On my first visit to the kingdom of Jordan, my family and I were hosted to a very special meal on the eve of our departure. They called it Mensef. The guests stood around a large platter of rice, beautifully garnished with succulent delicacies, flavored with aromatic spices and a gravy that gave it a mouthwatering taste. But then came the fun part. We all rolled up our sleeves and together enjoyed the meal directly from the tray, eating it with our bare hands. That was Middle Eastern food with all of its purposes and at its best. For one of Indian descent, which is my birthright, it was like coming home and more.

There is a symbolism to that way of eating. The enjoyment of a delightful combination of food, the fellowship one with the other, the touch of the hand into the same platter, the celebration of life and its purpose-all signifying trust and closeness and the memories of days we had spent together. Every detail was an invitation, saying, "Welcome to our home and become one of us." We were greeted with a kiss and bidden good-bye with a kiss. We had gathered as friends and left with an intimate trust of a deeper friendship.

That, may I add, is only an inkling of what Jesus was offering to His followers-communion with Him. Even atheistic religions like Buddhism and pantheistic religions like Hinduism, though they deny a personal, absolute God, still smuggle in ways of worship in which a personal being is addressed, only because the isolation within drives the self to a transcendent personal other.

The reason for this is that we are more than just in search of ritual. We are, in fact, broken. We have broken away from God; we are broken in relation to our fellow human beings. And the most elusive reality is that we are broken even from ourselves. We do not connect our own proclivities. Life is a story of brokenness.

This is at the core of the gospel. We have come apart from within. And to this brokenness, Jesus brings the real answer, not just a simplistic "come and get fed."

I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live

forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of this world.... I tell you the

truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in

you. (John 6:51-53)

Upon hearing it, many of His disciples said, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?" But Jesus said to them, "Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe" (John 6:60-64).

If this were all Jesus had said on the subject, I have no doubt it would have been the supreme puzzle of His teaching. The bluntness of the way it translates into our language is bound to leave the reader befuddled. But like many of Jesus' discourses, He gave them piecemeal until the final moment. Then the disciples harked back to the first instance when He hinted at the truth. This is clearly the hint. The fulfillment was to follow just days before His death and be finally understood only after His death.

Let us track the event that explained this puzzle.

First of all, it is patently obvious that He could not have meant a literal eating of His physical flesh and His physical blood because He was there in the flesh giving them a piece of bread, not a piece of His flesh.

Second, if He meant His actual flesh and blood, it would be tantamount to saying that only a small number could have shared in that life He offered. It would be restricted to the finite number of pieces a human body could be broken into.

Third, it would be chronologically restrictive. That body would soon decay and the blood would no longer bear life. Only those present at His physical death would have been able to share in that consumption.

Fourth, He had already said that He would raise up that body after it was killed, so that the body itself could not be referred to without making the whole process a masquerade.

Fifth, He commanded the Church to repeat what He was doing across history as a throwback to that moment. That would be impossible with His literal body.

Sixth, He said that His words were Spirit and not flesh.

And finally, when the actual moment of His sacrifice came as He had predicted it would, He explained what it meant. He sat down for the Passover meal with His disciples. The food that sustained, the fellowship this provided, the celebration it encompassed, and the pleasure of God's provision were enjoyed. Only now, there was a heaviness in their hearts. For that heaviness, manna alone would not help. This was a time to face life's supreme worth. An offering of such worth was in the making. The sacrificial Lamb of God was blessing the meal even as He was to be sacrificed. He took the bread, gave thanks, and gave it to His disciples, saying, "Take and eat. This is My body given for you; do this in remembrance of Me." He took the cup, gave thanks, and said, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." They tasted, touched, smelled, knew, and felt the dimensions of their salvation. He was physically present as He offered the elements.

Then He went on to say, "I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now until that day when I drink it anew with you in My Father's kingdom."

There you have it. This broken piece of bread represented what was about to happen. He was going to be physically and emotionally battered in a way that would draw the attention of friend and foe alike. Yet, in that actual brokenness, a mending would ensue. We ourselves would have the way provided to reconnect with God, with our fellow human beings and with ourselves. We would have access to a new relationship, which is part of a larger body, individually and corporately, because of His body broken for us. We could be part of an unbreakable fellowship because He would come and dwell within us. We could take part in an eternal celebration when we would be in the presence of God forever. We could know pleasure at His right hand because worship would be its climactic expression. These symbols of His body broken for ours, His binding for our dismemberment-these are given a tangible expression in the elements when we gather together for worship.

Although by remembering Jesus' past teaching the disciples had a partial understanding of what was happening that night, they were still unclear about all that it meant. That clarity was attained in a significant moment after the resurrection. The day Christ died had been a day they could not understand or appreciate. They saw His body broken, and their lives were devastated. They had questions galore and no one to ask them of.

After Jesus' crucifixion, some of the disciples were returning to their homes, and as they walked on the road toward the town of Emmaus, a stranger came alongside them. Much had happened during those few days, and they were in deep discussion, trying to understand it all. The stranger, listening in, asked why they were so despondent. They told him of the tragic happenings in the death of Jesus three days previous and added, "Are you the only one in Israel who does not know what has happened?"

The truth is that He was the only one in Israel who did know what had happened. But they did not yet know who He was. He began to expound all of history and how it tied into that day and its events. They were wonderstruck at the way everything connected. They still did not know who He was and pleaded with Him to stay and have the evening meal with them.

As they sat down to eat, the defining moment came. He broke some bread. And the Bible says that as He did that, their eyes were suddenly opened, and they knew it was Jesus Himself. There has not been a simpler act in history with more profound transhistorical memory attached. What a moment! What a meal! What a message! What a transcendence!

Indeed, to this very day, the Christian sits down with his or her fellow believers and shares in the broken bread and the cup. In that simple transaction, all of history finds its meaning in the person of Christ. Jesus' death in the past is remembered in the present and points to the future when we will break bread with Him in eternity. Every sense is brought into play-touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, and seeing. In that act, every barrier is broken-the barrier of sin between us and God, the barrier between body and soul as the physical and the spiritual connect, the barrier between life and death, the barrier of race and prejudice-for we all stand before Him at the same meal. It is the "Mensef of God." Can there be a greater reason to celebrate? Now life can be realized with every moment that it is lived.

In his book Life After God, Douglas Coupland tells a fascinating story. He was out on a walk in a beautiful park when he came upon a group of blind women, picnicking for the day. When they heard him walking by, they asked him if he would take a picture of them. He gladly consented, and they all snuggled close to get into the picture. But after he left, he pondered, "What on earth would a group of people devoid of sight want a picture for?"

May I suggest that in the way God has fashioned us, He enables us to enjoy the capacity of someone else so that we might share in a benefit even without the ability to experience it. The pictures were probably shown to those with sight, who could add to the insight of these women who, in their memories, could relive the occasion, transcending the way they had lived it the first time.

In this unique moment in history, by offering a broken piece of bread, God brings both sight and insight to the participant through the life of the One whose body was broken and who can therefore lift him or her into a sacred memory. And in that simple act, He refashions him into a new wholeness. That broken bread bridges every humanly unbridgeable chasm in millions of lives. We see in a way nothing else could have imparted-through His eyes, with His presence.

TRANSLATING INTO LIFE

In the practice of the Christian faith, this sharing of the bread and of the cup has been aptly called Communion. God has come near, and we enjoy the indwelling of His presence in us. The contrast here from every other faith is as diametric as one can imagine.

Hinduism at its heart and in its goals teaches us that we are to seek union with the divine. Why union? Because the Hindu claims that we are part and parcel of this divine universe. The goal of the individual is, therefore, to discover that divinity and live it out.

Listen again to the words of Deepak Chopra on this purpose of life. He makes this assertion in the early part of his book: "In reality, we are divinity in disguise, and the gods and goddesses in embryo that are contained within us seek to be fully materialized. True success is therefore the experience of the miraculous. It is the unfolding of the divinity within us."

Later in his book, Chopra makes a statement that forms the basis of his philosophy: "We must find out for ourselves that inside us is a god or goddess in embryo that wants to be born so that we can express our divinity."

I cannot resist asking, Who are the we? Who is the god? Who is the self? Are these different entities with which we are cohabiting? Is there a god who needs me (which me?) to bring him (which him, if it is actually me?) to birth so that my deluded self will cease to be deluded and will emerge divine as the real self? How did this god end up in embryonic form while I became full grown, so that I will give him the privilege of birth and lose my humanity to find my divinity? At the risk of being frivolous, this is the ultimate version of "Who's on first."

Toward the end of his book, Chopra asks us to make a commitment to the beliefs he has espoused in these words:

Today I will lovingly nurture the god or goddess in embryo that lies deep within my soul. I will pay attention to the spirit within me that animates both my body and my mind. I will awaken myself to this deep stillness within my heart. I will carry the consciousness of

timeless, eternal Being in the midst of time-bound experience!

This is the heart of philosophical Hinduism-self-deification. One of India's premier philosophers stated as forthrightly as one could, "Man is God in a temporary state of selfforgetfulness."

How can it be that we are the outworking of the quantum world but at the same time, gods? Is this what a few thousand years of human history have taught us? We are lonely and confused gods who have lost our way? This is the reason the "you" disappears in Hinduism and the meditative process is enjoined, so that we can as individuals merge with the one impersonal absolute-the capital "I," because there is no significant other.

