"God on Trial" Rescue Radio with Marjorie Cole

0:00 Music. Rescue Radio, because there's a war for your sins. Yes, Father God, we recognize the war, but it has already been won. And so we thank you, Lord God, for your faithfulness, for the protections that you've sent us through the Holy Spirit, through your word, and through the angels of God.

0:40 We thank you, Jesus, that your will be done, O God, on earth, in and through us as it's being done and declared in heaven. We thank you, Lord Jesus, thy kingdom come. You are coming again. We look for and prepare and watch for your return. Father God, in Jesus' name, and we thank you, Lord, for your coming the first time. We thank you for bringing us salvation, for settling the debt that we could not pay in paying with your own blood. We thank you for giving us power and victory and eternal life through that transaction. We thank you, Lord God, for giving us, you said, you know, you want us to, you've come that we might have an abundant life. And so we pray, Father, today that people would receive the joy, the peace, the goodness at this time of the year and receive the Spirit, the true Spirit of God, the Spirit of giving, the Spirit of love, the Spirit of hope, Father God, in their lives, in their hearts, in their relationships with one another.

1:33 And we also thank you, Lord God, for the promise, the promises, many promises, and we work and live in those promises, that no weapon formed against us will prosper, that no word said, no deed done, no action taken by the enemy will be able to bring forth any shame, trouble, or reproach. So guide us now as we bring forth the revelation of your truth through this podcast, Father, in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Well, today we want to— It's going to be a fun day. A fun day, we want to reintroduce. God on Trial. Now, God on Trial is an audio series that you've done really under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

2:16 And so we just want to, some of you have heard about this, and some of you have no idea what this is all about, God on Trial. Could you share with us a little bit of the background. How did this come to pass? And really, it is a monumental effort. And it turned out to be, what, 20 years in the making? Yeah, really. Something like that. But give us a little information about how did this come to pass? Well, as I was praying this morning, the Lord said, why don't you give them a gift for Christmas? And I think the gift, of course, is this God on Trial radio drama, which has been basically hidden, although it's in plain sight.

3:01 I mean, you can go purchase it right this second on our website, liferecovery.com. But yeah, it started out in the year 2000, I think, or maybe even before that. I was writing a big, long, deep theological treatise on God and the war and the devil and all this stuff. And I took it to some fellow writers at a conference, and they just said, ugh. This is never going to work. And so I felt very devastated, but we had lunch. And as I was sitting at lunch with one of the gals, she said, well, why don't you chunk the material? And I thought, oh, what does that mean? I thought it was from God, but what does that mean? So really what it ultimately ended up being was taking all the material and rewriting it as a drama in a script format so that people could read the drama.

3:49 And then ultimately it became a radio drama, or an audio drama so that people could actually enjoy the sound effects and the inflections and the actors and the background sounds and all that kind of good stuff. So it was really turned into a very rich experience. Well, yeah, part of the rich experience, it didn't seem so rich at the time, is that you sent this teaching treatise, a treatise book, however you call it, But you put it into script form, and really all the publishers that you sent to, I don't remember how many you sent to, they said, this will never work. We're not going to publish anything like this in this form.

4:33 Yeah, it was kind of funny because Pilgrim's Progress was written exactly in the format that they rejected. And Pilgrim's Progress is the second most popular book in all the world. Next to the Bible. Next to the Bible. and so but anyway so that wasn't you know I I didn't really care if they wanted the book or not because usually when they want your book they also want the rights to the book and I wanted to write it and keep it as as pure and holy as I wanted it to be a creative license I didn't want to lose that so yeah so I got busy writing and I wrote and wrote and ended up the the script was 450 pages long of course there's a lot of white space on the page like that but so it was like half done.

5:15 You know, it was maybe a third done because once you have the words down the dialogue, now you have to find the actors. And so that was our next journey. Yeah, I mean, you need all these people for all these characters. So basically the general theme of it, this is really, it's an ambitious project because you're covering things, Theology, you're covering God and his activity and the activity of the evil one interacting over the centuries, over the millennia. And so you're doing this in a creative, biblically accurate, yet entertaining form.

5:59 And so this is a lot of content here. And then, of course, you had the characters, all these different characters and voices that you needed. How in the world? It's like you're starting from scratch. Who do I get to do this? Who do I get to do this? How do I do this? Well, first of all, we have to understand that this synopsis of what this is, it's the story of spiritual warfare told from the devil's point of view, and it's the war between God and Satan for the souls of men. And so the anti-hero of the book, The Hero's Journey, is the enemy. So everything is seen from his point of view, from his plan, his plot.

