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THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF RAVI ZACHARIAS INTERNATIONAL MINISTRIES

VOLUME 27.4

JUST THINKING

Just Thinking is a teaching resource of

Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and

exists to engender thoughtful engagement with

apologetics, Scripture, and the whole of life.

Danielle DuRant

Editor

Ravi Zacharias International Ministries

3755 Mansell Road

Alpharetta, Georgia 30022

770.449.6766

WWW.RZIM.ORG

HELPING THE THINKER BELIEVE.

HELP ING THE BEL IEVER TH INK .

06A CLARION CALLThe light of the gospel shinesan eternal perspective uponour service unto God andhumanity, says JohnNjoroge, fusing all of ouractivities with significance.

TA B L E of C O N T E N T SVO LU M E 2 7.4

08SEIZE THE DAYThe entire craze for purposetoday raises importantquestions: What does it sayof how we see the meaningof life, and how we are tomake the most of it? OsGuinness addresses thesequestions in his new book,Carpe Diem Redeemed.

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03Editor’s NoteTHE TEST OF TIME

04BIGGER THAN THIS MOMENTJill Carattini writes thatwith the passing of time, it is odd that we are so poorlyreconciled to something sofamiliar and so shocked atsuch a universal experience.

21DISRUPTING THE STATUS QUOInto every generation andevery life, Jesus comes toupend and disrupt the statusquo, observes MargaretManning Shull. He is notdull. And he calls those whowould follow him to forsakeself-righteousness and pride.

23Think AgainYEAR AFTER YEARRavi Zacharias

JUST THINKING THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF RAVI ZACHARIAS INTERNATIONAL MINISTRIES

HELPING THE THINKER BELIEVE. HELPING THE BELIEVER THINK.

JOIN THE NEARLY 10,000 individuals from 127 different countries insigning up for the RZIM Academy Core Module. This 12-week onlinecourse offers highly practical training to help you become betterequipped to respond to individuals around you who have sincerequestions and honest objections about Christianity and to point themtowards Christ. According to our student feedback, people from allprofessions and ages, and all ranges of experience and education,have found this course helpful. The lectures cover the basics ofworldview, common objections to Christianity, and comparisonwith other belief systems. The strength of the training is in theemphasis on reaching the individual and learning to bridge the headand the heart.

Courses begin every month in English, with Spanish, French,and German options also available. Those who complete the CoreModule can sign up for one of our elective courses like What Does It Mean To Be Human?, Why Suffering?, Engaging the Modern World,Islam, and many more.

For more information, contact us at [email protected] orvisit rzimacademy.org.

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JUST THINKING • VOLUME 27.4 [3]

A FEW WEEKS after I moved into my house,I discovered a longstanding business intown was being torn down. Piles of antiquebrick lay in rubble, yet I saw somethingelse: a moss-covered patio in my barebackyard with a sweetly scented magnoliaproviding shade. Soon friends spent hourswith me breaking up stubborn Georgiaclay and tossing aside roots, rocks, and nailsto prepare the ground. The time investedand care in following detailed instructionsseemed a bit overwrought initially—afterall, I didn’t live in a floodplain—but everyguideline said a solid foundation was critical. Now more than 25 years later, mypatio sits on firm ground and happily, thefragrant magnolia tree is still providingshade. They have stood the test of time.

Jesus speaks of trees and foundationsin his Sermon on the Plain, recorded inLuke’s gospel. Jesus declares, “No goodtree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad treebear good fruit. Each tree is recognized byits own fruit” (Luke 6:43-44). When one’slife is rooted in God, it will be evident, saysJesus. A tree planted in fertile soil andcared for will produce good fruit.

Jesus builds upon this metaphor afew verses later: “I will show you what heis like who comes to me and hears mywords and puts them into practice. He islike a man building a house, who dug downdeep and laid the foundation on rock.

When a flood came, the torrent struck thathouse but could not shake it, because itwas well built. But the one who hears mywords and does not put them into practiceis like a man who built a house on theground without a foundation. The momentthe torrent struck that house, it collapsedand its destruction was complete” (verses47-49). Just as a “tree is recognized by itsown fruit,” so a structure shaken to its corewill reveal its true foundation. Investingtime and care to follow God’s instruction—brick upon brick year after year—lays asolid foundation that will stand the test oftime and even the onslaught of storms.

Yet as Darrell Bock notes in his commentary on Luke, “Obedience is not amatter of rule keeping but of faithfulness.[Jesus] is not formulating some ethic thatwe could not follow independent of a rela-tionship with him. Having a relationshipwith him is at the base of faithfulness.”

Jesus says in John 10 that he is theGood Shepherd who tenderly cares for his sheep; his sheep, in turn, listen to himand follow him. How we are loved! Hour byhour, day by day, may our lives reveal thatwe are truly his beloved sheep, entrustingourselves to his care and faithfully heedinghis every word.

Danielle DuRant is Director of Research &Writing at RZIM and Editor of Just Thinking.

THE TEST OF TIME

{ E D I T O R ’ S N O T E }

[4] JUST THINKING • RAVI ZACHARIAS INTERNATIONAL MINISTRIES

HAVE YOU EVER noticed how often we aresurprised by the passing of time? Do youcatch yourself with the familiar maxim on your mind, “Time flies!” or perhapsanother version of the same: “Where didthe summer go?” Or maybe you recall thelast time you noticed a child’s height orage or maturity with some genuine senseof disbelief.

Is it not odd to be so poorly reconciled tosomething so familiar, to be shocked at auniversal experience? C.S. Lewis likenedthis phenomenon to a fish repeatedlyastonished by the wetness of water—

adding with his characteristic cleverness,“This would be strange indeed! Unless ofcourse the fish were destined to become,one day, a land animal.”1

As we consider the idea of timeitself, seconds on the clock faithfully passeven as we ponder. All the same, we recognize that time is not just a fleetingthing. As Ravi Zacharias notes, “[Time]never moves forward without engravingits mark upon the heart—sometimes a stab,sometimes a tender touch, sometimes avice grip of spikes, sometimes a mortalwound. But always an imprint.”2

BIGGERTHAN THISMOMENTBy Jill Carattini


But why? If our origins are so humbleand we are destined for nothing more, ifwe are merely a collocation of time, atoms,and accident, why would we sense thatsomething sacred had been desecrated?Why would we be astonished at such atreatment of the dead if life itself is notpermanent?

I think we are outraged because wesense something substantial was trampledon indeed. In a lifetime, we see countlessglimpses of it. We remember sacredmoments in time, and we understandhuman life to have intrinsic dignity andworth, even when our philosophies sayotherwise. Note that no one asked thenames, occupations, race, or accomplish-ments of any of the victims. Our dignity is not assigned because of who we or whatwe have accomplished.

The Christian story offers more than a glimpse of a canvas and is biggerthan this earthly moment. The Scripturesmakes the very robust, central claim thathumankind is significant because Godcreated us in his image and the Son of God“became flesh and made his dwelling amongus” (John 1:14). Moreover, “Through [Christ]all things were made; without him nothingwas made that has been made” (John 1:3).Surely, there is a sacredness about lifeand death because the eternal author oftime has created our world and steppedinto it. Our surprise at time’s passing andoutrage at life—and death’s—violation areindeed thoroughly strange, unless God isvicariously involved in both our originand our destiny.

