Category Archives: Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Good Eye

July 30, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev was a nineteenth-century rabbi known for his mastery of an unwieldy Mishnaic teaching. To carry one’s self with the ayin tovah, or the “good eye,” is to see in a certain light the world and everyone in it. One scholar describes it as the choice “to intentionally focus on what is most pure in each person—to see their highest and holiest potential.”(1) Rabbi Yitzchok was beloved for his good eye, utilized even in cases where virtue seemed entirely wanting and holiness altogether deficient. As one author describes, “He’d roust the local drunk from his stupor on High Holy Days, seat him at the head of the table, and respectfully ask for his wisdom… He extended his caring to all, whether powerful or impoverished, scholarly or simple, righteous or reprobate.”(2) In minds often besieged by warring sides, opinions ad nauseam, and defensive or disparaging thoughts, the good eye is indeed a shift of perception.

I appreciate stories that remind me to keep my eyes opened for all that can be seen but can just as easily be missed. How we learn to see the world, how we labor to see and know the world, is profoundly important. Despite the perseverance of goodness, beauty, and truth around us, the collective wisdom of sociologists, philosophers, historians, and artists all indicates that contemporary culture is structurally estranged from the transcendent. Learning to see with the good eye may well be a difficult feat without mindful effort and practice. But could it not be an entirely transformative art for both the seer and the world being seen?

Without such effort, consider all that is lost. An article from the Washington Post chronicles a jarring exhibition of our propensity for estrangement—seeing with eyes that are not really seeing, hearing but not hearing. The report describes an experiment they called “Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?”(3) Violin virtuoso Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the world, was hired to perform several classical masterpieces at a Metro station during the morning rush hour. Three days prior to his debut at the Metro, Bell had filled Boston’s prestigious Symphony Hall, where only average seats sold for over $100. As he preformed with the same fervor on his handcrafted 1713 Stadivari for nearly an hour at the Metro, however, he took in a total of $32 and change from the 27 people who noticed him. The other thousand people hurried by, altogether unaware, though only three feet away from brilliance. “There was never a crowd, not even for a second.”(4)

Christian scripture is replete with stories that hint that it is always possible to pass over the gifts and grace in front of us, whether a glimpse of beauty or a lifetime of knowing the glory and presence of God. In the words of poet Francis Thompson:

The angels keep their ancient places:-

Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces,

That miss the many-splendour’d thing.

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful,” wrote Flannery O’Connor to a friend, lamentably including herself in that resistance. There are indeed times when God woos us slowly with beauty, grace, and grandeur, moving among us in a manner that busy or critical lives readily miss while focusing elsewhere. Other times it is we who find ourselves moved nearly to blindness, as we labor to take in the glory of God in a startling moment like Moses or Isaiah. Sometimes, like commuters in the Metro station oblivious of the work of art before us, our estranged faces miss the signs of a many-splendored God entirely. But still other times, we labor intentionally to see with good eyes, and find the world around us transformed with the splendor of the one who first called the world good.

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

(1) Marc Ian Barasch, The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009), 87.

(2) Ibid.

(3)Gene Weingarten, “Pearls Before Breakfast” The Washington Post, Sunday April 8, 2007.

(4) Ibid.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Better Treasure

July 29, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The catchy beat was disarming. Driving down the highway with my hands tapping out the rhythm on my steering wheel, I thought this was just another clever pop tune with bubblegum lyrics. Then the words to the chorus caught my attention:

“I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore

I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore

When we think it will all become clear

I’m being taken over by The Fear.”(1)

This song sung by the young British pop star, Lily Allen, was not just another slickly produced tune without substance. Allen sings of the destructive impact of materialism:

“I want to be rich and I want lots of money

I want loads of clothes and loads of diamonds

I heard people die while they are trying to find them

Life’s about film stars and less about mothers

It’s all about fast cars and passing each other

But it doesn’t matter because I’m packing plastic

and that’s what makes my life so fantastic

And I am a weapon of massive consumption

and it’s not my fault it’s how I’m programmed to function

I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore

I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore

Cause I’m being taken over by fear.”

Among other things, the song laments the vacuity of mindless consumption and its pervasiveness in our society. Consumption, as Allen points out, can be like any other form of addiction, providing an initial high that never again delivers what it promises. Instead, it leads us down the path toward diminishing returns and never ultimately satisfies.

Over two hundred years before Ms. Allen stepped onto the pop music scene in the United Kingdom, John Wesley articulated the dangers of materialism. “I fear, wherever riches have increased,” he wrote, “the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore, I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of religion to continue long….[A]s riches increase, so will pride, anger and love of the world in all its branches.”(2) Even as thousands and thousands were joining his ranks, he spoke prophetically about the inevitable decline and dissolution of this revival as a result of the increase of wealth arising from Christian diligence and frugality.

Indeed, it is well known to students of human societies that an increase in prosperity often brings with it a precipitous decline in religious involvement. After all, why would anyone need God when there is Master Card and Visa? The declining numbers in churches in the Western World seem to affirm that Wesley’s fears were warranted. Christian leaders speculate that if current trends continue in England, for example, Methodists will cease to exist in that country in thirty years.(3) Of course, long before Wesley uttered his fears, Jesus warned his disciples: “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and riches” (Luke 16:13). Jesus warns of the idolatry that so easily entraps us, luring us away from faithful allegiance.

We might be tempted to avoid these difficult warnings in times of economic “slow down.” How can we be tempted to serve “the master” of money, after all, when we have so much less of it? Yet even in its absence, we can find our hearts soothed more by the promise of money and the security we believe it will bring us. Even those who claim to follow Jesus can fall into a dangerous reliance on material security. When our hearts find salvation and security in having more and more material gain—whether we actually hold it or not—we are reminded of “the deceitfulness of riches” and the narcotic effects of material success.

Thus clearly, the abolition of wealth or production is not the answer to materialism! Rather, the answer lies in the proper use of wealth in our world: as a blessing for others and not just for our own use. Jesus instructed disciples to “sell your possessions and give to charity; make yourselves purses which do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven….For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Luke 12:33-34).

John Wesley understood this, too, and in the spirit of Jesus reiterates the same idea: “We ought not to forbid people to be diligent and frugal: we must exhort all Christians, to gain all they can, and to save all they can… What way then (I ask again) can we take that our money may not sink us to the nethermost hell? There is one way, and there is no other under heaven. If those who gain all they can, and save all they can, will likewise give all they can, then the more they gain, the more they will grow in grace, and the more treasure they will lay up in heaven.”(4)

In difficult economic times, this is far from unnecessary counsel. It may be, in fact, the very idea that finally breaks the chains of addiction and reveals a far better treasure.

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

(1) Lily Allen, “The Fear” from It’s Not Me, It’s You, Regal Records, United Kingdom, January 26, 2009.

(2) Cited in an article by Philip Yancey, “Traveling with Wesley” Christianity Today, November 2007, vol. 51, No. 11.

(3)Ibid.

(4) Cited from The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. XV (London: Thomas Cordeux, 1786).

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – On the Fringes

July 28, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Author A.J. Jacobs admits that he was agnostic before he even knew what the word meant. For all the good God seemed to invoke, the potential for abuse was far too high in his mind for God to be taken seriously. In a book exploring religion and religiousness, Jacobs describes an uncle who seemed to confirm this for him. Dabbling religiously in nearly every religion, his uncle went through a phase where he decided to take the Bible completely literally. Thus, heeding the Bible’s command in Deuteronomy 14:25 to secure money in one’s hand, he tied bills to his palms. Heeding the biblical command to wear fringes at the corners of one’s garment, he bought yarn from a kitting shop, made a bunch of tassels, and attached them to every corner he could find on his clothes.(1) While his uncle sought faithfulness to the letter, Jacobs was left with the impression that his uncle was “subtly dangerous.”

There are certainly sections of the Bible that when stripped of context and read in a lifeless vacuum can lead a mind to extremes. Like Jacobs, it is easy to conclude that religion and religiousness are completely ridiculous; or like his uncle, it is possible to assume complete literalism and run in ridiculous directions. The practice of making and wearing tassels on the corners of one’s garment, for instance, commanded in Numbers 15:37, is one such peculiar biblical decree easily dismissed in the name of reason or disemboweled in the name of faithfulness. Yet neither response truly yields an honest view of the command.

In fact, what seems an entirely curious fashion tip for the people of Israel was a common sight in many ancient Near Eastern cultures. Fringed garments were considered ornamental and illustrative of the owner; they were also were thought to hold certain spiritual significances.(2) In Assyria and Babylonia, for instance, fringes were believed to assure the wearer of the protection of the gods. Thus, God’s command of the Israelites to “make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations” took something familiar to the nations and gave it new significance for the nation God called his own. “You will have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the LORD and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes” (Numbers 15:39). Like many of the commands and rituals described in Jewish and Christian Scriptures, the instruction of tassels is about remembrance. The perpetual presence of fringe and tassel was a tangible reminder that all of life, not only moments of piety or prayer, was an opportunity to be in the presence of God. To miss the rich substance of this divine petition is to miss it—and its petitioner—entirely.

