest of the story. Yeah, I got a phone call one day from some person I had no idea who he was and he introduced himself as the president of the atheist club at this major university. And I'm like, right, who is this really? And he said, I want you to come. Would you be willing to come? We'll pay for it for your travel and everything. We'll pay your expenses. Well, you come and speak to our group on what? And he said, well, we understand it used to be a Darwinian evolutionist and didn't believe that God created everything as a creationist does. But now you're a creationist and we want to know how you came to this conclusion. We would like to know, is there any evidence that you can give that there really is a God? And I said, well, he sounded legit and everything. And I said, well, if this is really what you're wanting, yeah, I'd be glad to come and do it. So they gave me two nights to speak and I got there and I had some Christians who came with me as support. And there were some at the university that came and even beforehand we met and we prayed about it and everything. And I got up there and what I did is I totally approached it. Evidence that for a God, but not using science because science cannot prove technically prove can't see God crawling out of a test tube or a beaker. So what I did is I used logic and went through logic explaining for two nights that the evidence of God afterwards when it was all over a couple of really amazing things happened. One, the president and the vice president of their club and everything came up to me and they said, that was absolutely amazing. They said, we had no idea that there, you know, this this approach and stuff. And the whole point was they had challenged some of the Christian groups on campus for a debate on the evidence of God. Now I'm finding out that's why they wanted me to come because they want to find out what what was going to happen at the debate. So the president says, are these people were going to be debating and you stuff like this? And I go, I don't know what they're doing. But I'm just telling you there is logical conclusion to this. If Spock on Star Trek was given this information, Spock would have to agree that there is logical evidence. There is a God. But then he said, I think we have to change the name of our club from the atheist club to the agnostic club because none of this could have happened out of nothing. You have shown us there has to be some type of an intelligent designer that is out there. But what the sad part of this whole point is I'm like, this is fun. But what happened afterwards, we were not to eat the Christian fellows and stuff. We all went out to eat and one of the people said to me, I'm really sort of shocked, Michael, at the way you presented your information for this. And I said, how so? You didn't use one Bible verse. You didn't even read John 3 16. What kind of Christian witness is that? And I said, you see, you're mad. I'm not using Bible verse to defend the scientific thing for God. And they said, yeah. And I said, you do know the audience we're speaking to. They're atheists. They don't believe in the Bible. If I quote the Bible to them, it means nothing. But they believe in logic. Thus, I use logic to do this and showed them that. And they're like, oh, I guess that makes sense. And that's what I love about your meeting people where they're at. And that's quite frankly, I would challenge you. It's whatever you believe in, whether you identify as a believer or some other religion. Do you know why you believe that? Or are you just doing that because that's what your parents brought up? Or is that a feeling that you feel? And that's something that I've been convicted about is like, I grew up in an amazing Christian home. I met you through just our upbringing. And there was many times where I just checked the boxes. Like, I'm just going to do the, I'm just going to go through emotions and check the box. I had a great upbringing, but there was something deeper. And it was like, I remember when I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I was like, I'm going to dedicate my life to this. And I don't want to dedicate my life to a feeling or something that I should probably do. Like, I only have one life. I want to live it the best I can. And if Jesus Christ is Lord, and if the Bible is true, that's a, what he's saying in the Bible is insane in a way of like, it's, it's, it should capture our attention and we should dedicate our life to it. And if not, why would I waste my time on, on all these, some people call it hoops? Why would I waste my time worshiping a God that doesn't even exist? So true. So true. Let's, let's go back and let's now get your story of like, who are you? How did you, I mean, you were an amazing teacher and that was a great teacher before you even were a believer. And so talk about your upbringing and, and how God has used you and to impact people on the science realm and the Christian realm and all of that. I'll just let you talk about your story in a nutshell for the listeners. And by the way, it's windy. We got a helicopter flying over us. So hopefully you can hear us. We might just be having a fun little conversation that will just be between us. But yeah, your story. The Coast Guard comes around every now and then they're checking out boats that are traveling around looking for rescues and