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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  Translation

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Ravi Z

Most of us recognize that there are forces at work in our world that make communicating more akin to communicating across cultures—even within our home countries. Twitter, texting and other forms of modern short-hand must be learned just as one would learn a new language. TTYL, LOL, and other combinations of letters are indiscernible to the tweeting and texting uninitiated.

In a similar way, trying to find ways to talk about matters of faith often feels like trying to cross a broken bridge. Even more than that, anyone who claims to present a clear language of faith speaks into a cacophony of spiritual and cultural languages. Is it any wonder, then, that blank stares are the all too often response to the particulars of the unique vocabulary of faith?

And yet, those who speak what seems to them a clear message are also informed and shaped by their own cultures. Speech embodies a whole world of language, experience, and ways of understanding that experience, which in turn shapes the way in which individuals speak about their faith.

There are, therefore, particular difficulties inherent in translation from within one’s own culture. An ancient Chinese proverb highlights this difficult task: “If you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish.”(1) In other words, on what platform does one stand in order to speak into one’s own culture? We are products of the very culture into which we seek to communicate, and we can never completely stand outside our own culture. We are, in the words of the proverb, like fish trying to define water.

Notably, Christians affirm that the heart of the gospel message transcends culture and language, just as surely as it was originally proclaimed within a particular culture and language. After all, the good news of the gospel is about “the Word made flesh.” Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin explains the dialogical nature of the gospel as a product of culture and yet as a trans-cultural communication when he suggests: “Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied.”(2)

Newbigin uses the conversion and transformation of Saul into the apostle Paul as a case in point. His trial before King Agrippa, as recorded in Acts 26, illuminates this cultural dialogue. As Paul shares the story of his conversion with King Agrippa, he speaks the language of the Empire, Greek, and not his native Hebrew. Yet earlier, when he was blinded by “a light from heaven, brighter than the sun” and he heard a voice from heaven, it was not in the predominant Greek language. Paul tells Agrippa: “I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew dialect, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’” Paul then asked who was speaking to him, and the voice answered, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.” Newbigin suggests that this passage provides a means by which we can understand the challenges and the opportunities for gospel communication and translation from within a given culture.(3)

First, just as Paul hears the as yet unnamed voice from heaven in his native tongue, the “voice” of the gospel must be offered in the language of the culture into which it is spoken. As such, those who bear witness to it must communicate in a way in which it can truly be heard. The message must embody that which is understood and experienced in a particular culture.

Truly communicating the gospel, however, means it will also call into question the way of understanding that is inherent in one’s own cultural language. Saul truly believed his actions against the Christians were in keeping with the God-ordained desire to preserve and protect Jewish identity and purity of belief. Yet, the voice from heaven revealed that this devotion of Saul was a form of persecution against the very God he claimed to serve. The messengers must always be willing to re-think their message lest they find they are actually working against its intention.

Finally, while Christians must be diligent to clearly translate and communicate the gospel, conversion is the work of God. No human persuasion, no lofty speculation ever accomplishes the work of conversion. This is God’s work alone accomplished by the Holy Spirit, and those who bear witness in multiple cultural contexts can depend on the work of the Spirit to accomplish what God desires. “[I]n the mysterious providence of God, a word spoken comes with the kind of power of the word that was spoken to Saul on the road to Damascus…it causes the hearer to stop, turn around, and go in a new direction, to accept Jesus as Lord, Guide, and Savior.”(4)

The communication of the gospel into every culture is filled with challenges and opportunities. Without the work of careful translation, Christians can sound as if they are babbling in a foreign tongue. On the other hand, they may immerse themselves so much in cultural study and experience that they only seek “relevance” and lose the prophetic power of gospel proclamation. Indeed, as culture-bound people, there is always a risk of proclaiming a version of the gospel that is more cultural than Christian. Those who proclaim the Christian message must always be willing to hear the radical call to conversion in their own proclamations. Yet, making room in these proclamations for the transformational work of the Spirit, there is hope that the unique message of God’s deliverance in Christ will not be lost either on the one who hears or the one who speaks.

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

(1) Cited in Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 21.