Jill Carattini is Managing Editor of A Sliceof Infinity at Ravi Zacharias InternationalMinistries.

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

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

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

To be sure, the most profoundimprints hold in our minds a definiteplace in history—the birth of a child, thedeath of a loved one, occasions of excep-tional joy or beauty, moments of unusualpain. But isn’t there sometimes a sensethat they also hold something more? Insuch moments, we are touched by thereality of the thing itself, a meaning thatis bigger than this very moment. We walkbeyond the brush strokes of time to find aglimpse of a canvas that makes our usualview seem like paint-by-number. Some ofthese moments seem to hold the stirringthought that eternity will be the vantagepoint from which we see the big picture.

Those who challenge the notion ofeternity claim that it is a human invention,like religion itself, created to soften whatwe do not understand, to undermine thepainfulness of life, to release us from thefinality of death. As the late scientist CarlSagan wrote, “If some good evidence forlife after death were announced, I’d beeager to examine it; but it would have to bereal scientific data, not mere anecdote....Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.”3

As I consider Sagan’s words, my mindreturns to the crematory disaster thatmade the headlines across the UnitedStates some years ago. Few could overlookthe unfathomable outrage. Over 300 bodieswere carelessly discarded around thewoods and lakes of the property, bodiesthat should have been cremated but forwhatever reason were not. Deceitfully,the crematory gave families containersholding cement or burned wood in placeof a loved one’s ashes. Across the nation,people commonly noted that they feltsomehow violated by this act of sheerirreverence to the dead, whether theyknew them or not. In fact, at the time, lawsagainst such matters did not even exist.Who would have thought them necessary? Yet few denied that these were crimesagainst both the living and the dead.

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IN SPITE OF the proverbial certainty ofdeath and taxes, the human psyche hasalways dreamed of discovering loopholesin whatever mechanisms fix the limits. Yet though it might be possible to cheat on one’s taxes, “cheating death” remains aphrase of wishful thinking applied to inci-dences of short-lived victories against ourown mortality. Eventually, death honorsits ignominious appointment with all of us,calling the bluff of the temptation to believethat we are the masters of our own destiny.Despite the universal, empirical verificationof its indiscriminate efficiency, we continueto be constantly surprised whenever deathstrikes. Only a painfully troubled life canbe so thoroughly desensitized against itsugliness as to not experience the throbbingagony of the void it creates within uswhenever the earthly journey of aloved one comes to an end.

Such a peculiar reaction to an otherwise commonplaceoccurrence points strongly to the fact that this world is not our home. As Ecclesiastes 3:11explains, God “has set eternityin the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God hasdone from beginning to end.”Therefore, the mysteriousnotion that we are not meant to die is no mere pipe dream: it sounds a clarion call to the eternal destiny of our souls.

According to the biblicalrecord, there is no shame orarrogance in pitching our hopesfor the future as high as our imaginations will allow.

Actually, the danger is that our expectationsmay be too low, for “No eye has seen, noear has heard, no mind has conceived whatGod has prepared for those who love him”(1 Corinthians 2:9). Far from being theaccidental byproducts of a mindless collocation of atoms, we are indestructiblebeings whose spiritual radars, amidst

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CALLBy John Njoroge


much static noise, are attuned to our hearts’true home.

Trouble begins, however, when wetry to squeeze that eternal existence intoour earthly lives in a manner that alto-gether denies our finite natures. We do sowhenever we desensitize ourselves againstthe finality of death through repeatedexposure to stage-managed destruction of human life through the media. Or wezealously seek ultimate fulfillment in suchtraitorous idols as pleasure, materialwealth, professional success, power, andother means, without taking into accountthe fleeting nature of human existence. Or we broach the subject of death onlywhen we have to, and even then we feel theneed to couch it in palatable euphemisms.

With some of our leading intellectualsassuring us that we have pulled ourselvesup by our own bootstraps, and we thereforehave no need for God, the only thing missingfrom our lives seems to be the tune of“Forever Young” playing in the cosmicbackground. A visitor from outer spacewould probably conclude that only thevery unlucky ones die, while the rest of us are guaranteed endless thrill-ridesthrough space aboard this green planet.

But such a visitor would promptly be treated to the rude awakening that eventhe most self-assured of human beings are nonetheless in transit. Although it ispossible to sustain a facade of total controlwithin the confines of material comforts, a functional government, and a reasonabledistance from the darker side of humansuffering, this opportunity is not equallyshared around the globe. It would take avery specialized form of education tobelieve in the ability of human beings tocontrol their own destiny when hundredsof people are being put to the sword,homes are being razed to the ground, andyour neighbors are fleeing for their lives—a scenario my family lived through inKenya. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere,news anchors in this part of the worldrarely preface their gruesome video clips

with viewer discretion warnings, and sothe good, the bad, and the ugly are alldeemed equally fit for public consumption.

Affronted by such an in-your-face,unapologetic reality of human mortality,one finds oneself face to face with a dilemma:Why should I devote all of my energy tomaking a meaningful difference in theworld if it is true that everything doneunder the sun will eventually amount tozero? Once one has come to the conclusionthat the emperor has no clothing, what sensedoes it make to keep up with the pretense?Sadly, some see through the emptiness and choose to end their own lives. From anaturalistic perspective, that seems to be a perfectly consistent step to take.

Yet the Bible grasps this nettle withastounding authority. God not only hasplaced a yearning for our true home in ourhearts but also has promised to cloth theperishable with the imperishable and themortal with immortality through Christ’sown death (1 Corinthians 15:54). In themeantime, the light of the gospel shines an eternal perspective upon our serviceunto God and humanity, fusing all of ouractivities with significance.

When the call of God has beenanswered, nothing that is done in obedienceto the Father, as the Son himself confirmedin life and death, is ever trivial. Thus, evenin the face of suffering and death, as a fol-lower of Christ, I neither bury my head inthe sand nor grope blindly in total darkness.With faithfulness and joy, I enthusiasticallyrender service to my God;

And when my task on earth is done,When by thy grace the victory’s won,Even death’s cold wave I will not flee,Since God through Jordan leadeth me.1

John Njoroge is a member of the speakingteam at Ravi Zacharias InternationalMinistries and lives in Nairobi, Kenya.

1 Joseph Gilmore, “He Leadeth Me” (1862).


I HAVE OFTEN TOLD THE STORYof the time I was returning from Brusselsto London on the Eurostar Express. Asthe train approached St. Pancras Stationin central London, it went past somedilapidated Victorian buildings beside thetrack. Many of them were covered with asplattered mess of graffiti, slogans, andprotest symbols. But one wall carried amessage that was clearly readable as thetrain slowed before entering the station.

You only live once, and it doesn’t last.So live it up. Drink it down.Laugh it off. Burn it at both ends.You can’t take it with you. You only live once.

Those words are of course a sum-mary of the short-lived YOLO philosophy(“You Only Live Once”). The idea sweptmany university and college campusesbriefly as a much-popularized version ofwhat was taken to be Epicurus’s famousmaxim, “Eat, drink, and be merry, fortomorrow we die.” But regardless of thedistortion of Epicurus, it’s probable thatfew devotees of YOLO were aware of oneoriginal formulation that set out the philosophy with a sharp sting in its tail:“You only live once—if then.”

