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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  Love That Followed

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Writer Philip Yancey tells of his experience playing chess against a master player. He explains his rapid realization that no matter what move he made, no matter what strategy he chose, the master seemed to turn his play around to serve his own purposes. As I look back upon my life, it is so evident that the Master, that Hound of Heaven, has been on my trail, working all things out for God’s own ends—God’s own good and perfect ends, I might add.

In studying when the gospel first made inroads into my lineage, I have found that on both sides of my family, the first believers came from the highest cast of the Hindu priesthood six generations ago. The first Christian was a woman. She was interested in the message brought by missionaries, in spite of her family’s terrible displeasure. One day as she was about to leave the missionary compound in order to return home before her family found out, the doors of the compound were shut because of a cholera epidemic. Remaining with the missionaries until the time of the quarantine was past, she committed her life to God. Threat of disease and the walls of a closed compound were the freeing means of her coming to Christ.

Readers of English poetry will recall the turbulent life of Francis Thompson. His father wanted him to study at Oxford, but Francis lost his way in drugs and failed to make the grade time and again. This was a slumbering genius, if only his life could be rescued. When Francis finally succumbed to the pursuing Christ, he penned his immortal “Hound of Heaven”:

I fled Him down the nights and down the days.

I fled Him down the arches of the years.

I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind:

And in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

Down titanic glooms of chasmed fears

From those strong feet that followed, that followed after.

For though I knew His love that followed

Yet I was sore adread

Lest having Him I have naught else beside.

And he ends:

Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He whom thou seekest!

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest me.

I am utterly convinced that neither walls nor unfortunate mishaps nor poor decisions can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. Perhaps you have noticed footprints of one following closely across your own life. Will you follow them?

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Mustard Seed

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The stories Jesus told are inescapably weighted with ethos and revelation. Theologians have expounded chapters on the intricacies of even the simplest of his parables—agreeing and disagreeing along the way. Yet even so, and no doubt contributing to their appeal, the parables of Jesus are also simple enough to compel a child to listen:

“What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a mustard seed that a man cast in his garden; it grew and became a tree and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.”(1)

Though the theological and methodological approaches to this parable may be varied, perhaps in varying degrees each contends a similar truth: The kingdom of God holds much to be discovered, discussed, and held in wonder.

German theologian Joachim Jeremias argues that Jesus is not describing the kingdom as the mustard seed itself, but as the vision of the seed brought to fruition.(2) In other words, the kingdom of God is not the tiny seed, but the giant shrub into which it grows, and in whose boughs the birds make their nests. Jesus is looking for the audience to compare the kingdom of God to the final stage of the process from seedling to tree, and hence internalize the vision of a great and protective kingdom. Writes Jeremias, “The tree which shelters the birds is a common metaphor for a mighty kingdom which protects its vassals.”(2) For this influential scholar, the parable of the mustard seed depicts the sharp contrast between the kingdom of God in its fledging beginnings and the mighty kingdom that is breaking-in beyond all asking or perceiving. The kingdom of God is in the process of realization, and this is both an essential component for understanding the parable of the mustard seed, and every word Jesus ever said.

Others contend that the nature of metaphor itself is such that it leaves Jesus’s descriptions of the kingdom largely unarticulated, requiring hearers to draw out the conclusions based on what they know of him, the character of God, and the intricacies of life. The kingdom of God as it is compared to a grain of mustard planted in a garden sets up a point of contrast that is “creative of meaning,” to use the words of another theologian, and unending in dialogue: How is a kingdom like a tiny, planted seed? Who is the man who planted it? How is the realm of God like a tree with branches providing shelter? The conclusions are many—and transforming. Like all of his parables, the comparison of “kingdom” and “seed” sets hearers up for surprise. It is a metaphorical narrative that calls for participation, and leads hearers to a point of decision: Will you continue to see signs of the kingdom as futile and diminutive or will you open your eyes to the possibility of a great and hidden reality? For many scholars, this parable describes the advent of a radical world in its tiny beginnings. It subverts our well-ordered vision of what is, and leaves in its place a system of signs that point us to the person of Jesus and the kingdom he proclaims. We are invited into a conversation about the kingdom of God and its surprising and transcendent presence in our everyday situations.

Still other renderings of the kingdom and the mustard seed weigh in on the social context and cultural conventions of the first century world of the parables. As a Jewish rabbi speaking parabolically of the kingdom of God within a Jewish and Hellenistic context, Jesus would have conceivably elicited reactions quite different than ours today. William Herzog’s description of Mediterranean life as daily affected by insufficient and limited resources might illumine reactions of the audience to the great promise of the kingdom Jesus describes. If everything surrounding first century peasant life seemed in short supply, the description of the kingdom of heaven as a negligible grain of mustard growing into a great tree would undoubtedly be received in earnest wonder. The kingdom of God as the greatest of all shrubs reverses the imagery of status and social-standing by turning the smallest of all seeds into something of momentous proportions. The promise of shelter in the shade of the branches of God’s great reach would also have been a subversion of order to those who were slaves to the land beneath those branches.

In each of these approaches to Jesus’s unlikely comparison, we find truths and wonders worth gleaning as if from a great and fruitful tree. The parable of the mustard seed depicts the inconspicuous ministry of Jesus and the sometimes hidden signs of his significance as holding a potential far beyond metaphor or imagination, culture or history. The kingdom of God is not in the future only, nor is it only at hand in a history we cannot reach; it is here even now, reaching out with branches that bid all to come and dwell. As with all of Jesus’s stories, which “leap out of their historical situation and confront us as if they had not yet spoken their final word,” this parable of the kingdom will continue to surprise us if we will continue to inquire.(3) The great reality of the kingdom has been planted within the life and words of the human Christ, always ready to break forth the fullness of meaning, gradually or suddenly, or sometimes both.

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

(1) This parable is told in Luke 13:18-19, Mark 4:30-32, and Matthew 13:31-32.

(2) Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1972), 102.

(3) David Gowler quoting Richard Pevear in What Are They Saying about the Parables? (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), 2.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  A Peaceable Kingdom

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Where I live, I often see banners, signs in windows, and bumper stickers on cars with the message: “War is not the answer.” While I more or less agree that armed conflict rarely solves the problem of human violence, I am also very aware that a propensity towards violence and aggression are often responses that seem normal for most people. Perhaps this explains why in 2010 over thirty-five major conflicts were happening around the world, some of which have been going on since 1950. The United Nations defines “major wars” as military conflicts inflicting a thousand battlefield deaths or more per year.(1) Looking at these numbers of wars around the world would indicate that violent conflict seems an inevitable aspect of being human.

Of course, one doesn’t need to look much further than one’s own backyard to know that conflicts large and small are a daily struggle. Within local communities, within families, and within ourselves, we are often at war. Our wars may not be fought with sword or gun, but we often pursue a violent agenda with lawsuits and slander, our words and our actions. Simple misunderstandings turn into aggressive power struggles, and we find lethal weapons to cut down or wound our perceived antagonists. War may not be the answer, but solutions to the reality of violence in our hearts and in our world are not easily forthcoming.

Given this propensity towards conflict, I can be tempted to believe it was simply wishful thinking for Jesus to speak of peacemakers at all in his famous Sermon on the Mount. I am tempted to hear his pronouncement of blessing for these peacemakers as an impossible ideal for one such as myself so easily offended and so quick to defend. But Jesus was surely aware of the violent predilections of human beings when he said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9). After all, once his cousin John the Baptist was put into prison, Jesus was the one who said, “[F]rom the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matthew 11:12). Indeed, like his cousin, he too would suffer violence against himself, being falsely accused, tortured by Roman soldiers, and then crucified with two criminals.

So what did Jesus have in mind when he pronounced blessing on the peacemakers? From within his own Jewish context, peace, or shalom, was far more than the absence of conflict, although it would surely include that. Shalom implies a holistic sense of well-being for an individual or a nation. It means harmony in relationships, between individuals or nations, and it is understood to be God’s good gift for God’s people. It also carries the meaning of salvation, wholeness, and healing—both for the people of Israel, and for those who would be blessed by Israel through her witness and proclamation. Peace is the well-being and prosperity of life that results from fully reconciled, healed, and harmonious relationships with God, others, and all of creation.

