Ep 103 | Who Is the Real Jesus? | Dallas Jenkins | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Well, Easter is this Sunday.

And I think about where we were last year, last Easter.

We were told by a different president that he thought all of this would be done with COVID by Easter.

We're still in it this Easter.

I don't want to talk about COVID.

I don't want to talk about the news of the day.

I want to talk about something really important, and that is Easter.

We all love Christmas, but really Easter

is the reason for the season.

I look at Christmas even as just the gift and the start of that baby's life that culminates with Easter.

So, as we sat back with our

producers, we were going through the Rolodex on who could really talk about Easter.

And for me, there was one name that I really wanted to talk to.

And we'll see how this conversation goes, but it's the guy who created an app and a series called The Chosen.

It's an entire show about the life of Jesus.

It is also the highest crowdfunded TV series or film project of all time.

And season two comes out on Easter Sunday.

I have watched this with my teenage son.

It is phenomenal, really phenomenal.

There is nothing that you should spend your time on for entertainment more than The Chosen.

You can get the app, it's free.

They've made it free for everybody to watch and easy for everybody to watch.

It is an app, but they also will be able to throw it right to whatever you have as a screen so you can watch it on television with your family.

The guy we chose to have on today was doing something everybody was told was impossible.

He's making Hollywood-level movies and TV shows that have a Christian message,

but it doesn't feel like a christian message yeah a message you know it's like i hate those and johnny uh you know abortion is wrong right

yes but this evil businessman i mean stop stop

this hasn't been an easy project But I don't really want to talk to him about the project.

I do want you to know that it, season two begins on Sunday, Easter Sunday, and you should watch it.

You should watch season one and season two.

It truly truly is phenomenal.

But I want to talk to him because I think he really understands

Jesus, the real Jesus.

You know, he's been called a heretic for working with people from other faiths, a blasphemer by people of those faiths.

He's upset Christians on all sides.

He's upset everybody.

But he's kept his faith and he's kept his humility.

And he doesn't judge.

He has the real spirit of Christ with him.

He also has become a bit of a historian, and you will see it in The Chosen.

It's real.

It feels real.

It feels exactly what it was at the time of Christ.

We're going to just talk about Jesus.

On the podcast today, welcome Dallas Jenkins.

Dallas, welcome to the podcast.

I spent a lot of time with my team trying to figure out who would be the best guest to have the week of Easter.

And, you know, we could have gotten a lot of preachers and pastors and, you know, some legendary figures.

But I chose you for a reason.

Your

series on Jesus called The Chosen is phenomenal on several different layers, but

it is so

not just historically accurate.

It is so unlike the way Hollywood or a church film would ever be made about Jesus.

It's real.

And that's what I wanted to have a conversation about this Easter week is the real story of Jesus.

So welcome.

Thank you so much.

I'll take your introduction as we could have gotten someone great, but we chose you.

No, we could have gotten somebody legendary, but we have you because you are a great, great person that has

a very different

angle to the

traditional way of telling the Christ story.

Does that connect with you?

Absolutely.

And I appreciate you having me on.

And it's a privilege to talk to you again.

But yeah, that's, I think this Easter is,

as we launch season two, it's bringing up all of these conversations again, and especially Easter of 2021.

I mean, coming off of the last year,

the discussion of who Jesus is and who Jesus was

when he was on earth, what his mission was, what our mission should be, I believe has gotten quite skewed in a lot of the pop culture dialogue.

Yeah.

And I will tell you this.

I go to a very traditional kind of service every Sunday.

You know, we still wear a suit and we sing from the hymn book and everything else.

But I think that is changing, and part of that is good.

It needs to change.

The church is outside of those four walls.

That's just like a quick pit stop to get refueled to be able to make it the rest of the week and do the right things.

So now you're looking at

a country that its membership to churches in the last 12 months is now down by 50%.

I don't know if that's going to recover as quickly as it went away.

Many people that were going were

they've now broken the habit of going every Sunday, going to church.

And the millennials in particular are looking for something what they would describe as more real, more authentic.

So let's start with that.

Yeah, it's a really interesting

question.

I think the same question applies to things like movie theaters is, is the desire, the pent-up desire, going to cause people to be even more excited to get to church or to movie theaters because they've been denied it for the last year?

Or is it going to cause people to get into the habit of living without it?

I will say this.

Some of these things, some of these things that have happened as a result of the lockdowns and mandates and all that stuff, most of which I'm significantly opposed to as a libertarian, but some of it has weeded out some of the bad, you know, which which

can be a good thing.

And I think that's even true of some churches.

I'm a passionate evangelical churchgoer myself, but there are probably some churches that needed to not survive,

which I think is okay.

But what I've seen with The Chosen

is

that when the pandemic hit and we decided to make the show free,

we were only going to do it for a few weeks, just kind of as a goodwill gesture.

And the moment we did it, not only did our viewership

go through the roof, but our income quadrupled.

And that's what we call God's impossible math.

We made the show free, and we ended up getting far more income than we expected because we thought we would lose money.

And the reason is, and the reason I bring this up, is because we hear over and over again, I need this now more than ever.

I need God more than ever.

I'm pursuing my Bible more than ever.

I'm pursuing Jesus more than ever.

So that part of it, I do believe, is causing a return more than ever, not just the show, but I think the desire for Jesus, the desire for God.

I don't know about church, but I do know about that.

The relationship with God is increased.

Yes.

And this is where Thomas Paine got in trouble and was misunderstood.

He's known as the first, you know, America's first atheist.

He wasn't.

I have the letter that he wrote from France that says, no, no, no.

They have a problem with God because in France they associate God with the church and the church with the state.

So I'm just trying to separate that tangled mess.

And I think that's what we're hearing from

millennials and those who are just coming of age now, that they have a real need and a desire to connect with something bigger than themselves, a desire to connect with God, but all of the traditional ways of connecting don't appeal to them at all.

That's absolutely right.

And it's why they are finding their new God

in certain political movements, certain social movements.

Social justice, yeah.

And I'm seeing, and I'm sure you're seeing this as well,

this really weird thing that's happening where the roles are being reversed.

