Category Archives: Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Science and Religion

August 28, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

If you ask many people today what they think about science’s relationship to religion, you are likely to be told that the two have been in conflict for a very long time.(1) There was the trial of Galileo by the Inquisition, for example, the debate between Wilberforce and Huxley, and there is still an on-going dispute over the teaching of evolution in American schools. These usual suspects may be trotted out whenever this topic is mentioned, but are events such as these really typical of the history of science as a whole?

Contrary to the impression given by some commentators, the conflict thesis between science and religion is one that has been discredited in academic circles for some time. The rise of science in the West was, of course, a very complicated affair in which many different factors played a part. There were certainly inevitable points of tension, but this does detract from the fact that Europe was a largely Christian continent in which religious individuals and institutions inevitably played a central role in the changes that occurred.

A number of the popular misconceptions about history are addressed in Ronald Numbers’ book, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion.(2) One of the most famous examples is the “debate” between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley (1860), which was actually an after-lecture discussion on the merits of Darwin’s work. The alleged clash was largely forgotten about until the 1890s, when it resurrected by those seeking to attack the power of the Anglican orthodoxy. By this point the scientific community had become more professionalized and some of its members realized the debate could be used to promote their already growing autonomy. The event was therefore portrayed as if it had been a portentous victory for science over religion, even though, at the time, neither side was said to have won and the discussion was held on purely scientific grounds.(3)

It is important, therefore, to be aware of how history is sometimes portrayed. Scholars no longer use the term “dark ages,” for example, because the description gives the false impression that this was a period of ignorance during which little development occurred. Rodney Stark suggests that there is a similar problem with the process known as the Enlightenment, because the term itself, coined by Voltaire, was appropriated by various militant atheists and humanists who sought to claim the credit for the rise of science. As Stark points out, “The falsehood that science required the defeat of religion was proclaimed by such self-appointed cheerleaders as Voltaire and Gibbon, who themselves played no part in the scientific enterprise.”(4) This depiction of the Enlightenment, as if it was some kind of clean secular break from the past, persists today, but, as John Coffey points out, it could be more accurately described as a religious process. This is because many of those at the vanguard of the movement were Protestants (though certainly not all orthodox) who sought to fuse religious and philosophical ideas together. This is not to deny the role of certain groups of atheist thinkers, but crucially these were not representative of the Enlightenment as a whole. Furthermore, Dominic Erdozain argues that you can trace a lot of the unbelief of the time back to expressly religious roots. It was a Christian conscience (rather than a secular or pagan one) that drove much of the Enlightenment thought and a poignant example of this was the way in which Voltaire often used Jesus—albeit his own interpretation of him—in order to attack the church.(5)

It is always helpful, therefore, to bear in mind John Hedley Brookes’ comments, when he reminds us that: “In many of the disputes that have been conventionally analyzed in terms of some notional relation between science and religion, the underlying issues were principally about neither science nor religion, nor the relationship between them, but were matters of social, ethical or political concern in which the authority of either science, religion or both was invoked (often on both sides) to defend a view held on other grounds…”(6)

As this suggests, simplistic ways of understanding history honor neither history nor the present.

Simon Wenham is research coordinator for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Europe.

(1) Article adapted from Simon Wenham’s, “Making History: The ‘War’ Between Science and Religion,” Pulse, Issue 8 (Summer 2011), 2-4.

(2) R. Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009).

(3) For further reading see J. R. Lucas Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter (available online).

(4) R. Stark, For the Glory of God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 123.

(5) J. Coffey and D. Erdonzain, lectures given at The Dark Side of Christian History Conference, St Ebbe’s Church, Oxford, February 5, 2011.

(6) J. H. Brooke, Darwinism and Religion: A Revisionist View of the Wilberforce-Huxley Debate (lecture), at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 26 February 2001 (available online).

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Storyteller

August 27, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

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 far greater than himself.

The author himself, Kurt Vonnegut, has stepped beyond the role of narrator and into the book itself. 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 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 with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men… And the word became flesh and dwelt 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.” As Eugene Peterson 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.

Working in an urban ministry setting many years ago, I saw a small glimpse of the strange effects of being spiritually present—an incomparable cry to the Incarnation itself, but a lesson in the sacredness of place nonetheless. During the first year, I lived in an apartment just outside the city. But during the second year I was able to move into the neighborhood where many of the children involved in our ministry lived. The difference was profound. Teenagers that previously had held me at arms length came closer. Kids continually came to my door to ask if I could play. We occupied the same space, and it was not unusual for them to mention it. One girl told me that she knew I was real because I stayed around after dark. In her eyes I was now interested in her life in a way she could physically grasp: a hand to clasp on the way home, a next-door neighbor to sit with on the porch, a heart that knew both the joys and fears of the city. Stepping into this neighborhood changed everything for all of us.

How much more the author of grace and mystery has stepped into our world to change our lives. John relays as an eyewitness that Jesus Christ, the Word in flesh, came to live beside us in body and blood. Eternity stepped into time and brought with it grace and truth. The author of life moved into his creation, declaring it good all over again, bringing the presence of redemption, proclaiming again the meaning of life. It is a story that turns the mind inside out with questions of existence and reality. But in intense contrast to Kilgore’s conclusions of purposelessness, we are strangely called to be a greater part of the storyline.

In the words of G.K. Chesterton, “I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has a purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person.”(3) The vicarious humanity of the Son of God is the nearness of a storyteller who hopes we might know him, and grasp that we are known. His presence is our very overwhelming good.

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

(1) Kurt Vonegut, Breakfast of Champions (New York: Random House, 2006), 246.

(2) John 1:1-3,14.

(3) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Company, 1909), 110.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Making a Name

August 25, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

English author Samuel Johnson once wrote, “There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart, a desire of distinction, which inclines every man to hope, and then to believe, that nature has given himself something peculiar to himself.”

I was startled by the clairvoyance of an editorialist who once connected these sentiments with America’s escalating fascination with book writing. His comments put flesh on the motive often hidden behind the guise of individuality. “The search for personal significance,” he explained, “was once nicely taken care of by the drama that religion supplied. This drama, which lived in every human breast, no matter what one’s social class, was that of salvation: Now that it is gone from so many lives, in place of salvation we have the search for significance, a much trickier business.”(1)

Though the author does not necessarily articulate a sense of loss in regards to the replacement of one pursuit for the other, his thought process is helpful. As religion continues to be eclipsed, particularly in the West, as a provider of significance, humankind is left searching for other sources. From the increased interest in book writing, to social networking, to extreme sports and hobbies, it is a quest clearly observed. Nonetheless, the quest to find significance apart from God is hardly a modern phenomenon. The desire to make a name for oneself is as old as the hills upon which we have built our grand towers and conquered great cities. The drive to define significance on our own is as ancient as the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel. The aspiration is nothing new; book writing is just one more outlet.

But what is interesting, in terms of understanding human history and behavior, is that we should have this longing for significance in the first place. If we are merely products of a wholly indifferent materialist universe, why are we not more at home with our own insignificance? Why should we seek a transcendent sense of meaning at all? Unless, indeed: there is something about us that is neither temporal nor insignificant.

Within the Christian worldview, the cry of the heart for personal significance is a cry the Christian has owned and contended with. When a person answers the call of the Lord to “come and follow,” she admits she has found in the person of Christ an answer to a cry she was incapable of answering personally. When Jesus proclaimed, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” he was stating something essential for the one searching for significance. Knowing who we are and what we need is the starting point for what we will become. The quest for personal significance commonly among us today reverses this, telling us that we must first become something in order to meet our own needs and make a name for ourselves.

Christ is the one in whom our lives find their greatest significance because he is the only one who accepts who we are and offers us what we need. Is my search for significance really panning out? Will writing a book or climbing the corporate ladder really hush the cry within me? What if attempts to define life’s meaning apart from God will always be empty? For significance, like life itself, is not manmade.

