Category Archives: Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faith and Doubt

August 1, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Agnes Bojaxhiu, who died in 1997, was one of the most influential persons of her time. She was so, because she was so passionate about her beliefs that her life became an articulate expression of her faith. She loved life and so hated abortion; thus even when called to speak to a pre-dominantly American audience, she strongly criticized the policy. When asked to comment on her remarks, President Bill Clinton only noted, “Who can argue with a life so well-lived?”

Yet, Agnes Bojaxhiu was privately racked by an emotional vacuum in her relationship with God. In some of her writings, published posthumously, she is quoted as saying: “The more I want [God], the less I am wanted.” Sometime later she writes again, “Such deep longing for God—and…repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal. [The saving of] souls holds no attraction. Heaven means nothing. Pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything.”(1)

Ordinarily, this would not be anything noteworthy, as many would privately disclose that we, too, have been troubled by doubt. But the world looks back at the legacy of Agnes Bojaxhiu, who was better known as Mother Teresa, and these letters, which are very private expressions of her personal struggles, are publicly analyzed. There are many questions that this honesty about doubt raises. Is it wrong to doubt? What kinds of doubt are acceptable and what is not? And most importantly, how do we deal with it?

We do see in the Bible many who wrestled with doubt. Job who was the midst of suffering said, “If I called and he answered me, I could not believe that he was listening to my voice. For he bruises me with a tempest and multiplies my wounds without cause” (Job 9:16-17). Look at the extent of his struggle—even if he were to hear the voice of God in answer to his plea, he would not believe that it was in response to his prayer. His bruises, which were many, constrained belief and encouraged doubt.

Then there is Jeremiah who cried out to God in the face of persecution. “O LORD, you have deceived me and I was deceived; you have overcome me and prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me” (Jeremiah 20:7). Though this was not a cry of outright unbelief, it was a struggle with a God who seems to be silent in the face of unjust suffering.

In addition to these voices, the list of doubters would not be complete without mention of Thomas, whose name brings to mind the very word. When the disciples recounted to him their encounter with the risen Lord, he refused to blindly believe their words. “Unless I see in his hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25).

Where there is faith, it seems there is also the possibility of doubt. How do we handle doubt? Firstly, we should be honest about our doubt. In the Gospel of Mark there is an account of a father who brought his demon-possessed son to Jesus. He implored him to cast out the demon. Jesus agreed, saying that all things were possible to those who believed. The father of the boy then confessed, “I do believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). While there is no mechanical method or technique to rid ourselves of doubt, we can approach God with honesty, confessing our doubt, and our need for his help.

Secondly, God does not want us to live by simply depending upon our feelings. While feelings are important, they do not tell us what is real. They supplement the other facets of how God has made us as humans. Thus, the oft-quoted verse comes alive with meaning in this context: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Christians are invited to love God with not just their emotions, but also with all their bodily faculties, wills, and minds. As we observe God’s world and reflect on it, there are impressions of the divine formed in the eyes of our heart, which direct us toward the true God. Thus our minds, our emotions, our wills, and all our faculties are complementary components in our relationship, by faith, in Christ.

And finally, while we are often hard on Thomas, he is to be commended because he doubted so that he could believe. It was not a doubt that was destructive, but a doubt that led to a faith that would not fail him. A blind faith may not have held him finally in the face of martyrdom.

Far from a troubling secret that Christians must hide with shame, our doubts must always lead us to investigate, and then to respond like Thomas to the evidence provided by the risen Jesus—with surrender: “My Lord and my God.”

Cyril Georgeson is a member of the speaking team with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Delhi, India.

(1) David Van Biema, “Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith,” Time, August 23, 2007.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Now My Eyes See

July 30, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

A friend of mine lost his father twice. The first time, he was lost through divorce when my friend was just a young child. He grew up without the loving presence of his father. The second time, he lost his father through death, just as his relationship with his father experienced a renaissance. Given just a few opportunities to spend time with his father, my friend has lived the majority of his life in the presence of absence.

In suffering the absence of his earthly father, not by any choice of his own, my friend struggles to understand God’s presence in his life. It is often a struggle not to view God as one views parents and caregivers. And so, even though my friend persistently seeks after God, his experience of God has largely felt like the absence of God. Locked in a cosmic game of hide and seek, he is constantly searching, but feels he rarely finds.

This experience of absence, sadly, is not unique to my friend, but is often a struggle for those who claim faith, and even for those who do not. Blaise Pascal, one of the greatest Christian apologists, described his own experience with the perceived absence of God as a pitiable mystery:

“This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion, if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.”(1)

Those who live in the midst of absence often experience a cruel vacancy; an empty throne room with an empty throne. Feeling as if one is far from the presence or oversight of God is indeed a pitiable state.

The words of Job, ancient in origin, speak the same language of absence experienced by many today:

Behold, I go forward, but He is not there,

And backward, but I cannot perceive Him;

When He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him;

He turns on the right, I cannot see Him.(2)

The story of Job is at least in part a story of God’s absence. While the narrator of the story and the readers of the story know the beginning and the end, Job finds himself in the silent middle struck down by tragedy. His story painfully reminds us of the mystery that in our moments of great need, God seems to go missing. Job’s cry is our cry, “Oh that I knew where I might find Him that I might come to his seat” (Job 23:3). Job clings tenaciously to the hope that he would find God, and find a just God in his case. “I am not silenced by the darkness,” Job proclaims, “nor deep gloom which covers me” (23:17).

Called to “light the light of those in darkness on earth,” Mother Teresa wrote that if she ever became a saint, “I will surely be one of darkness.”(3) The paradoxical and unsuspected reality of her mission to the poorest of the poor in this world would be that she herself would experience the terrible darkness of God’s perceived absence. In the middle of her ministry, she wrote to one of her spiritual directors, “[T]his untold darkness, this loneliness, this continual longing for God which gives me that pain deep down in my heart…is such that I really do not see….[T]he place of God in my soul is blank…I just long for God and then it is that I feel—He does not want me, He is not there….I hear my own heart cry out, ‘My God’ and nothing else comes. The torture and the pain I cannot explain.”(4)

Like my fatherless friend, the pitiable Pascal, and the anguished Job, Mother Teresa experienced the profound pain of the absence of God in her life as she ministered to those largely missing from the radar of compassion and care. She herself was a light, but she experienced little light in her own heart and life. She was indeed a light in the darkness, but she experienced little of the illumination of God’s comforting presence in her own dark existence.

And yet, the paradox of her life reminds us that the experience of God’s absence need not lead us to the darkness of despair, but can propel us to embody God’s presence to others who grope for God in the darkness. As we do, we may experience just what Job did: “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees Thee.”(4)

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

(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees, as cited in Kelly James Clark, When Faith is Not Enough (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 38.

(2) Job 23:8-9.

(3) Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta,” Brian Kolodiejchuk, ed. (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 1.

(4) Ibid., 1-2.

(5) Job 42:5.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – When the Stakes Are Highest

July 26, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There is a place in my Bible that is prone to be frequently revisited. In fact, it is quite often the place I find in front of me when I open the book. And every time it happens, like a scent that uproots a potent memory, I recall the story behind the pages.

Some time ago, between classes in college, I was reading in a park when the skies shifted without warning and the pounding rain left a permanent bookmark on a chapter in John. The pages have long since dried, leaving the paper wavy and wrinkled, and easy to turn to upon opening. But something about the lasting impressions of the rain—no doubt, a fitting metaphor of life—has also impressed that day into my mind. The hardest rains always leave indelible imprints.

In The Problem with Pain, C.S. Lewis refers to pain as God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Convincingly, he presents a careful theodicy, considering the problem of suffering from an entirely theoretical perspective. He presents the things we know to be true of suffering, pain, and evil, what we know of the suffering and death of Christ, and the strength we are given when the peripheral questions of life are answered by a good God. Twenty years later, in the pages of A Grief Observed, Lewis describes watching his beloved wife lose her battle with cancer and wrestling with God through the pain of her death. Here, he writes as a man who bitterly and intimately knows what he knows to be true of God and evil, suffering and Christ, even as his soul is breaking. Writes Lewis, “Your bid—for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity—will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high.”(1) He continues, “Nothing less will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.”(2)

His words seem harsh—and right. The times I seem to have most truly and fearfully looked the object of my faith in the eyes was always while it felt I was pounding my fists against the chest of God, half-demanding, half-pleading. Those days gave new meaning to Paul’s admonition, “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling.” In Christian prayers we cry and in our hymns we sing, “Draw me nearer, nearer, nearer blessed Lord, To the cross where Thou hast died. Draw me nearer, nearer, To Thy precious, bleeding side.” But when the stakes were at their highest, those words ring with a frighteningly real cost.