When I was growing up as a believer, we were the ones, the Christians were the ones who were protesting and trying to cancel people.

And then we learned our lesson and stopped doing that.

And because we realized it's just, A, it doesn't work.

B,

it's not a good look.

That's not really biblical.

And it's not a good thing.

It's not a good thing.

It's like the argument.

I mean, you're a libertarian and a Christian, so you'll understand this.

I've never been against gay marriage.

That's between you and God.

The marriage license involves the state, and the state has no place in that.

I mean, even in my relationship, I don't want the state involved in mine.

And we've chosen these really poor

arguments that have boxed us into this kind of people that I don't think we are and I don't want to be.

No, and I think

when marriage debates came up, one of the things I would sometimes say was,

we made this mistake a long time ago

back when we were a more puritanical society and were

a more more Christian nation and we did think we did kind of confuse this whole we want freedom but not totally because we want the government to be the one that arbitrates marriage and approves of our faith I don't think we saw the future I don't think we saw that yeah eventually that's going to come back and bite us in the butt

and I think it has and but what that's what's happening now in reverse is yes this belief that when I want something to be true in society, when I want something better for society, the government is the best way to enact that.

And that is, I think, in many times, many ways,

therefore, someone's form of religion.

I need security in

my faith.

And so it used to be done poorly by using the government to enact literal religion.

Now it's being done to enact a different kind of religion.

And both things were anathema to what Jesus was preaching.

He did not shy away from anything controversial, but it was never about the system.

It was always about the heart.

Yeah.

And I think this is going to come back and backfire eventually

in a couple of ways.

I think it's going to backfire just like it did on Christians that were like, ah, we're going to stop drinking because the state's going to help us out.

I mean, that just was horrible.

And

you become this, I don't know, the church lady.

You know what I mean?

And nobody wants to be the old church lady from Dana Carvey.

And I think that is going to happen eventually to the left.

But because it's with the government and it is much more in bed, the social justice and even climate change

is requiring now a

total adherence, or you're a blasphemer,

you're a heretic, and it is a religion.

But

because that religion and that belief is now

coexisting with the government, you're going to end up with France in the end, French Revolution.

Yeah, and I think

this applies to the left and the right.

And so I, you know, I have, I'm looking at our, even just our show, our casting crew, probably, it's probably split down the middle,

Christian, non-Christian, left, right, right, all of that.

And I say it to both my friends on the left and the right.

It's the beauty of being a libertarian.

You find yourself offending people both multiple times.

But I'm saying

Twitter has become the church lady.

They just don't use the word church.

And lest we criticize them too much and call them the judgmental prudes, lest we, you know, let's remember we sometimes like to use the government for our advantage too, just because we justify it by saying, but it's a good thing.

It's what the Bible says.

Right.

And God doesn't want us to be

doing smoking marijuana.

Therefore, the government should.

And I'm like,

you're starting your sentences the exact same way your opponents are.

Exactly right.

Let's really be cautious because the fill-in-the-blank of what we want the government and what morality we want the government to act out

is always going to change dependent on who happened to be elected.

And I don't think that's a world you want to be in.

And that's why.

Yeah, go ahead.

You're seeing this,

and Christians are learning this right now.

We're seeing what it's like to be the minority, or at least in the governing sense, that we are the minority.

The corporations seem to be on the other side.

So now we feel it the way it must have felt to others when we were doing this.

And what's amazing to me is

how many people are not learning their lesson.

How many people on our side are saying, we've got to take it back so we can get rid of all these people.

And you're like, wait, that doesn't work.

That's the kind of stuff that leads to death camps or concentration camps because at some point you can't convince a very large portion of the population

to go along with you.

And so then you're left with, well, then what do I do?

And if you've gone down this road too far, the only thing is, is they're standing in the way of progress or they're standing in the way of the Lord.

And so they have to be eliminated.

That's where horrible, horrible things happen.

Yeah.

And here's the other thing.

Jesus didn't try to eliminate horrible things from happening.

In fact, he promised them.

And so every time that his followers would say, well, when are we going to overthrow these people?

Or when are we going to rid ourselves of these enemies?

And in fact, speaking as a libertarian who hates most taxes,

his disciples even asked Jesus, what do we do about all this onerous taxation?

And Jesus' answer on these questions was always, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's whatever.

Just pay under Caesar what's Caesar's.

I'm not, I don't care about that.

He really, it's a lesson for me, but I think it's a lesson for everybody is he always was like, yeah, that's just not why I'm here.

Let's focus on the heart.

Where are you going to be?

Where's your heart?

Regardless of the circumstances, because the circumstances are going to be psycho.

They're just going to look different.

Yeah.

They're going to be the cycle forever.

Yeah.

Let's talk about that difference in Jesus here.

Because

if you don't, and I think this is something that the left understood through Hollywood, that they could come in and change the heart.

They could change and soften the heart on things by by telling particularly different, you know, a particular story in a very heartwarming way.

You could change people

in the course of a society.

And they have done that.

However, I don't think they're doing that really now, at least as effectively as they used to be.

And conservatives and Christians have always been bad at that.

Until really, honestly, you are, I think, the best example of a storyteller to fit the time and to tell these stories in a way that I've not seen them told before.

They're still true to the story, but

they're not traditional.

And so they affect you deeper, especially if you're somebody who

doesn't like all that churchy stuff.

Yeah, I think part of the reason why the chosen is resonating with both believers and non-believers is because in many ways, it's a response to or at least the result of a lot of my experience as a strong evangelical Christian my whole life.

And my dad, same thing, my dad wrote the Left Behind books.

You know him.

You've had him on your show.

25 years ago, last year was the anniversary of Left Behind.

So it's been this really amazing, full-circle thing to see this kind of happening again, where the Bible being brought to life in a fresh way.

But what I think is resonating with people is that

the chosen is the result of two things.

One, watching really great television and movies my whole life,

but most of them, nearly all of them, not made by Christians.

I've learned a lot of nearly every good storytelling technique

that

ultimately came from the Greeks and came from Aristotle and whatnot, and came from Old Testament.

But

most of it has come from Hollywood.

They are brilliant storytellers.

