The story of an investigative journalist’s search for the truth of Jesus Christ after his wife became a believer has already sold over five million copies.
The Case for Christ, published by Zondervan and now also a movie, makes for very compelling reading. And, as a fellow journalist, I couldn’t commend Lee Strobel’s book highly enough.
I particularly liked the accounts of the court cases he has covered, chosen to introduce various aspects of his extensive scrutiny of Christianity’s foundations.
But having dedicated my retirement from the secular press to Jewish mission, I found the chapter on whether Jesus bears the fingerprint of God as the most exciting.
Lee travelled all the way from Chicago to southern California to interview Louis Lapides, a Jewish pastor who heads up a national network of 15 Messianic congregations (of Jewish believers) after an encounter with Christ in the desert, where he was spending time with friends.
After his parents divorced when he was 17, Louis was understandably distraught and proceeded to rebel from acceptable behaviour, indulging in a heady mix of sex, drugs and Eastern religion while also experiencing the horrors of the Vietnam War. All of which left him in no doubt about the very real presence of evil in the world.
Then he was challenged by a Christian on a Sunset Strip sidewalk. But he couldn’t believe in Jesus, he explained, because he was a Jew. Offered a Bible, he said he would read the Old Testament, but not the New. “Fine,” said the preacher. “Just read the Old Testament (i.e. the Jewish Bible) and ask the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – the God of Israel – to show you if Jesus is the Messiah.”
So, he did and was astonished to discover around 50 major prophecies all bearing the hallmarks of Jesus, though written centuries before he came.
As for the New Testament, he thought it would basically be “a handbook on antisemitism” and that Jesus was “a god of the Gentiles”.
But when he discovered that was clearly not the case, that it was as Jewish as the Old Testament, he came clean with God and had that epiphany in the desert, after praying: “I have to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus is the Messiah. I need to know that you, as the God of Israel, want me to believe this.”
God spoke directly to his heart, and he thus set out on a personal relationship with Jesus, the Son of God and Messiah, which made him feel “whole”. Like other Jewish seekers, he had discovered the truth of Yeshua’s words that “Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” (Luke 24:44)
This is a truly remarkable book that has obviously changed many lives including that of the author, who wrote: “I had seen defendants carted off to the death chamber on much less convincing proof!” And he concluded that “it would require much more faith for me to maintain my atheism than to trust in Jesus of Nazareth!”
The dramatic change in Lee’s own behaviour after just five months caused his five-year-old daughter Alison to ask her ‘Mommy’: “I want God to do for me what he’s done for Daddy.”
It was, after all, his wife Leslie’s conversion to Christ that prompted his investigation designed to prove her wrong.
One of his interviewees, Gary Habermas, an expert on evidence for the appearances of the resurrected Christ, had a very poignant, personal story to add – that of his late wife Debbie as he struggled through the days when she was slowly dying of stomach cancer. Of course, he knew that God raised Jesus from the dead – he had written seven books about it. And then he realised that the Lord was trying to tell him: “If Jesus was raised, Debbie will be raised.”
And I have a similar story, already mentioned in a recent article. Easter this year falls, as it often does, in the middle of Passover on April 5th, which happens to be the 26th anniversary of the day my late wife Irene died. When, at the funeral, I first saw her coffin and wondered how I would cope with delivering the eulogy I had prepared, I heard the Holy Spirit whisper to me: “She is not here; she is risen!”
I was thus revived and emboldened with the sure hope of her resurrection!
Charles Gardner is author of Israel the Chosen, available from Amazon; Peace in Jerusalem, available from olivepresspublisher.com; To the Jew First, A Nation Reborn, and King of the Jews, all available from Christian Publications International.