In fact just before the apostle Paul admonishes the Philippian Church to work out their salvation in fear and trembling, he describes the cost of Christ, “who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross.“(3) In his life, his body, his very attitude, Christians believe that Christ carried the cost of sin; he carried our dire need for hope in life and in sorrow, and our inability to draw near to God ourselves, and not necessarily for a lack of trying. There was a point in his pain from spreading cancer when a friend said soberly, “I had no idea how Christ suffered. I never thought of it.” There is something about our pain that can lead us to the heart–breaking beauty of the cross, to the utmost expression of love wrought with stripes and sorrow in violence. As the hymn continues, “There are depths of love that I cannot know, Till I cross the narrow sea; There are heights of joy that I may not reach, Till I rest in peace with Thee.”

It is fitting, then, that the pages marked by rain in my Bible tell the story of the death and resurrection of Lazarus. As Mary and Martha and Jesus wept, the rain seemed appropriate. But I remember clearly being struck with another thought: Surely, it was Lazarus who got the lesser end of the deal that day. To a crowd of people mourning death and loss, Jesus proclaimed radically, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies” (John 11:25). While Jesus spoke to the mourning crowd about true life, Lazarus himself was one hard step closer to living that mystery. I wondered that day how Lazarus felt about coming back. He was one great step closer to the heights and depths of the joy we know in part, the kingdom Jesus had told him about; he had been drawn, in some sense, nearer to the almighty God. For Lazarus, humanity’s deepest problem and loudest prayer had been answered. And then it began to rain, ever etching that thought into my Bible and my consciousness.

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

(1) C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 49.

(2) Ibid., 49-50.

(3) Philippians 2:6-8.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – At the Border of Faith and Doubt

July 25, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

It seemed like yet another routine border crossing in what was then Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia.(1) The year was 1981; Leonid Brezhnev was the head of the Soviet Union, and half of Europe languished under the Communist vision and control. As a young and eager Christian, I had joined a mission whose primary task was to help the church in Eastern Europe. This involved transporting Bibles, hymn books, and Christian literature to believers behind what Winston Churchill called the “Iron Curtain.”

It was indeed an iron curtain: a vast barrier made of barbed-wire fences, mine fields, exclusion zones, guard towers, heavily armed soldiers, and dogs. Although designed allegedly to keep the West out, it was in actuality a vast system of control to keep those under this tyranny in. On this occasion my task was to transit through Czechoslovakia into Poland to deliver my precious cargo of Bibles and books to a contact there.

The literature was concealed in specially designed compartments, and my colleague and I had gone through our routine preborder procedures. We bowed our heads and prayed that God would protect us. We then proceeded to the border crossing between Austria and Czechoslovakia.

It was a cold, bleak, early winter day. It all seemed normal. We entered Czechoslovakia, and the huge barrier descended behind us. We were now locked in. As usual, the unfriendly border guards took our passports, and then the customs inspector arrived. I had been trained to act casual, to pray silently, and to respond to questions. I sensed this time it was different. The man ignored me, concentrated on the structure of our vehicle, and was soon convinced we had something concealed. I became quite tense. They eventually took the keys from me and locked my colleague and me in separate rooms. The guards broke into the special compartments in our vehicle, where they discovered the Bibles and literature.

My colleague and I were handcuffed, not allowed to speak to each other, and put in separate cells with people who spoke no English. The small rooms smelled of disinfectant and had only two bunk beds and a hole in the floor that served as the toilet. The light was kept on all night and some basic food was brought three times a day. The rules were rigid and enforced: no sitting or lying on the beds during the day. This meant shuffling backward and forward for hours in a highly restricted space, then facing a difficult night as we sought to sleep under the glare of the constant light.

Time became blurred. Was it morning, day, evening? I found myself alone, in a hostile place, without anything to read, without anyone to talk to, without any idea when or if we might be released, and with seeming unlimited (and empty) time on my hands. There is nothing like empty time and constricted space to bring to the surface feelings, questions, and doubts.

Contrary to some of the more starry-eyed testimonies I have read, I did not experience overwhelming grace or a profound sense of God’s presence. I did have the assurance that God was there, that God knew what was going on, and that “my times were in his hands” (see Psalm 31:15). My feelings, however, became a source of torment. For some reason I had an initial impression that we would be released quickly and expelled from the country. As the first few days passed with no communication and I had no idea what was happening, I began to wrestle to some degree with doubt. It was intense, it was real, and it was filling my mind and clouding my thoughts and my heart. My doubts seemed to focus on uncertainty as to what God was doing and whether I could actually trust what I thought was his leading. I also was struggling with how much I might be asked to face.

I can well remember a point of surrender. After several days, I resigned myself to the possibility that my imprisonment could last for years. I might not get out for a long time, so I had to make the best of what was and to rest in God. It is a point where we accept the hardship, where we still believe in greater good, and where we surrender to what seems like inevitability. I think I came to relinquish my sense and need for control (I had none anyway) and simply accept that God would be there as promised, and therefore, to rest in Him.

I had crossed an important point that I subsequently discovered in the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Richard Wurmbrand, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Vaclav Havel. Scholar Roger Lundin remarks:

“To Bonhoeffer, this is the distinctive ‘difference between Christianity and all religions.’ Our suffering, wrote Bonhoeffer only months before his 1943 arrest, teaches us ‘to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless.’ The interpretive key to human experience is to be found not in our preference for Eden but in our power to share in the sufferings of God and the world: ‘We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune.’”(2)

As those raised in comfort and convenience, the very nature of all this may frighten or repel us. If the message we have believed or the model we have been taught has raised false expectations, then we are going to be subject to doubt and fear, and worse, reject the whole thing. But the gospel and Christianity are concerned with reality, and hence with truth. By this I mean what the true nature of life really is and means. Christianity is not an escape system for us to avoid reality, live above it, or be able to redefine it. Christianity is a way that leads us to grasp what reality is and, by God’s grace and help, to navigate through it to our eternal home.

As I sat thinking, praying, and hoping in the custody of the Czechoslovakian authorities, I was surprised one day when the door opened and I was summoned forth, signaled not to speak, and then led out to a waiting car with my colleague. We were driven in silence to the border. We were handed our passports and our severely damaged vehicle, and we were then expelled from the country. We crossed into Austria and were able to talk for the first time in nearly two weeks. We shared our stories, and we stopped and prayed. We heard missing details; we discovered ways that God worked in us. We spoke of our struggles, our doubts, and our overall confidence.

It would be presumptuous to turn our limited experience and insight into a major pattern for all, yet in the midst of it we were able to detect broader strokes, hidden meanings, and real possibilities. Like Joseph so many centuries before, we could look back on all that happened, reflect on it and say, “They meant it for evil, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

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

(1) Excerpted from Stuart McAllister’s chapter “The Role of Doubt and Persecution in Spiritual Transformation” in Ravi Zacharias, ed., Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Ravi Zacharias. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson.

(2) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters, 17, 370, quoted in Roger Lundin, From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 40.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Hell Is Other People

July 23, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre closes his play Huis Clos (“No Exit”) with the pronouncement, “Hell is other people.” The play offers a sardonic vision of hell as the place in which one must spend eternity with individuals one would barely seek to spend five minutes with in real life. As one writer notes, “The most terrible, exasperating torment, in Sartre’s eyes, is the agony of soul caused by having to live forever alongside someone who drives you up the wall. Their annoying habits, their pettiness or cynicism or stupidity, their disposition and tastes that so frustratingly conflict with yours and require, if you are to live in communion with them, some sort of accommodation or concession of your own likes and desires—that, says Sartre, is Hell.”(1) Living in a world in which tolerance is the highest value, most readers find Sartre’s vision highly narcissistic or the logical conclusion of an exclusively individualistic, existentialist philosophy.

