Defining Life: An Evening with Dr. Ravi Zacharias

Date: October 9, 2011

Official websites
Dr. Ravi Zacharias
Lee University
Official press release

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Dr. Zacharias: Defining Life

Life rests on four pillars: eternity (existence), morality (essence), accountability (conscience), and charity or love (beneficence).

Eternity
Ecclesiastes 3:11 says God has put eternity in our hearts. It's our true, final destiny. Eternity is also why time is unnatural to us. Otherwise we would never notice how it passes. According to C. S. Lewis, a man remarking on the passage of time is like a fish remarking on the color of water. A fish doesn't notice the water it swims in. Neither should a man notice time - unless he's destined for eternity. Everything we think, say, and do in this life should be viewed in the light of eternity. Otherwise life has no purpose. Eternity defines our existence.

Morality
Morality is not based on culture or time. It cannot be horizontal (man). Morality must be vertical (God), with an outside reference point. Its basis is the absolute nature of an unchanging God. The essential word in the Ten Commandments is "sacred": sacred God, sacred words, sacred neighbors, sacred marriage, sacred things, etc. Life without sacredness is relativism. The only way for a relativistic world to get rid of objective morality is to make Jesus look like them, which is just what Hollywood did in "The Da Vinci Code" and other like films.

[My response: This is also what some in the church have unwittingly done with Jesus. I say unwittingly because they're not consciously trying to get rid of objective morality. Yet moral relativism is the result of some drastic cultural and theological changes in the visible church today. Isn't the essence of idolatry making Jesus look like us, i.e. less than he is in himself as God? Don't many of us - both in the church and outside it - have our own "pocket Jesus"? Aren't we also trying to mold God into our image? I think everyone, the church included, will get a rude awakening when Jesus Christ returns.]

Accountability
We need to be accountable to someone when we're alone. That someone had better not be human. People will fail us. God will not. We must be accountable before God alone. He is the one we will stand before someday. The writer Oscar Wilde was driven by pleasure. It was the very essence of the Decadence movement of 1890s Europe. Yet even Wilde realized in his final years and in his poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" that he needed to be accountable to someone other than his lover, since neither man loved any of their male lovers for the other's sake. They knew nothing of the agape love Christ demonstrated on the cross. In this moment, Wilde finally recognized his need for Christ. He became a Roman Catholic on his deathbed.

Charity (love)
Love is the supreme ethic. Truth is the supreme point of judgment. Lose either and you lose God. The Middle East is the greatest evidence of lovelessness, its 5000-year history evidence of the logic of unforgiveness. Yet the greatest evidence of love is the cross of Jesus Christ, his atonement the heart of the gospel. I recently convinced one Muslim to stop asking "if" Jesus died and start asking "why."

The following Q & A was enlightening. I provide a summary below.

How do you describe the nature and rationale of your apologetics?
Dr. Zacharias: my apologetic approach is rational, relational, and emotional. Apologetics can be too cerebral. We must answer the questioner, not just the question. We don't always know where people are coming from. A relative of theirs may have just died. If I sense that my answer is insufficient, I will ask if I can talk with the person privately.

How must we deal with apathetic people?
Dr. Zacharias: Everyone has a window of time to ask questions. If they receive none, they assume their questions have no answer. I pray with apathetic people, which has later led some to become more open to God when they need him. Interestingly, China is now open to Christians. They know an amoral government is doomed.

How does the body overcome the paradox of past, present, and future?
Dr. Zacharias: The body is the greatest misunderstanding of Christians, who are too gnostic. God gave us taste buds, not just food. Sex is more than procreation, too. God lets us feel pain - in our bodies, hearts, and souls - to let us know something is wrong. The body indicates ultimate reality and greater truths. We see God's sovereign work in the temples of our bodies.

