Modern Heroes of the Christian Faith
The Bible is filled with biography – one character after another parade across the pages. God loves to teach lasting lessons through the lives of individuals. With that in mind, Stephen Davey has undertaken a special biographical series illustrating biblical truths through the lives of contemporary believers. These ordinary men and women provide a wonderful legacy. They are influenced and influential because of their faith in God. They are Modern Heroes of the Christian Faith.
Modern Heroes of the Christian Faith
From Skepticism to Faith: The Inspiring Journey of Viggo Olson
Do you believe in the power of science and evolution? Now, imagine using that belief to disprove the Bible, but instead, you find yourself on a faith journey that leads you to serve as a medical missionary in Bangladesh. I invite you to join me as we trace the fascinating journey of brilliant agnostic, Viggo Olson. Through a series of late-night debates with his wife, Olson embarks on a personal investigation to challenge the claims of Christ, only to find himself profoundly impacted by scientific evidence that supports God's creative hand.
As if this transformative journey wasn't captivating enough, we also delve into Olson's study of ancient cultures and cities. From the Hittites to the Edomites, and the magnificent city of Petra, Olson discovered these once denied biblical myths to be true. This further solidified his belief in the reliability of Scripture and the complexity of God's creation. We also pay homage to the modern heroes of the Christian faith who influenced Olson's conversion. Buckle up for an exhilarating discussion on the magnificence of God's creation, the power of faith, and the legacy of Viggo Olson in the Christian faith.
This series is available as a book. Learn more: https://www.wisdomonline.org/heroes
music playing, chimes, playing, chimes, playing, chimes playing. Welcome to Modern Heroes of the Christian Faith. With Steven Davey, I'm your host, scott Wiley. In this series you'll learn more about the profound impact. Steven is the president of Wisdom International. You can learn more at wisdominternational. In today's episode, you'll meet Viggo Olson. Olson began his academic and professional career as an agnostic who believed that human life was a magnificent, creative hand of God. Discover how the Lord brought Dr Olson and his wife to saving faith through intensive scientific research and observation, and then carried them to Bangladesh where they served in medical missions for decades music playing, chimes playing, chimes playing.
Speaker 2:Today we complete a series of biographical sketches related to Scripture that impact individuals' lives and have given us, in their own lives, something worthy of imitation. For today I want to introduce you to an individual and his wife, and then we'll get into a little bit of the Word of God that impacted their lives. The New York Times called Viggo Olson, another David Livingston. If you're familiar with Livingston, he was a medical doctor and he was a doctor in the regions of Africa and, like him, olson will go to unchartered regions, primarily settling in Chittagong, which is right there on the subcontinent of India, a Muslim majority country called Bangladesh. I've had an interest in this diplomatic leader, this statesman, this pioneering church planter, bible translator. I have his two volume biography. It's entitled Doctor D-A-K-T-A-R, which is Bengali for doctor, and I've also had a personal interest because of a member of my own extended family.
Speaker 2:My father's cousin, my third cousin, becky Davy, spent decades serving as his nurse in the hospital they built in Bangladesh. I can still remember, as a boy, becky visiting our home while on furlough. I can still see her dressed in a very colorful sari and wearing a very whinsome smile as she talked about the ministry of Christ through their work in Chittagong. Now, if you knew this surgeon, she would serve alongside when he was still a medical student, vigo his friends called him Vic you would have met a brilliant agnostic, a young man who was convinced of his evolutionary world view. He believed and answered the fundamental questions of life, though he was still a little trouble with some of the fill-in blanks that had not yet been filled in. He considered Christianity just one more religion, and it was a religion sort of created by people, like all the other religions of the world, who were afraid of death and the unknown, and so this sapped their minds, their consciences and made them feel better. But then something begins to happen in his life as a medical student, his life will eventually so dramatically change that he will eventually refuse an invitation to join the Mayo Clinic medical staff. He will turn down incredibly lucrative opportunities, including the opportunity to become the chief surgeon in the second largest hospital in America, and he'll go to this third world country. When we sing Take my Life and Let it Be, you Can have it All. Although him, it's going to really mean that in every respect he will give it all away. Something radical will happen to his life.