For many others, however, Sartre’s sentiments are not so easily dismissed. Living, working, and interacting with other people can indeed create a hellish existence for many. And most of us, if we are honest, can quickly think of the names of individuals whose personal habits or grating personalities makes relating to them very difficult at best. Sartre’s honesty, albeit through a cynical lens, also exposes clear boundaries of human tolerance. On the one hand, the capacity for tolerance is generally based on loving those who are easy to love or who share our own way of living in and viewing the world. On the other hand, the capacity for tolerance easily extends towards external causes, idealism, and abstract principles. These are quickly shattered when we come into contact with the real people who exist not as causes or ideals or principles.

An example from my own life serves to illustrate Sartre’s insight. I am involved in causes working for justice in situations of homelessness, which is a perennial issue where I live. It is easy for me to “love” the broad category of people who are “the homeless” as long as they remain an idea or a concept. Yet, every month when my church holds a dinner for the homeless in our community—the full-range of humanity on display right in front of me—I often feel my “love” is really just thinly veiled patronage. Eating with individuals who have not showered in weeks (or months), who suffer from mental illness, or chemical dependency tests my tolerance in ways that the idea of homelessness never will. This monthly meal highlights how little I truly love those real people seated all around me.

A contemporary of Sartre, C.S. Lewis wrote about this tendency to love causes and ideals more than real people in his novel The Screwtape Letters. He saw this hellish tendency as a carefully constructed diabolical strategy. The demon, Wormwood, was advised to “aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious.”(2) The obvious, Lewis notes through his character Screwtape, is the human capacity for both benevolence and malice. Their misdirection and exploitation is not as obvious to us. Diabolical Uncle Screwtape explains to his nephew Wormwood:

“The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary…but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy.”(3)

If benevolence, tolerance, or love are simply attached to ideals involving people we never have any direct contact with in the day to day, how can that really be benevolence? In the same way, how can we say we love our neighbor when our malice towards particular habits or personality quirks is on full display? How quickly we lose our temper with family members; how easily we show offense at those who do not see it our way; how readily we devise strategies to withhold love, or to punish our ever-present offenders?

Lewis highlights a predominant theme in the teaching of Jesus. Throughout the gospels, Jesus corrects the prevailing notion that the neighbor is one just like me, who agrees with me, and sees the world as I see it. The “neighbor” is other people—not an abstraction, but a living, breathing person with habits, views, and quirks that will not only get on our nerves, but also tempt us toward contempt. And love is only a real virtue when it is lived out among real, human relationships. As Lewis’s character Screwtape notes wryly:

“All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from [Satan’s] house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there.”(4)

Sartre was honest in revealing the often hellish reality of living with other people. We would much rather love an ideal, a concept (the homeless, or starving children across the world) than the people right in front of us, in our lives right now. In the life of Jesus, we see a man who loved those individuals directly in front of him; he gathered around him a group of disparate people from tax-collectors on the left, to zealot revolutionaries on the right. He delayed arrival at a temple official’s home because an unknown woman touched the hem of his garment. He delivered a man so out of his mind that he had been driven from his community to live in desolate caves. In front of the most important religious officials of his day, he allowed a woman of questionable reputation to anoint his feet with perfume and use her tears and to wipe them with her hair.

The love of Jesus is not a pie in the sky ideal for people he never knew; it was tangible, messy, and ultimately cost him his life. In Jesus, we see heaven on display in the hell of individual lives. If we seek to follow him, vague ideals about tolerance must give way to flesh and blood reality—loving the all-too-human in front of us.

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

(1) Lauren Enk, “Hell is Other People; Or is It?” catholicexchange.com, August 12, 2012, accessed July 10, 2013.

(2) C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Rev. ed., (New York: Collier Books, 1982), 16.

(3) Ibid., The Screwtape Letters, 30.

(4) Ibid., 31.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Befriending Wisdom

July 22, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I remember vividly a warm childhood day with my family at a park on Lake Michigan. My youngest sister and I had each been given a granola bar to snack on as we wandered about the grassy park. Most likely I ate mine quickly, with the hope that someone would give me another. My little sister, on the other hand, who has always walked through life with an unhurried way about her, was savoring each crumb as she walked along, charmed by the ducks who were marching along with her. In a manner of minutes, however, her charming procession shifted parade leaders. The next thing I remember was the angry cry of a four year-old who found herself backed up against a wall by a flock of granola bar-stealing ducks.

The book of Proverbs depicts a similarly inescapable scene throughout its pages. One gets the clear sense that we are to live watchfully, that wisdom is something to be guarded carefully, lest it be snatched out of our hands before we have time to object. “The one who guards their way guards their life,” reads one verse. “Do not forsake wisdom,” advises another. Like an animal stalking its prey, folly and wickedness are personified as luring and lurking enemies, often disguised, always vying for our attention, meeting with anyone who will hear, ready to seize all that is not guarded. “Folly is loud,” notes the writer of Proverbs, “she is seductiveand knows nothing. She sits at the door of her house; she takes a seat on the highest places of the town, calling to those who pass by, who are going straight on their way, “‘Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!’” (9:13-16).

In a world where we are saturated with information and ideas, overwhelmed by voices vying for our attention, and bombarded with distractions contending for our allegiance, it is not hard to see why folly and wickedness are voices the writer chooses to personify. It is not a truth preached abstractly, but a reality we know all too well. Foolishness is like a person we can befriend.

But the book of Proverbs also personifies wisdom. Chapter eight asks, “Does not Wisdom call? Does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries aloud: ‘To you, I call’” (8:1-4). In a sea of well-marketed persuasion, it is a comforting truth that is easily forgotten. Just as voices that tempt and fool cry aloud for our attention, so wisdom calls out to us and understanding raises its voice. But who is the voice of wisdom? And do we find it as tangibly as we seem to find the tempting voices of folly?

Scripture makes it clear that God not only speaks and moves the world with words, but that all wisdom and understanding come from the mouth of God. Sadly, however, the voice of God is one voice many are uninterested in hearing. “The tragedy,” writes A.W. Tozer “is that we have trained our ears not to hear.” Through many voices, God has communicated this truth. “For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes.”(1)

As the writer of Proverbs admonishes, we can be as those who make our ears attentive to wisdom, inclining our hearts to understanding. Let us cry out for insight and raise our voices for understanding, guarding our minds lest they be snatched away like the treat in a young child’s hand. Let us seek the source of wisdom as we would hidden treasure. It is God after all, at whose word chaos became order and darkness became light, and who cries out repeatedly for our complete attention: The one who has ears to hear, let them hear!(2)

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

(1) Matthew 13:15, Isaiah 6:9,10.

(2) Matthew 11:15, Mark 4:9, Luke 8:8.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – World of Ordinary

July 19, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

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

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

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

In this sense, the psalmist and prophets and ancient storytellers are indeed all struggling artists, closing the infinite distance between the grandeur of God and an ordinary humanity. What are human beings that You are mindful of them? Mortals that You care for them?

The parables Jesus told are also richly artistic, theological pauses upon the ordinary. Presented to people who often find themselves beyond the need for stories, whether puffed up with wealth and self-importance, or engorged with religion and knowledge, his stories stop us. He is acutely aware that the religious and the non-religious, the self-assured and the easily distracted often dance around idols of magnitude, diverting their eyes from the ordinary. And yet his very life proclaims the magnitude of the overlooked. The ordinary is precisely the place that God chose to visit—and not as a man of magnitude.

Whatever your philosophy or worldview, your own attention to the ordinary is worth considering. It is far too easy to miss the world as it really is. While Jesus’s own disciples bickered over the most significant seats in the kingdom, they were put off by a unwanted woman at a well, they overlooked a sick woman reaching out for the fringe of Christ’s robe, and they tried to silence a suffering man making noise in an attempt to get Jesus’s attention—all ordinary scenes which became the place of miracle. Even in a religion where the last are proclaimed first, where the servant, the suffering, and the crucified are lifted highest, the story of the widow’s coin is still easily forgotten, the obscure faces Jesus asked the world to remember easily overlooked. But the call to remember the great acts of God in history is equally a call to the many acts of life we see as less great. For the ordinary is filled with a God who chooses to visit.

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

(1) George Eliot, Middlemarch, (London: Penguin, 1994), 194.