6:43 So we're kind of getting in on the mind of the enemy and how he's trying to stop God in God's plan of redemption. So basically the thing starts before creation when Lucifer falls and he's angry and upset and jealous of God. of God making the human beings. And so the first dialogue we have is between God and Satan and, you know, that contempt that Satan is holding against God. And so eventually, however, we have to pull this into a drama where we have, you know, Adam and Eve and Cain and the actors and various ones. But so that's how it began. And I had to, yes, I had two sets of actors. I had ones that were professionals that we paid a lot of money to.

7:30 Most of them were out of Chicago. And the man who did the sound effects, Steve Wick. Was a professional already. He had done all the sound effects on the left behind audio. I mean, the video version of that left behind series. And so he was very, very gifted in all these things and did a great job. And so, so we had professional actors and then I pulled local people who just were characters and had good voices and were fun. And, and so what we, cause we had a cast, not only God and Jesus and Adam and Eve and all of those well-known people. We also had to find people who would play the parts of these demons like confusion and doubt and murder and contention and torment, etc.

8:17 And so we kind of just picked people who were willing to have fun with us, and so we recorded locally and then also recorded in Chicago. So it was kind of an effort, a dual effort on the parts of technology and people working together. It's kind of fun. You recorded in several different studios. Yeah, over the course of time, because recording, we must have recorded over the space of like almost 13 years. That's my fast guess, because we actually started the production, I think, in 2006 or 2008, and we didn't complete it until 2019, and we only completed it then because the Lord said, finish what you started.

9:00 And so I said, okay. But the problem was not, you know, finding the actors or the script. The script was already written. The problem was finding the money because it was a lot of money because, you know, those people are not cheap. So it turns out that I think every episode was at least four to $5,000 and there's 28 episodes. And I didn't want to go in debt with all this. So it was just like, as the money became available, we did the next recording. Another thing, too, about God on Trial is that you, in this series, you're dealing not only with the spiritual warfare, the realities of spiritual warfare between God and Satan for the souls of men, but you're also dealing with just about every philosophical question that people would have about God, about life, about nature.

9:53 That's incorporated into. And amazingly, those questions are dealt with. Through dialogue. Through dialogue, basically in every episode is dealing with that. That is just amazing. So someone that, whether you're a new believer, you're going to get a lot of truth. Whether you're a more mature believer, you're going to be reinforced and challenged. And then someone who does not believe at all is going to hear about. About answers from God on these life issues, these questions. The reason we call this whole audio drama God on Trial is because the question is, does God have a right to be God? Does he have a right to rule the universe?

10:42 What gives him that right? And so many people who are skeptical. Agnostic, atheists, anti-God people have these serious questions, and I don't think the church has been able to answer them in a way that we can actually reach these people because these people aren't going to go to church for one thing. And so what, and it's also very entertaining and children love it. There's a, you know, one of my best audiences actually in the trials and pilot projects were the children. They loved it so much that they would collect their little allowances and give us $12 to do the next episode. It was so cute. But anyway, so it's something that can reach the children too. And I think this is why it's really good for parents to look at this because not only does it pull you in for 28, 30 minutes, it gives you a discussion at the end of it with your family, with your kids, with your friends, with your Bible study, where you can actually go look up these scriptures.

11:35 So it's a phenomenal way to study the Bible and have fun doing it. And they're about, what, 30 minutes long? Yeah, 28 to 30 minutes. 28 to 30 minutes long. And they're formatted in a sense after years ago, way, way, way back. There were these radio dramas. People would, before television came around, people would sit by the radio, families would sit by the radio and listen to these dramas. And I remember listening to those as a kid. I'm that old. But anyway, you would listen. And they had all this. Like unshackled and things like that. Yeah, they had the sound effects and the drama and the music. And it was like. It just really pulled you in, and that's one thing I've noticed about each of these, not just because you wrote it and you're my lovely wife, but every episode, it just pulls you right in, gets your attention, and keeps your attention all the way through.

12:31 Well, there was going to be a lot of dialogue in the court because we had to take, God is on trial, so therefore God is being taken to court, and so Satan is the chief prosecutor in presenting his arguments against God, pulling his witnesses, and all of that. The witnesses are all pulled from the Old Testament, both God's and Satan's, so we're just getting a real look at, does God have a right to be God and rule the universe? So again, we have that dialogue going on in heaven, but at the same time, I wrote a subplot for finding Jesus, the head crusher, on earth, because there were some demons that were stationed, and their job was to protect themselves and be aware, because the premise was that God was going to send the head crusher out of the born of a woman, and so their job was to find this head crusher and deal with him before he did any damage to their kingdom.

13:25 And so we have two plots going on, so you'll see that we flip back and forth in every episode so that they don't just become a boring listening of arguments and cross-examinations, but they really become important and powerful truths that are released. So, again, Satan is challenging God, and God grants him the right to his appeal to test God and bring him to court. And so, Satan is pulling his witnesses from the Old Testament. I think all of the old characters in the Old Testament that had a bone to pick with God, you know, There's Nimrod, there's Lot's wife, there's Cain, there's all these people that had felt.