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

(1) Joseph Epstein, “Think You Have a Book in You? Think Again,” The New York Times, September 28, 2002.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Out of the Wilderness

August 22, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Kris Lackey thought he had hurricane-proofed his manuscripts. An English professor at the University of New Orleans, he had saved his fiction and papers (including the novel he had half-finished) via hard drive, flash drive, diskette, and hard copy. But as the murky waters continued to rise and he was forced to evacuate his home, he left his papers and computer equipment behind. Even so, he left them in high places—tables and bookshelves well out of harm’s way. He was, by no means, expecting the 11 feet of water that completely besieged his house during Hurricane Katrina.(1) Returning more than a month later, Lackey found pages floating in mud, completely indecipherable, as well as what was left of his flash and hard drives. Nothing was retrievable. Nothing.

The frustration of lost words is a silence palpable to many. When long emails go missing or documents are destroyed in a crash of technology, the task of reconstruction is deeply aggravating at best; at times, it is painful. Sadly, Mr. Lackey’s is not the only story of loss in the midst of natural disaster. Poems, novels, and memoirs were all lost in the same wind and water, devastating each of their authors. To lose a book, to lose an entire lifetime of words, is a sting I shudder to imagine.

Yet, in a very real sense, the sting of lost words reaches far beyond the author. Any story lost is a loss of our own in some way. Losing words is painful because our words are not haphazard. Losing books is devastating because books play an irreplaceable role in the life of the reader. The stories that reach us are so much more than words on a page belonging only to one person. John Milton writes eloquently of the wounds at stake in the death of a story:

“For books are not absolutely dead things but do contain a potency of life in them… [A]s good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye… [A] good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”(2)

In the words of this author we cherish, the loss of a good book, the loss of language, is a loss of life in every multi-leveled sense of the word. “There is a reason,” I heard someone say recently, “that books have been smuggled over borders for centuries.” The wealth of life and knowledge in words and characters, verse and meter is well worth the risk.

I was in the fourth grade when I first experienced this kind of hold of a story on my young life. I was reading Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terebithia, which both carefully and abruptly introduced me to my own mortality. I was a year younger than the characters that came bounding out of those pages and into my world. But the thought of death as an unyielding part of life itself—one that would reach even me—was a thought that had not yet entered my mind. With Jess, I insisted there was some mistake: “Leslie could not die anymore than he himself could die.”(3) His subsequent wrestling with death was an initiation of sorts into my own.

Through others we have no doubt learned similarly. We are incarnate inhabitants of our world, and we learn and know this world by stories.(4) The shock of recognition in a character that speaks what we feel—what we feel but do not yet know—initiates and wakes us to life and story around us—indeed, as Milton says, to a master spirit, to life beyond life. God made humans, said Elie Wiesel, because God loves stories.(5) Indeed, my own skewed perspective of God was in part rewritten by God’s use of my own imagination. I learned to know God through themes of forgiveness in Dostoevsky, reason in Chesterton, loyalty in Tolkien, mystery and wonder in the fairy story. God is indeed always leading us toward the rooms of belonging Christ helps us to imagine.

Like the angel of the LORD who appeared to the weary Elijah, God offers us word and story as substance for the very journey: “Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for you” (1 Kings 19:7). In the midst of this great journey of characters, this quality of God, this character who speaks, this Word who became flesh on our behalf, is indeed an extraordinary gift. Without words that startle us awake or stories that inexplicably remain with us, we would grow faint in the silence, longing for a voice to cry out in our wilderness. How remarkable that this is exactly the kind of God who speaks.

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

(1) Daniel Golden, ” Words Can’t Describe What Some Writers In New Orleans Lost,” The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 1, 2005.

(2) John Milton, Areopagitica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918), 3.

(3) Katherine Patterson, Bridge to Terabithia (New York: Harper, 1977), 134.

(4) For a helpful exploration of this topic, see philosopher James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2013).

(5) Elie Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest (Berlin: Schocken Books, 1995), prologue.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias – Harmless Petty Sins

August 21, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

A familiar fable tells of the hunter who lost his life to the leopard he himself had saved as a pet for his children when the leopard was just a cub. The moral of the story can be deduced easily from the title, Little Leopards Become Big Leopards; or else, sin is easier to deal with before it becomes a habitual practice that eventually defines our lives.(1) Though the story as it stands is a beautiful illustration of a profound truth, there is a deeper lesson regarding the nature of sin that is easily concealed by this line of thinking and which, I believe, lies at the very essence of the Christian call to Christ-likeness. The problem is that the parallel between little harmless leopard cubs and little harmless sins can be dangerously deceptive.
Whereas leopard cubs are indeed harmless, there is no stage of development at which sin can be said to be harmless, for individual acts of sin are merely the symptoms of the true condition of our hearts. It is not accidental that the call to Christian growth in the Scriptures repeatedly zeros-in on such seemingly benign “human shortcomings” as bitterness, rage, anger, harsh words, slander, and malicious behavior (Ephesians 4:31). In his watershed address, The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus placed a great deal of emphasis on lust, anger, and contempt—behaviors and attitudes that would probably not rank high on our lists of problems in need of urgent resolution. Armed with firm and sometimes unconscious categories of serious versus tolerable sins, we gloss over lists of vices in the Scriptures because they seem to be of little consequence to life as we experience it.
But when we fail to grasp the subtleties of sin, we run the risk of rendering much of biblical wisdom irrelevant to our daily life and practice. While we appreciate the uniqueness and necessity of the sacrificial death of Jesus on our behalf, his specific teachings can at times appear to be farfetched and the emphasis misplaced. Does it not seem incredible that the God who made this world would visit it in its brokenness, dwell among us for over thirty years, and then leave behind the command that we must be nice to each other? Can the problems of the world really be solved by having people “turn the other cheek” and “get rid of anger and malice”?
Unfortunately, those “little” sins are not only the mere symptoms of a much bigger problem; they are also effective means of alienating us from God and other human beings. How many careers have been ruined only because of jealousy? How many people have been deprived of genuine help as a result of the seemingly side-comment of someone who secretly despised them? How many relationships have been destroyed by bitterness? How many churches have split up because of selfish ambitions couched in pietistic terms? How much evil has resulted from misinformation, a little coloring around the edges of truth? And have you noticed how much we can control other people just through our body language? From the political arena to the basic family unit, the worst enemy of human harmony is not spectacular wickedness but those seemingly harmless petty sins routinely assumed to be part of what it means to be human.
According to a NASA scientist, a two-degree miscalculation when launching a spacecraft to the moon would send the spacecraft 11,121 miles away from the moon: all one has to do is take time and distance into account.(2) How perceptive then was George MacDonald when he uttered these chilling words, “A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter, and thinking himself a good Christian”!(3) Similarly, C.S. Lewis warned that cards are a welcome substitute for murder if the former will set the believer on a path away from God. “Indeed,” he wrote, “the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”(4)
Now the decisive path out of this quandary is not just a greater resolve to be obedient to God. Such a response is usually motivated by guilt, and the duration of our effort will be directly proportional to the amount of guilt we feel: we will be right back where we started from when the guilt is no longer as strong. The appropriate response must begin with a greater appreciation of the holiness of God and a clear vision of life in God. It is only along the path of Christ-likeness that the true nature of sin is revealed and its appeal blunted. Yes, brazen sinfulness is appallingly evil and destructive, but it only makes a louder growl in a forest populated by stealthier, deadly hunters masquerading as little leopards. It is no idle, perfunctory pastime to pray with King David:
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Test me and know my thoughts.
Point out anything in me that offends you,
And lead me along the path of everlasting life (Psalm 139:23-24).
J.M. Njoroge is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) For example, Paul White’s, Little Leopards Become Big Leopards, published by African Christian Press.
(2) John Trent, Heartshift: The Two Degree Difference That Will Change Your Heart, Your Home, and Your Health (Nashville: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2004), 17.
(3)George MacDonald, in George MacDonald: An Anthology by C. S. Lewis (New York: Dolphin Books, 1962), 118.
(4) C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, in A C.S. Lewis Treasury: Three Classics in One Volume (New York: Harcourt & Company, 1988), 250.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – This God

August 20, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I cannot begin to estimate how many times I have attempted to encourage someone with the assurance of God’s nearness to their situation: God is with you. God is near. God is among us. As a Christian, it is an astonishing attribute of the God I profess, a comforting attribute which voices long before my own confessed: “God is our refuge and strength,” writes the psalmist, “an ever-present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1). “The Lord is near,” the apostle tells the Philippians, “Do not be anxious” (4:5-6). That there is one who draws near is a vital part of the story of Christianity, one in which Christians understandably draw hope. But it is not automatically hopeful to everyone. I was reminded of this when my assurance of God’s presence in the life of a struggling friend was met with her honest rejoinder: “Is that supposed to encourage me?”