(2) Ibid., 4.

(3) Ibid., 5.

(4) Ibid., 7-8.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Two Thrones

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Ravi ZIn the beneficial book How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart note that “every individual Old Testament narrative is at least a part of the greater narrative of Israel’s history in the world, which in turn is a part of the ultimate narrative of God’s creation and his redemption of it.”(1)

The story told in Daniel 6 is one such narrative. Daniel sets a definite rhythm to the story, carefully dancing between the stories written on the hearts of his listeners and his own story, presenting a reality for all to see and hear.

In the beginning we find a peaceful kingdom and a king in control. Daniel, we are told, a Hebrew foreigner and a slave in exile, is found by King Darius to be distinguished above all other men, set apart from the others. With these words, Daniel meaningfully hints of another story—a story his listeners knew well. Choosing Israel, God set his people apart from all the nations, claiming them as his own. Daniel tells the story written on every heart of every person listening. And it is a story that speaks volumes to a people in exile, removed from all of it: “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation… And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people”(2)

Yet quickly the story moves from the picturesque image of a king very much in control, to a telling picture of human frailty. Daniel is trapped by manipulative lawmakers and sentenced to be thrown into the lions’ den, while King Darius finds himself bound by his own law, ineffective in his own kingdom, and powerless to save his distinguished Daniel.

It is in the midst of this self-realization that the king speaks directly to Daniel for the first time in the story. Quite significantly, Darius’ words are not about himself or Daniel or his accusers, but Daniel’s God. “May your God, whom you serve continually, deliver you!” proclaims the king. The storyteller is careful to make a point of this indeed, for however dimly, Darius of the nations has exercised faith in the God of Israel. Guilt-ridden and unable to sleep, Darius is well aware that his sense of sovereignty as king was little more than the sovereignty one has over the hunger of a lion. Daniel is in hands beyond his dominion. With incredible transparency, King Darius sees for the first time his desperate need for a King greater than himself. Here, it is the events taking place in the heart of Darius that above all show the greatest hint and the greatest hope in the entire narrative. As the prophet Isaiah has written, “Thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, but also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite’” (Isaiah 57:15). One is left to wonder whether it is king Darius who is most in need of the Spirit’s reviving or Daniel who is left for the night in a den of lions.

At first light, Darius runs quickly to the lions’ den. Finding Daniel alive, the king proclaims a hymn of wonder at the God who rules in high and holy places, in dark dens and in restless hearts.

As the narrative comes to an end, we find the king of the nations, bowing in reverence before the God of Daniel. For those listening, it is simultaneously a proclamation of the history of Israel touched again by the hand of God. Far-reaching implications exist for all. For King Darius it is first and foremost the realization that God is, that God not only exists but is the King most high, and that Daniel is distinguished above others because his God is distinguished above all. For those in exile it is the real hope that God is never far off, but intimately ruling the kingdom, faithfully reigning in heaven and earth, though appearances might suggest otherwise. And for those of us listening hundreds of years later, it is the stirring sounds of God alive and actively at work in creation, stretching holy hands to reach the most unlikely of places and the lowest of hearts with the resounding promise which Christ makes our own, “I will be your God and you shall be my people.”

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

(1) Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1981), 80.

(2) Exodus 19:6, Leviticus 26:12.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Beyond ‘If’

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I remember a time when it seemed quite obvious to me that God was what I wanted. I thought I understood what Pascal meant by a God-shaped vacuum in my life and Saint Augustine’s insistence that hearts are restless until they rest in God. But what I was fairly certain I had grasped cognitively, I knew I had not grasped practically. The hole seemed only partially filled and my heart did not seem at all at rest. I wanted to want God. I knew it was God that I ultimately wanted, and yet I was sickened with the suspicion that I had not found God fully because I didn’t want God enough. And so I wrestled: Do I really believe? Fully trust in Christ? Hope in the cross? Am I sorry enough for my sins? Am I seeking with all my heart? How can I make myself want God more?