14:09 Angry with God, and they had a case to present. But then Justice, which was God's defense attorney, he would cross-examine them. So in every argument, there was a counter-argument, there was a presentation, so that you end up actually having answers, or at least options to answers that you didn't have before. Not only those who had a bone to pick with God, but those who were truly faithful to the world. Right, because Jesus... Moses, Abraham, Noah, and they're tested. They're challenged by the enemy for what they believed and what they did. Right, and we go into the details, too, like when the crossing of the Red Sea, when Moses is on the witness stand and he's talking about how that happened and Satan is challenging him on how in the world God could be so cruel as to use his own people as bait to pull Pharaoh into the Red Sea, but Pharaoh willingly went. It wasn't that God forced him to go, etc.

15:09 So there's a lot of drama in there. And so what we want to do right now is, I pulled a Christmas section, you know, with Jesus in Bethlehem. I pulled that section and we'll have you have a listen. It's about, I don't know, seven or eight minutes long and see what you think. And here at the end of it, we'll come back and we'll talk to you about how you can get a hold of this and how it might be helpful to you. Have a listen. Just gone live here at EUL. It looks like there's been a slight delay. We expect the prosecution to press formal charges any minute against God and call Cain as his first witness. Yeah. What do you want? Make it snappy. I'm running late.

15:54 You're where? Right here. Standing behind you in the blue soon. I didn't want to go red because I thought that would be too conspicuous. What are you doing here? This is heaven. There's got to be hundreds of reporters around here and thousands of undercover angels. Someone is bound to recognize you. Hey, what can they do to a fallen angel? Take away his wings? Besides, this is important. I got some good news and I got some bad news. What? No backstabbing, tear-wrenching sob story? No big fat excuse for breaking the rules and being here?

16:35 As best we can figure it, he's coming as a baby. The bad news is, we don't know which baby. Hi, where exactly? Now tell me something I don't know. Everybody knows he's coming as a baby, idiot. What do you think seed of the woman is? A grapefruit? I think he might be coming in by Bethlehem. Bethlehem? Why Bethlehem? It's small. No good restaurants. And a few crummy motels. That's about it. A king coming out of Bethlehem? You've got to be kidding, right?

17:15 That's where these wise guys were heading when the star disappeared. What wise guys? What star? The new star in the east. Oh, don't bore me with the details. Good news for us. They stopped to ask for directions. Got the whole town stirred up. Oh, how fortunate is that? Lost in Bethlehem. It ought to be a movie As we speak, they're meeting in Jerusalem With the fat cats and the big shots To find out where the kid is The king of the Jews, they call him Whoa, now? In Jerusalem?

17:58 Isn't that Herod's precinct? Our boy's got it covered Herod's hot under the collar and ready to blow a gasket Oh, keep the pressure on him make him paranoid about this kid taking away his kingdom. He knows he's no Jew and has always been insecure about being an Edomite sitting on the throne of David. We got him gathering all the experts. They all say the same thing. It's got to be Bethlehem. So, what are you waiting for? Go get the kid and kill him! More bad news. There's a big census going on in Bethlehem right now and thousands of extra people are in town for the holidays.

18:45 So, when did a party ever stop you from doing your job? If we just wait, that'll lead us right to him. Oh, what makes you think they're going to find him if you can't? Aaron's got them believing he wants to come along and worship with them. Dumb enough to believe him so when they come back to tell him where the kid is you'll just ride along isn't it a beautiful thing when you can get everybody else to do your dirty work for you I want to know the minute he's dead oh by the way did they bring any gifts. Music.

19:29 Gold, frankincense, myrrh, stuff like that. Be sure you get the loot on the way out. God's perfect world was falling apart. Abel was dead, and the war to kill the Deliverer had begun. So, what did you think? Wow. I mean, just every time. I mean, I don't know of any presentation anywhere that's like this. No, I think we're pretty unique here. It's unique.

20:12 Just the way it's approached, the way it's presented, it's just very powerful. Truly the Lord really inspired you in writing this and producing this. It's good, but it's not all positive because some people say, well, you know, because what we're really doing is we're helping people to understand how the devil, the demons, the liars, talk in our minds, talk in our hearts, and how they talk among one another, and how they set up plots, and how they plotted to kill Jesus. So the whole thing takes you all the way to the crucifixion. It starts in the garden, goes all the way to the crucifixion, and we have Caiaphas, and we have various other ones who are, you know, playing their parts, Pilate and whatnot. And so, but really what's happening is, you know.

20:54 You know, people have to see that there were real people involved here with real emotions, and that they were being pulled and pressured by real spirits that were trying to get them to act in a contrary way to what was righteous and good. So, yeah, it's a, so people, again, with the title God on trial, people just say, well, you know, maybe we're giving the devil too much credit, you know, from his point of view, whatever. But the thing is, the devil is a real enemy, and he's really here among us and it's not going to help you out to just ignore him or pretend he does not exist. He won't go away if you ignore him. You need to know, you know, Paul said we're not ignorant of his devices.

