“The ‘kingdom of God’ is for the gullible,” I read recently.  “You enter by putting an end to all your questions.”

It’s true that Jesus moved all over Judea pronouncing the reign of God and the kingdom of heaven as if it were a notion he wanted the simplest soul to get his mind around.  But simplicity was not what hearers walked away with. With great disparity, he made it clear that this kingdom was approaching, that it was here, that it was among us, that we needed to enter it, that we need to wait for it, that we desperately need the one who reigns within it. The tension within so many different and dynamic realities turned the clarity of each individual picture into a great and ambiguous portrait. He insisted, the kingdom “has come near you.” Yet he prayed, “Thy kingdom come.“(1) Paul, too, described the placement of believers in the kingdom as something established: “God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.”(2) While the writer of Hebrews described the kingdom as an ongoing gift we must accept: “Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us therefore give thanks.”(3) To make matters all the more complex, Jesus also assigned the kingdom imagery such as a mustard seed, a treasure in a field, and a great banquet, among others.

Contrary to putting an end to one’s questions, the kingdom of God incites inquiry all the more. What is the nature of this kingdom? Can it be all of these things? Who is this messenger? And what kind of proclamation requires the herald to pour out his very life to tell it? Whatever this kingdom is, it unmistakably introduces to a world far different from the one around us, one we cannot quite get our minds around, with tensions and dynamisms reminiscent of the promise of God to answer our cries “with great and unsearchable things you do not know.”(4) It is a kingdom that tells a story grand enough to master the metanarratives which otherwise compel us into thoughtless, gullible obedience. It is a kingdom with a king whose very authority exposes our idols as wood and reforms our numbed minds with great and surprising reversals of reality.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem.

In this kingdom Jesus proclaims we are shown a God who opens the eyes of the blind and raises the dead, who claims the last will be the first, and the servant is the greatest. But his proclamations did not cease with mere easy words. Jesus put these claims into action, placing this kingdom before us in such a way that forbids us to see any of it as mere religion, abstraction, gullibility, or sentimentality:

“Then the whole assembly rose and led Jesus off to Pilate.  And they began to accuse him, saying, ‘We have found this man subverting our nation.  He opposes payment of taxes to Caesar and claims to be Christ, a king.’

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – This Kingdom →

Middlemarch is the epic novel by Mary Anne Evans, better known by her male penname George Eliot. The work is considered one of the most significant novels of the Victorian period and a masterpiece of English fiction. Rather than following a grand hero, Eliot explores a number of themes in a series of interlocking narratives, telling the stories of ordinary characters intertwined in the intricate details of life and community. Eliot’s focus is the ordinary, and in fact her lament—in the form of 700 pages of detail—is that we not only so often fail to see it, but fail to see that there is really no such thing. There is neither ordinary human pain nor ordinary human living. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” she writes, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”(1)

The world Eliot saw around her is not unlike our own in its capacity to silence the dissonance of details, the frequency of pain, the roar of life in its most minute and yet extraordinary forms. We silence the wild roar of the ordinary and divert our attention to magnitudes more willing to fit into our control. The largest tasks and decisions are given more credence, the biggest lives and events of history most studied and admired, and the greatest powers and influences feared or revered most. And on the contrary, the ordinary acts we undermine, the most common and chronic angst we manage to mask, and the most simple and monotonous events we silence or stop seeing altogether. But have we judged correctly?

Artists often work at pulling back the curtain on these places we have wadded out of sight and sound, showing glimpses of life easily missed, pulling off the disguises that hide sad or mortal wounds, drawing our attention to all that is deemed mundane and obscure. Their subject is often the ordinary, but it is for the sake of the extraordinary, even the holy. Nowhere does Eliot articulate this more clearly than in her defense of the ordinary scenes depicted in early Dutch painting. “Do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish those old women scrapping carrots with their work-worn hands….It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and flame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.”(2) For the artist, ordinary life, ordinary hardship, ordinary sorrow is precisely the scene of our need for God, and remarkably, the scene of God and miracle.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Scene of Miracle →

Mine is not a heritage that deeply associates identity with the land on which that identity was forged. My ancestors packed every belonging they were able to place on a boat (including, I’m certain much to someone’s chagrin, a nine foot corner cupboard) and eventually made their way to Ohio. It was not easy for them; Irish immigrants were not well-received. But they made a life for themselves far away from all they once knew as home, choosing to distance themselves from the land of their forefathers in more ways than one. They even changed the spelling of their surname so that “home” would be less recognizable. For some immigrants, the land they leave is never far from their minds—and often this is true even of the generations who have never seen this land for themselves. This was not the case with my ancestors.

