The Great Metaphor

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The places in Scripture that most often slow my mind to a reflective halt are usually intensely visual. The ancient cry of Isaiah 64:1, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,” is one such image that has long been for me like a museum filled with the most hopeful, most disturbing, and most inviting art. Fitting with Isaiah’s vision for a world that revolves around the throne and the kingship of God at the center, his cry was a fervent prayer for the severe presence of a God he knew could come nearer.

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

If only you would cleave the heavens!
(If only) you would come down,
From facing you, mountains would quake!

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

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

But this act of rending is also used in the Old Testament figuratively, usually in terms of removing someone from power or formally tearing away their authority, as when Samuel told Saul that the kingdom had been rendered from him and given to his neighbors (See 1 Samuel 15:28). Yet here in the context of Isaiah’s prayer, the word seems to take on both figurative and literal qualities. Oh that you would rend the heavens like a garment and come down here, tear away our perception of authority and show us your own! The cry is clearly making use of metaphor and yet it is a desperate plea for God’s presence in power, tangibly and substantially--“so that the nations might tremble at your presence!” (Isaiah 64:2b).

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

Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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

The End of Atheism

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Recently, a rash of fundamentalist atheists has become a publishing phenomenon. Touting that God is a delusion destructive to human life and civilization, and heralding the end of faith, these authors see only positive results at the end of atheism. Reason and rationality will conquer any "zealous" adherence or devotion to a transcendent God.

It's fairly easy to identify with the concerns that motivate these authors towards atheism. Like them, I grieve over the violence perpetrated in the world in the name of God and religion. I can understand how Mother Teresa would poignantly wonder about God's presence with her in the suffering wasteland of Calcutta. And certainly, I, like many others, have had life experiences that raise questions concerning God's involvement in my life, and God's love toward me. I can understand the despair-filled temptation towards agnosticism, or even atheism.

Yet, the world many atheists envision without God or faith is overly optimistic, and ultimately unrealistic. Their beautiful portraits of what the world could look like if we only jettison our faith are painted with glowing brushstrokes of romantic imagery and language:

"This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call 'spiritual....' No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation....love our neighbors, and [know that] our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish."(1)

I find this vision completely out of step with a world in which innocent civilians, even as I write this essay today, are being silenced and slaughtered by the thousands. Indeed, in light of the state of our world, an optimistic ending for atheism is as out-of-touch with reality as belief that the world is flat.

In fact, this vision of a godless world being a better world is shattered by the writings of the prescient prophet and atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche, the German philosopher who wrote in the nineteenth century, predicted what an atheistic society would look like. And unlike the pseudo-optimism of our popular atheists today, Nietzsche's vision is harrowing and disturbing. "The story I have to tell," he wrote, "is the history of the next two centuries.... For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection." He claimed that the world was entering an "era of monstrous wars, upheavals, explosions and that there will be wars such as have never been waged on the earth."(2)

Why such pessimism about the future of the world? Nietzsche argued that the actions of human beings had rendered God superfluous. In The Gay Science his madman yells, "'Where is God?' Well, I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I." He goes on to doubt if even reason and the advance of theoretical knowledge, as our modern-day atheists posit, could heal the "wound of our existence." Indeed, science, reason, and history could not overcome the reality that human beings "can rise or sink to no other reality than the reality of our drives." One of those drives, Nietzsche argued, is the will to power, ultimately fulfilled by rogue regimes in World War I, and in World War II by the Nazi regime and the Communist regime led by Joseph Stalin.

Thus, Nietzsche's utter suspicion of reason calls the entire optimistic program advocated by popular atheists into question. God's absence would not make for a better world, according to Nietzsche. Indeed, his picture of a world without God, without a divine Creator intimately involved in re-creation, is a very grim place filled with darkness, amorality, and despair.