Nearness in and of itself is not assuring. I had forgotten this in my well-meaning, though knee-jerk truism. An essential ingredient in the assurance that comes from nearness is the person who is drawing near. The degree of comfort and assurance (or wisdom and conviction) we draw from those near us is wholly contingent on who it is that has drawn near. For some, that God is near resembles more a threat than a promise. My friend’s perception of God at that moment was closer to Julian Huxley’s than King David’s. For Huxley, God resembled “not a ruler, but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.” For David, God’s nearness was clearly thought his good.(1)

Who is it that Christians believe is near? And what does this even mean?

In Christian theology, the attributes of God are qualities which attempt to describe the God who has come near enough to reveal who God is. These self-revealed attributes cannot be taken individually, removed from one another like garments in a great wardrobe, or chosen preferentially like items in a buffet. They are not traits that exist independently but simultaneously, at times in paradoxical mystery to us. God is both near us and “among us” as Isaiah writes; God is also far from us and beyond us—in knowledge, in grandeur, in immensity, in position. “Am I only a God nearby,” declares the LORD, “and not a God far away? Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him?” declares the LORD. “Do not I fill heaven and earth?”

Christians further believe that the one who dwells both among us and in the highest heavens is also good and wise and holy. The God of whose nearness Christians speak is infinite in being, glory, blessedness and perfection; all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, everywhere present, almighty, knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.(1) Like this God there is no other. The God who draws near us is wholly other.

Yet after the candid response from my friend, I realized how important it is to attempt to clarify what I mean—and whom I speak of—when I say that this God is near; and my attempts will remind me that this is never a simple, casual knowledge understood. My friend needed not only to hold the knowledge that God is near but the relational trust that God is merciful. She needed more than a rational reminder that God is holding her and her situation, but the embodied promise that God is good. She needed to hear the “who” behind the promise, beyond the attribute. And I needed the candid reminder that the attributes we can study, the biblical promises we cling to, the words I count on to comfort or restore, are pale in comparison and meaningful only because of the one they describe. The promise that God is among us is only promising because it is this God who is among us.

Christians hold this notion most specifically in the mystery of the Incarnation, the divine drawing near to the human plight in human form. Who is this who comes near, who rends the heavens to stand beside humanity, who stands at the door and knocks? Who is this vicariously human, mediating Son of God among us?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who attested to the nearness of God though confined to a jail cell, depicted the one beside whom he lived and before whom he prayed as a quiet companion, gentle and fierce, persuasive and patient on our behalf. He prayed:

“Lord Jesus, come yourself, and dwell with us, be human as we are, and overcome what overwhelms us. Come into the midst of my evil, come close to my unfaithfulness. Share my sin, which I hate and which I cannot leave. Be my brother, Thou Holy God. Be my brother in the kingdom of evil and suffering and death. Come with me in my death, come with me in my suffering, come with me as I struggle with evil. And make me holy and pure, despite my sin and death.”(2)

What if it is this God who hears our prayers, the humanity of one who walked and suffered in Jerusalem, the Christ who came among us only to die and rise again? What if it is this God who is near?

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

(1) cf. Psalm 73:28.

(2) As excerpted from the Westminster Larger Catechism.

(3) Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, Ed. Edwin Robertson, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 22-23.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Beyond Grace

August 19, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic” rails Ivan Karamazov against God in Dostoyevsky’s classic work The Brothers Karamazov.(1) Those who encounter, or are encountered by the parables and stories of Jesus often feel a similar sentiment. For the parables of Jesus are often exceptional in upsetting religious sensibilities, sometimes vague, and many times enigmatic in their detail and content.

The parable of the laborers in Matthew 20 serves as a case in point. A landowner hires laborers to work in his vineyard. They are hired throughout the workday and all the workers agreed to the wage of a denarius for a day’s work. The enigmatic and exceptional punch line to this story occurs when those who are hired at the very end of the day—in the last hour—are paid the same wage as those who worked all day long. The long-suffering laborers cry out, “These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day” (20:12). Those workers that were hired first are not paid any additional wage. The first are not first, in this story. Instead, the landowner replies with a radical reversal: the last shall be first, and the first last.

Not only is the conclusion to this story exceptional and enigmatic, it also seems wholly unfair. For how could those who worked so little be paid the day’s wage? Yet this upending of any sense of fairness is a recurring theme in other parables of Jesus. Indeed, the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, while a familiar story for many, functions in a similar manner and upsets our sense of what is fair and right, just as in the parable of the laborers. A careful reading presents an extravagant display of grace towards all wayward sons and daughters, even as it illuminates a human parsimony with grace.

Jesus presented the story as a crowd of tax-collectors, sinners, and religious leaders gathered around him. All who listened had a vested interest in what Jesus might say. Some hoped for grace; while others clamored for judgment. “A certain man had two sons,” Jesus begins. The younger of the man’s two sons insists on having his share of the inheritance, which the father grants though the request violated the Jewish custom that allotted upon the death of the father a third of the inheritance to the youngest son.(1) With wasteful extravagance, the son squanders this inheritance and finds himself desperately poor, living among pigs, ravenous for the pods on which they feed. “But when he came to his senses” the text tells us, he reasons that even his father’s hired men have plenty to eat. Hoping to be accepted as a mere slave, he made his way home. “And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him” (Luke 15:20).

The religious leaders listening to Jesus might have gasped at this statement. How could the father extend such grace towards a son who disowned him and was so wasteful and wanton? The father’s action towards the son is truly prodigal; extending grace in an extravagant way, and upsetting every sense of justice and fairness for those hearing the story. His prodigal heart compels him to keep looking for his son—he saw him while he was still a long way off. And despite being disowned by his son, the father feels compassion for him. With wasteful abandon, he runs to his son to embrace him and welcome him home. The father orders a grand party for this son who has been found, “who was dead and has begun to live.”

The older brother in Jesus’s story provocatively gives voice to a deep sense of outrage.(2) In many ways, his complaint intones the same outrage of the laborers in the vineyard. “For so many years, I have been serving you and I have never neglected a command of yours….But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your wealth with harlots; you killed the fattened calf for him” (Luke 15:29-30). We can hear the implicit cry, “It’s not fair!” The text tells us that “he was not willing to go in” to the celebration. He will not hear the entreaty of his gracious father both to come in to the celebration and to recognize that “all that is mine is yours.” Just as in the parable of the laborers the last shall be first, and the first last.

While not vague in their detail or content, these two parables of Jesus are both exceptional and enigmatic. If we are honest, they disrupt a traditional sense of righteousness and of fairness. Both portraits of the prodigal father and of the landowner present a radical fairness of God. God lavishes grace freely on those often deemed the least deserving. Perhaps the sting of the exceptional and enigmatic aspects of these parables is felt deepest by those who see themselves beyond the need of grace.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Cited in Mary Gordon, Reading Jesus: A Writer’s Encounter with the Gospels (New York: Pantheon, 2009), x.

(2) Fred Craddock, <i>Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching</i> (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990), 187.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Speaking to Bones

August 18, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

My experience with the oboe had magnificent beginnings. In fact, it was far more magnificent than I realized. I was in high school and had played in our orchestra for years, but I had never heard of the double-reeded instrument, much less the haunting sounds it made. Yet here in front of me was a woman with an oboe, a friend of a relative, offering to play for us. The sound was rich and beautiful. It was exactly the sound I imagined Mr. Tumnus playing on his flute for Lucy, the Narnian tune that made her “want to cry and laugh and dance and go to sleep all at the same time.” I came home and immediately asked our director if he had any interest in adding an oboe to the mix.

I (and my family) soon learned the oboe was capable of sounds in great distinction from the ones I had heard that day. I spent no more than a month struggling with the nasally, often out-of-tune notes on my borrowed oboe before I turned it back in, completely defeated.

I have no idea why I thought it would come so easily. Perhaps it was the ease with which the instrument was initially played before me, its seeming similarly with the instrument I already knew, or my imagination of magical flutes in stories I loved. I had heard the tune of a master and convinced myself that I could mimic it. But the music was a gift that required years of labored mastering. The oboist I had met that afternoon was a member of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, yet this never seemed to enter my equation.