Jesus pronounces blessing on all those who advance peace because in being peacemakers, they are engaging in the very deepest activity of God. They are behaving as God’s children. Thus, Jesus identifies them as “the children of God” because they are imitating God’s divine work in the world as they live shalom and invite others to experience it. Peacemakers are those who receive God’s saving work into their lives, as ones who have found peace with God, and then make peace in the lives of others. The apostle Paul echoes this call to be peacemakers in his letter to the Roman believers in Jesus: “If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”

This is exactly what Tom and Libby Little were doing in Afghanistan for over thirty years, until Tom was murdered, along with nine others from his team, on Thursday, August 5, 2010.(2) As medical workers and eye-doctors, the team went to the remotest and often conflict-ridden parts of Afghanistan to bring shalom through medical mission. In an article written just prior to receiving the news that her husband had been murdered, Libby Little spoke of their years as peacemakers, suffering as God’s servants in a war-torn world: “God blessed those occasions and visited us with his power. His amateur followers, stricken with stage fright, forgetting their lines, were acting out in miniature something of his own Grand Narrative—Immanuel, God with us.”(3)

The blessing of Jesus on peacemakers occurs in a world where violence indeed continues. This reality, at the very least, is implicitly acknowledged as Jesus extends blessing on those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness. As in the case of the Little’s, and in our own daily conflicts and warfare, peacemaking often involves the hard work of enduring, and sometimes suffering violence, without giving in to the human desire to take retaliatory violence into our hearts and hands. Those who pursue peace are blessed as God’s children, imitating the action of the Father to bring the children peace.

 

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

(1) “The World at War,” http://GlobalSecurity.org, November 11, 2010.

(2) “The Death of 10 Members of the Nuristan Eye Care Team,” International Assistance Mission, http://iam-afghanistan.org/, November 13, 2010.

(3) Libby Little, “A Small Version of the Grand Narrative,” Christianity Today, August 2010.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Pharisee

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“You are nothing but a Pharisee,” said Maggie with vehemence. “You thank God for nothing but your own virtues; you think they are great enough to win you everything else.”(1)

Whether familiar or new to the scathing words of Maggie Tulliver to her brother Tom in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, it is clear that she is not speaking complimentary. The word “Pharisee,” as this interchange illustrates, is often used as something of a synonym for hypocrite, a haughty individual with a holier-than-thou air about them. Webster’s dictionary further articulates this common usage, defining the adjective “pharisaical” as being marked by “hypocritical censorious self-righteousness,” or “pretending to be highly moral or virtuous without actually being so.”(2) To be called a Pharisee is far from a compliment; it is to be accused of living with a false sense of righteousness, being blind and foolish with self-deception, or carrying oneself with a smug and hypocritical legalism.

The etymology of the word from its roots as a proper noun to its use as an adjective is one intertwined with history, drawing on the very tone with which a rabbi from Nazareth once spoke to the religious group that bore the name. In seven consecutive statements recorded in the book of Matthew, Jesus begins his stern rebukes with the scathing introductions: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” “Woe to you blind guides!” His conclusion is equally pejorative: “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?”(3) The word “Pharisee” has become far more associated with this critique than its greater context. Thus Maggie can call her brother a Pharisee and not be thinking of the Jewish sect of leaders for which Jesus had harsh words, but of the harsh words themselves.

Yet taking something out of context, even if Webster’s dictionary grants the permission, can be dangerously misleading. These were not always the connotations of the word Pharisee, and we do ourselves and the words of Jesus a disservice by assuming that his harsh words are all we need to remember about them. Quite ironically, the description “pharisaical” would once have been a great compliment. The Pharisees were highly regarded guardians of the strict interpretation and application of Jewish Law. They were known for their zeal and for their uncompromising ways of following the God of their fathers. It is likely that the apostle Paul was a Pharisee, and it is suggested that much of his Christian theology owes something to the shape and content of this earlier training.(4) In other words, to be a Pharisee was not an easy life riddled with loopholes and duplicities, like we might assume. The Pharisees were so certain there was a right way to follow God that they sought to follow this God to that very letter with all of their lives.

In this light, Jesus’s words seem a little harsher, his tone a little crueler—and perhaps his warnings a little closer to home. In the Pharisees, Jesus scolded the very best of the religious crowd, those who dedicated everything, and cared the deepest about following God. If Jesus came today into churches and singled out the ministers who work the hardest, the youth who are most involved, and the families who serve most consistently and called them a brood of vipers, we would be hurt and confused and even defensive. This is exactly what happened amongst the Pharisees.

But not all were so defensive that they refused to hear. Nicodemus came to Jesus in the obscurity of darkness and found himself confronted by a conversation about flesh and light. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a member of the Jewish ruling council, who was highly regarded. This most likely explains the veil of night by which he sought to meet Jesus; the comments against his fellow Pharisees were not met with open arms. Even so, it was an act of faith to seek out this controversial young man from Galilee; it was an act of humility to grapple with a message that thoroughly confused him, accusations that cut to his very core, and words that called even the God he knew into question. Yet this initial meeting with Jesus was for Nicodemus the beginning of life made new. This Pharisee who had come so far in his faith, who had lived so great a commitment to God, had not come so far as to reject the idea that even he might need to stop and turn around. Might the Pharisee in all of us respond similarly.

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

(1) George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (New York: Penguin, 2002), 394.

(2) Merriam-Webster Online, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pharisaical, and Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (Cleveland: William Collins Publishers, 1980), 1066.

(3) Matthew 23:33.

(4) N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 182.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A World Invisible

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

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

The angels keep their ancient places—

Turn but a stone and start a wing!

‘Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces,

That miss the many-splendored thing.(3)

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

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

O world invisible, we view thee,

Intangible, we touch thee,

Unknowable, we know thee,

Inapprehensible, we clutch thee.

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

Does the fish soar to find the ocean?

The eagle plunge to find the air—

That we ask of the stars in motion

If they have rumor of thee there?

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

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

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

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)

Cry—and upon thy so sore loss

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder

Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

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

Cry—clinging to Heaven by the hems;

And lo, Christ walking on the water,

Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

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

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

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

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

(2) Isaiah 64:1.

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

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

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  Faith and the Whole Picture

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I’ve been trying to avoid using the word ‘faith’ recently. It just doesn’t get the message across. ‘Faith’ is a word that’s now misused and twisted. ‘Faith’ today is what you try to use when the reasons are stacking up against what you think you ought to believe. Greg Koukl sums up the popular view of faith, “It’s religious wishful thinking, in which one squeezes out spiritual hope by intense acts of sheer will. People of ‘faith’ believe the impossible. People of ‘faith’ believe that which is contrary to fact. People of ‘faith’ believe that which is contrary to evidence. People of ‘faith’ ignore reality.” It shouldn’t therefore come as a great surprise to us, that people raise their eyebrows when ‘faith’ in Christ is mentioned. Is it strange that they seem to prefer what seems like reason over insanity?

It’s interesting that the Bible doesn’t overemphasize the individual elements of the whole picture of faith, like we so often do. But what does the Bible say about faith? Is it what Simon Peter demonstrates when he climbs out of the boat and walks over the water towards Jesus? Or is it what Thomas has after he has put his hand in Jesus’s side? Interestingly, biblical faith isn’t believing against the evidence. Instead, faith is a kind of knowing that results in action. The clearest definition comes from Hebrews 11:1. This verse says, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” In fact, when the New Testament talks about faith positively it only uses words derived from the Greek root [pistis], which means ‘to be persuaded.’ In those verses from Hebrews, we find the words, “hope,” “assurance,” “conviction” that is, confidence. Now, what gives us this confidence?

Christian faith is not belief in the absence of evidence. It is the proper response to the evidence. Koukl explains that, “Christian faith cares about the evidence…the facts matter. You can’t have assurance for something you don’t know you’re going to get. You can only hope for it. This is why the resurrection of Jesus is so important. It gives assurance to the hope. Because of a Christian view of faith, Paul is able to say in 1 Corinthians 15 that when it comes to the resurrection, if we have only hope, but no assurance—if Jesus didn’t indeed rise from the dead in time/space history—then we are of most men to be pitied. This confidence Paul is talking about is not a confidence in a mere ‘faith’ resurrection, a mythical resurrection, a story-telling resurrection. Instead, it’s a belief in a real resurrection. If the real resurrection didn’t happen, then we’re in trouble. The Bible knows nothing of a bold leap-in-the-dark faith, a hope-against-hope faith, a faith with no evidence. Rather, if the evidence doesn’t correspond to the hope, then the faith is in vain, as even Paul has said.”

So in conclusion, faith is not a kind of religious hoping that you do in spite of the facts. In fact, faith is a kind of knowing that results in doing, a knowing that is so passionately and intelligently faithful to Jesus Christ that it will not submit to fideism, scientism, nor any other secularist attempt to divert and cauterize the human soul by hijacking knowledge.