stuff, I guess. But yeah, well, I grew up actually in a Christian family and very, very devout Christian family. And I grew up in programs like Awana's, memorizing scripture, all this Sunday school. That's what I grew up in. But when I got to college and unfortunately it was a Christian college, private Christian university. They taught me that the Bible, the first 11 chapters of Genesis is not really authentic. That it's, it's allegory. It's not actually historical events that God used our winning evolution. And that's how he created things and stuff. And so they really got me questioning. And the thing is as a college student, as most college students, I just took whatever the professors, because they're educated, I took whatever the process, the professor said and just accepted it without question. And so I left the Christian university no longer believing in God's being the creator God. And I had problems deep inside, but it was, that's what I was doing. And now I'm out teaching students, biology students, and some things that pain me still to this day. For instance, one time as I was teaching this in a biology class about Darwinian evolution, one of my students came up afterwards and said to me, Wow, Mr. Lane, thank you so much for, for teaching me this because now I have a reason not to believe in the Bible. And when he said that boy, I'll tell you, it's like something's not right. I was just startled. And I felt this is not right. But then, yeah, I got really tremendously blessed my teaching career. I don't even know to be totally honest, I don't even know how many teaching awards I have. I really don't. I don't display them. They're all in a box. I don't even know where they are. Denise, my wife probably could tell you, but I don't know because I don't want to look at them because it's too easy to get full of pride that way. And that's just what God gave me. It's nothing I earned. So I don't even want to look at stuff like that. But it was after I had become the recipient of a major national award, I got to work in the field of research. And I worked in, I took classes in molecular biology, microbiology, more stuff. And I worked in fisheries genetics. And when I was working in this and working on my master's thesis, I was running into problems with it because I was working in the field of evolution, trying to show how evolution occurs in fish. And I was having all sorts of problems. So at this point also, I used to debate, I used to debate Christians on Darwinian evolution versus creationism. And I always picked out my targets carefully. I went after pastors. I did. I intentionally went after pastors. Now, at this point, to be totally honest, I still considered myself a born again Christian. I believe I was. But boy, I would be what Peter would have called a baby Christian because I did not believe in the first 11 chapters of Genesis. And so in these debates, I never lost a debate at one of these church functions. Never once did I lose a debate. I won every single time. Because to be honest, it was so simple to throw science papers and stuff at pastors and they had no idea on how to come back. And there were certain things I would always believe or not, I would pray before a debate would go on. Please Lord, don't let them ask me this or don't let me. Don't let them ask me that. And they never did. It's so sad, but they never did because I didn't have answers for things like that. But anyway, I was struggling because it research and then at this, the last debate I did like this, there was some guy, I have no idea who he was. He came up to me afterwards at the end of the debate and he says to me, congratulations. He really embarrassed our pastor and our elders and our Bible, our Sunday School teachers really well. That was really interesting how you did that. And he says, do you believe in the Bible? I said, yeah, but the first 11 chapters of the Bible, I think are open interpretation. I believe it's allegory. It is not historical fact. And he goes, okay, then he asked me a couple of questions, one of which was, well, if that is true, then why does Paul in the book of Romans, we're not talking Genesis here, we're talking Romans, why does Paul say that death is a result of sin? And if there was no sin, there would be no death. But Paul goes on to say that Christ had to come and conquer death. And if there was no death, then why did Christ have to come and suffer and die? And he didn't go into detail. He just basically just left the debt, turned around, walked away, which was good because I had no response for him. If death, according to Darwinian evolution, if death has been going on for millions of years, then Paul is saying death was something that was God's creation, that death is a natural and good thing, and it's part of his creation, it's a beautiful thing. Well, death isn't. Anyone who's experienced anybody close to him dying. That's not beautiful. That is not nice. That is, a lot of people get angry with God over things like this. But Paul specifically says that Christ came to conquer death. Christ came to conquer the sin. He died for our sins. It was all related. And at that time, in research, I had the opportunity to have a meal, a dinner, with Dr. Sidney Fox and his wife, who Nobel Prize-winning laureates. These guys are brilliant, and they worked on the early Earth theories of how life formed. And I