Martin Luther King Jr. once said, darkness cannot
drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Stay
with me as we look at the ways that authentic
followers of Jesus have opposed evil for centuries
and the inspiration and courage it gives us to
keep up that fight today. Don't go away. Welcome
to this edition of Living on the Edge with Chip
Ingram. We are a discipleship ministry devoted
to helping Christians worldwide live out their
faith for the glory of God and the benefit of
all people. And does today's Christianity genuinely
embody the ideals and vision that Chip described?
Well, in just a minute, guest teacher John Dickerson
will unpack what we can learn from these world
-changing Christians from the past as we continue
our series, Dealing with Doubts. So with that,
here's John with his talk, Jesus, You, and the
Fight for Human Rights. There are many lights
in the world, but when it comes to the sun, there's
only one light of the world. There's only one
light that when you see it breaking over the
horizon, people in Chicago are seeing it and
people in Miami are seeing it. There's only one
light that brings the life and the warmth that
the entire planet depends on. It's like, man,
without that light, not only would we be depressed,
but we would not have life. There's light and
there's darkness in our existence physically,
and there's light and darkness in our existence
morally. For example, in the small group that
I get to be part of, there's a guy in our group
named Chris. He's an x -ray radiologist at an
emergency room. And it's really fun showing up
at small group every week because we always get
to hear another story from Chris of some person
who came in, like how in the world did that happen
to that person? But tragically, one of the things
that Chris has shared with us is that lately
there's at least one shooting at the hospital
where he works, where he's x -raying someone
who has a bullet in their body, one every single
night. And the reality is that is an expression
of moral darkness. Darkness rather than light.
There's physical darkness and light. There's
moral darkness and light. There's spiritual darkness
and light. I wonder for you right now, what evil
in the world grieves you? What evil is it that
is a moral darkness perhaps or a spiritual darkness
that just grieves you? It could be something
like violent crime for an entire city or maybe
it's bullying for your child or grandchild. You
know, kids can be so cruel. And I wonder today,
what if there were a light, just like the sun
can brighten the earth, that can brighten moral
and spiritual darkness? What if there were a
light that could brighten any evil? In fact,
could extinguish evil? Would you want to experience
that? I mean, in the same way that when you wake
up and it's 20 degrees out and it's dark and
you see the sun rising and something inside you
says, I'm so glad the sun is finally awake. What
if there was something equivalent to that for
the moral darkness in our lives, for the spiritual
darkness in our world? Would you want that for
yourself? Would you want that for the people
around you? Well, Jesus claimed. To be exactly
that light. He claimed to be not a light in the
world, but the light of the world. And so far
in this series, we've seen that Jesus of Nazareth
is a historically documented person. He's not
a myth. He's not a fable. He's more documented
than Socrates or Plato or Aristotle or even Shakespeare,
who's far more recent. Not only do we know for
sure this guy existed. But we know that we have
reliable documentation of what he said. We also
know that 2 ,000 years later, the people who
follow him have become the largest movement in
all of human history. And that's according to
non -Christian researchers at the Pew Research
Center. That one out of three people alive today
says, I'm a Christian that is a follower of this
peasant prophet. who lived 2 ,000 years ago.
And so that has led us to the conclusion, we
should look at what this guy said. I mean, he's
more influential than Steve Jobs or Elon Musk
or Thomas Edison. He's more influential than
Alexander the Great or Muhammad, the prophet
of Islam. We should look at what he said. And
what we've found within his words is that he
doesn't just claim to be a helpful teacher. or
an inspirational life coach. He claims to be
Almighty God. And we have to do something with
that. Because that's either true, and if it is,
then everything he said we should take to heart,
or it's not true. And so we've been looking at
the record of his impact on humanity. Today we
look at this quote where Jesus said in John chapter
8, I am the light of the world. Not a light in
the world, but the light of the world. And then
he says this, whoever follows me will essentially
be freed from spiritual and moral darkness or
from evil. They'll be freed from addiction, freed
from lying, freed from cheating and stealing,
freed from abusing others. Instead, they will
have the light of life. Jesus claims to be the
only light that can fully extinguish evil. I
hope that gives you some hope today, wherever
there's evil, maybe within yourself of some habit
you can't break or evil in your family system
of brokenness or evil in the world. Jesus claims
to be the only light that can fully extinguish
that. Now, in our series, we've been looking
at the greatest breakthroughs in human existence.