Tom Price is an academic tutor at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Oxford, England.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Scandalous Windows

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Christian theologians often speak of the “scandal of particularity” that surrounds the gospel. The absurdity of God becoming incarnate in Christ within human history is hard to escape. In other words, it is a scandal to suggest that God somehow stepped into a particular moment in time, the heavens somehow opening like a window. It is scandalous that an unknowable God should somehow become so particularly known.

The prayer of Isaiah conveyed in chapter 64 is one that boldly confronts us with this very scandal. The particularity of the moment in which God, prophet, and the people of Israel are speaking is unmistakable: “Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come down! That the mountains would quake at your presence” (64:1). This cry of longing and remembrance is one wrought out of a great and terrible history, the storied and convoluted relationship of a God called Yahweh and his chosen, wandering people. And yet, there are certainly many who, when reading these words, feel as if Isaiah has torn out their own storied and convoluted hearts and placed them upon the page: Oh that you would tear open the heavens and come nearer! Multiplying the scandal of this particular ancient longing is this Father who is as able to speak to a particular post-exilic people as He is to you and me, here and now.

Adding to this picture, Isaiah’s words strike me as those a person in Bethlehem could likely have been uttering on the night Christ was born (or you or me hundreds of years later). In the days of Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, the people of Israel were living in a period of silence. It had been over four hundred years since God had spoken of a coming redeemer and his forerunner through the prophet Malachi. Malachi had called the people again to anticipate and to be prepared for the day that was coming. But in the quiet nights of four hundred years, even the faithful stumble and doubt. How long had devoted pilgrims been repeating to themselves: “From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him” (64:4). Yet on doubt-ridden nights, the waiting was no doubt for them as wearying as it is today, the silence daunting, the longing unsilenceable, convinced it is we who are foul and repelling. “[Y]ou have hidden your face from us, and have melted us into the hand of our iniquity,” laments Isaiah (64:7).

Whether uttered aloud or groaned silently, how often our longings convey something of the same convoluted emotions—trust and fear, hope and dejection, frustration and guilt. Ours, too, are the cries of a desperate people, wrought with a sense of longing, burdened by a sense of shame. Isaiah’s next question—”How then can we be saved?”—is one we, too, might utter, at times cynically, accusingly; while other times whispered as a prayer or burdened confession (64:5).

Regardless, it is precisely here, in the darkness of post-exilic Jerusalem, in the night of God’s silence, or in the cry of one who is all too aware of the rift of sin, that the very particular cry for God to come down is met with the scandalous assurance of radical and particular belonging. Indeed, Isaiah concludes to God, “[E]ven if no one is calling your name, bestirring himself to take hold of you, because you have hidden your face from us, and melted us down by means of our iniquities, now, Yahweh, you are still our father! We are the clay, and you are our potter. All of us are the work of your hand!” (64:7-8). It is reminiscent of Bonhoeffer’s description of a mining accident and the hope of the Incarnation as the distinct sound of knocking to those trapped beneath the weight of the earth. There is someone coming whether we want him or not, and he is calling your name.

The great window of a torn-open heavens and the massive ladder of a God who descends are the expectant images that tell us the hopeful story of a God who is scandalously near—whether we want God to be near or not. Picturing this hope, our imaginations can run wild at the thought of quaking mountains, awesome deeds, and great reversals we did not expect. But so these windows and ladders are the stirring and expectant vessels of smaller and seemingly insignificant glimpses of a God among us. Even in the soul who can only partially admit that he is a wandering child is something of the radical reach of a Father’s love. In the company of a friend through cancer or the sting of death is the image of the one who is nearer than a friend.

In Isaiah’s particular cry is an invitation to pay attention to the unlikely and the unexpected in the great windows of history and the small windows of daily life. Isaiah’s particular cry is an invitation to hear the cries of those before us as well as the cries of our hearts, which may just be answered by the cry of a God who hears particularly. Indeed, how scandalous is the image of the infant Christ looking up at his young mother, his own cries joining humanity’s own? There was a particular moment in history when humanity heard God weep. And there will be a day in history when this same Christ will dry every tear from our eyes.

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 – Love as the Substance of Everything

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Oft quoted at weddings, preeminent celebrations of romantic love, a poem is read extolling the virtue of love:

Love is patient and kind

Love is not jealous or boastful…

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, love never ends.

What many may not realize is that this is a poem from the pen of the apostle Paul. And while this poem is used to paint a picture of young love at weddings, its intent far transcends the romance of the occasion, and a fairly limited understanding of this virtue.

Romantic love was not in the apostle’s mind when he penned this verse. Instead, tremendous conflict in the fledgling Corinthian church caused Paul great grief. There were dissensions and quarrels over all kinds of issues in this community; quarrels over leadership and allegiance, over moral standards, over marriage and singleness, over theology, and quarrels so extreme that lawsuits were being filed!(1)

So after reminding the Corinthian followers of Jesus that they represented his body—a body with many members and unique gifts and functions—Paul lifts up love as the height of what it means to be a mature human being:

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing….Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away….but now abide faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love (13:1-3, 8, 13).

Often, as I survey various communities in our world today, I see the same kind of division and derision, as was present in the Corinthian community. More often than not, one encounters a war of information, argumentation based on this book or that claim, this person’s authority or that person’s expertise. Quick to criticize and lambaste, noisy gongs and clanging cymbals abound; but the love that never fails is a rare and fleeting occurrence. How does one make sense of all this, particularly in light of Paul’s proclamation that without love we are nothing?

Perhaps part of the reason why there is so little love is that there is a fear that to love is somehow to compromise. Many feel the strong need to disassociate with the way love is commonly defined; as unthinking acceptance, an anything goes, an ‘I’m ok you’re ok’ easy love as bland and undefined as gelatin. Surely, the Apostle Paul’s understanding goes far beyond this flabby view of love. After all, he spends the majority of his first letter to the Corinthians exhorting their bad behavior by virtue of their lack of love.

Yet, I sometimes worry that a reticence to extend love to others without condition belies a forgetfulness about the conditions of our acceptance by God. Paul writes to the Romans, “But God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (5:8). If God loved us while we were yet sinners, why do we find it so hard to love others?;

In a world that largely perceives Christians to be in-fighters, hypocritical, argumentative, and judgmental naysayers, would it not demonstrate maturity to reexamine our fear of what it might look like if we tried to take Paul’s words about love to heart?

Would it, or could it look like creating seminaries in the prisons, as has been done at Louisiana’s maximum security prison at Angola? Would it, or could it look like working with different Christian fellowships towards a vital social goal despite denominational differences or theological disagreements? Would it, or could it look like proactive movement to engage the culture rather than reactive retreat? Would it, or should it look like growing into mature human beings? Paul continues,

When I was a child, I used to speak as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.

In Jesus, the full stature and maturity of humanity is on display. He taught that love was the summary of all that had gone before, and fulfillment of the entire law and the message of the prophets—love God and love your neighbor as yourself. If the greatest of the virtues is love, as affirmed by Jesus and the apostle Paul, can all who seek to follow envision becoming a community that seeks to make love their chief responsibility and goal?(2) Now abide faith, hope and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

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

(1) See 1 Corinthians 1:10-14; 3:1-10; 4:14-21; 5:1-13; 6:1-11; 7; 8:1-4 as examples.

(2) Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Kind, Beautiful, and Foolish

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In his book The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky sets forth the bold assertion that “beauty will save the world.” The sheer number of ways in which this quote has been applied attests to the risk inherent in the idea, and perhaps inherent in beauty itself. Certainly the church during the Reformation recognized the risks involved in imaging God, using beauty to communicate an incommunicable mystery, the impersonal to describe a Person. For good reason, many are cautious when we hear a statement such as the one in this novel.

But Dostoevsky did not pronounce the idea with the naïveté with which it is often quoted. He did not have in mind the kind of beauty we worship in the fashion or beauty industries nor did he have in mind an impersonal object or a purely abstract notion, a distinct but distant ideal. On the contrary, Dostoevsky entertains the idea in a person, in Myshkin, who lives the quality of beauty as if an inescapable quality of his inmost being. For Myshkin’s inclination is to help rather than to harm, to give mercy rather than malice, forgiving again and again, though surrounded by people who do not. In fact, it is this group who tirelessly labels Myshkin the “idiot” because he refuses to participate in the disparaging and destructive ugliness of their own ways but instead takes what is cruel and repulsive in them and their culture and dispels it. They hate him for it; they believe him a fool. But it is a kind and beautiful foolishness.