SEIZETHE DAY

by Os Guinness

(YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE)


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That blunt version of the YOLO philosophy, and indeed the entire crazefor purpose today—books, seminars, conferences, life coaches, slogans, andall—raises important questions: Whatdoes it say of how we see the meaning oflife, and how we are to make the most ofit? From our dawning consciousness ofthe world as infants to our waking everyday to a new day of life and a world out-side us that we can see, hear, and touch,we are always and only at the very centerof our lives and therefore at the center ofexistence as we know it. It is therefore ajolt, a fundamental jolt, to realize howthat perspective carries an illusion.

We are simply not at the center ofexistence. We will not always be here, andthe universe will go on without us as if wehad never been here. Most people neverhear of us even while we are here, and alltoo soon it will be as if we had never beenhere at all. For almost all but the tiniesthandful of us, the day will come whenthere is no trace of us in the living memoryof the earth.

Thus for all our sense of significance,whether modest or inflated, we are all, asthe Greeks said, “mortals.” In the wordsof a Roman epitaph, “As I, so you, so everyone.” Or as the Bible states simply,“Dust you are and to dust you will return”(Gen 3:19). Human life is hemmed in bythree words and the reality they speak of: mortality, brevity, fragility—the lastbecause all that shows we are alive andseparates us from death is a mere breath,and one day a single breath will be ourlast. Who, if they have ever seen a greatperformance of Shakespeare’s King Lear,

can ever forget the anguish of the old kingholding his dead daughter Cordelia in hisarms, as if he could put a mirror to her lipsand see if there was even the slightest vaporon the glass? “Why should a dog, a horse,a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?”1

One single breath? And a finitenumber of breaths that in a finite numberof days could all be counted? Does theshortness of it all leave you dizzy? Doesthe truth that we are “born to live to die”give life the sense of Milan Kundera’s“unbearable lightness of being”? Are we toconclude with the writer of Ecclesiastes,“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Eccles1:2)? Life is so short, and it can as easilybe wasted as lived to the full, so what doesit all add up to? How do we make the mostof such fleeting days on earth? What doessuch a microsecond life say of our under-standing of life, meaning, purpose, identity,truth, and of notions such as right andwrong? What does it say of how weunderstand what lies behind all of thesethings—our views of the universe and oftime, history, reality, and whether there is a God, gods, or nothing behind it all?And what does it say of how we are tounderstand the ideal of an “examinedlife,” a “life worth living,” and how we live well in our brief stay on earth?

If, as people commonly say today, ourbrief lives are simply “the dash betweenthe two dates on our gravestones,” whathope is there of investing that brief dashwith significance? There are truths thatno one can answer for us. We must eachface them alone. Our own mortality is oneof them. How challenging to stand andask as Tolstoy asked himself, “What willcome of my entire life? . . . Is there anymeaning in my life that will not be annihi-lated by the inevitability of death whichawaits me?”2 And how terrible to come closeto the end of life and have to say withTolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, “What if my wholelife has been wrong?”3

In short, our human challenge is to

Taken from Carpe DiemRedeemed by Os Guinness.©2019 by Os Guinness. Used by permission of InterVarsityPress, P.O. Box 1400, DownersGrove, IL, 60515-1426.www.ivpress.com


make the most of our time on earth and toknow how to do it. Time and space are thewarp and woof of the reality in which welive our brief lives as humans, but theyare different. When Alexander the Greatasked Diogenes if there was anything hecould do for him, the flinty old philosopheranswered famously, “Stand out of my light!”We can occupy part of space exclusivelyand block someone else’s access, but noone occupies time exclusively. Time is our“commons,” the open and shared groundfor all who are alive at any moment toenjoy together.

More importantly, we humans canconquer space, and we do so easily androutinely with our bulldozers, our cranes,our smart phones, our jets, and all theshiny achievements of our technologicalcivilization. But we cannot conquer time.Time does not lie still before us like space,for it is within us as well as around us, andit is never stationary. It moves, and in onedirection only—onwards and unstoppable.In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel,philosopher and rabbi, “Man transcendsspace, and time transcends man.”4

Importantly too, the comparative easeof our conquest of the world of physicalspace disguises a vital fact: our conquestsof space are always at the expense ofusing up time. We are spending our timeeven if we twiddle our thumbs and donothing, and energetic activism does notsolve the problem. We can build “biggerand bigger barns” or bigger and biggerempires, whether political or commercial,but there is always a day or a night whenlife ends, and then, as Jesus of Nazarethwarned, “your soul is required of you” (Luke 12:20). Which means that the timewe have spent in doing anything is thereal cost and the proper key to assessingwhether we have gained or lost and theeffort has been worthwhile. Howevereffortless-seeming our accomplishments,we always pay for them at the expense of our greatest challenge and the most

insoluble mystery of our lives—time.“What does it profit a man,” Jesus alsodeclared, “to gain the whole world andforfeit his soul?” (Mk 8:36).

Look around the world today at allour high-striding billionaires, multibil-lionaires, and soon-to-be trillionaires.They may be titans of finance or technol-ogy or political power, but face-to-facewith time they are the same little people,the same mortals we all are. Whatevertheir plans and their dreams for the future,whatever their intentions and their reso-lutions, whatever their energy and theirresources, death waits for them at the endas for us all, and death is therefore trulyhumanity’s “final enemy,” whatever thehopes of the life-extension dreamers.Heroes or villains, saints or sinners,world-famous or unknown, we all die inthe end. All human life is time bound: italways has been, and it always will be. Ourbasic condition is what the novelist andpoet Thomas Hardy called “time-torn.”5

Yet the challenge of time is sharperstill for us as modern people. Karl Marxfamously described workers in theIndustrial Revolution as “wage slaves,”and quite apart from the thought of deathat the end of life, many of us in ouradvanced modern world know well thatwe are as much “time slaves” as some are“wage slaves” and “debt slaves.” Life in theinstant world of advanced modernity isfired at us point blank. And since we areencouraged to realize that life will speedup further as things are made even more“efficient,” does it mean that we are livingtoo slowly and inefficiently now? We haveless control over our time than ever,which is the real index of slavery. We areunder the gun as never before—running,running, running and never catching up.(Most of us, we are told, are “triple screen-gazers” and check our smart phones morethan one hundred times a day, which isonly one aspect of our constant state ofpartial attention and always feeling behind.)


Yet for all our frustrations and complaints about the “rat race,” we oftendo not give much thought to all that liesbehind it and how we can begin to counterit. Which means we are all the more vul-nerable to the efficiency experts and tonew fashions that turn out to be falseanswers, and to some that make the prob-lem even worse. And there is always thethought that we do not want to admit: Ifour own technologies have made us intotime slaves, we have done it to ourselves.

How then are we to think about thechallenge of time today, and how are weto live more freely under the pressures ofmodern fast life? There is no escape frombeing time bound and time torn, for thatis part and parcel of our being human. But is there an answer to the nightmareof time slavery in the here and now, andtherefore to seeing time well and makingthe most of life?