What I mean is, what are the things that took
us from the dark ages when life expectancy was
45 years, when there was no hospital to go to
if you were sick, people didn't know how to read
and write, slavery was a global norm, there was
no antibiotic if your child got sick, and so
as a result, many children died before age 10.
What took us as a society, as a planet from that
existence to an existence where every one of
us has a hospital that we can drive to? Every
one of us has been taught by someone else how
to read, right? We didn't go to school because
we wanted to. We live in a society that made
us do it for our own good. How did the world
change so dramatically when it was in those dark
ages, if you will? For thousands of years, what
changed it? And we saw that the top 10 hospitals
in the United States, which are also the top
hospitals in the world, we looked through the
history of them and we saw that not coincidentally,
but one after another, they were founded by followers
of Jesus who said, we're doing this to care for
the poor. And if that seems like an unbelievable
claim to you, I'd encourage you to watch part
two of this series because it's documented. We're
making these claims from things that people wrote
down, not from opinions. Now, in the book Jesus
Skeptic, there's documentation of these other
breakthroughs as well. Medicine, universities,
the scientific revolution, and education for
all. If any of this is interesting to you, I'd
encourage you to get a copy of the Jesus Skeptic
book. Now, today, we're going to dig into the
end of open and legalized slavery. And behind
me now, you see some of the well -known champions
of that. And we're going to look through each
one of these in our time today. But first, before
we do that, it's important that we set the context.
Because when we talk about history, the last
200 years is a very small time. And the reality
is if we go back thousands of years, a sad reality
about humans is that slavery has been a norm
in every major civilization up until the last
200 years. In fact, when Jesus lived, the world
that he was born into was under the Roman Empire.
We know the Romans had slaves. It's so well documented.
In fact, just this week, researchers over in
Pompeii, where a volcano kind of froze a whole
civilization, they found these tiny little slave
quarters for the slaves in Pompeii. About 40
% of the population in the world that Jesus was
born into were slaves. This was not an anomaly.
This would have also been the case in ancient
China, India, Egypt, Greece. In fact, in a historical
guide to world slavery, researchers who spent
their entire lives studying slavery throughout
human history said this. In the ancient Near
East, as in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the pre
-conquest Americas, so before the Europeans showed
up, Various forms of slavery and servitude almost
certainly emerged long before they were systematized
by laws or legal codes. So when we look at cave
drawings and ancient pottery and ancient records
for civilizations that have them, slavery shows
up all over the world. Here's how normal it was.
Some of these quotes are going to make you cringe,
and that's good. Aristotle, who most of you would
be familiar with, you'll learn about him in your
philosophy class. Aristotle lived about 300 years
before Jesus. Here's how normal slavery was.
And by the way, a lot of people say like, oh,
Aristotle, very sophisticated, wise person, right?
He once said or wrote, he who is by nature, not
his own, but another man's is by nature a slave.
Aristotle wasn't the only one. Socrates and Plato
also argued that slavery is the natural order
of human existence. And if you read their writings,
you'll see that they base this argument off of
their observation. They say we've traveled around
and every great society has slaves. Therefore,
slavery must just be part of the natural order.
This is the world that Jesus came into. And it's
not just slavery. Human rights as we know them
today, we're born into a society where we think
this is normal. But so many of our human rights,
the rights for kids to not have to work, the
rights for women, were not the norm throughout
history. Here's another thing Aristotle said,
and I hesitate to even read it out loud because
I'm like, someone's going to pull a video of
that off the internet and just clip me quoting
Aristotle on this. He said, a proper wife should
be as obedient as a slave. The female is a female
by virtue of certain lack of qualities and natural
defectiveness. I mean, that's outright evil.