And so I don't shun them like a lot of others, you know, but like when I was growing up, again, I was part of a strong Christian

culture that was rejecting Hollywood.

And so that was a mistake.

The response to that was to make Christian entertainment,

but when you reject Hollywood in all of its good and bad, you're rejecting...

That includes the good.

And so Christian entertainment has largely been really bad, including some of the stuff I've done myself.

I don't hold myself exempt from that.

Point being, the chosen is in many ways like a,

I don't want to be what I've seen before, particularly in Jesus portrayals.

I mean, how many Jesus movies and miniseries have you seen as a believer in Jesus, Glenn, going, gosh, that's not a Jesus I would ever follow.

He's boring.

Right.

Right.

He's British.

You know, not that I'm against Brits, but I don't want my Jesus to be British.

I know.

It's so strange.

I don't know why Hollywood always makes everyone, even the Germans in World War II were British in our movies.

It's crazy, but I digress.

Go ahead.

Right.

So

I just, I always watch Jesus projects going, all right, here we go.

My hero finally portrayed.

Oh, he's so boring, you know,

or, oh, I don't identify with anybody that he's surrounding himself with.

And I can't identify with him because he's perfect.

And he doesn't really make for a great protagonist because he doesn't have anything to learn like any good protagonist.

So, the chosen is again, I think, a solution or attempt, at least an attempt to be a solution to a lot of problems that I've faced just growing up.

In that, I never had good entertainment

that

matched my principles and my values.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

So, Dallas,

let me go back to Jesus here.

Let's talk about him

as

a role model.

A lot of people

on both sides sides get him very, very wrong

because he wasn't about hell and damnation.

He was about repentance and forgiveness.

And quietly stating, with an exception of making money off of God and doing something to a child, he's very, very mild on everything.

And he's only asking for you to change your heart.

And we lose this as Christians because we fall back on the, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?

Then I guess when you say yes, it doesn't matter what you do even after that, you're good, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

It's the changing of the heart.

Now, on the left,

people are saying that he's a socialist,

he would be out marching with BLM.

I don't see Jesus as a sign carrier or

an organizer of protests.

So who was he?

Yeah, that's a great question.

And I'm not just saying this to be cautious.

I'm saying this because it's true.

I'm not trying to land in the middle here, but it is absolutely true that both sides, I believe, have a tendency to get this wrong.

And I've been on both sides of these arguments.

Jesus

absolutely believed in the least of these, absolutely served at the least of these, absolutely abhorred discrimination in any form.

Everything that I see in protests over the last year, I shouldn't say everything, but a good chunk of what I've seen in protests from both sides, some of which I've agreed with, some of which I haven't,

I believe Jesus would,

for the most part, agree with on a...

I even don't like to use the word agree with as though he's agreeing with someone else's position.

He sets the positions.

We agree or disagree with him, but uh, so I want to make that clear.

But uh, absolutely caring for the poor, absolutely serving others, absolutely.

I mean, if you're a boss of a company and you're not taking care of your people, um, you're not doing what Jesus wanted.

If you're a husband, um, if I mean, when we talk about racial discrimination, gender discrimination, all of those things, um, absolutely, Jesus was all about ridding his

people of any of those prejudices to an extreme degree.

But is the

okay, go ahead, but.

Well, I was just going to say,

the big but is

never did he use governmental or religious systems to enact those truths.

He always said, those religious systems, those government systems are traps.

You will start to rely on them instead of your heart.

And he specifically called out the Pharisees all the time.

And even though he said, do what they say,

they're believing the correct things, but not what they do and not how they act it out.

He would say to them, You are, your heart is not,

your heart has been consumed by the law, not by the heart.

And your heart is not for the people.

So Jesus absolutely was a revolutionary.

He absolutely was a, let's break down the walls, but they were never physical walls.

They were all.

He wasn't a revolutionary in the way we think of revolutionaries now, like Che.

You know, when he stood on race, that's really one of the big points of the story of the Good Samaritan.

The Good Samaritan was Samaritan, Samaritans were not

liked.

They were an enemy.

They were below,

you know, the Jews.

And

we just don't associate with them at all.

His point is, this Samaritan Samaritan is good because of what his heart is.

Judge him by the character of his soul, not by where he came from or what he looks like.

Yeah, and

he also said he referred to a she.

The first person he revealed himself as the Messiah to publicly was a woman, a Samaritan woman who was not only looked down on by Jews, was looked down on by fellow Samaritans as someone who

had had five previous husbands.

She was out at a well in the middle of the day, the middle of the heat.

Women always got their water in the morning before it got too hot.

She was out there in the middle of the day because in the heat because she was outcast.

She was not with the other women.

And that's who Jesus met with in the middle of the day to give some truth that changed history and revealed himself as the Messiah.

And she was in many ways the very first evangelist about Jesus being the Messiah.

And then they ended up spending three days in Samaria, a place where they were absolutely racist towards, the Jewish people were, and vice versa,

very much prejudiced towards.

And he kept, that's what he was doing.

He was like, I'm going to the places no one else goes, and I'm talking to the people no one else talks to.

And again, to illustrate, he didn't do it through governmental or religious systems.

He was always doing it outside the system.

And that's what caused him to die.

That's what killed him.

The systems were like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Don't upset the apple cart here.

But But he wasn't also doing it to try to make, I mean, he was obviously trying to make a point, but he wasn't doing it like, I'm going to strategically go over here and be with these people.

So that way people will see, and then I'm going to go over here.

It was, he was led by the problem, and he was doing no more than loving people.

Yeah, I would say there's one exception to that,

which is, which we cover in season two, the healing at the the pool of the Bethesda.

One of the things we cover in episode four of season two is, and you see glimpses of it in the trailer that's out, is

there is a scenario that I believe that he healed this man on the Sabbath and told him to pick up his mat on the Sabbath when he probably could have just, the guy had been crippled for over 30 years.

He could have done it the next day.

The guy would have been fine with that too.

I do believe he did that on Sabbath just to,

we say in the show, stir up the the water a little bit, but to kind of stir up a little bit of,

again,

I don't think just for the purpose of doing that, but to make the point that same thing with his disciples eating on Sabbath, which was also set at the apocart, was whether or not he did it on purpose to start the problem, that I don't know.