“JUST DO IT” TO “JUST BUY IT”Roman Krznaric’s best-selling Carpe DiemRegained captures the modern dilemmasuperbly, and my own title is a deliberatevariation on his.6 He has set out to explorethe present status of the famous two-wordmaxim carpe diem, “seize the day,” fromthe Roman poet Horace’s celebrated Ode11. As Krznaric sees it, the motto hasnever been more popular, and it is nowinterpreted variously as a matter of fivemain approaches to time: grasping anopportunity, going for pleasure, practicingpresence, developing spontaneity, andpursuing a certain style of politics. Thedistinguished English actress Judi Denchhad the motto tattooed on her wrist onher eighty-first birthday, and Hollywoodcaptured the philosophy brilliantly in thefilm Dead Poets Society. Robin Williamsplayed a teacher in a New England school,urging his students in poetry class: “Weare food for worms, lads. Because, believeit or not, each and every one of us in thisroom is going to stop breathing, grow old

and die. . . . [Therefore] Carpe diem. Seize theday, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”7

At the same time, Krznaric argues,the passionate desire to not miss out onlife has been pulled off course by a welterof current distortions and look-alikes.Seizing the day, making the most of themoment and living each moment to thefullest, has been hijacked and redirectedto such false ends as consumerism, hedonism, workaholism, mindfulness,and irresponsibility. Nike’s “Just do it,” he says, has morphed into “Just buy it,” “Just plan it,” and “Just watch it.”

Krznaric’s book is a fascinating tourof the contemporary horizon concerningresponses to time in the modern world. It shines a searching light on all sorts ofcurrent follies and pitfalls in handlingtime and therefore on the challenge of living a “good life” and an “examined life”today. Yet with the selective attentiontypical of so many of today’s thinkers, hisown answer overlooks the perspective ofthe most radical view of time that onceshaped the Western world and that shinesout today like a lighthouse in the stormthat is advanced modern life—the uniqueperspective of the Hebrew and ChristianScriptures. He admits that his omission isdeliberate and his short-sightedness isself-induced. “I don’t believe there is anyultimate meaning of life, whether writtenin scripture, the stars or our DNA. If it’s meaning we seek, we can—and must—create it for ourselves.”8

Create it for ourselves? Like BertrandRussell, with the great English philosopher’sview of the Greek giant Atlas who carriedhis own world on his own shoulders,Krznaric does not believe there is anymeaning of life that is “inherent” in theuniverse or “out there,” to be discovered.If anyone desires meaning today, they will have to create it by themselves andcarry it by them selves. Nothing else isconceivable. By definition, the atheists’ oragnostics’ search for the meaning of time


and life can never amount to more than aDo-it-Yourself endeavor.

The truth is that the DIY secularistview of time is a major and widely regardedanswer, but it is only one answer amongthe world’s many answers and a minorityanswer at that. Yet when it comes to achallenge as profound as time, all answersshould be considered and none shouldmerely be asserted as if self-evident ortaken on trust simply because the speakeris an eminent philosopher or a best-sellingauthor. As always, contrast is the motherof clarity, and the differences between theanswers make a difference—and make adifference not only for individuals but for whole societies and civilizations.

This book sets out the contours ofthe very different answer that Krznaricoverlooks—the Bible’s. Unfortunately,this Jewish and Christian perspectivecame to be blindly accepted in the Westwith too few questions asked, and it isnow blindly rejected in the West with toofew questions asked. Over against the earlier attitude, I am not asking for anyspecial treatment, and over against thecurrent attitude, all I would seek is a fairhearing for a view that is distinctive, radical, and magnificently consequentialfor each of us as individuals as well as forthe future of humanity. For surely it isundeniable that a wise understanding anda positive response to time and history isas vital to the future of humanity as it isto each one of us in our daily lives.

Carpe diem, “seize the day,” or makethe most of life is a magnificent ideal, buthow are we to achieve it? How are we tomake it more than a slogan and a cliché fitonly for a college student’s poster? Howare we to take it beyond its three mostobvious pit-falls, seizing the day in a self-ish or a short-term manner, or cultivatinga style of spontaneity that is only a sillyform of randomness? And how are we todo it under the unrelenting pressures of modern fast life? Science, by its very

nature, can give us explanations for things,but it cannot provide the meaning we areasking for. Philosophy, after three thousandyears, has sharpened and sharpened ourthinking, but it has brought us no nearerto answers. For all the skepticism oftoday, and the refusal to think too deeply,the wisdom of the ages still holds truethat we must look to ultimate beliefs.

My argument here is simple,straightforward, and a sure way forward.Seizing the day and making the most of lifemust not be flaunted in the face of impos-sibility or absurdity; the ideal requires avision of life capable of fulfilling it. Andthat, I will argue, can best be found withinan ultimate belief, a faith, a relationship, a trust that does justice to the deepestmeaning of time, of history, and humansignificance and enterprise.

In short, seizing the day, making themost of life and understanding the mean-ing of life are inseparable. All three requirethat if we are to master time, we mustcome to know the author of time and themeaning of time and come to know thepart he calls us to play in his grand story,which makes the deepest overall sense oftime and history. And even more, wonderof wonders, we are then invited to live lives that align our individual hopes anddestinies with the very purpose and destinyof the universe itself.

NINETEEN FORTY- ONE, THEYEAR I happened to be born, has beendescribed as the true midnight hour of thetwentieth century. The lights of freedomand democracy appeared to be flickering,Nazi Germany and Imperial Japanseemed invincible, and the diabolicalmalevolence of “the final solution” wasgerminating in the dark recesses of Naziminds. Seventeen million had been killedin the brutal Japanese invasion of Chinathat was launched four years earlier, andwhere our family lived near Kaifeng, theancient capital of the Song dynasty, five


million people—including my two brothers—died in a terrible famine caused by anarmy of locusts and the heartless responseof General Chiang Kai-shek to his ownpeople. Later in 1949, living in Nanjing,the ancient capital of the magnificentMing dynasty and later of NationalistChina, my parents and I witnessed thefinal victory of Lin Bao and the Red Armyand the triumph of Chairman Mao andthe People’s Republic of China.

In short, the horizon of my earlyyears was filled to overflowing withrumors, brutality, crisis, natural disaster,war, death, revolution, terror, and historyon a grand scale. Human life seemedcheap, every day was a challenge to sur-vive, and we who did survive seemed toricochet from day to day and from placeto place, with as little sense of control aspinballs in a cheap arcade machine.