But more than this, we do well to carry such social, historical, and linguistic depth throughout other segments of Scripture we might otherwise dismiss. What might have seemed an insignificant quirk of an ancient context finds meaning in texts long thereafter. In ancient times, for instance, tassels were a part of the hem of a garment, which itself was a significant social statement. The hem was the most ornate part of one’s attire, and thus declared the wearer’s importance before the world. It was considered a symbolic extension of one’s person, a means of grasping one’s stature—sometimes literally. Grasping the hem of one from whom you wanted something, you were thought to be grasping the very identity of the owner—and hence it was shameful to refuse the request. The hems of kings’ and nobles’ robes, moreover, were symbolic of their rank and authority, and therefore were often longer, richer in color, or made with more costly fabric. Thus, when David cut the hem of Saul’s robe in the cave, the declaration was as potent as crushing the crown of Queen Elizabeth or impeaching the president. Saul conceded, “Now I know that you shall surely be king, and that the kingdom of Israel shall be established in your hand.”

But along with authority, importance, and personhood, holiness was also expressed in antiquity by the fringes and hems of one’s garment. The length of a priest’s or rabbi’s fringes was symbolic of piety, respect, and authority. And this message is perhaps no clearer than in the vision of Isaiah 6 when the very hem of the robe of the LORD filled everything before the prophet’s eyes. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Isaiah envisions the God described in Scripture as one whose person is larger than anything we can imagine, one who comes near to us within a specific context, and fills the world with even the fringes of Himself.

I know only of one other hem that amazed crowds and changed individuals in the same way. Unlike the priests who made “their fringes long” to shout of their piety, this man had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him (Matthew 23:5, Isaiah 53:2). And yet, people came from the very fringes of society hoping to touch even the hem of his robe. They begged him that they might touch even the tassels of his cloak. And indeed, all who touched him were made whole.(3)

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

(1) A. J. Jacobs, A Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 6.

(2) “Fringes,” in J. Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 68-70.

(3) Cf. Matthew 14:36, Matthew 9:20, Luke 8:44, Mark 6:56.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Mysterious Fingerprints

July 25, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

He seemed to brace himself for what had become the typical barrage of questioning after stating his occupation. The once unrecognized field of “forensic science” now comes attached with visions of beautiful men and women swabbing for DNA, replicating gunfire trajectories, and piecing together the truth with hair, bugs, and CODIS. The tremendous popularity of forensic dramas has made crime scene investigating a household subject. With a real forensic scientist standing in front of me, I admit it was hard to repress my enthusiasm. Predictably, I asked if he watched any of the shows. Humoring my line of questioning for the moment, he admitted that he did not.

The vast public intrigue with forensic science has been increasing as feverously as the viewerships of crime scene television. In Great Britain alone, the increase in students applying for forensic programs is up nearly 33 percent, attributed entirely to the influence of CSI, NCIS, Bones, and many similar programs.(1) They come into their programs believing they already know a great deal about the job because they have seen it all performed. In a more damaging vein, criminologists note the pervasive misinformation that is powerfully influencing criminal justice systems in various ways, particularly and significantly in the minds and expectations of jurors.(2)

Analysts refer to this global phenomenon of forensic pop culture and its consequences as the “CSI Effect,” though speculation on the reasons for our feverish embrace of the motif is wider ranging. In my own right, I find something compellingly uncomplicated in the movement from mystery and crisis through clues and evidence to truth. In less than an hour, I am taken from dark riddle to conclusive resolution. Truth and justice emerge plainly, even where deception, obscurity, and injustice once reigned. In the rare instance when the suspect does not personally own up to the crime after the facts have emerged, the science and its expert witnesses are so definitive that it hardly matters. The truth is clear.

Of course, I know in reality that mysteries are not typically so easily dissected nor the truth so mechanically laid out for the taking. But in that brief hour, I am relieved at the clarity of truth, presented to me quickly and with watertight certainty. English professor Scott Campbell further speculates on the allure of “a longed-for world where deceit is no longer possible and where language finds a close, unbreachable connection to the events it seeks to describe.”(3) On the nature of truth in such a world he notes, “If we know how to look for it, the truth is self-evident. It will, in effect, narrate itself.”

In a world where the category of truth is often subjected to the murkiness of taste and opinion, the attraction to a self-evident, one-dimensional truth is understandable. All the lofty humility of the abstract pluralist cannot beautify the noise of a million clashing voices and truth claims; eventually, we grow weary of the end product and seek a less polluted scene. In the words of the illustrious detective Joe Friday, “All we want are the facts.”

And yet, we must be wary of simplifying the nature of truth in our attempts to simplify our investigations of it. This is precisely what the pluralist must do to make room for all his claims and voices. But in the world of the Christian, the world of truth is far from flat. Nor is its true song a raucous cacophony. Quite the opposite, Swiss theologian Hars Urs von Balthasar oft reflected on the truth as “symphonic.” Elaborating on this, professor Anthony Baker explains, “Truth is not simply a completed score, but the action of playing it back to God the way it was written. Only by following Christ into the cacophony, by descending into hell ourselves, by actively engaging in the redemption of fallen melody, can the church be alive with the resurrective power of the Spirit.”(4)

In other words, truth is not simply something passive that we intercept, like the outcome of a CSI episode that leaves us entirely certain of “what really happened.” Truth certainly has this definitive element; to be sure, the Logos which became flesh is God’s definitive account of truth. But this is something far deeper and more dimensional than cold, unresponsive facts, as further evidenced in John’s description of Christ as one “full of grace and truth” in himself. There is a corresponding, interactive, participatory quality to truth, which takes longer than an hour to absorb and is best understood by engaging its depth and character within a world of impersonal, simplistic alternatives. For if truth is personal—indeed, a Person—it demands a lifetime of shared engagement with the one who is truth and the Spirit who actively leads us into a discovery of this truth.

Without any doubt, the mystery of the Christian religion is great—mystery not in the hidden CSI sense, but mystery revealed. Paul’s description of Jesus is as full of inscrutable truths as it is compelling evidences: “Hewas revealed in flesh, vindicated in spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among Gentiles, believed in throughout the world, taken up in glory” (1 Timothy 3:16). Evidences of the heights and depths of this divine mysterious truth can indeed be received as factual, definitive fingerprints. But so they are clues that point to a multi-dimensional, inexhaustible Person full of grace and truth.

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

(1) Paul Hackett, “Want a Career in Forensics? Here’s Some Hard Evidence,” The Guardian, March 28, 2007.

(2) “Forensics and the Media: A 3-Year Project Examining the ‘CSI Effect’ and a Forensic Pop Culture” presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, Nov. 1, 2006.

(3) Scott Campbell, “‘Dead Men Do Tell Tales’: CSI: Miami and the Case Against Narrative,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, Spring 2009, Volume 8, Issue 1.

(4) Anthony D. Baker, “Fiddling with the Melody: Illuminating von Balthasar’s Symphony of Truth,” The Other Journal, Issue 15, May 11, 2009.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Book of Nature

July 24, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Day after day pours forth speech,” says the psalmist of nature’s glory. “Night after night reveals his greatness.”

As a Scot, I grew up with a love of the countryside. My parents would take us on drives to Loch Lomond, to places like the Trossacks (a beautiful hill and moor area) and many more. These early encounters evoked something that I did not (as a non-believer then) understand. It was the power of beauty itself to speak, not in an audible voice of course, but in some very real sense.

Recently, I drove from Florida to Georgia as the verdant green and array of colors were exploding. I’d be captivated by trees blooming in all their glory, wisps of white, pink, and other shades all mingling in a medley of splendor, and then surprised by bursts of red (which I learned were Azaleas). It was all quite wonderful! Now lest you think I am some strange, European romantic, I have to say that this “noticing” is a result of the patient, constant, and enthusiastic education granted me by my wife.

She has always loved flowers. In my early days of “serious” ministry and dedication to God, I often wondered how one could be sidetracked by such trivia, such commonalities. Yes, flowers and things pointed out were nice when a passing glance was permitted, but they were not important in my mind. They were not the real thing, the serious thing, the main show!

Perhaps it was age, or more likely a divine breakthrough, but one day I began to notice. These things were splendid; they were so unique. They had such detail, so much grandeur, and they evoked delight and joy. C.S. Lewis describes a childhood encounter with a miniature garden that his brother had made in a tin box. He describes the sense of longing, the experience of what he called joy, though fleeting, which was profound and real. Though he didn’t know what to call it then, Lewis was gradually awakened to the power and role of beauty, an influence he would employ to great effect in his writings.