It was not until I spent time within a Native American community in Oklahoma (and later the intertwining worlds of the Palestinians and Israelis) that I came to realize the powerful pull of a homeland, even for those who hold it only in the imaginative longings of their minds. For those of us who view land in terms of property lines and economics, there is a giant chasm that separates us from those who define geography as life and spirit. The tragic role of geography in the story of every Native American tribe is easily recognizable, but the spiritual, personal, and physical weight of that offense is often grossly miscalculated. “To us when your land is gone, you are walking toward a slow spiritual death,” says a Shoshone elder who has fought persistently for access to Shoshone land. “We have come to the point that death is better than living without your spirituality.”(1)

Such intensity in the name of place and homeland is not unique to Native America. For the people of ancient Israel, the relationship between land and faith was equally profound. The destructive loss of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians in 587 BCE was infinitely more to them than the loss of home and property. For them it was the loss of faith, identity, and God’s presence. Walter Brueggemann writes of Jerusalem’s destruction: “The deep sense of displacement evoked by the loss led to the conclusion in some quarters that all the old promises of YHWH to Israel—and consequently Israel’s status as YHWH’s people and Jerusalem’s status as YHWH’s city—were placed in deep jeopardy.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Misplaced →

The deep-seated impression of a parent in the life of a child is a subject well traversed. From pop psychology to history to anthropology, the giant place parents occupy from birth to death is as plain as the life they initiated. Of course, the massive giant which occupies this place may well be the absence of that person, inasmuch as the person him or herself. “It doesn’t matter who my father was,” Anne Sexton once wrote, “it matters who I remember he was.”(1) The looming memory of an absent parent is every bit as big as a present one, maybe bigger. For me, it was something of a revelation: Absence itself can become something of a presence.

It is little wonder that the deepest struggle many of us have with faith is in the absence of God. We learn early that absence is a characteristic connected to despair, wrought from disconnectedness, or born of devastation. We do not see our experience of God’s absence as a subject for lament—like the psalmist’s “Rise up, O Lord; O God, lit up your hand; do not forget the oppressed”—but as a sign of doubt. And so, we often do not know how to reconcile the God who appears in burning bushes and dirty stables, who descends ladders and rends the heavens, but whose crushing silence feels every bit as profound. We don’t know what to do with the ruinous sensation of neglect when God comes so close to some but remains far off from others. We hold in mind the one who came near to the rejected Samaritan woman, but we uncomfortably suspect that we might have been given something else, or worse, that God has for some reason simply withdrawn. The sting of abandonment is overwhelming; with Gerard Manley Hopkins, our prayers seem “lost in desert ways/ Our hymn in the vast silence dies.”

Though it does not always come as a consolation, the Bible recounts similar difficulties and suspicions from some of God’s closest followers. “There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you,” says Isaiah, “for you have hidden your face from us” (Isaiah 64:7). “Why should you be like a stranger in the land,” demands Jeremiah, “like a traveler turning aside for the night?” (Jeremiah 14:8). There is something consoling in knowing that any relationship—even that of a prophet of God—goes through the ebbs and flows of intimacy with the divine. Even the Son of the God cried out at the sensation of God’s withdrawal: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” Nonetheless, knowing that we are not alone in our pain is not the consolation we seek. Misery’s company does not, any more than reason or rationale itself, have much to say to the child who wants to know why her father left; this is not what she is looking for.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Leave of Absence →

“What does it mean to be human?” has been the inquiring theme of more than a few journals, conferences, and special reports. It is a question that is considered from anthropological, theological, and biological perspectives, from within medical, ethical, social, and spiritual circles. Yet regardless of the examiner, any plumbing of the depths of the nature of humanity is a discovery that the implications are as far-reaching and intricate as the subject itself.