But I do know that he certainly didn't care that he was upsetting some people

was the heart.

Yeah, wasn't that more about the law?

I mean, mean, if your ox is in the mire, you know, I know the Sabbath, but we've got to do God's work, and we have to do the things that we have to do.

So it may not even have been about stirring things up as much as this is God's work, helping people, good people, loving people.

That's God's work.

And we should always be about God's work.

Yeah, and how can you let a day of the week interfere with the ultimate goal of all of this, even the ultimate goal of the law.

The law that God established for the Israelites in the Old Testament, which was quite restrictive, was in many ways to show their need for a Savior, the fact that they can't live up to the law.

But what the Pharisees did was they took the law, much of which was intended for good, and then they even added to it.

They added non-biblical,

non-Torah laws, traditional laws, oral traditional laws that became scripture.

Not literally.

They became gospel-like to these to these people.

And

I think

he came and went, No,

you've completely missed the point.

Now, you know,

I left the room.

Now I got to clean it back up again.

It's amazing to me that you would say this.

I just read an article where they said, with all of the things that we're now doing by law through administration,

you know, through the, you know,

the SEC and

the FCC and

all of these agencies under any administration, the Constitution has gone from a couple of pages to 3,000 pages.

And I'm sure most of it was done with good intent, but you've along the way lost the entire point of our Constitution.

And that's what Jesus was saying about God's law.

You've missed the point.

And they'd literally done what you just said.

They had added pages.

I mean, that's the thing.

It had gotten more and more and more to where, well, we've said you shouldn't work on Sabbath because that's a day of rest.

Good thing.

But, well, what constitutes working?

Well, I mean, and then it got to the place where people were so burdened by it that it was costing them, and many times it was costing them their lives.

They would be hungry because they couldn't, you know, they were being taxed by the Romans, oppressed by the Romans, so they couldn't, they didn't have as much money.

So now they can't even go try to get food on a certain day.

I mean, and so that's why when Jesus was stopped by the Pharisees, which is another scene we cover in season two, where his disciples are eating on Sabbath or picking the heads of grain, and the Pharisees come in and go, whoa, whoa, you're not allowed to do that.

How can you let your followers do that?

What kind of Messiah are you?

And he says,

you know, Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

Or am I getting that reversed?

Yeah, Sabbath, that's true.

Yeah, Sabbath was made for the man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

then, of course, he mentions that he's Lord of the Sabbath and he can, you know, he's the one who can decide how this is interpreted.

But he brings up even King David, King David from the Old Testament, where he says, Don't you remember, guys, when he was desperate and he was starving and he needed food and he actually ate the bread of the presence, which was like holy bread, and he ate it on this day.

Like, you're, and he could be reminded of that.

And they're like, what are you saying?

You're like, David?

And he's like, actually, I'm greater than David.

You know, that was when this all started to go.

But the point being is, he constantly was saying, you can't let the law become the thing.

The law is merely a guide, you know, a guardrail, but it's ultimately about the heart.

Dallas,

Gandhi,

I really like Gandhi.

Although parts of his life, he was an incredible racist.

It's kind of like Churchill.

I really like Churchill until you read about what he did in India.

You know,

everybody has a dark side to them, and

the point of life is, are you getting better or are you getting worse?

But Gandhi,

he said,

you know, I love this Jesus of the Christians.

I love him.

I just have a problem with some of his followers.

And I kind of feel the same way at times.

And I'm sure some of his followers feel the same way about me as well.

But he, in the end, was appealing to Christians because they understood that peaceful

same thing as Martin Luther King.

When you look at history,

you have another figure from the same time period, and that's Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

And

I don't know if Dietrich Bonhoeffer really understood or not,

but he believed that Gandhi was right, Jesus was right, and it is this peaceful non-compliance that is the the secret.

And it truly has to be based in love and really following the example set by Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer didn't make an impact because the churches had already been lost.

The spirit of that, of Christianity, if you will, Judeo-Christian principles, had so been almost eradicated in society, and most people just started closing down, it was too late for them.

Do you

are we approaching the same kind of situation to where

we've got to work on the human heart now because there comes a time when it's not there anymore?

It's not, you don't just get it.

It requires some work to keep it going on.

Yeah, so I think the answer is definitely yes, yes, that we are approaching a time in which

the church,

and by that I mean the large church,

the Christ bride,

are

losing or possibly have lost, certainly lost the majority influence.

I'm sure there's, of course, still some influence, but there always will be.

It's not influence I'm talking about.

It's the

I talk to many Christians who say,

yeah, yeah, the time for peaceful, you know, talking to the other side, and they're just, they no longer believe, and I'm not saying the majority, but there are many Christians that no longer believe that

Jesus is enough, that,

you know, the example of Martin Luther King is just not,

you're not able to apply that now and make any headroom.

And I think that's dead wrong.

Yeah, so I understand what you're saying.

I would agree with that.

I rarely compare Jesus to any other earthly

because it's so, he was about something so much bigger.

But I definitely get what you're saying.

I just don't believe there's, I don't believe there's a choice in the matter.

And I don't believe Jesus gave that choice.

He specifically said, there will be trouble.

You will be persecuted.

This is not going away.

It's only going to get worse.

And the only chance you have, the only hope you have is your human heart and in excuse me and in your relation and in your relationship with others and that's why he kept saying you know love others love you know uh serve others it was always about um

it started with worshiping god of course it starts with the vertical um towards god and and and

the repentance and the acceptance and the surrender to god but how we live it out

I mean, I just, I can't emphasize it enough.

It was always about the heart and the personal, including his miracles.

That's one of the things that we really focus on in the show is, and that's one of the things that I really, I think, discovered as I'm doing the more research I do and the more I try to understand this man that I'm portraying in the show, is even his miracles were small.

He occasionally did, you know, the feeding of the 5,000, for example.

But more often than not, I mean, his first public miracle was a favor for his friends because his mom asked him to.

When you realize that, what Emmanuel means, Emmanuel means God with us, which is traditionally

a Christmas term, but it really applies to who Jesus was all the time.

