"God On Trial: The Backstory" RESCUE RADIO with Marjorie Cole

0:24 Rescue Radio, because there's a war for your soul. Yes, Father God, we're excited. There is a war, but it has been won. Thank you for coming to rescue us, Lord God, and dying for us that the curses of sin and death were taken away from us. And you've given us power and restored unto us the power and authority to help you to walk in the fullness of the victories of the kingdom of God. And I thank you, Jesus, for all the creative ways that you have used us in this journey, Father God, and that you are going to give us eyes to see, ears to hear, a heart to receive your wisdom and your instruction, Lord God, that we might walk more fully and with wisdom as we go forward to walk out the victories that you died to give us on Calvary.

1:10 And we bind the strongmen, the familiar spirits, those who will hold assignments against us, the work of the enemy, the grip of the terrible one, any spirits of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment that try to overwhelm or overtake us, your people, the remnant, the Church of Jesus Christ with deception, we bind and forbid it. We commend that they be exposed and that their plans be absolutely routed and exterminated, Father God. And we thank you that you promised that no weapon formed against us will prosper. So again, we're standing in your promises and rejoicing in your faithfulness. So guide us in this conversation now in Jesus' name. Amen.

1:51 So, what are we talking about today, honey? Well, we're talking about God on Trial. Oh, God on Trial. Yeah. Isn't that an audio drama or something? Yeah. Hello. Yes, that's an audio drama that it's kind of in the old years ago, there were radio dramas. Yeah, there were. You had the sound effects and, you know, it's like, oh, you just imagined and you saw all this stuff. Through the sound. Through the sound. And so, you know, and you've put together something. This is something you've done. It's opening arguments, got on trial. And what exactly is opening arguments? And go ahead and tell us a little bit about that. Opening arguments came out of a boring thesis, a treatise on all the things I had gathered in my little journey about the truth of God, sin, you know, redemption, the battle, the war, the spiritual war, and I wanted to write it in the form of kind of a book. Of course, everybody wants to write a book.

2:55 And so I started writing the manuscript, typing it, and I saw all these words on the page, no white space, and I was saying to myself, oh, I don't even know if I want to read this or could read this. Why? If I can't even read this, how is anybody else going to want to read this? So I was a little painted in a corner with this. I thought it was a very important truth. Truths needed to be told, but I didn't know what to do next. And so what I did do next was I took the manuscript to a conference where there were published authors who were willing to listen to excerpts or passages from wannabe authors' work.

3:36 And so I read a few paragraphs or whatever to the audience, and it just like felt flopped right on the floor and it was like a lead balloon like we used to say oh it was like oh my goodness this is so bad and nobody liked it and it was like, And so then we had lunch. We went to lunch. Thank God for lunch that day. Because I sat next to someone who was a published author. She had done a lot of work with workbooks and things like that. And she said to me as we were eating, she says, well, why don't you just chunk the material? Okay. That was her exact words. What's chunk the material? What does that mean? Well, what I took it to mean and what I think she tried to say was, you know, present it in a different format where you break it down, make it more palatable in littler bites.

4:27 And so I really didn't know what that was going to look like until God dropped it in my mind to write it as a script. You know, what I wanted to do was present the idea of the war between God and Satan for the souls of men. And I'd done a lot of studying on movie scripts and how you write those things and the plot and the hero's journey and all these things but this didn't quite look like that but in some ways it was kind of like that so I wrote a script, with the dialogue, with the characters and the scenes and all this stuff and I put that all in a book, in a manuscript and I sent it to a bunch of publishers back in 2000 about that when we were still trying to get our books published by publishing houses, you know, and everyone rejected me.

5:17 They didn't like the script concept. I mean, to me, it was like, this is really cool because people, you know, it'd be easy to follow. You know, you got a lot of white space there. You can go along. Yeah. But anyway. They didn't like it at all. No one would read this. And then I thought to myself, you know what? You forgot something. Pilgrim's Progress is written in the form of a script, and it is the second most popular religious book in the world. Next to the Bible. Yeah, next to the Bible. And so, but I took it home and I said, okay, well, then we're going to have to give it sound. We're going to have to give it action. We're going to have to get actors. We're going to have to actually bring it forth, not just on the off the page.

5:58 We're going to bring it off the page. And so, God on trial, opening arguments, basically the premise is examining the idea is, does God have a right to rule the world? And is God good? So that's what we had to start with, examining God's right to rule the world. Yeah, so that's, you know, there's people that have challenged God or the idea of God over the years. And then you had all these theological insights and understandings about how God works, how spiritual warfare works, and everything like that. So you're there and wanting to put it in a palatable form. and so what is exactly is the premise there I mean you're wanting to put it in a.

