Hank Unplugged: Essential Christian Conversations

Hank Hanegraaff, host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Hank Unplugged podcast, reflects on the heroic, Christ-honoring actions of Todd Beamer on Flight 93, September 11, 2001, who helped prevent the Muslim hijackers from crashing the Boeing 757 into the United States Capitol. Beamer’s source and impetus were the very Creator who made us all icons of Himself.

Hank Hanegraaff, host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Hank Unplugged podcast, reflects on the fact that with the passing of time—twenty years since September 11, 2001—we have become complacent to the Islamic terrorism that spawned the Manhattan massacre. Some have forgotten—others are blithely unaware—that Islam is the only significant religious system in the history of the human race with a sociopolitical structure of law that mandates violence against the infidel. Disastrously, the current narrative is that to tell the truth in this respect is tantamount to radicalizing Muslims and exacerbating hostilities that might otherwise lie dormant. This narrative is, of course, patently false. In reality, Islam is not a religion in the sanitized western sense. Rather, Islam is an all-encompassing socio-political legal matrix that has bred a worldview antagonistic to anything but itself. There are, certainly, millions of peaceful and tolerant Muslims, but that hardly means that Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion. It is not. The only real solution to a disintegrating West and resurgent Islam is the proliferation of the gospel of peace proclaimed by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Hank Hanegraaff, host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Hank Unplugged podcast, shares that when his friend and publisher Jack Countryman asked him to write on peace, he considered it a daunting task. Not because he’s not experienced peace. Rather, because—as St. Paul explains—“the peace of God transcends all understanding.” How does one explain what transcends all understanding? The gospel of peace is a preview of the promise of perfect peace in paradise. Through peace with God, peace with others, and the promise of certain peace in paradise, we are equipped to face all the trials and tribulations life brings our way.

Hank Hanegraaff, host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Hank Unplugged podcast, shares another profound letter from his sister Jobje, as she continues her arduous journey through pancreatic cancer treatment. “Each morning I eagerly look outside before the sun rises to reveal an absolutely beautiful scene. A white, thick mist hovers in the distance over the yet unplowed fields…. This mist which has brought by night the silent secret dew, the morning’s light reveals its adorning—the silvery, translucent, delicate frosting of the moisture on the branches, the twigs, the needles of the pine trees, and then even as I watch the steamy mist everywhere arising upward to meet the sun…This is my Creator at work, Who each day paints a new picture of His mercy for me.” James 4:14 reminds us, “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” “I am here only for a little while, but I am made in His image. Someday I will rise like a mist from my earthly existence, ascending upward into the sky to meet the Son, my Savior, and as He parts the veiled, cloudy mist, as He reveals Himself to me, as He takes me by the hand, as He brings me upwards through the misty clouds…I will finally finish my journey at His heaven…. I look forward to that day.” Thank you for your prayers for Jobje and her family.

Hank Hanegraaff, host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Hank Unplugged podcast, reminds us that Islam advances not only by sword but, as the late Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi boasted, by migration without assimilation. Indeed, said al-Qaddafi, “Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe—without swords, without guns, without conquests.” His point was that a civilization that is becoming Islamic demographically will inevitably succumb to Islam politically. From his perspective, there was no need to fly airplanes into buildings when with patience those same buildings can fall into Muslim hands, much like the billions of dollars of equipment and capital that are now in the hands of the Taliban, who also exercised patience.MUSLIM: What You Need to Know about the World’s Fastest-Growing Religion https://www.equip.org/product/cri-resource-muslim-and-robert-spencer-books-on-islam/

Hank Hanegraaff, the host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Hank Unplugged podcast, observes that the moral evils we see happening in the world, including horrendous events in Afghanistan and the ongoing holocaust of abortion on demand, as well as natural evils like hurricanes, all cry out for an explanation. It may seem as though there are many possible responses to this problem. In reality, however, there are only three basic ones—responses from the point of view of philosophical naturalism, pantheism, and theism. And only Christian theism provides a relevant, plausible, and existentially satisfying resolution to the problem of evil. As followers of Jesus Christ, we look forward to a world in which “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21: 4).

Hank Hanegraaff, the host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Hank Unplugged podcast, reminds us that it is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception. The human nature of a human being from conception to old age is not a mere metaphysical contention but a scientific fact. While an embryo does not have a fully developed personality, an embryo does have full personhood from the moment of conception.

Hank Hanegraaff, the host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Hank Unplugged podcast, asks what will be the fate of American and Afghan allies left captive behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. Tragically, the answer is borne out by history. Recall that precisely seven years ago, Mosul, Iraq fell. Muslim fighters thereafter captured village after village. Men were executed. Women and girls taken as slaves, with the sanction for raping captives issued directly from Allah in the Qur’an. Indeed, the consensus of sharia, in concert with the will of Allah, mandates war as a “religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force” (Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah). The Islamic wars mandated by sharia will continue on as a plague on the landscape of humanity.

Hank Hanegraaff, the host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Hank Unplugged podcast, reflects on what could cause someone to blow themselves up and kill so many others in the process. According to the Qur’an, women are promised to suicide bombers as soon as they depart this life. And these women, known as houris, do not sleep, get pregnant, menstruate, spit, blow their noses, or ever get sick, and these “good and lovely, buxom and virginal” women are created specifically as a reward for males of the Muslim community who have been faithful to Allah. Qur’anic descriptions of the houris are particularly intoxicating to modern-day Islamic jihadists. Tragically, most Muslims, like these young Islamic jihadists, are blithely unaware that the sensual visions of paradise that inflame and inform their lusts emanate from the fertile imaginations of mere people—a bankrupt Zoroastrian eschatology.

Hank Hanegraaff, the host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Hank Unplugged podcast, reflects on the appointment of Harvard’s new Chief Chaplain atheist Greg Epstein. He is the author of Good without God and somehow knows with certainty that there is no life after death, and that we should not look to God for answers—rather we should look to him. Much has changed in Harvard’s four-hundred-year history. Consider Harvard’s original mission statement: “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.”