Union with the impersonal absolute defies language, reason, and existential realities. It does not satisfy the longing for communion. However much one may respect the intent of such teaching, we deceive ourselves if we believe that it is philosophically coherent. It is not. That is why some of the most respected Hindu philosophers and thinkers have brandished it as one of the most contradictory systems of life's purpose ever espoused." Not only that, Hinduism could not survive the sterility of this kind of self-deification. Personal deities are erupted by the millions, and the temples are crowded with people seeking to worship. No, the suggestion of inward divinity is psychologically imprisoning and the individual breaks away to find another.

While Hinduism goes co one extreme-the deification of the self-Islam is at the other extreme. In Islam, the distance between God and humanity is so vast that the "I" never gets close to the "Him" in God. And because this distance between the two is impossible to cross, worship takes on an incredible clutter of activity, designed to bring the worshiper close. Repetition and submission take the place of the warmth of a relationship. One need only glimpse a Muslim at worship to see the difference. With all that he observes and all the rules he keeps, there is never a certainty of heaven for the common person in Islam. It is all in the "will of God," they say. One's destiny is left at the mercy of an unknown will. When relationship is swallowed up by rules, political power and enforcement become the means of containment.

One day a Muslim friend and I were out for the day together. I had forgotten that the Fast of Ramadan had just begun and suggested that we step into a restaurant for a cup of coffee. "I will spend years in jail for that cup of coffee," he said, so of course I apologized for the suggestion. Then in low tones he admitted that his fast was restricted to public view and that he did not practice it in private. "I cannot work ten hours a day without eating," he said. There was an awkward silence, and he muttered these words: "I don't think God is the enforcer of these rules." As anyone knows who has asked any Muslim, they will admit with a smile upon their faces that during the month of the Fast of Ramadan more food is sold than during any other month of the year. But its consumption takes place from dusk to dawn rather than from dawn to dusk. Legalism always breeds compliance over purpose.

In the Christian message, the God who is distinct and distant came close so that we who are weak may be made strong and may be drawn close in communion with God Himself, even as our identity is retained as we are. That simple act of communion encapsulated life's purpose. The individual retains his individuality while dwelling in community. The physical retains its physicality but is transcended by the spiritual. The elements retain their distinctness but become bearers of truth that point beyond themselves to a spiritual fellowship that our spirits long for.

Just as the consummate act of love between a man and his wife concretely expresses all that the moral and spiritual relationship embraces, so the simple act of taking the broken bread and the cup encompasses the actual reality of the intermeshing of God's presence in the life of the individual. It is an act of worship that represents a life that is full of meaning. The ramifications are profound.

THE REALITY EXPERIENCED

Let me take you to a unique place at the tip of a desert. I have been there, and my heart has been spoken to in ways beyond description. Walk into a Sunday morning worship service, and this is what you will see. There sit two women missionaries, surrounded by a group of people who, when they smile, look pitiful. When they come closer, you feel a lump in your throat. But they are wonderful people who love Christ. This is a home for people with leprosy. There in that room, the moment of Communion has come. The elements are passed, and the object lesson is staggering.

Beyond the heinousness of the disease emerges a glorious message of oneness and hope. His body is broken for all of us so that His nourishment, His friendship, His celebration, and His pleasure bind us together as one. One day those bodies will all be made new when we drink from that cup and eat from that bread with our heavenly Father.

This brings us to a most staggering conclusion on what worship means. Food and health may be a relevant branch to which we hold. But the trunk that is rooted in the sacred call of God to worship is based on a reversal of that relevance. It is not that God needs to be relevant to us. It is the very counterperspective of God that beckons us to become relevant to Him. What do I mean?

In his book The Integrity of Worship, Paul Waitman Hoon includes a chapter called "The Irrelevance of Worship." His whole point is summarized in one paragraph in which he reminds us that the experience of worship can sometimes call us to look beyond our need to what God is calling us toward:

How often have we craved light on our life in the world, only to be summoned to ponder our destiny in eternity. How often have we been preoccupied with the church local, and instead found our vision turned to the Church triumphant and universal. And how often have we asked that worship bless our souls with peace, only to hear the lesson for the day calling us to a holy warfare. How often have we desired strength to overcome the world, only to learn that we are to be stoned and sawn asunder in the world. How often have we sought comfort to our sorrows, and instead found the sorrows of the world added to our own. Such reversals may be strange to men. But only such contradiction answers to realities both relevant and irrelevant that are at the heart of the Church's worship.

This was the reversal the disciples did not expect. They came to Jesus asking for the abundance of bread so their stomachs could be full. They discovered that there was bread of a different kind broken for them because of a deeper emptiness than they had imagined. They had bought their lunch at a nearby restaurant. But they were being invited to a different table. With their purchase, they would soon be hungry again. Jesus was offering them eternal fulfillment with moment-by-moment freshness. That is why the task of the Church is not so much to make God relevant to the people as much as it is to make people relevant to God.

There is a magnificent woodcarving in Worms, Germany, called "The Altar of Blood." It is a

depiction of the Lord breaking the bread for the disciples. I stared at that masterpiece, which took years of a craftsman's life to complete, and found it beyond my capability to describe. It is the heart of what God calls us to. It is in that exchange that He sobers the mind, quiets the heart, and bridges every barrier.

Is our God so small that He cannot impart life without cannibalizing? Those who understand the depth of what Communion means understand the fulfillment of worship. Those who don't understand leave hungry and cannibalize their own souls. The songwriter rightly pleads for all of us, so that our deepest hunger may be sated.

Break Thou the Bread of Life,

Dear Lord to me,

As thou didst break the loaves Beside the sea;

Beyond the sacred page I seek thee, Lord;

My spirit pants for thee,

0    living Word.

Thou art the bread of life.

To me, to me,

Thy holy Word, the truth That saveth me;

Give me to eat and live With thee above.

Teach me to love Thy truth For Thou art love.

Oh, send Thy Spirit, Lord,

Now unto me,

That He may touch my eyes And make me see;

Show me the truth concealed Within thy Word,

And in Thy Book revealed,

1    see Thee Lord.

IS GOD THE SOURCE OF MY SUFFERING?

I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN THIS CHAPTER BY RESPECTFULLY QUOTING, with the permission of the writer, portions of one of the most heartbreaking letters I have ever received. I truly admire the courage, the candor, and the teachability of the man who wrote it. It is obviously not easy to bare one's soul. My heart aches for him and his family in this terribly painful experience.

This letter, though specific and immediate in the writer's context, represents a question asked of Jesus two thousand years ago, in a similar situation. In fact, for all of us, if we are honest, behind this question lies possibly one of the greatest barriers to belief in God.

Dear Mr. Zacharias,

I need your help desperately. I'm not asking for money or anything like that.... I seek your counsel.

Please take time to read this letter. It is extremely personal and heartbreaking. My situation is serious, and I am now well into my second year of torment and fear. I thought I would be able to figure out all the "answers" I would need to find peace in my soul but have continually run into the proverbial brick wall. Or perhaps the answer was there all the time and it is just too grim for me to accept. I don't know. Quite simply I am confused and frightened. And I need your help.

On August 4, 1997, at 3:15 P.M., my son, Adam Mark Triplett, died in an airplane accident. It happened in the town of New Richmond, Wisconsin. Adam was a flight instructor for a local flight school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Adam was a respected student, fine musician, professional pilot, devoted friend, and dedicated Christian man. He was also a delightful brother, husband, and son. My only son. Adam died at the age of 23, after only three months of marriage. I can't imagine life without him....

A few years ago my wife and I purchased a new computer. Little did I know how much danger it would bring into my life. One day, casually exploring the Internet with my newfound friend of technology, I was surprised to discover an e-mail message sent to me anonymously. To my shock and surprise, I found myself looking at a picture of perversion and hard-core pornography.

I became angered by this vulgar intrusion and set out to find out more of where it came from. I continued my search, thinking I could become a crusader of sorts for the cause of decency. But I fell victim to the wiles and devices of the devil himself and soon became

trapped in a pattern of personal viewing.

If I had a "bad day" at work or the car broke down (any excuse would do), I would settle the score as it were by balancing the scales with a bit of "personal viewing." By now I justified my "personal viewing" as not harmful.... I wasn't intruding on or hurting anyone else. I paid no attention to what I was doing to myself.

One day at church I found myself in "personal viewing" in my mind, not paying attention to the pastor's message. Fear jumped into my heart, and I began to try to do away with this evil practice. No success. The downward spiral continued, affecting my business and family relationships, to say nothing of my responsibilities as a leader in my church.

On August 4, I dropped my son off at the airport. His next student was waiting for him. As he walked away from the car he turned and smiled and gave me a "thumbs-up" sign (our personal sign of approval). As I drove away, looking in the rearview mirror ... I had a strange and faint realization that it would be the last time I would ever see him on earth. I shook it off as a random thought. I discarded it. Forgot it completely. I went back to work.

By the end of the day I was in a steep rage over God only knows what ... [and I decided that] I would just go home and do some "personal viewing." At least I could find some satisfaction there, I thought.

[As I was driving,] very quietly, almost in a whisperlike tone, soft and gentle, in a pleading voice I felt God saying to me, “Mark, please, I don’t want you to do that.”