Similarly, John Calvin reminded the world that God has given his creatures two books: the book of nature and the word of God. For the Christian, they are not equal in authority or revelatory power, and yet it is a serious neglect to focus on one at the exclusion of the other.

In today’s world, many are sincerely inspired by nature. They love long walks, visits to the country, and absorbing the beauties of the world around. They often make nature an end in itself. They celebrate its magnificence, but are left to see it all as a random outcome of chance and necessity. Some Christians, through neglect, do much the same thing. A number of years ago, some monks in an Austrian monastery had gotten used to overlooking a particular painting that hung in their hallways. One day a visitor looked in astonishment and realized it was a Reubens, the prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter. A connection was suddenly made between a work of art and its renowned artist. It caused a sensation, an awakening, not the least of which to its value, which was now known.

The psalmist, the Celts, and many others across the centuries learned to see God’s hand in nature and to celebrate God’s goodness and provision from it. Take a few moments today to look at the birds, contemplate the trees, enjoy a walk, and smell the flowers. Perhaps you may just experience a glimmer of God’s glory, too.

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

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Characteristics of Absence

July 23, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

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

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

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

A far better consolation would be the assurance that he never left in the first place. Of course, anyone who has known the sting of abandonment will understandably find such a claim near impossible to fathom. A distant God is every bit as real and hurtful as the disruptive presence of the absent parent. And we have surely known his absence. We have lived with the injurious silence of a one-way relationship. We have known the cold echo of an empty room, unanswered cries, the ache of loss.

But what if the absence of God was not at all like that of an absent parent? What if the moments when God’s distance was most palpable were in fact moments most full of God’s mysterious love? As Alister McGrath suggests in Mystery of the Cross, “God is active and present in his world, quite independently of whether we experience him as being so. Experience declared that God was absent from Calvary, only to have its verdict humiliatingly overturned on the third day.”(2) What if the darkened experiences of God’s distance were filled with the promise that Christ has gone only momentarily to prepare us a room?

Such a leave of absence is no more permanent than the absence of a father who has gone off to work in the morning with the promise to return before bedtime. Such a distance is marked not with isolation and disconnection, but in fact with love and communion. It is the kind of absence that takes on the characteristics of a presence. It is the kind of distance somehow brimming with the promise: I will never leave you or forsake you.

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

(1) Anne Sexton, “A Small Journal,” in The Poet’s Story, ed. Howard Moss (New York: Macmillan, 1973).

(2) Alister McGrath, The Mystery of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 159.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Good News for Women

July 22, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

A New York Times blog written by Nicholas Kristof recently caught my attention. “Does Religion Oppress Women?” was the question and the title of the article. As someone who speaks and writes on behalf of the Christian faith, I have often heard this asserted as a reason against belief in the Christian faith—or any faith at all. But I am also a woman and I wondered how a secular journalist like Kristof might answer this question. Moreover, I wondered what in his travels and experience he had seen that made him write about this topic in particular.

Kristof has traveled extensively across the African continent and has spent time in some of Africa’s poorest communities. In his many essays documenting these experiences, he often talks about the role of faith, acknowledging both its positive role and its negative contribution in the life of African women specifically. He writes, “I’ve seen people kill in the name of religion… But I’ve also seen Catholic nuns showing unbelievable courage and compassion in corners of the world where no other aid workers are around, and mission clinics and church-financed schools too numerous to mention.”(1) So, is religion and Christianity in particular good for women? Kristof does not offer an easy answer to this question.

And of course, there are not easy answers. As recently as April 2010, as reported in Christianity Today magazine, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that Christians in some countries in Africa still practiced female genital mutilation.(2) For many, and particularly persons of faith, these findings are very troubling.

In fact, these findings take on doleful irony when one looks at the earliest Christian movement and its attraction for women in particular. The world of the Roman Empire, filled with a diverse array of religious options, could not compete with the growing Christian movement in its appeal to women. So many women were becoming Christians, in fact, that pagan religious leaders used its attraction to women as an argument against Christianity. In his treatise, On True Doctrine, the pagan leader Celsus wrote in alarming terms about the subversive nature of Christianity to the stability of the Empire and regarded the disproportionate number of women among the Christians as evidence of the inherent irrationality and vulgarity of the Christian faith. Historian David Bentley Hart writes of Celsus’s alarm: “It is unlikely that Celsus would have thought the Christians worth his notice had he not recognized something uniquely dangerous lurking in their gospel of love and peace… [A]nd his treatise contains a considerable quantity of contempt for the ridiculous rabble and pliable simpletons that Christianity attracted into its fold: the lowborn and uneducated, slaves, women and children.”(3) Indeed, Christianity attracted women and others deemed on the bottom rung of society because it elevated their status from an often oppressive Roman patriarchy.

Even a cursory survey of the historic evidence concerning women and early Christianity demonstrates an ineluctable pull. Rather than being another force for oppression, Christianity drew women into its fold. Hart adds; “There is no doubt for any historian of early Christianity that this was a religion to which women were powerfully drawn, and one that would not have spread nearly so far or so swiftly but for the great number of women in its fold.”(4) In a world where women were largely viewed as household property or worse, how could they not be drawn to a figure who elevated their worth and status? Jesus, unlike many in his contemporary world, showed extraordinary kindness and care to women—even women of questionable character. He was often criticized for this by the religious of his day. But he welcomed women into his community of disciples just the same.

At the heart of Christianity is Jesus. Jesus raised people up to the full-stature of their humanity. And the earliest followers of Jesus, as Hart concludes, “from the first, placed charity at the center of the spiritual life as no pagan cult ever had, and raised the care of widows, orphans, the sick, the imprisoned, and the poor to the level of the highest of religious obligations.”(5) Of Jesus it was said, “A battered reed he will not break off, and a smoldering wick he will not put out.” In a world where women, among many others, are often battered reeds and smoldering wicks, this is liberating, good news.

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

(1) Nicholas Kristof, “Does Religion Oppress Women?” The New York Times, December 15, 2009.

(2) Christianity Today, “Spotlight: What We Learned About Africa,” April 2010, vol. 54, no. 6, 11.

(3) David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 115. See also pp. 159-161.

(4) Ibid., 159-160.

(5) Ibid., 164

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Genuinely Human?

July 21, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The recognition of one’s humanity can be an uncomfortable pill to swallow. Life’s fragility, life’s impermanence, life’s intertwinement with imperfection and disappointment—bitter medicines are easier to accept. The Romantic poets called it “the burden of full consciousness.” To look closely at humanity can indeed be a realization of dread and despair.

For the poet Philip Larkin, to look closely at humanity was to peer into the absurdity of the human existence. Whatever frenetic, cosmic accident that brought about a species so endowed with consciousness, the sting of mortality, incessant fears of failure, and sieges of shame, doubt, and selfishness was, for Larkin, a bitter irony. In a poem titled “The Building,” he describes the human condition as it is revealed in the rooms of a hospital, where one finds “Humans, caught/On ground curiously neutral, homes and names/Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,/ Some old, but most at that vague age that claims/The end of choice, the last of hope; and all/ Here to confess that something has gone wrong./ It must be error of a serious sort,/ For see how many floors it needs, how tall…”(1)

With or without Larkin’s sense of dread, the confession that “something has gone wrong” is often synonymous with the acknowledgment of humanity. “I’m only human,” is a plea for leniency with regards shortcoming; in Webster’s dictionary, “human” itself is an adjective for imperfection, weakness, and fragility. Nevertheless, there are some outlooks and religions that stand diametrically opposed to this idea, seeing humanity with limitless potential, humans as pure, the human spirit as divine. In a vein not unlike the agnostic Larkin, the new atheists see the cruel realities of time and chance as reason in and of itself to dismiss the rose-colored lenses of God and religion. Yet quite unlike Larkin’s concluding outlook of meaninglessness and despair, they often (inexplicably) suggest a rose-colored view of humanity.(2) Still other belief-systems emphasize the depravity of humanity to such a leveling degree that no person can stand up under the burden of guilt and disgust.

In deep contrast to such severe or optimistic readings, Jesus of Nazareth adds an entirely different dimension to the conversation. The Jesus admits in his own flesh that while there is indeed an error of a serious sort, the error is not in “humanness” itself. He provides a way for the great paradox of humanity to be rightly acknowledged: both the deep and sacred honor of being human and yet the profound disgrace of all that is broken. So the Christian’s advantage is not that they find themselves less fallen or closer to perfection than others, nor that they find in their religion a means of simply escaping this world of fragility, brokenness, guilt, suffering, and error. The Christian’s advantage is Christ himself. The human Son of God mediates on our behalf, bringing us back to a full and forgiven humanity. In his life, death, and resurrection, the Christian is able to see their own broken humanity and a world that has gone awry in light of God’s severe and merciful pursuit. In his vicarious humanity, we encounter our own.