He was with us and his miracles, he wasn't up there on stage doing magic tricks to wow the crowds to prove to a mass amount of people who he was.

It was one-on-one, and it was always small.

And he would always use

innocuous things to do it, like mud to heal a man's sight.

You know, just little things that are very common that he would do to change someone's life.

And that's the thing that just wrecks me every time, and I get emotional even thinking about it, is some of the scenes that we've portrayed, even the way that I portray them as a filmmaker, I oftentimes will kind of like shrink the visual and get it to where it's Jesus' eyes and the recipient of the miracle's eyes.

And you're seeing reactions of a person and how the miracle is impacting them, not just the recipient of the miracle, but the observer.

So Matthew the tax collector, for example, in season one, his journey accelerates because of what he witnesses Jesus do to someone else personally.

That's the huge thing.

And so

Jesus always was a lot of times getting away from the crowds to be with one person or to be with just 12 people.

It was always so personal.

So that's the thing that I, where I fully agree with you is

we don't have a choice in the matter.

This world is not our home.

It's going to be this way until God's kingdom comes.

We are

only, things are only going to get worse externally.

I believe that.

And

so

whether we believe that or not, or whether we believe it looks like it did 2,000 years ago, all of that is up for debate.

But Jesus, over and over and over and over and over again, your heart, your heart, your heart.

It's about me and you, this relationship here.

So, when we say, well, that's not enough, peaceful protest isn't enough, peaceful non-compliance is enough, we got to storm the gates.

I just go, well, not if you want to follow Jesus's example.

Yeah, exactly right.

And, you know, it's it also goes in another direction.

Um,

you know, it sounds kind of defeatist coming from Jesus, where he says, you know, the poor will always be among you.

Um,

wait a minute, he cares about the poor.

Why isn't he, Why isn't he telling us to get together?

Because there is there, I don't know what it is, but this condition of

being poor

is never going to be cured.

When we have a war against poverty, we can do everything we should be doing.

We can do so much more as a people through our churches personally.

But I've never felt charitable on April 15th.

Never.

And that's not a day of charity to me.

And there is something about doing it individually and not worried about the global picture.

It's truly one-on-one.

Yeah, that's a great point.

And you think about how much

money and time and charitable energy has been spent when some of these big

organizations, charitable organizations like Compassion International or World Vision or whatever,

what do they do

to generate the most income?

They have you sponsor one child.

They send you a picture of somebody because they know that that's actually going to generate more than when you're trying to, if you think about

the mass all at once, it's overwhelming.

Yeah, you give up.

And when you mention that that quote from Jesus, which is such a wonderful quote, where he says the poor, you know, well, it's not, I shouldn't say it's a wonderful quote, it's a sad quote, but when he says the poor will always be poor.

What he's responding to,

he's actually defending someone who's spending tons of money on perfume to pour on his feet.

He's actually defending.

We always say today we're always criticizing anyone who, you know, who owns something fancy, or even sometimes we even criticize people in the church for

some sort of

elaborate presentation.

And I personally, I do advocate for efficiency and good stewardship of whatever money we have.

And I don't want God, you know, Christ turning over the tables in my house anytime soon.

But Jesus, it's something we oftentimes forget is that Jesus was actually defending a woman who's pouring expensive perfume on his feet and saying,

there will always be poor.

Let's thank her and reward her for her devotion.

And the reason that he was honoring it is because it was an outpouring of her devotion.

And this was the way to do it.

Nicodemus, the same thing.

Nicodemus, at the end of Christ's life, when he gave so much to the spices and the perfumes, it was a visual representation of his desperation and his worship of God.

Now, maybe you might find this blasphemous.

I don't know, but I hope not.

I always am,

because I've had the experience of growing up poor, then working my way up and having a lot of money in my 20s, and then just being insane

and just being stupid and egotistical and driven by money.

I lost it all.

And then I regained

my, after I was poor again, the second time, I regained some of that.

And so I have a different look.

And I always think, because I've really wrestled with money.

How does this fit in a spiritual life?

And a couple of things come to mind is

Jesus talks about how his father is building mansions for us.

He's not building a co-op city.

We are having a mansion built for us.

So it's not the stuff per se.

You know,

when I lost my money the first time, when I was really driven by money, I had a car that I absolutely loved, and I cried the day it went back to the dealership.

I actually cried.

I'm so humiliated if the Lord, when the Lord shows that to me, I'm just going to be, I know, I know.

But

now, if I lose something,

it was great.

It was fun.

It was nice while we had it, but that's not what's driving my life.

And the difference here is that we're all seemingly missing is it's not a problem being rich or poor.

There are many people poor that are a lot happier than rich people, and a lot of rich people that do really good things

with their money, and they shouldn't be demonized as evil.

You know what I mean?

Oh, 100%.

And no, it's not blasphemous at all.

And yeah, you're absolutely right.

When we're in heaven, we're not going to be in the nation-state of Chaz.

We'll be in

pretty nice digs

from what I understand.

But yeah, Jesus never

criticized the rich for being rich.

In fact, he gave multiple multiple parables about the importance of earning your money and multiplying what you're given.

And I mean, he actually rebuked those who were given something and then they just held on to it

or they didn't invest it or they didn't double it.

And they thought it would save it.

Well, of course.

And when he was traveling,

and when he sent his disciples to travel and when missionaries went on their journeys in the book of Acts, They had to stay in the homes of wealthy people.

They were sustained by the generosity of wealthy people.

In fact,

even there were women who followed Jesus who sustained his ministry financially.

Well, they didn't get their money by being poor, and he defended it like we as we just talked about.

He defended the woman who poured the expensive perfume on his on his feet.

And he talked about the beauty of

feasts, big, elaborate wedding feasts, and all of those things he always talked about in a positive way.

But he was very, very explicit about what what you just said, which is if it's got your heart, then you're in big trouble.

And it's in fact, you're going to have a harder time getting into heaven than a camel is going to get into through an eye of a needle.

I mean, he was very hard on those to whom did have to those who did have those means.

But poor people missed the boat too.

You know, so he was an equal opportunity

offender when it came to

making sure that your heart was in the right place.