In contrast to the godless future predicted by Nietzsche or our current atheistic prophets, the prophet Isaiah, even in the midst of warnings of exile, destruction, and suffering had a hope-filled vision of a world permeated with the presence of God: "The wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the kid, the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child will lead them... they will not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea" (Isaiah 11:6, 9). This vision of a God-filled future is what Christians should hope for and work towards, even as we wrestle with the challenges and the difficulties of a God-famished world.

Margaret Manning is associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 227.

(2) Quoted in Erich Heller, The Importance of Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 5.

A Country Not My Own

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Traveling through the fields of her own country, Ruth found herself a widow in the midst of a great famine. Yet though her family would have been nearby to help, she chose to follow her mother-in-law to Judah. And thus, to her already diminished role as widow, she added the disparaging status of “foreigner.”

I have not spent much of my life as a foreigner, though my short bouts with being a cultural outsider remind me of the difficulty and frustration of always feeling on the outside of the circle. Just as the distance between outside and inside seems to be closing, something happens or something is said and you are reminded again that you don't really belong. It can be both humbling and humiliating to always carry with you the sober thought: I am out of place.

The book of Ruth scarcely neglects an opportunity to point out this reality for Ruth. Long after hearers of the story are well acquainted with who Ruth is and where she is from, long after she is living in Judah, she is still referred to as "Ruth the Moabite" or even merely "the Moabite woman." Her perpetual status as an outsider brings to mind the vision of Keats, and the "song that found a path/ through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home/ She stood in tears amid the alien corn." She stood in strange and foreign fields and was forever reminded she was the stranger.

And yet, while she was undoubtedly as aware of being a foreigner as much as those around her were aware of it, Ruth did nothing to suggest a longing to return to Moab. Her words and actions in Judah are as steadfast as her initial vow to Naomi: "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried" (Ruth 1:16-17a).

It is a daring risk and declaration, for in these early pages of the story, little is known about Naomi's God or her people. The brief mention of both comes as a distant report: "Then she arose with her daughters-in-law to return from the country of Moab, for she had heard in the fields of Moab that the LORD had visited his people and given them food" (1:6). Moreover, Naomi's first mention of the God of her people holds a similar sense of detachment. Though she recognizes God's sovereignty over her situation, it is blurred with bitterness: "The Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. For I went away full, and the LORD has brought me back empty" (1:20-21). Her description was hardly a compelling one for the outsider looking in.

And yet, Ruth clearly embraces all of Naomi: the people who would only see her as a foreigner and the God who was not her own. Adding to her faithful embrace, it is Ruth the Moabite, whose voice is the first in the story to call on the divine name. After her resolute declaration of loyalty to her mother-in-law, Ruth adds the plea, "May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me" (1:17b). Furthering the irony of Naomi's own distant words, it is the foreigner who has taken Yahweh to be her God and calls on this God accordingly. Fittingly, it is this faithful foreigner whose adoption into God's presence can be traced in blood to the throne of King David and the reign of Christ.

It is often in the moments when I am feeling most isolated, displaced with pain or burdened with the reminder that I am out of place, that I somehow find myself most aware of belonging. The psalmist cries with the identity of one who belongs elsewhere: "Hear my prayer, O LORD, listen to my cry for help; be not deaf to my weeping. For I dwell with you as an alien, a stranger, as all my fathers were" (39:12). The stories of Scripture give voice to my nagging sense of homelessness, reminding me in comfort and in pain that I am a stranger in a country not my own. We are men and women moving farther up and further into a greater kingdom. And the life of a foreigner named Ruth illustrates how great is the longing of God to see each of us embrace it here and now.

Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Amos, Acedia, and Ease

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

“Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, those who feel secure on Mount Samaria” (Amos 6:1).

I must admit that at one time the prophet Amos could not have seemed further off in his description, at least of my experience, in the land of Zion. For those who internalize tension and conflict, like children hovering in a corner listening to parents grow farther from hearing each other, being at ease is not an option. As one commentator describes the tension in Israel, “The clash between the cherished heritage of the majority and the hopes of the minority is more than friction.”(1) There is truly no place quite like this land. But there is also no place on earth where I’ve found myself more disheartened. In this tense and complicated place, the prophet’s words, the words of a shepherd to a relaxed and comfortable people, seem directed at an entirely unfamiliar kind of sheep. Or do they?

