When brazen thieves made off with Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” and “Madonna” several years ago, I wanted to join the search. The thought of adding Munch’s works to the secret galleries of art forever lost was upsetting to say the least. I pictured clumsy men dragging irreplaceable works through sullied alleyways and destructive elements. Like most, I dreaded the worst. Valuables cannot be trusted in the hands of thieves.

Of course, these men were conscious that they had in their possession something of value. If the paintings had meant nothing to them, they would never have been worth stealing. With the rest of the world, the thieves were well aware of the nature of the items they held in their hands. At the time of the burglary “The Scream” was estimated at 75 million and “Madonna” at 15 million. But for them “value” took on an entirely different meaning. In thieves’ hands, beauty is something to be exploited. It is smuggled into a dark underground and bartered for in secret. Its true value has been exchanged for something lesser.

One of the claims of the Christian worldview is that God has set his glory before the world. Since the beginning of time, Christians believe, God has shown his faithfulness, his goodness, his grandeur. God has placed his countenance upon us and trusted us with his Name. God sent his human Son to be with us and through him offered the assurance of new life, new robes, new creation. And repeatedly, we have taken his Name and exchanged it for something lesser. We have dragged it through sullied alleyways and destructive elements, holding this treasure like thieves, having lost the true value of all we hold. We follow God not as God but as something smaller—something exploited for pride or held as personal virtue.

When Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all of the vendors and money changers, he said in person what God had proclaimed for years: “Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you?” (Jeremiah 7:11). Jesus not only addressed the merchants, whose eyes were too focused on wages, but he denounced leaders and authorities, and pilgrims who had lost their footing. Thus, the prophet from Nazareth overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and he pronounced the words of God one more time: “It is written, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a ‘den of robbers’” (Mark 11:17).

God’s Name cannot be trusted in hands of thieves—of this God is well aware. Yet even so, God continues to place it before us:

“For this is what the high and lofty one says—he who lives forever, whose name is holy:

‘I live in a high and holy place,

but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit,

to revive the spirit of the lowly

and to revive the heart of the contrite.

I will not accuse forever,

nor will I always be angry,

for then the spirit of man would grow faint before me—

the breath of man that I have created…

I have seen his ways, but I will heal him;

I will guide him and restore comfort to him’” (Isaiah 57:15-18).

Into grubby hands and deceptive hearts God continues to place his Spirit. This is the strange and difficult and interesting headline of Christianity. Though we behave like thieves, we are trusted with treasure.

To the delight of art aficionados across the world, Edvard Munch’s stolen masterworks were later brought home. There had been speculation that the thieves had burned the paintings to escape the police search, but fortunately, they did not. The frames were smashed in the getaway, but the pictures for the most part were returned unharmed. They remain again in loyal hands.

On the contrary, all of the riches of the glory of God have been placed in hands that are prone to exploit his mercy, abuse his Name, and exchange his glory for something far less significant. But even a den of robbers cannot stop the work of God. As Christ drove out the deceit of the temple so he continues to drive away our own lies that block us from seeing all that exists in our hands. The house of the Father is open to all, and we are not thieves but children.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

After fifteen years and nearly seventeen thousand miles, an unlikely fleet was set to make port on the beaches of Britain. On January 29, 1992, three massive containers on a cargo ship from Hong Kong crashed into the Pacific Ocean during a storm. The containers were filled with brightly colored bathtub toys bound for the United States. Instead, twenty-nine thousand little plastic ducks, frogs, beavers, and turtles began a journey that would be carefully monitored by children, oceanographers, environmentalists, and newscasters alike.

After 23 years, the tiny bobbing friends have traveled past Japan and back to Alaska, drifted deliberately down the Bering Strait and past the length of Greenland, and carefully floated down the eastern coastline of the United States. They have persevered through storms that would have left boats and crews in dire straits. They patiently endured four years frozen in ice as they crossed the Arctic Ocean. They have arrived at various intervals on various shores, faded and tattered by sun and surf, some with animal bites and barnacles to show for the journey. But each smiling plastic face seems to return with an ironic confession: the smallest vessels on tumultuous seas are not necessarily the most vulnerable.