Because I believe that there's, in many ways, sometimes a theology of poverty, that some people become just as proud of or obsessed with poverty

as they do wealth.

And

it's much like the same comparison goes to people who are too prideful.

It's the opposite side of the same coin as someone who's too self-loathing.

It's like, well, they're both, they're all part of the same belief, which is it's obsession with self.

And

you're

if you're too antagonistic towards the wealthy, you care, you yourself care too much about money.

And that's that's the key.

So, yeah, Jesus was not prejudiced against wealthy people.

He was prejudiced against anyone who was owned by anything other than him.

And money just happens to be the thing that most easily owns us.

But so does narcissism, so does pride, so does golfing on a weekend, you know.

Right.

That's one of the things that,

you know, in my faith, we stay away from tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine, and logical reasons for all of those things.

But one of them is on caffeine,

it's not about the caffeine.

It's not about

coffee as,

you know, being wrong or evil.

One of the things that it is all about is,

are you dependent on anything?

So in other words, unless it's a prescription prescription drug and properly used,

are you dependent?

Do you get up in the morning and you're like, I have to have my cup of coffee?

That should show you on the very small scale, don't ever be locked into anything but the Lord.

Yeah, and that's a really great point.

And I've gotten to know so many LDS friends as I've worked on this project because many of them are actually responsible for getting this show out to the world.

And we've had lots of these conversations.

And I think there's something really important about this.

As an evangelical, I don't have, I'm not part of a church that has the same, some of the same restrictions that you guys do.

Well, one thing I've found is both, both, both things can be dangerous.

Meaning,

I've talked to some of my LDS friends for whom the restriction has become an idol.

They rely so much on the,

I'm not owned by anything, but they are kind of owned by the law, by the rules.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The rules become so important that if they break a rule or

if they have a need for something, that can be a devastating,

you know, God-distancing moment for them.

I, I know, that's something that we evangelicals handle pretty well.

The problem, the thing we don't handle well is we love to judge alcohol and smokers, but

if we say, your body's a temple of the Holy Spirit and you shouldn't be beholden to anything.

Pardon me as I weigh 300 pounds and I have to also, I can't get through my day without my coffee.

I'm going to be a bad person.

So it's all about, I think both, I think

it's all about, it is truly all about moderation in all things and making sure that you are focused on him and nothing comes between you and him.

And that could be judging other people.

That could be, you know,

drink.

That could be anything, anything in your life.

and these laws I know somebody who

I know somebody who has has left the church because they violated some of the rules and they feel so guilty and they feel like nobody could ever accept me and I keep saying

then you don't understand repentance and if those people don't understand repentance that's up to them but if you're sorry and you've apologized to God and asked for his forgiveness and he's freely given it to you, everything after that is all you and it's just as damaging as any sin you might have committed.

Yeah, and I think I'm seeing a lot in the LDS community, which

per capita is probably the biggest fans of the chosen anywhere.

When I go to Utah,

that's the one place where

I'm a bit of a celebrity.

It's really the show has

become huge in the LDS faith.

And partially also because we filmed some of season two at that amazing set in Goshen, Utah that's owned by the LDS church, who allowed us to shoot there for the first time they've ever allowed anyone outside the church to use it.

It's extraordinary.

And I've had tons of these conversations and it's been really interesting to see again, like we just talked about, the strengths and weaknesses of LDS faith, evangelical faith.

I think that one of the weaknesses that has happened over the course of history with the LDS faith has been this self-loathing whenever, and this fear of if I make a mistake,

if I don't do the works properly, if I don't get the works properly,

the grace part will never come.

And in the evangelical faith, it's the opposite.

And so we have struggles in the opposite way where we've got the grace part.

We could probably stand to do a few more works, you know, to, you know,

but

it all comes down to, and I think this is why the chosen is resonating so much with

LDS folks in particular, but also evangelicals, is

I'm stripping away the religious boundaries.

I'm stripping away

the walls that we've put up between our denominations.

I'm stripping away the requirements that have been put upon me by whatever church I attend.

And I'm just getting to know Jesus.

And I'm getting to see him.

through the eyes of people like Nicodemus, who's a religious leader who was missing the boat, as well as someone like Mary Magdalene, who was demon-possessed.

Those two two opposite sides

are all finding the same thing.

So maybe I can find the same thing as someone that I'm on the opposite side of.

Maybe there is this man who came to earth and can unify

the hearts of people who are longing for a savior.

I will tell you that I watched The Chosen with my son, and he's 16 and

doesn't know about this whole God thing, you know.

He's a typical 16-year-old who's very outspoken about things

and is not really the one to

be really excited to get up Sunday morning to go to church, any church.

And we watched it together and loved it because

we can see people either that we know or are pieces of us in every single, what you've done in the first season with introducing the apostles, when, I think it's in the first episode, maybe, where you meet the tax collector.

And it is phenomenal.

I've never seen it done that way.

I've never seen Mary Magdalene played this way.

Such a beautiful depiction of...

of what was happening to her in the past, why she was the way she was.

It's beautiful and entirely relatable.

I mean, it's a great movie,

even if it was just about, you know, just regular old humans

and

God wasn't a part of it, it is a tremendous story of love and redemption, horror,

personal struggles.

I mean, it's really good, Dallas.

Really good.

Well, thank you.

That means a lot.

I'm, first of all, shocked to hear you have an outspoken son.

That's got to be a surprise.

But

I'm sure God

laughs at that every morning.

But you use the term beautiful.

And this is a really, really important point for anyone who has seen the show or hasn't seen it yet and wants to watch it.

The beauty comes from,

because you also use the word horror,

H-O-R-R-O-R, which is that

the reason I believe that it's beautiful, the story is beautiful.

I'm not talking about my show, just

the God story.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What we're trying to do is what I think a lot of other Jesus productions haven't done, which is we show you the before.

That's what my wife calls.

We have a devotional book that's out based on the show and based on the gospels and a Bible study.

And we always use this term, the before.

And that's the before you meet God, before God, you know, and we always say God finds us in that before.

And that before is usually really brutal.

It's really ugly.

It's really horrifying.

