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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –   The Right Side of Pain

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We shuffled back and forth between the states that sat like metaphors between our divorced parents—a summer, a spring break, a Christmas far from one of them. The pain of the one we were leaving was always palpable, but we always had to leave.

It’s strange the things you interpret as a child with the limited perceptions you have. I was very small when I determined that pain had sides—like a terrible river that could be crossed. I silently vowed I would not allow anyone to keep me stranded on the wrong side of people in pain. As a result, I spent a lifetime collecting strays, searching for the oppressed, feeling the pain of others, and desperately attempting to bind broken hearts, usually without much (or any) success. I realized one day that every community I have ever been involved with has been one somehow marked by suffering. At times, I was even somewhat frantic about expanding my circle of care. The world of souls is a sad and broken place. I was most certain of this because I was one of them, and I vowed that they would not be alone—or perhaps, at times, more accurately, that I would not be alone.

On occasion, I could be honest about unhealthy patterns to my ever-expanding circles of care. With each oppressed group, I would come among them with the best of intentions. I would give everything I could and some things I could not—love, time, money, tears, depression—until I collapsed, no longer able to give anything at all. I always thought I was retreating out of necessity because taking in pain was understandably exhausting. I figured that the metaphorical house I tried to keep filled, at times, simply needed to be emptied from over-crowding. I was opening up my house until people were hanging from the rafters and lamps started getting broken, and I was falling apart. Little did I realize, the house was falling apart before any of them entered in the first place. I was inviting them into the wrong house.

It is an uncomfortable mystery in the house of faith that sometimes God in his mercy must tear down even walls built with good intention. The psalmist knew it well: “Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain… In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat—but God grants sleep to those he loves.”(1) In my house, the broken and the oppressed necessarily found care with limits, hospitality with conditions. The psalmist points instead to a world re-formed and revived within the walls of the house of God. We are like olive trees, he says, who flourish in those great corridors, creatures remade by the care of Home, tears collected and life resuscitated in God’s unfailing love for ever and ever.(2)

Describing the disparity between the hospitality of mortals and the hospitality of God, Abraham Heschel writes, “The [human] conscience builds its confines, is subject to fatigue, longs for comfort, lulling, soothing. Yet those who are hurt, and [the God] Who inhabits eternity, neither slumber nor sleep.”(1) In other words, what if God never sleeps or slumbers in part because those who are hurting never sleep or slumber? Try as I may as a caretaker I cannot pull that off. No one can be as God to the hurting. We can stay awake with a dying loved one in his pain and suffering. We can care for neighbors who have no roofs to protect their heads at night. But the house in which the suffering find unfailing love will be God’s. Like the friends of the paralytic who carried him all the way to Christ, this is the house to which we must bring them. His is the house in which we all will live.

I think I will always move toward broken communities and I will struggle with the weight of the things I see. I struggle equally with the apathy that makes me want to flee from it all and clear away the troubled crowd. But I am convinced that the right side of pain can only be accessed through the house of God, a house built not by mortal hands, but held up by the beams of the Cross: A house filled with the loving exchange of a divine communion and the vicariously human touch of the Incarnate of Son. I know of no other refuge with great doors so open and a host who suffers but does not sleep, with rooms prepared and a table set with places even for enemies, where hospitality is not a conditional sharing of personal pains, or a self-centered preoccupation with suffering, but an extension of the very real invitation: Come to me, all who are weary and I will give you rest.

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

(1) Psalm 127:1-2.

(2) Psalm 52:8.

(3) Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Perennial, 2001), 11.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Unexpected Encounter

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Ravi Z

During my high school years, my friends and I would always attend church youth group on Friday evenings. More often than not, these events comprised of playing different games and eating food. After the games were done, we would be ushered in to a room where we would sing songs and then listen to a short talk given by the youth leader. I knew what to do in these moments. I had become an expert at tuning out religious or spiritual talk. I had fifteen years of growing up in a Christian home which consisted of attending church twice every Sunday, one midweek service in addition to another church club. I was a well-seasoned Christian, or at least I thought I was.