“[H]umanity’s mystery,” as one writer expounds, “can be explained only in the mystery of the God who became human. If people want to look into their own mystery—the meaning of their pain, of their work, of their suffering, of their hope—let them put themselves next to Christ… If I find, on comparing myself with Christ, that my life is a contrast, the opposite of his, then my life is a disaster. I cannot explain that mystery except by returning to Christ, who gives authentic features to a person who wants to be genuinely human.”(3)

The author of these words was well acquainted with the paradox of human nature and the God who became human to bring the world to authentic humanity. Oscar Romero was a Salvadoran priest who saw the very worst and the weakest of humanity in the corruption, violence, and suffering of a country at war within itself. A witness to ongoing violations of human rights, Romero spoke out on behalf of the poor and the victimized. In both the abused and the abusers, he saw the image of God, glimpses of Christ, and the dire need for Christ’s true humanity. For his outcries, Romero was assassinated in the middle of a church service. He was holding up the broken bread of communion, the very sign of Christ’s human body on earth, given for a broken and hungry world.

Surrounded by reasons to be despairing of humanity, there is yet this startling image of a human who gives us cause to reconsider our despair, one whose only brokenness was at our own hands. Christ is more than someone who came to fix what was wrong. He is the image of all that is right, the bread of life for those who seek to be genuinely human.

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

(1) Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 191.

(2) Various Atheist bus campaigns offer well-known examples of this, one a few years ago declaring, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” See Ariane Sherine, “The Atheist Bus Journey,” The Guardian, January 6, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/.

(3) Oscar Romero, The Violence of Love (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 112.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Way It Is

July 18, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Through winding, trash-strewn roads and poverty-lined streets we made our way to another world. Clotheslines hung from every imaginable protrusion, a symbol of the teeming life that fought to survive there, and a contrast to the empty, darkened world of night. The only light in otherwise pitch-black alleys came from the glow of cigarettes and drug pipes, which for split seconds illumined faces that lived here. It was late and I was sick, discovering after a long flight that I had not escaped the office stomach flu after all. Our van was full of tourists, their resort brochures a troubling, colorful contrast to the streets that would bring them there. Strangers who only moments before wore the expressions of anticipation of vacation now rode in expressionless silence. One man broke that silence, just as the taxi turned the corner seemingly into an entirely new realm and resort. With pain and poverty now literally behind him, he said quietly, “Well… It is what it is.”

These words rung in my ears all weekend, most of which was spent crumpled on the bathroom floor, unable to participate in the wedding we had come to “paradise” to enjoy. In the end, it seemed a metaphor for thoughts I wanted to remember physically and not in mere abstractions. You see, typically, when the drowsy, comfortable world I have come to expect is jarred awake by visions of the way the majority of the world actually lives, the upset that is caused is largely conceptual, immaterial, abstract. Sure, I am momentarily both deeply saddened and humbled by the wealth of resources and rights many of us take for granted in the West. I am aware again of the need to stay involved and vocal about relief efforts and global injustices that take place daily right under our noses. But for the most part, my angst, my theology, my reactions are all abstract, observed mentally, not physically. That is, they remain deeply-felt issues, but not concrete matters of life.

Of course, I am not suggesting that abstract, philosophical ideas are the problem—clearly my vocation is dedicated to the notion that ideas carry consequences, that reflection on questions of truth, beauty, hope, and love are indeed matters vital to the development of fulfilled and finite human beings. What I am suggesting is that the abstract is both hopeless and of no use without the concrete (inasmuch as the concrete is a desert without the infinite). Many of the most stirring theological pronouncements Jesus made were in fact not statements at all—but a life, a death, a meal shared, a daily, physical reality changed, a new possibility realized.

And this is precisely why those simple words “It is what it is” are a coping mechanism that should sicken us every bit as thoroughly as the scenes that make us want to utter them in the first place. Far from a mere collection of abstractions about another world, the Christian life is an active declaration that all is not as it appears. While other worldviews and religions offer an explanation for why and how this world “is what it is,” Christianity offers something different. With the prophets, with the Incarnate Christ, the God-Man among us, every story and parable and interaction declares: “This is not the way it’s supposed to be!”

Professor of theology William Cavanaugh notes that this vital difference in perspective takes form from the very beginning, starting with the way the book of Genesis tells the origins of the world. Instead of telling a creation story like the Babylonians, for instance, where the circumstances of creation are awry from the start, the Hebrews tell a story where all is inherently good from the beginning, but then something goes terribly wrong. What this tells every hearer of the story thereafter is that things are not the way they are supposed to be. As Cavanaugh notes, “There is a revolutionary principle right there in the Scriptures which allows us to unthink the inevitability of sin, to unthink the inevitability of violence, and so on.”(1) The very first story God tells provides a framework for walking through a world enslaved by poverty and violence, sin and deception—a framework that provides both profound meaning (this is not the way it’s supposed to be!) and a concrete call to live daily into other, redemptive possibilities—possibilities Christ himself embodied.

It is thus an inherently Christian task to actively work at unthinking the inevitability of the way things are and to labor accordingly at changing them. Any reflection of truth and beauty, however abstract, if truly lived out by those who believe them, will ultimately address the concrete matters of life as well. For the Christian, this is a world where nothing merely unfortunately is what it is. Imagining other possibilities, working to unthink the divisions, deceptions, and frameworks that keep us bound to creation’s fall and not its redemption, we join the work of Father and Spirit. We join the Son who takes the abstractions of truth and beauty and declares concretely, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

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

(1) William Cavanaugh with Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 95, Jan/Feb 2009.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – On Defining Atheism

July 17, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

A popular tendency among some atheists these days is to define atheism, not as the positive thesis that God does not exist, but as the neutral claim that an atheist is one who simply lacks belief in God. If we could scan the mind of the atheist and catalogue all the beliefs the atheist holds, we would not find a belief of the form, “God exists.” Those who insist on defining atheism in this manner want to avoid the implications of having to defend the claim that God does not exist. They demand justification for faith in God while insisting that they bear no rational burdens in the debate since they are not making any positive claims on the question of God’s existence.

This strategy is mistaken on several levels. To begin with, there is no logical connection between a lack of belief about God in someone’s mind and the conclusion that God does not exist. At best, this definition leads us to agnosticism, roughly the view that we do not know whether or not God exists. For example, there are millions of people on this planet who hold no belief about the Los Angeles Lakers. But it would be quite a stretch to conclude from that empirical fact that the Lakers therefore do not exist.

Additionally, atheism thus defined is a psychological condition, not a cognitive thesis. Conduct a quick search on the Internet, and you will even find atheists who claim that babies are atheists because they lack belief in God. But, as some philosophers have pointed out, that is not a flattering state of affairs for the atheist, for, strictly speaking, a cow, by that definition, is also an atheist. For someone who is intent on merely giving a report about the state of his or her mind, pity, or an equivalent emotion, is the appropriate response, not a reasoned exchange. But nobody who has reflected long and hard about the issues and is prepared to argue vehemently about them should be let off the hook that easily.

In any case, such a definition of atheism goes against the intuitions held by almost everyone who has not been initiated into this way of thinking. In spite of the myriads of nuances one can give to one’s preferred version of denying God’s existence, the traditional view has been that there are ultimately only three attitudes one can take with regard to a particular proposition. Take the proposition, “God exists”. One could (1) affirm the proposition, which is theism, (2) Deny the proposition, which is atheism, or (3) withhold judgment with regard to the proposition, which is agnosticism. Those who affirm the proposition have to give reasons why they think it is true. Those who deny it have to give reasons why they think it is false. Only those who withhold judgment have the right to sit on the fence on the issue. Thus J. J. C. Smart states matter-of-factly, “‘Atheism’ means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God.”(1)

Nor will an attempt to defend this new definition on the basis of the etymology of the word “atheist” work. The word “atheist” is from the Greek word “Theos” which means “God”, and the “a” is the negation. The “a” is taken to mean “without”, and hence “atheism” simply means “without belief in God”. But this will not do. Even if we grant that the “a” means “without”, we will still not arrive at the conclusion that atheism means “without belief in God”. What is negated in the word “atheism” is not “belief” but “God”. Atheism still means “without God”, not “without belief”. There is no concept of “belief” in the etymology of the word – the word simply means the universe is without God, which is another way of saying that God does not exist.

Semantic quibbles aside, there are deeper problems with this position. The same atheists who decry the irrationality of believing in God still insist on shoehorning theistic ideas into their ontology. Most of them continue to defend the meaning and purpose of life, the validity of objective morality and the assurance that humanity is marching on towards progress and would move thus faster were it not for the shackles of religion. Such cosmic optimism would be unrecognizable to the most prominent atheists of yesteryear, not to mention the many in our day who say as much. It is recognized as a remnant of a biblical tradition that still has some of its grip on the western psyche.