My response was harsh and direct, "Oh, You don't want me to. Big deal! You don't want me to do anything, do You? I always have to be perfect, don't I? Well, not today!" The Lord then spoke a bit louder and more serious, "I'm asking you not to behave this way." Again I responded with arrogance, "How are You going to stop me? What will You do, kill my son?"

A third time the Lord God spoke to me. But this time His tone was more forceful, strict, and authoritative, "Mark, you don't understand. I'm telling you that I do NOT want you behaving this way."

By now, my ego was in full swing. My response was deliberate and direct. I heard no more from the Lord regarding the issue.

I arrived home at about 5:30. My wife was cooking on the grill in the backyard. She asked me if I had heard of a plane crash that day. I said no. She seemed unnerved and suspicious and afraid. I "felt" something was wrong....

Then the sheriff arrived. Katrina (Adam's sister) screamed. Linda wept uncontrollably. I was completely numb but felt a presence of strength take over my body and mind. I believe it was God's Holy Spirit....

In the weeks that followed Adam's death, I began recalling the events of that day. I became consumed with the guilt of my sin against God that day. I became acutely aware of my wretchedness and the need to fall at His feet and seek forgiveness.... Was I to blame for this horror? Oh, dear God, let it not be so.

As you can well imagine, this letter stopped my day. As I read it, with each paragraph the anguish intensified, as blood flooding into emptied arteries. My heart throbbed, beating out sensations of self-examination. Everything else faded into secondary importance. I put myself in this man's shoes and imagined the horror.

How much more painful can life be than to carry such enormous guilt, laden on top of such tragedy? When the wording was narrowed down, the sharp question remained, "Did God take

my son's life? Was He making me pay for going against His wishes?"

This double-pronged search for an answer-"Is God the author of pain?" "Is my pain because of my sin?"-has disturbed both skeptic and believer alike. Every thinking person attempting to make sense of a world enriched with good but convulsing with evil tries to think this through, yet finds no easy solution, especially when something as dramatic as this happens. After centuries of debate, to find an adequate response remains a daunting task. It is a question worthy of our greatest attention. At the same time, I am convinced that there is no more comprehensive answer to the problem of suffering and evil than the one that the Christian faith affords.

The Bible does not avoid raising this struggle. Jesus faced this question head-on. Sometimes it came to Him in subtle forms, sometimes in direct tones. The most striking incident in which He faced this challenge is recorded in the ninth chapter of John's Gospel. The discussion ensues on the heels of one of the lengthiest reports of any miracle that He performed. There is more than normal dialogue that precedes and succeeds this particular healing, and the reason is because an explanation is sought for a person's physical deformity.

As Jesus was walking along with His disciples, a man who was blind crossed their path. The disciples, in this instance, were not content just to witness the miracle of sight restored. They went for the jugular, aiming quite clearly at the role of God in a tragic situation. One of the disciples asked Jesus rather abruptly, "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

Is he responsible for his plight, or is someone else the cause?

Jesus completely surprised them with His response that it was neither the young man nor his parents who were responsible for the man's deformity. "This happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. As long as it is day, we must do the work of Him who sent Me. Night is coming when no man can work. While I am in the world, I am the Light of the World."

What did He mean, "That the work of God might be displayed in his life"?

As He tried to unfold the answer, bear in mind that He was up against four groups of people, each with its own reason for questioning Him. The first were the disciples themselves. They wanted this question answered because they sought an explanation of individual suffering. But then there were the neighbors. They knew a miracle had taken place and were puzzled at the "how" of it all. How could He give sight to the blind? The skeptics in the group literally saw the effect but did not want to admit the "Who" behind it. They did not like where Jesus' answer led them because it compelled them to decide whether or not they had the honesty to repudiate their pride and follow Him. And finally, there was the blind man himself. He had personally experienced the transformation and was somewhat overwhelmed by all of the implications-especially, facing the critics. A personal conversation with Jesus left him without doubt that He was not merely a healer of the eyes; He was the transformer of the heart.

It is obvious that Jesus' answer in this passage goes beyond the agonies of parents who have lost children or of those who have graciously borne much pain. He recognized immediately that there was a question behind the question.

The answer, therefore, goes deeper, not only to touch the pain of the human heart but to understand the breadth of evil, pain, and suffering. If we are to go as deep, the answer necessarily will take us through a long journey. The question simply cannot be answered while ignoring possible challenges to the answer at every stage. Those who stay with it will see that the biblical world-view is the only one that accepts the reality of evil and suffering while giving both the cause and the purpose, while offering God-given strength and sustenance in the midst of it.

Those who refuse to accept these truths that Jesus presents will continue to find this a barrier to God and, I dare suggest, a barrier to reason itself.

Years ago, there was a lighthearted story making the rounds. It was the story of a breakdown in a power plant that sent the city into confusion. For a long time, no engineer could be found who was able to fix the problem. Finally a man came along who, by the push of a button, restarted the system. He billed the city for a million and one dollars. Surprised at the number, somebody asked him why it was a million and one, and not just a million. His answer was that one dollar was for pushing the button. The one million dollars was for knowing where to push.

At first glance, Jesus' response to their question seems rather meager. It consists of a few simple statements. But those brief lines are weighted with comprehension on a larger scale. That is why the incredible depth in Jesus' answer can only be appreciated if the world-view behind it is understood. To just take hold of these few lines and miss the context of His total message is to do violence to a very important theme. To avoid that peril, I will take the question back to its underlying challenge and face the hard but real struggle of evil and pain in a world to which a loving God lays claim. Once we have comprehended the broader Christian perspective, we will understand that Christ readily answers the immediate question in light of the bigger question behind it.

A UNIVERSAL ANGUISH

At the outset, let us remember that every world-view-not just Christianity's-must give an explanation or an answer for evil and suffering. Either evil categorically proves that God does not exist, as the atheist avows, or evil is "not ultimately real evil," as the pantheist claims, or evil is most coherently explained by the Christian view of God and His purpose in creation. In short, this is not a problem distinctive to Christianity. It will not do for the challenger just to raise the question. This problem of evil is one to which we all must offer an answer, regardless of the belief system to which we subscribe.

Among the discoveries I have made as I have studied this subject is that every writer who attempts to answer this question has one thing in common with all others and one fundamental assumption. The common factor is that each one begins with a litany of horrors and atrocities. It is not just one person born blind, or one baby innocently killed. The list seems interminable. It is as if we ourselves need reminders of how emotionally charged this problem is, defying any reasonable solution. Horrors of unimaginable proportions are cataloged. I found that in itself instructive, and this approach has a lesson that I will address later.

But then there emerges a second component, and that is the determination of a starting point. Much is assumed or concealed right at the beginning. For the skeptic, the question ties him or her up, immediately. That confusion ought to pay heed to the Irish farmer who, when asked for directions by a lost tourist, said, "If that is where you want to go, this is not where I would begin." You see, most skeptics begin their challenge to God's existence with the problem of evil or at least reserve their greatest emotion for that discussion. But in doing so, they dig a deeper pit than the one they are trying to get out of, because raising the problem of evil without God runs the risk of failing to justify the question. But many do begin here and get wrongheaded. As this discussion proceeds, I will point out why this is not a logically sound starting point for one who seeks to disprove the existence of God.

POSITIONING THE PROBLEM The Christian world-view suggests that evil is better posed as a mystery than as a problem. Now, before the antagonist jumps up and cries, "Foul!" thinking that by branding it a mystery I am attempting to evade a solution, let me calm that fear. To call it a mystery is not to avoid the necessity of realizing a solution. Problems seek answers, but mysteries demand more-they merit explanation. This means that there will need to be converging lines of argument, not just a single answer signed off with Q.E.D.

But there is a very important reason to brand evil a mystery. Gabriel Marcel defined a mystery as a problem that encroaches on its own data. By that he meant that the questioner unwittingly becomes the object of the question. We are not merely observers to the reality of evil. We are involved in it beyond any mere academic discussion. Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College, comments, "Getting to Mars is a problem. Falling in love is a mystery."' Evil, like love, is not a problem. It is a mystery.

One cannot address the problem of evil without ending up as a focus of that problem. Skeptics calmly bypass this reality and proceed as if they were spectators observing a phenomenon, when in reality, they are part of the phenomenon. Let us position the challenge to Christian theism in the words of the renowned thinker David Hume, and we will quickly see how the question carries the questioner with it. This is how he words it:

Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors am debtors, a field of battle strewn with carcasses, a fleet floundering in the ocean, nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

Hume complains elsewhere that it is impossible to square such a world with an ultimate purpose of love. This is possibly better posed than Hume even realized, for he hinted at an explanation even in the question. The thrust of his question is forthright. The problem of pain and suffering is real and individually felt. That is why every group got involved with Jesus on this matter.

Not only is the problem real and felt, it is also universal. No religion attempts to explain this more than Buddhism. Buddha's entire pilgrimage toward "Enlightenment" began because of his absorption with the mystery of evil and suffering. The universality of it was what set him on his course.

But if there is the reality of it and the universality of it, there is also the complexity of it. Evil is questioned from at least three sides: the metaphysical problem (What is the source of it?), the physical problem (How do natural disasters, etc., fit into the discussion?), and the moral problem (How can it be justified?).