Generation after generation, voices that have spoken to the question of human nature often reflect something of the paradoxical character of humanity. Plato described human life in terms of the dualistic qualities he observed. While the mind is representative of the intellectual soul, the stomach is an appetitive beast that must be tamed. In terms less dividing of mind and body, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of the human propensity for both compassion and cruelty at once. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”(1) Speaking in the 17th century, Blaise Pascal made note of further dueling extremes present within humanity. “For after all, what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all—and infinitely far from understanding either… He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”(2)

What does it mean to be human? The seeming paradoxes in and around us make the question difficult to answer. We may sense at times within us contradiction and inconsistency—a desire to be a good friend beside the wherewithal to manipulate, the intention to be a good neighbor beside the tendency to walk away without helping. I find it quite reminiscent of Aslan’s response to the children in Prince Caspian: “‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,’ said Aslan. ‘And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.’”(3)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Image of True Humanity →

There are some stories that move us whether we hear them at five or fifty-five. The 1965 release of the first Peanuts movie, A Charlie Brown Christmas, was instantly loved by adults and children alike. But it almost did not make it past the television executives who hated it. The movie was criticized for everything from being too contemporary in music, to being too religious in tone. But audiences everywhere confidently disagreed. Having aired every year since its debut in 1965, it is now the longest-running cartoon special in history.

One of my predictably favorite scenes finds Charlie Brown on a hunt for the perfect “great big, shiny, aluminum tree—maybe even a pink one” as instructed by Lucy for their Christmas pageant. At the tree lot, Charlie Brown walks through row after row of flashing, shiny spectacles of color, trying his best to choose well and please his friends. But then he sees a small, natural tree, nearly overshadowed by the flash and glitter of the rest. It is pitiful and loosing needles, but it is the only real tree on the lot. In a moment of confidence, Charlie Brown chooses the unlikely sapling over all the others (and is thus the target of laughter and mockery by all).

Even as children, we seem to know intuitively that there is something remarkable—perhaps something even sacred—about being selected, long before we understand the implications of choice at all. That someone saw anything worth choosing in this sickly little tree is a turn in the plot that quiets us. Charlie Brown claims the unlikely, pathetic tree as his own, and there is a part of us that feels claimed too.

The Christian story of God among the world is filled with the language of claiming and calling, gathering and choosing. Yet, stripped of the story and its characters, these words often offend us. We speak of the injustice of a God who claims anyone, who shows signs of favoritism, or calls anyone particularly. We forget what we felt deeply as children—namely, that being claimed among a group of the prettiest and the smartest and the fastest is not about deserving it at all.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Unlikely and Selected →

Though we often note the radical disparity between secularism and Christianity, that doesn’t stop many of us from tacitly assuming that our secular interlocutors will at least recognize the plausibility of our rational arguments for the faith. But they frequently don’t. Why? Is it because they’re less rational than they fancy themselves to be? Are they just stubborn? Is it because they don’t want there to be a god?

Though each of these questions might shed some light on the situation, I don’t think they go to the heart of the matter. Furthermore, I think they often serve as a pretext for dismissing our secular friend’s outlook, and patting ourselves on the back for having given it our best shot. (Sadly, I’m speaking from experience here.) I think a better question is: What am I missing? Why am I not being heard?

Consider the historical evidence for Jesus’s resurrection. Despite its illustrious track record with skeptics, many non-believers simply dismiss it out of hand. Why? It turns out that there’s a brilliant thinker behind the scenes, and we need to make his acquaintance.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume devoted an entire section of his seminal essay, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, to the subject of miracles. Unabashed in his ambitions, Hume’s stated aim was to provide an “everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion,” and to mount an argument against miracles that would prove “useful as long as the world endures.”[1]

Since the world is still enduring, it may prove useful for us to re-examine Hume’s thesis regarding miracles: “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.”[2] Let’s temporarily bracket the question of whether this sentence is accurate or fair, and pause to admire its rhetorical finesse. Who would want to defend anything that constitutes a “violation of the laws of nature”? Who would want to argue against scientific evidence? What kind of person makes a habit of attacking the testimony of “unalterable experience”? More significantly, what sane person would want to trespass beyond the bounds of reason?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Why Can’t Skeptics Hear My Arguments?  →

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Soul of America

Years ago, Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop penned their book, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? It was a book that warned of the decisions that were being made within a culture stepping into new and terrifying terrain. They saw clearly where we were headed. We are now there.

I narrow that title down to what is happening on the home front here in America.