When Ezekiel was brought before a valley filled with dry and broken bones, he was immediately consumed by the vastness of it all. “The hand of the LORD came upon me and brought me out in the Spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley; and it was full of bones. Then He caused me to pass by them all around, and behold, there were very many in the open valley; and indeed they were very dry” (Ezekiel 37:1-2). One imagines Ezekiel walking among bones, weary of the vision, and despairing of his helplessness to change it.

There are some scenes in life we approach with utter dismay and fear at our ability to make a difference or accomplish the charge before us. Others, like my attempt at the oboe, begin with a skewed impression of the thing itself and our aptitude to hold it. I have approached the gift of Christ both with the dismay of one looking into a valley of impossible tasks and the foolishness of one not interested in practicing any of his words. But neither has forged me nearer to the gift himself.

Still, such approaches to Christ come naturally to many of us. Who can not tremble at some of the things he says? “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). The charge to live as one made in God’s image seems at times futile, like bones in an open valley dreaming of wholeness. And yet, I was startled once—as if it were a foreign thought—at a friend’s inquiry about my practice of life by the Spirit, and the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control that come from walking by the Spirit. We are at once both the child terrified at failing and the child who refuses to even try. Yet neither identity is set forth in Scripture.

In the valley that tired and overwhelmed him, Ezekiel was questioned by the one who put him there. “And He said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ So I answered, ‘O Lord GOD, You know’” (Ezekiel 37:3). His answer is both evidence to his wisdom and perhaps also a glimpse of his skepticism. Ezekiel doesn’t respond that God is asking the unthinkable; he doesn’t comment on the great number or dryness of the bones. Yet, he doesn’t approach the question pretending to know less than he does about bones and biology either. Instead, he offers a reflection on the one who asked: “O Lord God, You know.” Ezekiel gives the task back to God and then proceeds to follow God’s instructions to speak the bones to life.

I believe my fleeting moments with the oboe had much to do with my fleeting motivation to practice. But I think similarly, I failed because of my underestimation of the accomplished musician before me. Seeing her for who she was could not have made me an oboist, but it might have shown me the way. How much more so this is true for the one who invites us to follow him and offers us the gift of his hand. In his life, death, and resurrection, Christ transfigures the impossible for us, giving us in his vicarious humanity a way of holding it. Christ takes us, dry and lifeless, and gives us both the words and the way to make our dry bones live.

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

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – WHO’S DOING YOUR THINKING FOR YOU?

August 16, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I was oddly paralyzed in a used bookstore the other day. A feeling of helplessness seized me as I surveyed the creased spines of the numerous books crowding the dusty shelves. Rifling through the faded paperbacks, I felt bored and listless, like I was rehearsing a tedious habit I’d long since outgrown. Usually, time stops the second I step into a bookshop. On this particular occasion, however, the exit exerted a near-magnetic pull. Like any self-respecting booklover, I wondered what was happening to me.

Setting aside my tendency to be overdramatic, a surprising thought occurred to me as I beat my hasty retreat. I’ve grown so used to retail websites like Amazon.com assembling lists of recommendations based on my ratings, interests, and shopping history that it now takes a concerted effort on my part to actually find something for myself, to actually think for myself.

The ingenious strategy of these sites is to use our choices to build a shopping experience that is uniquely tailored to fit our tastes and “preferences.” Each item you click helps to narrow the parameters of your search, and to customize the page so that you’re perusing a uniquely you-shaped store. Ironically, the more choices you make, the more customized your page becomes, and the less choices you actually have. Helpful as these lists are, they do have a tendency to paint us into our respective digital corners.

To be fair, some sites have sought to minimize this tendency by supplying “random” lists that contain items and titles that don’t conform to any of our established interests. Contrived as this might seem, it does manage to restore a modicum of spontaneity to a consumer experience that increasingly resembles a hall of mirrors. And, of course, there’s still the good old word-of-mouth tradition.

But, all qualifications aside, when I look at my own habits, the fact remains that I often prefer to have my mind made up for me. Not even a meal out is complete without a compulsive investigation of online reviews. Let me be clear, I am not saying that consulting online reviews is tantamount to surrendering all independent thought. If that were the case, I’d be an empty-eyed drone… What I am saying is that we often have a tendency to bypass the risks involved in forming our own thoughts in favor of the thoughts and opinions of others.

One of the more insidious aspects of current online culture is that so much of what crosses our screens tries to tell us what to think. Even the titles—50 Excellent Novels by Female Writers Under 50 That Everyone Should Read, for example—assume we’re passively waiting to be fed answers. This, I would argue, is one of the more shallow and lamentable trends in the age of instant information. Thinking for yourself is one of the most potent freedoms you can exercise; it also takes work. Though we certainly don’t abandon all free thought every time we take advantage of one of these many online conveniences, it’s also worth pausing to ask: Who’s doing my thinking for me?

Posted RZIM Blog – Cameron McAllister on August 12, 2014

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sledgehammers and Other Good News

August 15, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I found myself sighing with something like relief one day after reading a comment made by C.S. Lewis. He was responding to a statement made by a scholar who noted that he didn’t “care for” the Sermon on the Mount but “preferred” the Pauline ethics. Lewis was of course bothered at the suggestion of Scripture alternatives between which we may freely pick and choose, and it was this that he addressed first. But his response also included a striking remark about the Sermon on the Mount itself, and this is what caught my attention. Said Lewis, “As to ‘caring for’ the Sermon on the Mount, if ‘caring for’ here means liking or enjoying, I suppose no one cares for it. Who can like being knocked flat on his face by a sledgehammer? I can hardly imagine a more deadly spiritual condition than that of the man who can read that passage with tranquil pleasure. This is indeed to be ‘at ease in Zion.’”(1)

To be “at ease in Zion” was the deplorable state of existence the prophet Amos spoke of in his harsh words to the Israelites.(2) Reeling in false security and erroneous confidence from their economic affluence and self-indulgent lifestyles, the Israelites, Amos warned, would be the first God would send into exile if they failed to heed his words.

The Sermon on the Mount was likely as alarming to those who first heard it as the thought of exile for those whose homeland is far more than an identity. Lewis’s comparison of Christ’s words to a sledgehammer is not far off. Those potent chapters are not unlike the electric paddles used to shock the heart back to life, back to the rhythm it was intended to have all along.

The Sermon on the Mount is like the keynote address for the kingdom Christ came to introduce and to gather us together like a hen gathers her chicks. On that mountainside, Jesus points out many of the mountains that blur vision of this kingdom. He repeatedly notes that we are not quite seeing as he sees, not grasping reality as it really is. “You have heard that it was so…” he says again and again, “but I tell you…” His words are hard and thorough, and even the simplest of phrases is permeated with the profound glory of a kingdom we far too easily settle for only seeing in part:

Blessed are the poor in spirit…

Blessed are those who mourn…

Blessed are the meek…

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…

Blessed are the merciful…

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.(3)

Perhaps I have become at ease in Zion if I can read these words without wondering if I am among the blessed, if I am one seeing God or missing it. When I lose sight of the kingdom behind the haze of selfish ambition, guilt, or fear, Christ’s words become like a foghorn calling me to set my eyes on the one I follow and live up to the hope I embody: “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?” When I find myself making demands of God, I am shown again just how much God demands of me. “You’ve heard it said, ‘You shall not murder. But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister’ is guilty of the same.

For the crowds that gathered that day on the hillside, Jesus’s words were likely quite troubling. If God’s commandments were difficult to follow before this sermon, they were now entirely terrifying. Who can stand in this kingdom Jesus describes? And how is this good news? How could we ever be gathered into this communion? And yet, in all of his wisdom, in his unfathomable love, in the middle of his sermon Jesus proclaims gently but confidently: Do not worry. It is as if he says to those rightly awake and trembling with the fear of certain failure, “I am not only the fulfillment of all the law and the prophets, but the embodiment of these good things and the one who makes all things possible for you.” This, he also says repeatedly. In his humanity, Jesus vicariously approaches our own, lifting us to possibilities we can only imagine.