The third of these is at the heart of the issue: How does a good God allow so much suffering? Immediately we enter into a very serious dilemma. How do you respond to the intellectual side of the question without losing the existential side of it? How do you answer the Mark Tripletts of this world without drowning it all in philosophy?

Those who feel the pain of the question most, often shudder at how theoretical philosophical answers are. We do not like to work through the intellectual side of the question because we do not see where logic and philosophy fit into the problem of pain. If you have just buried a son or a daughter, or have witnessed brutality firsthand, this portion of the argument may bring more anger than comfort. Who wants logic when the heart is broken? Who wants a physiological treatise on the calcium component of the bone when the shoulder has come out of its socket? At such a time we are looking for comfort. We want a painkiller.

But to focus only on the result without paying due heed to the process may only temporarily kill the pain, leaving the joint still out of order. Somewhere and at some point, logic must stand on its own. Comfort will follow if the reasoning is surefooted.

And to you, the reader, I plead: Even if this first portion seems tedious, please stay with it, because it is here that we study the question, before proceeding to the answer. We must not allow the anguish of the heart to bypass the reasoning of the mind. The explanation must meet both the intellectual and the emotional demands of the question. Answering the questions of the mind while ignoring shredded emotions seems heartless. Binding the emotional wounds while ignoring the struggle of the intellect seems mindless.

What, then, is the starting point? Since the crux of the problem is first and foremost moral questioning, how can there be moral justification for evil? An analogy from C. S. Lewis may be of help. He reminded us that when a ship is on the high seas, at least three questions must be answered. Question number one, How do we keep the ship from sinking? Number two, How do we keep it from bumping into other ships? These two may be obvious but behind them lurks the most important one, number three, Why is the ship out there in the first place? The first of the questions deals with personal ethics. The second addresses social ethics. The third one wrestles with normative ethics.

Our cultures at best deal with the first and the second questions. They ignore a rational defense of the very purpose of life and do not know where to turn for guidance. If one does not know one's purpose, any destination will do. And when the ship starts to sink or bumps into another ship, how does one safely reach the harbor without any instruments?

Let us be certain that no ethical imperative can be established and no moral pronouncements can be made without first establishing life's imperative and knowing how to measure progress. Why do we exist, anyway? And it is here that the skeptic flounders on the high seas of life. If we are here purely by accident and we navigate purely by whim, how does one determine whether any journey is in the right or wrong direction? Why be in one place rather than anywhere else?

Now we shall see why the question itself defeats the skeptic who at the same time wants to deny that any purpose for life actually exists.

LIVING WITH CONTRADICTION

Let me present two doors through which the person who has raised the question of God's existence tries to escape from the entailments of disbelief with the semblance of a reason. I am afraid, however, that those doors are marked "No Exit."

The first escape route in the problem of evil is propounded by those who protest that God cannot exist because there is too much evil evident in life. They see no logical contradiction within their system since they do not have to prove that evil coexists with a good Creator. Evil exists; therefore, the Creator does not. That is categorically stated.

But here, Christianity provides a counterchallenge to remind them that they have not escaped the problem of contradiction. If evil exists, then one must assume that good exists in order to know the difference. If good exists, one must assume that a moral law exists by which to measure good and evil. But if a moral law exists, must not one posit an ultimate source of moral law, or at least an objective basis for a moral law? By an objective basis, I mean something that is transcendingly true at all times, regardless of whether I believe it or not.

This argument is very compelling and must be given due consideration by anyone who denies the existence of God but accepts the presence of evil. In contrast to the Christian's assertion that God is necessary in order to posit the notions of good and evil, the skeptic responds by asking, "Why cannot evolution explain our moral sense? Why do we need God?"

This is the latest approach by antitheistic thinkers who seek to explain good and evil apart from God. Over the years naturalists first denied causality as an argument to prove God's existence: Why do we have to have a cause? Why can't the universe just be? Then they denied design as an argument for God's existence: Why do we need a designer? Why could it not have all just come together with the appearance of design? Now they deny morality as an argument for God's existence: Why do we need to posit a moral law or a moral law source? Why can't it just be a pragmatic reality? This I find fascinating! They want a cause for suffering or a design for suffering, but they have already denied that either of these is necessary to account for every effect.

This attempt to deny God because of the presence of evil is so fraught with the illogical that one marvels at its acceptance. Not one proponent of evolutionary ethics has explained how an impersonal, amoral first cause through a nonmoral process has produced a moral basis of life, while at the same time denying any objective moral basis for good and evil. Does it not seem odd that of all the permutations and combinations that a random universe might afford we should end up with the notions of the true, the good, and the beautiful? In reality, why call anything good or evil? Why not call it orange or purple? That way, we settle it as different preferences. By the way, Bertrand Russell tried that latter approach and looked quite pathetic at it.

The truth is that we cannot escape the existential rub by running from a moral law. Objective moral values exist only if God exists. Is it all right, for example, to mutilate babies for entertainment? Every reasonable person will say no. We know that objective moral values do exist. Therefore God must exist. Examining those premises and their validity presents a very strong argument. In fact, J. L. Mackie, one of the most vociferous atheists who challenged the existence of God on the basis of the reality of evil, granted at least this logical connection when he said:

We might well argue ... that objective intrinsically prescriptive features, supervenient upon

natural ones, constitute so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely

to have arisen in the ordinary course of events, without an all-powerful God to create them.

Therefore, the conclusion must be agreed upon that nothing can be intrinsically, prescriptively good unless there also exists a God who has fashioned the universe thus. But that is the very Being skeptics want to deny because of the existence of evil.

The first exit door to flee from God is opened, and the sight is terrifying. Only one option is left, and that is to try to alter the shape of the door. Recognizing that if evil is admitted then an objective moral law might need to be invoked, the skeptic tries a new tack. Listen to this incredible explanation by one of atheism's champions, Richard Dawkins, of Oxford:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

Do you see what has happened? The skeptic started by presenting a long list of horrific things, saying, "These are immoral, therefore there is no God." But to raise these issues as moral issues is to assume a state of affairs that evolution cannot afford. There is just no way to arrive at a morally compelling ought, given the assumptions of naturalism. What then does the skeptic do? He denies objective moral values because to accept such a reality would be to allow for the possibility of God's existence. He concludes then that there really isn't such a thing as evil after all.

This is supposed to be an answer? If DNA neither knows nor cares, what is it that prompts our knowing and our caring? Are we just embodied computers, overvaluing our senses? If our feelings have no bearing at all on the reality of this question then maybe ours is the artificial intelligence and the computer's is the genuine one, for it has no feeling; it has only information. Computers do not "care" and do not "grieve over evil," and are, therefore, closer to reality.

Is this what we have come to? We must be warned that there are no brakes on this slippery slope once we step onto it. The denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil itself. Can you imagine telling a raped woman that the rapist merely danced to his DNA? Tell the father of young Adam Triplett that he is merely dancing to his DNA. Tell the victims of Auschwitz that their tormentors merely danced to their DNA, and tell the loved ones of those cannibalized by Jeffrey Dahmer that he merely danced to his DNA. So dance along!

How repugnant! This is not a dance! This is the escapist's foot on the throat of reason, gasping for rationality while denying that logical points of reference exist. In effect, while seeking an answer to the question of evil, he ends up denying the question. In fact, I put this theory to the test with some students at Oxford University. I asked a group of skeptics if I took a baby and sliced it to pieces before them, would I have done anything wrong? They had just denied that objective moral values exist. At my question, there was silence, and then the lead voice in the group said, "I would not like it, but no, I could not say you have done anything wrong." My! What an aesthete. He would not like it. My! What irrationality-he could not brand it wrong. I only had to ask him what then remains of the original question, if evil is denied?

Dawkins could have helped him even further. In his 1992 lectures to the British Humanist Association, he made an astounding assertion. Having debunked the notion of God in his numerous writings and explained away evil as DNAs dance, what then must we make of the sense of morality that we find in the human experience? Why do we even pose such questions about good and evil?

Dawkins has the answer. Viruses. A virus scrambles the data within the human gene and spits out this misinformation. Somehow if we can expunge the virus that led us to think this way, we will be purified and rid of this bedeviling notion of God, good, and evil .6

In Dawkins-speak, those who asked Jesus the question needed an antivirus program. In fact, Jesus Himself would need reprogramming. And I suppose, one who moralizes on the Holocaust needs new antivirus protection. That way the question of evil would not even surface. One would like to ask Dawkins if we are morally bound to remove that virus. Let us not forget that he himself is, of course, free from the virus and can therefore input our moral data.

The problem has encroached upon itself In an attempt to escape what they call the contradiction between a good God and a world of evil, skeptics exorcise the mind of theistic notions, only to be entered and overcome by contradictions sevenfold.

Though I have often quoted G. K. Chesterton in his criticism of this kind of thinking, no one says it better, so I would like to quote him again:

All denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind and the modern skeptic doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then writes another book, a novel in which he insults it himself. As a politician he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then as a philosopher that all of life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie.

The man of this school goes first to a political meeting where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts. Then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is forever engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt becomes practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

Let me illustrate Chesterton's point with something more contemporary. In pathetic ways, we saw this exemplified when America was caught in the throes of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. In our moral contradiction, an amazing cultural mood was uncovered. The president's famous line that "it all depends on what the definition of 'is' is," sent reporters scampering onto the streets with the question of the century: "Do words have a fixed meaning, or may we give them any meaning we choose?" (What could encroach upon itself more than purveyors of words inquiring if words have any meaning, while using words to ask the question?)