Listening to the blistering political rhetoric, I am asked all over the world, “What has happened in America?” The question should go deeper. Whatever happened to the American soul? We are truly at the cliff’s precipitous edge and the fall could be long and deadly. Why? We have a deep crisis of the soul that is killing us morally and we have no recourse. We have no recourse because the only cure has been disparaged and mocked by the elite and the powerful. And those very ideologies are now presiding over the slaughter of our citizens while the abundance of speeches is inversely proportional to the wisdom they contain and Reason bleeds to death before our eyes.

These may be strong words but I am staggered by all that is happening around us while the powerful fiddle and bodies litter the floors of offices, airports, and even restaurants. How many families will be shattered and offered up at the altar of our foolishness?

Let me connect some dots to trace where the real killing is happening. Dare I say a kind of genocide stares us in the face? Genocide is defined as the mass killing of a particular group of people. I have started to ask myself whether genocide is the first step towards mass murder or has a kind of mass murder already taken place before we experience genocide and the mangled bodies? I propose to you that multiple killings have preceded the horrors with which we now live. Those killings prepared the ground for the literal burial of our own people.

Three killings in particular are as real as the carnage we see when suicide vests are detonated: the death of morality, the death of truth, and the death of reason. With such tragic exterminations, we now find ourselves in ever-present danger, constantly lectured to by those who have all the bodyguards they and their families need while the rest of us are sitting ducks for evil people whose rights are protected more than those of their slaughtered victims. Why is this happening? We are at war but not only with an enemy. We are at war within our own culture, and whether we will ever win over the enemy depends on whether we win this war within our own souls.

At first, how I connect these dots may seem far-fetched, but they are indeed connected. Some time ago Robert Shapiro, the well-known lawyer of the famed O.J. Simpson trial, was being interviewed by Megyn Kelly of Fox News. She asked if justice had been served in that case. In a mind-stupefying, pathetic answer, he said, “There is legal justice and moral justice. Legal justice was served.” Maybe it was rightly called the trial of the century: We have entered the twenty-first century having amputated law from morality. Welcome to the uncivil civilization legalizing murder. That an intelligent, educated, supposedly legal scholar can make a statement like that and think he has defended a noble cause is fatal to our culture. Maybe that’s why Shakespeare described Satan as “the prince of lawyers.” If that’s what legal theory espouses we are in great peril. I have no doubt many an honorable lawyer cringed at that response but probably none was shocked. This is where law has drifted and come unhinged from any moral moorings. When justice is decapitated and something can be legal but immoral, we know we have already killed the heart of what it means to be human. The morality of the beast is now normal. Is it any wonder that Nazi judges felt they were doing the “right thing” by upholding their legal prerogative that resulted in the death of millions? Our society is being dragged towards the morgue because the law has held the gun to the heart of morality.

Ironically, there was something in his response to be applauded. At least he granted there was such a thing as moral justice. So that leads to a deeper question: Should not Morality and Truth be inextricably bound together? That is at the heart of all judgments. What is the truth when a person is killed? But now, I dare say, not only does morality not matter, the truth doesn’t matter either. That has also been buried. If you want a snapshot of our times, here it is: Four brave Americans serving their country murdered by a bunch of hate-filled thugs, whose ideology we are not allowed to identify, received and presided over by a litany of lies, their bodies draped in the national flag, while assurance is given to the bereaved that the culprits will be hunted down, including the one because of whom they were killed. If that scenario doesn’t drive us to our knees, Lord have mercy!

We are in the graveyard of a culture when a most somber moment cannot compel the conscience to tell the truth. Oh, that the victims could have sat up for just a moment and stared down that heinous lie! But it was not to be.  One day it will be so as their blood cries out from the ground. As Muggeridge said, “The lie is stuck like a fish bone in the throat of the handheld microphone…. Truth has died, not God.” The noble thing to have done when that blunder was made was to admit a failure for whatever reason and ask for pardon, but not to bury the dead with a lie! As if it is not dark enough for a handful to tell a lie, even worse, in our culture today the lie is no longer a posture to be shunned. We celebrate power over truth, enshrouding the lie with our flag. That is a form of national murder. You see, a blunder is a momentary reality. Upholding a lie is a character flaw, sending that lie into eternity.