How do we differentiate morals and principles?
Dr. Zacharias: We must find a transcendent basis for both, an immovable reference point. A person can be moral yet spiritually lost. God's chronological and logical method in the Bible is redemption, righteousness, worship. The ultimate immorality is thinking we can stand before God without cleansing [Psalm 24].

How do we get people to question their religion's internal consistency?
Dr. Zacharias: This criterion is insufficient for testing truth. A person can believe what is false. I recommend reading the apologist Norman Geisler.

Is postmodernism tenable for viewing Christianity?
Dr. Zacharias: No. Relativism isn't true. But postmodernism isn't new either. It began in Genesis 3 with Satan questioning God. Since the 1960s, pastors have been pressured to be culturally relevant. But the seminaries haven't caught up with the times. They've been appealing to emotion rather than passion and truth. The latter is what young people really want. Communication involves substance (truth) and form (package). We can mess up form but we're doomed if it overtakes substance! Relevance with truth finally becomes irrelevant.

What does "be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect" mean?
Dr. Zacharias: We are not to be God but to be like him in purity. We must be complete in ourselves, having a goal before us, and approved unto God. Only if we follow the light of Christ will the shadow of success and blessing follow us.

[My response: Complete in ourselves? Doesn't he mean complete in Christ? God must choose our goal. If we choose our own, we're doomed.]

Can you help a friend, a young Russian Christian and former atheist who has no fellow Christians in his town?
Dr. Zacharias: Christian apologetics [lots of reading], developing spiritual disciplines.

How do you defend the age of the earth and a seven-day creation in the face of scientific data atheists present?
Dr. Zacharias: Metaphysics isn't physics. Philosophy and the Bible aren't science. What's missing is the difference between agency and cause. The "age of the earth" is the agency/instrument, not the cause. The causality of creation is a miracle. The intelligibility is a designer. The history is philosophical and unnatural, involving a divine personal dimension.

[My response: He could have done better! The Bible is scientific and creation is true science. The Bible says God made the world in seven days. "The evening and the morning were the _ day" = 24-hour periods. The Jewish calendar says the earth is less than 6000 years old. My grandfather, a Pentecostal preacher, says God made the world full-grown - just like Adam and the animals.]

How do you explain the emotional aspect of theodicy, i.e. God's love and hell?
Dr. Zacharias: The basis of God sending people to hell is an objective moral law. Only a Judeo-Christian worldview can even validate this question; it alone gives value to human life. Love requires freedom of the will. And God is just. He will not force us to love him. According to C. S. Lewis, those who say to God "thy will be done" will enter heaven. Those who refuse him will hear God say to them "thy will be done" - and they will enter hell. Yet for those who hate God, heaven itself is hell. The essence of hell is the inability to love and the absence of the sacred.

My Impressions

I have listened to Dr. Zacharias's radio program "Let My People Think" only a few times. I find the man hard to understand on the radio. Yet I was not going to let the opportunity of hearing him in person pass me by! Dr. Zacharias is a wonderful speaker, both articulate and humorous. I am now reconsidering listening to "Let My People Think." I may even read one of his books. Dr. Zacharias has also renewed my interest in the works of C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. Suddenly, the idea of challenging postmodernism is invigorating.

I'm open to Christian apologetics, preferably presuppositionalism. My mother, who also attended the session, is not. Yet we both observed that we heard Dr. Zacharias, not Jesus Christ. He did not come with spiritual power. Dr. Zacharias tried to defend the gospel as a man speaking words of men's wisdom, rather than allow the Holy Spirit to flow through him and let the lion of the Word speak for itself in a mighty roar. "For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe" (1 Corinthians 1:21, KJV). Did Dr. Zacharias preach last night? No.

Christian apologetics has its place. It can answer people's questions and soften their hearts toward Christ. Dr. Zacharias is an exceptional Christian apologist who's followed his divine calling with excellence. Yet I believe preaching with spiritual power will be the heart and soul of the coming end-times revival, not formal apologetics. I pray Dr. Zacharias learns to preach.