Twelve years ago, studying the storied dimensions of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I noted midway through the experience a weariness with everything. My second encounter with Jerusalem was not far off. Long after I had witnessed the hopeful work of a reconciliation ministry, the power of pain exuding from a bereavement support group, and the high of a few holy places, the lows of one particular city took over and evacuated everything but cynicism. As I watched those from one side of the conflict prance down a divided walkway reminiscent of the divided South, only to be harassed by a group on the other side minutes later, the tide of emotions within me turned completely shallow. The anger and tension of the city had cast a compelling shadow. Though the gentle wisdom of a hopeful few was still reachable in my mind, I found myself not caring about any of it. In that moment, all I could think was: Nothing is ever going to change. Why bother? I was weary in Zion, feeling everything and yet somehow nothing, lulled to an apathy that seemed justified--even as it caused me alarm.

“Acedia” is a word I learned from Kathleen Norris not too long ago, and it came to mind in this instance as vividly as it has on less foreign soil. It is a word that has fallen out of use in the last thousand years, written out of our minds and vocabularies, but not out of our lives. The Latin word refers to spiritual torpor or apathy. It is the spiritual equivalent of sloth--inactivity or unconcern in the practice of virtue. The term was most often used in monastic circles, considered an adversary that materialized in the drastic lives of the monks. But the question at the heart of acedia--“Why bother?”--moves far beyond the walls of the monastery, and perhaps particularly in the hearts of those who find themselves weary of feeling, those who would sooner choose the ease of apathy than the work of relationship, the simplicity of self over the sacrifice of community.

Like weariness or despair, acedia creeps into our lives and moves us to spiritual indifference. It comes when we are tired of feeling, weary of living with care and attention, lulled to sleep by comfort or disinterest. At this description, Amos’s portrayal of Zion may not feel so far off after all. In fact, at the time of Amos, the people of Israel were perhaps struggling with something quite like acedia. Reeling in false security and erroneous confidence from their own economic affluence, the Israelites were living in a deplorable state of existence, warned Amos, blind and isolated by their focus on self, impervious to their own indifference at the situation around them. It was in the midst of this, their most opulent and apathetic juncture, when the shepherd proclaimed: “Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria” (Amos 6:1).

If we will hear it, the cry of Amos hits with a sting of accuracy in far more lands than one. Whether we choose the ease of turning our heads to injustice out of weariness, the ease of hatred or alienation in lieu of the harder work of community, or the ease of apathy simply out of the lull of economic comfort, we are living with acedia--at ease in the land of Zion, or Zealand, or Atlanta. Here, the hope of any city, where ease and apathy permit its members to tolerate things we should not, rests not in chariots or horses, but in our ability to battle the daily temptation to throw our hands up in the air and ask “Why bother?” Kathleen Norris would remind us that the battle of acedia calls us to boldly live as those committed to the work of hope and attention, community and prayer--even when these things would seem most taxing. For where we are tempted to despair, compelled to stop feeling or seeing, there Christ calls us to get up and follow, to go further into the life of a kingdom that does not promise ease, but assures of us rest. Where acedia has so rooted itself in our spirits that our very bones are as dry and lifeless as the multitude in the valley with Ezekiel, even there the Spirit hovers over our darkness, bringing breath and new life, urging those at ease in Zion to wake up and stand again.

Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Ethan Bronner, “After 60 Years, Arabs in Israel Are Outsiders,” The New York Times, May 7, 2008.