The Sermon on the Mount is a concentrated example of how Jesus came to fulfill in us dynamically everything the law meant to show us. Like a sledgehammer to a frozen heart, his life cries out to all who are at ease in Zion, whether cold from self-indulgence or unaware of God’s life-giving pursuit of our affection. In this, Christ’s role is uncompromisable. He is both the human Son of God who is embodiment of all we are meant to be in the fellowship of the Father and our mediator who bestows us the very possibility.

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

(1) C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 181.

(2) Amos 6:1.

(3) Matthew 5:3-9.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Real and Unseen

August 14, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There is something deeply unsettling about biological threats. The very idea of unseen, undetectable, but deadly toxins or viruses is a modern nightmare. The sad thing is that we have too many actual examples to fuel our fears. For multitudes in the industrial town of Bhopal, India, a normal working day turned into a catastrophe of biblical proportions as people were poisoned and killed by gas leaking from a local factory. Similarly catastrophic, the events surrounding the reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine combined the worst of leftover Soviet era paranoia and secrecy with a calamity of truly mind-boggling proportions. Hundreds of young men were ushered in to fight a fire, knowing nothing of the deadly radiation saturating the area, and as a result, thousands died (though exact numbers are not clear). And today, uncertainty mounts as workers struggle to contain the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, badly damaged by the devastating earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

The weight and power of these deadly issues grips us. We feel and understand it acutely. There are things in our universe that are invisible, but real and deadly. And there are few guaranteed fail-safe mechanisms to protect us, in all circumstances, from harm. This feeling of vulnerability, this sense that there are things beyond our control, this notion of risk is something the modern mind finds repulsive. We want security, we demand certainty, and we feel entitled to assurance. But what is it, and where is it to be found?

Ernest Becker, several decades ago, wrote a very challenging book called The Denial of Death. He shows how society works to create hero-systems and elaborate ways of suppressing or avoiding the reality of death. As Woody Allen once said, “It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Here is where the Christian faith speaks clearly to the human dilemma. In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul writes, “As in Adam, all die.” There are no exceptions, no escape routes, and no exits. It is as inclusive as it gets. Death is the great leveler. It respects everyone.

However, the apostle does not stop here; he goes on to say “so in Christ will all be made alive.” This is the great distinction. Death occurs on a hundred percent scale. Our link to Adam is inviolable; we are all descendents, and inheritors of all that this implies. Like those infected with a deadly virus, the issue is not morality or effort. We need a solution, an antidote, an answer beyond us. What Christianity outlines is a way out, an answer that is a transfer.

What do I mean? As long as we are located “in Adam,” which means our natural state and line of descent, we are subject to the outworking of the brokenness, damage, and suffering that is now a part of the human condition. The invitation to change is the move to be “in Christ.” What does this mean? Several things. It means trusting him to provide what we cannot provide for ourselves—namely, healing and help. It means confessing our failings and seeking his forgiveness. It means receiving a new kind of life within, by means of the gift of the Holy Spirit (cf. John 1:4).

These two great antagonists, life and death, are powerful indicators in the human story. Michael Green, the superb British evangelist says, “Jesus did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live.” Life! This is the issue C.S. Lewis brings to light in Mere Christianity, where he contrasts physical life (bios) with spiritual life (zoe) and our urgent need for the latter, which we can only obtain on Christ’s terms and not our own.

As I watch ageing, decaying people, I recognize something sad and good at the same time. Death is not (or need not be) the end. We pass through death (by faith in Christ) to the resurrection. Joni Erickson Tada brought this home to me some years ago as she spoke from her wheel chair, testifying of a love for Jesus and her great expectations as a believer, despite her very real suffering and restrictions as a paraplegic. She announced to us all that when she sees Jesus, she will dance in heaven. I believe it. This is resurrection hope and a sure foundation. There are many unseen but real threats, but there are also unseen but real promises, and he who makes them says to us even now, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Truly Human

August 13, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“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, 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 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. 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 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 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.’”

As a Christian, I see my own inconsistencies in the merciful hope of Christ as mediator. The Christian story presents Christ as the truly human Son of God in whom and for whom all creation was made. Stepping into creation, Christ has come to restore the image of true humanity, drying the tears of a broken world, reviving the image of God within us, overcoming the enemies of sin and death.

In the company of Pascal and Solzhenitsyn, I find Christ to provide the only grounding that offers hope for the contradictions within us. Far more than a hope merely for the future or an escape vehicle from present reality, Christ redeems the tension within us, the tension between my identity as a child of God and a daughter of humanity. We are assured that the promise is ours: “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.” For Christ is not only at work redeeming a fallen humanity, resuscitating our nature with his own, standing as the mediator who lifts us to God. Christ came to unite humanity with God so that we can be truly human as he is human.

This is far more hopeful news than other worldviews or self-help plans impart. For if true humanity is a humanity fully united to its creator, then the possibility is ours. Acting on our own power and authority, independent of God, we merely expose our alienation from God and from our true selves. We fail to know what it means to be fully human. But united to Christ through faith we are united to another nature entirely. Writes one disciple, “[God] has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires” (2 Peter 1:4).

While Christ is the one who makes our resuscitation possible, the one who restores in us the image of God, the process of reviving is also something we actively take hold of as human beings united to the Son. In other words, to live as children made in God’s image and united to Christ is not a static hope, but an active calling made possible by the one who mediates the very hope of what it means to be human. “So then,” in the words of Paul, “just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness” (Colossians 2:6-7).

What does it mean to be human? Perhaps we only begin to answer this immense inquiry when we turn to the one who shows us the very meaning of the word.

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

(1) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 75.

(2) Blaise Pascal, Pensess (New York: Penguin, 1995), 61.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Second Greatest

August 11, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Sam Harris is one of the well-known band of atheists whose vitriolic rantings and button-pushing avowals seem to draw audiences like reality television. His observations are shouted angrily; his ideas are often inflammatory. His frustration with Christians is spouted with sarcasm, antagonism, and resentment. And something in one of his recent works made me wonder how I might have contributed to it. In an open letter to American Christians, Harris begins, “Thousands of people have written to me to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians believe that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own.”(1)

When one understands apologetics as a defense of the Christian faith, voices like Harris, who attack Christianity and its morality with fluent hostility, seem to justify a defensive stance. How can one respond to those who readily earn and live up to titles like “Darwin’s Rottweiler” without barking a few hostile lines of their own? Is it ever Christ-like to respond to Harris in the manner that Harris responds to Christ?

There is no doubt that Jesus frustrated more than a view scribes; he was fairly harsh on the rich, and he responded angrily to the commercialization of the temple. Yet while these are the scenes we might summon to substantiate hostile words when the God we love is debased with insult, Harris is right. Jesus told anyone who would listen that the greatest commandment is to love God with everything that is in us, and the second greatest commandment is to love our neighbors as we would ourselves.

In fact, in this scene it is interesting that Jesus noted the second greatest commandment at all. No one had asked this question (we generally are not interested in runner ups), and yet he willingly offered the information. He made note of the second commandment as if it was so near to the greatest commandment to warrant formal connection. Elsewhere, Jesus furthered these instructions so that we would be sure that “neighbor” was not a word with which we could take creative license. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-44).

As in many of Jesus’s instructions for being a disciple, his approach hardly seems reasonable. Here he seems to ask that the Harris’s and Dawkins’ of the world be given a respect which they deny others. In fact, we are told that their disrespect is not something that should bring defensiveness but rather enigmatically blessing. Love and pray for those who persecute you. And, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:11-12).

Of course, this is not to say that Jesus did not gently point out the poverty of certain arguments and bias of their sources, blatant double standards, and willful inconsistencies. And in the case of the new atheists, this might include the altogether unwarranted optimism for a world rid of faith. But Christians would do well to remember that Jesus’s harshest words were never reserved for those of other faiths or belief systems, but those from within his own faith. And regardless of the belief system in front of you, Jesus commands respect, humility, and some real degree of the love you claim to know. “Since God so loved us,” writes John “we ought also to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (1 John 4:11-12).

Obeying the greatest commandment must never be the motivation for disobeying the second greatest. If the bombastic detractors of the Christian faith refuse to see its God, might they at the very least encounter the reality of God’s command to love them in spite of it.