(2) George Eliot, Adam Bede (London, Penguin, 1980), 224.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Questioning God

July 18, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

“Life just doesn’t seem fair.” How often do you find yourself uttering those words? The unscrupulous continue to get richer while the poor continue to be oppressed and victimized. This complaint is especially poignant when family, friends, or leaders whom we expect to act honorably and for our welfare betray our trust. We experience the injustice of people getting away with backstabbing, manipulation, and deception, prospering while those who choose to do what is right are misunderstood and discriminated against. Where is God in the midst of all these? Does God see and judge? If so when and how?

The book of Habakkuk is a very short dialogue between God and the prophet on exactly these questions. Not much is known about this prophet of Judah, but the context of his complaints hint that he prophesied during the declining years of Judah. Judah had over and over again forsaken God and engaged in all kinds of evil—idolatry, corruption, and violence. Like most prophets, Habakkuk was concerned about the wickedness and injustice in Judah. And he wants to know when the Lord will answer his call for help. But unlike other prophets who would direct their message at God’s people, Habakkuk directs his laments at God:

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise. So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted.(1)

Habakkuk wrestles with what he knows about God’s character alongside God’s apparent tolerance of the violence and injustice that he witnesses around him. He knows God to be perfectly holy and perfectly just. How is it then that God can idly look on and not punish the guilty? And instead the transgressors are enjoying the fruits of their wrongdoing.

Habakkuk’s experience demonstrates that bewilderment and affliction are not necessarily signs of spiritual immaturity or unfortunate distraction from faith. Instead these cries contribute to the development of strong faith and are the raw materials of prayer and worship. By challenging and questioning God, Habakkuk learns to seek the intentions and purposes of God, becoming a joyful example of one who lives by faith. Doubting God’s fairness or sovereignty does not necessarily mean we have parted from faith or that we are questioning belief itself. Asking God probing questions is very much a part of the life of faith.

And though he doesn’t engage all his questions, God indeed responds to Habakkuk.

As we see the evil around us, often we cannot help but wonder why is it that God hasn’t done anything about it. We remember innocent lives that are taken in the name of religion, we remember friends who are tortured and murdered for the sake of truth, we recall moral evil committed against innocent children.

But nothing escapes God’s attention. God hears every single one of our prayers and is not unaware of the evil and sinfulness around us. And God promises that ultimately those who experience injustice in this world will be comforted. It is against this encouraging hope that the book of Habakkuk closes with a beautiful song that ends with rejoicing at the sovereignty and faithfulness of God.

I’Ching Thomas is associate director of training at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Singapore.

(1) Habakkuk 1:2-4.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Second Naïveté

July 17, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Naïve is generally a description we do not hold proudly. When Jane Austen describes Lydia as the naïve youngest of the Bennet daughters, it is not intended as a compliment: “Lydia was Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless.”(1) We are prone to see naïveté in its unflattering light, not wanting the description to make the shortlist of our character traits (unless perhaps we are under the age of ten). But though we are largely familiar with the unfavorable definition, the word in its original context is not so narrowly characterized. In fact, the word naïve is derived from the Latin word “natural,” a word which remains a synonym many would not recognize. True naïveté can thus describe one who shows absence of artificiality or unaffected simplicity of nature, one who has no hidden agendas or duplicitous motives. At this definition, it seems much less an insult and more a quality to which we might actually aspire.

A professor in seminary used the word “naïve” in this broader sense to describe his relationship with Scripture as he grew from child to theologian. He recounted three stages, the first of which he described as the stage of naiveté in the unencumbered, unaffected sense of the word. Through the trusting eyes and faith of a child, many first hear the stories of creation, flood, and miracles with minds that understand the world and everything in it as God’s. As children absorbing life with uninhibited excitement, the stage of naiveté allows the imagination to hear and see in ways adults often cannot. The result is a deep response to the world within the Bible, which is seen to fit perfectly into the world around us. There is a sense that the Bible is a story in which we are very much participants.

Unfortunately, if naïveté marks a state of unaffected simplicity, the world of a child is quickly marked by that which complicates and pollutes. Thus, a second stage of life with the Bible can be a stage of critical awareness. As we are exposed more and more to a disharmonious world where people disagree, sides are chosen, and things are inconsistent, our minds can grow increasing skeptical. In this stage some become critically attuned to the differences between the world as they know it and the world of the Bible. Others take note of this disharmony when life takes turns in ways that jar childlike stability and leave them unsure of things that once seemed constant. Not knowing how to process, they might feel punished by God. Inconsistencies between stories at school and stories in church may seem irreconcilable. I remember walking with a sense of mourning in this stage, confused that the Bible seemed misleading, angry at the God of false adventures, and guilty for turning my back on the one I thought I had come to know.

Though stages of development are necessary in any formation of lasting faith, stage one and stage two are literally worldviews away from each other. Jesus alludes to the massive difference in his proclamation: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”(2) In the theocentric mindset of a child, God is the great Adventurer and we are participants being led through a story. God is the one who remains at the center, while creation, including you and me, surrounds its creator. But as children grow into adulthood and become more aligned with the culture around them, the center often shifts. Anthropocentric or self-centered minds see themselves at the center, while the world, including God, surrounds them. Sadly, this is the mindset that many of us live out of—with the insistence that the storyteller is “me.”

Yet my professor described a third stage, which, for many comes at the recognition that the story we continue to discover as life happens is far bigger than we know how to tell. Like God’s response from the whirlwind to a questioning, anguished Job—”Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”—we rediscover the one at the center, and it isn’t ourselves. In this stage of second naiveté, the world of the Bible can be engaged with awareness and imagination, and a greater sense of devotion, because we have come once again to see the God to whom it points. God’s Word tells the story that brings us to the Storyteller. Thus, we can come readily to the Bible with our questions, doubts, and inconsistencies because we are approaching not a dusty book, but a Person. While the words of Scripture are always true, so they are always pointing to the Word beyond themselves: “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”(3) In the second naïveté, we can find ourselves before the one who makes it possible to return to the unhindered sincerity of a child. We can discover a God who speaks, the Word who draws near, and a Storyteller who beckons us to participate.

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

(1) Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 298.

(2) Matthew 18:3.

(3) Jeremiah 33:3.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Life After Death

July 16, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

While serving in parish ministry, I witnessed the deaths of 15 people in just two and a half years. Fifteen parishioner-friends passed from my sight while I served and lived among them. Watching church members struggle with various illnesses and succumb to death challenged me in ways I could have never expected. Up until this point, I had only lost one set of grandparents. Yet, during this brief time it often seemed a day didn’t go by when I was not receiving news of another hospitalization, another life-threatening illness, or yet another death.

Despite the many emotional, physical, and spiritual challenges I faced during this time of ministry, I was also given incredible gifts. Journeying with someone you know and love through the dying process reminds you of your own mortality and finitude and that life is short and precious. Furthermore, this journey provides the gifts of deepening one’s emotional reservoirs, to growing physical fortitude in the face of wearying grief, and developing a spiritual perspective of both death and life. I do not speak of these gifts as a detached observer, but as one who has lost the life of the one nearest and dearest to me.

Jesus said a good deal about this dying journey. Often, he called his followers to a single-hearted allegiance, and yes, even to death. In Luke’s Gospel, he tells the great multitudes following him that “if anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”(1)

What is often forgotten in a casual reading of the gospels is that the Cross was the instrument of death and disgrace. It was an instrument reserved for the vilest offenders, and as such was an instrument of punishment for the lowest of the low. Yet, whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. There is no “if” in Jesus’s statement, only whether or not we will follow him to death. Far from an encouragement towards an easy road or life, Jesus’s statement sounds far more like a warning to those who might prefer a casual acquaintance with him.

The fact that Jesus makes this kind of statement about the qualifications of a disciple to the “multitudes going along with him” should not be ignored. This would have sounded like very bad news to those who heard it, and perhaps the crowds dissipated after they heard Jesus speak these very difficult statements. Perhaps they were the very ones who later clamored for his death by crucifixion. It was easy to follow Jesus when he focused on the positives. And yet, as sure as babies are born into this world and new life begins every spring, death is inevitable. Not just physical death, but the “little deaths” experienced by every human being every day. Perhaps it is the death of dreams that comes when you realize you won’t go to the moon or marry the King of England. Or perhaps it is the realization that all of one’s labor is not for oneself and will remain unrealized by those in this generation. What about the death that comes when the recognition hits that a great deal of what makes up adulthood is repetitive and mundane?