 

But who can navigate through such a mess of ifs and conditions? If I work harder, if I trust more fully, if I repent more somberly or seek more fervently, then I might find the holy God of faith. Still for others, the conditions we set before a relationship with God are a matter of hiding: if God really knew me, if I stop running, if I sat before God without this mask, God wouldn’t want anything to do with me.

But in our mess of conditions, it is often the simplest thing that escapes us. For at the heart of the Christian pursuit of God is the game-changing promise of God as human.

And I am most confronted about the ‘ifs and thens’ I needlessly carry, when I am sitting before the ‘ifs and thens’ of those who knew him best. The apostle Peter writes: “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation—if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good” (1 Peter 2:2-3). Peter’s words put forth a shining thought: If you don’t want God, then why are you so anxious to want to want God? But if you have indeed tasted that the Lord is good, then why wouldn’t you want more? Could it not be that this longing is in and of itself an assurance of God’s presence? If you have tasted the goodness of God in anyway, then hunger for the one who spoke and walked and died and lives, as if a baby crying for milk; for God is near.

The disciple who knew first hand his own disappointing reactions before God here exhorts us to move beyond ‘ifs’ when it comes to Christ. Let us not prefer our pain, or drag our feet, or self-examine ourselves to sickness. For Christ is one of us, mediating on our behalf. If you have even slightly tasted the goodness of the Lord, then like newborn infants, yearn for this one who nourishes, thirst for God’s living, human Son.

In reality, I believe that my want for God was a real one. And in fact God was nearer than I realized, as life often goes. I believe our longing itself is something of answer to our restlessness, though it is one that will not be fully known until we are fully in his presence. In any case, and perhaps most importantly, God has found us.

 

When Jesus stood at the well beside the woman of Samaria, the conversation was about water but the words were about life, though she didn’t realize it at first.(1) Shocked that he, a Jew without a cup, would request a drink from her, a Samaritan with a past, she asked if he knew what he was doing. For surely, she must have reasoned, if he really knew her, he would not want anything to do with her. Pointedly, Jesus responded not by validating her ‘ifs’ but by replacing the subject of the sentence with himself. “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” Putting down her water jar, and her struggle, she ran home with the excitement of a child and told everyone about the one who found her at the well.

We are like children discovered by one of our own.

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

(1) See John 4.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Cross or the Cookie Jar

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As a young man growing up in Scotland, like many others, I was exposed to Christianity and the symbol of the cross. It was a point of confusion, a mystery at best, and at worst, an object of scorn and disgust. I did not know what it meant or why religious people thought it important, but I knew I wanted nothing to do with it.

Alister McGrath, Professor of theology, ministry, and education at King’s College, London, writes: “Just as God has humbled himself in making himself known ‘in the humility and shame of the cross,’ we must humble ourselves if we are to encounter him. We must humble ourselves by being prepared to be told where to look to find God, rather than trusting in our own insights and speculative abilities. In effect, we are forced to turn our eyes from contemplation of where we would like to see God revealed, and to turn them instead upon a place which is not of our choosing, but which is given to us.”(1)

In other words, nothing in history, experience, or knowledge can prepare the world for God’s means of drawing near. At the cross, something we are not expecting is revealed, something scandalous unveiled, something we could never have articulated or asked for is given to us. Philip Yancey, the renowned author, offers more on this: “Here at the cross is the man who loves his enemies, the man whose righteousness is greater than that of the Pharisees, who being rich became poor, who gives his robe to those who take his cloak, who prays for those who deceitfully use him. The cross is not a detour or a hurdle on the way to Kingdom, nor is it even the way to the Kingdom; it is the Kingdom come.”(2)

Christian or not, I think many of us have significantly distorted ideas about the purpose and meaning of the cross. When many people think of “sin” or the human condition before God, what comes to mind is perhaps something like the image of a child caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Such an image might well be understood as disobedience or maybe even naughtiness, but is it really that important? It is certainly not bad enough to justify extreme reactions. As a result of such a metaphor, our moral reflections on sin tend to foster incredulity or disgust. The response seems totally out of proportion to the offense.

But let us shift the metaphor. Supposing one day you go for a routine medical examination, and they discover you have a deadly virus. You did not do anything. You were not necessarily responsible, but you were exposed, and infected. You feel the injustice of it all, you are afraid, you are angry, but most of all, you are seriously sick. You are dying and you need help.