But on this particular Friday evening, something happened that I will never forget. I was in the chapel listening to people singing songs, but it all felt so different. I looked across the room and saw people singing as if they really meant what they were singing. People were not only singing about God. They were singing to God. They looked and acted as if God were really in the room. And I must confess that it was the first time, at least to my remembrance, that I felt that same reality. The only way I can describe this moment is to tell you that God was in the room.

I did not sing. I saw the words on the screen. I looked at the person leading the songs and stubbornly did not sing a word. But here’s where things became a bit complicated. The fact is, I did want to sing. All my life, my soul longed to sing out to God. It is hard to explain this tension, but let me put it like this. My soul longed to sing out a song to God, to God’s greatness, but I felt that up to that point, if I were to sing I would simply be singing a song for the sake of being in church. I had never felt the ‘Godness’ of God. It was in this moment that I first sensed the greatness of God all around me. I gave in and started singing.

And what pleasure I felt when I sang. I did not fully comprehend this God to whom I was singing, and I still don’t, but I knew that the one to whom I was singing was real. Deep down, I knew that God was real. Worship, in this case, came before I placed my utter dependence in God. As I tried to make sense of what I experienced that evening, I came across the writings of the late Abraham Heschel. He once wrote that “the secret to spiritual living is the power to praise. Praise is the harvest of love. Praise precedes faith. First we sing, then we believe. The fundamental issue is not faith but sensitivity and praise, being ready for faith.”(1) My heart’s expression of worship at the Friday night youth event served as a means to knowing and understanding God more. Indeed, as Heschel pointed out, trust in God was obtained by first acknowledging and responding to the reality of God.

Christian conversion happens in many different ways. As it has been said, there is only one gospel but there are many ways to that gospel. In my case, on one particular evening while I was midway through high school I attended a church youth event not looking for God and was confronted with God’s presence. God’s presence was immediate and palpable. It was then that I encountered God for the first time. I was “overtaken with awe of God”(2) and in singing out, even raising my hands to God, I experienced a rich pleasure that I had never before tasted; pleasure because my voice and hands were finally able to express what my soul had so longed for.

Nathan Betts is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Toronto, Canada.

(1) Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), 116.

(2) Ibid.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Great Metaphor

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Ravi Z

The places in literature that most often slow my mind to a reflective halt are usually intensely visual. Among them, perhaps surprisingly to some, are images from ancient scriptures that offer some of the most beautiful scenes. The ageless cry of Isaiah 64:1, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,” is like a museum filled with the most hopeful, most disturbing, and most inviting images. Fitting with Isaiah’s vision for a world that revolves around the throne and the kingship of God at the center, his cry was a fervent prayer for the severe presence of a God he knew could come nearer.

Like the God for which he longed, the prophet’s words are intense, stirring, and intentional. Isaiah’s use of words—in fact, the entire genre of prophetic literature—cries out with poetic vision. As Abraham Heschel comments, “Prophecy is the product of a poetic imagination. Prophecy is poetry, and in poetry everything is possible, e.g. for the trees to celebrate a birthday and for God to speak to man.”(1) And that is to say, God gives us something of the divine character in the prophet’s powerful interplay of word, metaphor, and image. As messenger, the prophet yields the words of God, and the poetic nature of prophetic speech reveals a God who speaks in couplets, a God who uses simile and metaphor, rhythm and sound, alliteration, repetition, and rhetorical questions. Any reading of prophetic speech requires that one engage these poetic structures. A quick scan of Isaiah 64:1 reveals a depth of interacting words and key patterns, and a metaphor that moves us like the mountains Isaiah describes:

If only you would cleave the heavens!

(If only) you would come down,

From facing you, mountains would quake!