6:49 A story form, kind of. A story form. Yeah. But what's essentially the premise of God on Trail? Well, it's this, that people have a lot of, you know, they have a lot of, there's a lot of stumbling blocks in working through your relationship with God. If God is so good, then why did he do this? And there's a lot of people even in the Old Testament that had a bone to pick with God. And so, all we wanted to do was bring forth a premise, a venue, where we could actually. Challenge God in a way where we would present, like a courtroom scene, where you'd have the prosecution being Satan, and you'd have the prosecutor and the defense attorney being the justice.

7:33 And so, that's what we did. We presented a script. We had to set up the story, And to set the story, we went back to Eden and dramatized Adam and Eve and the temptation in the garden. And then there was this huge, obvious, horrible sin breakdown in the human race. And so everybody's looking for a solution. And so chapters or episodes 1, 2, 3, and 4 are kind of setting up this idea of taking God to court. And will God permit us to take him to court? So that was the first couple of episodes. We had to kind of work through how would you make that palatable?

8:14 How would you make that feasible? And how would you do that? And so it's a very fun bunch of issues and problems we had to work through. So you're dramatizing and you're condensing. But you're staying true to the Word of God. You're staying true to the Word of God. You have some creative license in there? Well, I was limiting my license to the biblical truth, but I did have to do some creative licensing because when we started to think about who would we draw from the Old Testament, this is all featuring, so it's the story of God on trial in the heavenly courtroom. Satan coming in with his prosecution, his arguments, calling his witnesses, and then the defense attorney calling his witnesses.

9:01 So we had to collect our witnesses and things like that. But it also was to try to, you know, bring forth another concept. And that second concept was the subplot or the substory. And that was the idea of when God gave, you know, the curse, put the curse on Satan, the serpent, he said, the head crusher was going to come. And so all of this is building from that fear of the enemy that the head crusher was going to come and crush his head. So he had to find and determine out of all of these women and all of these centuries who that head crusher would, from where he would come. And so he knew it was going to be the seed of a woman. So this is our subplot where the enemy on earth, the demons, if you will, are on earth and they're looking for this threat, this head crusher.

9:52 And so what we have done too is written, I wrote the script from the devil's point of view. So he is the anti-hero of the book because we're seeing it from his point of view. And so he's on the offensive going after God. And I think that's what a lot of people do. And so this was helping people to understand, putting their own arguments against God into a form where they could actually. Work it all through, work out, well, what was, if this is so good, then why, and blah, blah, blah. And so there's two stories going on. There's the story of God being tried in heaven by Satan, and then there's also the subplot of finding Jesus.

10:32 So that's very exciting because we can see two stories going on at one time. So, yeah, and you have the characters. Who are some of the Old Testament characters that you have in there? Well, I had to think of people who got in trouble with God, and we kind of took them in a chronological order. And the first, I think the first one was Cain, because, you know. Well, then you start out with Adam and Eve. Right, Adam and Eve. And the fall. Yeah, of course. And the temptation of the fall. And then we went back up into the court of heaven, too, to look at some logical arguments that justice would make to prove the goodness and validity of God. So all of the writing, which was fun, actually, fun.

11:14 And I had no idea. when I sat down to write, whatever day I was going to write on, I really had no idea where it was going to go. I mean, I just wrote. And sometimes I'd write myself right into a corner, like the devil is presenting an argument about something. And I said to God, okay, now how do we answer that? And it was every time the Spirit of God would just turn it to the place where you're showing exactly how to answer that in the Spirit of God. And it was like I was learning while I was writing. So the Holy Spirit clearly was guiding you in this whole field. Yeah, and every time, and everything.

11:55 I mean, this project, you can't imagine. This is a—. We've been working on this project. We were working on it. It started in probably 2000 when I first got my first rejections from the publishing house. So, that's almost 20 years in the making. Yeah. Yeah, we finished it in 2019, which, well, the reason is several reasons, obviously. But when we started this, first I'm writing the script, and it's fabulous. It's wonderful. It's flowing. It's good. But it's 459 pages of script. Yeah, and who's going to read that? I was going to read that. That's a lot of, so we had, we just said, okay, we're going to present this as a radio drama.