Whatever the cross and the gospel are about, it is not a slap on the hands for kids refusing to heed the rules of the cookie jar. It is not mere advice to get you to clean up your life and morals. It is not mere ideas to inform you about what it takes to be nice. It is restoration and recreation, a physician’s mediation; it is about human flourishing and discovering life.

The cross may seem an extreme and offensive measure to the problem of sin and death and sickness—but what if it is the very cure that is needed? McGrath describes our options at the cross of Christ. “Either God is not present at all in this situation, or else God is present in a remarkable and paradoxical way. To affirm that God is indeed present in this situation is to close the door to one way of thinking about God and to open the way to another—for the cross marks the end of a particularwayof thinking about God.”(3) Shockingly, thoroughly, scandalously, the cross depicts a God who throws himself upon sin and sickness to bring the hope of rescue miraculously near.

Some find it shocking, some overwhelming, some almost too good to be true. It is, however, for all.

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

(1) Alister McGrath, The Mystery of the Cross, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 104.

(2) Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 196.

(3) Alister McGrath, The Mystery of the Cross, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 103.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Telling Limitation

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A few years ago Forbes magazine published a special edition issue dedicated entirely to a theme they boldly called “the biggest concern of our age.” The articles began with the blunt assertion that “we’ve beaten or at least stymied most of humanity’s monsters: disease, climate, geography, and memory. But time still defeats us. Lately its victories seem more complete than ever. Those timesaving inventions of the last half-century have somehow turned on us. We now hold cell phone meetings in traffic jams, and ’24/7′ has become the most terrifying phrase in modern life.”(1) Certainly, among other things, this statement is a telling look at some of our modern assumptions. Particularly fascinating is the categorizing of time as a monster. Time is limiting, after all, and the greatest modern monster of all seems to be to find ourselves limited in any way.

I was reminded again of this article and its fearful expressions of limitation while reading something in the book of Psalms. Like the candid passage above, the psalms are also known for their sincere expressions of troubling ailments and enemies. And yet the gigantic differences in narrative are not only fascinating but helpful in challenging some of the modern assumptions embedded in our telling and embodying of the human story. It is easy to be nudged along by progress and convenience such that we find “humanity’s monsters” to be the problems that need correcting—and not humanity itself. But what if it is not limitation that ails us?

Significantly, the psalmist presents his list of the various monsters that limit and block his way before the God he seeks. “Be merciful to me, O Lord,” writes the psalmist, “for I am in distress; my eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and my body with grief” (Psalm 31:9). Standing before one who is limitless, the psalmist casts limitation in a wholly different light. The writer powerfully concludes, “But I trust in you, O Lord, I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hands… Let your face shine on your servant; save me in your unfailing love.” Fixed upon trustworthy hands that hold fleeting days, the psalmist recognizes that, like time itself, all that limits and weakens us will also eventually fade—but God’s unfailing love will not. Limitation certainly brings the psalmist to God, but it is not what ultimately ails him.

Like the ground and grammar of the psalmist, the Christian perception of weakness and limitation is also held beside the unfailing love of God, but a God who has been given a face, a body, and a human story in the person of Christ. In his letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul speaks of something he calls the “thorn in his flesh.” No doubt a striking expression of limitation, scholars have debated for centuries what this thorn might have been—a physical ailment, a burdensome opponent, a disability of some sort. No one can be sure. But what is certain is that Paul was a uniquely significant influence in spite of this limiting thorn. He writes, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But God said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” “Therefore,” continues Paul, “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.  For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:8-10).

It is a countercultural narrative to be sure. Yet what God has done through hardship, through limitation, even through seeming failure, is a restorative, re-forming story of the grace and authority, mercy and care of the victorious one the weak can proclaim.