I can’t say I thought about suchweighty matters at the time. I was eight atthe climax of the communist revolutionwhen Mao’s reign of terror began, but myfather—who was fearless—was like ananchor in the storm around us. I certainlythought about such questions later. Mybrothers had died. Why not me? Howcan we say we each matter when we are

dwarfed by the cosmos, dwarfed by time,dwarfed by events, and dwarfed even bymost of the things that are the backdropof our own lives, such as the size of thestate and the number of our fellowhumans on the earth at the same time aswe are? For some people, of course, theanswer is that we don’t matter. Once upona time, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Insome isolated corner of the cosmos, pouredout shimmeringly into unaccountablesolar systems, there was once a star onwhich clever animals invented knowledge.It was the most arrogant and hypocriticalminute of ‘world history’: but it was onlya minute. After nature drew a few breaths,the star grew still with cold, and theclever animals had to die.”9

Many people today would agree with Nietzsche, but from the Jewish andChristian perspective he was wrong, badlywrong. Nothing could be farther from theGenesis account of creation and the Bible’sevaluation of time, history, and our littleindividual lives. Do we each have value? Is there any meaning to our lives, even intimes of conflict and catastrophe? Yes, yes,yes, Jews and Christians cry out togetherlike a trumpet blast. We may not see itnow, but there is meaning to life and to the covenantal view of time and history as a whole. There is meaning in each lifebecause we are each significant, history issingular, so we play our part in a larger picture and a longer story whose endingwill make sense of it all when it is unveiled.

Nietzsche did not believe in God,and to his credit he refused to trust in anyview of life that favored a human perspec-tive for which there was no foundationwithout God. Life for him had to be seenagainst the whole of life and the vastnessof the cosmos without God and withoutinherent meaning. There is certainly aparadox in the Bible’s view. We may be“creatures of dust,” small in size, absurdlydwarfed by history and outnumbered byour fellow creatures, but we are made inthe image of God, and “breathed into bythe Spirit of God.” So we each havemomentous worth and significance, andour little lives make glorious sense—evenif it is not all always apparent to us withinthe limited horizon of the here and now.

Perhaps because those turbulentearly years, I have always had a passion tomake sense of what was happening aroundme. Like a dog with oversensitive ears, Ihave always felt the presence and passingof time acutely. Most people, it seems, fitcomfortably into their own times like ahand in a glove and find it strange to thinkof living in any other time—though ofcourse many feel themselves out of stepwith their times as they grow older. In hislast years, C. S. Lewis famously described


himself as a “dinosaur.” Doubtless thecommonsense realism of those who justlive and rarely give a thought to time isenviable in many ways.

There are those who wish they hadbeen born in completely different timesand somehow always feel out of joint intheir own time. The great Austrian states-man Prince Metternich, who lived from1773 to 1859, felt this deeply. “My life fellinto a disgusting historical period. I wasborn either much too early or much toolate; now I actually feel good for nothing.At an earlier period I would have enjoyedlife, in a future period I could have beentruly constructive; today I spend my lifepropping up decaying buildings. I ought tohave been born in 1900, thus having beforeme the twentieth century.”10 Even theapostle Paul himself wrote that he felt like“a man born out of due time” (1 Cor 15:8).

I have never had the unthinkingcontentment of the first group or theunsettled restlessness of the second,though for me the blend of time and thetimes has grown to be one of the majorthemes in life. I have had an electric senseof “the moment” almost as far back as I can remember, and have constantlywondered what it all must mean. We onlylive once, and time is short, so timethrows down a gauntlet at each moment.Do we rise to meet it and seize themoment or not? Life’s challenge, as theBritish king Cymbeline says to his lordsin Shakespeare’s romance when he hearsthat the Romans have landed, is to “meetthe time as it seeks us.”11 Or in the famouslines of Brutus in Shakespeare’s JuliusCaesar, there are tides in the affairs ofmen that must be “taken at the flood.”12

NOT A MOMENT, BUT A WAY OF LIFEThe Bible’s idea of carpe diem, “seize theday,” or “redeeming the time” is sharplydifferent from the direction to whichmost people take the ideal—toward theselfish, the short term, and the purelyspontaneous. There is no surer foundation,

no stronger propulsion, and no more soaringvision of carpe diem than within the biblicalor covenantal view of time. Yet just as freedom is not “the permission to do what you like” but “the power to do whatyou should,” so “seizing the day” is farmore than the matter of bare choice—Krznaric’s “that you choose rather thanwhat you choose.” Why you choose, howyou choose, and what you choose are allvital and decisive factors in the Bible’sunderstanding.

As discussed earlier in this book,repentance and forgiveness are the key to“redeeming the time” in terms of the past,and notions such as sabbath and sabbati-cals are a key to redeeming the time interms of the present. But what of redeem-ing the time in terms of the future, as“Carpe Diem” is usually understood?Seizing the day or redeeming future timeis rising to life within a powerful matrixof truths that sets out an entire way of lifein which the ideal of carpe diem can cometo its highest fruition. God calls us in theflux and flow of time and history, and thegift of being able to seize the day flowersfrom a way of life that weaves togetherthree principles: “Walk before God,”“Read the signs of the times,” and “ServeGod’s purpose in your generation.”

WALK BEFORE GODWhy “walk before God” rather than mere-ly striking out in whatever impromptuacts of faith or whatever unplanned newdirections in life may spring to mind? Forone thing, creative improvisation is farmore than random impulsiveness, a stud-ied effort to flout the past, a passion toshock the bourgeoisie, or a trendy crazeto be creatively destructive. The freestand most brilliant creative improvisations,whether in sport, singing, jazz, painting,dancing, politics, or thinking, are not random acts of fancy but the fruit of agenuine mastery of an art. They are bornof countless hours of training, practice, anddiscipline—the celebrated “ten thousand


hours” principle through which masteryhas become intuitive and there is freedomfor the new and creative. St. Francis ofAssisi, for example, was often known forhis surprising and spontaneous acts, butfar from random, they were born of thedepth of his deep and daily relationshipwith Jesus and his care for his fellowhumans and God’s other creatures.

For another thing, the natural andnecessary foundation of the life of faith iswalking before God. What a person saysand does, and how they live in daily life,are always the best test of what they saythey believe and the truest indication oftheir intentions and motivations. Goetheremarked that “we should try in vain todescribe a man’s character, but let his actsbe collected, and an idea of the characterwill be presented to us.”13 That may soundobvious, but it is not how many peoplethink about God and faith. Just ask thequestion, Is there a God, and what is thebest way to know him? and most peoplewill answer in terms of philosophy.Western thinking and faith have beenheavily influenced by the Greeks, andmany people therefore tend naturally todiscuss God using philosophy. They thinkabout God and understand faith throughphilosophical arguments and proofs, usinglogic and building a case from nature (forexample, the famous theistic proofs for God).

Yet the Jewish people have longpointed out that God is introduced in theBible through history rather than philos-ophy, and that faithfulness (or reliabilityand loyalty) is central to the notion offaith. Faith in God is not the conclusion ofa syllogism or the last link that completesan intellectual chain of logic. God is knownin the Bible through the story of encounters,in experience, in history. The Jews knewGod unmistakably because he rescuedthem from slavery in Egypt, and they sawand experienced his majesty at Mt. Sinai.As the rabbis point out, one might expectthe Ten Commandments to be introduced

with the words, “I am the Lord your Godwho created the heavens and the earth.”But what God actually said in declaringthem was, “I am the Lord your God, whobrought you out of the land of Egypt, outof the house of slavery” (Ex 20:2). Theyknew God unmistakably through his great acts in history—the ten plagues, theparting of the Red Sea, the encounter atMt. Sinai, the provision of water andmanna in the wilderness.