Speaker 2:What begins the process would be his marriage to a woman, a young lady, who was also an agnostic, though raised in a believing home. Her parents were committed Christians, and yet it had all gone in one ear and out the other. Well, they get married, and their visits to her parents home would often unfold into these late night debates, and though they were civil and polite, vic would later write he was boiling inside as they debated, and in the course of one of those debates, in fact late into the night, into the early hours of the morning, he agreed really to be polite and accommodating, but he still yet agreed, and she with him, that they would personally explore the claims of Christ, christianity. Now, vic was convinced it wouldn't take all that long to debunk this what he called quote unscientific religion. It wasn't going to take him long to shoot down Christianity. Besides, you'd already been fully immersed in, in evolution, in the science of the day, and and God was effectively, you know, uninvolved and creating People, the world, the universe. He believed, like a deist, that God probably existed, but wasn't personal. You couldn't know him and it really didn't matter anyway, the idea that God created the universe, that God designed the human body, the Animal kingdom, plant life, everything else to. To Vigo Olsen, that idea was At best unintelligent sort of cop out. Certainly it wasn't intriguing to this rather brilliant medical student. He'd been raised during the rather heady days of Scientific discovery and advancement when he was in elementary school.
Speaker 2:In the 1930s the medical community and the scientific community was becoming a little bit more brash and bold, and their denunciation of Of what had been the underpinnings at least deism was of our own country, that there was a guy who started it all, and so he found refuge in their comments, which were becoming bolder. In the 1930s a famous astronomer made the statement, published his thoughts that quote the notion of a beginning was repugnant. Now the steady state theory to held sway for a long time, and that is that the universe was Infinite and and everlasting. That's been proven untrue In our world, even by the evolutionists that now know there was some sort of explosion of time matter beginning. They called it the Big Bang.
Speaker 2:He said here the scientists, openly and without apology, that the idea of God creating the universe was repugnant. In other words, it made him nauseated. And he was applauded for making that kind of statement the most brilliant mind by far when Olson was entering high school was Albert Einstein who had said it, but in published in an interview, and I quote him the circumstances of an initial moment of creation irritates me. Well, paul the Apostle said it would. For one thing, the idea of God creating the heavens and the earth is repugnant, unscientific, foolish and irritating. The Apostle Paul writing from his own evolutionary world that believe the gods just sort of allowed it all to happen according to their own dictates, and Buddhism in fact had reached Asia Minor by the time Paul was a missionary and they were very aware of this worldview.
Speaker 2:He writes in Romans 1 that the power and the nature of a creator God is evident, obvious and and because of what is discovered about what he made, paul said their only response can be to suppress it. It's interesting his use of that verb to suppress. It's a Greek verb that means to steer, that's T E E R. In other words, no matter what they see or what they observe or what they discover, the world wants to steer it all Into their own interpretation and away from the idea of a creator God, and to steer people away from that concept and and to Steer them into their own interpretation, which, by the way is the reason why there's an anything that's going to be discovered or observed, where people are going to go. Oh Well, I didn't know that. Now I'm gonna bow my knee to God and believe in Jesus. That isn't gonna happen. If you're waiting on the Ark to be discovered, you know, for this mass revival to break out, it ain't gonna happen.
Speaker 2:Dead people came to life by the way and entered Jerusalem after Jesus said it's finished. And what did they do? They suppressed the truth. I God has to open the eyes of understanding. But Paul says in the meantime, the unbelieving world wants to steer away from that which they observe, which, to us as believers, is one more declaration of wow, what a glorious God we have. But still, they politely agreed to study. They assumed it wouldn't take long to defend their evolutionary worldview, to prove that God was uninterested and distant, that Jesus was just a marvelous teacher and a moral example and that Christianity was just simply one of many religions.
Speaker 2:So they began their study in an attempt to disprove the concept of creation. He would later write this Specifically we already knew that planet Earth and the universe had not always existed, which meant that they must have been created by some mighty force or energy. The Earth is packed with power firepower, waterpower, atomic power. Only a power can bring into being a power-packed system. The question to me was could it have happened by some undirected, random explosion, which was gaining in popularity, known as the Big Bang?
Speaker 2:Now, as a medical student, vigo was being exposed to what he called the pattern of the human body, the pattern of cells, cellular structure. He said I could study tissue under the microscope and determine if it was lung tissue or brain tissue or heart tissue, simply because of these amazing patterns. Then he said, as we began to just look more broadly, the patterns really were everywhere the pattern of the universe. According to set laws of gravity and thermodynamics, matter and light, stars and planets track their orbits precisely to the second. The Earth and Sun and Moon are in a perfect relationship, so that we live out our lives without being burned to a crisp or frozen into a cosmic ice cube.