What is in the time you hold before you this very moment? Do you see limits and fear? Or could you see, as Paul saw, limitations and impossibilities made approachable in the flesh of one who came near? Even in our weakness, maybe because of our weakness, God can accomplish far more than seems available. No one hoped for a weak Messiah. No one would have asked for a suffering servant where a military leader was needed. No one thought the death of Jesus could be the catalyst for any sort of reordering grace. The defeat of Jesus as a display of power still seems a foolish story to tell. But the love of God is jarringly given in the broken gift of the Son. And the human Christ’s defeat is also boldly the human Christ’s victory. And so it is also ours: the story in which the last are made first, the broken made beautiful, and the weak made strong in the power and the life of the Spirit.

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

(1) Forbes, special edition, 2000, emphasis mine.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – I Shut My Eyes to See

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“I shut my eyes in order to see,” said French painter, sculptor, and artist Paul Gauguin. As a little girl, though completely unaware of this insightful quote on imagination, I lived this maxim. Nothing was more exhilarating to me than closing my eyes in order to imagine far away exotic lands, a handsome prince, or a deep enough hole that would take me straight to China!

In fact, like many, imagination fueled my young heart and mind. After reading C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, I would walk into dark closets filled with warm winter coats fully expecting to be transported like the Pevensie children into foreign and wonderful land. Charlotte’s Web took me to a farm where I could talk to my dog, like Fern talked to Wilbur, or to the spiders that hung from intricate webs in my garage. Pictures on the wall came to life and danced before me; ordinary objects became extraordinary tools enabling me to defeat all those imaginary giants and inspiring me toward powerful possibilities fueled by vivid imagination.

Sadly, as happens to many adults, my imagination has changed. I don’t often view my closet as a doorway to unseen worlds, nor do I pretend that my dogs understand one word of my verbal affection towards them. Pictures don’t come to life, and I no longer pretend my garden rake or broom is a secret weapon against fantastical foes. Often, I feel that my imagination has become nothing more than wishful thinking. Rather than thinking creatively about the life I’ve been given, I daydream about what my life might be like if… I lived in Holland, for example, or could backpack across Europe, or lived on a kibbutz, or was a famous actress, or a world-renowned tennis player, or any number of alternative lives to the one I currently occupy.

Sadly, the imagination so vital in my youth doesn’t usually infuse my life with creative possibility, but rather leads me only to wonder if the grass is greener on the other side. Mid-life regrets reduce imagination to restlessness and shrivel creative thinking to nothing more than unsettled daydreams. Rather than allowing my imagination to be animated by living into God’s creative power, I allow it to be tethered to worldly dreams of more, or better, or simply other.

The psalmist was not in a mid-life imaginative crisis when he penned Psalm 90. Nevertheless, this psalm attributed to Moses, was a prayer to the God who can redeem imagination for our one life to live. Perhaps Moses wrote this psalm after an endless day of complaint from wilderness-weary Israelites. Perhaps it was written with regret that his violent outburst against the rock would bar him from entry into the Promised Land. Whatever event prompted its writing, it is a song sung in a minor key, with regret so great he feels consumed by God’s anger and dismayed by God’s wrath.

Whether prompted by deep regret, disillusionment, or a simple admitting of reality, Moses reflects on the brevity of life. He compares it to the grass “which sprouts anew. In the morning, it flourishes; toward evening it fades, and withers away.” Indeed, he concedes that “a thousand years in God’s sight are like yesterday when it passes by, or as a watch in the night.” Before we know it, our lives are past, and what do we have to show for them? Have we lived creatively? Have we used our imagination to infuse our fleeting, one-and-only lives to bring forth offerings of beauty and blessing?

Imagination, like any other gift, has the potential for good or for ill. It has power to fill my one and only life with creative possibility, or it has the potential to become nothing more than wishful thinking. As the psalmist suggests, our lives can be full of creative possibility when we desire hearts that seek to live wisely, live joyfully, and live gladly before the Lord, the God of infinite imagination and creativity.

Imagination built upon a foundation of gratitude invites us to live our lives with hope and with possibility to imagine great things for our God-given lives. “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard….all that God has prepared for those who love him” (Isaiah 64:4; 65:17). Can you imagine it?