I sometimes wonder if we have so stripped away the possibility of actual beauty in our encounters with the divine that we not only miss something real of God and others to behold in the world, but we miss opportunities to show the world the beauty of God—in hands and faces, in people who bestow crowns of beauty instead of ashes, in communities that repair ruined cities instead of causing further devastation.(1) Theologian William Dyrness laments the modern mentality that has somehow lost the sense of the “wholeness that beauty reflects.”(2) We are so mindful of beauty’s limitations; but isn’t it we who are the limited as the depicters of God’s beauty? “[When I look at] the moon and the stars that you have established,” sang David, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them?” (Psalm 8:3). Describing the very wholeness that beauty reflects, Dyrness continues, “Based on God’s continuing presence in the Spirit of Christ, God is somehow present in all beauty.”(3)

That is to say, the divine presence can be seen in the beauty of bringing the cup of cold water, in the stained glass mural of the great cathedral, or in the life that sits in broken shards before the potter and in the lives who sit with her. Moreover, if beauty is revelation, if creativeness is more than an object but an action of both play and work in God’s kingdom, if the Incarnation is a call to participate in the glory of God as persons who imbibe that glory, then there is most certainty in beauty the potential to save, for God is both the Source and Subject.

In his 1970 Nobel Laureate lecture in literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made the bold suggestion: “Perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth. If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, or not allowed through—then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that very place, and in so doing fulfill the work of all three?”(4) In other words, perhaps we cannot afford to omit the possibility of God reaching out to the world in beauty, in mystery, and transcendence.

Of course, this is not to say that beauty is not a risk for the community of God. We are sinful and limited creatures in our ability to appreciate true beauty, and it is often an elusive concept to understand practically. We are artistically formed at the hands of a God who is far beyond us. We must indeed remember with David that it is we who fall short, we who must maintain the perspective of humility and keep before us a sense of mystery. But like Myshkin who attempted to rise above the ugliness of his world, we must also have the courage to risk beauty, living as those who recognize the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and so choose to boldly proclaim and reflect this beauty in a world that would have otherwise.

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

(1) See Isaiah 61.

(2) William Dyrness, Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue (Grand Rapids, Baker Academic, 2001), 90.

(3) Ibid., 90.

(4) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1970, from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980, Ed. Tore Frängsmyr (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1993).

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  How Should We Pray?

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Huckleberry Finn first heard about prayer from Miss Watson, who told him that prayer was something you did everyday and that you’d get what you asked for. So he tried three or four times praying for hooks to complete his fishing line, but when he still didn’t get what he asked for decided that “No, there ain’t nothing in it.”

Prayer is a curious activity. It is one we seem, at times, regardless of belief or creed, almost inclined naturally toward, while other times, like Huck, almost as naturally conclude we either can’t make it work or conclude there ain’t nothing in it.

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples asked him to teach them how to pray. Jesus said to them, “When you pray, say:

‘Father, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

And forgive us our sins,

for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

And do not bring us to the time of trial.’”(1)

The Lord’s Prayer, which Christian’s around the world still hold and practice today, comes out of this context—that is, out of a plea for help with prayer and out of the praying of Jesus himself. It is not just the good advice Jesus had to offer about praying; it is his praying. In fact, giving his followers this prayer, Jesus, like John, was following a common rabbinic pattern. When a rabbi taught a prayer, he would use it to teach his disciples the most distinctive, concise, essential elements of his own theological teachings. Thus, disciples would learn to pray as their teacher prayed, and from then on, when a disciple’s prayer was heard, it would sound like that of his teacher’s prayers, bearing his own mark and posture before God.

As this suggests, when Christians pray the Lord’s Prayer today, it is simultaneously an offering of the voice of Jesus, a declaration of belonging to him, and a pronunciation of the lessons he wanted his followers most to know and to hold near.

Somewhat different than fishing hooks, the prayer for daily bread is foundational; a literal need. News of world food shortages, urban food deserts, the prevalence of malnourishment, and volatile food prices remind us with repetition that cries for basic provision are appropriate and necessary. Fifteenth century theologian Martin Luther spoke of the prayer for daily bread as the plea for “everything included in the necessities and nourishment for our bodies such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, farm, fields, livestock, money, property, an upright spouse, upright children, upright members of the household, upright and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, decency, honor, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.”(2) In other words, bread is not merely the private concern of those who need something to eat. It is far broader than this, including far more than bread, and far more than isolated individuals before God. Our daily bread is something friends, neighbors, communities, economic situations, and governments affect collectively. Christ’s prayer for daily bread, then, is a prayer for food and clothing, but also for good neighbors, good rulers, and good conscience as we face need and want and hope in unison together.

As such, a prayer for daily bread can be a reminder that we do not live in a vacuum before God or the world. Rather, we live in communities where we are responsible for one another. So if we pray for daily bread, like Jesus, we pray for God’s care and provision. But subsequently, we are praying against the things in life that prevent God’s provisions for our neighbors as much as for ourselves. This may well be corruption or systems of social injustice; it may also be our own hardened hearts, fearful dispositions, or a self-consumed and consuming living. When our neighbor prays for daily bread, our neighbor prays for our help, in the hands of the one who provides all things.

To pray the words Jesus invited us to pray means we pray out of the same paradox in which Jesus prayed himself. He was both the Son who knew he would need the Father’s provision to get through the days before him and the Son who poured out his life for the crowds and individuals that needed him. Praying for daily bread, we are simultaneously the wealthy who can respond in gratitude for all that God has given us and the impoverished who cry out for the daily bread we need and the God who sustains all things. We are both the rich and the poor, the trespasser and the one trespassed against, united to our neighbors in ways we are constantly invited to imagine. We join ancient ancestors who prayed for physical nourishment in the desert, and with them know that we are still hungry. In difficult days, in plentiful days, the invitation of Christian prayer is the invitation of the Spirit to join in a united cry—”Give us this day our daily bread”—placed before the bread of life who comes to give life to the world.

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

(1) Luke 11:1-4.

(2) Martin Luther, “The Small Catechism,” The Book of Concord, 357.

Alistair Begg

Alistair Begg – Know Your Election

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For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you. 1 Thessalonians 1:4

Many persons want to know their election before they look to Christ, but that is not possible; it is only to be discovered by “looking to Jesus.”1 If you desire to ascertain your own election, after the following manner shall you assure your heart before God.

Do you feel yourself to be a lost, guilty sinner? Go straight to the cross of Christ, and tell Jesus so, and tell Him that you have read in the Bible, “Whoever comes to me I will never cast out.”2 Tell Him that He has said, “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”3 Look to Jesus and believe on Him, and you shall make proof of your election directly, for as surely as you believe, you are elect.

If you will give yourself wholly up to Christ and trust Him, then you are one of God’s chosen ones; but if you stop and say, “I want to know first whether I am elect,” you do not know what you are asking. Go to Jesus, just as you are, in all your guilt. Leave all curious inquiry about election alone. Go straight to Christ, and hide in His wounds, and you shall know your election. The assurance of the Holy Spirit shall be given to you, so that you shall be able to say, “I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me.”4

Christ was at the everlasting council-He can tell you whether you were chosen or not; but you cannot find it out in any other way. Go and put your trust in Him, and His answer will be, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.”5 There will be no doubt about His having chosen you when you have chosen Him.

Sons we are through God’s election,

Who in Jesus Christ believe.

1) Hebrews 12:2   2) John 6:37  3) 1 Timothy 1:15   4) 2 Timothy 1:15   5) Jeremiah 31:3

Devotional material is taken from “Morning and Evening,” written by C.H. Spurgeon, revised and updated by Alistair Begg.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Is Faith?

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“Faith is believing what you want to believe, yet cannot prove.”

Sadly, many people, including some Christians, live with this definition of faith. For some it feels liberating. It means being able to believe in anything you want to believe. No explanation is required, indeed, no explanation can be given; it is just a matter of faith. For others, such a definition is sickening. Embracing faith means you stop thinking. As faith increases, reason and meaning eventually disappear. No explanations can be given, and none can be expected. Thus, living in faith is living in the dark.

For both groups, the problem is the same. By starting with the wrong definition of faith, they have asked the wrong question, are dealing with the wrong problem, and so have ended up with the wrong answer. Faith is not wishful thinking. It is not about believing in things that do not exist. It neither makes all things believable nor meaning impossible.

So what is the right definition of faith? “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” writes the author of Hebrews. A few verses later faith is similarly defined as knowing that God exists and that God rewards those who earnestly seek Him.

Perhaps the best word we can use to translate the Greek word “pistis” (usually translated faith) is the word “trust” or “trustworthy.” Suppose you tell a friend that you have faith in her. What does that mean? It means two things. First, you are sure the person you are talking to actually exists. And second, you are convinced she is trustworthy; you can believe what she says and trust in her character.

