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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A special report on This American Life follows the lives of several people currently living what they unequivocally call “Plan B.” Host Ira Glass expounds his thoughts on an informal poll and a seemingly universal human reality. He asked a room of hundred people to think back to the beginning of adulthood when they were first formulating a plan for their lives. He called it Plan A, “the fate you were sure fate had in store.” He then asked those who were still following this plan to raise their hands. Only one person confessed she was still living Plan A; she was 23 years old.

It seems a trend among us: There is the thing we plan on doing with our lives, and then there’s the thing we end up doing, which becomes our life. Here, Christians often have a nuanced view of Plan A: it is God’s plan they are trying to follow. But there is still very much an initial picture of what this plan, and subsequently our lives, will—or should—look like. God’s best becomes something like a divine Plan A, while any other plan leads the follower to something else.

But akin to the statistics in the room with Mr. Glass, it is likely that the number of Christians who find themselves living the plan they first imagined are also few and far between. For some, this is seen as good news. Many discover along their carefully laid out plans that they are doing far more leading than being led, and God seems to mercifully redirect them. “Many are the plans in a human heart,” the proverb reads, “but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” Others find the journey with God from Plan A to B to C to D an interesting part of the pilgrimage itself, maybe even the gift of following an unfathomable creator, a creator who we discover is far more creative than we! Yet there are still many others who walk away from Plan A thoroughly defeated. Regretful turns and drastic detours may now be behind us, but the deviation from the journey is writ large before us. We have failed at Plan A, the plan we believed divinely inspired; God’s best is now merely God’s backup. Wrestling with the guilt or disappointment of such a deviation can be found with or without the Christian spin.

When life turns out to be something you didn’t plan on, when missteps and unplanned detours loom with guilt, a life of alternative routes and broken roads seems certain. It is easy to wonder in despair what it means to have missed God’s best, and to believe that somehow God must now step back into the picture, disappointed, and find a secondary plan for your life. I find it equally despairing to encounter those who maintain they are living God’s Plan A and smugly insist it was their own virtue that accomplished it. How significant, then, are Christ’s words to his despairing disciples after an evening of mistakes, both to those of us who have ever felt the sting of falling off track and to those of us who want a pat on the back for getting it right. To these men who repeatedly failed to follow his instructions, Jesus simply said, “Rise, let us be going.”

Author and humanitarian Naomi Zacharias once told me that following God is something like following the directions on a GPS system. At the beginning of the journey, the plan for arriving at the desired destination is before you. But when you accidentally turn left or are forced to take an unforeseen detour, the computer doesn’t scold you. It doesn’t force you to start over or announce that you can no longer make it to your final destination because you have ruined the route. In fact, it doesn’t even make you feel guilty. The end still in mind, it simply adjusts the plan from that point onward, as if the “wrong” turn was a part of the journey all along. The destination has not changed. Plan A may have switched to Plan B in your mind, but the outcome remains the goal, not self-invented praise for the journey.

Although Blaise Pascal was a mathematician who saw the created world as one of equations and precision, he saw the God who created this world as one who is innately personal, guiding, and accommodating. “[T]he God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation,” Pascal wrote in his Pensees, “a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy, who united himself with them in the depths of their soul…who makes them incapable of having any other end but him.“(1)

What if the God you followed is well aware that there are turns in life we can never undo, choices we cannot erase, and detours we were never expecting? Some of these turns God no doubt laments with us. But God is never deterred by our position. Plan B may be a phrase you use to punish yourself or others, but the God of Christianity is not any farther away in what you are calling Plan A than Plan A or C or D. In fact, God sees only one plan: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD to a struggling people, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” In this, God is ever at work redirecting your steps, while the end—God alone—remains the same. Despite broken roads and secondary paths, God is forever showing that the destination is unchanging, and in the end, “God’s best” comes into our lives not because of our own careful steps toward the divine but because of divine steps toward us. The God of the Christian is one whose plans are all-encompassing, whose arm is not too short to save, who goes the extra mile, and who takes every detour without mention, that even one will not remain lost.

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

(1) Blaise Pascal, Pensees (London: Peguin Books, 1993), 141-142, emphasis mine.

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The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him.(1)

The Gospel of Mark begins with this intriguing narrative of the Spirit compelling Jesus into the wilderness to be tested and to make his home among wild beasts. The original Greek language is so forceful as to imply that the Spirit literally expelled Jesus into this land of wild beasts and satanic attack. It is even more striking when compared to Matthew and Luke’s gospels, which both suggest that Jesus was “led by the Spirit” who accompanied him into the wilderness.(2) Despite Matthew and Luke’s gentler version, the point is still the same: the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tested and tormented by the devil. It seems natural to ask why the Spirit would compel Jesus into the wilderness.

The history of Israel and particularly the Exodus from Egypt gives some perspective on this question. After four hundred years of oppression and enslavement, God sent Moses to deliver the people and to lead them into the Promised Land. A great drama ensues between the “gods” of the Egyptians and the God of Israel. Ten plagues fall, the sea is parted, and the Egyptian army is swallowed up by the raging waters. And then we read: “Moses led Israel from the Red Sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the wilderness and found no water…. and the whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.”(3) Israel would spend the next forty years, the text tells us, wandering in that wilderness of lament and bitterness with God being put to the test. Would God provide for their needs or would they come out of Egypt only to die in the desert? From the narrative’s perspective, what began as a great deliverance stalls in the wilderness of the Sinai.

Like Israel before him, Jesus’s story, as recorded by Mark, begins with great drama. John the Baptist announces the Deliverer: Israel’s exile was over, for the Messiah had come. The Deliverer is baptized by John and in front of the crowds declared “the beloved Son” of God. What a tremendous beginning to his earthly ministry. And yet, like Israel, Jesus begins that earthly ministry not with healings and miracles, or with fanfare and great teachings, but by being “immediately cast out into the wilderness.”

As many biblical commentators have suggested, Jesus was re-enacting the great history of Israel in his own life and ministry. He was Israel’s Messiah, their deliverer, just as Moses had been. Yet, like Israel, Jesus would be tested and his test had to precede entry into the Promised Land. Jesus would be put to the test—would he provide for his people as their Messiah, their deliverer? Counter to the expectations of the people, this Deliverer would be crucified and offer his life as the means by which salvation was offered.

For Christians, Lent is a season in which the journey through the wilderness precedes Easter morning. Of course, what is enacted in the season is very much a part of lived experience of many in our world. Many dwell in wilderness spaces of suffering, disappointment, doubt, or sin. Promised lands of hope, fulfillment, and healing seem far off and foreign. In these lands, what do we do? Who will we turn to? In what, or in whom, do we place our trust? And, when put to the test, have the ‘gods’ we have chosen to save us prove to be true?

The journey of life is a journey that inevitably runs through the wilderness. We cannot escape it, nor can we go around it. And yet, in the life of Israel God brings bread from heaven and water from a rock in their wilderness sojourn. God was with them in the desert. Moreover, the gospels present a God who in Jesus Christ did not seek to escape the wilderness either, but was compelled into it. In his own testing, Jesus reveals that a new kind of life can be found even in those seemingly deserted places—God provides even there. While we will often wander in the wilderness, with God’s help we can indeed be transformed by it.

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

(1) Mark 1:12-13.
(2) Matthew 4:1; Luke 4:1.
(3) Exodus 15:22; 16:2.

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