The death of morality, the death of truth; then we come to the last, the death of reason. Aristotle reminded us that the first law of logic is identity. We must identify what we are talking about. A particular identifiable characteristic is indispensable to the referent. We must identify the characteristics of the thing we define. That is necessary to understanding the thing and to resisting contradiction. But as destroyers enter our lands and desire to pillage and kill, we are led by rhetoric that kills the first law of logic, the law of identity. We are told that identifying the enemy is not that important; strange that the same logic is not employed to all other local inimical ideologies but only seems to apply to Islam. Honest Muslims themselves wish to call it for what it is but our clever linguistic sleight of hand seems to restrict us from such identity—and so we bury our dead without identifying why the killer killed them. First, we try to mitigate our peril by this incredible new coinage, “radicalized,” that conveniently shifts the blame from the active shooter to the remote controller. Now we don’t even wish to identify what controls the remote controller. Propaganda that kills identity is deadly to the soul of a culture.

We are sliding into the future with evil stalking us but no morality, no truth, and no reason to guide us. America may be flirting with a self-inflicted mortal wound. Or it could well be a killing that is designed by a postmodern ideology masquerading as political correctness. When liberalism, whose legitimate child is relativism, has played itself out it will be a Pyrrhic victory to find ourselves in the hands of those whose identity is no longer in doubt. And when they are in control, the very means they used to hide their identity will be silenced as well. They will preside over the last rites of politically correct enforcers and a “free press” that abused freedom and celebrated the lie ‘til they themselves were silenced, buried by the truth they never wanted to expose.

There always has been, and is now more than ever, only one hope for rescue. If we abide in God’s truth revealed in his Son, then we shall know the truth and the truth will set us free. That is why I say again and again that we must dispense with our verbal arsenal that speaks only in terms of right and left. We have forgotten there is an up and a down. May God help us! We need His transforming power to change our thinking and to give us a hunger for what is true. True freedom is not in doing whatever we wish but in doing what we ought. That has been buried in America. And only one who knows the way out of the grave can give us a second chance to live: Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life that sets us free from within first, before we learn to deal with the lies around us.

As my prayer for this July 4th, I think of the great hymn by Isaac Watts prayed often in moments of drastic transition. I have added a fourth verse for our times.

Our God, our Help in ages past,

Our Hope for years to come,

Our Shelter from the stormy blast,

And our eternal Home!

Under the shadow of Thy throne

Thy saints have dwelt secure;

Sufficient is Thine arm alone,

And our defense is sure.

Before the hills in order stood

Or earth received her frame,

From everlasting Thou art God,

To endless years the same.

We need thee now as ne’er before,

We mourn the wisdom gone;

Transform our land forevermore—

Redemption through your Son.

Posted by Ravi Zacharias on July 2, 2016

http://www.rzim.org/

Starting with a question seems like a good idea to most people: it helps to bring a sharper focus, it’s conversational, it reveals gaps in knowledge, and it’s quite natural.(1) Kids seem to use questions instinctively to find out about the world. Of course, there are lazy questions and there are thoughtful questions. The difference is hard to explain, but anyone who has ever heard or asked a great question, asked at the right time, will immediately know why good, careful, thoughtful questions are always worth asking.

When it comes to questions about faith, Christians have often pointed to the example of God asking Adam and Eve, ‘Where are you?’ (Genesis 3:9), and the way in which Jesus interacts with people in the New Testament. Here are just a few of the questions of Jesus:

What are you looking for? What do you want me to do for you? Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me? If you love only those who love you, what credit is that to you? Do you want to be well? Do you see this woman? What good is it to gain the whole world but forfeit your soul? Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Who is greater, the one seated at the table, or the one who serves? Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? Which of you would hand his son a stone when he asks for a loaf of bread, or a snake when he asks for a fish? How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God? Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God? Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ but do not do what I command? Why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For which of these good works are you trying to stone me? Do you think that I cannot call upon my Father and he will not provide me at this moment with more than twelve legions of angels? Would you like some breakfast? Have you come to believe because you have seen me? I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? Do you love me?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Starting With a Question →

Some anniversaries slip past us without recognition, and yet one such forgotten recipient continues to smile regardless. The first emoticon, perhaps better known in the realm of online discourse as the smiley face, has been smiling for more than 30 years. Its creator, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott Fahlman, suggested the symbol in 1982 in an online discussion about the limits of online humor. “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),” he wrote. “Read it sideways.”(1)

The rest is history. Fahlman’s smileys spread from his classroom to other classrooms, from universities to the corporate world, and eventually around the world. The emoticon aided what online communicators were all too aware was ailing. In the world of instantaneous communication, miscommunicating is sometimes more probable than communicating. Humor, sarcasm, and general human warmth can easily be sacrificed in this subculture of speed and technology. Words merely given in brief can be misperceived as terse or loaded. Comments meant to be taken lightly can be missed altogether. Many would argue that the invention of the emoticon has helped, though it certainly has not eradicated every obstacle.