Speaking about the belief that every human life needs to be protected, Richard Rorty wrote, “This Jewish and Christian element in our tradition is gratefully invoked by free-loading atheists like myself.”(2) But if God does not exist, theists live on false hope, and the freeloaders fair no better. Sever the cord between God and those elements of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the honest among us fly into oblivion with shrills of despair to which only a Nietzsche or a Jean Paul Sartre can do full justice; for the validity of such positive attitudes about life is directly propositional to the plausibility of the existence of a caring God who directs the affairs of mankind.

J.M. Njoroge is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) J. J. C. Smart, “Atheism and Agnosticism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

(2) Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 80, No. 10, Part 1: (Oct., 1983), pp. 583-589.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Death of Gods

July 16, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Gods, too, Decompose”

“God is dead,” declares Nietzsche’s madman in his oft-quoted passage from The Gay Science. Though not the first to make the declaration, Nietzsche’s philosophical candor and desperate rhetoric unquestionably attribute to its familiarity. In graphic brushstrokes, the parable describes a crime scene:

“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God,’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I! All of us are his murderers…Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?…Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’”(1)

Nietzsche’s atheism, unlike recent atheistic mantras, was more than rhetoric and angry words. He recognized that the death of God, even if only the death of an idol, introduced a significant crisis. He understood the critical role of the Christian story to the very underpinnings of European philosophy, history, and culture, and so understood that God’s death meant that a total—and painful—transformation of reality must occur. If God has died, if God is dead in the sense that God is no longer of use to us, then ours is a world in peril, he reasoned, for everything must change. Our typical means of thought and life no longer make sense; the very structures for evaluating everything have become unhinged. For Nietzsche, a world that considers itself free from God is a world that must suffer the disruptive effects of that iconoclasm.

Herein, I believe Nietzsche’s atheistic tale tells a story beneficial no matter the creed or conviction of those who hear it: Gods, too, decompose. Within Nietzsche’s bold atheism is the intellectual integrity that refused to make it sound easy to live with a dead God—a conclusion the self-deemed new atheists are determined to undermine. Moreover, his dogged exposure of idolatrous conceptions of God wherever they exist and honest articulation of the crises that comes in the crashing of such idols is universal in its bearing. Whether atheist or theist, Muslim or Christian, the death of the God we thought we knew is disruptive, excruciating, tragic—and quite often, as Nietzsche attests, necessary.

Yet for Nietzsche and the new atheists, the shattering of religious imagery and concepts is simply deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction. Their iconoclasm ultimately seeks to reveal towers of belief as houses of cards best left in piles at our feet. On the contrary, for the theist iconoclasm remains the breaking of false and idolatrous conceptions of God, humanity, and the cosmos. But added to this is the exposing of counterfeit motivations for faith, when fear or self-interest lead a person deeper into religion as opposed to love or truth, or when the source of all knowledge becomes something finite rather than the eternal God. While this destruction certainly remains the painful event Nietzsche foretold, God’s death turns out to be one more sign of God’s presence. As C.S. Lewis observed through his own pain at the death of the God he knew:

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.”(2)

For Lewis, it was the death of his wife that brought about the decomposition of his God. For others, it is the prevalence of suffering or the haunt of God’s silence that begets the troubling sense that our God is dying. At some profound level, the Christian story takes us to God’s death as well, perhaps for some in more ways than one. Like the Incarnation, the crucifixion leaves most of our ideas in ruins at the foot of the cross. The journey to death and Golgotha is an offensive journey to take with God. But blessed are those who take it. Blessed are those in pain over the death of their Gods. Blessed are those who mourn at the tombs and take in the sorrow of the crime scenes. For theirs is somehow the kingdom of heaven, a kingdom somehow able to hold Golgotha, a kingdom able to hold death itself.

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

(1) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181-182.

(2) C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 66.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Ambassadors of Reconciliation

July 15, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Recently on a drive through a small, suburban town, I saw the following message on a church sign: “Afraid of burning? Apply Son-screen.” I’ve seen similar messages to this one; “How will you spend eternity: Smoking or Non-Smoking?” “Life is Hard. Afterlife is Harder!” “WARNING: Exposure to the Son may prevent burning!” While there may be a pithy cleverness to some of these church slogans, I am bothered by the use of fear as a primary motivator for entering into a relationship with God. Why would anyone “scare” people into relationship with God? Can a true relationship be formed on the basis of fear?

Of course, the narratives of the Bible are replete with admonitions to fear the Lord. Even those unfamiliar with Christianity are likely to have some acquaintance with the familiar Proverb: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (1:7). But the fear of God is quite different from being afraid. Actually, the fear of the Lord is a component of faith; it arises from knowledge of God and from within the context of relationship with God. The fear of the Lord is reverence for God, and it reminds us of our place and our standing before that God. We are finite and fallen. God is infinite and holy. Fear is simply another name for the wonder, reverence, and praise we owe to God our Creator.

Now, perhaps these church billboards have a hint of this understanding in their message, but sadly, the result for those reading these kinds of messages is fear, or revulsion. If the only motivation to turn to God is to avoid punishment, how is that any kind of relationship? Perhaps this message results when there is confusion between the justice of God and punishment. Often, we want to punish others, or we have misplaced the desire to see others punished for a sense of justice. In contrast, the desire for justice is the desire to see things put right, made right by God. As Jesus prayed, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is a prayer for God’s justice to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Rather than making people fell afraid and focusing on all that is fearfully wrong, there is also the exhortation to proclaim all that God has set right in Jesus Christ: “Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were entreating through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:18-21).

Interestingly enough, more than any other command in Scripture, we are commanded to ‘fear not,’ and ‘do not be afraid.’(1) In fact, there are 366 commands (one for every day of the year and for Leap Year) to not be afraid. In Jesus’s teaching and message, he reserved his warnings of judgment for those who considered themselves in the “right” with God—those who defined their righteousness by their own merits. Jesus never used fear as a motivation for following him. Rather, for those on the outside looking in, Jesus extended hospitality and welcome. Indeed, in his message announcing “the kingdom of heaven is at hand; repent and believe the gospel” Jesus extends an invitation, not an ultimatum driven by fear. It is an invitation to enter into the kingdom by following him—his way, his life. Those who follow Jesus today can extend the same invitation to others who are seeking: “We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”

Perhaps understanding proper fear gives new insight to the words written in John’s first letter. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us” (1 John 4:16-19). Author Scott Bader-Saye comments that fear twists virtue into vice.(2) Fear motivated by a lack of love pursues punishment. When anyone is detached from love, fear-filled messages are sent. But when the proclamation centers on the God who ‘so loved the world that he gave his only Son’ fear is replaced by love; a love freely offered to others, by the God who has first loved us.

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

(1) Lloyd Ogilvie cited in John Ortberg, If You Want To Walk on Water You Have to Get Out of The Boat (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 118.

(2) Scott Bader-Saye, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2007), 48-49.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – IS RELIGION VIOLENT?

July 14, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In a 2002 article in The Guardian, author Salman Rushdie, inspired by bouts of violence in his native India, articulated a now-common view on religion. The article was titled, “Religion, as ever, is the poison in India’s blood.” In it, Rushdie outlined the familiar stance of the vociferous new atheists, bidding the world to stop speaking of religion in the fashionable language of “respect” and skating around the obvious conclusions about both God and religion. He writes:

“What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion’s dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! […] India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.“(1)

Rushdie’s voice is merely one among many in the increasingly prevalent conversation about God, religion, and violence. Against Christianity, the critiques come quite specifically. Richard Dawkins describes the Christian story as vicious, sado-masochistic, and repellent, symptomatic of a violent God, a Bible full of violence, and followers willing to overlook that violence, or worse, to embrace it. For Dawkins and his conspirators, God is the problem that initiates the problem of violence: ”The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can be desensitized to their horror.”(2)

Unsatisfied altogether by those who try to interpret the Old Testament through the lenses of the New, those who point to Jesus as fulfilling personally and particularly some of the more uncertain images of God, the new atheists see only continuity in the violence of Christian theology. In Dawkins’ words, “New Testament theology adds a new injustice, topped off by a new sadomasochism whose viciousness even the Old Testament barely succeeds. It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol… The theology and punishment-theory behind it is even worse.”(3)

While the vitriolic rants of the new atheists are filled with arrogance, oddities, and inconsistencies of their own, their well-voiced objections to Christian violence are hardly unique to them. For many, both in and outside the church, it is an issue deeply felt, a problem that needs a viable answer. Why is it that religion and violence often merge? And what is the solution? For the great majority of those who bravely vocalize such a question, the great “solution” of eradicating religion is simply unhelpful. And in fact some are suggesting the exact opposite, suggesting that the cure to religious violence does not rest in less religion or no religion (an argument that has been on the increase since the Enlightenment), but rather more religion.