For Mary Magdalene, it was horrifying.

I mean, she was demon-possessed.

For Nicodemus,

Nicodemus had money and wealth and position, but it was horrifying as well because he was trapped in such a tradition that he couldn't see, or at least initially, at least most of his colleagues couldn't see their savior right in front of them.

And so what we were really doing, especially like you said, right away in episode one, we don't even see Jesus until the very end of episode one.

And the reason that when he arrives, people describe it as one of the best or most impactful moments of television they've ever seen and I say that with all humility just I'm just pointing out that it's because we take the time we take the time to not gloss over the before and if you can identify with those who met Jesus and if you can identify with their problems if you can identify with their questions then the hope is that you can identify with the solution and the answer.

And that doesn't come and it's not as beautiful and it's not as impactful if we're not willing to reside and experience and connect with the before.

This is going to be a real random question, I think, for you.

So hear me out on this.

I used to believe that common sense was common, that there are certain inalienable truths and inalienable rights that we all find self-evident.

I don't believe that anymore.

I think you could go to, you know, fields in China and say, you should be free.

And they wouldn't really understand it and they wouldn't necessarily find that comforting or good.

When it comes to

the Jesus story,

it does all seem like common sense.

When he says something, it's not, it's profound because it's simple.

Is there such a thing as self-evident truths?

I do believe that there are self-evident truths, of course.

I believe that God does print things on our hearts, and I believe that even we believers can sometimes squelch them by

our daily sin struggle, as I like to call it.

Whereas

you'd think that after being

hit with the truth of the gospel and believing it, believing that there was a man who literally died for our sins and is our Savior and the Savior of our souls, that we would have no problem following all of the biblical truths and living, you think, almost a

sinless life because we're so grateful.

And yet every single day I'm reminded of how short I fall of

being worthy of his grace.

So even we believers can sometimes squelch those self-evident truths.

The problem that really happens is when we take those self-evident truths, and we not only squelch them, but we replace them with something else.

And that's one of the reasons why the founding fathers kept it so narrow, is

we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

That's obvious.

It should be obvious.

But when they also talked about the rights, you start hearing people all the time now use the term right to apply to things that are privileges.

And I think that's a very human, selfish, flesh-filled perspective, which is the founding fathers go, all right, well, we have the right to

life.

No one has the right to intrude on your life or to kill, you know, to end your life.

To liberty, no one has the right to end your, or get in the way of your freedom.

And no one has the right to

infringe on your pursuit of happiness.

Not necessarily happiness itself.

That we can't promise.

That God certainly didn't promise.

But the pursuit of it, yes.

Now you're seeing you have the right to fill in the blank.

And that is absolutely an indication that we are getting away from those self-evident truths and we're starting to build on them.

And anytime you build on self-evident, quote-unquote, self-evident truths,

they're always going to satisfy us.

And they're always going to satisfy our flesh.

And that's not necessarily

what God was about or what the Founding Fathers were about.

And the reason I'm bringing it to the Founding Fathers is just simply to say that something that they really did understand was

that

God didn't

want us demanding much more than

the very basics and

that is life.

And so I think that we've, to answer your question, yes, there absolutely are self-evident truths.

And yes, any of us, believers or non-believers, are capable of rejecting or ignoring them.

It is, you know, you said God never promised us, you know, whatever.

Really, the only thing he promised us was this is going to be really hard.

But

I'll wash you clean with the Savior and you can come back.

You know, you'll be fine.

When you think think about, well, God wouldn't want, no, God sent us here knowing that we would be tempted, knowing that we would fail, knowing that some of us would fail spectacularly,

but we could endure it and we could

learn to get better every day.

And what you said about,

you know,

we should be grateful every day.

I have to tell you, I,

you know, my whole life life was turned around with baptism and repentance and the atonement.

I needed it so desperately.

And there should be nobody more grateful than me.

And I have found myself, you know, in the last few years feeling like, you know, I wish I could go through some of that.

I don't.

I don't, God, I do not want this.

But, you know, some of that, again, because you feel like you kind of drift from it.

No matter how intense it was, you still drift and it takes a lot of work to stay, you know, even in the pocket, let alone really, truly Christ-like.

Yeah.

And that's one of the main, I mean, you're bringing up one of the main points of the show is the goal is to be Christ-like.

The goal is to follow in his steps.

The goal is to be as much like Christ as possible while recognizing you'll never get there, while recognizing that one of the reasons he came, the main reason he came was because you can't do it.

And he would always say that.

He'd say, you've heard it said that it's wrong to murder.

I'm telling you, you guys are so far from,

you're...

even thinking about murder as a sin.

So just get it out of your heads that you're going to use the law to live this perfect life.

It's never going to happen.

And that's the difference between joy and happiness.

You're not always going to be happy.

You're not always going to be perfect.

But you can find joy when you recognize surrender.

And that's where the effort comes in.

And I try to avoid, and maybe it's the evangelical in me who's not a Catholic, not LDS,

which tend to be a little bit more religious-based or structural.

But the evangelical in me tends to try to avoid trying to accomplish it through what I do.

Where I put the work in the most, or I try to at least, is in the surrender, is in the death to self.

And if I'm truly surrendered, if I'm truly broken,

then that should hopefully maintain this need for for the Savior and gratitude.

Yeah,

I think that that is the

whole trick.

And some of us might need more structure around us than others.

I just don't think that

I don't think God's going to

send me to a lake of fire and brimstone because I didn't go to the right college.

I was going to the wrong church.

I was doing that.

He is, he is, I don't want to be around a God like that.

I mean, if he's like, you know what, you're a good person, you lived a good life, but sorry, you went to the wrong place.

Gee, dad, I think that's a little harsh, don't you?

Yeah, yeah, you missed it.

You missed 0.47 out of the 52 points that I had given.

Therefore, you're

his point was you're missing all of them.

You're missing all 52.

You're missing it all.

Even when you think you got it, you don't.

So just keep surrendering to me.

Keep that cycle

of repentance going, not because you're pouring ashes on yourself, but because it leads you to gratitude.

That's really what repentance does is it's the first step towards gratitude.