To the utter "surprise" of the surveyors, most people seemed to agree that words can sometimes mean different things to different people, assuming, of course, that there was no equivocation in meaning as the question was posed and the answer given.

That prompted the next question: "Is morality an absolute or a private matter?" The overwhelming response came back that morality is a private matter.

These two questions became the lead-in on a CNN news report. First, that words only have personal meaning. Second, that morality is a private matter. Ironically, the third item on the news was that the United States had just issued a stern warning to Saddam Hussein that if he did not stop playing word games with the nuclear inspection teams we would start bombing Iraq.

Suddenly, words did matter. We would not let Saddam dance to his DNA. We would not let him write his own dictionary. We would not let him live by his own ethic, but we could let each of our citizens determine the meaning of the words they used and insist that our morality is no one else's business.

This is precisely the world to which Dawkins and those of similar philosophy must be logically driven. It is a world of systemic contradiction. If morality is nothing more than evolution's climb, there is no way to measure when we have reached the top. By their own admission, there was no prevision in the random collocation of atoms. In the end, such a philosophy of evil makes life unlivable in a community. Dawkins cannot explain evil by denying an objective moral law, and he cannot deny evil without losing his challenge for the existence of God. This door for the skeptic is marked "No Exit," even as his ship sinks.

ASKING GOD TO BE CONTRADICTORY

The second door seems, at first, to be a certain way out. The skeptic asks why God could not have made us to always choose good. Philosophers of note have raised this as the sharpest edge of their challenge to Christianity. But here, too, the challenge violates reason.

Alvin Plantinga of the University of Notre Dame, who is considered by many to be the most respected Protestant philosopher of our time, has made a strong and compelling argument against this challenge of the skeptic. He argues that this option bears a false view of what God's omnipotence means. We must realize that God cannot do that which is mutually exclusive and logically impossible. God cannot make square circles. The terms are mutually exclusive.

Plantinga is right. I might add that if God can do anything at all, even that which is mutually exclusive, then He can also contradict His character, which would by implication render the problem of evil moot, needing no defense. The very reason we raise the question is because we seek coherence. In a world where love is the supreme ethic, freedom must be built in. A love that is programmed or compelled is not love; it is merely a conditioned response or self-serving.

Once again, even thinkers hostile to Christianity inadvertently assert truths that agree with Christian thought. For example, Jean Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, says:

The man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He is not bent on becoming the object of passion, which flows forth mechanically. He does not want to possess an automaton, and if we want to humiliate him, we need try to only persuade him that the beloved's passion is the result of a psychological determinism. The lover will then feel that both his love and his being are cheapened.... If the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone.

How insightful! Love compelled is a precursor to loneliness. Having the freedom to love when you may choose not to love is to give love legitimate meaning. This is why I said earlier that David Hume had more of an answer in his question on the problem of pain than he may have known. Is not an ultimate purpose of love the only way you can square the problem of pain? To ask that we be denied freedom and only choose good is to ask not for love, but for compulsion and for something other than humanity.

Both doors of escape for the skeptic are shut tight. You cannot posit evil without a transcendent moral law, which macroevolution cannot sustain. And you cannot gain the highest ethic without the possibility of freedom. The first sends us into lives of contradiction. The second demands a contradiction of God.

In brief, for the naturalist, the man born blind was dancing to his DNA. As to the question

behind the question, the naturalist not only fails to answer it, he fails even to justify it.

How would other religions answer the disciples' question, and the question behind the question?

As I have stated, pantheistic religions have attempted extensive answers, and sometimes those answers are terribly confusing. The difficulty with Hinduism is that it has no monolithic answer to the problem of suffering. By declaring everything in the physical world to be nonreal, illusory, changing, transitory, it ends up with philosophical problems beyond measure. And, of course, one is compelled to ask, What has brought on this "illusion" of evil, if everything is part and parcel of the divine reality? They do try to answer that.

There is a classic passage in the Bhagavad-Gita in which Krishna counsels young Arjuna, who is on the battlefield, facing the possibility of killing his own half brothers. He struggles and cannot bring himself to do this. Krishna, who comes as his chariot-driver, talks to him about his duty. This was his duty, to fulfill his caste's responsibility as a warrior. This is the way life moves on. But he told Arjuna not to fear to do his duty, for all good and evil are fused in the one ultimate reality, Brahman. In Brahman, says Krishna, the distinction breaks down. That which appears evil is only the lesser reality. In the end, all life, all good, all evil, flow from God and back to Him or it. "Go to war and do your job." This convergence of everything into one absolute reality forms the hub of the answer to the question behind the question. One can see how a sense of fatalism dominates when all reality is inexorably and inevitably unfolding.

There is a humorous story told of India's leading philosopher, Shankara. He had just finished lecturing the king on the deception of the mind and its delusion of material reality. The next day, the king let loose an elephant that went on a rampage, and Shankara ran up a tree to find safety. When the king asked him why he ran if the elephant was nonreal, Shankara, not to be outdone, said, "What the king actually saw was a nonreal me climbing up a nonreal tree!" One might add, "That is a nonreal answer."

While these are seen as fables, there is no way for classical Hinduism to deal with the problem of evil. To deny that evil is real does not diminish wickedness, nor does it daunt the heart's desire to seek purity. So much of Hindu worship is steeped in purification rites. That is why the entire corpus of popular Hinduism is filled with the forms of worship, fear of punishment, means of obtaining God's favor, etc.

But why are these hungers themselves seen as real? In fact, one of Hinduism's strongest criticisms of Christianity and the reason given for refusing its validity is the Hindu's reference to the days of the British Raj and to the evil of the exploitation of the subjugated. One cannot have it both ways; evil cannot be both illusory and concrete.

Hinduism explains this perception of evil as induced by ignorance. But that only pushes the question one step further. If all is one, and plurality is an illusion born out of ignorance, then who is the source of the ignorance but the one? And if the one is the source of the ignorance, then the impersonal absolute in the one is an absolute that lacks true knowledge. But here we face Hinduism's real answer to the question of the man who was blind from birth.

Reincarnation is a central feature of Hindu philosophy. In fact, some eastern thinkers have leaped upon this particular passage of the blind man as proof that the Bible teaches reincarnation. How else could the man have sinned before birth? Let us be assured that it is both a misrepresentation of the passage and an avoidance of facing up to what their doctrine of reincarnation actually espouses.

First, this section hardly "teaches" reincarnation. It is merely a question asked. The Bible's teaching is that "it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment" (Heb. 9:27 KJV; emphasis added). In fact, in this very context Jesus states that there was no direct connection between any previous act and the man's condition, and that the opportunity to choose to believe God's message is brief, after which there is no recourse. By contrast and by definition, reincarnation is a recurring cycle of cause and effect, till all infractions have been paid for and the absolute attained. Jesus clearly denies that possibility. "Night is coming when no man can work," He said. Opportunity ends.

Rather than hearing my thoughts on what reincarnation in Hinduism means, listen instead, to the words of the Upanishads on this matter:

Accordingly, those who are of pleasant conduct here-the prospect is, indeed, that they will enter a pleasant womb, either the womb of a Brahman [the priestly class], or the womb of a Kshatriya [the warrior or royal class], or the womb of a Vaisya [the working or professional class]. But those who are of stinking conduct here-the prospect is, indeed, that they will enter a stinking womb of a dog, or the womb of a swine, or the womb of an outcast. (Chandogya Upanishad, 5.10.8)

There are other passages of descriptions that go into further detail, ideas that one cannot read with indifference. Hinduism here conveys an inherited sense of wrong, which is lived out in the next life, in vegetable, animal, or human form. This doctrine is nonnegotiable in Hindu philosophy. There are passages in the Upanishads that are rather jolting, when one reads them.

Buddhism also invokes the doctrine of karma and reincarnation. The opening lines of the Buddhist scriptures say that every individual is the sum total of what he or she thought in his or her past life. One of the collections of Buddha's discourses is called the Anguttara Nikaya. Here are some thoughts:

My kamma [past and present actions] is my only property, kamma is my only heritage, kamma is the only cause of my being, kamma is my only kin, my only protection. Whatever actions I do, good or bad, I shall become their heir.'

(Take note that the Pali language of the Buddhist scriptures has a different sound to some words that have become common in English from Hinduism. Kamma, for example, carries the meaning of karma.)

So, for Buddhism, too, the answer to the disciples' question regarding the blind man's predicament "Who sinned, this man or his parents?"-would be, "Both this man and his parents have sinned." The suffering of the blind man is the inheritance of his past life's sin, and it is the lot of the parents to inherit this situation.

They do have a difference, though. Hinduism argued by saying that behind the world of the transitory or nonreal lies what is ultimately real. Buddhism reversed that by saying that behind the real world is actually impermanence. Thus, the reason for all our cravings is that because we think there is permanence, we have cravings. Once we know there is nothing permanent, not even the self, then we stop craving. In the state of "Enlightenment," the self is extinguished and all desire, and therefore, suffering, is gone. That is the goal of Buddhism.

How can we end suffering? According to Buddhist teaching, if we can obliterate desire we will obliterate evil. In fact, the very word nirvana means the negation of the jungle of desire to which our rebirths have condemned us.