In light of our transience, we have the choice to live creatively and imaginatively or wishfully longing for another life. We can choose to dwell in the presence of the God of infinite imagination for what our lives can be or we can choose to waste our time peering over to the other side. Yet we only have one life to live: “So teach us to number our days, that we may present to you a heart of wisdom….that we may sing for joy and be glad all of our days….and confirm the work of our hands.”(1)

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

(1) Psalm 90:12, 14b, 15a, 17.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Surprised by Time

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Have you ever noticed how often we are surprised by the passing of time? Do you catch yourself with the familiar maxim on your mind, “Time flies!” or perhaps another version of the same: “Where did the summer go?” “I can’t believe it’s already September.” Or maybe you recall the last time you noticed a child’s height or age or maturity with some genuine sense of disbelief.

Isn’t it odd to be so poorly reconciled to something so familiar, to be shocked at a universal experience? C.S. Lewis likened this phenomenon to a fish repeatedly astonished by the wetness of water. Adding with his characteristic cleverness, “This would be strange indeed! Unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.”(1)

As we consider the idea of time itself, seconds on the clock faithfully pass even as we ponder. All the same, we recognize that time is not just a fleeting thing. As Ravi Zacharias notes, “[Time] never moves forward without engraving its mark upon the heart—sometimes a stab, sometimes a tender touch, sometimes a vice grip of spikes, sometimes a mortal wound. But always an imprint.”(2) To be sure, the most profound imprints hold in our minds a definite place in history—the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, occasions of exceptional joy or beauty, moments of unusual pain. But isn’t there sometimes a sense that they also hold something more? In such moments, we are touched by the reality of the thing itself, a meaning that is bigger than this very moment. We walk beyond the brush strokes of time to find a glimpse of a canvas that makes our usual view seem like paint-by-number. Some of these moments seem to hold the stirring thought that eternity will be the vantage point from which we see the big picture.

Those who challenge the notion of eternity claim that it is a human invention, like religion itself, created to soften what we do not understand, to undermine the painfulness of life, to release us from the finality of death. As scientist Carl Sagan writes, “If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I’d be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote…Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.”(3)

Even as I give this quote some thought, my mind returns to the crematory disaster that touched the headlines across the U.S. some years ago. Few could overlook the unfathomable outrage. Over 300 bodies were carelessly discarded around the woods and lakes of the property, bodies that should have been cremated but for whatever reason were not. Deceitfully, families were handed containers holding cement or burned wood in place of a loved one’s ashes. Across the nation, people commonly noted that they felt somehow violated by this act of sheer irreverence to the dead, whether they knew them or not. In fact, at the time laws against such matters did not even exist. Who would have thought them necessary? Yet few denied that these were crimes against both the living and the dead.

But why? If we our origins are so humble and we are destined for nothing more, if we are merely a collocation of time and atoms and accident, why would we sense that something sacred had been desecrated? Why would we be astonished at such a treatment of the dead if life itself is nothing permanent?

I think we are outraged because quite certainly, something substantial was trampled on indeed. In a lifetime, we see countless glimpses of it. We remember sacred moments in time, and we understand human life to have intrinsic dignity and worth, even when our philosophies say otherwise. Note that no one asked the names, occupations, race, or accomplishments of any of the victims. Our dignity is not assigned because of who we are, nor worth due to something we have accomplished.

The Christian story makes the very robust, central claim that humankind is significant because God is significant, the Son of God choosing not only to fashion all of creation but to become one with it, taking on humanity himself. Perhaps there is a sacredness about life and death because the eternal author of time has come so near to it. Our surprise at time’s passing and our outrage at life—and death’s—violation are indeed thoroughly strange, unless God is vicariously involved in both our origin and our destiny.

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

(1) C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (Orlando: Harcourt, 1986), 138.

(2) Ravi Zacharias, The Lotus and the Cross (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2001), 16.

(3) Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (London: Headline, 1997), 204.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Breaking In

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The hometown of Jesus was a small village tucked between the hills of the Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean, located away from the main centers of the population. The Gospel of Mark describes the first time Jesus visited his hometown after he had become a public figure (Mark 6:1-6). His public ministry had, up until then, been based largely in Capernaum.