21:35 We recognize what his strategies are. Well, I would encourage people, you know, this is just a little sample in episode six, actually. If you want to start the series, I'd go right back to the beginning and start with episode one. And, you know, again, And it's like, what can you do with this? Well, it's for edification, it's for entertainment, it's for enlightening people, and it's for evangelism. So you can use this again over and over. And we have it in both MP3 formats and a hard copy on a disc. And they're very, very reasonable. And so, again, it's just like a treat to be able to hear the Bible, take it to a deeper, different level.

22:18 I mean, we have the audio dramatizations of the Bible. Some people, they use those versions and there's that very deeper sense of emotion and things that's included in that kind of a rendition. And this is kind of what happens here. So we would really encourage you, make it a Christmas gift, make it a Christmas project, make it a New Year's project, just come one a day or one a week and enjoy just pondering, thinking, rethinking, thinking, meditating. So many times we're sucked up into all kinds of fantasies and all kinds of entertainment and escapes. And those things are fluff and they're foolishness and they don't make any difference in our lives.

22:58 But this is something where you can actually escape into reality and leave your fake reality behind for a minute and look into some real reality and be blessed and encouraged and enlightened. Escape into reality. I like that. I like that statement. Yeah. So how can they get this series? Okay. Well, it's pretty simple. It's go to liferecovery.com, and we have it right there in our bookstore, God on Trial. Every episode, I think you can get a sample from hearing in every episode. And or you can go to God on Trial and just type in God on Trial. I think it's .org, isn't it? And you can...

23:38 Dot com? Oh, GodOnTrail.com. And then you can just, it'll pull you right into the place where you can buy it on the website. What's nice, if you're on a road trip. Oh, yeah, that's very nice. We know people that listen. And on their phones nowadays. On their phone, on a road trip. And basically each episode is about the same length as the average commute in the Twin Cities. Oh, yeah, that's true. You know, back in the day, back in 2004, when I was just beginning this, and we had no idea how long it would take or how much money it would cost, or if we'd ever have the wherewithal to finish it, I remember I was standing in my kitchen doorway one day and flipped my Bible open, which I do sometimes, and Isaiah 29, 17 popped out at me.

24:27 It was just God confirming that this is going to go forward, but it's going to take a while. And so it says in 17, here's the question. Is it not yet a very little while till Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful forest and the fruitful field be esteemed as a forest? In that day, the deaf will hear the words of the book. What? What does that mean? The audio book. God was confirming that this is going to be an audio book. The eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity and out of darkness. The humble also shall increase their joy in the Lord. and the poor among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel, for the terrible one is brought to nothing. So we're talking about in the God on trial.

25:10 The scornful one is consumed, and all who watch for iniquity. Wait for iniquity, look to find iniquity in other people, are cut off, who make a man an offender by a word, and lay a snare for him who reproves in the gate and turns aside the just for a thing of evil. And then verse 24, it says, and those who erred in spirit will come to understanding and those who murmured will learn doctrine. So this is Isaiah chapter 29, starting verse 17. So God is saying this is going to become an audio book. And this was about the exact time when we had just made that decision and we're starting to actually record this drama as an audio book. And so God just gave me this. So he says, is it not a little while? Well, it's been a little while.

25:52 It's now like 20 years later again. We started in 2000 and now we're 2024. 24. So we're about 24 years into this production that's been well-aged and hidden, but for such a time as this. I believe it was for the end times. And I believe it's for the generation Z and X and Y and millennials, because they're the ones right now who are going to carry the torch for the return of Jesus Christ. So again, have a look, have a listen, and let us know what you think. Well, God bless you. Lord, I thank you for the anointing that you've given Marjorie to create this and put this together. Lord, we give you the credit and you give you the glory.

26:33 We just pray that those that are listening right now, that they would just consider this and take a listen and take a look and go deeper into the teaching and the opportunities that there are to use this as a tool to share the gospel. with friends and family. And we love you and we thank you so much. Thank you, Jesus. And we really encourage you too, if you like it, send us a little email. You can send that to info at liferecovery.com, info at liferecovery.com. We'd love to hear from you. And maybe even for the first few of you that are brave enough or willing to send us, you know, your report, your comments, we might even give out a few free episodes just because you're helping us to get the word out.

27:24 So God bless you, and again, have a merry, wonderful, blessed, holy season as we prepare for and remind ourselves about the first coming of Jesus Christ and look forward to his second coming. Amen. I have an emergency. What is your location? Music. 3, 2, 1, go! Rescue radio.

28:05 Cause there's a war for your soul.