The Pain of Forgiveness

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I was recently captured by a story told by Wendell Berry about two friends who lived in a small community in Kentucky in the year 1912. Ben Feltner and Thad Coulter were part of a close-knit agrarian community with strong ties to each other, to the land, and to hard work. Yet tragedy ensued when Thad invested in a risky business deal with his son and lost out. Humiliated and falling into despair, Thad drank himself into a stupor and then headed over to ask his friend Ben for help. Ben did not want to discuss options with Thad in his condition, and so refused to talk with him until the next day when he was sober. However, Thad succumbed to the darkness creeping over him and returned home to get his gun, which he then used to shoot Ben Feltner in a drunken rage. The rest of the story was a beautiful tale of forgiveness and mercy offered by Ben’s family and the community. Yet sadly, Thad himself was unable to experience that forgiveness because he could not bear to live knowing he had killed his best friend, and so ended his own life.

The narrator then makes this profound comment: “People sometimes talk of God’s love as if it’s a pleasant thing. But it is terrible, in a way. Think of all it includes. It included Thad Coulter, drunk and mean and foolish, before he killed Mr. Feltner, and it included him afterwards.”(1)

“God’s love is terrible, in a way. Think of all it includes.” I have often been asked, “Could not God have forgiven people without going through the pain and the violence of the cross?” As nice as that sounds, reality forces me to ask: When is forgiveness not painful? True forgiveness cannot occur unless the hurt is acknowledged and called for what it is. When you look a wrong full in the face but choose to accept the hurt instead of returning it on the one who did it, that is always painful.

Jesus illustrates forgiveness by telling the story of a servant who owes his master more money than he could possibly repay (See Matthew 18:21-35). The master originally threatens to sell the servant’s family and possessions to get some return for the debt, but when the servant begs for mercy, the master is gracious and forgives the debt. Yet the same servant not only refuses to forgive the debt of his fellow servant, but also has him thrown in prison as punishment.

Sometimes we treat forgiveness and justice as though they are mutually exclusive. If we choose the way of justice, we think the options are reparations or retribution--either the guilty person makes up for a wrong or is punished for it. These are the only options the servant offered his debtor. Since the second servant could not repay, he was then punished. However, the master chose the way of mercy when he forgave the debt, neither requiring reparation nor inflicting retribution. If God has really forgiven us like the master forgave the servant, we ask, then why all the pain and death of the Cross? Does the Cross undermine God’s mercy? Is it merely an underhanded way for God to force repayment from humanity or exact punishment on us?

In asking these questions, we betray a misunderstanding of both justice and forgiveness. Justice can never be achieved by reparation or retribution alone, because like the servants’ debts, true wrongs can never be repaid. The hurt and pain caused are not reversible. Punishing the guilty person does not undo the hurt either, even if it brings brief satisfaction to the victim, just as the first servant did not get his money back simply because the other man was in jail. Justice must be about much more than balancing out the wrongs of the world. It must be about making things right, about the kind of restoration that does not reverse the pain, but moves beyond it toward something new.

And just as wrongs cannot be erased by punishment or repayment, they cannot really be erased by simple forgiveness either. When the master forgives the servant’s debt, the debt does not simply disappear. The master takes the loss! He accepts the full brunt of the debt himself. Similarly, when a person forgives, he or she accepts the full brunt of the hurt or injustice rather than returning it on the one who caused it. Although it is painful, this is the way that healing and restoration begin. This is why there is no way to avoid the bloody Cross. And this is why God’s love is terrible. Think of what it includes: us, with our best and our worst, with our failed attempts and outright cruelty, with our wrong motives for right actions and our right motives for wrong actions... us, with the mess we have made of the world, with our brokenness and despair, with our rebellions and inadequacies. We are the ones included in and redeemed by the deep and wide love of God. Paul is astonished by this reality when he emphasizes that Christ died for us while we were still sinners! (Romans 5:8).

Instead of demanding that we pay what we cannot, instead of punishing us for not paying what we cannot, the God we see in Jesus Christ accepts the loss himself and opens his arms even to those who would murder him. The Cross does not represent God’s mercy being tamed by his anger; rather, it demonstrates that God’s mercy is much bigger than we think. The Cross is a graphic picture of God’s terrible love. Think of all it includes.