The townspeople had undoubtedly heard stories. Whispers of miracles and strange events were being reported from neighboring cities. His teaching was being called different, holding a different sort of authority among rabbis. I imagine the people of his hometown took a proud interest in all of the murmuring, anxious to see why everyone was talking about Jesus, anxious to claim him as their own. Now he was coming back home and they were excited about it. Invitations to teach in the synagogue were usually extended to distinguished visitors; he was, no doubt, in many eyes, the local boy done good, and now they would see for themselves.

According to Mark they were not disappointed. In fact, he reports, “they were astounded” (6:2). Making reference to the wisdom they heard and power they beheld, they clearly took notice that he was a man out of the ordinary. And yet, they couldn’t take the man at face value, for it was not just any man; it was Jesus. They could not get past the fact that this seeming authority in front of them was Mary’s son, the carpenter, the boy next door. And so Mark notes, they “took offense” at him, stumbling over the commonality of the extraordinary one before them (6:3).

During his tenure as a professor at Magdalen College in Oxford, C.S. Lewis delivered a memorial oration to the students of King’s College, the University of London. It was titled, “The Inner Ring.” Addressing his young audience as “the middle-aged moralist,” Lewis warned: “Of all passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”(1)

Lewis spoke of the natural desire to find ourselves a part of the inner circles that exist endlessly and tauntingly throughout life. He cautioned about the consuming ambition to be an insider, and not an outsider, though the lines we chase are invisible, and the circle is never as charming from within as it looks from without. Like the taunting mirage the weary traveler chases through the desert, the quest for the Inner Ring will break your heart unless you break it, he insisted. For “it is the mark of a very perverse desire that seeks what can not be had.”(2)

Yet it is no doubt a desire that touches us all. There are those we will never truly see because they are within our circles. And there are those we will never see because they are without. Our invisible lines will continue to exclude the majority, and our pursuit of the inside will keep us in confined by our own impervious parameters of sight. Unless we allow them to be broken.

The kinfolk of Jesus chose to belittle the depth of his teaching, the compassion of his hands, and the significance of his power because they could not see past the circles they were certain he was excluded from. Throughout his testimony, Mark gives witness to the close ties between faith and healing, expectation and eyesight. This hometown crowd could not see Jesus for who he was because they were blinded by lines that told them what he could not be. “Isn’t this Mary’s son?” they scoffed in fear and disgust (6:3). Excluding mention of Joseph, their words were intended to belittle Jesus and his origins, to put him on the wrong side of the line with one who was sexually suspect.

And yet ironically, in pointing to Mary, they unwittingly point to the miracle of the virgin birth, the first evidence of Christ’s breaking of an inner ring. Where his hometown saw scandal and commonality, where we see circles that exclude, this human Son breaks the lines of separation, and extraordinarily offers the world an invitation into the presence of Father, Son, and Spirit.

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

(1) C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1980), 154.

(2) Ibid., 154.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Science and Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Storyteller

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Science fiction novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said of one of his most recurrent characters, “Trout was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken of this possibility several times to his parakeet. He had said, for instance, ‘Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I’m a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.”(1) In this scene from the book Breakfast of Champions, Kilgore Trout’s haunting suspicion is unveiled before him. Sitting content at a bar, Kilgore is suddenly overwhelmed by someone or something that has entered the room. Beginning to sweat, he becomes uncomfortably aware of a presence far greater than himself.

The author himself, Kurt Vonnegut, has stepped beyond the role of narrator and into the book itself. The effect is as bizarre for Kilgore as it is for the readers. When the author of the book steps into the novel, fiction is lost within a higher reality, and Kilgore senses the world as he knows it collapsing. In fact, this was the author’s intent. Vonnegut has placed himself in Kilgore’s world for no other reason than to explain the meaninglessness of Kilgore’s life. He came to explain to Kilgore face to face that the very tiresome life he has led was, in fact, all due to the pen and whims of an author who made it all up for his own sake. In this twisted ending, no doubt illustrative of Vonnegut’s own humanism, Kilgore is forced to conclude that apart from the imagination of the author he does not exist. Ironically, he also must come to terms with the fact that it is because of the author that his very existence has been ridiculous.