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

(1) Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation: A Challenge to the Faith of America (New York: Bantam Books, 2007), vii.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – For the Frozen Sea

August 8, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Robi Damelin knows it is all too alluring for the media to depict an extremist screaming at the top of a mountain about a greater nation or the mother of a suicide bomber saying she’s proud to have given her child; the alternative does not sell as well as the sensational. “But I can tell you of all these mothers who’ve lost children,” she says. “I don’t care what they say to the media. I know what happens to them at night when they go to bed. We all share the same pain.”(1)

Damelin is a mother who knows this pain well. Sitting beside her, Ali Abu Awwad, a soft-spoken young man thirty years her junior, knows a similar pain. Robi and Ali each tell stories of loved ones lost to violence, stories that happen to intersect at a place that puts them at painful odds with one another. Each grieves the loss of a family member caused at hands on opposite sides of the same violent conflict. For Ali, filled with the loss of his beloved younger brother, that place of intersection was once filled with thoughts familiar to many in his situation: How many from the other side need to die in order to make my pain feel better? Yet bravely, he began to notice something else at the crossroads of his side and theirs. For both Robi and Ali, it was the tears of the other side that would change the way they tell their stories.

Some stories, as Kafka prescribed, indeed provide the ax for the frozen sea inside us. Rather than crafting for themselves stories that add to the cold sea of hatred and despair which devastated them, Robi and Ali tell of the common grief that cracks the frozen wall between them. They are now a part of a growing network of survivors on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict who share their sorrow, stories of loved ones, and ideas for lasting change. “It’s the shared pain that allows you to open to another place completely,” says Robi. “If you want to be right it’s very easy,” adds Ali. “But to be honest is very difficult. Being honest means to be human.”(2)

Their story brings something I have been thinking about personally into a much broader place. Namely, the stories we tell ourselves powerfully shape our worlds: I am a victim. I am entitled. I am right. I am abandoned. I am in control. These simple narratives rest at the heart of the things we do and say, quietly but decidedly shaping our worldviews, our identities, our humanity. They at times act as self-fulfilling prophecies, narratives which keep us locked in worlds we may even claim we want to leave: I am devastated. I am betrayed. I am on my own. The tale of Ali and Robi shows two people willing to change the more common narratives of power and prerogative to the much less comfortable narratives of shared loss and weakness: We are human. We are grieving. We know the same pain. And as such, they are finding humanity where there was once only suspicion, relationship where a great divide often reigns, and a common story which chips away at a great frozen sea.

Unfortunately, ours is a world often suspicious with regards to common narratives. Even common stories of human existence can be seen as controlling attempts to manipulate or undermine the individual’s story, which is viewed as supreme. The master narrative is similarly dismissed, rejected on grounds of totalitarianism. According to Robert Royal in The New Religious Humanists, the current philosophy is one that favors “petites histoires, that is, personal stories as the only locus of rich meaning open to us.” In this view, he continues, “all the old grands recits—Christianity, Hegelianism, Marxism, even liberalism—are dangerous totalizing and potentially terroristic illusions.”(3) The pervasive postmodern mindset prefers an individual approach to seeing the world, speculating on our origins, perceiving our destinies—independently.

But without undermining the power of personal stories, can we be satisfied with them alone? If petites histoires are really the only locus of meaning open to us, are we content with the effects of being held within those walls? Is the world the better for it? Robi and Ali, for one, would remain enslaved and frozen in a bitter conflict without the commonality that opened their eyes to a deeper humanity. Moreover, without a grand narrative that can truly answer humanity’s grand questions, the individual story only axes away futilely at a frozen abyss it can never crack.

The most remarkable gift of the master narrative I have chosen to tell and retell is that the storytelling is not over. I am instead freed to hear and tell my petites histoires in light of the whole story, which is yet unfolding even as it proclaims a definitive end. Which means, that sometimes the stories I tell myself are mercifully corrected by far greater I am statements than my own. That is to say, the quiet narrative that insists I am alone is told beside, “I am the good shepherd who searches for even one that is lost.”(4) The subtle fable of personal control is confronted by a story of life, death, and resurrection; a remarkable beginning and a far more remarkable end. Stepping both into history and petites histoires, God as storyteller shows us what it means to be human; with one Word, breaking through every frozen barrier.

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

(1) Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad with Krista Tippett “No More Taking Sides,” Speaking of Faith, February 18, 2010.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Gregory Wolfe Ed., The New Religious Humanists (New York: Free Press, 1997), 98.

(4) Cf. John 10:11-14, Luke 15:1-10

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – From Disparate Threads

August 7, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Some years ago, I was visiting a place known for making the best wedding saris in the world. They were the producers of saris rich in gold and silver threads, resplendent with an array of colors. With such intricacy of product, I expected to see some elaborate system of machines that would boggle the mind in production. But this image could not have been farther from the real scene.

Each sari was made individually by a father and son team. The father sat above the son on a platform, surrounded by several spools of thread that he would gather into his fingers. The son had only one task. At a nod from his father, he would move the shuttle from one side to the other and back again. This would then be repeated for hundreds of hours, until a magnificent pattern began to emerge.

The son certainly had the easier task. He was only to move at the father’s nod. But making use of these efforts, the father was working to an intricate end. All along, he had the design in his mind and was bringing the right threads together.

The more I reflect on my own life and study the lives of others, I am fascinated to see the design God has for each one of us individually, if we would only respond. All through our days, little reminders show the threads that God has woven into our lives.

Allow me to share a story from my own experience. As one searching for meaning in the throes of a turbulent adolescence, I found myself on a hospital bed from an attempted suicide. It was there that I was read the 14th chapter of John’s Gospel. My attention was fully captured by the part where Jesus says to his disciples: “Because I live, you shall live also” (John 14:19). I turned my life over to Christ that day, committing my pains, struggles, and pursuits to his able hands.

Almost 30 years to the day after this decision, my wife and I were visiting India and decided to visit my grandmother’s grave. With the help of a gardener we walked through the accumulated weeds and rubble until we found the stone marking her grave. With his bucket of water and a small brush, the gardener cleared off the years of caked-on dirt. To our utter surprise, under her name, a verse gradually appeared. My wife clasped my hand and said, “Look at the verse!” It read: “Because I live, you shall live also.”

A purposeful design emerges when the Father weaves a pattern from what to us may often seem disparate threads. Even today, if you will stop and attend to it, you will see that God is seeking to weave a beautiful tapestry in your life.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Beautiful and Terrible

August 6, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In one of Shakespeare’s most known and loved passages, the young heroine, Portia, urges Shylock, the moneylender, to show the kind of mercy that “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,” that “is enthroned in the hearts of kings,” and “is an attribute to God Himself.”(1) This arresting image of mercy is both noble and other-worldly, rousing images like that of Caravaggio’s “The Seven Acts of Mercy,” in which an angel’s outstretched hand reaches over seven scenes of mercy: burying the dead, feeding the hungry, refreshing the thirsty, harboring the stranger, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, and ministering to prisoners. The seven scenes are based on the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:35-36: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Though Jesus does not specifically reference burial of the dead as an act of mercy, it was deemed merciful by the church during the time of plague, when care of the dead was literally care of one’s neighbors.

Similar depictions of sympathy, provision, and kind leniency often come to mind at the mere thought of mercy wherever it is found. As Caravaggio paints it and Shakespeare depicts it, mercy is beautiful. Images of quiet humanitarianism and heavenly acts of concern afford mercy a reputation worthy of Portia’s words.

Yet this is not the only perception of mercy in action. Even Shakespeare reasons elsewhere, “Mercy but murders, pardoning those that kill.”(2) There is perhaps no better representation of this contrasting perception than in the practice of “compassionate release” for convicted criminals. Every year, in each of the countries with compassionate release programs, thousands of requests are considered. Though few are granted, it is typically more than unpopular. At the release of the terminally-ill Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, who was sentenced to life in prison for the 1988 bombing of a Pan American jetliner, mercy was justifiably detested. One headline described Megrahi’s release as “an ugly act of ‘mercy.’”(3) Mercy is indeed far less beautiful when its recipients mar the pictures.

Reactions to ‘ugly acts of mercy’ are understandable. In Megrahi’s case, cries for justice were heard across the globe. The sense of injustice was palpable, particularly for those who lost loved ones at the hands of the released man. Much could be said in this case about justice and injustice. For indeed, justice demands that guilt not be swept under the carpet; and yet here, mercy served as the broom. What cannot be said, however, is that we should expect anything different from mercy, that we can expect mercy to always be beautiful, or somehow easier to swallow. Mercy is always ugly to someone.