Nonetheless, the quick embrace and subsequent explosion of emoticons suggests at least a subtle awareness that in the breakdown of language something human is in fact lost. High school and college professors readily lament the frequency with which “chat” language is creeping further into academic writing. Their greatest concern is that many students don’t even realize there is a difference. While it can be argued that email encourages a certain sloppiness in communicating, text messaging has forged the creation of an entirely new language—a language created with regard first for the technology as opposed to the speakers or the conversation itself.

In a publication on the topic of language, Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio made the observation that words and language both shape and affect our humanity. He then added, “The corollary of this claim is the observation that cultural institutions and habits that corrupt or weaken our use of language are profoundly dehumanizing.”(2) When words are ransacked of meaning and replaced with concepts less distinct, we ourselves become something less distinct. Though technology is far from the only culprit, wherever the offense is committed, consequences are costly. In fact, it is said that one of the first steps to slavery is a loss of language.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Words, Language, and Humanity →

All of us, at one time or another, have experienced the strange physiological reaction of zygomatic stimulation and subsequent larynx strain. This strain upsets the respiratory system, which results in deep, noisy gasps. The mouth opens and closes as the lungs struggle for oxygen. The struggle for oxygen causes the face to turn various shades of red and strange, unique noises emerge from deep within. What is this strange, physiological reaction I am describing? It is laughter!

We normally associate laughter with humor. But gelotology, the study of laughter, suggests another trigger for laughter that has been called ‘the incongruity theory.’ This theory suggests that laughter arises when logic and familiarity are replaced by things that don’t normally go together—when we expect one outcome and another happens. Generally speaking, our minds and bodies anticipate what’s going to happen and how it’s going to end based on logical thought, emotion, and our past experience. But when circumstances go in unexpected directions, our thoughts and emotions suddenly have to switch gears and laughter often emerges out of the tension between what we expect—and what actually happens.

Recently, I was struck by how the incongruity theory of laughter may shed light on the nature of faith, particularly as it relates to Sarah and her laughter at God’s promise of children in Genesis 18:11-15. In general, the account of her laughter at God’s promise that she would indeed bear a child is read as a lack of faith. Yet, the writer of the letter to the Hebrews counts Sarah among the faithful. Sarah, we’re told by the author, is one of the faithful witnesses because she “received the ability to conceive by faith, even beyond the proper time of life since she considered God faithful who had promised” (Hebrews 11:11).

It is not difficult to understand why many see a lack of faith as they read this story. For many have difficulty believing that faith can be found in the gap between what we expect and what actually happens. Or perhaps it is assumed that faith never doubts, nor questions, nor struggles with the seeming incongruities of life. Sadly, some cannot conceive of a faith that laughs!

But even if Sarah’s laughter indicates a level of disbelief who could blame her for being incredulous? Who wouldn’t laugh at the promise of a child to someone barren and long beyond the childbearing years? This is where the incongruity theory of laughter is so helpful. For Sarah’s laughter contains a glimmer of faith; faith that is really found in incongruity—holding together belief and disbelief in the face of incongruent circumstances and situations.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faith and Incongruity →

I remember the first time I learned that legal proceedings are not always exact pictures of justice. I think my mom was trying to get me to clean my room. Trying a new tactic, she told me that if a burglar happened to break in that night, trip over the junk on my floor and break his leg, I would be the one responsible for his injuries. In such a scenario, the thief could actually take legal action against the very person he was trying to rob. I remember feeling indignant at the thought of it (though likely not enough to clean my room).

