If There’s No Sex, Money, or Power…The Gospels Might Be Telling the Truth

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]I watched a some of your other podcasts and you said most crimes fall into three categories, lust, greed, and the pursuit of power. Um, can you explain that for me?

[00:00:10]Yeah, so when you're working in homicides, and I didn't discover this as a Christian, I discovered it as a just a guy who was working cases that if you're at a death scene and you're wondering who did this, well, only three reasons why anyone commits a murder, anyone does anything they shouldn't do. It's only sex, money, and power. Now, they're graded. So, there are things that within those three, and I think power is probably like a 70%er, the other two are probably only 30%.

[00:00:34]But often it's it's going to be one of those three things. There is no fourth category. And people always write to me and say, "Well, you're missing it.

[00:00:39]You're missing. Well, what about crazy?"

[00:00:41]Well, I'm talking about if someone is criminally insane, and very few people are, um, but if somebody was, well, then I wouldn't be able to try them.

[00:00:48]Because it wouldn't even need a motive.

[00:00:50]Criminally insane people don't operate uh, by these impulses. They're insane.

[00:00:54]But everybody else operates by these three impulses. So, I can't adjudicate somebody who's criminally insane. And by the way, everyone wants to make that case. Oh, yeah, he was he was insane at the time or he lost his mind or whatever. But they they never really works out that way. Judges don't fall for that. Turns out that people who are sane still do crazy things.

[00:01:14]And that's what we're after here. What's causing them to do the crazy thing?

[00:01:17]Well, sex, money, and power. What about vengeance? Well, what's causing you to be vengeful?

[00:01:21]It's sex, money, or power. So, any of the else that you add to this, just ask, "Well, what's driving that?" And it's going to you're going to come back to those three things. Yeah.

[00:01:29]So, so for us, it's just a matter of saying, "Well, she's dead. She's laying Well, what Okay.

[00:01:34]What what what what impact is it She's either dead over money, power, or sex.

[00:01:38]So, which is it here? That's at least going to eliminate people. Eliminate certain categories. And of course, when we first start, we got all three categories are still on the table.

[00:01:46]And then you eventually at some point you're going to say, "Okay." So, there's all kinds of like big-time cases going on right now that are getting national attention. Well, in the end, that's how they're they're going to shake out.

[00:01:56]They're going to shake out with one of those three motives.

[00:01:59]The downside makes it pretty simple to work cases. Now, those are in scripture.

[00:02:03]I just didn't know where to find that in scripture, but it's all in one verse in 1 John 2. So, it's there, but I just never, uh, read scripture. For me, it was just like just practically speaking, if you work enough cases, you see this pattern over and over and over again. It's just those three things. So, yeah, a lot of this is those are the three things. And those are the three things I actually used to to examine, um, the the writers of scripture. Because if this is a lie, lies are just like murders, they're just like any other misbehavior.

[00:02:30]Only people only lie for the same three reasons that people kill somebody. So, if this is a lie, any lie about the past, it's for sex, money, or power.

[00:02:38]That's why people lie. So, the question then that makes, by the way, it makes me easy for me. It is legitimate then to say, "Well, if I can't figure out how this person is gaining anything in sex, money, or power, it might just be the truth." Now, they could be crazy. Yeah.

[00:02:52]Or they could be mistaken.

[00:02:54]But the lie, if they're lying to me, it's only for one of those three reasons. How do I How do I apply this kind of thing? How do you transfer this kind of thing? Like you were talking about, it's this stuff that's kind of like what we were talking about, hiding in plain sight. But it's a lot of what interested me is I I walk into this church, and I'm not was raised around any Christians, none of my family. My wife was interested in going to this church in Orange County. So, I go into this church with her, and it was like, um, pastor was really clever. He he said that Jesus was was valuable, smart, said some smart things, said he was the smartest man who ever lived. I said, "Okay." I bought a Bible to see if that was true. And as I'm reading through the Gospels, I'm starting to see a lot of the same stuff we see in the cold case uh, files. In other words, we have supplemental reports that are taken by a detective who's interviewed a witness.

[00:03:42]Well, that's what Luke says he's doing in the Gospel of Luke. You know, or Mark is writing for Peter in Rome. Well, he would be like that guy who's a report writer, but he's not the witness. He's writing for the witness. And when you get done with that, there's a certain texture to those accounts. They don't agree.

[00:03:57]None of my cold case accounts agree if I've got more than one witness. Because again, they're they're micro-focusing on things that are of interest to them.

[00:04:06]Uh, maybe one knows what guns is what kind of guns what is what. Knows I even knows a revolver from a semi-automatic.

[00:04:12]Okay.

[00:04:13]Other people don't. Um, one maybe bought that shirt for her husband, and she's now she can tell what kind of shirt it is. But there's And so, they'll focus on different things, leaving out other details altogether. Now, in in real cases in in in present time, like it was just a couple days ago, I can go back out and re-interview that that witness and kind of get to the root of why you didn't mention this thing.