Rachel Tulloch is associate apologist at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Toronto, Canada.

(1) Wendell Berry, “Pray Without Ceasing,” in That Distant Land, (Washington DC: Shoemaker Hoard, 2004), 69.

Encore!

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I have never been so tired as I was when I stepped on that plane; neither have I been so happy for so many empty seats. I was dreaming of a two hour nap before I even found my place. Of course, as is usually the case in situations like these, when one is intent on being anti-social and insistent on having earned the right to be so, I found myself not only with a companion, but with an animated, loquacious, first-time traveler. The young woman beside me had been a child as she watched the events of September 11th unfold and had determined then never to travel by airplane--that is, until today, when events reared a need to break her own rule. She was terrified and excited and inquisitive all at once. She also noticed things I’m fairly certain I have never noticed in all my years of travel, commenting with elation, curiosity, or confusion on every single one of them. By the time we landed, I not only had a new friend, I was wide awake to the disheartening reality of all I fail to see around me.

It would seem that repetition has a way of lulling us to sleep; monotony a way of robbing us of sight, or else leaving us in the stupor of disinterest. Real life examples are readily available. How many news stories do we need to hear about violence or suffering, racial oppression or injustice, before we fail to hear them at all? For that matter, how many stories about something small but positive do we really take in before we respond in boredom? How many times do we need to sit on an airplane or see the bird outside our window before the marvel of flight simply goes without notice? Like most adults, we learn to tolerate the repetitious by learning to operate on auto-pilot.

And yet, I am certain, even among the most skilled of auto-pilots, there was a time when we found ourselves, like every child, delighting in the monotonous, longing for another minute with grandpa, another page of the story, another trip down the slide. The incongruity is unmistakable. How can our failure to see be blamed on monotony, unconscious living attributed to the repetitive, when at one point monotony and repetition were not only tolerated but invigorating? Blindness can easily be blamed on the world around us--and there is certainly reason to consider the daily effects of all that bombards our senses--but perhaps this is too easy an answer. Perhaps the scales on our eyes are multiplied not by the many repetitions in life, but by our failure to see life in the many repetitions around us.

Jesus spoke of the kingdom as belonging to the likes of little children, and many have speculated the child’s ability to see the world with wonder as one of the reasons for it. G.K. Chesterton saw the child’s ability to revel in the monotonous as another. The child’s cry for more, reasoned Chesterton, is a quality of the very God who created them. “It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”(1)

For the child on the slide or the toddler with a story, “Do it again!” is far from a cry of boredom or routine, but a cry for more of life itself. This is likewise the joy of the psalmist, the cry of the prophets, and the call of Christ: “Consider the lilies, how they grow...if God so clothes the grass of the field...how much more will he clothe you?” (Luke 12:27-28). Jesus asks that we consider the kingdom around us like little children, and thus, something more like God--finding a presence in faithful recurrences, grace in repetition, rumors of another world in the ordinary world around us. Here, even those within the most taxing of life’s repetitions--the daily care of an aging parent, the constant burden on the shoulders of those who fight against injustice, the labor of hope in a difficult place--can find solace. “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope,” said Jeremiah in the midst of deep lament. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning...‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him’” (Lamentations 3:22-24, emphasis mine).

Morning by morning, the daily liturgy of new mercies comes with unapologetic repetition to all who will see it, the gift of a God who revels in the creation of yet another daisy, the encore of another sunset, the discovery of even one lost soul.

Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 65-66.

The Snare of Misplaced Affections

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The book of Judges poses many interpretive challenges for the student of Scripture. Filled with stories of the grotesque and the tragic--the rape and subsequent division of the Levite’s concubine into twelve pieces in Judges 19, the undoing of mighty Samson, or the story of Jephthah and his vow to offer up one of his own children as a burnt offering in Judges 11--challenge any contemporary reader’s sensibilities.