Life is certainly far more than an attempt to keep our heads above water, and yet at times it feels a suited metaphor. Like tiny rubber ducks in an oceanic bathtub, we are tossed about the rocks of fear and anger, pulled under by currents of despair and disappointment, and broken at times by the journey. Human fragility is often as startlingly obvious as the image of a bath toy in the Bering Strait. We are at times almost averse to this fragility, whether seen in ourselves or in others. Fighting to keep afloat in an unpredictable sea, we take on distracting cargo and build defensive walls—anything that makes us feel less like tiny vessels lost at sea and more like giant ships passing in the night.

But metaphors of strength can be misleading, and vulnerability is often fearfully misunderstood. Though we may be reluctant to hear it, there is one tradition that clearly puts forth the story of a fragile and fleeting humanity. Jesus spoke readily of his own death and wept at the grave of a friend. The apostle Paul wrote of our bodies as “jars of clay,” words hastening back the image of David who lamented that he had become like “broken pottery.” Yet even well beyond the fragile images of humanity given in Scripture, the vulnerability of a God-man comes into focus and redefines all of our terms. The image of Jesus on the cross further turns our understanding of fragility on its head, challenges every discomfort with brokenness, and redirects our associations of weak and strong. In these images of Christ we discover a vulnerability of God that makes our greatest images of strength seem somehow childish. In his cruciform journey, God uses the weak to shame the strong, a suffering Son to meet the wounds of creation, and the vulnerable image of a broken savior who comes near.

The Christian profession is that it is by the Cross which we live, by a seemingly weak vessel, that we are brought home. Christ is not promised as a religious escape raft for the hard realities of this world. On the contrary, he calls to us in our weakness and reminds us that it is not unfamiliar to him. Through tumultuous waters, he beckons us to see there is potential in fragility, mercy in affliction, life beyond and within the journey that currently consumes us. Something like the image of tiny ducks arriving after an unlikely voyage, the journey of a soul to the cross is one in which Christ redirects our thoughts on vulnerability, the weak and the strong. And along the way, God is aware of every last and fragile vessel, going after even one that is lost, longing to gather us unto himself like a hen bringing together thousands of chicks under her wings.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Proverbs 28:13

Is repentance necessary in the believer’s life? Yes, and we can see this critical truth in 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” You may say, “The word repentance isn’t in that verse.” But let’s take a closer look.

Remember, “to repent” simply means to change your mind. For unbelievers, this refers to saving faith—that is, the decision to place trust in Jesus. But for Christians, repentance involves a change of heart with regard to behavior or attitude. We must make an ongoing decision to lead an obedient, Christlike life.

In 1 John, this choice is represented by the word confess, which originally had the sense of “agree with.” In other words, if you confess your wrongdoing to God, you are coming into agreement with Him about that sin and, in turn, disagreeing with your previous view. Here, confession isn’t a matter of salvation; rather, it means allowing the Father to continually reform your mind, molding you more and more into the image of His Son.

God absolutely hates sin. So if you agree with Him about sin, then you are changing your mind about the disobedience in your life. Thoughts, attitudes, and actions that once seemed perfectly natural will no longer fit with who you are. As God continues to work in your life, your mind will gradually reject old thought patterns, and you’ll more closely represent His way of thinking.

Is there sin in your life that has become too uncomfortable to bear? Confess the matter to God, and allow Him to change your mind about it today.

Bible in One Year: Ezekiel 7-9

In cities across the world, the blind are leading the blind, quite literally. In an exhibit that hopes to promote understanding between people with and without eyesight, Dialogue in the Dark takes small tour groups through a variety of environments in complete darkness, inviting them to rely on senses they are far less used to trusting. For approximately one hour, visitors are led by visually impaired guides like George Pinon, who has been blind since age 3. Along the way, visitors can ask questions of their visually impaired guide, whose face remains unseen until the end.(1) In a similar worldwide exhibit, Dinner in the Dark, participants are served a four-course meal in complete darkness by blind waiters, challenging taste buds and table manners alike.