These few stanzas make use of repeated words and paired images to convey an intensity about human longing for the transcendence of God. The cry is not merely for God’s presence, but a presence that will tear open the heavens and cause mountains—even Mount Zion and the children of God—to tremble. Set in the opening line, the Hebrew word qarata is as illustrative in tone as it is meaning. The guttural sound and sharp stop in its pronunciation contribute to the severity of the word itself, which means to tear, to rend, to sever, or to split an object into two or more parts. ”Oh that you would rend the heavens…”  “If only you would cleave open the heavens and come down…”

Significantly, this Hebrew word is most often found in the Old Testament referring to the rending of garments out of grief or desperation. Ezra describes falling in prayer “with my garments and my mantle torn, and on my knees, I spread out my hands to the Lord my God” (Ezra 9:5). The same word is used of David after hearing that Absalom had killed all of his sons: “The king rose, tore his garments, and lay on the ground; and all his servants who were standing by tore their garments also” (2 Samuel 13:31). The images of grief and shredded garments would likely have come to the minds of those who first heard the cry of Isaiah to God: If only you would tear the heavens in two and see what is happening in your holy cities… If only you would sever this distance that sits between us like a heavy garment…

But this act of rending is also used in the Old Testament figuratively, usually in terms of removing someone from power or formally tearing away their authority, as when Samuel told Saul that the kingdom had been rendered from him and given to his neighbors. Here, in the context of Isaiah’s prayer, the word seems to take on both figurative and literal qualities. Oh that you would rend the heavens like a garment and come down here, tear away our perception of authority and show us something real, your own power. The cry is clearly making use of metaphor and yet it is a desperate plea for God’s presence in power, tangibly and substantially—”so that the nations might tremble at your presence,” Isaiah cries.

 

Even so, whether uttered metaphorically or literally, the cry for God to tear open the heavens and come down is a cry no mind conceived, nor ear perceived how thoroughly God would answer. For those who read this passage in light of Christ, fully taking in the poignant image of the heavens tearing like a garment brings to mind the tearing of the temple curtain when Jesus took his last breath. ”Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. And at that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split” (Matthew 27:50-51). The incarnation, the death, and resurrection of Christ was God’s bold answer to an ancient longing—the longing and the answer both intensely visual and unapologetically real. The Word himself is God’s response to the great metaphor of a God who rends the heavens like a garment, a God so present that he comes down to be among us, causing the earth to quake at his own breath.

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

(1) Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper, 2001), 469.

(2) See 1 Samuel 15:28.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – House of Pain

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Ravi Z

 

We shuffled back and forth between the states that sat like metaphors between our divorced parents—a summer, a spring break, a Christmas without one of them. The pain of the one we were leaving was always palpable, but we always had to leave.

It’s strange the things we interpret as children with the limited perceptions we have. I was very little when I silently vowed I would not allow anyone to keep me on the wrong side of people in pain. As a result, I spent a lifetime collecting strays, searching for the oppressed, feeling the pain of others, and desperately attempting to bind broken hearts, usually without much success. Every church I have ever been involved with has been one somehow marked by suffering. I have at times been somewhat frantic about expanding my circle of care. The world of souls is a sad and broken place. I was certain of this because I was one of them, and I vowed that they would not be alone—or perhaps, at times, more accurately, that I would not be alone.

On occasion, there have been other unhealthy patterns to my ever-expanding circles of care. With each oppressed group, I came among them with the best of intentions. I gave everything I could and some things I could not—love, time, money, tears, depression—until I collapsed, no longer able to give anything at all. I always thought I was retreating out of necessity because taking in pain was understandably exhausting. I figured that the metaphorical house I tried to keep filled, at times, simply needed to be emptied from over-crowding. I was opening up my house until people were hanging from the rafters and lamps started getting broken, and I was falling apart. Little did I realize, the house was falling apart before any of them entered in the first place. I was inviting them into the wrong house.