Despite these interpretive difficulties and challenges, the book of Judges reveals the all-too human story of our propensity towards idolatry, and the consequences that ensue from misplaced affections. Perhaps no story is more poignant, in this regard, than the story of Gideon. Born the youngest son of the smallest tribe of Israel, the half-tribe of Mannaseh, Gideon grows up in a land oppressed by the Midianites, the Amalekites and the “sons of the east” (Judges 6:3). The text tells us these enemies were so numerous that they “would come in like locusts for number, both they and their camels were innumerable; and they came into the land to devastate it” (6:5-6).

It is for this reason that we find Gideon threshing wheat in a wine press, hiding from his innumerable enemy. Despite his fear, the angel of the Lord addresses him as a “valiant warrior” and appoints this young man as the deliverer of Israel. Sure enough, as the text tells us, Gideon and a mere 300 men defeat the innumerable armies of their enemies. Gideon is the unlikely hero and the Israelites are so impressed by his military leadership that they seek to make him king. “Rule over us, both you and your son, also your son’s son, for you have delivered us from the hand of Midian” (8:22). Gideon rightly persuades these men that the Lord is their king and ruler. Had the text ended there, we would never see the clay feet of our story’s hero.

We are not told why Gideon does what he does, but rather than be rewarded by becoming king over Israel, he instead opts for a monetary remuneration and exacts a spoil from the men who came to make him their ruler; a gold earring from each one totaling 1,700 shekels of gold. Today, that amount is roughly the equivalent of 3 million dollars. But these earrings were in addition to the spoils of war Gideon had already collected from the slain Midianites: crescent ornaments, pendants, purple robes, and even bands from the camels’ necks. And he used this gold to craft a monument of sorts to himself--a golden ephod or decorative vestment--which he had placed in his home city, Ophrah. While the text is not explicit about the reasons for making this ornament, the outcome was disastrous. “Gideon made an ephod, and placed it in his city, Ophrah, and all Israel played the harlot with it there, so that it became a snare to Gideon and his household” (8:27).

While there are many applications to be drawn out of the story of Gideon, we cannot help but see the warning to us all about the perils of misplaced affections. A desire for honor became the snare for all of Israel and perpetuated their propensity towards idolatry. Subtle and seemingly innocuous, our desires can quickly become entities we worship. It is a reminder to us all to ask: “What are our desires, and what do they tell us about what we love?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.” Eventually, what dominates our innermost thoughts and imaginations comes forth as that to which we give our allegiance and worship. Indeed, long before Emerson, Jesus warned similarly that “where our treasure is, there will our hearts be also” (Matthew 6:21).

Margaret Manning is associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

In the Belly of Darkness

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Even the smallest children in vacation bible school that year seemed to catch the irony deeply anchored in the story of Jonah. God calls one of his prophets to deliver a message to save the great city of Nineveh. The prophet, who is in the profession of pointing lives to the God who saves, runs in the opposite direction because he knows God would really save them! The special effects and the unforgettable plot--a great storm, a big fish, and a God everyone knows you can't run away from--make the narrative an easy theme for children's sermons and vacation bible school. Yet, child or adult, the text offers a mouthful. At the thought of Jonah in the fish, one little boy noted anxiously, "Jonah needs God to save him!" Indeed, Jonah introduces us to the God who hears, though our words are wrapped in self and seaweed, and the bars of sin and self-deception continue to imprison us. We need God to save us.

A text within the book of Jonah that is of particular interest to me is a text that in some ways seems not to fit in the story at all. Interrupting the style that quickly draws in its hearers, the text moves from narrative to poetry and back again to narrative. And yet the deliberate jaunt seems to provide a moment of significant commentary to the whole. The eight verses of poetry not only mark an abrupt shift in the tone of the text, but also in the attitude of its main character.

Spoken as a cry for deliverance, the poetic words of the prophet arise from the cold belly of the fish to the presence of merciful God. The scene is a stirring image reminiscent of David's wonder, "Where can I flee from your presence? ... If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there... If I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me" (Psalm 139:7-10). By his own actions, Jonah had descended into the depths, moving from the land of life and light into a sea of darkness and dampness. Yet his words ascend to the God to whom salvation belongs, and Jonah is saved:

"I called out to the LORD, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
For you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows
passed over me...