In each scenario, the turn of phrase “the blind leading the blind” challenges every negative connotation associated with it. The idiom is, of course, not meant to depict actual visual impairment like Pinon’s, but the far more common impairment of insight, knowledge, or vision of reality. Typically, the saying is applied in situations where the person (or people) in charge knows no more than those whom he or she is leading. The phrase is one used in antiquity, most notably used by Jesus in Matthew 15:14 and Luke 6:39. “Let them alone,” Jesus said of the Pharisees; “they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.”

Just as Jesus seems to say here of the scribes and Pharisees of his day, the non-religious sometime describe every religious person in such terms. They reason that the anatomy of faith in general promotes a culture of the blind leading the blind. Moreover, Christianity in particular, some argue, is founded on such a blindness. The deluded disciples, blind by their love for Jesus or perhaps simply their need to be right, perpetuated a story that continues to delude the world. In his Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris writes that nonbelievers like himself are thoroughly dumbstruck by the pervasiveness of Christian blindness, by the Christian “denial of tangible reality,” by the suffering these Christians create “in service to religious myths” and their wholehearted “attachment to an imaginary God.”(2)

While blindness to reality is a common accusation among the nonreligious, their accusations typically extend well beyond the charge of blindness. Charles Templeton, for instance, describes the resurrection story as a fable put forward by followers hoping to keep the dream alive. He insists that resurrection is first of all implausible, and that the story must be false because there are no secular histories which mention it. What’s more, he describes the discrepancies within the gospel accounts themselves as evidence of dishonesty or tampering of the storyline. Like many, he ends with the sharp conclusion that though Christians embrace it with blind eyes, “the entire resurrection story is not credible.”(3) In such a scenario, however, it would be far more accurate to accuse Christians of being “the deluded following the liars” than “the blind following the blind.”

In fact, I think most Christians would vigorously agree that the resurrection is indeed unfathomable. In the same way that Mary and Joseph understood that pregnancy among the virginal does not make sense, the resurrection flies in the face of what we know to be true of dead bodies: they do not rise. On this point, no one is blind. If by some way a body did happen to rise, it would have been a miracle unparalleled in history. On these details, I think most Christians and atheists can, in fact, agree!

But the claim that resurrection is implausible cannot be accurately bolstered by the claim that secular histories make no mention of it. Secular writers of the time, including Pliny, Josephus, and the Roman historian Tacitus, in fact affirm the biblical accounts in matters of historic detail. Christ’s life, his reported miracles, his sentence under the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, his crucifixion, and his reported resurrection are all well documented by the historians of the era. Templeton’s insistence that a miracle of resurrection proportions would have convinced the entire population in a matter of hours is optimistic at best; there are far too many who prefer to watch from afar or to keep their eyes closed entirely.

Further, the oft-mentioned claim of discrepancies in the biblical accounts of the resurrection story cannot be used to logically discount the story itself. First, error must not be confused with imprecision. It makes sense that Paul mentions men as the first witnesses of the risen Christ because in that historical context women (who are named as the first witnesses in other accounts) were not considered valid witnesses. Second, falsity must not be confused with perspective. The minimal differences between the gospel accounts actually assure there was legitimate conveying of perspective going on and not simply a memorized story they needed to keep straight.

Finally, the theory that the story was conjured up by disciples who simply believed what they wanted to believe is not quite plausible. If the disciples had agreed to propagate a story, it serves to follow that they would have known to conceive something far less remarkable, a story that would accommodate the arguments they would undoubtedly face. With even the slightest bit of intelligence, one could see the claim that Jesus had only “spiritually” or “figuratively” risen again would have been much harder to prove false by antagonists. Furthermore, when standing up for these falsified claims was a matter of life or death, it seems likely that at least one of them would have buckled—far more likely than an entire group (and many others) being willing to die for a lie. A far cry from “the blind leading the blind,” such a scenario would call for “the liars following the liars.”