12:35 We're going to have to shorten the episodes to like 28 minutes, something like that. We had no idea how many episodes it would be, but we knew that after a while. Well, we had a false start. We started this thing the first time and our director was an amateur. You know, we were all the amateurs. The actors were, you know, pull them off the street kind of thing. And I looked at it and it sounded terrible and we did our first recording, I think it was in the lounge in the First Covenant Church there with our own audio equipment and I walked out that day and said, this is not good. This is not going to work. And yet I wasn't going to give up but we had to kind of throw that idea to the wind.

13:18 But the good thing that came out of that failure was that the guy that was going to play Satan was, knew a professional sound director in Chicago who had actually worked on the Left Behind series, the DVD version of it. All of the foliage, all of the sound and stuff was in that. He had proven himself. So we contacted him and he said yes. It was just kind of a fluke who would know who this guy was from adam but we found him and he was willing to to help us so that began the search for the actors and the and we had a we there's many characters in this drama i don't know we i think maybe 40 or 50 oh yeah anyway and and you you found just regular regular people that were willing to do it and you kind of you coached them and they recorded these different voices and various studios over a period of several years.

14:18 Several, yes. It was quite a few years. But then you got some professional voices from Chicago that were just really, and actually our so-called amateurs did a really good job. Yeah, the ones, we had two studios. They really did. We had two locations, Chicago and Minneapolis. And so we were recording the Minneapolis actors and they'd come to our, we had various studios. I think we went through four or five different studios and whatever all that looked like. So when we would gather—and we would do about one episode. We just focused on one at a time. And I wanted to have—you know, you have to—some characters have to be really good, like the voice of God.

15:00 There's one guy I wanted for God, and— He was out of Moody Bible Institute, I believe, and he was willing to play the part of the voice of God. And to me, he's just perfect. Yeah. Mike Kellogg. Mike Kellogg. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. So I said, okay, this is taking a long time, and I don't know how old he is, but we cannot let God die because if we don't get this finished. So what I did is I wrote all of his lines first. First, I send them to him and he kind of recorded them just in case we would, you know, have to have them. And I'm not, you know. Don't want to lose God. This is a crisis for all the actors.

15:40 Like, what if we lose one of them? And one or two dropped out because one of the guys didn't want to play the devil anymore. One of the devil's the demons. And so we had to kind of, okay, we had to readjust. Now we've got to change. That's in any long series. That's in any long series where you're coming up against, you know, life and people change and move and die and whatever. So that was part of the challenge. But the other part of the challenge, which was really probably the biggest challenge, was paying for it. Yeah, because it turned out, how much was it per episode? And the thing is, too, you paid pretty much all the amateurs. Yeah. You gave them something. Yeah, we paid everybody. But then you had the voices from— The professionals.

16:23 From Chicago, which is, what was it, like $200 an hour? Yeah. And a minimum of two hours. Yeah. So that can count up in a hurry. Yeah. And so it ended up being, what is it, like something like $5,000 per 30-minute episode. Yeah, $5,000. And then it ended up being 28 episodes. Yeah, so we were paying as we go. And this was a good thing and a bad thing because when you're paying as you go, you're slowed down if you don't have the money. And so we raised some money in the beginning. Some people saw the vision, gave us some money. That was great. So we got to about the first four or five episodes, and then we ran out of money. And so then we were doing, at that point, we were doing about one episode a year.

17:06 And so that's why it was taking so long. And it was, you know, but we weren't giving up on it. We just couldn't give up on it. It was just too fun and too great. And the actors were marvelous. And they did, you know, I remember some of them. It was amazing. You know, I found people that I wanted to play certain parts. We wanted to have actors who were diverse. We wanted to have some, you know, nationalities, different accents, so we could get a kind of a worldview or flavor in this, because this isn't just for one culture. This is for everybody. And so, you know, we had people who they would. You know, be Irish or be, you know, I don't know, Scandinavian.

17:49 Anyway, so that was very cool and fun. And so, but I remember one of the actors, bless God, I loved his voice. And he was such a great, awesome, broken, absolutely broken believer. And I wanted to play the part of one of God's witnesses, Abraham. So God called Abraham, Moses, and let's see, Noah. Noah was impeached. The enemy actually called him as his witness, but he got impeached because Noah would not, you know, default, go to, you know, curse God, whatever. And so, but this guy, I remember the day we picked him up and he was playing one of these major biblical roles and he's, I had to go get him.