It is in this way that the writer of Hebrews talks about faith in God. Faith is knowing that God is real and that you can trust in God’s promises. You cannot trust someone who isn’t there, nor can you rely on someone whose promises are not reliable. This is why faith is talked about as the substance of things hoped for and as the evidence of things not seen. Both words carry with them a sense of reality. Our hope is not wishful thinking. Faith does not make God real. On the contrary, faith is the response to a real God who wants to be known to us:

“I am the Lord, and there is no other;

besides me there is no god.

I arm you, though you do not know me,

so that they may know, from the rising of the sun

and from the west, that there is no one besides me;

I am the Lord, and there is no other” (Isaiah 45:5-6).

Ever since the church began, the refrain has always been the same: Come, believe, follow the light of the world. It has never appealed for people to leap into the dark; no such invitation is found anywhere in Scripture. Instead, we are called to step into the light. The Christian gospel is not a message that revels in ignorance. It is the revelation of God in the person of Christ, so that we might know there is no other. The Christian is called to see things as they really are, and not as she would simply like them to be. We trust in a God who has been revealed to us in the Son and the Spirit. We believe because God is real.

The Christian gospel invites you to delve into reality. It commands you to be honest in your commitment to know that which is true. Is Jesus real? Who did he claim to be? Is he really alive today? Faith comes in response to knowing the answers to these questions, even as Christ is calling you near. But don’t stop after the initial introductions! Just as you are able to put more trust in someone as you grow to know him, so faith increases as you grow in your relationship with Christ. There is a God who is real and true; there is a God who is near and longing to gather you nearer. The great joy of the Christian faith is found in the person who invites us to trust and believe.

Michael Ramsden is European director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in the United Kingdom.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – On Earth as It Is in Heaven

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I don’t know what it is as children that makes us readily picture God as seated high above us. From childhood, we seem to nurture pictures of heaven and all its wonderment as that which spatially exists “above,” while we and all of our worries exist on earth “below.” While this may simply illustrate our need for metaphors as we learn to relate to the world around us, there is also biblical imagery that seems to attest the portrayal. Depicting the God who exists beyond all we know, the Scripture writers describe the divine throne as “high and lofty,” the name of the LORD as existing above all names.

Yet even metaphors can be misleading when they cease to point beyond themselves. Though the Scriptures use the language and imagery of loftiness, they also attest that God’s existence is far more than something “above” us. Author Steven Chase notes the danger in seeing God primarily above and our pilgrimage simply in terms of ascent. He writes, “[T]o construe the spiritual journey exclusively as a path from “below” to “above” tends to create chasms—often unbridgeable—between body and soul, the beginner and the adept, the active and the contemplative life, and the powerless and the powerful.”(1)

In the minds of many Christians, a chasm likewise exists between the kingdom of heaven and the world in which we now live. The kingdom of heaven is seen as the place we are journeying toward, the better country the writer of Hebrews describes. In contrast, our place on earth is seen as temporary; like Abraham, we are merely passing through. As a result, chasms stand between kingdom and earth, today and tomorrow, the physical and the spiritual. Whether intentionally or otherwise, the earth becomes something fleeting and irrelevant—one more commodity here for our use, like shampoo bottles in hotel bathrooms—while Christ is away preparing our permanent rooms. When the Christian pilgrimage is seen an ascent to another world, whether articulated or subconscious, this world soon becomes superfluous and God a distant caretaker.

This chasm not only belies a posture irresponsible for those called to love their neighbors and cultivate their surroundings, it betrays the identity and decree of a good creator, and negates the words of our most sacred prayer. What does it mean that we pray God’s kingdom come, God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven? What does it mean that Christ repeatedly declared the kingdom of God is here and now among us? What does it mean that for lack of human praise the very rocks will cry out at the glory of their creator and the trees will clap their hands?

Wendell Barry attempts to answer these questions with applications for the Christian pilgrim. “All creatures live by God’s spirit, portioned out to them, and breathe his breath. To ‘lay up…treasures in heaven,’ then, cannot mean to be spiritual at the earth’s expense, or to despise or condemn the earth for the sake of heaven. It means exactly the opposite: do not desecrate or depreciate these gifts, which take part with us in the being of God, by turning them into worldly ‘treasure.’”(2) Far from being a non-spiritual, kingdom-irrelevant commodity, the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. Far from a God concerned merely with the heavens, surely the Lord is in this place whether we are aware of it or not.

The Spirit of God is active not only among the church, or believers across the world—or even merely people throughout the earth. God is moving over the earth and all its life, creating and sustaining the natural world.(3) While we are indeed strangers looking to a heavenly kingdom, this does not mean we are estranged to the earth around us. While we long with the faithful for a better country, we are called to care and cultivate on earth the things we look toward in heaven. We are given eyes to see God’s kingdom all around us, even as we pray to see it more fully on earth as it is in heaven.

Moreover, that we are going to a better country does not necessarily mean we are going to an entirely different country. In the words of one author who bids us to see the cure of Christ as reaching tangibly here and now, as far as the curse is found, “To suggest that the sin of man so corrupted his creation that God cannot fix it but can only junk it in favor of some other world is to say that ultimately the kingdom of evil is more powerful than the kingdom of God. It makes sin more powerful than redemption, and Satan the victor over God. Reducing the gospel to a strictly spiritual dimension of human existence concedes everything outside of that dimension to the enemy.”(4) Like our lives, which show shadows of the fall even as we behold the light of redemption, all of creation groans along with us for that which we now see in part but will one day see in full. The Christian message testifies to the presence of the kingdom of God among the world. Thus the Christian life is one that does not turn its back on the world here and now, but tends to life as visionaries of God’s grace, cultivators of healing, and catalysts for transformation throughout all the earth. Indeed, a follower of Christ is one who testifies to the radical work of the Cross and the uniqueness of Christ Jesus who, unlike any other, came to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.

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

(1) Steven Chase, The Tree of Life: Models of Christian Prayer (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 145.

(2) Wendell Barry, “God and Country,” Eds. Wayne G. Boulton, Thomas D. Kennedy, Allen Verhey, From Christ to the World: Introductory Readings in Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1994), 526.

(3) See Psalm 104, Psalm 148, Isaiah 55:9-13, Romans 8:19-22.

(4) Michael D. Williams, Far as the Curse is Found: The Covenant Story of Redemption (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2005), 21.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Gaps

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Cognitive dissonance, the study of psychology tells us, is the internal tension that results when our experience doesn’t match our professed beliefs and values. It is that sense of unease when we encounter something that contradicts what we have held to be true. We often experience this tension in the course of academic training as we learn new ideas. Or we can be jolted as we meet new people with vastly different backgrounds and cultures from our own.

But perhaps dissonance is felt most acutely when it occurs in the realm of faith commitments and expectations. Why is it that even when the right thing is done, the good action taken, nothing appears to change in my life or circumstances? If suffering is merely an illusion, why do so many people experience so much pain? How is it that marriage can be so difficult and yet God’s ideal for relationships? How is it that prayer seemingly goes unanswered even in the face of faithful and persistent prayers? How do I reconcile personal and global suffering with a view of a good and benevolent Divinity governing the world?

Some, to be sure, might claim to have never experienced (or noticed) cognitive dissonance as a reality in their own lives. There are always quick explanations offered for those who don’t find it quite as easy to reconcile the gaps between beliefs and experience: We have drifted away from our moral center. We have not studied enough, or prayed enough. We have not understood right teaching. Perhaps there are times when all of these explanations may be true.

But is it always so easy to explain dissonance away? I asked this question anew when I looked at the questions raised by John the Baptist as presented in the New Testament. John the Baptist was the cousin of Jesus of Nazareth. Like Jesus, he had an extraordinary beginning, having been born to parents beyond child-bearing years. The last of the great, Hebraic prophets, the gospels portray John with all the intensity and moral outrage of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or Malachi. John was fearless in his proclamation issuing the call of repentance to sinners and the religious leaders alike. He even baptized Jesus in preparation for his own itinerant ministry. He was resolute in his stand against immorality and hypocrisy. He understood his unique and limited role in preparation for the Messiah. Even as his own disciples came undone and complained that the crowds who once clamored to see him were now flocking to Jesus, John stood clear in his calling: “You yourselves bear me witness, that I have said, ‘I am not the Messiah,’ but ‘I have been sent before him’” (John 3:26-28).