This emphasis on the walk of faith is striking in the description of God’s callto Abraham. The text in Genesis is veryspecific about what he is to leave andbreak away from:

Go forth from your country,And from your relativesAnd from your father’s house,To the land which I will show you.(Gen 12:1)

But it is silent—it says absolutelynothing—about what he is to do when hegets there. All Abraham is told is “Walkbefore Me, and be blameless” (Gen 17:1).The same was true for the first followersof Jesus. They became “followers of Jesus”or “followers of the Way.” The good newsthe early Christians trumpeted to theworld was the story of what God had doneand what as firsthand witnesses they hadseen with their own eyes and heard withtheir own ears. But their basic witnesswas the way they lived it out in theirlives—their “walk.”

This stress on history rather thanphilosophy is behind the vast differencebetween what Pascal described as “theGod of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” who is not the “god ofphilosophers and scholars.” A truth well-lived outweighs both a truth well-statedand a truth well-argued. A truth well-statedis excellent, but a truth well-lived is price-less. To say that is not to disparage goodphilosophy. Good philosophy is as a


matter of “good thinking about thinking,”and it is especially crucial for establishingthe sort of wisdom common to all humanbeings as well as for clearing the groundand showing that faith is neither irrationalnor foolish as critics claim. But God is primarily known through his actions inhistory and in the lives of individualsrather than through arguments alone.

Above all, the reality of God is betterdemonstrated in the story of the life, work,death, and resurrection of Jesus than in athousand arguments about the existenceof God. And the credibility of faith shinesout more clearly in a life of real faith thanin the statement of mere beliefs or thedeclaration of a creed. A life of faith is thestory of the truths Christians believe butare embodied in human form. Each suchlife adds its support to the voice of theBible as the grand story of a thousandsmaller stories of God’s breaking into theexperience of human beings in real life. To be sure, words count crucially, proposi-tions matter vitally, and truths about Godmay and must be stated theologically andaccurately, as in the majestic propheciesof Isaiah, the profundity of St. Paul’s argu-ments to the first Christians in Rome, orin the historic creeds of the church. Clarityof faith is essential, loyalty to truth is all-important, and truth claims must alwaysbe set out as cogently as possible. But themultilayered reality of truth comes intoits own in the visible, audible, and tangiblereality of a life lived by faith.

Many implications flow from thispoint. For example, the reminder andinsistence that faith (in Hebrew emunah)means faithfulness, loyalty, and trustwor-thiness, so that apostasy is tantamount toadultery, a violation of love and loyaltyand not simply a failure of theologicalcorrectness. But one central implicationis that the life of faith is a way of living inrelationship with God, and not simply amatter of a stated belief. For people offaith, this means that seizing the day is

never a sudden impulse or a random actof unplanned inspiration. It is not a whimor short-lived intention like a New Year’sresolution. Seizing the day is the creativeexpression of a seasoned way of life thatknows God and is steeped in always seeingtime, history, and life “under God,” and inliving God’s way faithfully before him.“Walking before God,” then, is living asGod intends us to live, and the essentialfoundation without which making themost of life is impossible.

IF YOU DON’T GET IT, YOU DON’T GET ITThe second major requirement for seizingthe day, redeeming the time, and makingthe most of life is discernment of themoment and the hour. Aware of God, weare aware too of our world and our times.With one hand on the Bible and the otheron the newspaper or the Internet, we arecalled to “read the signs of the times.” Boththe Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament)and the New Testament are full of exam-ples of discerning the times—or failing todo so. Some are positive and some negative.For many people, the positive examplesin the Old Testament are better knownand much loved. For instance, some ofKing David’s men from the tribe ofIssachar were described as skilled inreading the signs of the times (1 Chron12:32). Even more famous are the wordsof Mordecai to his cousin Esther, queen ofPersia, “Who knows whether you havenot attained royalty for such a time asthis?” (Esther 4:14). There are strikingnegative examples in the Old Testamenttoo, and above all the sobering fact that,with the exception of only two men—Caleb and Joshua—the entire generationthat Moses liberated from Egypt failed tomake it to the Promised Land. Throughone of the gravest incidents of mistrust inIsrael’s history, second only to the flagrant rebellion over the Golden Calf, an entiregeneration—as a generation—was judgedunworthy of entering the land.


At first glance, the New Testamentappears to have more negative examplesthan positive. The reason is that in allfour Gospels the generation Jesus cameto simply did not “get” him, including hisown disciples for the longest time. In theGospel of Matthew, for example, Jesuschided the Pharisees and Sadduceesbecause their discernment did not matchtheir weather forecasting. “Do you knowhow to discern the appearance of the sky,but cannot discern the signs of the times?”(Mt 16:3). In a single chapter in Luke’sGospel, Jesus repeatedly hammers on theterm “this generation” and declares thattheir generation was culpable, and thatthe people of Nineveh and the Queen ofSheba would rise up against them at theDay of Judgment because someone fargreater than Jonah or Solomon hadappeared to them and they had failed to“get” it (Lk 11:29-32).

Yet unquestionably, the profounddepths of the failure to see who Jesus wasand what he was about was mirroredmost deeply in Jesus’s lament overJerusalem. “He saw the city and weptover it, saying, ‘If you had known in thisday, even you, the things which make forpeace! But now they have been hiddenfrom your eyes . . . because you did notrecognize the time of your visitation”(Luke 19:41-44). Or as another translationputs it, “all because you did not recognizeGod’s moment when it came” (NEB).Remarkably, the suggestion is that Jesuswas able to see not simply two aspects oftime but three—his own day that wasright in front of him, the coming day inAD 70 when the Romans would sackJerusalem, and a third day, the day thatmight have been theirs if his generationhad responded to him and chosen the waythat led to peace.

Does this challenge to discernmentmean that “reading the signs of the times”is simple and straightforward? Far from it.The science of weather forecasting has

advanced a long way since Jesus accusedthe Pharisees and Sadducees of hypocrisy,though making sense of history and“reading the signs of the times” is as diffi-cult as ever. But the reason for the widen-ing gap offers us a clue to the way forward.Reinhold Niebuhr put his finger on theproblem. There is a marked differencebetween studying nature and forecastingthe weather on the one hand and inter-preting history accurately on the other.The difference lies in the role played bythe human heart in the two enterprises.

When we study nature, Niebuhrpoints out, the mind is at the center andthe self is at the periphery. So while wewill never be other than finite people, wecan be at our most objective when welook at nature. But this relationship isreversed when we study history. Historyis a participant enterprise. All our desires,emotions, prejudices, and interests comeinto play, consciously or unconsciously.History is all about people, and there arepeople that we as people dislike, leadersthat we mistrust, events that we fear, andoutcomes that we long for, even if we arehardly aware of it. So our emotions crowdin and interfere, our blind spots play apart, our minds are pushed to the side,and we are rarely as objective as we think.That is why history itself and our dailynewspapers can easily become propagandaand political weapons, again often unconsciously. In short, Niebuhr argues, the problem we face in interpreting history is not a “defect of the mind” but a “corruption of the heart”—which meansthat eliminating error has to be moral andspiritual, and not purely intellectual.