And yet even in these deaths, is there a gift to be gained or given? Can there be hope for abundant life even as time marches us closer and closer to physical demise? Are there yet gifts of faith, grace, love that will make carrying the cross towards Calvary “a light yoke and an easy burden”?

In speaking of his own death and the gifts it would yield, Jesus said that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it; and he who hates his life in this world shall keep it to life eternal.”(2) In the clamor of voices that shout to grab it all now, or in the all too human inclination to elevate self-fulfillment as the result of a “me first” mentality, Jesus extends the ironic invitation to embrace death in order to truly find life-eternally. This is both a promising and challenging invitation. The challenge Jesus sets before those who would follow is the challenge to “die” to what we think makes for life—and surely this might look differently for each who would answer the call. In order to experience the abundant life Jesus offers, we follow him towards death, so that by faith in the power of resurrection, we might receive the gift of life indeed.

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

(1) Luke 14:26-27.

(2) John 12:24-25.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Divinity and Dirty Hands

July 15, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Dirty hands are quickly given a bad rap. Children are born ready to dig into the mess before them, to experience the sandbox by getting it under their fingernails and in between their toes, and to delight in life by generally getting it all over themselves. But it does not take long before we learn that dirty fingers and messy faces are not acceptable, that jumping into mud puddles to experience the rain will almost always come with a reprimand, and that finger-painting is for the little ones who have not yet graduated to more “refined” utensils. Moving from child to adult seems to involve cleaning up one’s act in more ways than one.

The earliest Christian disciples utilized metaphors of childhood in their letters to newly believing communities. Paul compares one’s knowledge of God to the process of learning: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”(1) Peter similarly encourages new believers to grow in love and knowledge: “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.”(2)

It is easy to read both of these examples and conclude that the ways of children are behaviors we are being told to out grow. It is easy to allow our negative perspectives on what is “childish” to inform the way we receive these exhortations involving what is “childlike.” Yet far from speaking of childhood negatively, Paul is comparing our current understanding and vision of God to that of a child’s, which will encouragingly grow clearer on the day we stand before God face to face. Similarly, Peter is not urging us to grow out of our newborn hunger, but on the contrary is calling us to grow further into it. In other words, there are indeed some things in childhood that God would not have us to abandon with age!

I cannot help but wonder how much of life we forego as we misplace the instinct of getting our hands dirty, and instead learn to perceive the world in detached and more acceptably tidy ways. I believe the same can said of faith. Might we miss out on things of the kingdom, things of God and of Christ, because we have so ossified faith into something that only touches spirit or mind, and not hands, feet, and body? Might we fail to move farther up and further into the kingdom because we see this kingdom as something only distant—a future hope for a future life—instead of something dynamically here and among us, calling us to a fully-engaged, hands-dirtying existence today?

“I tell you the truth,” Jesus told disciples and on-lookers alike, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”(3) Neither Christ nor the kingdom he came to make known is a static entity, something that mattered long ago and might matter once again, but not here and now in this life as we know it. On the contrary, all of history, the stories of salvation and the Incarnation itself, remind us that God is far more hands-on than this. The Lamb of God very physically took away the sins of the world. And with a God who is willing to become flesh and dwell among us, who is willing and able to stand as the gate to another world, what makes us believe that we would be called to a faith that is anything less than hands-on as well? Even in his last days, Christ did not merely leave us with instructions to remember him as a figure in history. He told us to remember him, gave us a meal, and left us with a way to bodily take-in the very kingdom and story he proclaimed again and again.

Christ has truly given the world permission to touch, to experience, to jump completely into the great and wonderful kingdom in which God reigns. In this kingdom, we can be as children who delight in knowing life with dirty hands, who like Thomas need the invitation to touch, and like Paul see the need to give mind, soul, and body to the one who gave us all of himself. The kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

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

(1) 1 Corinthians 13:11-12.

(2) 1 Peter 1:2-3.

(3) Matthew 18:3.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Light Disturbing

July 12, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In a letter dated September 6, 1955, Flannery O’Connor confessed that though the truth “does not change according to our ability to stomach it,” there are periods in the lives of us all, even of the saints, “when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, [even] downright repulsive.”(1)

I take solace in her unapologetic confession—here, a writer who viewed her faith not as a substitute for seeing, but as the light by which she saw. And as I stared recently at a painting of Mary and the infant Jesus by Giovanni Bellini, I knew what she meant. I was suddenly but entirely disturbed by the story of the Incarnation. In my mind the message and mystery of the Incarnation was still a vast and hopeful notion, the character and complexity of a Father who sends a Son into the world an unchanging, unfathomable story still intact. Yet in front of me was suddenly a different side of that story. I was unexpectedly confronted with questions of the Incarnation I had never considered. Would we label a father “loving” who gives a teenage girl a task that devastates her future, destroys her reputation, and in the end, mortally wounds her with grief? What kind of God asks for servants like Mary?

Madeleine L’Engle reflects on faith and art with words O’Connor would affirm and those of us with honest questions embody. She reminds us that in all artful learning “either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure.”(2) Like many, I had recalled and retold the Christmas story for years, but I had never remembered it like this. In the light and shadows of Bellini’s interpretation of this biblical scene, I was startled in the call of Mary to bear the Son of God, the severe cost of obedience and the complete disruption of a life.

In fact, it is fairly easy to rush to the theological implications of the texts that depict the role of Mary in the life of Jesus. We quickly move from Mary’s acceptance of Gabriel’s words to the man who preformed miracles and calmed storms in a way that made him seem motherless. While the song of Mary recorded in Luke 1:47-55 slows readers down and bids them to consider the young mother in her own words, it is easy to assume in the ease of her praise of the Almighty a sense of ease for her situation, to add to her cries of joy the assumption that she never wept. Mary sings: “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Luke depicts an image of Mary that is hard to ignore, and Bellini follows his example. With one hand, Mary holds Jesus securely to her side, while with the other she gently holds his foot in a way that seems to communicate both her willingness to share the child with the world and her suspicion that he will spring from her care to lift the lowly as she herself has been lifted. Mary is seated poised, stoic, and adult-like, which in some ways seems far from the childlike Mary we encounter in Luke, and in other ways seems to reflect the wisdom she was able to express far beyond her years. As one pledged to be married in first century Nazareth, Mary would have been little more than a child herself, a child who was perhaps able to respond to Gabriel the way she did because “she had not lost her child’s creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world.”(3) Bellini’s Mary looks far more weathered, serious, and austere, as if she is somehow aware of the fate of the child in her arms and her utter helplessness to save him. In the face of the girl who was somehow able to see beyond the great risk of being pregnant and unwed, the weight of her decision is here apparent in her tired, helpless expression.

In front of this picture, I could not help but remain at the level of the servant and the severe cost of discipleship. Yet the longer I stared, the more grace seemed to permeate my deepest reservations about the nature of God’s calling and the often unchallenged images of a Father with strange ways of showing love. The longer I considered the song of Mary in light of all she would endure, the more I heard in my disturbance the cry of Christ himself: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? How often it seems that the glimpses of God’s light which stay with us longest are not the glimpses that are blinding and certain in their power, but those which are mysterious and steady in their invitation, emerging out of dark questions and entirely disturbing moments.

In fact, there are far worse things than being disrupted by the one who calls the world to follow, the once-fragile child who now asks that we put our hands on the plow and not look back, let the dead bury the dead, take up our own crosses, and bring with him good news to the poor. It is far worse to be so at ease that we do not receive the graceful disturbance of a Father who would offer his only Son, and a Son who would go willingly. It is far worse to be so familiar with the story that we fail to see the beautiful One disturbing this world, lifting up the lowly, sending the powerful away empty, and filling the hungry with good things.

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

(1) Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1988), 100.

(2) Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: Bantam, 1982), 30.

(3) Ibid., 18.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Side of the Broken

July 11, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

June 2013 will not be long forgotten by the Indian mind for the pain that we experienced as a nation. The tragedy surrounding one of Hinduism’s most sought after pilgrim centers, Uttarkhand, spells a magnitude that is staggering. The region is known for the beauty of the Himalayas and has often been referred to as “the land of gods” on account of the places of worship and pligrim centers that it houses. Some estimate that as many as a few thousand villages were swallowed up by rushing waters and an estimated ten thousand individuals were carried to a watery grave amid flash floods, heavy rains, landslides, and building collapses. Amid the chaos there have also been reports of the heroic efforts by the Indian armed forces and other relief agencies in their rescue efforts in the region. Yet, the horrifying experience of humanity being pitted against the strength of nature’s raw and unbridled power has left us with pictures that cause us to shudder, if not scream, “Why?”