got to have questions, dinner with him so I could ask questions. And there were some things that I just asked. I said, I don't understand a little bit about this evolution stuff that I've been teaching for years, about how the first life form could possibly form on this planet out of nothing. And now he had done work with protocells and stuff like this, and he says, well, the thing is, he says, Michael, the thing is, we know, those of us who are in this, we really know deep down. This is not how life could have began here. You're never going to get DNA this way. All living things have DNA. This is not going to work. He pointed me to a couple of other papers to read, and some from people at NASA. And he says, we know that the early Earth wasn't like what you see in a textbook, that life didn't form the way it says in a textbook. And so that was happening. This debate happened, and all the stuff my research was hitting dead ends, and I'm like, something's not right. And then you look at this thing called the metabolic pathway of all the chemical reactions occurring inside of a cell, big massive chart, huge thing with listing all these enzymes and how it all works as a flow chart, that everything has to be already set up before life can even begin. And I'm like, there has to be a God. So even on my one in my classroom, I put above that chart at that time, I made a little post-it note on a thing called Print Shop. If anybody remembers this old computer program, making banners, and I wrote, there is a God, and I put that above there because it shows me. And you're allowed to do that in public school? Well, I didn't get in trouble right away. I had Bible verses all over my room. What year was this? That was probably, well, the dinner with the Nobel laureate was probably around 89. The debate happened in 89. So all this was happening right around the same time in 1989. Okay. And so you obviously have always wanted to be true. You just want to do the right thing. Right. You don't have an agenda from a standpoint of, trust me, it's not always easy to teach what we're teaching. That is true. So true. And especially as a scientist who's, I've seen you, you know your stuff, and you probably get put into a category of this wacky scientist that doesn't know science and all this stuff. So from there, this commitment of like, okay, I like obviously some people ask you questions and it got you thinking. But when did you really shift your attention and when did you start teaching? Because how many studies have you, do you think you've written on apologetics and just Bible studies in general? Well, I know that there's, I got asked a couple of years ago, how many Bible studies have I, and lessons have I written? So I, I sat down at the computer and just started counting. And I actually stopped before I got to the end because I realized I, I estimated it was probably 700 or 800 and it was easily, I could see by the numbers. I was going to hit probably close to 2000, just Bible lessons. And they asked me about science lessons that I have taught and developed. And I have even, I've published in journals and stuff, peer reviewed journals, different science protocols and papers. And, and things. And I have several hundred science lessons and the archeology lessons. There's, well, I've written two books, The Stones Bear Witness and really catchy, more Stones Bear Witness. Yeah, I'm real good with titles. And I'm writing a third one right now. But there's quite a few chapters there and probably about a hundred specific archeological lessons. Matter of fact, that's what tonight's Bible lesson is going to be on. Archeological evidence that the Bible is true, showing artifacts and, and things that have been discovered from the 1800s to even just a couple of weeks ago. So one of the things is looking at, looking at this ministry and I want you to speak a little bit to it. But the whole concept is evidence for faith. Again, we're not, we're not going to win any creative awards here, but it's like we, we want to be a ministry that produces evidence so that you know why you believe in what you believe. And it's, again, we're not in the convincing game. We just, we want to show you like life is incredibly important and this decision is the most important decision in your life. Make sure you understand why you're making that decision. So we look at the Bible and obviously if the Bible is not accurate, if it's not true, then we shouldn't be believing it. Right, exactly. We look at that. We look at history. We say, did the Bible and history like did that, is that accurate? We look at archeology. We look at science. We look at, you know, what do you call it, philosophical logic? I use logic a lot. And it's like all of these should just help with the conversation. It shouldn't be contradicting because that's the number one thing people say, well, like, yeah, the Bible just is not accurate. And it's like there's science and history and people will throw that out there and it's frustrating because even someone who's like, I probably know more than the Evers Joe when it comes to the Bible and history and all those things. Like, I, like that was frustrating for me. It's like, man, I don't feel confident standing up on stage debating someone or knowing why I believe. And so then I'm just kind of going back to this is what I feel like. And that's not, I don't