The Zealots at the time of Jesus didnot “get” him because their political viewsdistorted the lenses through which theysaw him. Jesus rode in on a donkey, not awar charger, so clearly he could not driveout the Romans and was not the Messiahthey were looking for. They wanted a“God’s hammer,” Judas Maccabeus, to free


them from the Romans and not a “sufferingservant” to free them from their sins.Even Jesus’ closest friends James andJohn did not “get” him at first, becausethey and their mother had ambitions forthemselves that were at cross purposeswith what Jesus was calling them to.

Against all such personal or publicdistortions, we need to apply the correc-tives of what it means to think Christianly.The fear of the Lord is indeed the begin-ning of wisdom because it leads to thevantage point and to the humility thatenable us to view everything under theaspect of the kingdom, with our selvesmore firmly in place and out of the center.Then the importance of growing in thefruits of the Spirit come in, to help correctthe biases and corruptions of our heartswe are unaware of. The role of friends isvital too, for “Iron sharpens iron, so oneman sharpens another” (Prov 27:17).Which in turn underscores the importanceof always being open to correction, for weall often go wrong, we make mistakes, andwe need to be set back on the track of thetruth. And finally, it is essential that weare led by the direct prompting of God’sSpirit, for only the Spirit of God knowsthe truth of the situation, and he alonecan cleanse our muddied lenses and openour eyes to see what is really happeningand what God is really doing in our time.

GOD’S PURPOSE IN OUR GENERATIONThe third major requirement for seizingthe day and following God’s call in time andhistory is to seek to serve God’s purpose inour generation. King David’s men werenot simply skilled in reading the signs ofthe times. They “understood the times,with knowledge of what Israel should do”(1 Chron 12:32). They were not simplypundits, and their knowledge was neverfor its own sake. What they had come toknow through their discernment was to belived out, and the wiser and more accurate

the discernment the more faithful theactions and the lives that flowed from it.

For followers of Jesus, the samethrust is at the heart of the Lord’s Prayer,“Your kingdom come. Your will be done,on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10).God’s call is always deeply personal, but it is also always a call to the higher andwider purpose of advancing God’s rule on earth. One glorious expression of this aspect of calling in time is the little,almost throwaway description of KingDavid himself, when the apostle Paulremarked, “For David, after he had servedthe purpose of God in his own generation,fell asleep” (Acts 13:36). There is a surprisingtribute there—David served. “Servantleadership” has been reduced to a clichétoday, and the contrast with ancient rulerslost. The pyramids and the ziggurats, forinstance, were statements in stone, andthe top stone stood for the king with thewhole weight of the society there to support him. The gods ruled the heavens,the sun ruled the sky, the lions ruled theanimal kingdom, and the king ruled hispeople. But from Moses on, the rulers of Israel were called to be leaders whoserved. They served both God and theirpeople, and in serving their people, theyserved God’s purpose in their time.

That brief sentence of tribute toDavid is packed with meaning and lessons.It refers to a significant task, a specifictime, and simple terminus. David,described by God in the same chapter as“a man after my own heart,” served God’spurpose in his own generation and thenleft the earth, his task done. But togetherit adds up to a Jewish and Christiandescription of carpe diem, seizing the day,redeeming the time, and making the mostof our lives—people of faith discerningthe times and serving as partners withGod to fulfill his will for their times andhelp to restore the world to what it wasintended to be.


Many other points from the Bible’sview of time might be considered. For astart, life is a gift, so time is always a mat-ter of stewardship. Especially consideringthe shortness and fragility of life, bothtime and money must be spent well. Oragain, the Old Testament, for instance,clearly distinguishes between the role ofthe prophet from the role of the priest interms of their attitudes to time—prophetsbeing generally concerned with the pres-ent or “the future in the present, the endalready implicit in the beginning,” andpriests with the eternal, prophets with therelevant and the spontaneous, priests withthe regular and the structured and theordered.14 Seizing the day is thereforeprophetic at heart. Or again, Jesus put animportant emphasis on “dailiness.” (“Giveus this day our daily bread” [Mt 6:11];“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”[Mt 6:34 KJV]). Seizing the day is there-fore born of a sense of the responsibilityof this day’s immediacy and the necessityof the hour and our neighbor’s need.

Or yet again, St. Paul reminds usthat we must have no illusions of perfec-tion in either our thinking or our behav-ior. Try as we should to read the signs ofthe times well, we still “see through aglass, darkly” (1 Cor 13:12 KJV). We arenot omnipotent or omniscient, so neitherour understanding nor our actions willever be perfect in this life. “Imperfect” willalways be written over our understandingand “Incomplete” over our actions andour lives. Our best reading of the signs ofthe times is bound to be flawed. Equally,our best actions will be incomplete, so ourtrue legacy will never be clear until we seeGod face to face and hear the Master’s“Well done” that only he can pronounce.

Until that great day, all our enterprisesmust be rooted and anchored in humility,remembering that our best judgmentsand our best efforts will one day be underjudgment themselves. But while our days on the earth may be short, our best

understanding faulty, and our noblestendeavors often incomplete, we are stillto “choose life,” seize the day, redeem thetime, and seek to serve God’s purpose inour time. Then the way we die will be thenatural expression of the way we have lived,and both living and dying will demonstratethe faith that has inspired us. Then too,whatever the period of history we arecalled to live in, arduous or easy, we mayjoin in the ancient Jewish prayer from the time of the Maccabees: “Privileged, O Lord, are we to live in this generation.”

Os Guinness (DPhil, Oxford) is a social criticand a member of the RZIM speaking team.

1William Shakespeare, King Lear, act 5, scene 3.2Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious

Writings (London: Penguin, 1987), 35.3Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

(Jerusalem: Minerva, 2018), 91.4Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath:

Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York:Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), 98.

5Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (London: Penguin, 2006).

6Roman Krznaric, Carpe Diem Regained(London: Unbound, 2018).

7John Keating, Dead Poets Society, quoted in Krznaric, Carpe Diem Regained, 13.

8Krznaric, Carpe Diem Regained, 10.9Friedrich Nietzsche, unpublished essay

“On Truth and Lie in a Morally-DisengagedSense,” in Robert Wicks, Nietzsche (Oxford:One World Books, 2002).

10Klemens von Metternich, Aus Metternichsnachgelassenen Papieren, ed. Prince RichardMetternich-Wineburg (Vienna: WilhelmBraumüller, 1881), 3.348 (no. 442).

11William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, act 4, scene 3.12William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act 4,

scene 3.13Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in

John Lukacs, Remembered Past: John Lukacson History, Historians and HistoricalKnowledge, ed. Mark G. Malvasi and JeffreyO. Nelson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books,2004), 5, 9.

14Jonathan Sacks, Ceremony & Celebration(New Milford, CT: Maggid Books, 2017), 215.


DISRUPTING THE STATUS QUOBy Margaret Manning Shull

AUTHOR DOROTHY SAYERS was never oneto live by convention. The only child of anAnglican clergyman, she was one of thefirst women to graduate from OxfordUniversity in 1915. After graduating fromOxford, she made her living writing adver-tising copy until she was able to publishmore and more of her fiction. In the earlystages of her career, she fell in love with amember of a motorcycle gang in England,and joined them in their travels far andwide.1 Had she convinced C.S. Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien, and Charles Williams to ride withher, the Inklings group might have takenon an entirely different character!