In a carefully qualified sense, professor Miroslav Volf explains, “I don’t mean, of course, that the cure for violence lies in increased religious zeal… [rather] it lies in a stronger and more intelligent commitment to the faith as faith.” That is, commitment to the kind of faith that is itself good news, truth and beauty incarnate, a story that reinterprets all others. He continues, “The more we reduce Christian faith to vague religiosity which serves primarily to energize, heal, and give meaning to the business of life whose content is shaped by factors other than faith (such as national or economic interests), the worse off we will be. Inversely, the more the Christian faith matters to its adherents as faith and the more they practice it as an ongoing tradition with strong ties to its origins and with clear cognitive and moral content, the better off we will be.”(4) In other words, Christ’s Incarnation properly understood as a nonviolent invasion of a violent world by the God of shalom hardly fosters violence!

On the contrary, his violent death at the hands of a life-taking world is entirely reversed at the hands of the life-giving Father and the resurrection of a murdered son. His proclamation of a different kingdom is embodied in a God who steps near enough to consume us, but who offers instead a paradoxical alternative: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him” (John 6:56). No, Christianity properly understood and entirely embodied cannot be used to incite violence. It instead takes the angry words of its staunchest critics and the vile abuse of misguided disciples, and, like its liberator, lives the radical alternative to the story they tell.

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

(1) Salman Rushdie, “Religion, as ever, is the poison in India’s blood,” The Guardian, March 9, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/mar/09/society.salmanrushdie, accessed January 15, 2010.

(2) Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 51.

(3) Ibid., 285.

(4) Miroslav Volf, “Christianity and Violence,” Boardman Lectureship in Christian Ethics, March 6, 2002, http://repository.upenn.edu/boardman/2, accessed January 18, 2010.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Problems of Pain

July 11, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your pain today?”

Ironically, the question, a hospital’s attempt to understand and manage the pain of cancer patients, only seemed to cause my father more pain. He hated the daily inquiry that seized him almost as consistently as the sting of the growing tumor. It aggravated him deeply, more than I could say I understood. It was a philosophical quagmire for him that somehow mocked pain and amplified the problem of suffering. If he answered “10″ in the midst of a painful morning, only to discover a greater quantity of pain in the evening, the scale was meaningless. The numbers were never constant, and what is a scale if its points of measurement cannot stand in relation to one another? If he answered “10″ on any given day would that somehow control the ceiling of his own pain? He knew it would not, and that uncertainty seemed almost literally to add painful insult to an already fatal injury.

Considerations of pain and suffering are among the most cited explanations for disbelief in God, both for professionally trained philosophers and for the general public. If a good, powerful, and present deity exists, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? Even for those who argue that the existence of God and the presence of evil can be reconciled, the vast amount of suffering in the world certainly compounds the dilemma. We can sympathize with Ivan Karamazov in his depiction of the earth as one soaked through with human tears. We imagine not merely one person measuring their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 but innumerable individuals, and the temptation is to add all of these scales together as one giant proof against God.

In his 1940 book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis warns us against espousing such a temptation. “We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the ‘unimaginable sum of human misery,’” he writes. “Search all time and space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone’s consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it.”(1) Or, said in another way, there are as many problems of pain as there are conscious beings—and God must deal with each and every one of them.

For someone like my dad, for whom weighing pain was both disparaging and unfeasible, this would perhaps have been one comfort in a maddening abyss of darkness. It means his own problem of pain was not lost in a sea of meaningless scales and indescribable measurements. It means that his frustrating, inconsistent ceiling of sorrow was itself held in the arms of God—and not vaguely absorbed in an immeasurable sum, or else given a distant, theoretical answer. It means that God had to come near not simply to pain in general, but to him in person.

This is exactly the scandalous confession of Christian hope. As Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, “When life is hard and apparently hopeless, we can be confident that this darkness of ours can be taken up into the great darkness of redemption through which the light of Easter dawns. And when what is required of us seems too burdensome, when the pains become unbearable and the fate we are asked to accept seems simply meaningless—then we have come very close to the man nailed on the Cross at the Place of the Skull, for he has already undergone this on our behalf and, moreover, in unimaginable intensity.”(2) On the cross, in the person of Christ, the problem of pain was God’s own, felt acutely, absorbed personally, endured as one person—and answering as many problems of pain as there are created beings.

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

(1) C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 103.

(2) Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Scapegoat and the Trinity,” You Crown the Year with Your Goodness: Sermons through the Liturgical Year (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), 87.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Last Enemy

July 10, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In spite of the proverbial certainty of death and taxes, the human psyche has always dreamed of discovering loopholes in whatever mechanisms fix the limits. Yet though it might be possible to cheat on one’s taxes, “cheating death” remains a phrase of wishful-thinking applied to incidences of short-lived victories against our own mortality. Eventually, death honors its ignominious appointment with all of us, calling the bluff of the temptation to believe that we are the masters of our own destiny. But despite the universal, empirical verification of its indiscriminate efficiency, we continue to be constantly surprised whenever death strikes. Only a painfully troubled life can be so thoroughly desensitized against its ugliness as to not experience the throbbing agony of the void it creates within us whenever the earthly journey of a loved one comes to an end.

Such a peculiar reaction to an otherwise commonplace occurrence points strongly to the fact that this world is not our home. As Ecclesiastes 3:11 explains, God has put eternity in our hearts, and therefore the mysterious notion that we are not meant to die is no mere pipe dream: it sounds a clarion call to the eternal destiny of our souls. If the biblical record is accurate, there is no shame or arrogance in pitching our hopes for the future as high as our imaginations will allow. Actually, the danger is that our expectations may be too low, for “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). Far from being the accidental byproducts of a mindless collocation of atoms, we are indestructible beings whose spiritual radars, amidst much static noise, are attuned to our hearts’ true home.

Trouble begins, however, when we try to squeeze that eternal existence into our earthly lives in a manner that altogether denies our finite natures. We do so whenever we desensitize ourselves against the finality of death through repeated exposure to stage-managed destruction of human life through the media. Or we zealously seek ultimate fulfillment in such traitorous idols as pleasure, material wealth, professional success, power, and other means, without taking into account the fleeting nature of human existence. Or we broach the subject of death only when we have to, and even then we feel the need to couch it in palatable euphemisms. With some of our leading intellectuals assuring us that we have pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps and we therefore have no need for God, the only thing missing from our lives seems to be the tune of “Forever Young” playing in the cosmic background. A visitor from outer space would probably conclude that only the very unlucky ones die, while the rest of us are guaranteed endless thrill-rides through space aboard this green planet.

But such a visitor would promptly be treated to the rude awakening that even the most self-assured of human beings are still in transit. While it is possible to sustain a façade of total control within the confines of material comforts, a functional government, and a reasonable distance from the darker side of human suffering, this opportunity is not equally shared around the globe. It would take a very specialized form of education to believe in the ability of human beings to control their own destiny when hundreds of people are being put to the sword, homes are being razed to the ground, and your neighbors are fleeing for their lives—a scenario my family lived through in Kenya. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, news anchors in this part of the world rarely preface their gruesome video clips with viewer discretion warnings, and so the good, the bad, and the ugly are all deemed equally fit for public consumption.

Affronted by such an in-your-face, unapologetic reality of human mortality, one finds oneself face to face with a dilemma: why should you devote all of your energy to making a meaningful difference in the world if it is true that everything done under the sun will eventually amount to zero? Once one has come to the conclusion that the emperor has no clothing, what sense does it make to keep up with the pretense? Sadly, some see through the emptiness and choose to end their own lives. From a naturalistic perspective, that seems to be a perfectly consistent step to take.

Yet the Bible grasps this nettle with astounding authority. Not only has God placed a yearning for our true home in our hearts, God has also promised to cloth the perishable with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality through Christ’s own death (1 Corinthians 15:54). In the meantime, the light of the gospel shines an eternal perspective upon our service unto God and humanity, fusing all of our activities with significance. When the call of God has been answered, nothing that is done in obedience to the Father, as the Son himself confirmed in life and death, is ever trivial. Thus even in the face of suffering and death, as a follower of Christ, I neither bury my head in the sand nor grope blindly in total darkness. With faithfulness and joy, I enthusiastically render service to my God,

And when my task on earth is done,

When by thy grace the victory’s won,

Even death’s cold wave I will not flee,

Since God through Jordan leadeth me.(1)

J.M. Njoroge is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) From the 1862 hymn, He Leadeth Me, by Joseph Gilmore.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Suffering of Forgiveness

July 9, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In four horrific months in 1994, at the urging of the Rwandan government, the poorer Hutu majority took up bayonets and machetes and committed genocide against the wealthier Tutsi minority. In the wake of this unspeakable tragedy, nearly a million people had been murdered.

In August of 2003, driven by overcrowded prisons and backlogged court systems, 50,000 genocide criminals, people who had already confessed to killing their neighbors, were released again into society. Murderers were sent back to their homes, back to neighborhoods literally destroyed at their own hands, to live beside the few surviving relatives of the very men, women, and children they killed.