Sometimes God in his mercy must tear down even walls built with good intention. “Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain… In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat—for he grants sleep to those he loves” (Psalms 127:1-2). Such was the case with me. In my house, the broken and the oppressed found care with limits, hospitality with conditions. But we are like olive trees who “flourish in the house of God,” says the psalmist. For in this house, we can “trust in God’s unfailing love for ever and ever” (Psalm 52:8).

Describing the disparity between the mind of humanity and the mind of God, Abraham Heschel writes, “The [human] conscience builds its confines, is subject to fatigue, longs for comfort, lulling, soothing. Yet those who are hurt, and He Who inhabits eternity, neither slumber nor sleep.”(1) In other words, God never sleeps or slumbers because those who are hurting never sleep or slumber. Try as we may as caretakers we cannot be as God to the hurting. We can stay awake with them in their pain and suffering. We can care for them as neighbors. But the house in which the suffering find unfailing love is the Lord’s. Like the friends of the paralytic who carried him all the way to Christ, this is the house to which we must bring them. His is the house in which we must live.

Though I still seem to move toward broken communities and still struggle with the weight of some of the things I see, I realize I struggle equally with the apathy that makes me want to flee from it all and clear away the crowd. But I am convinced that the right side of pain can only be accessed through the house of God, a house built not by human hands, but held up by the beams of the Cross. Here our souls find a house with rooms prepared for them and a table set with room for our enemies. God has invited us into the kingdom; the doors of a great house are opened wide. And it is a house where hospitality is not a conditional sharing of personal pains, or a self-centered preoccupation with suffering, but an extension of Christ’s real invitation: Come to me, all who are weary and I will give you rest.

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

(1) Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Perennial, 2001), 11.

 

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The Prophet – Ravi Zacharias Ministry

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“Sir, I can see you are a prophet.”

Jesus hadn’t told her future, a task many equate with prophecy. He told her past. “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband” (John 4:17-18). From this knowledge of her angst-ridden personal life, the woman at the well concluded that Jesus was no less than a prophet. As the conversation continued, she began to wonder if Jesus was not in fact the Prophet.

The storied role of a Hebrew prophet is a perspective lost in modern times. The prophets were messengers sent by God to a world hard of hearing, whether by suffering or stubbornness, sin or shame. “Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony,” writes Abraham Heschel, “a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the words of the prophet.”(1) The prophet’s words were often cries of the imminent future, but they were also exclamations for the present, insight into the past, and windows into another kingdom. The Hebrew prophets were messengers, but they were also mediators. They were called to restore the hearts of the people to the God they had abandoned. To a world that needed to be wakened, the prophet was God’s megaphone. But likewise, the prophet brought the cry of humanity before the heart of God. Standing between God and the people, the prophet cried out at times as prosecutor, at times as the defense.

It is essential to know this backdrop of Hebrew prophecy if we are to understand the person and work of Christ. Like the Hebrew prophets who came before him, Jesus was more than an individual who told the future, or a person with divine insight. He came as messenger, but he offered far more than words. He came to herald another kingdom and to restore hearts to God in the present one. He came with the message of salvation and he stood between God and humanity—even unto a cross—to give it. He came as both judge and physician, the herald of our brokenness and the bearer of that brokenness.

In fact, the woman at the well saw that Jesus was one who had no doubt “stood in the council of the LORD”—the distinguishing factor between true and false prophets given in Jeremiah 23. Even so, the conversation continued to surprise her, and she began to surmise that the one in front of her was even greater than a prophet, greater than those who stood boldly between God and humanity crying to both. Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks” (John 4:21-23). As seen in the reactions of this Samaritan, these words had eschatological, historical, and cosmological dimensions. This man had the voice of a prophet and something more.

Leaving the jar she came to fill, the woman at the well ran home, proclaiming out of her own silent agony the hope he voiced within it: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”

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

(1)   Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 5-6.