Yet we rarely see it this way with any consistency. When demanding justice in situations where we have been wronged, mercy’s ugliness is usually clearer. But we seldom apply the same thunderous demands for justice when it works against us. This is well-illustrated by Orual in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. Orual, who has spent a lifetime carefully building her case against the gods, meticulously describes each instance where she has been wronged, and demands to be heard by the gods for the sake of justice. But after she has finally had her chance to formally state her case before the gods themselves, she is stunned to hear that it is now her turn to face her judges.

“My judges?” she asks.

“Why, yes, child. The gods have been accused by you. Now’s their turn.”

“I cannot hope for mercy,” she laments to the one beside her.

“Infinite hopes—and fears—may both be yours,” he replies. “Be sure that, whatever else you get, you will not get justice.”

“Are the gods not just?” she asks.

“Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”(4)

I don’t believe our strong sense of justice is misguided. But justice demands that we apply it to ourselves as thoroughly as we apply it to others. For those who realize the gravity of this equation, no image except the unthinkable injustice of the cross of Christ will console. For here, mercy is indeed as ugly as it is beautiful: “Divine love speaks its most exalted word just as it plunges into unspeakable degradation.”(5) In Christ’s unjust suffering and unfathomable love, we are mercifully restored. Beautifully and terribly, we are liberated.

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

(1) William Shakespeare, The Works of William Shakespeare, Vol. 1, “The Merchant of Venice,” (London: Bickers & Son: 1874), 186.

(2) William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Philadelphia; J.B. Lippincott, 1899), 165.

(3) “Lockerbie Terrorist’s Release Is an Ugly Act of ‘Mercy,’” LA Times, August 21, 2009, http://www.latimes.com, accessed August 24, 2009.

(4) C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Orlando: Harcourt, 1984), 297.

(5) Jeremy S. Begbie, “The Future of Theology Amid the Arts” in Christ Across the Disciplines: Past, Present, Future, ed. Roger Lundin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 160.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Questions in the Boat

August 5, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

As a Christian writer and speaker, I am often asked what the most frequent questions are regarding the Christian faith. I am frequently asked questions of an intellectual or historic nature: Did Jesus of Nazareth really exist? Is his resurrection from the dead a historical event? How is one to understand the Bible as the Word of God? For some, the questions never go beyond intellectual curiosity or pursuit. For others, these questions need to be answered for constructing a sound apologetic.

Probe a bit deeper, however, and it isn’t difficult to discover that many questions come from the deepest places of the heart. They come because of personal experience with suffering of one form or another. Is there a God? If so, does that God care about me, know me? If so, why does God seemingly allow so much suffering? When the fervent prayers of righteous men and women do not prevent the cancer from spreading, or the child from dying, or the plane from crashing, or the marriage from failing, these more existential questions come like water bursting through the dam.

The kinds of questions I receive are not unique to my contemporary context. They have been asked for millennia. The technical term for the theist’s response to the issue of suffering is called theodicy. Theodicy is the word given in the seventeenth century by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the great intellectual thinkers of the Enlightenment period.(1) Theodicy attempts to explain how and why there can be suffering in the world if God is all-powerful and loving. In trying to solve this problem, some thinkers have denied the omnipotence of God; God is all-loving, but not able to do anything about suffering. Others dispense of the notion that God is all-loving, at least in any conventional understanding. But, neither of these alternatives provides a satisfactory answer.

Intellectual wrangling over this problem, aside, the experience of suffering in light of both the goodness and power of God has caused many to doubt God, and others to walk away from faith altogether. If God does not prevent suffering, and if God does not care about the sufferer, then for some, the only alternative appears to be that God cannot exist in any meaningful way.

The writers of Scripture wrestled with these questions too. Often, they provided different ways of answering these questions. Some believed that suffering resulted from sin. Others believed that God causes suffering as a form of punishment. Still others asserted that suffering brings redemption.(2)

In Mark’s gospel, a simple story about a boat caught in a terrible storm provides an altogether different answer framed around three profound questions. When evening had come, Jesus and his disciples got into a boat, most likely to cross the Sea of Galilee, in order to “go over to the other side” (Mark 4:35-41). In the course of their travel, a fierce storm arose suddenly and violently. It was so intense that the waves were not only breaking over the boat, but the boat was filling with water and on the verge of sinking. The gospel writer tells us that Jesus was asleep in the stern of the boat and resting soundly when the disciples roused him with their fearful, first question: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Jesus seems to ignore their question their question, and instead answers the wind and the waves, “Peace, be still.” His exhortation to the natural elements of wind and water was nevertheless intended for the disciples as well, for he returns their question with a second question: “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” To which the disciples reply to one another with the ultimate question, “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?”

It is not entirely unreasonable for those who want to be followers of Jesus to think that because he is in the boat suffering will not arise. But suffering does come, and the wind roars around and the sky turns black, and the storm of all storms appears to envelop all in darkness and terror. Jesus, don’t you care that we are perishing becomes an incredulous for all who would wish for immunity from the troubles of life. But Jesus’s answer reminds us that faith does not insulate us from life’s storms. Indeed, as noted author Craig Barnes has written “Faith…has little to do with our doctrines or even with our belief that Jesus could come up with a miracle if he would only pay attention. Faith has everything to do with seeing that…the Savior [is] on board“(3)

In the midst of difficult and often unending questions about suffering, Jesus is there in the midst of the storm of doubt, in the tumultuous waves of despair, in the gale-force winds of defeat. He rests in the assurance of God’s care in the storm. His presence with the disciples in the storm tells us more about who he is—neither removed from suffering, nor always preventing suffering—then why we suffer. “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Margaret Manning is a member of the writing and speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Bart Ehrman, God’s Problem (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 8.

(2) See for example Proverbs 3:33, “The Lord’s curse is on the house of the wicked, but he blesses the abode of the righteous”; Amos 4:1-3, “[Y]ou cows of Bashan who oppress the poor, who crush the needy…the Lord God has sworn in his holiness: the time is surely coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks”; and Isaiah 53, the redemption by the suffering Servant.

(3) M. Craig Barnes, When God Interrupts (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 138.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Wrinkles in Time

August 4, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Uncanny” was one of the vocabulary words on my sixth grade vocabulary list, which was to be found within the book we were reading as a class. I remember thinking Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was exactly that—uncanny, peculiar, and uncomfortably strange. Yet I also remember that it stayed with me—the story of a quirky girl named Meg, her overly-intelligent little brother, and their time-transcending journey to save their physicist father with the help of three mysterious beings. Madeleine L’Engle, the writer whose books invite readers to see time itself differently, passed away not too long ago. But her stories will continue to perplex sixth graders, and stay with us long after we have set them aside.

L’Engle is the writer who first showed me the incredible difference between two words in Greek, which we unfortunately translate identically. To the English reader, chronos and kairos both appear to us as “time.” But in Greek, these words are vastly different. Chronos is the time on your wristwatch, time on the move, passing from present to future and so becoming past. Kairos, on the other hand, is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is time as a moment, a significant occasion, an immeasurable quality. The New Testament writers use the word kairos to communicate God’s time, it is real time—it is the eternal now.

So it might be said for the Christian that when Jesus stepped into time to proclaim the kingdom of God among us, he came to show us in chronos the reality of kairos. “Jesus took John and James and Peter up the mountain in ordinary, daily chronos,” writes L’Engle. “Yet during the glory of the Transfiguration they were dwelling in kairos.”(1) With this story in mind, L’Engle describes kairos as that time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, time where we are completely unselfconscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are continually checking our watches.

Whatever your view of religion, it is likely an experience you can recount; a moment so sweet or magnified it seems to stop time. But L’Engle presses the Christian to see it as something to be expected. “Are we willing and able to be surprised?” L’Engle asks. “If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.”(2) If we have the courage to see it, the kingdom of God is close at hand, kairos breaking through like Christ into the world.

