Popular Pastor Greg Laurie recently had an opportunity to present a clear gospel message to world famous psychologist and philosopher Jordan Peterson during a conversation between the two men that covered a wide range of topics including faith, personal loss, and the search for purpose and meaning.
As the interview, a two-hour long episode of “The Jordan B. Peterson” podcast, wound down to a close, 71-year-old Laurie, who serves as the pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California, took some time to look back on the loss of his son Christopher. The 33-year-old died in a tragic car accident in July 2008, a date that Laurie has repeatedly called the “worst” of his life. And that’s totally understandable. No parent should ever outlive their own child. I can’t even imagine how awful that must feel.
“As a Christian, I believe I’ll see my son again because he believed in Jesus,” Laurie said during the chat with Peterson. “He won’t be in Heaven because I’m his dad. He’ll be in Heaven because he put his faith in Christ and he had that relationship. He’s a part of my future as well. So that gives me hope. But also, I realize that God can allow these things in our life. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it. I don’t even try to explain it.”
“Peterson, author of We Who Wrestle with God, connected Laurie’s testimony to the biblical narrative, noting that grief, though painful, affirms the value of life,” The Christian Post reported.
“The depth of your grief is proportionate to the magnitude of your love,” he explained. “So you might say, ‘Well, how could God constitute a world made such that a child could die? And then you think, ‘Well, if you have a child, and the child dies, and you grieve, the grief is an indication of the magnitude of the loss.’ So the fact that you grieve, that’s a testament to the value of life, even though it’s truncated.”
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The California pastor then said that he absolutely believes there is an afterlife, saying, “I believe in Heaven, and I believe in it more than I’ve ever believed.” He then went on to give a description of Heaven not as some kind of abstract concept but a real place as taught in Sacred Scripture.
“I’ve always been a student of Heaven as a Christian, and the Bible speaks so much of Heaven, but when my son went to be there, I wanted to know more about it,” he told Peterson. “As you read the Bible, you realize that Heaven is a real place for real people to do real things. Jesus said, ‘I go to prepare a place for you.’ And Heaven, in the Bible, is pictured as a city. It’s pictured as a country. It’s pictured as a paradise. The Bible tells us we’ll eat in Heaven. We’ll be reunited with loved ones in Heaven; we’ll be active. And then, one day, Heaven comes to Earth, and what we call the millennium, Heaven and Earth become one. I believe strongly in that.”
In response, Peterson said he struggles to reconcile earthly moments of transcendence with the promise of eternity. “How do you reconcile, in your own mind, the insistence that part of the Christian moral pattern is to perfect the world and to raise the material up to the heavenly with the notion of the afterlife and immortality?” he asked. Laurie pointed to biblical narratives as a source of clarity; Paul, in 2 Corinthians, spoke about being “caught up in the third Heaven,” while Jesus promised the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise” — a word translated like the “Royal Garden of a king,” the pastor said.
“Paul went there, and he came back, and then after that, he said, ‘I have a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better,’” Laurie explained to the psychologist. “Ever since that moment in this life, he had homesickness for Heaven. So coming back to my son, I can’t explain it, but I would say this: when he went there, I feel like a part of me went there too.”
“I believe when my son left this world for the next world, and that tragic automobile accident, that he was taken by angels into God’s presence, and I believe that I will go there too,” Laurie added. “It’s faith that’s in my heart.”
As he thought back on his journey through life, the pastor placed emphasis on how faith becomes the most real during suffering.
“God made a lot of promises,” he stated. “I’ve put those promises to the test, including the worst thing of all, to lose a child. And I’ve seen how God had come through for me. If He hadn’t come through for me after my son died, I would have given up preaching, for sure. Why carry on? But He came through for me.”
Laurie concluded the interview with a clear presentation of the Gospel: “Ultimately, when everything’s said and done, what’s more important than the afterlife? What’s more important than where we spend it? According to the Bible, I believe there’s a literal Heaven, a literal Hell, and I believe we choose in this life where we will spend the afterlife,” he said. The pastor said the reason he’s going to Heaven is “not because I’ve lived a good life, because I failed in many ways, but because Christ laid His life down for me on the cross.”
After the interview was finished, Laurie went on to describe Peterson as “one of the great minds of our generation” who has a “deep interest and love for the Bible.”
“I really appreciated how he let me tell my story. In the process of telling it, I was able to share how Jesus Christ has changed my life and what it means to come into a relationship with Him,” Laurie recounted.
Peterson has not, as far as we know, repented and placed full faith in Christ, but his interest in the topic of salvation and God is seemingly drawing him nearer and nearer to that conclusion. Pray for his soul and for his conversion.