When my life was ebbing away,
I remembered you, LORD,
and my prayer rose to you,
to your holy temple" (Jonah 2:2-7).

Someone told me recently that we only seem to truly pray when we are in the midst of despair. When we have no other excuses to offer, no other comfort to hide behind, no more façades to uphold, we are most likely to bow in exhaustion and be real with God and ourselves. In our distress, we stand before God as we truly are--lives in need mercy. "For most of us," writes C.S. Lewis, "the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model."

Jonah's eloquent prayer for deliverance stands out in a book that is detailed with his egotistic mantras and glaring self-deceptions. In the midst of the mysterious darkness of the fish, he seems to understand the real deception that keeps him in the dark: "Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs" (2:8). Jonah, if only momentarily, clings to a truth more secure than comfort: "Salvation comes from the LORD" (2:9).

In moments of despair and distress, might we see similarly. In times of trouble, may God remove the idols that block our view of Him and reveal his strength in our weakness, his heart in our transparency. At times the deliverance we need is that of deliverance from ourselves.

Sadly, Jonah's idols of self and comfort returned not long after the prayer was finished and his life was spewed back into normalcy. As he rages over the death of a plant and the saving of Nineveh, Jonah doesn’t want to see the God who saved him. The scene brings to mind Isaiah's description: "Surely the hand of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear, but...your sins have hidden his face from you" (59:1-2). Even so, the book ends on a note bidding us to see that God is always about the work of salvation. Whether in the lives of nations "who know not their right from their left" or in the lives of men and women blind with self and sin, God moves faithfully among us. Might we remember in distress and in safety, salvation comes from the LORD.

Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

No Greater Communion

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

There are some communities that tragically seem to miss something vital in their communing. A support group can be a place where a person can delve deeper into the behavior that isolates them; websites are reportedly linking strangers together who are, in turn, simultaneously committing suicide. Moreover, the sheer number of online confessionals reveals the need for a community where one can be real about plaguing guilt, failures, and offenses. Members clearly express a need for the fellow humanness of a flawed community, and at the same time a need to remain, in some ways, inhuman--unknown, nameless, faceless.

Brandon's is a name and a story over which to pause. The 21-year-old died in the privacy of a chat room full of people who watched by web-cam as he killed himself with drugs and alcohol. Their conversation was disquieting, left behind in a hauntingly silent script. Voices cheered him to pass out on screen. Brandon responded with his phone number. "Call if I look dead," he said. But even after he passed out, they spoke as if he was something less than real. "He's dead," said someone. "Happy trails," said another. "Should I call 911?" "No!" they agreed in unison.

After this tragedy, columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote in shock of Brandon's story and what seemed to be the telltale signs of yet another failed community: the virtual community. The very community, he reminded, that we were promised at "the dawn of the Internet Age, the one that would link all humankind in brotherhood, sisterhood, enlightenment."(1) Such connectedness clearly failed Brandon. Even if his friends would have stopped to call for help, they didn't know his real name.

Beneath the promises of our successfully linked world, a poignant undertow of despair is noticeably emerging. We are living in a lonely world, in a very needy world, and the need for true community and meaningful connectedness has never been more piercingly heard and severely felt. When the diaries of the famed atheist, Madeline Murray O'Hare were auctioned off several years ago, they found three times punctuated in her journals the words: "Will somebody somewhere please love me? Will somebody somewhere please love me?"

What heart is not stirred at those words? Our longing for meaningful connections is real, and it is a longing that runs deeper than any one area of our lives. We are looking for connections of the heart, soul, and mind.

The same teacher who said the greatest commandment on earth is to love God with all of our strength and our being, once held a child in front of him and said, "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me" (Matthew 18:2-5).