Speaker 2:This all troubled him. There's a pattern everywhere, he wrote. There seems to be proof of some intelligent power, not random power that brought it into being. Then the thought struck him this analogy which he shared with his wife. That bothered him, he said. You know, it occurred to me that if I took all the wooden blocks of a hundred scrabble games and I took all of those letters and I put them into a plastic tub and I shook those letters vigorously and then I threw all 9,000 pieces out onto the floor, that would be a demonstration of power. But would they fall so that the letters formed patterns, sentences? No, some would lie on top of other letters. Many of them would rest face down, some would be turned sideways upside down. None of them, none of them would form a paragraph. But suppose, he said to his wife you know I'm thinking about this suppose someone with fingers connected to an intelligent mind picked up the scattered pieces and formed them into words and sentences, so a story emerged. That would be intelligent power. He said to her you know, power can shake that tub and throw letters onto the floor, but it will take intelligent power to write a story. And the patterns we see around us move everything from orbiting planets to cellular structure.
Speaker 2:Daniel Olsen and his wife would come to believe the truth of David's great declaration of God's glory. Keep in mind they were not Christians, but they came to believe that God did intelligently create, after all, one of the texts that would mark them in their research. I want you to turn to. It's the great declaration of David. It's Psalm chapter 19,. His poem on the creative handiwork of God we've called Psalm 19. I couldn't help but think of this text as I read their biography, and let me just make a few comments.
Speaker 2:David writes in verse one the heavens are telling of the glory of God and their expanse, that's the sky, the planets, the stars, the galaxies around us. David writes they are declaring the work of his hands. The Hebrew words for telling and declaring, by the way, are continuous in their tense. In other words, their message never turns off. You could translate this the heavens keep on telling us about the glory of God. By the way, that's, as a believer, so thrilling to me, because they figure out an even greater and more powerful telescope. And what do they discover? There is even more out there. Well, the Bible tells us God designed that so that it would just simply add to the glory of his creative handiwork. So the bigger it gets, the bigger God gets. It's the reason it is so incredibly glorious. He says here that heavens keep on telling us about the glory of God. The sky keeps on describing his handiwork. Creation is the handiwork, that means it's the hand work, it's his fingers, so to speak, like a sculptor crafting something or an artist painting something and then signing it, as it were, with his signature. I have read that Picasso would roll his thumb into paint and then, on the canvas, he'd roll his thumb across the bottom of the canvas. That would be his signature. It essentially says if you take the time to look, god's fingerprints are everywhere. His art collection is all around. It's on continuous display. Eugene Peterson, in the message, paraphrases this opening line wonderfully to read God's glory is on tour in the skies.
Speaker 2:I love that Notice verse 2, where he writes day to day pours forth speech and night to night reveals knowledge. The word David uses for pouring forth speech is the same Hebrew expression for a spring bubbling up, bubbling up. It just keeps bubbling up. Creation keeps bubbling up. Information about the creative power of God, notice is taking place day to day, literally day after day after day after day after day after day. The brilliant wisdom of God just keeps bubbling up as you observe creation. And it isn't just day after day, david adds notice, it's night after night. In other words, turn the lights out and you get a brand new photo album. It's a different photo album than during the day, unique in its evening sky, but it simply bubbles up more knowledge about the creative genius and glory of God. The word David uses at the end of verse 2, by the way for knowledge, you might write into the margin of your Bible.
Speaker 2:It can be understood to mean, or be translated, observable data. It bubbles up observable data Day after day, night after night. The observable data of creation is constantly bubbling up, knowledge that if you weren't committed to suppressing the truth, you would at least say there's an intelligent creator out there. Where would you like to look? Study the petals of a flower. Study the animals, study the human body. It's amazing. My age is not amazing, but you study it. You see what Vigil Olsen saw. It is the pattern of cellular structure, the laws of nature, the beauty and hospitality of planet earth, even in the water you drink. Where'd the water come from? They're not able to answer that question to this day. The best shot at it is asteroids. The data keeps bubbling up the precision of gravity, the nature of light, and on and on and on.