It's outright evil, but this was the philosophy
for slavery, for gender equality. Back to the
evil of slavery. Here's how one researcher, Catherine
Cameron, who spent her life studying this, the
Oxford Research Encyclopedia summarizes her work
and says this. In her cross -cultural, so she
looked at all the cultures around the world.
historical research, all the data she could find
on comparative captivity. How did different cultures
do slavery? There's lots of variation. She found
that bonds people, that is slaves, those who
are physically enchained to be property of another
person, composed 10 to 70 % of the population
of most societies. So one to seven out of every
10 people in the global average. was born a slave,
and never had any hope or opportunity of that
changing. This lends credence to another researcher,
Seymour Drescher, who has asserted that freedom,
not slavery, was the peculiar institution. What
does that mean? It's more rare to live in a society
that doesn't have slaves than a society that
does throughout human history. And we know this
because even in the last 100 years, did you know
that India, the country, did not outlaw slavery
until 1976? Saudi Arabia did not outlaw slavery
until the 1960s. Slavery was outlawed in Peru
in the 1930s. China, if you went to China in
the 1930s and 40s, you would still see slaves.
It was still a normal part. of that society up
until the end of World War II when the Western
nations went in is when that changed for China.
Worldwide, this has been a plague on human existence,
a spiritual and moral darkness all through human
history. You're listening to Living on the Edge,
and we'll return you to guest teacher John Dickerson's
message in just a minute. But let me quickly
share with you, God has called us to do incredible
ministry work all around the world. And when
you regularly give to Living on the Edge, you're
a part of what we do. So consider becoming a
monthly partner today. Then visit livingontheedge
.org. We appreciate your generous support. Well,
with that, here's John. I want to skip forward
to Luke 4, verse 16, because it was in such a
world. A world where the majority of people couldn't
read, where women were often sold as property
into marriage, where slavery was the norm, where
there were not hospitals or antibiotics or immunology.
It was into that brutal world that Jesus said,
I'm the light of the world. And those who follow
me are just going to be a beacon of light in
the darkness. He said this multiple times. Here's
another example. Luke 4, 16. Jesus went to Nazareth,
which is where he'd been brought up. And on the
Sabbath day, he went into the synagogue, as was
his custom. He stood up to read. And the scroll
of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. And
unrolling it, he found the place. So he searches
through Isaiah for this passage that describes
the Messiah. God on earth to extinguish evil
from humanity. And Jesus reads it and he says,
the spirit of the Lord is on me because he has
anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom to those unjustly
imprisoned and recovery of sight for the blind.
To set the oppressed. That is the captives. That
is Jesus whole audience knew the slave class.
To set them free. Messiah will free those wrongly
imprisoned. Messiah will give physical sight
to those who've been blind. Messiah will set
the slaves free. What a expansive, impossible,
outrageous. prediction. And then Jesus looks
out at his friends, people he grew up with, and
he makes this impossible claim. Verse 21, he
says, today, this scripture is fulfilled in your
hearing. In other words, I am the Messiah. I
am the one who will set the captives free. I
am the one who will break the bonds of the oppressed.
Now, if you're a follower of Jesus and you've
been in church for a while, perhaps you've heard
this passage taught. In a spiritual metaphoric
sense that we're slaves to addictions and to
dishonesty and to all sorts of dangerous lusts
and passions. And then when we believe in Jesus,
he breaks those spiritual bonds and we can now
say no to those things and yes to good things.
And that's true. But what I want to talk about
today is the literal fulfillment of Jesus prediction.
about what his movement would do across the entire
planet. You see, if you were to fast forward
1 ,830 years from the time Jesus said that, and
if you were to be here in the United States,
you'd be in a nation where half the country thinks
slavery is evil and half still thinks it's okay,
and there's great unrest and a war is about to
begin, a civil war. And within that time, it
was a great battle of ideas or ideologies. And
we know the specific people who led the charge
through their writings and their posters and
their books to convince the entire nation that
slavery is an evil because we live under a God
who is just, who has made all people equal. And
that was the basis of their argument. And we
know this because of their documentation. For
example, this publication called The Liberator.