With eyes still bloodshot at visions of a genocide it failed to see, the world still watches Rwanda, looking with a sense of foreboding, wondering what happens when a killer comes home; what happens when victims, widows, orphans, and murderers look each other in the eyes again; what happens when the neighbor who killed your family asks to be forgiven. For the people of Rwanda, the description of the Hebrew prophet is a reality with which they live: “And if anyone asks them, ‘What are these wounds on your chest?’ the answer will be, ‘The wounds I received in the house of my friends’” (Zechariah 13:6). How does a culture bear the wounds of genocide?

For Steven Gahigi, that question is answered in a valley of dry bones which cannot be forgotten. An Anglican clergyman who lost 142 members of his family in the Rwandan genocide, he thought he had lost the ability to forgive. Though his inability plagued him, he had no idea how to navigate through a forgiveness so costly. “I prayed until one night I saw an image of Jesus Christ on the cross…I thought of how he forgave, and I knew that I and others could also do it.”(1) Inspired by this vision, Gahigi somehow found the words to begin preaching forgiveness. He first did this in the prisons where Hutu perpetrators sat awaiting trial, and today he continues in neighborhoods where the victims of genocide live beside its perpetrators. For Gahigi, wounds received in the house of friends can only be soothed with truth-telling, restitution, interdependence, and reconciliation, all of which he finds accessible because of Christ.

In fact, the work of reconciliation that is taking place in Rwanda in lives on every side of the genocide may be difficult to describe apart from the cross of Christ. While it is true that forgiveness can be explained in therapeutic terms, that the act of forgiving is beneficial to the forgiver, and forgiveness releases the victim from the one who has wronged them, from chains of the past, and a cell of resentment; what Rwandans are facing today undoubtedly reaches far beyond this. While forgiveness is certainly a form of healing in lives changed forever by genocide, it is also very much a form of suffering. Miroslav Volf, himself familiar with horrendous violence in Croatia and Serbia, describes forgiveness as the exchange of one form of suffering for another, modeled to the world by the crucified Christ. He writes, “[I]n a world of irreversible deeds and partisan judgments redemption from the passive suffering of victimization cannot happen without the active suffering of forgiveness.”(2) For Rwandans, this is a reality well understood.

And for Christ, who extends to the world the possibility of reconciliation by embodying it, this suffering, this willingness to be broken by the very people with whom he is trying to reconcile, is the very road to healing and wholeness. “More than just the passive suffering of an innocent person,” writes Volf, “the passion of Christ is the agony of a tortured soul and a wrecked body offered as a prayer for the forgiveness of the torturers.”(3) There is no clearer picture of Zechariah’s depiction of wounds received at the house of friends than in a crucifixion ordered by an angry crowd that lauded Christ as king only hours before. And yet, it is this house of both murderous and weeping friends for which Jesus prays on the cross: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Far from the suggestion of a moralistic god watching a world of suffering and brokenness from a distance, the costly ministry of reconciliation comes to a world of violence and victims through arms that first bore the weight of the cross. For Steven Gahigi, who facilitates the difficult dialogue now taking place in Rwanda, who helps perpetrators of genocide to build homes for their victims’ families, forgiveness is indeed a active form of suffering, but one through which Christ has paved the hopeful, surprising way of redemption. Today, wherever forgiveness is a form of suffering, Christ accompanies the broken, leading both the guilty and the victimized through valleys of dry bones and signs of a coming resurrection.

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

(1) Johann Christoph Arnold, Why Forgive? (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis books, 2010), 202.

(2) Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 125.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Unlikely Blessing

July 8, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Stranger things have happened. My friends had struggled with infertility for most of their married lives. Employing the latest reproductive technologies didn’t work and thousands and thousands of dollars later there was still no child. As a result of all this, and because of their advanced age, they had given up the possibility of having a biological child and adopted a little boy. They were overjoyed to bring this little one into their family, and we rejoiced together at his baptism. Little did we know at the time that my friend was pregnant; nine months later this couple welcomed their daughter into the world. They were truly overwhelmed by this unexpected and unlikely turn of events. Sometimes, surprise is the greatest blessing.

Surprise is at the start of Luke’s gospel narrative which begins with two women, who were both, like my friend, unlikely candidates for mothers. Elizabeth was a woman beyond child-bearing age. She was barren. Mary was a young, unmarried girl. Yet, these two women were the mothers of two of history’s most famous individuals: John the Baptist, the last prophet of Israel, and Jesus, who would be called, Messiah. The announcement of these pregnancies must have been disconcerting at best. As if this strange news wasn’t enough, it was announced to both families by an angelic visitor. The first words spoken were “do not be afraid.” Do not be afraid, indeed! These births would turn the world upside down, and would change the lives of these women; both women were the unlikely recipients of unlikely blessing.

Despite the improbable circumstances, Elizabeth praises God by saying, “This is the way the Lord has dealt with me in the days when He looked with favor upon me, to take away my disgrace among men” (Luke 1:25). Elizabeth and Zacharias were both from priestly lines: Zacharias from Abijah, and Elizabeth from Aaron. The gospel alerts the reader that they “were both righteous in the sight of God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of God” (Luke 1:5-6). However, Elizabeth’s barrenness would have called her “righteous” status into question. Childless women were a ‘disgrace among men’ in her day. Childlessness was naturally looked upon as a grave misfortune or even as a sign that one was cursed by God. The wife who presented her husband with no such tangible blessings or supporters felt that her aim in life had been missed. So the announcement that Elizabeth would bear a child beyond her child-bearing years was as unlikely as a virgin having a child.

Mary, unlike Elizabeth, was a young girl from a backwater town. No priestly line, nor royal heritage. No one would have noticed her, or thought twice about her. Yet like Elizabeth, a strange blessing was bestowed upon Mary indeed! As one author notes, “Mary, God’s favored one, was blessed with having a child out of wedlock who would later be executed as a criminal. Acceptability, prosperity, and comfort have never been the essence of God’s blessing.”(1) Mary, despite the disgrace and the suffering she would endure declares, “Be it done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

To be sure, this “blessing” would cause Joseph to want to end his betrothal to Mary, leaving her alone and with child. Angelic intervention was necessary to change his mind. And after Jesus was born, Mary would watch her son grow, watch his itinerant ministry unfold, and behold the wrath and anger of the religious leaders he challenged and confronted. Then, she would watch in horror as her son was crucified, falsely accused and innocent of all charges. She must have struggled to understand why God would not save him from that fate. Indeed, God’s blessing must have seemed very strange, or very cruel.

In general, blessing is equated with the good life. And when the term is used today, it is rarely ever used to refer to the unexpected and unwanted blessing of suffering or hardship. As one who hears these narratives today, I can scarcely see blessing in lives cut short, or in the pain of losing children far too soon. We do not get to hear much of what Mary or Elizabeth thought about these unlikely events, or how they must have felt as their sons’ lives unfolded. Yet, perhaps they uniquely understood that God’s blessings are not wrapped up in doing everything and anything we ask God to do for us. Instead, God’s blessings are often experienced in ironic, unexpected and strange ways—life emerging from death; joy from sorrow; becoming first by being last.

My friends certainly know this to be true, just as Mary and Elizabeth did. Their young daughter, not yet 12, died from a rare form of ocular cancer. They grieve her loss every day, even as they rejoice in the blessing of her short life; a strange blessing, indeed, and one that is filled with sadness. They have come to know a strange joy that Mary and Elizabeth must have also experienced. They have come to know that “joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes….”(2) Perhaps the most unlikely blessing indeed.

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

(1) Alan Culpepper, New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke, Vol. 9, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 52.

(2) Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, (New York: HarperCollins, 1969), 54.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Changing Tunes

July 7, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

A popular U.S. comic strip once held the attention of millions as it chronicled the misadventures of a boy and his stuffed tiger. The infamous pair was inseparable, lingering energetically in topics both adult and childlike. One day on a walk in the woods, six-year-old boy Calvin announces to Hobbes the tiger that he has decided he doesn’t believe in ethics anymore, because, as far as he’s concerned, “The ends justify the means.” “Get what you can while the getting is good,” Calvin reasons, “Might makes right.”

At this, Hobbes, who is a stuffed tiger in the eyes of all but Calvin, promptly pushes his human friend into a mud hole.

“Why’d you do that?” Calvin objects.

“You were in my way,” Hobbes replies, “and now you’re not. The ends justify the means.”

Finding himself in the mud, Calvin sees clearly that he cannot live with the outworking of his lauded theory. He seems to reach a brief and annoyed moment of enlightenment, until he uncovers a way to reconcile the conflict with self-interest: “I didn’t mean for everyone, you dolt. Just me.”