Speaker 2:Vigil was given a book by a pastor. They decided that they would agree to attend a church that Jones parents recommended and they went a few times. The pastor gave him a book written by 13 scientists, believers on creation and I know you're gonna want to know the title of it. I couldn't find the title of it. It's not in his biography, it's just 13 scientists wrote it and so I know you're gonna ask me afterward and I don't know what it is. But he did write.
Speaker 2:After reading that he said this was again was just disproving what I believe to be ironclad. He says my polite interest was becoming a passionate fascination. It wasn't long before they settled in their minds the reality of a creator got still unbelievers. But they turned next to try to attempt to disprove the consistency and reliability of Scripture. And I don't have time to get into all their explorations. But Olson would later write, and I quote him even though there are 66 books in the Bible and those books were written over a span of 1600 years by 40 different, more than 40 different authors, from peasants to fishermen, to physicians, the poets, the Bible harmonized with consistency, he said to his wife. It's as if one person is supervising the writing of it all.
Speaker 2:In college he had been taught that writing was unknown during Moses's time. Moses was a, you know, caveman who wrote with charcoal on a wall. He was taught that the Hittite civilization was a myth. The Edomites were myth. They were all folk tales from the Old Testament to make Jewish people feel good about their nationality. And yet again, in the early 1900s, the archaeologists which are a friend, whether they want to be or not, of Scripture, were just excavating more and more until they've been able to prove that writing by the time of Moses was actually an art, going all the way back, in fact, into Abraham's day. It was an art form.
Speaker 2:The Hittite civilization was discovered just prior to my lifetime. It was excavated. Harvard University had denied the existence of the Hittites, used them as one of their flaming proofs that the Old Testament was a collection of folk tales. Now Harvard, by the way, can give you a doctorate in Hittite civilization. You may have read their apology on the internet about what they said earlier. Olson discovered as well. Even the ancient Edomite culture had been uncovered, once denied as a biblical myth. Now it's captivating the imagination of the world with its magnificent capital city of Petra carved into the soft stone. You can now tour it. In fact, just 24 months ago, using satellite imagery equipment, archaeologists have discovered another structure, series of structures that has yet to be dug out in Petra. They're still discovering what the Old Testament said existed.
Speaker 2:So Vick and his wife turned, you know, to the prophecies of Scripture. It wasn't long before they were able to catalog 30 of them that talked about the first coming of Jesus and his crucifixion. Even before crucifixion was capital punishment or execution by means of civilization, and here David's talking about hands and feet being pierced of the servant of God. They had held to the view that Jesus was a remarkable man, a martyr for his cause, and he wondered out loud to his wife if maybe Jesus was God's way of communicating. He had already studied Plato. Plato had claimed brilliantly that philosophy could in no way deny the possibility of divine revelation. Then they arrive at John 1 that this Lagos, which is the word Plato used, this Lagos, this, this revelation, this, this explanation had come from God. It was God In verse 14, it became flesh. Wow.
Speaker 2:They studied the gospel accounts. They admitted to one another that God seemed to be communicating with mankind. In fact, he told his wife on one occasion, you know, if he wanted to communicate successfully with an ant, the best way to do it would be to become an ant. So the argument he said followed that for God to communicate with us, he would need to join the human race. You know to us, perhaps for you, if you've been raised in the church, you're going. Yeah, we knew that they don't have. He didn't have a college education in the scriptures. He's got a concordance and a Bible. He's talking with people and the scriptures are taking him to the truth of God's explanation through Jesus Christ. They are edging closer, aren't they, to the conclusion, as God is working in their hearts, that God is real, that Jesus was sent from God, that God communicated.
Speaker 2:The Bible is historically accurate and it's still, however, to them ancient history. Is Jesus really alive? And with that they turned to the eyewitness accounts of the resurrection of the Lord and that stupendous claim that he made I am the resurrection and the life. You come to me. Even after you die, I'm going to make sure you live again. Really, how do you prove that? Well, you come back to life.
Speaker 2:And so they discover the radical change in the life of the disciples, undeniable proof of what had happened in their own hearts and minds. In fact, vigil also will later write the resurrection of Christ was, to us, the hinge of the whole question. If he did rise from the dead, get this now, get this. Here's an unbeliever writing this. If he did rise from the dead, we would have to grant that everything Jesus said was true and binding. There's the rub binding, he said.