[00:04:34]Yeah. Right? Because yeah, I don't see it in the report. And I'm not going to tip you. I'm just going to go and say, "Can you tell me again what happened?"

[00:04:40]And see if maybe they insert this detail they left out before.

[00:04:44]Then I might ask, "You know, you didn't mention that earlier, did you?"

[00:04:47]No. Okay. So, I'm let I'm let them kind of tease it out. Uh, can't do that with these cold cases because often the witnesses are already dead. I can't go back and re-interview them. Well, that's kind of like the cold like the Gospels.

[00:04:57]Can't go back and re-interview these witnesses. They've been dead for thousands of years. So, what do I How do I assess a supplemental report with a dead witness statement?

[00:05:06]Um, well, the kind of the same set of skills. And a lot of it is forensic.

[00:05:11]Although, I use a lot of forensic statement analysis, but it's not a science. Like it's an art.

[00:05:16]So, you can use it and be completely wrong.

[00:05:18]But it does give you places to look.

[00:05:20]Like you can tell that Okay, right here, something's going on. Now, what's going on there? Well, I think it's this, but I could be wrong. But there's definitely something going on here because this is a tell. Why would you use that word when you don't need to? So, for me, it gave me an immediate interest in the original languages.

[00:05:35]And to know what is the best straight-away translation from the Greek on that. How many times does this author use that expression? How many times is that expression used in the first century? What's the cultural context of it? So, a lot of it for me became this obsession with forensic statement analysis, reading through the Gospels, and seeing things that were really, uh, eye-opening that I felt like, "Okay, so now we I'm going to test these."

[00:05:59]Uh, so as a first casual reading that got me to know how do you test an eyewitness statement? Well, in California, we have a jury instruction.

[00:06:06]And it's a pretty simple jury instruction. It says that, um, jurors are allowed to listen to witnesses on the stand and consider these areas, broad areas.

[00:06:16]Um, and test them and so, ask these questions as you're sitting on In your own mind, ask this question. Well, the questions are like 13 questions, and they break into four categories. Were they really there at all? Could they be demonstrated that they were really there? Two, um, can they be corroborated in some way? Although, my cases don't have video.

[00:06:35]Today you'd have video could be great corroboration, but we don't have that kind of stuff in a case from 1970. So, that that's the second one. Third, have they changed their story over time? Or have they been a consistent Have they been a consistent truth-teller who hasn't changed their story over time?

[00:06:48]And finally, do they possess one of those motives, sex, money, or power, that would cause them to lie to me?

[00:06:55]So, like what's in it for them to tell a lie?

[00:06:58]So, I said, "Okay, that's the template I use on every case. Let's Let's do that with the Gospels. Let's just go through the Gospels and ask those those those four questions and and see how they hold up."

[00:07:07]Now, I I think the part of the problem is I would have said as a non-believer, "Well, I could I might accept some things in the Gospels, but I could not accept anything miraculous." I think it's like a genre shift for me.

[00:07:20]A mythology includes miraculous claims.

[00:07:23]History doesn't. So, I would have said, "I'd have to be out as soon as I find a miracle claim." The virgin conception.

[00:07:30]Okay, right away. Can't I got to be out.

[00:07:32]This that little things just don't happen. So, the first thing I had to ask myself is, "Do I have good reason to believe that I really can explain the universe the way it is with just natural causes?

[00:07:43]Just space-time, matter, physics, and chemistry." So, that was the first thing I needed to ask. Is that Is that fair?

[00:07:48]Or is there Cuz I was somebody who was pretty thoughtful about my my thinking on how we got here and and and why it was the way it is.

[00:07:57]I had a view of how the universe came into existence as an atheist.

[00:08:01]Big Bang cosmology. I would have said that all space-time and matter comes into existence from nothing.

[00:08:06]The same as that that cosmology is still the standard model in physics.

[00:08:11]Even today with all the multiverse theorists and all the string theorists, I mean, Big Bang cosmology is still king.

[00:08:18]But that proposes there's something outside of space-time and matter that could be causally powerful enough to blink everything into existence, and it has no spatial, temporal, or material dimensions.

[00:08:30]And it it temporal dimensions. It has it it It can't be made of space-time and matter.

[00:08:36]That's the very thing it's creating when it creates the universe.

[00:08:40]So, as you think about that, that does kind of open the door. If that's an impersonal force, but physics needs something to act on, and there's nothing to act on.

[00:08:48]So, the question becomes, "What is the causal force that starts everything?"

[00:08:52]And if there is such a thing, it is personal, well, then no miracle in the New Testament is really all that offensive, right? Those are all small potato miracles compared to Genesis 1, everything from nothing.

[00:09:03]So, I just had to be honest about at least holding So, I I at least tried my best to say, "Are these reliable accounts?"

[00:09:12]Um, if you can, um, at least hold with an open hand the possibility of the miraculous.

[00:09:18]And I think they passed the test that way.