Can one resist asking, How does a world-view that considers everything to be impermanent even explain the origin of impermanence and the seduction of the mind to see these as permanent? What, then, is this self if it doesn't even exist, except as an illusion? The answer of Buddha is that he himself lived under the illusion of permanence until through multiple reincarnations he discovered the impermanence of all reality. Then he announced that this would be his last existence, since he had obtained complete desirelessness. In that last incarnation, of course, he corrected his disciples in their erroneous views. He challenged several Hindu teachings.

But above all, Buddhism faces a truly insurmountable problem. If life is cyclical and there is no beginning to the incarnations, why is there an end? How does one have an infinite regress of causes, if there is a final incarnation?

Philosopher William Lane Craig reminds us that an infinite regress of causes is like trying to jump out of a bottomless pit. How do you start if you never reach the bottom? On the other hand, one might well ask, if every birth is a rebirth, what kamma was paid for in his first birth? One might also ask that if desirelessness is the ultimate nirvana, would it then be safe to say that in that state there is not even the desire to see evil come to an end?

The incredible aspect of this teaching is that the more painful one's existence, the more certain that the previous life is successfully paying its dues. So that when one picks up the body of a little child, deformed from birth, kamma is in operation. One might not wish to admit this, but that is the existential reality of this teaching.

Some years ago, I was told of a group of missionaries and their families who had been killed in a bus accident near a village in a Buddhist country. Within minutes, the bus was ransacked and the bodies pillaged for loot. The reason-those who died were only receiving their kamma, and there is nothing wrong in taking what is left from one who is paying his or her dues.

If every life is a payment for a previous life, one also wonders why Buddha was so reluctant to allow women into the sacred order and decreed that the rules for governing them be far greater. In fact, even a woman who had been in the order for years owed greater reverence to a man who was just an initiate. If kamma is in operation, why were these rules superimposed, assuming a virtue of higher order placed upon some? Unless of course, a woman, by virtue of being a woman, inherited a greater kamma.

What becomes evident is that the pantheistic ship comes apart on the reef of evil. One cannot affirm the absence of a self while individualizing nirvana, and one cannot talk about the cessation of suffering without also giving the origin of the first wrong thought. Buddhism has an intricate set of rules and regulations because it needs them. As a nontheistic path, it is a road strewn with kamma. It recognizes evil and then, fatalistically, shuts its eyes to it, seeking escape.

In striking contrast, the Christian message recognizes the horror of evil and seeks to offer a morally justifiable reason for God to allow suffering. Let us turn to the Christian response, so that we may see the difference.

THE GIVER OF LIFE

When all that the Scriptures have said is pulled together, there are six elements that combine to give an explanation that is coherent and unique. No escape is sought, either in the denial of the

question or in the implications of the answer.

First, the God of the Bible reveals Himself as the Author of life and as the Being in whom all goodness dwells. The chasm between the skeptic and the Christian is huge, right from the start. God is not merely good. This means that with reference to God we are dealing with more than moral issues of right and wrong, pleasure or pain. We are dealing with a transcendent source of goodness that is opted for, not because it is "better" in a hierarchy of options, but because it is the very basis from which all differences are made. Moral categories, for us, often move in comparisons and hierarchies. We talk in terms of judging or feeling that one thing is better than another. Our culture is more advanced morally than someone else's culture, at least so we may think. God's existence changes those varying categories and moves us not into comparative categories but into a presentation of the very essence of what the word goodness is based upon.

God is holy. This difference is what makes the argument almost impossible for a skeptic to grasp. Holiness is not merely goodness. "Why did God not create us to choose only good?" "Why do bad things happen to good people?" The reality is that the opposite of evil, in degree, may be goodness. But the opposite of absolute evil, in kind, is absolute holiness. In the biblical context, the idea of holiness is the tremendous "otherness" of God Himself. God does not just reveal Himself as good; He reveals Himself as holy.

In the play Phantom of the Opera, there is a song called "The Music of the Night." It is sung by the half-sinister figure of the Phantom, who woos the woman he loves. He soothes her with his voice and entices her into his world, telling her that the darkness of the night sharpens each sensation and heightens the imagination. He pleads with her to abandon her defenses and yield to the tug of the senses, even as night blankets the eyes of truth.

Then comes this line: "Turn your face away from the garish light of day," because in the darkness, one can change the "oughts" of the conscience to the pleasure of one's passions. The melody is haunting, the words are seductive, and the will is taunted. To such a way of thinking, light is garish because it exposes the wickedness that is shrouded by the darkness.

The holiness of God is like light in a dark world. Just as the coming of dawn exposes the thoughts or deeds of the night before and often leaves a sickening feeling of wrong, so holiness discloses what light itself is-the source of discovering and liberating what the lie has ensnared. The Old Testament prophet Isaiah described his awe-stricken state when God revealed Himself to him. Isaiah, a morally good man, nevertheless fell on his face and immediately sensed that he was unfit to be in God's presence. He was not just in the presence of someone better than he was. He was in the presence of the One by whom and because of whom all purity finds its point of reference. That is why he was speechless.

Here, Islam and Christianity do find a partially common perspective. God is transcendent, not only in His being, but in His nature.

God's holiness, in turn, conveys an intrinsic sanctity to our lives. We are His offspring. This is not a culturally conferred sacredness or a legally determined sacredness. Every person has intrinsic value. That value is one's birthright with God as his or her heavenly Father. Was it not that recognition that prompted the question in the first place? If my birth is sacred, then what wrong merited my blindness?

THE SOURCE OF THE STORY Second, from this authorship flows a deduction. If God is the Author of life, there must be a

script. We are not, in Jean Paul Sartre's terms, empty bubbles floating on the sea of nothingness. We are not on a cruise with no purpose or destination or instruments.

It is not that the world is a stage and we can pick and choose different scripts. The lines that are given tell us that this is not a play, but real life that directs the story in every act and thought. The individual subplot must gain its direction from the larger story of God's purpose for our lives.

The blind man, the disciples, and the neighbors all knew the story. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. God was sovereign over every life. How did this man's blindness fit into the story? The particular was seeking an explanation in the larger context. If the larger plot were fully understood, the smaller story would make sense.

There is a very simple way to illustrate this. I referred earlier to a song from Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, which has been one of the most successful musicals on Broadway. The music is superb, and the story line is riveting. I recall that when I first heard some of the music over the radio, I was surprised that portions of it seemed discordant, sometimes even shrill. How could the same composer orchestrate both the delightful and the jarring? I could not blend the two until I finally saw the play. Then, it all fit together the magnificent and the pathetic, the harmony and the discord, the hideous and the beautiful. Why? Because there was a script to explain it.

When one comes to grips with the story of God's plan and purpose born out of His holy and pure character, both good and evil speak within its context. Without God, there is no story, and nothing makes sense.

I once had the privilege to attend a lecture at Cambridge University when Stephen Hawking was speaking. His goal was to examine the question "Is man determined or free?" Hawking went through his material meticulously and then came his long-awaited conclusion: "Is man determined? Yes. But since we do not know what has been determined, we may as well not be."

(I could not resist wondering if he had himself risen above determinism in order to make such a pronouncement, or was the pronouncement part of the determinism he espoused? Had the data encroached upon itself?)

The audience all but groaned. There were actual audible sounds of disappointment. You see, there is no way to understand design without a pattern. There is no right way to live out life if there is no script. In fact, not only do we lose the story, we also lose all commonality of reference for meaning.

During the First World War, something fascinating took place one Christmas Eve. In the midst of an uneasy silence of the guns at night, suddenly a lone voice began to sing a Christmas carol. Irresistibly, another voice joined in, and before one knew it, there was a wave of music because of Bethlehem, cascading across enemy lines, as both sides joined in reading the same script. The story of the babe in a manger, the Prince of Peace, was able to bring communion between warring factions, even for a few hours. This is how a songwriter tells that story. Unfortunately, I can quote only a few stanzas here:

Oh, my name is Francis Tolliver,

I come from Liverpool.

Two years ago the war was waiting For me after school,

From Belgium and to Flanders,

Germany to here,

I fought for King and country I love dear.

'Twas Christmas in the trenches And the frost so bitter hung,

The frozen fields of France were still,

No sounds of peace were sung,

Our families back in England Were toasting us that day,

Their brave and glorious lads so far away.

I was lying with me mess-mates On the cold and rocky ground,

When across the lines of battle came A most peculiar sound.

Says I, "Now listen up, me boys,"

Each soldier strained to hear

As one young German voice rang out so clear.

"He's singing very well, you know,"

My partner says to me.

Soon one by one each German voice joined in the harmony.

The canons rested silent

And the gas cloud rolled no more,

As Christmas brought us respite from the war.

As soon as they were finished And a reverent pause was spent,

"God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"

Struck up some lads from Kent.

The next they sang was "Stille Nacht,"

"Tis 'Silent Night,"' says I,

And in two tongues one song filled up the sky.

You see, two languages can proclaim the same meaning when the message is known to both. When even the thought of God's presence could stop the killing on that night, how much greater impact would the commitment to His entire script have? Goodness can endure a few moments; holiness is life-defining.

God has a script. He has spoken of it in His Scriptures. Finding the script moves us closer to solving the mystery.