like that. And that's not, that's not great as we're going out and sharing the gospel. It's like, it's all built on a house of cards that could fall. And so the purpose of this ministry is to really equip pastors and people that are going to school and anyone that professes to be a believer or not to either number one, equip you to know why you believe in what you believe or number two, help you understand that you need to go on your knees and ask that Jesus comes into your life and know why you're doing that. Sorry for stealing all your thunder. Oh, that's fine. Like talk about like the, the why behind this ministry and, you know. Well, when we, when we started this, we were trying to figure out, I mean, for one, I remember when, when you came in and initiated the whole conversation about starting this ministry, I was, I was sort of taken aback because I thought you were asking me for somebody who I could recommend to you to do this. And I was thinking as he's asking somebody who can do these things and I'm sitting here, okay, well, who do I know? And then he said, no, I want you to do it. And I'm like, man, I'm 63 years old, you know, are you getting an ancient flat? You went a nice way of saying old fart. But why are you getting someone like me to do it? But it definitely, because we prayed about and everything and that's God put it upon our hearts that this is what he wanted me to do. So, but what it is was putting together and doing this ministry from four perspectives. And we came up with these four pillars. As you just mentioned, science, history, or an archeology, the Bible itself is able to stand up. I mean, it has for centuries. Leaders, politicians, dictators, emperors have tried to destroy it. It's still the number one bestselling book in the entire world. There's got to be some reason for that. And then logic itself. So that's why we have evidence for, and that's the number four, the four for the, our title, that's where it comes from. And all of these are pointing from to evidence that these things are real. So we had this, this early discussions on this to set up this type of a ministry using these four pillars. And God has blessed us tremendously. Just we're not even a year old. We started May 1st of last year. That would have been 2021. And so far in this year, we're still in our first year. I have been allowed to actually present over 100 lessons in live, not recordings, just live lessons. I've been, you told me I would be busy and I was, wow, never dreamed this was going to happen. But over 100 people are number 100 times, I've been asked to go and speak. I've also, we've been putting the podcast together and I mean, which is interesting. I didn't even know what a podcast was. It's not something you read in a textbook or seeing a microscope. So I didn't know what one was. It had to be explained to me about six times. Really? They can hear me? Yeah, I'm not the most technologically advanced person. You want to do a gel electrophoresis or separate DNA? Hey, I'm your guy. But that, but we have podcasts and we have the videos and now we're, we're putting together, we just published a marine biology book for this course. And we, we've got more things that we're planning to do and more lessons. But God has just opened up so many things. And the whole point is to try to get people to see that there really is evidence. Because what happens is people take hearsay that the, how many times I have heard, science has disproved the Bible, science has disproved the Bible. And I have challenged colleagues, scientists, friends of mine, show me a science error, a provable science error in the Bible. They think once in a while they get something. And then I say, okay, this is probably, and this is likely a translation error. Let's go back to the original Hebrew and see what it is. And a lot of times that clears up the problem. They say, oh, wow, the Bible was accurate. Or they'll say like, well, science says this. Well, the Bible says this. Well, guess what? If you go back and you'll see science for the longest time for centuries was saying the wrong thing. What am I talking about? Science for centuries used to say there was only 1,026 stars in the entire universe. And that was on all the history or all the, all the exams in astronomy and in science. How many stars are there? 126. Really? I mean, what? Ptolemy, the guy who counted these things out one night went out with a bucket of chicken back in the time of Christ, right around in there, went out with a bucket of chicken, spread out a blanket, sat down and counted the stars. Believe it or not, that's how pretty much it was done. That probably wasn't bucket of chicken on a fried pizza or something. But anyway, that's how they came up with it. And it was just, just carried on through science for centuries. And now we got the space telescope up there and we're like, holy cow, we can't count the stars. But you go back to the book of, you know, you look in the Bible and it says the stars are countless. You can't count the stars. I had a question this week. A person said when we were talking a little bit about this and he says, well, is that why God, well, why, I understand about the stars, but why does God's also can concern like affinity in a way to grains of sand? Like you can't count the grain of sand. Many times that's an analogy made in the Bible that God uses