Any secular historian, you don't have to be a
Christian to look at the facts. would say that
the Liberator was, if not the most, one of the
most influential publications in turning people's
opinions. See, there were people in the North
who hadn't personally seen slavery. And they're
like, well, I don't have a slave. I'm against
it, but what does it have to do with me? And
they needed to be educated about what life was
actually like in the South and for slaves. And
publications like the Liberator are what did
that. And in time turned the conscience of an
entire nation. Now within the Liberator, you
can see in the middle that Jesus is standing
there. That there's a cross behind him. And that
there's a slave kneeling and praying for freedom.
And there's a Caucasian man sort of repenting
on the other side. And that they're on equal
footing before God. Now if you were to study.
The banners and the words here, I've highlighted
a couple of them. You'd see that the words around
or on the top there above Jesus say, I come to
break the bonds of the oppressed. It's the verse
we read in Luke 4. It's Jesus saying, me and
my followers, we will set the captives free.
In the ribbon beneath, you see some other words
of Jesus. It's in the King James, an older translation,
but they're quoting Jesus who said in Matthew
22, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
Now, the reality is that this time in history,
people in the United States and Europe and Western
Europe were the first societies in all of history
where most people could now read. And this had
come about because the Protestant Christians
wanted people to read the Bible. And all of that
is documented. And as a result, this King James
Bible was an almost universal textbook. So when
the abolitionists, those are the people who fought
to abolish slavery, when they tied their argument
to the word of God, you have for the first time
in history, an entire nation where most people
have read the Bible for themselves. It was a
unique window of time. And they say, it's according
to the Bible. that we have to overthrow this,
even if we're not part of it, even if it's out
of sight. We have to give our lives to follow
Jesus. And if you imagine a barn full of kindling
and a match, the kindling was a nation that knew
how to read the Bible for themselves. The match
were the abolitionists who, like a spark in the
darkness, said, we will give our lives to end
this evil and injustice of slavery. It took them
hundreds of years. In fact, it started in 1688.
Here's a document well known by historians from
the Quaker Christians in Germantown. So 1688,
the United States does not exist yet. This is
a colony. This is a new land. It's pioneers.
They're cutting down trees with axes. They're
dying of cholera and stuff. And these Quaker
Christians who are reading the Bible for themselves.
wrote the document behind me, which most historians
say is the first ever universal declaration of
equal human rights. That all people should be
treated equally, regardless of their gender or
their race or what class they were born into
or even their religion, that all people should
be treated equally because of Jesus and him saying
over and over again, you can read this document
for yourself. And it quotes about eight times
Luke 6, 31. Jesus saying, as ye would that men
should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.
That was the Quakers mantra. We call it the golden
rule today. And in modern English, it sounds
more like this. Do unto others as you would have
them do to you. Or at an elementary level, treat
others the way you want to be treated. That was
their whole thesis. This is Living on the Edge
with Chip Ingram. And you've been listening to
the first part of our guest teacher, John Dickerson's
message, Jesus, You, and the Fight for Human
Rights, from our series, Dealing with Doubts.