A similarly troubling picture of justice arises when a person is trying to help a victim, but ends up becoming the victim herself—such as when a passerby stops to administer CPR and winds up, for whatever reason, with a lawsuit on her hands. A newspaper column by Abigail Van Buren, known to her advice and manner-seeking readers as “Dear Abby,” lamented the increasing need for “Good Samaritans” to stop and consider the risk before providing assistance. While Abby herself noted there was no excuse to withhold help, one reader was insistent. In places without a “Good Samaritan law,” which actually removes the liability of the one providing assistance, “people who offer a helping hand place themselves potentially at financial and emotional risk.”(1) The reader continued, “I only hope that I have the presence of mind in the future to withhold assistance in a state that has no Good Samaritan law.”

While the law of human nature seems to assure the majority of people will pass by an accident assuming that someone else will help out, the laws of litigation seem to warn Good Samaritans to watch their backs altogether. Consequently, in many cases, increasingly so, no one does anything. The victim remains the victim; the Samaritan remains unscathed.

I suppose it should not come as a surprise that we have managed to hyper-individualize one of the most non-individualistic characters in all of storytelling. The very point of the parable of the Good Samaritan, the story from which the vernacular term for helper now takes its name, is to teach that hierarchical, individual distinctions, whether thinking in terms of race, religion, or personal liability, are misleading and harmful. In the story Jesus tells, the Samaritan’s presence of mind is the exact opposite of self-conscious. The Samaritan deliberately places himself in the center of harm’s way (not knowing if the thieves are still nearby), not to mention the epicenter of disdain for showing disregard to cultural norms (he was a Samaritan who should have been keeping to himself). The assurance of coming out unscathed could hardly have been this Samaritan’s motive for reaching out. On the contrary, the Samaritan places himself in a position where he is certain to bear the cost—one such cost being the financial burden of care for the wounded person on the road.

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For the earliest believers in the God of Abraham, confession, sharing aloud what they held as sacred, was a way remembering all they had witnessed. Before God they declared: “You saw the suffering of our forefathers in Egypt; you heard their cry at the Red Sea. You sent miraculous signs and wonders against Pharaoh…. You made a name for yourself, which remains to this day” (Nehemiah 9:9-10). Before one another they remembered: “We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him” (1 Thessalonians 4:14). Whereas some might view the confessions of the church today as formal treatises or ancient documents, the intent was the same: The church confesses what it needs to remember, what it longs to remember. We confess the promises of God; we confess the actions of God. We confess, and our identity is forged. For what we choose to remember in doctrine and history, faith and belief, boldly informs who we are.

Confessing is, therefore, much more than formal subscription to words spoken in history. It is learning to voice the unchanging story of the gospel beside the situation and mission of the church today. It is the utterance of dynamic truths and the active process of living by them. Confessing God the Father moves those who confess into a particular history, people, and reality, and then compels us to move further and further into the identity it places before us. With Simon Peter, the church confesses of Christ the Son: “We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:69). And with Christ, the church confesses the Spirit.

Yet for the Church in history and for many today, none of these are easy words. Nor are they words from which one can pick and chose with whim and preference. They are spoken with the knowledge that they must inform all of life, regardless of the life in which we find ourselves. Michael Horton clarifies, “While it is certainly possible to have a church that is formally committed to Christian doctrine—even in the form of creeds, confessions, and catechisms, without exhibiting any interest in missions or the welfare even of those within their own body, I would argue that it is impossible to have a church that is actually committed to sound doctrine that lacks these corollary interests.”(1) In other words, rightly functioning, confession and mission, doctrine and life exist hand in hand. Karl Barth was equally insistent upon the missional corollary of true confession. “A declaration may be bold and clear, and centrally Christian… but so long as it remains theoretical, entailing no obligation or venture on the part of him who makes it, it is not confession and must not be mistaken for it.”(2) To use one of Christ’s own metaphors, true confessing does not produce words that fall like seeds on shallow ground, but seeds that grow into great trees where others can come and rest in their branches. Confession is an action in a very real sense of the word.

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In the Garden of Gethsemane on the night Jesus was arrested, the disciples fell asleep when Jesus had asked them to stay awake; they turned their heads away in weariness when he had asked them to pray and keep watch. They felt the heaviness of their eyes instead of the heaviness of the moment, though Jesus repeatedly tried to stir them to be alert. It was a day of failings. After Jesus’s arrest, everyone deserted him and fled. Peter, who had emphatically declared he would never deny Christ, heard the rooster crow and knew exactly what he had done. In the aftermath of three denials, Peter wept bitterly. One wonders how the other scattered disciples received the morning.

