Light Brings Salt

Light Brings Salt

Volume 3, Issue 10 March 6, 2005

Iron Range Bible Church

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

Ravi Zacharias

Did you hear the Hollywood elite speak with passion against The Passion of the Christ? The actor Jon Voigt scathingly attacked Mel Gibson for focusing so much on the gruesome. What? Did I hear him correctly? I had to see humor in that attack, for two miracles had taken place. A relativist had finally admitted that violence on the screen can be overdone, and second, that the screen can change behavior in the viewer. Please take note. Voigt—who starred in Deliverance, which I am told is a graphic, disturbing film—and others like him resented a film for being ideologically driven but crowned Michael Moore’s film with the highest praise. They were disturbed, they said, because the film was too violent. Are these not the same purveyors of violence who are outraged by censors?

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 Oxford, who has proposed that religion is a virus that has made its way into the software of some DNA, and therefore, it must be expunged. This is liberalism’s cure for the malady that plagues their freedom. Moral absolutes, according to such demagoguery, are the bane of our existence brought into play by the virus of religion.

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 Hollywood a few short years ago when a Christian leader was brutally murdered by the Iranian authorities? I can accept the argument of the person who cries out against the slaughter of innocents in the war in Iraq if at the same time that person cried out against all slaughter of innocents.

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 India, I went to visit my grandmother’s grave. I do that each time I go to Delhi. But there had been a lot of rains and some of the graves had sunk into the mud. With friends, I looked and looked and couldn’t find her grave. The caretaker said that he no longer had the register in his possession to tell me where she was buried. I knew the general area but just couldn’t find it. I began to get quite anxious about the possible loss of her grave. Then all of a sudden, I saw her name and the verse of Scripture that was inscribed above it. I was so grateful and proceeded to arrange for another, taller stone to be erected there. You see, even a grave has significance because it is a marker of a life, a relationship, and a memory.

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 Beijing, China, where all over the city I saw banners that said, Merry Christmas. I spent one morning going through the Forbidden City on Tiananmen Square. This historic city was constructed in the fourteenth century as the home of China’s emperors. As I walked in the cold with some friends from one gate through to the next, deep in the inner sanctum of the palace of the Forbidden City I saw a small Starbucks. Yes, you read that correctly. And on the window of that Starbucks it said Merry Christmas. I stopped and pondered: How odd it is that in the land of Mao where individuals were humiliated for the sake of the “People” I should see a sign wishing me a Merry Christmas, while in the land where individual freedom is touted as defining the nation’s reason for being, the “People’s Tree” won the day.

But I found out something more, as I visited that vast land. The Chinese Church is now one of the largest in the world. No, Mao and his Cultural Revolution, standing on the shoulders of Marx, could not stop the faith that has transformed millions throughout history. In a land where the State has stopped at nothing in its attempt to crush the spirit, the spirit has triumphed. The contradiction of contradictions may be that God uses even the wrath of men to praise Him.

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