For those who were there and providentially made it out safely, the sense of relief and yet the horror of having been so close to injury or death must take a long time to deal with. For those whose pilgrimage turned into tragedy, in either injury to self or in the death of a loved one, the pain will remain. I watched a video clip of a few pilgrims who made it to what appeared a safe place overlooking a deep waterfall only to be washed away by the rushing waters moments later in full view of others. I had not envisaged the end of the video and may have spared myself of the agony had I known. Tears stream down my face as I write.

At moments like this, the worldviews don’t divide us. The pain unites us. That group of individuals could have been my loved ones in another circumstance. There is something about another’s pain that rattles our insides. As I bow to pray for mercy, I realize that I am far removed from the circumstances of my fellow citizens who have been hurt, injured, traumatized, and bereaved. Yet, I know can pray. I can cry. I can feel the pain.

This is no picture postcard world. As I write, there are images from Syria, Egypt, and other parts of the world that remind us that it is a volatile world of brokenness. It is also troubling to note that while the vagaries of nature have wrought great harm in Uttarkand, the vagaries of humankind have brought great pain in other parts of our globe.

As we think of circumstances like these, we are left with the two-fold challenge of seeking explanations and solutions. The naturalist will be quick to dismiss any notion of the divine. The faithful ones of various faiths will have their pick of explanations. For instance, I read of a survivor from Uttarkhand who believed that what happened there was on account of the wrath of the gods being unfolded on humanity’s careless wrecking of tress, minerals, and natural resources. Others may speak of fate that could not be escaped, that the story had been scripted thus and could only unfold as it did. Still others will struggle and seek solace rather than reason. To them no explanation will be appealing or comforting—and maybe the majority of those who had a personal tryst with the tragedy would come close to that position.

The Christian worldview offers us a view that I dare say can be found nowhere else. It is one worldview which neither callously dismisses the pain on the one hand nor makes the sufferer stand alone in that pain. The Christian worldview presents us the view of a Perfect One who paid the price for the brokenness of an imperfect world. His goal in coming was not to say, “Here is my judgement,” it was rather to say, “I will take your judgement upon myself.” Like a fair judge who does not condone the magnitude of the crime committed but passes the sentence and then moments later offers to take the place of the condemned one, Jesus came to set us free.

The stories from Uttarkhand will continue to haunt our national memory. The pain of those who made their pilgrimage even in the face of physical dangers will not be easily forgotten. But our prayer as God’s people can be that from the valleys and hills of such pain and memories, some would find their hope in lifting their eyes to another hill—the hill upon which a Savior died. A God who stands on the side of the broken.

Arun Andrews is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bangalore, India.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Scene of Miracle

July 10, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The 1748 essay “Of Miracles” by David Hume was influential in leading the charge against the miraculous, thoughts that were later sharpened (though also later recanted) by Antony Flew. Insisting the laws of a natural world incompatible with the supernatural, the new atheists continue to weigh in on the subject today. With them, many Christian philosophers and scientists, who are less willing to define miracle as something that must break the laws of nature, join the conversation with an opposing gusto. Physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, for instance, suggests that miracles are not violations of the laws of nature but rather “exploration of a new regime of physical experience.”(1)

The possibility or impossibility of the miraculous fills books, debates, and lectures. What it does not fill is that moment when a person finds herself—rationally or otherwise—crying out for intervention, for help and assurance, indeed, for the miraculous. “For most of us” writes C.S. Lewis, “the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.”(2) To this I would simply add that often prayer is both: both the anguished cry of Gethsemane—”please, take this from me”—prayed at the foot of an impossible mountain.

Whether this moment comes beside a hospital bed, a failing marriage, a grave injustice, or debilitating struggle, we seem almost naturally inclined in some way to cry out for an intervening factor, something or someone beyond the known laws of A + B that sit defiantly in front of us. For my own family that moment came with cancer, complicated by well-intentioned commands to believe without doubt that God was going to take it away. When death took it away instead, like many others in our situation, our faith in miracles—and the God who gives them—were equally devastated.

In the throes of that heart-wrenching scene, every time I closed my eyes to pray, the vision of an empty throne filled my mind. It was something like the vision of Isaiah in the temple, only there was no robe and no body filling anything.(3) My prayers seemed to be given not a resounding “no,” but a non-answer, a cold, agonizing silence, which was also very much an answer. It was only years after the scene of my failed prayers for the miraculous that I was physically startled, again like Isaiah, at the thought that the throne was empty because the one who fills it had stepped down to sit beside us as we cried.

Such a miracle wasn’t the one we were hoping for and some may scoff at the notion of calling it such, and yet, years now after the sting of death, the incarnational hope of a God who comes near—in life, in suffering, even unto the grave—is inarguably the miracle far more profound. I don’t fully know why in the midst of our pain we felt alone and abandoned. Perhaps our eyes were too focused on the scene of the miracle we wanted, such that no other could be seen. ”God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard,” writes C.S. Lewis. ”Our preparations to receive [God] sometimes have the opposite effect. Doesn’t Charles Williams say somewhere that ‘the altar must often be built in one place in order that the fire from heaven may descend somewhere else‘?”(4)

And this somewhere else, the place that catches us off-guard, is maybe even quite often right in front of us, near but unnoticed, miraculous but missed. In the words of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson, “I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.”(5)

What if we were to start looking, not for miraculous signs and antepasts from beyond, but for a closer scene of miracle, for invitations to explore that new regime of physical existence brought about by the Incarnation, for foretastes of a banquet to which we are invited even today. Miracle and mystery may well be plainly before our eyes. For of course, Christianity is the story of the great Miracle, the story of the God-Man coming not where we expected, but where we needed him most. Like the kingdom itself and the Christ who came to announce it, the scene of miracle may be nearer than we think.

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

(1) John Polkinghorne, Faith, Science and Understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 59.

(2) C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer (San Diego: Harcourt, 1992), 60.

(3) See Isaiah 6.

(4) Lewis, 117.

(5) Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 243.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Authority for Life

July 9, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

What images come to mind in association with the word “authority”? Typically, I think of government leaders or persons who hold positions of power. Reading the world headlines, I often hear tales of brutality, betrayal, and oppression by those in “authority.” There seems to be no end of warlords and despots, brutal dictatorships, and tyrants siphoning the resources of nations to hoard it for their own malevolent use. Or, there are the recent allegations, and likely realities, concerning the use of classified information; those in authority ‘spying’ on citizens or governments and using this information in ways to bolster power or for leverage in negotiation. All manner of negative images for authority fill the minds and hearts of those who read about them or who suffer under them with feelings of mistrust and contempt.

Sometimes it seems that the corruption of those in authority is endemic to those who are in leadership. Over one hundred years ago, Lord Acton warned: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”(1) While Lord Acton’s sentiment appears thoroughly pessimistic, the requisite power that comes from being put in a position of authority often tempts the one who leads to use power in ways that promote harm, disorder, and injustice. Given the abuse of authority that seems too often on display, it is no wonder that many feel a wary skepticism towards authority figures and institutions of power.

For those who struggle with a more jaded view of power, the attribution of authority applied to Jesus’s teaching ministry might cause even the skeptic to sit up and pay attention; for even someone not familiar with the intricacies of Christian belief or theology would be reticent to compare the authority of Jesus with the way in which authority is often demonstrated in the world today. Jesus never held political office nor did he have a high-ranking leadership position in the temple or synagogues of his day. He would ultimately be crucified by those in authority over him.

Instead, authority is attributed to Jesus at the end of a sermon he preached. The multitudes listening to that sermon “were amazed at his teaching; for he was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.”(2) What was it about Jesus that caused such amazement, and that made his teaching authoritative?

Many commentators note that the scribes cited other teachers and leaders in their teaching, but Jesus cited himself and his own words as a sign of authority. This is borne out in the repeated phrase throughout the Sermon, “You have heard it said…but I say.”(3) Jesus’s authority comes from issuing his own teaching and his seemingly new understanding of the Torah.

