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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A World Invisible

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Aristotle once said that the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor, an eye for resemblances.(1) The prophet Isaiah had an eye for a God so near to his people that he saw the heavens being torn open and God stepping down to be among us. “O that you would rend the heavens and come down! That the mountains would quake at your presence.”(2) This commanding metaphor gave Isaiah an eye for the resemblances of God all around him, and sparked every word of the prophet who spoke so that the world too would see more.

I have a friend who refers to people like Isaiah, those with a vision for God and God’s resemblances throughout the world, as “eyes of the kingdom.” There are times when these visionaries surprise us as much as the resemblances of the God they call us to see. A homeless man in nineteenth century London was one such visionary, lamenting the ease with which we often miss the very thing in front of us:

The angels keep their ancient places—

Turn but a stone and start a wing!

‘Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces,

That miss the many-splendored thing.(3)

The poem is titled “In No Strange Land” and was written by a man whose life oscillated between brilliant writer and homeless addict. Francis Thompson lived on the streets of England, slaking his opium addiction in London’s Charing Cross and sleeping on the banks of the River Thames. But he continued to scribble poetry on whatever paper he could find, often mailing his work to the local newspaper. “In No Strange Land” is one of the poems Thompson mailed from the streets of homelessness.

The tone of the poem is not unlike the prayer of Isaiah 64. Thompson begins with the great reality and oft unrecognized hope that is before us:

O world invisible, we view thee,

Intangible, we touch thee,

Unknowable, we know thee,

Inapprehensible, we clutch thee.

His words are reminiscent of the gift Isaiah reminds us is ours: that we are able to recount the gracious deeds of God, to see the hand of the Potter in dark times of history, to call him Father even now in the midst of blindness from sin or sadness, disappointment or distraction. The rhetorical question that follows Thompson’s praise of the unnoticed inquires of our often short-sighted vision and demanding questions to God:

Does the fish soar to find the ocean?

The eagle plunge to find the air—

That we ask of the stars in motion

If they have rumor of thee there?

Thompson wonders why we insist upon interrogating a distant God, when God may just be standing beside us. The poem brings to mind the crux of Isaiah’s vision and metaphor—namely, that there is a God whose throne is before us, though our tendency is to miss it all together. As commentator John Watts notes,

“[Our] failure…to see God’s vision, to hear God’s voice, and to rise above human goals of pride, striving, and independence adds a tragic dimension to the vision [of Isaiah]. To the bitter end a large proportion of the people cling to their version of the past as the only acceptable pattern for their present and their future. They demand that God conform to their concept of what his plans ought to be and thus preclude themselves from participation in God’s new creation.”(4)

Both Thompson and Isaiah use the power of image and metaphor to bid us to look again and again, and learn to live as eyes of the kingdom. While it is true that God sometimes comes down and unmistakably transforms time and place, other times we fail to see the sacred in our midst simply because we do not want to see anything subtle. We pass over what God has extended, whether a sign of grace, a moment of transcendence, or a richer lifetime of seeing his presence. And we ironically miss the images of God all around us within a world that is made in God’s image. As the unlikely poet laments:

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)

Cry—and upon thy so sore loss

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder

Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,

Cry—clinging to Heaven by the hems;

And lo, Christ walking on the water,

Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

Thompson invites us to see the scandal of the particular in the story of God and the stories of our own lives. There is indeed a certain traffic about Jacob’s ancient ladder, but it may well be pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross, New York City, or Hong Kong. Christ may well come walking on the water, though perhaps not from the direction of Gennesareth, but Thames.

Like the vision of the prophet Isaiah, life itself can remind us of the coming of a deliverer, the drawing near of God to humankind, the arrival of the human Son of God, our rescuer, into our very midst. A voice is indeed crying out of the wilderness: Who will have ears to hear it, eyes to see it? Francis Thompson’s “In No Strange Land” is a call to see the strange particulars of Christ’s story, but to also see him in the faces and stories before us, perhaps even in the unlikely story of a homeless man sleeping on the banks of the river Thames.

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

(1) Quoted in Leland Ryken, Ed., The Christian Imagination(Colorado Springs: Waterbrook, 2002), 403.

(2) Isaiah 64:1.

(3) Francis Thompson, “In No Strange Land,” The Hound of Heaven and Other Poems (Wellesley, MA: Branden Books, 2000), 78.