THE POINT OF THE STORY Third, if there is a story, what is at the heart of it? Not only is God holy, but He also reveals to us the sacred nature of love, to which He beckons us. And from this sacredness of His love must flow all other loves.

The important aspect of this logical flow is that intrinsic sanctity provides both the reason and the parameters of love. The inability to understand the mystery of evil leads to an inability to understand the sacredness of love. A deadly mistake that I believe our cultures make in the pursuit of meaning is this illusion that love devoid of the sacred, a naked love, is all we need to carry us through life's tests and passions.

Such a love cannot sustain us. Millions of lives are hurt every day in the name of love. Millions of betrayals have been made every day because of love. Love may make the world go round, but it does not keep life straight. In fact, love by itself will make evil more painful. Love can only be what it was meant to be when it is wedded first to the sacred. Sacredness means separateness. Holiness beckons not just to love but moves in increments till it is climaxed in worship.

What does all this have to do with suffering? Everything. You see, when the skeptic asks why God did not fashion us so that we would only choose good, he or she completely misses-drastically misses-what goodness is in God's eyes. Goodness is not an effect. If an effect is all that is important, of course God could make us that way. There is nothing logically contradictory about making us as automatons. But if life is born out of sacredness, neither goodness nor love alone is the goal. It is reverence, and it must be chosen even when it is hard and costly. This kind of love is a choice to let the sanctity of life dictate the commitment of the will. This kind of reverential love can look upon suffering and see it beyond the clutches of time and through the victory of eternity.

Dr. J. Robertson McQuilkin was formerly the president of Columbia Bible College and Seminary. He is one of the most remarkable people in our world. He is a conference speaker and author of note. But none of those credentials exceed his exemplary and heart-gripping love for his ailing wife, Muriel. She has walked down the grim and lonely world of Alzheimer's disease for the last twenty years. Dr. McQuilkin gave up his presidency and numerous other responsibilities to care for her and to love her. He has penned his emotional journey in one of the most magnificent little books ever written. At one point in the book he recounts this incident:

Once our flight was delayed in Atlanta, and we had to wait a couple of hours. Now that's a challenge. Every few minutes, the same questions, the same answers about what we're doing here, when are we going home? And every few minutes we'd take a fast paced walk down the terminal in earnest search of-what? Muriel had always been a speed walker. I had to jog to keep up with her!

An attractive woman sat across from us, working diligently on her computer. Once, when we returned from an excursion, she said something, without looking up from her papers. Since no one spoke to me or at least mumbled in protest of our constant activity, "Pardon?" I asked.

"Oh," she said, "I was just asking myself, 'Will I ever find a man to love me like that?"

What a testimony that is to a great love and to a great hunger. Will any one of us find a love, a selfless love like that? We all recognize a sacred love when we see it, and we long for it. Sacred love is not without boundaries. There are lines that commitment will not cross, because when they are crossed it ceases to be love.

Interestingly enough, in the old English usage of words in the wedding ceremony of the Church of England, each spouse standing before the altar pledged to the other, "With my body, I thee worship." That was a remarkable pledge. It meant that there was an exclusivity and reverence physically expressed that gave a language to that love. Until we understand that kind of love we will never understand why it cannot be programmed. Nor, for that matter, will we ever grasp the true nature of evil. From worship flows this love. That is why God did not make us choose good. It is not goodness we are called to, but worship. Jesus did not just say, "You shall love the Lord your God." He described it as a posture that incorporates mind and heart and soul. When that kind of love is expressed to God, every other love finds its cue.

Robertson McQuilkin ended his book with these words:

Yet, in her silent world Muriel is so content, so lovable, I sometimes pray, "Please Lord, could you let me keep her a little longer?" If Jesus took her home, how I would miss her gentle sweet presence. Oh yes, there are times when I get irritated, but not often. It doesn't make sense. And besides, I love to care for her. She's my precious."

The book is magnificently titled, A Promise Kept. You see, there is a script, and only when that script is etched upon the heart is life truly livable.

Douglas Coupland gives a sobering reflection of a generation, himself included, that wandered in the wilderness of life without God. He cuts through the hype and the velvety veneer of absolute freedom and at the end of his book writes a surprising postscript:

Now, here is my secret: I tell you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God, that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love."

Only when holiness and worship meet can evil be conquered. For that, only the Christian message has the answer.

THE CENTERPIECE OF THE STORY

This brings us to the fourth step. How is it possible for the sacred to acknowledge the reality of evil and still be able to offer a morally justifiable explanation?

The core of the Christian message posits a way that by all estimates has been a unique and matchless expression in the face of evil. Jesus described His journey to the cross as the very purpose for which He came. His death in that manner brings a message with double force. It demonstrates the destructiveness of evil, which is the cause of suffering and, in Jesus' example, the ability to withstand suffering even though it is undeserved.

Suffering and pain did not spare the very Son of God. Looking at Him on the cross were the very ones who sang songs of joy at His birth. Surely, for Mary, this had to be an utterly traumatic moment. The One who was conceived of God was now at the mercy of man. But I suspect she knew in her heart that something had yet to be completed in the script.

Looking at the cross, evil becomes a mirror of fearsome reality. But by carefully looking into the cross, we discover that it is not opaque but translucent, and we are able to glimpse true evil through it. The suffering of Jesus is a study in the anatomy of pain. At its core, evil is a challenge of moral proportions against a holy God. It is not merely a struggle with our discomfort. Here, two staggering truths emerge.

Remember what I said as we began, that every exponent seemed to begin with a long list of horrible tragedies or atrocities. Here is the first entailment. The more intense the moral dilemma, the less the skeptic is able to justify it as evil. Alvin Plantinga very cogently points this out for us:

What is genuinely appalling is not suffering as much as human wickedness. But can there be any such thing as horrifying wickedness if naturalism were true? I don't see how. There can be such a thing only if there is a way rational creatures are supposed to live, obliged to live, and the force of normativity is such that appalling and horrifying nature of genuine wickedness is its inverse. Naturalism can perhaps handle foolishness and irrationality, acting contrary to what are your own interests. It can't accommodate appalling wickedness.

The more grim the reality we face, the more obvious is the measuring stick. Though secular thinkers persist in hiding from this truth, we cannot explain appalling wickedness without seeing through it for what it really is.

A few years ago, a rap group recorded a song that became an instant hit. If I were to quote the words here, shock, revulsion, and horror would be the common response. The dehumanizing cruelty, inordinate sadism, and the celebration of violent rape took vulgarity to a new depth of depravity. Yet, within days of its release millions of copies had been bought by anxious fans.

How does one respond to this? Or more to the point, how does one explain it? Was it not witnessing the sadistic delight of the audience in a movie theater as they cheered for cruelty that led the poet William Auden to begin his own search for God? Unvarnished evil bore a terrifying reflection. He was compelled to find an explanation for it.

Where does one look for the explanation? With compelling measure, the cross of Jesus Christ brings into focus evil's assault upon innocence so that we can see both a mirror and a window. How this comes about, I can make but a feeble attempt to explain as we lisp toward clarity. It is here that the second staggering truth emerges.

Eleonore Stump, professor of philosophy at the University of St. Louis, has written an outstanding essay titled, "The Mirror of Evil." Unfolding her own personal journey toward God, she has brought a fascinating argument to the forefront. In the beginning, she recounts Philip Hallie's struggle on the same issue, as he described it in his book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. Hallie was struggling to work through human depravity. The appalling wickedness that changed his whole life was in coming to terms with the unmitigated brutality in the Nazi death camps. His despair reached its limit when he wrote:

My study of evil incarnate had become a prison whose bars were my bitterness toward the violent, and whose walls were my horrified indifference to mass murder. Between the bars and the walls I revolved like a madman.... Over the years I had dug myself into hell.

As he became immersed in this man-made hell, Hallie noticed a hardening in his own heart. He ceased to feel the horror of evil. But as a prisoner to his own indifference, something happened. He came across the heart-gripping work of the people in a small French village, Le

Chambon, and found himself responding to their supererogatory acts-acts of extraordinary kindness in the face of evil. Undaunted by the cruelty around them, the Chambonnais repeatedly risked their own lives to rescue those most directly under the Nazi scourge and to alleviate their suffering.

As Hallie read of their deeds of merry, he found himself almost unconsciously wiping away a tear, then two, then three, till his face was covered with tears. Surprised by such an uncorking of emotion from a heart he thought had died to the schemes of men, he stopped himself and asked, "Why am I crying?"

Had something released him from behind the bars of bitterness and indifference? Had the translucent mirror of evil let through just enough light from the other side that he could see not only the face of wickedness, but also a faint possibility beyond the mirror, the countenance of God? Had some light shone forth from the darkest corner of the world and directed the path of this one, trapped by fear?

On the verge of seeing himself stripped of all feeling in the pit of wickedness, the merciful had opened up a spring of tears. The Chambonnais became a symbol of all that was contrary to the hell unleashed by the Third Reich. There was no more perplexity for him. There was only one antidote. He saw through the wickedness, and Hallie wrote:

We are living in a time, perhaps like every other time, when there are many who, in the words of the prophet Amos, "turn judgment to wormwood." Many are not content to live with the simplicities of the prophet of the ethical plumb line, Amos, when he says in the fifth chapter of his Book, "Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of Hosts, shall be with you.".... We are afraid to be "taken in," afraid to be credulous, and we are not afraid of the darkness of unbelief about important matters....