One of the more striking things to confront in each of the four gospel accounts, besides the human Jesus himself, is the reactions people had to him. When in his presence, some like Mary and the man with leprosy fell instantaneously at his feet, others like the young rich ruler or the people of Nazareth turned away. In his presence some cried for mercy and others who needed a doctor were confronted with the question of whether or not they wanted to be well. In the presence of Jesus of Nazareth, choices were made, theories adjusted, realities were challenged, affections transformed.

Ironically, those deemed unrighteous and dishonorable by the social standards of the day were often the most responsive to the demands of Jesus. I have often wondered if this was because they were the ones most willing to see themselves without pretense, those most willing to respond to their own inconsistencies with fear and trembling. In the presence of Christ, the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda came to see the contradictions he lived with, his broken refrain, and his need for a new song. The Samaritan woman at the well saw not only that Jesus was speaking truth, but that he was truth, and that his way of life was full of life, while her own had been forced to the sidelines. Called into the presence of Christ, Zacchaeus saw his ravenous, isolating ways and the great hunger of his life for a different sort of communion. Conversely, the rich young ruler walked away from Jesus’s instruction because it was a request and reality that he just could not face.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the phrase “polyphony of life” as a metaphor for the various melodies of life that captivate or consume our affections. The invitation of Christ, he observed, does not come in such a way as to injure or weaken other loves, but always to provide a kind of cantus firmus to other melodies lest they run us adrift or out of tune. The cantus firmus, which means “fixed song,” is a pre-existing melody that forms the basis of a polyphonic composition. Though the song introduces twists in pitch and style, counterpoint and refrain, the cantus firmus is the enduring melody not always in the forefront, but always playing somewhere within the composition. Love of God was the cantus firmus for Bonhoeffer, the soul of the concerto and the clarifying essence for a life of various sounds and directions. “Where the cantus firmus is clear and plain, the counterpoint can be developed to its limits… Life isn’t pushed back into a single dimension, but is kept multi-dimensional and ployphonous.”(1)

It is both brave and essential to listen to the various melodies that hold our lives and shape our affections, and to ask what is the guiding song behind it all. The invitation of Christ is one that will engage all of life. The fully human Incarnate Son could make no lesser request. His invitation is that of fullness of life, a diversity of loves and desires shaped and flourishing around a firm cantus firmus. In this love, all things their find their coherence; the broken fragments of lesser songs are remade, re-tuned, and restored.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Disappointment and God

July 4, 2014 broboinhawaii 1 Comment

I struggled as a teenager growing up in Delhi. Failure was writ large on my life. My dad basically looked at me and said, “You know, you’re going to be a huge embarrassment to the family—one failure after another.” And he was right given the way I was headed. I wanted to get out of everything I was setting my hand to, and I lacked discipline.

During this time, India was at war and the defense academy was looking for general duties pilots to be trained. So I applied and I went to be interviewed, which involved an overnight train journey from the city of Delhi. It was wintertime and we were outside freezing for about five days as we went through physical endurance and other tests. There were three hundred applicants; they were going to select ten. On the last day they put their selection of names out on the board, and I was positioned number three.

I phoned my family and said, “You aren’t going to believe this. I’m going to make it. I’m number three. The only thing that’s left is the interview. The psychological testing is tomorrow, and I’ll be home.”

The next morning I began my interview with the chief commanding officer, who looked to me like Churchill sitting across the table. He asked me question after question. Then he said, “Son, I’m going to break your heart today.” He continued, “I’m going to reject you. I’m not going to pass you in this test.”

“May I ask you why, sir?” I replied.

“Yes. Psychologically, you’re not wired to kill. And this job is about killing.”

I felt that I was on the verge of wanting to prove him wrong—but I knew better, both for moral reasons and for his size! I went back to my room and didn’t talk to anybody. I packed my bags, got into the train, and arrived in Delhi. My parents and friends were waiting at the platform with garlands and sweets in their hands to congratulate me. No one knew. I thought to myself, “How do I even handle this? Where do I even begin?” They were celebrating, and yet for me, it was all over.

Or so I thought.

I was to discover later that God is the Grand Weaver of our lives. Every thread matters and is there for a purpose. Had I been selected, I would have had to commit twenty years to the Indian armed forces. It was the very next year that my father had the opportunity to move to Canada. My brother and I moved there as the first installment, and the rest of them followed. It was there I was in business school and God redirected my path to theological training. It was there that I met my wife, Margie; there my whole life changed. The rest is history. Had I been in the Indian Air Force, who knows what thread I’d have pulled to try to wreck the fabric.

Thankfully, our disappointments matter to God, and God has a way of taking even some of the bitterest moments we go through and making them into something of great significance in our lives. It’s hard to understand at the time. Not one of us says, “I can hardly wait to see where this thread is going to fit.” Rather, we say, “This is not the pattern I want.” Yet one day the Shepherd of our souls will put it all together—and give us an eternity to revel in the marvel of what God has done. Our Father holds the threads of the design, and I’m so immensely grateful that God is the Grand Weaver.

Excerpted and adapted from Ravi Zacharias’s The Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us Through the Events of Our Lives (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007).

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Is Good?

July 3, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

An editorial from The Wall Street Journal some years ago still comes to mind as I occasionally watch the news. The writer was describing host Larry King’s unsettling interview of a father whose wife drowned each of their five children. Peering restlessly at the television before him, the writer believed he saw not only a disturbing interview, but a rare glimpse into the culture at large. As the father spoke of his unwavering support for his wife on national television, the mother who committed the crimes sat in a courtroom thousands of miles away receiving her sentence for the murders of their five children at that very moment. When asked how he thought his wife would do in prison, he replied that she’d do just fine, adding, “She’s a good woman.”

But the writer’s angst went deeper than his discomfort over the descriptor of the mother as good, a term to which many predictably objected the following day. He noted, instead, his discomfort over the fact that the interview itself was conducted with the same work principle of any another day in the life of modern television reporting: “Interview anyone, ask anything.” To him, that the father was even there, that Larry asked, and that we looked on, bordered on a sick voyeurism. How could we call any of it good, any of us good? He concluded: “There are moments when one wants to go out to the street, stare up at the stars in the dark sky and admit, I don’t get it anymore… People keep looking for reasons inside this case. I keep wondering what’s happening to all the rest of us, soaking up these recurring, weird events from our living rooms.”(1)

More than a decade has passed since these comments, and television voyeurism has certainly escalated to all new levels. But the writer’s question about goodness remains hauntingly the same. What does it mean to be good? In the common delving out of goodness all around us, who decides if a person is actually good? A television audience? The individual? Larry King? A courtroom? And when do those of us watching move from sincere concern to shameless curiosity?

Is there an inherent determiner for naming something good? Can it really arise from no where? And if we use it broadly enough will we get to the point when the word itself is void of meaning? Perhaps we already have.

A strikingly similar question was voiced thousands of years ago in a conversation between two men—one, a rich young person; the other, a rabbi from Nazareth known for his strange stories and gossip-worthy surprises. The young man approached Jesus with a pressing question, unthinkingly addressing him as “Good teacher” before muttering out the inquiry. But Jesus didn’t get past the title. “Why do you call me good?” he asked. “Isn’t no one good but God alone?”(2)

Perhaps as unthinkingly as the rich young ruler, we have observed for years that Jesus was a good man. We would in fact be hard-pressed to find anyone today who would be comfortable calling Jesus a bad man or anything less than a good person. We would likely use the same term to describe ourselves. But indeed, what do we mean by good?

In a world where ideas creep slowly, making subtle changes that go unnoticed until havoc has broken loose and we are left like this author wondering what is happening, we do well to ask ourselves what we mean and where it comes from. G.K. Chesterton warned us several decades ago that we were tearing fences down before inquiring as to why they were up in the first place. And Jesus more than two thousand years ago inquired as to our very use of the word good: If this world is little more than a happy accident, why do you call me good? Why do you call anything good? No one is good except God alone. His statement was not meant to make us all feel like bad people. In fact it is interesting that we so strongly desire to call people good and believe that a generic, groundless goodness will suffice for all. But Jesus powerfully probes the vision that assigns goodness without a real foundation. What does it mean to be good? Who decides? And does a world without God have any basis for speaking of goodness in the first place? Jesus suggests it does not. For God gives us the very meaning of goodness. And Jesus himself embodies it.

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

(1) Daniel Henninger, “She Got Life, He Was Live,” Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2002.

(2) See Mark 10:13-23.

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Category Archives: Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Good Eye

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Better Treasure

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – On the Fringes

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Mysterious Fingerprints

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Book of Nature

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Characteristics of Absence

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Good News for Women

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Genuinely Human?

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Way It Is

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – On Defining Atheism

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Death of Gods

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Ambassadors of Reconciliation

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – IS RELIGION VIOLENT?

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Problems of Pain

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Last Enemy

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Suffering of Forgiveness

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Unlikely Blessing

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Changing Tunes

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Disappointment and God

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Is Good?

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