But is Jesus’s authority simply attributed to his being smarter or more learned in his interpretive skills than the religious and legal authorities of his own day? Did he use better logic or cleverer argumentation? Or does his authoritative teaching demonstrate something greater than clever turns of phrase and charisma?

Jesus’s authority comes not simply from his teaching, but in the way he revealed God’s authority as he lived his life. Indeed, the Gospel of Matthew sandwiches this great sermon of Jesus in between accounts of miracle stories. In fact, eight miracle stories immediately follow the sermon and give witness to Jesus “as one having authority,” and before he begins to preach, Jesus was healing “every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people.”(4) The authority of Jesus was not simply a demonstration of power or influence in the way we normally think of authority. Rather, the authority of Jesus brought healing and restoration. Illness and disease kept people away from community, away from temple worship—indeed, and away from God. Jesus released individuals from sickness, delivered them from principalities and powers, and thus restored them to their communities and to worship. In his ministry of teaching and healing, he brought those on the outside in.

Indeed, the miracles that Jesus performed demonstrated the nature God’s authority. All who relied on Jesus could enter into the realm and rule of the God who was on full display in his life and ministry. Jesus was not simply acting for God, but acting with God in such a way as to demonstrate that something new had come and had come with real power and authority. Although the word “authority” often conjures images of overlords or dictators for many in our contemporary world, there is an alternative vision on full display in the life and teaching of Jesus. Those who choose to place their lives under his kind of authority are free to live in ways that demonstrate God’s reign.

Regardless of the earthly authorities, anyone can live in light of the authority shown in Jesus. The original language indicates that his kind of authority gives the capability or liberty to enter into God’s new realm more fully and more deeply than ever thought possible. Placed within the kind of rule on display in the life and ministry of Jesus, all those who seek a true leader find the capability and liberty to live in like manner—using authority for healing, for calling powers and principalities to justice, creating order from chaos, and restoring new life to what was dead.

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

(1) John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st Baron Acton (1834?-1902). Letter, April 3, 1887, to Bishop Mandell Creighton. The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, vol. 1, ch. 13, ed. Louise Creighton (1904).

(2) Cf. Matthew 5-7; Matthew 7:28-29.

(3) Cf. Matthew 5:21-22; 5:27-28; 5:31-32, 33, and 34. Lloyd J. Ogilvie, ed., Myron J. Augsburger, The Communicator’s Commentary: Matthew (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1982).

(4) Matthew 8 and 9 present the healing of the leper, the Centurion’s servant, Peter’s mother-in-law, the calming of the Sea of Galilee, the casting out of demons, the healing of the paralytic, the healing of the hemorrhage, and the healing of the two blind men. Matthew 4:23-25 presents Jesus healing those from Syria, Galilee, Decapolis, and Jerusalem. These who are healed likely made up the crowds who listened in amazement to his sermon.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Private Faith and Public Ethics

July 8, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

As a student, I was privileged to sit under an advisor for whom the field of ethics, and particularly medical ethics, was a vibrant passion and sought-after proficiency. With his careful drawl and smiling eyes, my professor slowly and gladly brought me to an understanding of ethics that would never allow me to leave it, as I might have left a stuffy, uninteresting class. He also happened to be Christian, which one readily discovered was not by coincidence. His ethics and his religion were intertwined.

In one of Dr. Verhey’s more recent works, he further describes the connection of his ethics to Scripture. “There is no Christian life that is not shaped somehow by Scripture. There is no Christian moral discernment that is not tied somehow to Scripture. There is no Christian ethic—no Christian medical ethic or sexual ethic or economic ethic or political ethic—that is not formed and informed somehow by Scripture.”(1) That is to say, Christian communities are communities who practice ethics on some real level because they live by a particular identity, because it is who they are.

Now working within the field of Christian apologetics, one of the comments that I hear most often as a reason for rejecting Christianity is that of its followers. In essence, the difficulty many have with Christianity is disappointment with Christians—whether blatant hypocrisy, disheartening unkindness, or gross abuse of power. I try to address these real disappointments, while entreating the repulsed to see the suggestion in their own logic. Christ stands for something more. I try reasoning that the abuse of a religion must never stand in the way of getting at the truth of a religion. But many will not be swayed. I often leave these conversations saddened not merely because the obstacles seem immovable, but because I fully understand the grievance. The letter of recommendation written upon the countenance of professing Christians is far too often a message that deters.

Like ethics, Christian apologetics is a daily activity writ large upon the life of Christians and Christian communities whether they realize it or not. We live in such a world where one’s choice of religion can seemingly be housed in private rooms separated from the daily choices and ethics by which we live, and sadly Christians often attempt to live similarly. And yet the world somehow knows to hold those who profess belief in Christ accountable to something that indeed cannot be locked in private rooms and hidden from the public. This is both a call to the Christian to uncompartmentalize and a call to the disappointed to reconsider the Christ they seem to sense invites us to something transformative—something worth holding accountable in the first place.

The Christian indeed goes about life confessing, commending, defending, and living the gospel, showing the world an ethic and a religion whether they speak of these things or not. Both Christian ethics and the Christian faith are thus inherently Christian activities, disciplines that must take seriously the responsibility the identity imparts. This is not to say the Christian holds every answer or always lives as one transformed. But the Christian is a person of the Book, commanded to remember the movement of God in history, the nearness of the Spirit today, and the promise of Christ’s return—in every word, in every act, in every private space and public square.

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

(1) Allen Verhey, Remembering Jesus: Christian Community, Scripture, and the Moral Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2002), 54.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Power of Beauty

July 7, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The Power of Beauty / Just Thinking RZIM publication by Stuart McAllister – March 6, 2013

“Day after day they pour forth speech,” says the psalmist of nature’s glory. “Night after night reveals his greatness” (Psalm 19:2)

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.

I once drove from Florida to Georgia as the verdant green and array of colors were exploding. I was 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!

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.

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 Rubens, 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 vice president of training and special projects at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – An Unobstructed View

July 6, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

An Unobstructed View

by J.M. Njoroge on March 6, 2013

What a relief to remember that no amount of expertise on our part can ever diminish the glory of God or cause us to outlive God’s fatherly indulgence.

One of the most humbling moments in my life happened during a soccer match. At a critical moment in the game, I had to decide whether to go it alone or let a better positioned teammate attempt an almost guaranteed goal—a rare treat in soccer. Sadly, the split seconds available for the decision were enough for my ego to override my better judgment. Unwilling to pass on the glory of my scoring the winning goal, I made the wrong decision and lost the ball, costing the team an important game in the process.

An unobstructed view of our lives reveals the fact that we all owe debts that we can never repay. We will never begin to worship God until we recognize that we are bankrupt debtors, for an attitude of humility is an indispensable impetus to worship.

Ironically, I am inclined to believe that the consequences for me would have been much worse if I had managed to score the goal. Though quite humiliating, that terrible mistake gave me a glimpse into my own soul in a way that might have been impossible if I had actually led the team to a win. While it is hard to assert our egos in the midst of failure and hardship, the ugliness of our self-centeredness can be easily camouflaged in the motives and methods of our success, leaving us blind to our own insuperable finitude. When our pursuit for success is severed from a healthy sense of our chronic indebtedness, achieving success can instill in us a measure of entitlement foreign to our true identity. Such a pitfall is even more consequential in our spiritual lives since it is harder to distinguish between self-serving motives and genuine zeal for God. Unlike the gaping sins of the prodigal son, the dutiful son’s alienation from the father comes neatly packaged in obedience and commitment, the very treasures some of us long to lay before our heavenly Father.

But everything we know about ourselves and our world speaks loudly against this tendency to self-sufficiency. As human babies, we all begin our lives at the highest level of dependence, and none of us really outgrows all degrees of dependence. We depend on parents, teachers, peers, coaches, and others to open doors for us in life. From the inventions that give us comfort in this world to the young soldiers who give their lives in the battlefields to protect our livelihoods, an unobstructed view of our lives reveals the fact that we all owe debts that we can never repay. We will never begin to worship God until we recognize that we are bankrupt debtors, for an attitude of humility is an indispensable impetus to worship.

In spite of the fact that Jesus prayed fervently for unity and love among his followers, the visible church is often a conglomeration of competing factions, each equally convinced of its solitary possession of divine favor. Those who seek signs and wonders through the Holy Spirit are usually suspicious of those who emphasize exegetical approaches to the Scriptures. Christian scholars are sometimes content just to talk to each other, and the uncanny tendency of apologists to sniff out what they deem rotten doctrine is not always appreciated.