John and Chip will join us shortly to share some
additional thoughts on what we've heard. If someone
were to ask you, how do you know Jesus actually
lived? Or can we really trust the Bible? What
would you say? Join pastor and award -winning
journalist John Dickerson as he explores these
complex topics. Drawing on evidence from various
credible sources and the impact Christians have
had throughout history, John builds a credible
case for believing in Jesus. Our hope is that
as you listen, you'll be able to confidently
say, Jesus is real, the Bible is true, and I
can prove it. In fact, we have some valuable
tools to back you up. Anytime John or Chip mention
a book, podcast, or article in this series, you
can easily find it on our resources page at livingontheedge
.org. We want to equip you with practical Bible
-centered materials to use personally or share
with others. So check out the resources page
at livingontheedge .org today. Well, Chip's joined
me in studio now to share a brief word before
we go. Chip? Thanks so much, Dave. Hey, I wanna
take just a minute to ask you something really
important. If you've been impacted by this ministry,
would you please pray about partnering with Living
on the Edge in a new way right now. Nearly everything
we do is dependent on contributions from partners
like you. Our ability to reach people through
radio, online or our app, sharing and developing
small group resources, providing broadcasts that
are international in Asia and the Middle East
and literally dark places around the globe. Please
pray how you might be able to come alongside
and be a partner to Living on the Edge. to help
us reach people with the truth of God's Word.
Thank you in advance for whatever God leads you
to do. Thanks, Chip. As you've heard, God has
called this ministry to help Christians live
like Christians, both here in the U .S. and internationally.
So if you'd like to help us fulfill that mission,
we'd love to have you join the team by becoming
a monthly partner. Set up a regular monthly gift
by visiting livingontheedge .org or by calling
888 - Again, that's 888 -333 -6003 or go to livingontheedge
.org. App listeners, tap Donate. Now, with a
few final thoughts before we wrap up, here are
Chip and John. Thanks, Dave. John, it's good
having you here again. And I just can't tell
you how much I appreciate you sharing with the
Living on the Edge family. You know, the first
half of your message focused on one of the biggest
blights in world history, slavery. And honestly,
we're still dealing with the fallout of that
evil today. Yet in the face of this darkness,
you repeated Jesus' challenge for us to be the
light. Could you take a few minutes and share
some real practical ways that we can be the light
for Jesus in these dark days? Yeah, thanks, Chip.
That is a hard question and such an important
question. I mean, how do we today be the light
of Christ? And one of the things that saddened
me, one of the realities of this research about
the history of slavery in the world is that there
were some so -called Christians who were on the
wrong side of slavery. And some of them went
to church on Sundays and carried Bibles, but
they didn't actually read those Bibles. and do
what the Bible said. It was the Christians, those
Quakers that we learned about, and many others
who took the word of God literally and said,
if Jesus came to set the captives free, that's
what we're going to do. And so we have no hope
of shining the light of Christ. unless we're
actually obeying what he said to do. And it's
so important for every one of us who would call
ourselves a follower of Jesus to make sure, am
I truly reading the words of Jesus in the gospels?
And am I allowing the spirit of God to convict
me, to prompt me? to really be doing what Jesus
said. And then the second thing I would say,
how do we be the light is that we, as Jesus once
said, not hide it under a bushel, not hide it
under a basket, let our light so shine. And what
did Jesus say? That men would see your good deeds.
and glorify your Father in heaven. So we need
to be living among people who aren't yet believers
in a way that they see, notice, our actions in
a way that points them to God. And the way we
do that is by never forgetting that the solution
to the world's problems is Jesus. We live in
an age where things get labeled and get stereotyped
and get prejudged. And sometimes as followers
of Jesus, we're labeled and prejudged. And we
can easily fall into trying to defend ourselves
with words and getting into debates and arguments
about this label or that term or I'm for this
group or against that group. Instead, we shine
the light through our actions and by letting
both our actions and words profess that Jesus
is the light of the world, that he's the solution
to the world's problems. He absolutely is, John.
Great word. And we want you to better know this
light and be prepared to share the good news
of Jesus with others. And that's why during this
series, we've bundled Chip's Why I Believe book
together with John's book, Jesus Skeptic. We
hope that through these resources, you'll encounter
Jesus the God -man and understand why we can
fully trust and follow the teachings of the Bible.
For complete details about this two -book bundle,
call 888 -333 -6003 or go to livingontheedge
.org. App listeners tap special offers. Join
us next time as our guest teacher, John Dickerson,
picks up in our series, Dealing with Doubts.
Until then, I'm Dave Drewy, thanking you for
listening to this edition of Living on the Edge.