I think that is one of our biggest problems as a nation, is we have everything and yet we want more, more, more, more, more.

And there's no gratitude.

I mean, I have been very grateful for COVID.

I think COVID's been a nightmare, but I found a way to find the blessing in it.

And I think it has been a real blessing.

I mean, you could look at, you know, my political point of view.

I'm glad the kids are not in school because what they are teaching our kids is insanity.

But also, my family has gotten closer together because of COVID.

We are lucky enough to live next door.

So

we are all together much more than we were before COVID.

And

we have

focused only on the complaint, only on the lack, only on you have this and I don't have that.

We are completely

void of forgiveness, of

self-introspection, where he's like, hey, I don't want to throw that on you because, man, I got a lot of crap.

But mainly gratitude.

We're not thankful for anything anymore.

There's no way to survive that.

Yeah.

And when you're not grateful as a rule, then anything that comes in that upsets your life becomes way bigger and way more disruptive than it needs to be.

So you start to see, it doesn't have to be COVID to get you to be depressed or upset.

It can be something as simple as, you know, I went out to the restaurant and they didn't have on the menu what I expected.

And that can ruin your day.

And it does come from

a position of gratitude that when you're truly grateful for a savior, when you're truly grateful for not just your day-to-day blessings, but your soul blessing, your soul

rescuing,

it results in gratitude.

And then gratitude results in generosity.

and in

so many other,

I don't want to sound trite, but so many other positive things can be rooted back to gratitude, and so many negative things can be rooted back to a lack of gratitude.

And I think you're absolutely right.

We look at everything as an affront to our rights.

This didn't happen.

And I have the right to this.

That is when gratitude goes out the window and society really, not only our hearts start to break down, but society as well.

And I think that's where

to go back to grace and works, it's not not about either of those.

To me, it's not about either of those.

I mean, it is about the grace of God coming in and changing our hearts.

And that's why our works become important because it's just like you don't really have a change of heart because you're doing exactly the same stuff you were doing before you, quote, found Jesus.

And so works become important only as

a signal to yourself, you know what I mean?

That I'm not fully changed.

Yeah, yeah, sorry.

I didn't mean to interrupt you, but yeah, faith without works is dead, which is what the book of James says.

But when works become the thing, when works become the thing that leads you to faith, that's the problem.

But yeah, works are the indication.

They're the act of worship.

They're the act of gratitude.

And they're the indication, kind of

the gauge

as to where your heart is.

Because when you are fully transformed, it's not work, and you're not keeping score, and you don't even notice because I just, that's what I do.

You know, how many people do we know that are just so geared to helping others?

It's just part of their nature.

And if you would say to them, well, you're stacking up a lot of works, they would find that grotesque and they probably wouldn't even know what you were talking about.

Let's talk quickly about how people can watch The Chosen.

The second season starts this Easter weekend, and I cannot emphasize how good this storyline is, how well done it is, how different it is from anything else that I've seen in a Jesus story.

It is accurate, but it's accurate beyond just the words.

It is accurate, I believe, historically, you will feel and smell

what Jesus was feeling and smelling almost.

If it was a smell-of-vision, it's the closest thing you could get to that because you really understand

what it was like.

So season two starts now.

You should start at season one, but

how do you find it?

How do you access it?

Yeah, thank you for that.

Very kind of you.

And I'm wearing one of our hoodies, which says get used to different, which is a line that Jesus says to Simon in episode seven when Simon's so upset that Jesus is calling a tax collector to join his team.

And Jesus says, get used to different.

And that's going to lead me into how you can watch the show, which is you're not going to find it on your usual streaming devices or big television networks.

We did this outside the system and we created our own app.

It's called The Chosen.

It's a perfect name for it.

And here's the beauty of it.

Wherever you get your phone apps, you can find The Chosen.

Just look it up.

It's easy to find.

And most people will say, well, I don't want to watch a show on my phone.

Well, neither do I.

Our partners, our distribution partners at Angel Studios literally invented this technology that allows you to cast it directly to your streaming device so you have apple tv fire stick chromecast um roku you don't even need a subscription you don't need to pay anything you don't need to even enter your email address you just literally connect it directly from your phone and it takes 30 seconds and you can be watching the show on your television easter sunday night which is our launch of season two

uh that's going to we're launching that with a big live stream so uh that's going to be at eight o'clock eastern on our youtube channel our facebook page and the app.

And that's we're going to be watching it together all over the world.

And literally, there's going to be most likely hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people all watching at the same time because of the anticipation for season two.

So that one, that episode, you can watch with us whatever is easiest, Facebook, YouTube, or the app.

But yeah, moving forward long term, the app is

the thing.

And if you're used to DVDs, we've got those two.

We let you get those DVDs because there's a lot of our fans who are just not wanting to embrace technology.

But the app is

I will tell you, I downloaded the app and it's really simple.

I am convinced that the Lord gives us teenagers so we can navigate technology.

That may be the only thing that's good about the teenage years as a parent,

but it's really, really simple to use.

Tell me real quickly, where does it pick up?

Right where season one leaves off, although there's a twist.

So first of all, and I'm not going to give it away, but I will say season one leaves with Jesus and his current band of followers, there's seven of them, leaving their hometown and going out and spreading the word.

With that comes bad trouble and good trouble.

They stir up some trouble for their enemies, but they're also attracting some enemies as well.

And so you see the good coming and the bad.

But the opening of episode one of season two will, I promise you,

your jaw will drop.

I'm just going to say that.

Don't miss the first 30 seconds.

Don't be late.

Don't skip past it.

The opening of the season picks up in a place you least expect, and

it will blow your mind, I promise you.

And

so just make sure you don't be late.

So it's funny you say, where does it pick up?

The storyline, we get to where we've left off, but

we go a different way to get there.

And that's where I'll leave it.

I'm excited.

Thank you so much.

I'd like to have you on again because

you had such an interesting life and you have had great success and great failure.

And you've handled those two impostors just the same.

And

also growing up with a dad who wrote Left Behind

has got to leave a mark on you.

And I would imagine in a good way.

But thank you so much.

God bless you.

Thank you, Dallas.

You bet.

You too.

Bye-bye.

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