Speaker 2:I studied the eyewitness accounts of the change in the disciples when Jesus was in the tomb. They're huddled, hiding, terrified, unwilling to say anything or do anything, and Jesus appears and look at the proof of what happens in their own lives. Now they become these courageous, bold, fearless men. Most, if not all, of them are led to violent, horrific executions because of a myth. Now, the presence of the Lord who met with him over 40 days, the scriptures tell us, presenting to them undeniable proofs of who he was, and they would never back down again. Dr Olson writes that his quote invincible.
Speaker 2:Agnostic arguments were crumbling, but he says I still didn't know how to relate to God. I was assuming that Christianity was like Buddhism or Hinduism, or any other world religion for that matter, where you basically try to live a decent life and not hurt anybody and keep your nose clean and your good deeds, you know, try to do more of them than your bad deeds, and they kind of cancel each other out and you'll be good with God. And we kept studying the scriptures, he said. We encountered verse after verse that showed the distinction of Christianity from every other religion. Christianity wasn't good works, it wasn't self-help, it was repentance and faith in what Jesus did.
Speaker 2:Verses like these arrested his attention. He just sort of catalogued him in his biography, his autobiography, titus 3.5. Not by works of righteousness, which we have done, but according to his mercy. He saved us. Second Timothy 1.9. God who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace. Verses like Acts 16 31 believe on the Lord, jesus Christ, and you will be saved. Again, he's studying these, he's coming across these on his own, maybe, like you did John 1.12. To his men, he's received him. He gave the right to become children of God. Romans 10.13. Whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. And that's exactly what Viggo and John Olson did.
Speaker 2:In fact, one night he came home and he had heard another little argument against Christianity and he had sort of picked up it and really picked up on the idea. For the last two weeks his wife had been kind of quiet when he came home with this new thought and she, he said, looked at me and simply said Vic, don't you know by now this is true. And he says I had at that moment this blinding flash of inspiration. Indeed, I was fighting what I knew to be true. And he said when did you come to believe? And she said two weeks ago. And so he had to catch up.
Speaker 2:They both gave their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ, and their lives would never be the same. He would turn down every offer and every opportunity. He would eventually move to London where they would prepare them to set sail for Chittagong. His desire was to go right in the middle, in the gap between the ministries of William Kerry and Adnanam Judson, as they're preparing just as a side note, they're preparing to go to Chittagong and they're living in a house, you know, basically penniless. And he said the only heat were a couple of fireplaces. No heat upstairs. In fact he said they had the bitterest winter they're in Liverpool that they had had on record. He said the hallway of our home registered below zero. They would go to Bangladesh, make disciples, plant churches, build a hospital. They would minister medically to members of the royal family all the way down to untouchables, the poorest of the poor.
Speaker 2:But all of them if you read this biographies, all of them were asking the same questions that God led them through when did the earth come from? Is God really the creator? Did God really communicate to mankind? Is Jesus his revelation? Where can we find forgiveness? How do we relate to him? How can I find eternal life? Maybe you're asking the same questions today and it is no coincidence that you've arrived at this study and this introduction.
Speaker 2:He used to teach the Bengali believers, as he discipled them, that God's plan for their lives was not like a blueprint that you can lay on a table and see all the details. He said your life was more like a scroll and it would be unrolled bit by bit as God's plan and will for your life is unfolded. And he used to say, with a smile on his face Unrolling your scroll completely will take your entire lifetime. It's great advice, great perspective. Maybe for you today it's time to seriously consider the claims of Jesus Christ. And let me tell you ahead of time yes, what you discover will in fact be not only true but binding.
Speaker 2:We can sing about it. Take my life and let it be, take my lips, take my money, take whatever. Yeah, I sang that Tomorrow morning is going to matter, lord, as I go to that classroom or to that shop, as I go about my duties, my life is yours. Unroll just a little bit more, about 12 hours at a time, what you want me to do. If God is capable enough and wise enough to design a universe to function with precision and order according to his purpose, he's capable enough and wise enough to direct your steps and mine as he unrolls the scroll, the story not just of the universe, but your life and mine.
Speaker 1:That was Stephen Davie, the president of Wisdom International. You're listening to his series Modern Heroes of the Christian Faith. If you enjoyed hearing the story of Viggo Olsen, please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening. Stephen has a website filled with resources to help you know what the Bible says, understand what it means and apply it to your life. Learn more at Wisdom International. I'm Scott Wiley. Thanks for listening to Modern Heroes of the Christian Faith.
