Light Brings Salt
Volume 3, Issue 10 March 6, 2005
Dedicated to the Systematic Exposition of the Word of God
The
Silence of Christmas and the Scream of the Tsunami: Soul-Speak in a Suicidal
Culture
Part 2
Did you hear the
Why all this anger, I ask? This is not a little tempest in a teapot. This is a
firestorm intended for one purpose alone—to silence Christianity. Can you see
the trend? First, we kill God. Then, we kill man. And to justify it all, we
kill language. But language is guaranteed as part of our freedom. How does a
purveyor of free speech kill the right of others to have the same privilege?
This is cleverly done by transferring their hatred onto those they wish to
silence—and the word “phobia” is added to anything they are against. Funny,
they have never thought of themselves as Christophobes.
To drive home the last stake and elevate their view they co-opt the scientific
community and come up with an educated response. Enter Richard Dawkins of
Here is the conclusion. No, they are not against absolutes. They are only
absolute relativists. No, the destroyers of our cultural values are not against
freedom. They are only against the freedoms of those who challenge them. No,
they are not against phobias. They are only against the phobias that others
have. No, they are not against the sacred—the head of the ACLU is brilliantly
ordained as a reverend. They are only against God. No, they are not against
killing. They are only against those who kill for different reasons to theirs.
I do not recall hearing anything from Michael Moore when Saddam Hussein
slaughtered his thousands. Where is his bleeding heart when tens of thousands
of Christians are martyred and brutalized in so many totalitarian regimes? Did
we hear a whimper from
No, that does not happen. I could list a dozen other such glaring
inconsistencies. But herein is the cancer within the soul of our cultural
relativists. The slide has taken place because the West wanted to remove any
warning sign that cried “Stop!” to living with contradiction. Christianity
makes such a challenge. Relativists decry the violence in The Passion
because it exposes the violence in our own hearts. They redefine words because
they refuse to recognize that “In the beginning was the Word.” Their peace is a
bundle of contradictions because they reject the Prince of Peace. They have
killed truth because truth is too coherent for them and they want the benefit
of incoherence. They are terrified of some “fundamentalist takeover” and so
assign phobias to their opponents.
When you stop and think about it, it has been the same right from the beginning
of human history, hasn’t it? “Has God said?” in the Garden of Eden was followed
by “You shall surely not die.” The fear of God was replaced by the fear of
losing “freedom.” Adam and Eve failed to realize then, and we fail to realize
now, that there is no such thing as absolute civil liberty. If mine is to be
guarded someone else’s will have to be restricted and the reverse is true.
Absolutes always restrict for the right reasons. And it is all born out of one
thing, “sacred honor”—to honor God and your fellow human being. Only in that sequence
can life be lived out logically.
Cultural liberalism had better wake up to the truth. The bottom line is that
humanity is broken on the inside. We live with contradiction because life has
fallen apart within. We dress it up with language like makeup plastered over a
corpse, as if we have given it life again. Until we see the truth of our own
brokenness we will be shattering everything and making a hell around us. This
is where reality has a strange way of calling our bluff. God does not leave us
destitute. In no uncertain terms He shows us a glimmer of hope, not the
bankruptcy of the relativists’ answers but the image of God deposited in their
souls, revealed by their questions.
A rude awakening
And amid all our self-centeredness, a rude awakening has come to us as an
earthquake of gigantic proportions rocked continents the day after Christmas,
and tens of thousands of people were swept into the sea. This is a tragedy too
horrific to imagine. We have all sat glued to our television sets numbed by the
loss of life. What is the question the cultural liberal asks? How can God allow
such a thing? Where is God when such catastrophes happen?
Maybe it is time someone whispered that when Christmas was banned, the right to
ask any question of God ought to have been banned as well. But the question
haunts, doesn’t it, and there is no answer to be found in “The People’s Tree.”
The thief who stole the joy and life of Christmas Day was arrested the morning
after by the deluge of grief and death. In the courtroom of reality he was
found guilty by his own interrogation. How?
Analyze the question. It is a self-defeating question for the scientific
naturalist to ask why this happened because very few animals were lost in the
tragedy. They intuitively sensed the danger that approached and fled long
before the water could reach the shores. What happens to scientific
naturalism’s theory of evolution here, when creatures on the lower evolutionary
scale were smarter than those higher up the scale? If survival is the ultimate
good, this seems like “devolution” to me. As a matter of fact, I even heard one
person say that this is Nature’s way of balancing the numbers in a crowded
world. Naturalism breaks under the weight of its own argument.
Similarly, the philosophical naturalist poses the question in a self-defeating
way, for to ask the question is to assume a moral framework and there cannot be
a moral world for the philosophical naturalist. According to this belief, our
world came from primordial slime; can good or bad come from such chemistry?
What about the Hindu or Buddhist? He would have to say that this was the karma
of the individuals who perished in the deluge. Period.
And the Muslim? The Muslim is so committed to the
absolute sovereignty of Allah within which no freedom is granted to the
“creature” that his answer would just be “Inshah-Allah”—the
tsunami was just the will of God.
The question of “why” only has meaning because the Christian faith legitimizes
it. And so the very question betrays that the soul is not completely dead in
the West. Yes, the answers to life from the relativist may betray that “God has
died,” but the questions from his soul at a time like this reveal that he
cannot kill Him completely. A sovereign God in his grace has given us the freedom
to ask such questions.
You see, in our human courtrooms revisionist wordsmiths in the role of
prosecutor may play tricks with the words of others, but in the court of
reality their own words will accuse and indict them. Whether we like it or not,
only the reason for the season gives reason to the question and only in that
season is the reason for the answer. That is why Christmas will always be
celebrated in the heart even when it is denied public utterance. That is the
bequest of the “Big Day.”
I would be remiss if I did not end with a warning and a glimmer of hope. Maybe
I can summarize it in two illustrations.
Last year when I was in
Those who seek to change our vocabulary are gradually eradicating the
relationship between truth and culture, between the past and the present. They
want to remove all markers that brought us this far. They should be sure that
if they continue in this way the very worldview they have put into place will
one day eradicate them as well. Do you remember the words of Martin Niemoller who tried to warn those who remained silent to
the Nazi atrocities? He said,
First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a
Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t
a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a
Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to
speak up for me.
Those who wipe out the memory of the Christian faith will find out that the
logic of their position may one day lead someone to wipe them out as well, and
there will be no belief left to come to their aide, for there will be no one left with reason to speak of loving those who despise
you.
So what is the glimmer of hope? I began this essay while I was in
But I found out something more, as I visited that vast land. The
And so I thought: Maybe the East will bring the message to the West to awaken
her to her heritage. Voices may sing to us in foreign accents of that silent,
holy night, and no legal pronouncements from our cultural iconoclasts of the
West will be able to stop them. That will truly bring contradiction full circle
so that we might see the nature of truth that forces off the mask of
contradiction and shows us that the cry in tragedy is really the longing for
Christmas to be true.
What the civil libertarians need to know is that God simply will not be
conquered by our puny little outbursts and our juvenile pronouncements.
Christmas did not end with the night of Jesus’ birth. In fact, there were those
who tried to kill Him then as well. They thought they had succeeded but it was
only a momentary illusion. There was a day in which the central figure of
Christmas rose again from the dead. That is why death itself is not the
greatest tragedy. The greatest tragedy is when we have banished God and are
buried by our own questions. Christianity will never be banished to the grave
because it follows a Savior who knows the way out. That is the truth for life
and it is worth celebrating.
Ravi Zacharias is president of Ravi Zacharias International
Ministries
© 2003 Ravi
Zacharias International Ministries. All Rights Reserved.