What do you do with despair? What do you do when you know that you have messed up, when you know that you have missed an opportunity, when it seems that all of your shortcomings are written in large print across your life and there is no going back with an eraser?

Most of us walk away from a ruined moment thoroughly defeated. But where do you go? And how long do you remain in your defeat? Do you throw up your hands and stop trying? Do you mentally beat yourself up? Do you carry your guilt as if paying penitence? Do you, in the words of George MacDonald, house a conscience that does its duty so well it makes the whole house uncomfortable?

Christian author Joni Eareckson Tada knows intimately what the face of despair looks like. Injured in a diving accident that left her paralyzed, she was once convinced she had missed the best version of her life. Her misstep loomed before her, and because of it, she believed that God was somehow forcing her to go with God’s divine Plan B.

Do we, in our assailings and failings, hold a similar perspective? In the regret of a missed opportunity, the guilt of a failed moment, the despair of an irreversible situation, it is understandable that we sometimes sink into the hopeless thought that it is all over. It is easy to beat ourselves up, to despairingly ponder what it means to have missed out, and to believe that somehow, with disappointment, God must now come in and adjust the plan for our lives.

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“I know what I’m going to do for the next year, and the next year, and the year after that…I’m going to shake the dust off of this crummy old town and I’m going to see the world.”(1)

Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is the classic film of Christmas holiday fare. It’s ubiquity on the airwaves belies its dismal performance at the box office when it was first released just after World War II.(2) Capra’s film follows the life of George Bailey in his small town. And while the film has a happy ending, it exposes the creeping despair and bitterness that comes from the loss of George’s dreams. The film offers a powerful visual of the gap that forms between knowing what George will do “the next year and the year after that” and the reality of living that leaves him wondering whether his is a wonderful life.

Despite the film’s often saccharine sentimentality, it nevertheless presents a realistic picture of lost or abandoned dreams. Like the film’s main character, George Bailey, many of us had dreams of “seeing the world” and “kicking the dust off” of our ordinary lives and existence. Our ideal plans and goals called us out into an ever-expanding future of possibility and adventure.

In this sense, It’s a Wonderful Life offers all who enter into its narrative a chance to look into the chasm between many cherished ideals and the often sober reality of our lives. This glimpse into what is often a gaping chasm of lost hopes and abandoned dreams offers a frightening opportunity to let go. Indeed, facing the death of ones’ dreams head on forces a moment of decision. Will we become bitter by fixating on what has been lost, or will we walk forward in hope on a path of yet unseen possibility?

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Science fiction novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said of one of his most recurrent characters, “Trout was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken of this possibility several times to his parakeet. He had said, for instance, ‘Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I’m a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.”(1) In this scene from the book Breakfast of Champions, Kilgore Trout’s haunting suspicion is unveiled before him. Sitting content at a bar, Kilgore is suddenly overwhelmed by someone or something that has entered the room. Beginning to sweat, he becomes uncomfortably aware of a presence disturbingly greater than himself.

The author himself, Kurt Vonnegut, has stepped beyond the role of narrator and into the book itself, and the effect is as bizarre for Kilgore as it is for the readers. When the author of the book steps into the novel, fiction is lost within a higher reality, and Kilgore senses the world as he knows it collapsing. In fact, this was the author’s intent. Vonnegut has placed himself in Kilgore’s world for no other reason than to explain the meaninglessness of Kilgore’s life. He came to explain to Kilgore face to face that the very tiresome life he has led was, in fact, all due to the pen and whims of an author who made it all up for his own sake. In this twisted ending, no doubt illustrative of Vonnegut’s own humanism, Kilgore is forced to conclude that apart from the imagination of the author he does not actually exist. Ironically, he also must come to terms with the fact that it is because of the author that his very existence has been ridiculous.

The gospel writers tell a story that is perhaps as fantastic as Vonnegut’s tale, though one with consequences in stark contrast. The Gospel of John, too, begins with a story that is interrupted by the presence of the author: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and that life was the light of all people… And the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a Father’s only son, full of grace and truth… From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.”(2) As Eugene Peterson aptly translates, “The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” But in this story, the presence of the author is not our demise but our inherent good.

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