As a result, not only do we squander valuable benefits of dedicated teamwork within the household of faith, we also lose our edge in a broken world. Despite the monumental gains made in biblical research and translation, biblical illiteracy is still a high-ranking concern, and the frequent outbursts of oft-unfounded accusations from our detractors succeed in rattling the cage for not a few followers of Christ. While outcasts and sinners braved insults to seek refuge in Jesus, they bolt from the divided efforts of Christians and reject God because they mistake us for God.

When being right becomes an end in itself, we lose sight of our own need for God’s grace—a need that would be there even if we were faultless. Instead of recognizing that orthodoxy, though indispensable, is only the map of a journey which we must travel towards God, confidence in our knowledge of the truth becomes the missing link in our quest for self-sufficiency. We partition God’s comprehensive program for his people into various segments and guard our turfs with Herculean zeal. With a little practice, we become so adept at applying our preferred standards that we can accomplish the feat with our eyes closed. Having zeroed in on what we are certain to be God’s most vexing pet peeves, we stand poised not only to pronounce the verdict on those who offend but also to pound the gavel on God’s behalf. Before long, we, like Elijah, become convinced that we are the only ones who are faithful to God while all of his other children have lost their way.

Probably the best antidote to such spiritual calluses among loyal laborers in God’s vineyard is a healthy appreciation of the all-sufficiency of our Father and our exalted status as his humble children—a theological gem that is beautifully captured by C.S. Lewis in his book Prince Caspian. When the children are reunited with Aslan after many years, Lucy expresses surprise that Aslan looks bigger. Aslan responds, “I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”1 What a relief to remember that no amount of expertise on our part can ever diminish the glory of God or cause us to outlive God’s fatherly indulgence!

Pure, unadulterated motives may lie beyond the reach of even the most devout among us, but the intentional recognition of our humble place in deference to the majesty of our Maker is an indispensable ingredient in our service to God and others. It was neither out of false piety nor enslavement to sin that both Daniel and Nehemiah included themselves in their profound prayers of forgiveness on behalf of their sinful people (see Daniel 9 and Nehemiah 1:6). While I do not subscribe to the relativistic “never judge anyone” maxim that greases the engine of the spirit of the age, I am also convinced that “The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something for Him.” 2

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

1C. S. Lewis, The Complete Chronicles of Narnia (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 259.

2Oswald Chambers, as quoted by Os Guinness in The Call: Finding Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2003), 41.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – House of Hope

July 5, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

To the people of Israel, the image of God’s house was central to their worldview, a house reaching from the heavens to the places on earth where God caused his name to be remembered. God’s house was seen in experiences like Jacob’s, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it” (Genesis 28:16). It was experienced in the tabernacle that once moved among them as pilgrims, and later in their pilgrimages to the temple. Ever-expanding their vision of God’s house, altars were built over the places where God had appeared to them. Though sometimes as prodigals, their longing for home was a part of their identity as children of the house of God: “One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple” (Psalm 27:4). The house of God as it reached from heaven to earth was occupied by the King. As his people, they had been invited inside, where they longed to remain.

As with any group with a clear vision of inside and outside, belonging and not belonging, the Israelite’s understanding of the house of God could have easily been rationale for excluding foreigners, neighbors, and outsiders. Yet not long after God had called the people of Israel his own, God instructed them very specifically on the treatment of such people: “Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). “The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God” (Leviticus 19:33-34). The house of God was to be a house of hospitality, for such a spirit reflected the God within it: “For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:17-19). Called to ever-remember their status as foreigners, the people who were invited into the care of God’s house were to become a sign of that care themselves.

Followers of Christ live by the same: “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering” (Hebrews 13:2-3). Similarly the apostles command: “Practice hospitality” (Romans 12:13). “Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms” (1 Peter 4:9-10).

For those who know these ever-expanding rooms of God’s house, hospitality is a posture we are simply called to embrace. Along with the one who has welcomed us inside, we are to go out “into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.” The master of the house has prepared a feast and calls for the tables to be filled: “Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in, so that my house will be full” (cf. Luke 14:15-23).

While images appear daily of people displaced from their homes, disconnected and abandoned by tornado or flood or financial downfall, there are at the same time those who open their homes, churches who respond with food and shelter, hospitality that is given in places where distress and exclusion offer no rest. In these unlikely places, images of the house of God appear, startling us and other observers once again with its dimensions. Where lives are being touched by the “eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands” the body of Christ is living its identity, offering a sign and a foretaste of the kingdom of God. The writer of Hebrews comments on this vital role, “Christ is faithful as a son over God’s house. And we are his house if we hold on to our courage and the hope of which we boast” (Hebrews 3:5-7).

Startling us with its reach and calling us to hospitality, the house of God is occupied by one who prepares a place for the foreigners and outsiders and neighbors all around us. Whether prodigals or pilgrims, in this house we discover the God who longs to welcome the multitudes home.

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

(1) 2 Corinthians 5:1-2.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The God of Presence

July 4, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Was it only days ago or had years since slipped away? His rugged brother, Esau, could spend weeks in the wilderness hunting, but already he longs for the tents of home. Fearing retribution, Jacob is fleeing for his life, the distance increasing from his mother, father, brother—all that he has ever known. What he wrested with deceit—his brother’s blessing and inheritance—Esau intends to avenge with blood. Jacob’s destination, Haran, is more than a month away. Where is his blessing now?(1)

Deep into the hill country, the setting sun leaves shadows in the valleys darkening the calculations in his mind. If only his brother hadn’t offered him his birthright. If only he hadn’t listened to his mother. Running for days, Jacob soon succumbs to the weariness of night. Lying on his back, his head against a hard stone, he is vulnerable to attack from man and beast. Yet too tired to fight, his hypervigilant body slowly gives in to sleep.

Suddenly, a stairway from heaven touches earth. Angels ascend and descend. Above the stairway God stands and speaks: “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you” (Genesis 28:13-15).

Jacob’s heartbeat accelerates, adrenaline surging through him like a rush of desert wind. He cannot speak, he cannot move. His back against the cold earth, he is pinned by the weight of words, light, glory: fear. The LORD God is addressing him—blessing him!

Then he wakes up.

Stricken and dumb, minutes pass before words take shape: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” With this recognition, newfound fear floods his soul and a hushed awe breathes in the stillness of night: “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.” At the light of dawn he takes his stone pillow and sets it on its side. Pouring oil on it, he consecrates it as a marker to God. So Jacob calls this place “Bethel”: house of God.

While the “true ‘daybreak’ for his soul will not come until the end of his twenty-year exile [in Haran]… God’s revelation requires no scheming from Jacob…. In this unexpected event in a no-place, God, sovereignly and apart from Jacob’s schemes, reveals himself to Jacob.”(2) God reminds Jacob of his faithfulness, reassuring him, “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac.” What was wrested through deception now pales to what God graciously gives: “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” What could not be earned has been freely given. Jacob, once asleep to the gracious God of his father and mother, now awakes to God’s presence. God will be with him and lead him to Haran. And The God of Promised Presence will bless him and his offspring and bring him home.

Although Jacob’s story is unique—he would wrestle with God and God would change Jacob’s name to symbolize a nation—his story reveals that God, in manifest humility, seeks us wherever we are. Whether in the wilderness in the dead of night or the seeming no-place of grief, compromise, or rebellion, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob declares that He is “the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:6). God longs that we would surrender, like Jacob, for God desires to lead us home. And as we recognize this gracious presence and goodness, fear and wonder give way to worship, an overflow of awe and gratitude that cannot be contained: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”

Danielle DuRant is director of research and writing at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) For the background to this story, see Genesis 25:19-34 and Genesis 27.

(2) Bruce Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), 389.

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Category Archives: Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Faith and Doubt

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Now My Eyes See

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – When the Stakes Are Highest

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – At the Border of Faith and Doubt

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Hell Is Other People

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Befriending Wisdom

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – World of Ordinary

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Questioning God

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Second Naïveté

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Life After Death

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Divinity and Dirty Hands

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Light Disturbing

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Side of the Broken

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Scene of Miracle

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Authority for Life

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Private Faith and Public Ethics

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Power of Beauty

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – An Unobstructed View

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – House of Hope

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The God of Presence

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