(4) Watts, John D. W.: Word Biblical Commentary: Isaiah 1-33. Dallas: Word, Incorporated, 2002 (Word Biblical Commentary 24), xxix.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Word and Image

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Ravi Z

The first time I remember hearing the metaphor “rain on your parade,” I was at a parade and it was raining. As a nine year old, the disappointment was memorable. To this day, when I hear the metaphor used, it conveys with heightened success all that the phrase is meant to convey—and arguably more. I remember standing in the rain, watching the once-solid crowd dwindling to nothing, the marching bands abandoning their neat rows, the bright floats bleeding in color. The optimistic few remained in their chairs, somehow assured that the show would go on.  But we were not among the faithful few. “I’m sorry that it rained on your parade,” my grandpa said smiling at the perfect metaphor as we piled in the car, soggy and dispirited. With half a parade to remember, we went home, our enthusiasm thoroughly overshadowed by the rain.

We are mistaken when we think of metaphor as an optional device used by poets and writers for fluff and decoration. Much of life is communicated in metaphor. There is so much more to time’s landscape than often can be described plainly. Metaphorical imagery is unavoidable for the plainest of speakers. When I say to my colleague, “Your words hit home” or “I am touched by your message” I don’t mean that her words are reaching out of her book and patting me on the head. And yet, in a way, I do. What she had to say made an impression, opened my mind, and struck a chord; communicating so without metaphor is nearly impossible. It is the case for much of what we have to say: there is no other way to say it.

Language seems to recognize that there is something about life that makes metaphor necessary. Words in and of themselves fall short of conveying certain truths and intended meanings, so instead we draw pictures with language.

At the image of Jesus in his final moments of death, the hymnist inquired, “What language shall I borrow, to thank Thee, dearest friend?” One of the things I find most nourishing about the Christian story is its upholding of this mystery, speaking not in rigid confines but with words that always point beyond themselves, borrowing a language fitting of both the mind and the heart. There is a richness conveyed in page after page of the stories in the Bible that stretches minds and moves emotions. “O Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, how oft I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not have it” (Matthew 23:37). “As far as the east is from the west, so far [God] removes our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12).

Jesus speaks of the profundity of God’s longing using the fierce image of the animal maternal instinct. The psalmist writes of the unimaginable depths of God’s forgiveness using the immeasurable image of east and west on a map. Both paint pictures beyond the words themselves. Both seem to hit as invitations into an intimate, visceral relationship that make any sort of casual encounter seem highly unlikely. God’s own self-revelation in story and flesh vividly indicates that life can’t always be defined plainly, accepted in terms and principles. God is also far beyond the insufficient words we assign. What language can we borrow indeed?

When the Samaritan woman came to draw water at the well, Jesus asked her to give him a drink. The exchange was plainly enough about water but the words were mysteriously about life, though she didn’t realize it at first. Shocked that he, a Jew without a cup, would request a drink from her, a Samaritan without power or position, she asked if he knew what he was doing. And then they had a conversation about thirst that made her so much more aware of own thirst.

“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?”

Jesus not only invited the woman to see her own desire plainly, he pointed her beyond the metaphor, inviting her into the real and unplumbed hospitality of the one who satisfies. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again,” he said, “but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

In this plain and potent exchange of word and image, the woman at the well found someone who told her “everything [she] ever did,” and drew her into everything she ever needed. “Sir,” the woman replied, “Give me this water.”

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

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.

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Max Lucado – All Like Sheep

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Isaiah 53:6 says, “We all have wandered away like sheep; each of us has gone his own way.”  You wouldn’t think sheep would be obstinate.  Of all God’s animals, the sheep is the least able to take care of himself. Sheep are dumb.  Have you ever met a sheep trainer?  Ever seen sheep tricks?  Know anyone who’s taught his sheep to roll over?  No.  Sheep are just too dumb.

When David said in Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” couldn’t he have come up with a better metaphor than a Shepherd for sheep?  When David, who was a warrior and ambassador for God, searched for an illustration of God, he remembered his days as a shepherd.  He remembered how he lavished attention on the sheep.  How he watched over them. David rejoiced to say, “The Lord is my Shepherd” and in doing so, he proudly proclaimed, “I am His sheep!”