it to indicate, you know, eternity. Grain to sand because they said, even though there's a lot, you could probably sit down and count them. I said, no, there's parrotfish out here in the ocean that bites off pieces of coral every day. All these parrotfish going around and they bite off the coral. They grind up the organic animals and stuff in it. They swallow the whole thing. They digest the organics of these animal remains and algae and they excrete sand. So more sand is being added every day. Thus the number of sand is constantly increasing as this goes on. You know, there's things like that and they're like, wow, I didn't know that. And I said, well, that's why you're down here studying marine biology. What's so interesting is whether you're a science person or whether you just want to better understand how the Old Testament doesn't contradict, but just adds to the New Testament. And it's like, that was probably one of my favorite studies is just reading the prophecies and reading what was written about and then showing either history or the actual Bible and how it came true. And it's just like, and if we can prove that those are written, those are authentic, which there's a lot of proof there. If we can prove that and we can go through that logical step of you start here, then you build upon it, build upon it, build upon it. You really truly build a case that's rock solid. And that's what I just appreciated about you because there's definitely like, I love the pastors and people out there that are reading the Word and their gifts are worship and their grifts are, you know, sharing the gospel. But there's a crisis that we have, a crisis when it comes to someone accepting Jesus or wanting something more and then really not being able to grow or not really knowing where to start. And this is the whole purpose of the ministry is truly to equip people so that they can take that next step and teach, debate, serve, share the gospel, be better spouses and siblings. And so anything else that you want to say as it relates to this ministry, what God's put on your heart, any fun facts before we wrap this thing up? Well, one thing that really, this has happened a couple of times. And it's just what you're just saying just sort of reminded me of one of these events. I was at a, this is when I was just before I went to the mission field working at a camp. I'm still teaching school at a teacher convention. I'm standing there with a group of teachers. Now these are all very highly educated people and we're standing around and someone says to me like, I don't know what I said, but someone says to me, are you a Christian? And I said, yeah, and he like, this guy's a Christian. And I'm like, okay, what's the matter? You're going to take me out and stake me to a ground or something? I'm going to pour honey on my head and let the ants get. But what are you talking about? And they said, well, you, why do you believe the Bible is real? Why do you believe the Bible is real? And I said, well, for one, as you just mentioned, the prophecies. And they said, what kind of prophecies? All these messianic prophecies. There's over 200 major, close to 250 major and minor messianic prophecies. And for one person to be born to fulfill all these, that's, I said, scientifically impossible. That's beyond the odds of being 10, 1 to 10 to the 250th powers, what some mathematicians have done. And that is scientifically impossible. That goes beyond probability. And the guy said to me who was initiating the conversation, he says, but don't you realize that all those messianic prophecies were written after the time of Christ? And I said, what do you mean? He says, when Constantine became emperor, he had the Bible all written, putting in these prophecies, showing that Jesus would be the Messiah. They were written well after, 300, 320 years or so after the event. And the others were all, I mean, we got a crowd here at this point, they're standing around like, well, really? And you know, how are you going to answer that? And I said, have you ever heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls? And he goes, well, I've heard of them. I don't know much about them. I said, yeah, I don't think you do. Let me tell you, just take the book of Isaiah alone. There's been at least five complete copies of the book of Isaiah found. They've all been tested by non-Christian public, you know, testing facilities and stuff, and all been shown to be written somewhere between 250 BC to 150 BC. And you know how many prophecies are in there? The whole crucifixion story, the resurrection is in there. You have all this stuff, many other prophecies that Jesus would be born the Son of God, that he is the eternal God. He wasn't somebody who came along and was a man that elevated to a God. He was God. He would be born of a woman, as it says in Genesis 3.15, and he would be God. And I'm sitting here telling him all this, and they're said, what's the point? And I said, don't you get it? These prophecies were written hundreds of years before. I just totally destroyed it. He goes, oh my gosh. I says, are you certain about this? I said, just pick up, just go to any Google thing and type in the age of the books of the Dead Sea Scrolls. You're going to see these things were written before the time of Christ. And he goes, wow, I had no idea. And I said, well, that's why we're here. We're