18:36 Des and I went and got him. He was sleeping in his trailer. He lived in the, it was in the middle of winter. He was no food, you know, kind of like a homeless person living in a basic, you know, trailer, I guess. Oh, in a park somewhere. Yeah. And so he rolled him out of bed, got him some coffee, drug him into the studio. He was groggy and half awake. And I remember he is, really broken, and that's what I needed for Abraham. I needed somebody who was really broken in the loss of his son. And so we did it. We did it. He came through. We had to do a lot of editing and cutting and things, but he really did a great job.

19:21 But we have all kinds. And we had just normal, ordinary people who came in with these powerful. Versions or scripts. They did it. They did such a powerful job. So that was very good. But it was also a problem because halfway through, we completely stopped. We completely ran out of money. And so we had lost contact. This was years. I mean, we were in the middle of this project and it's half done. You can't produce a half done project. And we weren't going to publish episode one, two, and three, because we weren't sure if we were going to get done all of it.

20:02 We didn't know how long it was going to be, so we were just kind of stuck. And so when we were in the middle of the project, half done, I lost a lot of the contact with the actors. They'd moved, they'd, you know, changed locations. So when we started up again in 2018, I think it was, so we had maybe six or ten episodes done, and we had many to go. So I, well, I've got to find them back. And the reason we were able to start up again is actually because of my father's passing. My dad had left our family, each child, an inheritance.

20:46 And with my inheritance, I felt this would be the most important thing to do, you know, to honor his legacy and complete this project. And so we had the money. And so we just went after this thing like crazy. As a matter of fact, that was after I got a little bit of a scolding. My dad passed away near the end of 2018. And in 2019, we were going to church one Sunday morning, and I flipped my Bible open, and what did it say? Well, 2 Corinthians 8, verses 10 and 11 says, And in this I give advice, it is to your advantage not only to be doing what you began and were desiring to do a year ago, but now you must complete the doing of it that as there was a readiness to desire it, so there also may be a completion out of what you have.

21:49 And now the context there is they were going to give this offering. With Paul, yeah. So it's about money. Yeah, and they were able to, he said, okay, you've begun this, now finish it, get it together, get it out there. But the Lord used that to speak to you just to kind of say, okay, get her done here. Yeah, because it was about, my dad had passed away about four months before that, and so this was in January of 2019. And so we had many, many episodes to go, I don't know, 10, 15 left maybe, maybe even more than that. And so we pumped those things out. Now that we had money, we pumped them out three or four a month. That went sort of the first half. It was years and years.

22:33 And then in just a matter of what? Well, we got that done in four months. In four months, you did about half of it toward the end. Yeah, and it was finished in April 26, 2019, four months basically after God had scolded me. And so, but it's interesting too that in the beginning of the project, when I was still contemplating, what's this going to look like? How is this going to work? That I flipped my Bible open again, and I got to Isaiah 20, 29. And I remember exactly where I was standing in our house in Blaine and in the kitchen doorway. And I was saying, how long, Lord, how long? Because I got this word in 2004.

23:17 So we were just tiny, tiny, kind of a little bit into this project and it still was lagging and lacking money and tons of work. Plus, this was my side job. Side hustle. I mean, this wasn't the thing I was doing. You were counseling for a time. At that time, you were seeing clients like five days a week. Yeah, and writing books and doing all kinds of things. But anyway, Isaiah, this was the first word that Lord gave me, 29, 17, he says, and I was asking him, how long is this going to take? And he's asked the question, is it not yet a very little while till Lebanon will be turned into a fruitful field and the fruitful field will be esteemed as a forest.

24:00 And then verse 18, in that day, the deaf will hear the words of the book. Okay, what's the word here? The words, it has to be an audio book. So I owe an audio book. And the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity and out of darkness and the humble shall also increase their joy in the Lord. And the poor among men will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel for the terrible one is brought to nothing. And that's exactly what the plot was, that the terrible one would be put down, exposed, and defeated. The scornful one is consumed, and all who watch for iniquity are cut off. So they were trying to find fault with God, all these witnesses that were coming against them, but 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 naught.

24:46 So this really described to me what I saw opening arguments to be. And so this was given in 2004. And so we We actually completed the project 19 years later. You know, I don't know, 15 years later, 15 years later. And so this is called Perseverance. And what we wanted to do is give a little excerpt of what all, what this sounds like. This is available today on our website, Life Recovery. You go to liferecovery.com. It'll slip you over to a page called God on Trial. And then you will be able to purchase those episodes individually for like three bucks each, and it's 28 minutes long.