The gospel writers tell a story that is perhaps as fantastic as Vonnegut’s tale, though one with consequences in stark contrast. The Gospel of John, too, begins with a story that is interrupted by the presence of the author:  “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men… And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a Father’s only son, full of grace and truth… From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.” As Eugene Peterson translates, “The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” But in this story, the presence of the author is not our demise but our inherent good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God as Gardener

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I took up gardening a few years ago. (Well, actually gardening seemed to take me up.) It all started very innocently when a friend gave me a cutting from her jade plant. I knew nothing about plants. I had watched for years as my mother worked in her garden and I appreciated the interplay of color and texture created by the various flowers, trees, and shrubs. But I didn’t know the first thing about the process of cultivating or caring for a garden, and as far as I was concerned, the details involved in that process were best left up to my mother.

But all of that changed when I received my Jade cutting from my friend. She knew just how to initiate me into the wonders of gardening, without overwhelming me with the details. Jade plants are succulents; for those of you who do not know what a succulent plant is, it’s simply a plant that doesn’t need a great deal of water or attention. In other words, it’s the perfect kind of plant for a novice gardener! I was amazed by how quickly this one plant put down roots in my heart. Watching this little cutting grow tiny, threadlike roots, planting it in a pot filled with simulated desert soil, and experiencing the wonder as it grew into the small Jade tree that it is today—over 15 years later—amazed me at how something so small, so ordinary could become extraordinary.

I can tell you that it didn’t take long before I began to try my hand at plants that required more attention and care: african violets, cyclamen, gerbera daisies, iris, lilies, tulips, and a whole assortment of garden flora and fauna. I grew enchanted by the variety of color, texture, and arrangement each new species added to my garden. I learned about specific care regimens, their particular pests, the difference between a partial-sun and partial-shade plant, and how soil acidity impacts the color of certain types of plants.

More than all of this, gardening took me up because gardening quickly grew in me a sense of wonder. I suspect my friend knew this when she introduced me to my first, little jade plant. She knew that gardening would introduce me to the extraordinary in the ordinary. You cannot help but begin to pay attention to the tiniest details as you garden, and in turn, begin to notice all kinds of other awe-producing details all around you. The varieties of the color green in the trees, grasses, plants and shrubs, the nuances of blue and aqua hues that shimmer on lakes and oceans, and the little creatures that share the world with us—birds, rabbits, coyotes, skunk, deer, dogs, and cats.  Living now in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where gardening is beloved and beauty envelopes us, this is all the more true for me.

The Christian Scriptures indicate that the natural response to wonder is worship. Indeed, the psalmist suggests that the very detailed elements of creation proclaim the glory and worship of God: The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of his hands!  Whether we realize it or not, we are drawn into the very presence of God when we wonder in God’s creation. We affirm the beauty and the goodness of God as we wonder at and with and for creation. And as we wonder, we agree with God that all God made “was very good” (Genesis 1:31).

Have you lost your sense of wonder? Has your life gotten too busy, too laden with care or comfort or grief that you cannot see God’s extraordinary presence in the ordinary details of life? Or maybe God seems far off and unreachable, and you long for the tending and nurturing of a gardener yourself. I cannot explain away that longing any more than the psalmist, who expressed a similar lament when God felt far off to him. But I do know that nurturing my own garden and wondering aloud at the beauty of color and intricacy, I am comforted by the declarations of creation—of gardens and waters and heavens who seem confident, not only that there is a gardener, but one who is very good.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Making a Name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Out of the Wilderness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ravi Zacharias – Harmless Petty Sins

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – This God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1) cf. Psalm 73:28.

(2) As excerpted from the Westminster Larger Catechism.

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Beyond Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Speaking to Bones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted RZIM Blog – Cameron McAllister on August 12, 2014

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sledgehammers and Other Good News

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

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

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

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

Blessed are the poor in spirit…

Blessed are those who mourn…

Blessed are the meek…

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…

Blessed are the merciful…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(2) Amos 6:1.

(3) Matthew 5:3-9.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Real and Unseen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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