teachers. Yeah. Last question I have on this subject. What do you think is the reason why so many people are not becoming believers and are not? Like, what do you think the sticking point is? As you've taught all around the world, spoken to tons of people, I have almost 2,000 studies that you've written. What is the common theme? Is it pride? Is it just not knowing? Is it not thoughtfully thinking? Is it truly believing these things that are just not accurate? Like, if you could put your finger on some of the major problems, what would that be? Pretty much the number one thing is like what we just saw last night. You did not know. Yeah. People do not know. They take hearsay all the time. He hearsay, oh, there's no archaeological evidence to support the Bible. Really? There's never been one provable archaeological discovery that goes against the Bible. There's tens of thousands that support the Bible. People don't know that. People don't know how the Hebrew language is set up in the first 11 chapters of Genesis. That it is not allegory. The type of verbs that are used there in the Hebrew language are saying are only verbs that are used in historical fact. Not in allegories, not in fairy tale type stuff. This is really true, but most people have never heard this. They don't know it. Another part, yes, pride plays a major part of it, of course. Of course, it is prophesized too that the world is going to just totally rebel against God in the last days of the last days. So we know that's going to happen, but from what I experience, it's most of the time people have no idea. They just aren't trained or read on this and they just take the hearsay. Yeah. So I know this has been a unique podcast. I really appreciate all of you that have watched or have listened. A couple of asks, and I don't do a ton of ask on this podcast, but a couple of asks is number one, if you belong to a church or a community, please connect us with them. We're evidenceforfaith.org. We have multiple ways that you can contact us. If you comment or reach out directly to me, I will put you in contact with the people that can make that connection happen. We're trying to get Michael to as many strategic stages and connect with as many people as possible because strategically we want to be involved in the church and we want to be involved in your Bible studies. And so connect us with that. Number two is we're looking to raise support. We're really thankful that God has provided to date. And there's been people that have come out of the woodworks and said, hey, I love what you guys are doing and I want to invest in things like equipment, invest in things where you can get your content that's already made, digitized, so that more people can know this stuff and get this content and be able to do trips like this. And so if you are interested in supporting or know people that would love to support this ministry, again, evidenceforfaith.org, comment, reach out to us. I would love to have conversations with people that want to support our ministry or just figure out how they can help further this mission. And then last, if you want to be involved in what we're doing, whether it's like you have a gift for teaching, whether you want to go on to a trip, we're going to Israel in January, regardless if you want to be involved, we're going to just help be an ambassador for us. Again, evidenceforfaith.org. And below I will have maybe a better call to action like an email or something, but just reach out because we're trusting the Lord and God's been faithful and it's been amazing and it's been crazy to see people come out of the woodwork and help in every way possible. And we know that we need to double down and really go to the next level. And so these are some of the things that I personally am working on in the background. You see a lot of just the better wealth stuff, but I truly believe if we're going to live a wealthy life that means living intentionally and living out the things that we truly were on this earth for one time. And so let's use our talents, gifts, relationships and abilities to live a more fulfilling life. And I can't think of a better fulfillment than to see people come to know Jesus and for people to come to know this is why I believe what I believe and really equip them to not just have a feeling, but really know why they believe and what they believe. Any final words that you have? No, I just, we do look for people to let us come. I do science presentations, archeological presentations, logical presentations. And I also do, believe it or not, just plain Bible lessons too. I do a series on that, quite a few series on that. And I would love to be able to come and share stuff with your group, your organization, school, whatever, club, whatever it would be. We would love to do that and just encourage you to get involved, not in our ministry, get involved. I think we're coming into the last days, the last days. Whether or not, let's, you know, we still have the Great Commission. Let's get people out there, get the word of God out, the gospel out. But you know, the Great Commission does say to train because it says to disciple. That's training. And that's a lot of what this ministry is, just to train. And that's what I'm hoping to do. Alright guys, we appreciate you, appreciate hearing your thoughts, and thank you so much for watching to the end.