On the contrary, the disciples took the dangerous and difficult road—the inconceivable road—and they went to great lengths to proclaim it. Unlike those who might call them “blind” for conceding to the unfathomable, I find it far more difficult to examine the bigger picture and yet refuse to see.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Elizabeth Landau, “Being blind, ‘You Have to Be Adventurous,’” http://CNN.com, May 12, 2009, accessed May 12, 2009.

(2) Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 91.

(3) Charles Templeton, Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996), 122.

The Christian Vision Project was an initiative that began three consecutive years with a question. The aim was to stir thought, creativity, and faithfulness within the Christian church around the subjects of culture, mission, and gospel. In 2006, project leaders asked a group of Christian thinkers how followers of Christ could be countercultural for the common good. Their answers ranged from becoming our own fiercest critics to experiencing life at the margins, from choosing wisely what to overlook and what to belabor to packing up and moving into the city.

But today one answer in particular comes to mind. To the question of counterculturalism for the common good, professor and author Lauren Winner proposed: More sleep. She quickly admitted the curious nature of her retort. “Surely one could come up with something more other-directed, more sacrificial, less self-serving,” she wrote. Still, she carefully reasoned through the forces of culture that insist we give up an hour of sleep here, or two hours there—the grinding schedules, the unnerving stock piles of e-mail in need of responses, the early-taught/early-learned push for more and more productivity. Thus, Winner concluded, “It’s not just that a countercultural embrace of sleep bears witness to values higher than ‘the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desire for other things.’ A night of good sleep—a week, or month, or year of good sleep—also testifies to the basic Christian story of Creation. We are creatures, with bodies that are finite and contingent.”(1) We are also bodies living within a culture generally terrified of aging, uncomfortable with death, and desperate for our accomplishments to distract us. “The unarguable demands that our bodies make for sleep are a good reminder that we are mere creatures,” Winner concludes. “[I]t is God and God alone who ‘neither slumbers nor sleeps.’”(2)

It is indeed a strange part of the Christian story, the countercultural proclamation that the distinction matters deeply—that our humanity’s particular condition is as vital to who we are as God’s identity is to God. In fact the most momentous part of the Christian story—Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again—is often confessed liturgically beside the humble beginnings of creatureliness. The ashes of Ash Wednesday starkly remind us of the dust we came from and the dust to which we will return—as Christ’s own. Foreheads are marked with a bold and ashen cross of dust, recalling both our history and our future, invoking repentance, inciting stares. Marked with his cross, we are Christ’s: pilgrims on a journey that proclaims death and suffering, life and resurrection all at once. The journey through the light and darkness of Christ’s life is for those made in dust who will return to dust, those willing to trace the breath that began all of life to the place where Christ breathed his last. It is a journey that expends everything within us. To pick up the cross and follow him is to be reminded at every step that we are mere creatures, and he has come near our humanity to show us what that word originally meant.

To be sure, there are times when we may feel like the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, weary with sorrow, our own eyes heavy with sleep. Current world events and worn-out cries of anguish only deepen this wearied exhaustion. Arguably, this innate instinct is fitting. “[T]o sleep, long and soundly,” says Winner, “is to place our trust not in our own strength and hard work, but in him without whom we labor in vain.”(3) We cannot carry all that Christ carried anymore than we can carry the sorrows we now see all around us. Yet, where we are quite prone to exchange sound and trusting sleep for fretful slumber, helpless sorrow, or apathetic fatigue, Christ emerges through his own weariness to wake us. “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand.”(4)

The way toward the cross is one that will show both the Christian and a world of contrasting beliefs that we are all finite, fragile creatures in need of a guide, in need of sleep, in need of one who can bear far more than we are able. The cross will also show that the one we desperately need truly exists. While his friends slept, Jesus stepped closer toward betrayal and agony, going all the way to his death, so that one day he could wake us for good: “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you!”(5)

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Lauren Winner, Books & Culture, January/February 2006, Vol. 12, No. 1, Page 7.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Matthew 26:45.

(5) Ephesians 5:14.