25:32 But what I really wanted to say is this thing is amazing in that it's both entertaining. See, we didn't make the demons and the devil out to be scary, but what we do in their dialogue is show you how they work in our minds, how they try to bring accusation, how they plot against us. So we're actually showing that behind-the-scenes way that they talk with one another, the way they plot. I like especially episode three, where it says, Made in Hell, where they're trying to figure out how they're going to come and bring their case against God, now that they have permission from God to try Him. And so, we go with all of these. But the thing is very educational. It's entertaining.

26:15 It's inspirational, and it's evangelistic. So you can use it for four different things. You can use it as teaching. Actually, we... Piloted the first couple of episodes with a bunch of kids. Homeschool kids. Yeah. They loved it, and they started taking up donations. Offerings, giving us their— Little offerings, their nickels and dimes and quarters. They gave us their allowance. They actually send us their allowance. They send us their allowance to make more. To make the next one, yeah. To make more. So the kids really got it. They really loved it. So it's not something, oh, it's so sophisticated the kids can't get it. The kids were getting it right away, and they loved it. Because, you know, you can use your imagination. It's like those Adventures in Odyssey kind of thing. You can just sit there and listen to it on your screen, whatever.

26:58 And so then we got—so it's very entertaining and educational, and we can use it for Bible studies. I played it for some of a youth group one time, and one gal says, that's exactly how the devil sounds in my head, you know? And so there was getting some really positive feedback that way. And so it's—but it can be also the subject matter. Every single witness, there's Lot's wife, I'm sorry. There's Cain, there's Nimrod, there's Noah, there's Moses, there's Abraham. Lot's wife. Yeah, I said Lot's wife, yeah. And there's a few more that I forgot. But anyway, right now. But they...

27:40 All presented a different theological issue. For example, with Cain, the issue was religion versus works, versus grace and the blood. And for Lot's wife, the question was, well, I didn't know, you know, I didn't do it. You know, why am I getting in trouble for what my neighbors did? Kind of things like that. And so, and in Moses, we see how the enemy was captured when God led Moses into that bottleneck box canyon up against the Red Sea, and Satan thought he had him with Pharaoh's armies pressing behind him.

28:23 So you see, you hear Moses' rendition of the opening of the Red Sea. And in all of these, and in Jesus dying on the cross, all of those sound effects, all raising from the dead, going down into the belly of hell. Amazing, amazing sound effects. It's just like that is really what makes it. And so, yeah, we're just going to wrap this up with hoping and praying and trusting that you will want to taste this for yourself. And once you get episode one, you'll want two and three and four all the way to 28. At the time we were making it, we didn't know how long it was going to be, but it works out into a nice four-episode set, each seven sets of four episodes each.

29:10 But we would encourage you to go to the store and check it out. We're going to actually play you a couple of excerpts. And this is kind of the episode that has to do with Jesus first being discovered by the demons. So enjoy. joy. The hallways outside the court of heaven were buzzing with expectation and speculation. Would God appear? Would he rise to defend himself? Or would he clothe himself? We've just gone live here at EUL. It looks like there's been a slight delay.

29:51 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. You're where? Right here, standing behind me in the blue suit. 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?

30:35 No backstabbing, tear-wrenching sob story? No big fat excuse for breaking the rules and being here? As best we can figure it, he's coming as a baby. The bad news is, we don't know which baby. I, 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.

31:19 A king coming out of Bethlehem? You've got to be kidding, right? That's where these wise guys were heading when the star disappeared. What wise guys? What star? The no-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. How fortunate is that? Lost in Bethlehem. It ought to be a movie As we speak, they're meeting in Jerusalem With the fat tats and the big shots To find out where the kid is.

32:03 King of the Jews, they call it. Whoa. Now? In Jerusalem? Isn't that Herod's precinct? Our boy's got it covered. Herod's hot under the covers and ready to flow a basket. 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!

32:47 Or bad news. There's a big census going on in Bethlehem right now, and thousands of extra of people are in town for the holidays. So, when did a party ever stop you from doing your job? If we just wait, that'll lead us right to him. What makes you think they're going to find him if you can't? Herod's got them believing he wants to come along and worship with them. They're 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?

33:31 I want to know the minute he's dead. Oh, by the way Did they bring any gifts? Gold frankincense my stuff like that Be sure you get the loot on the way out. And we want to thank you today for listening to Rescue Radio, God on Trial, and encourage you again to go to liferecovery.com to pick up your first installments of episode 1234 to listen for yourself. Very soon, we will be able to have this on a basis where you can purchase all 28 at one time. We're working on that technical opportunity.

34:19 So, again, enjoy everything.