I imagine Jacob, too, discovered the difference between chronos and kairos when he set aside the past which was about to catch up with him, along with his paralyzing fear of the future, and found himself living in “none other than the house of God.” The prophets and poets describe similar moments of waking to the present and finding the eternal dimensions of time. The shepherds in Bethlehem were going about their ordinary work when the glory of the Lord captured the moment. “Do not be afraid,” the angel announced. “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you” (Luke 2:13-14). At this invasion of kairos into the routine of chronos, the shepherds chose to respond with action: “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about” (2:15).

Uncanny encounters with time are a part of the human experience. The Christian is given a language to explain these encounters. We live somewhere between the already and the not yet, caught by the eternal now and the one who dwells within it. The implications are both temporal and unending. Will we have the courage to look for glory in the ordinary? To release control of our calendars and watches and note the eternal in our midst? The apostle joins every prophet and poet who proclaimed the coming of the Messiah in history and the return of the king to come, “Behold, now is the time (kairos) of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2).

Like Christ, glimpses of the eternal come quietly and unexpectedly; they come and upset our very notion of time and all we discover within it. Why should we be so unreconciled to time if the temporal were our only concern? Or could it be that the eternal Word stepped into flesh, into our bounded realm of time, and literally embodied the reality that time is meaningful because of the eternal one in our midst. The Christian insists that kairos is breaking into chronos and transforming it. With Christ it proclaims, “The kingdom of God is close at hand”—and the temporal world invited to break in along with it. In ordinary moments that hint at such a radical invasion, might we have the courage to be surprised by one who comes so near.

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

(1) Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: Bantam, 1982), 93.

(2) Ibid., 99.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – We Fix Things

August 1, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“I fix things; that’s what I do,” says Walt Kowalsky, the character played by Clint Eastwood in his movie, Gran Torino. It is a departure from the usual expectations of Eastwood, although the expected scenarios of innocent or weak people, oppressed or threatened by serious bad guys, indeed occurs. What is different in this movie, however, is how Eastwood as the actor/director resolves these issues in an untypical (for him) twist.

The idea of heroes and heroines who “fix things” is a staple of writing, filmmaking, and good novels. Whether it is John Wayne, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Bond, or Jason Bourne, the icon and images play to our expectations. And what are these expectations? It seems that we long for justice, for healing, for an end to evil or wrong in the world.

The Enlightenment era gave birth to a view that one friend describes as “rational man (and woman) in control of their destiny.” Since it was believed that humans were the measure of all things (Protagoras), it followed that our destiny, our problems, and our challenges all rested within the power of our own capacities to resolve. It is as if long before Eastwood’s character, there was a corporate hope expressed: We fix things; that’s what we do.

One is tempted to stop and ask, oh really? The promethean vision of fixing things, and as a result, of ever-refreshed hopes, runs into many walls and recurring obstacles. I have long come to appreciate Murphy’s Law (if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong); not as a statement of despair, but as an ironic description of human life. This is the inbuilt “oh no” factor that affects projects, plane schedules, the best laid plans—and many of our well intentioned efforts at fixing things. Something is wrong in life and with life, but what is it and why can’t we fix it?

The Christian narrative portrays a great calamity at the heart of existence. A disruption has occurred. The universe and reality is disordered. There are forces at loose and powers at work that taint things, damage life, corrupt existence, and spoil things. What the Bible describes as sin (cf. Ephesians 2:1-3, Romans 3:23) is certainly one of the most helpful descriptions of what we actually see and experience, and I’d also suggest, one of the most empirically defendable.

When the London Times asked at the turn of the last century “What’s wrong with the world,” the writer G.K. Chesterton wrote a brief letter in response. “Dear Sirs: I am,” he said. By this he meant not that he was alone responsible for all the evils of existence, but that as a sincere member of the human race, he knew he was flawed, damaged, and in need of a help greater than mere human sincerity and an effort to fix things.

Chesterton, like many before him and after him, discovered that the struggle to face was not only external (in society, culture, issues, people or threats), but also internal (in resentments, bitterness, hatred, and a desire for control). Jesus made it clear that externals have little to do with our truest issues; it is what is inside that is our problem: “Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach…It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mark 7:15-16).

Our modern world wants us all to adopt the stance of Eastwood’s character. I fix things. But that is the issue: we don’t, and we can’t. It is not a motivation problem (in many cases). We usually want to get better, and we want others to get better. On the contrary, it is an ability problem, or in other words, a power problem. We do not have the necessary qualifications or tools for the job. However, there is one who is qualified and whose title, Savior, offers not only what I need, but that which we all need. The hunger for hope and the desire for things to be “fixed” are met in the one who, on Calvary’s Cross, bore our sin and shame, and rose again to offer new life and hope. Thus, the great hymn writer Augustus Toplady said it best: “Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to your cross I cling.”

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Theology of Sleep

July 31, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

For some people, the fear of sleep accompanies the fear of death. For some, the fear of not being awake is akin to the fear of not being. Public Radio International personality Ira Glass spent a program discussing his own fear of sleep, along with others who find something worrisome in the altered, vulnerable state of slumber. “I’d lie awake at night scared to go to sleep,” says Glass of himself as a child. “‘Cause sleep seemed no different than death, you know? You were gone. Not moving, not talking, not thinking. Not aware. Not aware. What could be more frightening? What could be bigger?”(1) Others describe a similar sense of foreboding in the still of night that is irrationally paralyzing for them: a seven year-old trains himself to resist sleep, a young student describes her extensive intake of caffeine and denial. But one man, speaking bluntly of the fear of death in the middle of the night, attests to the altogether rational quality of his fear. “It’s not an irrational fear… You understand that you’re a mortal; your life is going to be over at some point. You’re fighting the worst enemy in the world as you lie there in bed….you’re trying to fight death and there’s no way you can win.”(2)

Glass closes the program with an excerpt of Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” a poem about waking at 4 a.m. and staring around the bedroom, and seeing “what’s really always there:/ Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,/ Making all thought impossible but how/ And where and when I shall myself die.” Larkin, who died a bleak philosopher at 63, continues:

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says no rational being

Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing

that this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

Larkin is not the first poet to draw attention to sleep’s grasp of death’s hand, a hand most admit at times fearing, at times simply hoping to outrun. Keats referred to sleep as the “sweet embalmer,” and Donne was convinced that both death and sleep are the same type of action. Glass is right to point to death as the worst enemy of which there is no escape, and sleep, which is similarly unavoidable, is perhaps the disquieting reminder of that which we attempt to deny the rest of the day. For how much of our lives and livelihoods are aimed at outrunning the reality of our deaths? 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—are part and parcel of the forces that urge us to stop time itself, to live anti-wrinkles, anti-aging, anti-dying. Sleep could well be the daily reminder that some of us need to reclaim the reality of death, the beauty and brevity of life.

This is precisely the rationale with which author and professor Lauren Winner urges the world to sleep more as a means of waking to oft-unchallenged social cues and fears. Writes Winner, “Not only does sleep have evident social consequences, not only would sleeping more make us better neighbors and friends and family members and citizens. Sleeping well may also be part of Christian discipleship, at least in our time and place. 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.”(3) We are, likewise, bodies living within a culture generally terrified of aging, uncomfortable with death, and desperate for our accomplishments to distract us. The demands that our bodies make for sleep is a good reminder that we are mere creatures, that life is to be revered, and death will come.

This is indeed a sobering reminder, but it need not be only a dire reminder. For to admit there is no escaping the enemy of death is not to say we are left without victory: ”I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, shall live” (John 11:25-26). The one who made this claim made it knowing that death would come to all of us, but longing to show the world that it is an enemy he would defeat. Perhaps sleep, then, providing a striking image of finite bodies that will lie down and cease to be, can simultaneously provide us a rousing image of bodies that will rise again.

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

(1) Ira Glass, This American Life, 361: “Fear of Sleep” August 8, 2008.

(2) Ibid.

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

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Category Archives: Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Science and Religion

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Storyteller

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Making a Name

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Out of the Wilderness

Ravi Zacharias – Harmless Petty Sins

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – This God

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Beyond Grace

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Speaking to Bones

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – WHO’S DOING YOUR THINKING FOR YOU?

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sledgehammers and Other Good News

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Real and Unseen

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Truly Human

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Second Greatest

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – For the Frozen Sea

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – From Disparate Threads

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Beautiful and Terrible

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Questions in the Boat

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Wrinkles in Time

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – We Fix Things

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Theology of Sleep

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