Yet knowing all of this background creates a dramatic contrast when we hear John speak after he is imprisoned by Herod. His resolve was shaken. Both Matthew and Luke’s gospels record his own experience with dissonance: “Now when John in prison heard of the works of Jesus, he sent word by his disciples, and said to him, ‘Are you the expected one, or shall we look for someone else?’”(2) His question belies the ‘gap’ between the reality he envisioned and his current reality in a cold prison cell. If Jesus is the Messiah, John must have wondered, why am I sitting in this jail? The Messiah John proclaimed would “thoroughly clear his threshing floor” and “burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12). The Messiah was coming to rid Israel—and indeed the world—of evil. Yet in John’s day to day existence in his lonely prison cell, evil had won the day. “Are you the expected one, or shall we look for someone else?”

John’s dissonance is not unlike the gaps between belief and experience. Yet perhaps, according to author Scott Cairns, “[These also] can become illuminating moments in which we see our lives in the context of a terrifying, abysmal emptiness, moments when all of our comfortable assumptions are shown to be false, or misleading, or at least incomplete.”(1) Surely, John thought, the Messiah would free him from prison, bring justice, and bind up all the wicked like chaff to be burned. Yet, what was expected was not experienced. John experienced the terrifying and abysmal emptiness that came in a Jesus who was free from his expectations and of his own assumptions.

Jesus acknowledged that his ministry would be disruptive, and even be misunderstood. In responding to John’s doubts, Jesus said, “Blessed is the one who keeps from stumbling over me” (Matthew 11:6). Like John before us, those who seek to follow Jesus often stumble over him. The gaps between what we believe and what we experience create fissures in faith into which many fall. Yet, as Cairns suggests, might mining those gaps uncover the treasure of encountering Jesus in new ways? Might mining the gaps we experience hold the treasure of new insight and the beauty of a more faithful devotion if we are willing to let go of “comfortable assumptions” and cherished expectations? If so, then might all the faithful dig deep and find that what is precious and most valuable is often found in the fissures of dissonance.

 

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

 

(1) Scott Cairns, The End of Suffering (Brewster MA: Paraclete Press, 2009), 8.

(2) Matthew 11:3; Luke 7:20.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Commending Christ

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Author John Stackhouse describes the discipline of “apologetics” as the Christian work of commending the faith as much as it is about defending the faith.(1) Commending the faith, he argues, is something the Christian community does wherever it is—with one another, with neighbors, with the world. Consequently, it is also something the Christian community does whether they are aware of it or not.

In his sermon before the Areopagus, the apostle Paul commended the gospel with reason and rhetoric that would not have gone unrecognized. This is the “good news,” he professed, and the “good life” depends on it. To the Athenian philosophers, he commended the gospel in terms that mattered deeply to them. “Since we are God’s offspring,” he said quoting an Athenian poet, “we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.”(2) For on the contrary, he told them, the real and present Deity is now calling people everywhere to turn around and come near.

The apostle then followed this bold notion with a proof that would have caused as much, if not more, commotion in first century Athens as in hyper-rational modernity and cynical post-modernity. We know that God is the true creator, sustainer, and friend, he reasoned, because God “has given this proof… by raising [Christ] from the dead.”(3) Paul is telling the story of God in the world here, but he is also telling his own story. This Deity he commends to the Athenian philosophers is the risen Christ who appeared to him on Damascus road, who became ‘friend’ instead of ‘foe,’ and turned his own philosophy and consequently his life around.

Paul’s use of the resurrection as proof of all he has proclaimed to the Athenians is interesting on several levels. To begin with, while the apostle clearly sought to ground his Mars Hill message on a common foundation, he ended with a proof that must have seemed to some like a foreign tidal wave. For the Athenians, resurrection of the body was absurd and unreasonable, as much of an obstacle to them as the scandalizing cross to men and women of Jerusalem. While the philosophers of the Areopagus may have believed in the immortality of the soul, the body was what confined and imprisoned this soul. In their minds, there was a radical distinction between matter and spirit. Bodily resurrection did not make any more sense than a god with a body! For the Athenians, and indeed for all of us, this very proof required a radical turn of heart, mind, soul, and body. For some, this babbler’s new teaching was immediately labeled absurd. When they heard of this resurrection of the dead, reports Luke, there were scoffs and sneers.

Yet Paul’s apologetic, which was carefully researched, powerfully worded, and respectfully delivered, was not here ending on a careless note. On the contrary, he was ending with the chorus itself. For Paul, all of the words uttered up until this point would merely be noise had they not come from this very refrain. For if Christ has not been raised, both preaching and faith itself is useless, as he said elsewhere. Though it would have been a foreign language to the crowd at the Areopagus, Paul commended the resurrection as the very proof of his apologetic—for the entirety of his message was authoritative only and specifically because the resurrection had indeed occurred. Authors Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon note the central task of commending the Gospel: “Our claim is not that this tradition will make sense to anyone or will enable the world to run more smoothly. Our claim is that it just happens to be true. This really is the way God is. This really is the way God’s world is.”(4) For Paul, and for the apologist, the important Christian act of finding common ground must never involve burying what is real and living: Christ is risen from the dead.

This single event is the theological core of Paul’s identity and his highest apologetic. It is also the very pillar which makes abundantly clear that the true work of apologetics does not belong to Christians. Writes Stackhouse, “Spiritual adepts throughout the ages warn us that mere argument accomplishes little even within our own hearts.”(5) No one knew this better than the apostle Paul, who would never have otherwise considered Jesus anymore than one to despise: the work of conversion belongs to the Holy Spirit.

Thus, there were many at the Areopagus that day who sneered at Paul’s philosophical conclusions. There were also many who responded in the same manner they responded to any teaching considered at the Areopagus—namely, with fascination, with discussion, and with barren hearts and minds. But likewise, there were a number who believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.(6) By the grace of God, the risen Christ was commended and the obstacles that kept him from sight were overcome.

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

(1) The discipline of apologetics derives its name from the Greek word apologia, meaning defense. “Always be ready to give an answer (apologia) to anyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15).

(2) Acts 17:29.

(3) Acts 17:31.

(4) Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 101.

(5) John Stackhouse, Jr. Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 82.

(6) cf. Acts 17:34.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Remembering Jesus

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There is some truth to the idea that the ethics we truly live by are best discovered when they are enacted over the highest precipices—those thresholds of life, death, and weighted decision—or else the very lowest precipices, those places where comfort lures boredom and indifference. In the spaces where it is hardest to remember doctrine, standards, and philosophy, there we discover where the battle of moral decision is truly waged. In other words, it is far easier to recall ethical moorings at the university or in church than it is in the turbulent hallways of the Emergency Room or the consuming distraction of affluence.

This aspect of memory is one that Christian ethicists address and the God of scripture lauds. “Fix it in mind, take it to heart… Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the.”(1) Remembering, for the follower of this Creator, is to be an active pursuit: “These truths I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates.”(2) Not only is it true that what we remember affects who we are and shapes our affections, but what we remember deeply, what we have ingrained into our very identity, is far more likely be recalled when crisis, pain, or comfort make it hard to remember everything else.

In John Bunyan’s abiding allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress, Great Heart points to a place called “Forgetful Green” and says to Christian’s son, “That place is the most dangerous place in all these parts.” Building on this imagery, ethicist Allen Verhey described the temptation of forgetfulness in “the Forgetful Green of health and in the great medical powers to heal,” as well as in the “Forgetful Straits of pain and suffering and in the final powerlessness of medicine.”(3) That is to say, if we will not actively remember the story in which we are participants—moments where God has acted mightily, the times humanity has learned in tears, the reality of our immortality and the autonomy of God even in this—then in sickness and in health we will undoubtedly forget.

In fact, this story, which is the Christian’s, much of the world has already forgotten and bids us to forget as well. Leon Kass, member and former chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, argues that “victory over mortality is the unstated but implicit goal of modern medical science.”(4) Having experienced the unwelcomed surrender to Hospice in the medical treatment of loved ones, I can relate to the sentiment. Though in a hospital ward where death was a daily reality and prognosis grim, we were devastated and even angry at the doctor’s recommendation of Hospice care. At that one word, we were forced to admit what we were trying to ignore. Yet this was arguably one of the last gifts we received. We were forced to remember the hope we had long professed but altogether misplaced in the halls of medicine.

In a conversation with my mother once about medical ethics, I was surprised to hear her comparison of her work as a nurse in the hospital as opposed to work in a nursing home. She said surprisingly there really was not much of a difference in the attitudes toward death and dying. Though in a place where patients were far more openly facing their final days, death was still ignored by patients and families, care was rarely addressed in terms of providing for a good death, and aging and dying were realities slow to set in. In fact, even the terminology and goals of treatment were still focused on curing as opposed to palliative care. As nurses they were required to write up plans for improvement for each resident, and despite illness or age very few had “do not resuscitate” orders.