Perhaps her unconventional life ledher to highlight the more unconventionalside of Jesus’s own life and ministry. In acollection of essays published after herdeath, she wrote:

He was emphatically not a dull manin his human lifetime, and if he was God,there can be nothing dull about God either.But he had “a daily beauty in his life thatmade us ugly,” and officialdom felt that the established order of things would bemore secure without him. So they did away with God in the name of peace andquietness.2

Indeed, Jesus stormed into the temple—the site of religious convention—consumed by zeal. He upset the tables ofthe moneychangers and drove the vendorsout with righteous rage. There was nothingdull about this first act, which John’s gospelrecords for us, as Jesus entered Jerusalemfor Passover. Perhaps it was the last actthat finally got him killed. He upended thecommunalization of temple worship, drivingout those who would prevent prayer bycharging a fee. He was anything but dull.

Jesus was disruptive. And his disrup-tion disturbed the status quo. So disruptivewas he that the religious leaders of his dayfeared the entire nation might perishbecause of his advent. As Caiaphas, thehigh priest warned, “It is expedient for you that one man should die for the people,and that the whole nation should not perish” (John 11:50).

Those who sought to kill him did sobecause they sought to protect law andorder, tradition and teaching. It was notvice and corruption that sought him dead,but piety and due process. After all, wasn’tthis man the one who allowed prostitutesand tax collectors into his presence, evendining with them? Wasn’t this the manwho allowed a pound of the finest perfumeto be poured on his feet by Mary, who thenwiped his feet with her hair? Was this notthe one of whom it was said, “Behold, agluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend oftax gatherers and sinners” (Matthew 11:19)?He was too much for the status quo to han-dle: “If we let him go on like this, all menwill believe in him, and the Romans willcome and take away both our place and ournation” (John 11:48). So they did away withGod in the name of peace and quietness.

It is a painful irony that the ones who wanted him dead were not the lawless,but the pious and the righteous ones.These are the very ones Jesus argued forhis followers to exceed in terms of thestandards of righteousness: “For I say to

you, that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees,you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven”(Matthew 5:20). But the righteousness thatJesus espoused looked radically differentfrom the righteousness of the religiousleaders who now called for his death. In hisupending way, he revealed that those whooften appeared to be righteous were really“whitewashed sepulchers” (Matthew 23:7).His was a righteousness of compassionand not hollow sacrifice, of reconciliationwith offended brothers and sisters, offaithfulness and not lust; of commitmentto neighbors, keeping one’s word, andrepaying evil with good.3 His was a right-eousness that pierced straight to the heartwhere the transformation of mind, body,and action began. His was a righteousnessthat did not maintain peace and quietness.

As Dorothy Sayers wisely noted in herlife and her writing, into every generationand every life Jesus comes to upend anddisrupt the status quo. He is not dull. And hecalls those who would follow him to forsakeself-righteousness and the pride of piety. Likethose before us, would we instead do awaywith God in the name of whatever peaceand quietness we now seek to maintain?The journey to Golgotha is lined with therighteous as well as with sinners.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member ofthe speaking and writing team at RaviZacharias International Ministries andlives in Bellingham, Washington.

1 “Dorothy Sayers, Writer and Theologian,”Biographical Sketches of MemorableChristians of the Past, 17 December 1957,online at hoti://justus.anglican.org/resuppression.hotly.

2 Dorothy Sayers, The Whimsical Christian:Eighteen Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 17.

3 See Matthew 12:7 and Matthew 5:20-48 (The Sermon on the Mount).



I HAD THE great privilege to be in Shanghaiin the home of the famed Chinese evan-gelist Wang Ming Dao some years ago. Herecounted that he had been imprisoned for his faith in Jesus Christ, but he soonrenounced his faith and was released.Thereafter, he says, he lived with suchtorment of his soul that he walked thestreets of Beijing saying, “My name is Peter;my name is Peter. I’ve denied my Lord.”

Soon, Mao Zedong put him backinto prison—this time for eighteen years.

Wang Ming Dao said every day in prisonhe woke up and sang the hymn by FannyCrosby “All the Way My Savior Leads Me”:

All the way my Savior leads me; What have I to ask beside?Can I doubt His tender mercy,Who through life has been my Guide?Heav’nly peace, divinest comfort,Here by faith in Him to dwell!For I know whate’er befall me, Jesus doeth all things well.

{ T H I N K A G A I N }

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Initially, the guards tried to silencehim. When they weren’t able to succeed,they resignedly put up with his singing.Gradually, as the years went by, theywould gather near the opening to his cellto listen as he sang of God’s faithfulnessto him. Eventually, they began to ask himto sing to them and to teach them thewords of the song. Such is the impact ofone who walks faithfully with God day byday and year after year.

What does scripture tell us aboutsuch faith? It is fascinating to see how asingle verse from the Hebrew Scripturesmakes its way into the New Testament.The prophet Habakkuk witnessed manynational calamities and longed for answers.God assured Habakkuk of his vision forhis people: “If [the vision] seems slow,wait for it; it will surely come; it will notdelay” (Habakkuk 2:3). He concludes with this exhortation: “The just shall liveby faith” (verse 4).

This faith is not credulity. It is anundying trust in God and his son, Jesus,who claims to be who he is. Just as Godcalls us to faith, he models that faith to usby his own faithfulness to us. In the bookof Hebrews, the phrase “The just shall liveby faith” is rightly translated “The justshall live by his faithfulness.” The Greeksfocused on faith. For the Hebrew, faith-fulness is an intrinsic part of faith. Youcannot separate the two.

That verse from Habakkuk 2:4 isrepeated in the book of Romans to theEuropean Church, in the book of Galatiansto the Asian Church, and as noted, in

the book to the Hebrews to the MiddleEastern Church. Augustine carried it tothe Church in Africa, and ultimately tothe west. What lies at the heart of faithand the content of that faith became themajor teaching of the Early Church. Faith and faithfulness go hand in hand.

When I think of faithfulness overthe long haul—and of faith rooted in God’sword—I think today of my beloved profes-sor Norman Geisler, who recently wenthome to be with the Lord. At his request,I had the honor to speak at his funeral. As I shared then, he was an incrediblewarrior. He modeled what 1 Chronicles12:32 says: he had an understanding ofthe times, and he knew what to do. He hada purpose and a mission: to teach and towin others to Christ. Professor Geislerwas a warrior for the good, for the true,for the noble, for the eternal, and he waswilling to take the headwinds of all theopposition so that the true, the good, and the beautiful would be there longafter he was gone. What a life well lived!

How fitting that the closing hymnsung at his funeral was “Great Is ThyFaithfulness,” a tribute to his deep andabiding trust in God’s faithfulness in hisearly days until his final hours. Might ourlives echo the same, morning by morningand year after year:

“Great is Thy faithfulness!” “Great is Thy faithfulness!”Morning by morning new mercies I see;All I have needed Thy hand hath provided—“Great is Thy faithfulness,” Lord, unto me!

Warm Regards,

Ravi

Just as God callsus to faith, he

models that faithto us by his own

faithfulness to us.

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Ravi Zacharias International Ministries3755 Mansell Road Alpharetta, Georgia 30022

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