Showing us a child as a sign of the community of God’s kingdom, Jesus is saying something deliberate about the kind of community he is drawing together. Little children love readily with all of themselves. Their connections and unity are genuine, perhaps because the mind has not yet been deterred by suspicion, disappointment, or pride. As such, their hearts grasp something about communing we often do not. G.K. Chesterton, who said he learned more by watching children than any philosophy book, once observed that children have in their ownership the obscure idea of loyalty even to a thing. The child who has gone to bed without his toy does not only feel that he is sad without it. He also feels in some transcendental way that the toy is sad without him.

I believe Jesus urges us to see that those who will be like children, like men and women aware that the love we seek also seeks us, will find the kingdom of God. The very community we long for is governed by one who longs for us to be in it. If God is like the shepherd willing to leave the flock to go out searching for the one who has strayed, there is nowhere we can flee from his presence; there is never a time we won't belong. Indeed, there is no greater love, no greater connection, no greater communing.

Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Leonard Pitts, Jr., "Another link to connect us doesn't work," The Detroit Free Press, Feb. 12, 2003.

Collapsible Walls

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

At certain times of the year, an extremely ferocious wind from the mountain blows through the city of Bursa in Turkey. This wind, named Lodos by the locals, is so strong that if you were anything short of a 100 pounds, you would be blown off the street when it hits.

A few years ago, when Lodos was making one of its many visits, a grade school building collapsed and tragically killed six schoolchildren. Later, officials blamed the poor structure of the building's walls for the cause of the crash. The public claimed that had the walls been properly constructed according to safe building standards, the school would have been able to withstand the destructive blow of Lodos and the unfortunate incident would not have occurred.

In a separate incident, some musicians were tearing down parts of their house to build a music studio. Imagine their horror when they found newspaper stuffed between the bricks of the walls of the house! Apparently, the contractor appointed to build the house used paper to gap between bricks to save on costs and make more money from the project.

Such reports sound peculiarly like what Jesus warned in one of his parables. In Matthew 7:24–27, he tells of two builders--one wise and another foolish. The houses of both builders look sturdy in fine weather, but the test always comes with the storm. The one who built his foundation on the rock had his house still standing after the rain and flood, but the house of the foolish man came crashing down after the storm, as it was built on sand.

The original audience of this parable knew very well what Jesus was talking about, since theirs was a land known for its torrential storms. Through this familiar analogy, Jesus was warning his followers that only those who take heed of his teachings and live out what they had learned from him will withstand the storms of life and ultimately the final test on judgment day. Any shortcuts or shoddiness will eventually be revealed.

The devotion of those who pretend to have faith, those who simply pay lip service, those who have faith in faith instead of trust in Jesus, will be tested and proven powerless and unable to hold up under pressure. Even those who merely have an intellectual commitment to the teachings of Christ will find that their structure will fool no one when the storms of life come.

In Ezekiel 13:10–13 a similar warning is given to those who cover up the weak wall that they have built with whitewash. The Lord assures that the storm will come and the foundation of those whitewashed walls will be leveled along with the destruction of its builder.

Clearly we live at a time in history when the storm is beating endlessly against the foundation of our walls from all directions. Our belief in an absolute standard of morality is confronted by relativism; our conviction in the authority of scripture is challenged; our reverence in the person of Christ is mocked, and our attempt to live a simple lifestyle is constantly distracted by the lure of consumer advertising and its promise of a better life.

Yet, there are no two ways about it: if we are to be like the wise builder, then we must construct our foundation on the rock by practicing the righteousness we have learned.

As Thomas a Kempis writes in The Imitation of Christ, "To many the saying, 'Deny thyself, take up thy cross and follow Me,' seems hard, but it will be much harder to hear that final word: 'Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.'" We will find that the cost demanded of us is no less than a radical submission to the exclusive lordship of Jesus. However, the reward comes when we find our house still standing after the final storm leaves and when the sun breaks through again.

I'Ching Thomas is associate director of training at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Singapore.