If we spend our whole lives trying to forget the reality of death, it follows that being near death would not necessarily change our vision or jolt our memory. As Kass observes, “In parallel with medical progress, a new moral sensibility has developed that serves precisely medicine’s crusade against mortality: Anything is permitted if it saves life, cures disease, prevents death.”(5) But the incoherence of this medical philosophy even beside the weakest, most ailing patients shouts of the need for some hard questions and a call to remember: Is our obsession with youth a celebration of life or a denial of life’s end? What is a good death? Does it involve an acceptance of immortality? And for those who profess to remember Jesus, those who follow one who died and was buried, do we really answer counterculturally?

In this world confused about life and death, participants in Christ’s story are people who can mourn and lament, who can weep at gravesides and in cancer wards, who can decline treatment when it ceases to give life, and embrace death when it draws near. What does it look like to live and die as those who follow the one who rose above the seeming victory of the grave? This one, I would argue, is the one we do well to remember with all that is in us, wherever we stand.

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

(1) Isaiah 46:8-10.

(2) Deuteronomy 6:4-9.

(3) Allen Verhey, Remembering Jesus: Christian Community, Scripture, and the Moral Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2002), 90.

(4) “Go Gently into That Good Night,” Christianity Today, Jan. 2, 2007.

(5) Ibid.

 

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Beyond the Visible

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Winters, in the north-eastern part of India, especially Shillong where I live, can be bitingly cold, and more so when it rains. One year, the winter was particularly wet, and for weeks on end there seemed no respite from the cold. One gloomy day followed another with nothing to lighten the dismal scene of overcast skies and thick blankets of cloud stretched like a shroud from one end of the horizon to the other. Suffocated by the cheerless gloom that had pervaded my very heart and soul, small woes and anxieties that had seemed miniscule before, now seems threateningly gigantic. Funny how the weather can affect one’s mood! And just as I was beginning to feel that sunny days are but a distant memory, suddenly, the sun rose up one morning, bright and strong, shining in a blue cloudless sky. I was immediately reminded of a song in the Bible likening the sun to a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, rejoicing like a strong man to run its race.(1)

As I was reflecting on the sight, I noticed my neighbor’s door opened. Faithfully, as he had probably been doing every single day of his life, he turned his face to the sun and paid obeisance to it. With hands folded and eyes devoutly closed, he continued in this salutation of worship for a few minutes. As I sat there in the sun, enjoying the delicious warmth soaking into my body, I can understand exactly why people would want to worship it. There is something very nurturing, healing and life-giving about the sun’s warmth. No wonder that civilizations right from the Mayans and the ancient Egyptians to the Hindus of today, revered and worshipped it.

But does it have to end there, I thought? Should not our contemplation of the wonder of creation lead us to contemplate on the greater wonder of the One who is the cause of all existence? In his song offerings, the Gitanjali, the great seer and bard, Rabindranath Tagore captures the very essence of this truth when he sings: “The morning light has flooded my eyes—this is thy message to my heart. Thy face is bent from above, thy eyes look down on my eyes, and my heart has touched thy feet.”(2) Clearly, for Tagore, every part of creation is but the whisperings of the Almighty to the human heart.

Somehow, this thought takes me back to my young book-reading days. In my eagerness to come to the story at once, I would just glance briefly at the title and sometimes, bypass the name of the author altogether. The author was not important for me then; the story was! But through the years, I have come to appreciate a text more by also knowing something about its writer. His/Her experiences, thoughts and impressions that colour and give shape to the work. This, I find, enriches my reading experience and adds context to the text.

As I continued to enjoy the sunshine that winter morning, basking in its light and warmth, I directed my thoughts to the ultimate author who commanded the whole story into being and who continues to sustain that story from one sunrise to the other. “How wonderful this sun!” I exclaimed. “How wonderful is the One who created this sun!” an answering voice in my heart echoed.

Psalm 19, I believe, is a jubilant declaration of this truth as it points us beyond the visible to the One who is invisible and yet, whose presence and touch can be felt, can be seen, can be experienced:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language

where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world.

In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,

which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion,

like a champion rejoicing to run his course.

It rises at one end of the heavens

and makes its circuit to the other;

nothing is hidden from its heat.

Ravi Zacharias recounts this story in his book The Shattered Visage: On Christmas Day, 1968, three American astronauts made the first journey that humanity will ever make around the ‘dark’ side of the moon, away from the earth. Having fired their rockets, they were homebound on Apollo 8, and beheld our planet in a way that human eyes had never witnessed before. They saw earth rise over the horizon of the moon, draped in the beauteous mixture of white and blue, bordered by the glistening light of the sun against the black void of space. In the throes of this awe-inspiring experience their first response is to open the Bible and read from the book of Genesis for the world to hear: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…

Let me conclude by quoting authors Thomas Howard and J.I. Packer:

“The truth is that our supreme fulfillment, as moral beings made in God’s image, is found and expressed in actively worshipping our holy Creator. When the object of homage is noble, the rendering of homage is ennobling; but when the objects of homage are not noble, the rendering of it is degrading… [But] it is impossible to worship nothing: we humans are worshipping creatures, and if we do not worship the God who made us, we shall inevitably worship someone or something else.”(3)

Tejdor Tiewsoh is a member of the speaking team with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Shillong, India.

(1) Psalm 19.

(2) Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, Song no. 59.

(3) Thomas Howard and J.I. Packer, Christianity: The True Humanism (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1984), 146.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Why Christian?

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“Why Christian?” was a question put before Professor Douglas John Hall by one of the many students who end up in his office asking more about the theology he teaches. He notes the possibility that the question was asked rhetorically, maybe even a bit sarcastically, like those near Jesus who threw questions more like daggers than candid inquiries. But it is also possible the student just wanted to hear an honest explanation: In a world of so many spiritual options, in a world of reasons to reject religion altogether, Why Christianity? Regardless of tone or motive, the seasoned professor of theology decided to answer the question, laying aside the responses that could be given easily after so many years of teaching. “I confess, I [am answering] as much for myself as for you,” he writes to the student who asked the question. “You made me realize that after all these years I needed to face that question in the quite basic and personal way you put it to me.”(1)

On a typical day, my own answer to the question of Christianity might be steeped in the signs and realities of the uniqueness of Christ. Thankfully this answer is not my own. With many who have gone before me, I cannot explain Jesus of Nazareth without concluding his uniqueness:

“Surely this man was the Son of God!”

“Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” “Come and see the man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”(2)

Christianity is not a matter of preference or pedigree, but pilgrimage chosen specifically because a follower has found one worth following. “[Jesus] was the meekest and lowliest of all the sons of men,” wrote Scottish nobleman James Stewart, “yet he spoke of coming on the clouds of heaven with the glory of God… No one was half so kind or compassionate to sinners yet no one ever spoke such red-hot scorching words about sin… His whole life was love. Yet on one occasion he demanded of the Pharisees how they ever expected to escape the damnation of hell… He saved others but at the last, Himself He did not save. There is nothing in history like the union of contrasts which confront us in the Gospels.” Why Christian? Because there is none other like Christ.

The incomparability of Jesus Christ answers the questions of a world of spiritual options and religious hostility. Like professor Hall, facing the question “Why Christian?” is typically a matter of confessing the things I know, even as I know I now see but a reflection and will one day see face to face. Still, there are less typical days when the question comes not with hostility or sarcasm or curiosity, but from somewhere within, and the answers are somewhere caught up in despair or injustice or death. When standing over a casket or holding the hand of one whose body is riddled with cancer, “Why Christian?” takes on a different flesh—or else it wavers cold and corpselike. Christ’s uniqueness is suddenly a matter of urgency, needing to be spoken in words that have meaning in valleys of death and shadow. Standing before this body that once breathed, what does it really mean that Christ was unique? Though with a far different kind of trembling certainty, here too Christ’s incomparability is ultimately what matters.

The apologetic of the apostle Paul was always spoken starring life’s “last enemy” dead in the eyes. Whether answering the question “Why Christian?” or standing in jail having been beaten to silence, Paul kept before him the hope of the resurrection as both the proof of Christ’s uniqueness and the assurance that this uniqueness inherently matters. He spoke of the resurrection of Christ and his hope in the resurrection of the dead before the assembled Sanhedrin, before the Roman procurator Felix, and again before Felix’s successor, Festus, who conceded that Paul’s arrest was due to his proclamation “about a dead man named Jesus who Paul claimed was alive.”(3) Even before king Agrippa, Paul’s answer to the first acrimonious signs of the question “Why Christian?” was an appeal to Christ’s uniqueness in the hope of the resurrection. He asked, “Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?…I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen—that the Christ would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to his own people and to the Gentiles” (Acts 26:8, 22). For Paul, and for all who claim the inimitableness of Jesus, if Christ has not been raised, there is no answer to the question “Why Christian?”

Instead, the uniqueness of Christ is an answer for questions that come with sarcasm or sincerity. But so it is an answer with flesh when life’s typical comforts fall by the wayside and the valley of shadows is long and lonely.

“He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.”(4) There is none other like Christ. I know of no other god who weeps with us at gravesides and then shows us in his own dying and rising that death shall not hold its sting.

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

(1) Douglas John Hall, Why Christian: For Those on the Edge of Faith (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1998), 11.

(2) Mark 15:39, John 9:32-33, John 4:29.

(3) Acts 23:6, Acts 24:15, 21, Acts 25:19.

(4) Matthew 28:6.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sellouts and Revolutionaries

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They both trod along the dusty streets of ancient Palestine: one as an outcast and traitor and the other as a would-be hero. One used his position to cheat and extort his own people. The other carried a dagger under his cloak to swiftly exact vengeance on agents of government extortion. Neither man would have hoped to meet the other. Yet, a stranger from a backwater town would bring the two of them together. In fact, this most unlikely pair would not only meet, but serve alongside each other. All that had previously defined them would give way to a new understanding and a new path of life.

On that most unexpected day, Matthew was collecting taxes from the people. He made sure to extract more than what was necessary to fill his coffers with unlawful profits. The stranger who came by the tax office that day looked like any other man, so it likely came as quite a shock to Matthew when the stranger called out to him, “Follow me.” No one from among the people of Israel would even desire to speak with Matthew—yet this stranger called after him and invited him to follow. To where, he did not know, but his invitation was irresistible. That very night, Matthew invited the stranger to his home for dinner and they reclined at the same table. Even to Matthew, it would have been a radical sight. Seated among the most despised members of society, didn’t the stranger know how deeply this company was hated? How was it that he had come to Matthew’s house, a man hated in all Israel for being a sellout to the Roman government? Yet, here was this intriguing stranger eating and drinking with outsiders and sellouts.(1)

The day that Simon the Zealot was approached would be no less surprising. The Zealots sought any and all means to overthrow their Roman oppressors. As revolutionaries, Simon’s political affiliates hated all that Matthew’s kind represented. For Simon, Matthew was nothing but a colluder with those who sought to oppress the people of Israel. Yet this stranger from Nazareth called both of these men to his side. “Follow me,” he asked. So along with a group of fisherman—Simon Peter, the sons of Zebedee, James and John—and this wretched tax collector, Simon the Zealot was invited to follow this stranger who gathered a most unexpected group of followers.(2)

Why would anyone call such an eclectic collection of people to become his followers? What kind of leader brings together people who for all practical purposes are at opposing ends of the spectrum with regards to their views of the world?

The man was Jesus of Nazareth. And his call to “follow” would upend all their expectations, replace all previous affiliations, and transform their views of the world. This unlikely group would follow Jesus beyond personal expectations and goals, as well as their expectations of him as their leader. The nature of his teachings and his form of radical hospitality would not only change their own lives and views, but transform the world. Jesus called Matthew, as well as Simon, sellouts and revolutionaries alike. And the power of Christ’s message is displayed in the fact that a tax collector authored one of the four gospels, and the Zealot most likely gave his life—not as a revolutionary hero, but as a martyr for the gospel.(3)

Jesus proclaimed good news good enough to bring together a tax collector and a zealot, men from entirely opposing camps, the poor and the rich, the outcast and the sellouts. Indeed, he declared that anyone who does the will of God is his brother and sister and mother. The good news was also given to a former blasphemer, persecutor, and violent aggressor. But this is not what we remember the apostle Paul for either. We remember him for his efforts to take the good news throughout the Roman world. It is this man who said, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. And I am the foremost of sinners; but I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who would believe in him for life everlasting” (1 Timothy 1:15-16).

The gospel has a way of reaching out and adopting into the family of Jesus a most unlikely group of characters, just as it did for Matthew and Simon and Paul. Jesus called them to follow him—together. And he continues to call disparate groups of individuals together today as the gospel goes forth into the utmost parts of the earth.

This, then, is both the challenge and the opportunity of the gospel. Because it is an invitation broad enough, wide enough, and good enough to include even me, it also reaches out and welcomes those I might not expect and bids me to serve alongside. It challenges me to leave my preconceptions behind, as the door to the kingdom of God swings open to fellow sinners who will become saints. And it ushers us in a community of new allegiances, a body only God could create.

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

(1) See Mark 2:13-17.

(2) See Mark 3:13-19.

(3) Many later church traditions suggest that Simon joined Jude in apostolic ministry. Later tradition suggests that Simon was martyred by being sawn in two. See for example, The Golden Legend (Aurea Legenda) compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, 1275.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Public, Private, and Practical

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There is no mistaking the presence of unique challenges to belief in our modern day world. Our secular, privatized, consumerist affections have wielded a religion (indeed many religions) that has little or nothing to do with life itself. Coupled with secularism’s privatizing of religion from the public realm, consumerism’s pull creates a context whereby the choice of belief is not only a personal matter, but a matter entirely divorced from the history and communities that inform these beliefs. As professor David Wells notes, “God has been evacuated from the center of our collective life, pushed to the edges of our public square to become an irrelevance to how our world does its business. Marxism rested on a theoretical atheism; our secularized world rests on a practical atheism in the public domain, though one that coexists with private religiosity.”(1) This chasm between public and private, sacred and secular, forces a theology whereby God is largely absent, unknown in the public arena, and silent unless spoken to.

Meanwhile, in conjunction with our evacuation of God and subsequent practical atheism, we live within an understanding of unbounded freedom to pursue and consume whatsoever we will. While we may recognize secularism for what it is, Wells warns: “[W]e do not recognize the corrupting power of our affluence for what it is…. We consider our abundance as essentially harmless and, what is just as important, we have come to need it. The extraordinary and dazzling benefits of our modernized world, benefits that are now indispensable to our way of life, hide the values which accompany them, values which have the power to wrench around our lives in very damaging ways.”(2) Far more than a matter of wealth, our sheer appetites, which we readily appease as if angry gods, bring us to the conclusion that we ourselves are the center of collective life, echoing the call of secularism that God is exactly where God belongs—in quiet, private corners. Even within the church, this outlook is often practically lived if not publicly admitted.

Yet, this dichotomy that is now readily accepted between matters of private faith and public life belies a betrayal of the very identity Jesus sets forth for his followers. The hope within the Christian is not something we are able to keep private—for if the very public act of Christ’s resurrection from the dead was not real, then the very faith our culture would have us keep in private is futile. The events of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, and the faith that upholds them, do not allow for the dichotomies of public and private, spiritual and physical, sacred and secular. The call of Christ is one that encompasses every possible realm, thus making “private faith” an unintelligible distinction.

Nonetheless, while the challenges of “practical atheism” may indeed be the outworking of a unique cultural moment, it is hardly a new way of life. Though the causes and contexts are certainly different, our current cultural mood is in some ways comparable to the scene Paul discovered in Athens. Standing before these men and women, Paul gently bid them to see that their philosophy amounted to little more than practical atheism. Where there was belief that amounted to very little, where gods were acknowledged but unknown, and worship was offered in ritual, fear, and apathy, Paul set before them the God who is there, the God who is known. While the cultural challenges before us are intricate and unyielding, Christ brings the countercultural hope of a life touched by the God who is there. Practical atheism is unlivable when it is placed beside the one who is known.

Thus we might be encouraged in any attempt to believe, for regardless of the risks and opportunities that fill the world around us, so it is filled of the unfailing love of a present God. And it is this reality that despite ourselves or our obstacles compels the blind to see. On such matters of the Spirit, 18th-century preacher Jonathan Edwards once noted, “Though great use may be made of external arguments…for they may be greatly serviceable to awaken unbelievers, and bring them to serious consideration, and to confirm the faith of true saints… [T]here is no spiritual conviction…but what arises from an apprehension of the spiritual beauty and glory of divine things. And such a direct apprehension is a gift mediated only by the Holy Spirit of God.”(3) In our pluralistic, privatized, and practically atheistic culture this Spirit indeed continues to move.

 

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

(1) David Wells, “This Unique Moment: The Changing of the Guard and What It Means For Christians Today,” Modern Reformation, Sept./Oct. Vol. 4, No. 5, 1995, 10.

(2) Ibid., 11.

(3) Jonathon Edwards, Treatise on the Religious Affections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 307.