But perplexity is a luxury in which I cannot indulge.... For me, as for my family, there is the same kind of urgency as far as making ethical judgments is concerned as there were for the Chambonnais when they were making their ethical judgments upon the laws of the Vichy and the Nazis.... For me the awareness of the standard of goodness is my awareness of God. I live with the same sentence in my mind that many of the victims of the concentration camps uttered as they walked to their deaths: "Shema Israel, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echod." "Hear 0 Israel, The Lord your God is one."

Borrowing that lesson from Hallie, and thinking of the tear in response to goodness, Eleonore Stump then applies it in her own way. She proves Hallie's point by giving another illustration.

A woman imprisoned for life without parole for killing her husband had her sentence unexpectedly commuted by the governor, and she wept when she heard the news. Why did she cry? Because the news was good, and she had been so used to hearing only bad. But why cry at good news? Perhaps because if most of your news is bad, you need to harden your heart to it. So you become accustomed to bad news, and to one extent or another, you learn to protect yourself against it, maybe by not minding so much. And then good news cracks your heart. It makes it feel keenly again all the evils to which it had become dull. It also opens it up to longing and hope, and hope is painful, because what is hoped for is not yet there....

So, in an odd sort of way, the mirror of evil can also lead us to God. A loathing focus on the evils of our world and ourselves prepares us to be the more startled by the taste of true goodness when we find it and the more determined to follow where it leads. And where it leads is to the truest goodness of all-the goodness of God.

I found this to be surprisingly true in my own life. Just some days ago, I happened to be in Calcutta. It is a city that shows its wounds in public. Some estimates claim up to two million people living on the streets-the old, the young, infants-by the millions, hurting. The pain is so evident and so pervasive that its effect is to anesthetize you against it. Then, with some friends, we visited an orphanage operated by the order founded by Mother Teresa. As we walked in, children rose to their feet in their tiny little beds, and shouts of "Uncle!" came from different parts of the room, as little arms were raised. Our hearts melted, and tears flooded our eyes. Goodness in the face of evil is magnificent, because it is more than goodness; it is the touch of God.

Is this possibly what Malcolm Muggeridge meant when he said:

Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful, with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained.... This, of course is what the Cross signifies. And it is the Cross, more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ.

Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel relates in one of his essays an experience he had when he was a prisoner in Auschwitz. A Jewish prisoner was being executed while the rest of the camp were forced to watch. As the prisoner hung on the gallows-kicking and struggling in the throes of death, refusing to die-an onlooker was heard to mutter under his breath with increasing desperation, "Where is God? Where is He?"

From out of nowhere, Wiesel says, a voice within him spoke to his own heart, saying, "Right there on the gallows; where else?""

Theologian Jurgen Moltmann, commenting on Wiesel's story, astutely observed that any other answer would have been blasphemous.

Is there a more concrete illustration than the death of Christ to substantiate God's presence, right in the midst of pain? He bore the brunt of the pain inflicted by the wickedness of His persecutors-and showed us the heart of God. He displayed in His own suffering what the work of God is all about in changing our hearts from evil to holiness.

In fact, one of the most forgotten realities emerges from the Scriptures. Jesus struggled with the burden of having to be separated from His Father in that momentary event of His crucifixion, as He bore the brunt of evil. He cried out, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" The incredible truth was that at the very moment His Father seemed farthest from Him, He was in the center of His Father's will. That is precisely what an understanding of the cross means. Only when one comes to the cross and sees both in it and beyond it can evil be put in perspective.

What emerges from all of these thoughts is that God conquers not in spite of the dark mystery of evil, but through it.

Mahatma Gandhi made the comment that of all the truths of the Christian faith, the one that stood supreme to him was the cross of Jesus. He granted that it was without parallel. It was the innocent dying for the guilty, the pure exchanged for the impure. This evil cannot be understood through the eyes of the ones who crucified Him, but only through the eyes of the Crucified One. It is the woman who has been raped who understands what rape is, not the rapist. It is the one who has been slandered who understands what slander is, not the slanderer. It is only the One who died for our sin who can explain to us what evil is, not the skeptics. The cross points the way to a full explanation.

This leads to the "how" of it all.

THE SHOCK OF THE STORY

Fifth, if all that has preceded this is true, then the focus of evil should shift dramatically. Evil is more than an exterior reality that engenders universal suffering; it is an internal reality from which we run.

I recall talking to a very successful and very wealthy businessman who throughout the conversation repeatedly raised this question, "But what about all the evil in this world?" Finally, the friend sitting next to me said to him, "I hear you constantly expressing a desire to see a solution to the problem of evil around you. Are you as troubled by the problem of evil within you?" In the pin-drop silence that followed, the man's face showed his duplicity.

The longer I have encountered this question about evil, the more convinced I am of the disingenuousness of many a questioner. During a forum that I took part in on the subject of evil and suffering, an atheist asked me, "If you found out that God did not exist after all, what would you immediately do that you are not doing now out of fear of Him?"

That, alone, tells you the mind-set. There is a kind of antinomianism-an antilaw state of mind. "If God would get off my back, I could do many more things." One may as well ask, "If there were no policemen to look out for, what kind of speed would you drive?" or, "If there were no criminal justice systems, what kind of crimes would you commit?" or, "If nobody would ever find out, what wickedness would you engage in?" In short, it is a failure to see that the unguarded heart actually makes a prison for everyone-a prison where there are no rules.

Evil is to life what contradiction is to reason. If an argument is contradictory, reasoning breaks down. If life is consumed by evil, life breaks down. The problem of evil begins with me. One of the shortest letters written to an editor was by G. K. Chesterton. It read, "Dear Sir: In response to your article, 'What's wrong with the world'-I am. Yours truly, G. K. Chesterton."

ADMITTING THE SURPRISE

This brings us to our final point in the process of sustaining the Christian world-view regarding evil. The surest evidence that evil is not the enemy of meaning is this inescapable existential reality: that meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain but from being weary of pleasure. This obvious truth is conspicuously absent in the arguments of skeptics. It is not pain that has driven the West into emptiness; it has been the drowning of meaning in the oceans of our pleasures. Pleasure gone wrong is a greater curse than physical blindness. The blindness to the sacred is the cause of all evil.

This is where Jesus' answer to the question of the blind man comes through with extraordinary power and relevance. When He says that the man's blindness was due neither to the sin of the man nor of his parents but so that the glory of God might be displayed, the lesson is drastic because the message is profound. The restoration of his spiritual sight was indispensable to his understanding of the horror of sin's blindness. Darkness is devastating, and Jesus offers light and life. His cure was to help them see what they were really blind to, yet refused to see.

The problem of evil has ultimately one source. It is the resistance to God's holiness that blanketed all of creation. It is a mystery because we are engulfed in it-spiritual blindness. And there is ultimately only one antidote, the glorious display of God at work within a human soul, bringing about His work of restoration. That transformation tenderizes the heart to become part of the solution and not part of the problem. Such a transformation begins at the cross.

But like the skeptics of Jesus' day, some want to find a reason to deny who Christ is and the healing He can bring. Like the neighbors, the curious masses wish to know how it happened. Like the parents, those who come into close contact will witness the transformation that Christ brings. And like the blind man, those who have personally experienced Christ's power to transform their lives will understand the greater blindness from which they have been rescued.

This may be the real-life illustration in the struggle of which Mark Triplett wrote with such candor. The truth is not that his suffering and pain were brought about by the death of his son and his fear that he had caused it. As he himself had realized, by the terrible scourge of profaning the sacred, he had already brought about a separation from God and suffering to his own soul. He recognized what it had done to him-he had betrayed his wife, betrayed his family, and betrayed his God. The purveyors of sensual pleasure knew full well that his insatiable involvement with their offerings would take him down the road to financial waste and the potential death of his marriage. In the name of pleasure, they had inflicted the ultimate pain. Everything of worth was lost.

Here, at least, one man was stopped in his tracks to understand the cause and effect in a way that the skeptic never seems to understand. Whether or not the father's sin had taken the son's life is not the real point. In fact, the truth is that when Mark uttered those angry words to God, Adam was already dead. What is now pertinent is that through the loss of his son's life, the father has been brought face to face with what was killing him on the inside. But in the midst of that tragedy, the work of God was displayed. He procured pleasures of infinitely greater value than the profane pleasures of excitement without worth and without promise. The embrace of a forgiving wife, the lasting impact of a departed son, the fresh commitment to life's sacred trusts-these are the real treasures of life. That which had snared him was suddenly nauseating and repugnant to him. That to which he is now freed is to tell the world that life's real worth is to be found only in God.

When God restores our spiritual sight through the mystery of evil, we are then able to see the work of God displayed within the framework of our most difficult question. With tears of joy we bend before Him.

In summary, for the Christian, evil is real, this world is real, and time is real. Jesus recognized all three realities with reference to the blind man. He pointed out that this world has built into it the component of time. And upon the anvil of time beats the hammer of eternity until time ultimately reflects the values of the eternal and will be shed as a shell, from within which ultimate truths will be freely embraced. When we enter that stage, we will find out that the real anvil was eternity, that time provided the hammers, and that God's glory and purpose will be what remains.

Chapter six

WHEN GOD WAS SILENT

IN ROBERT BOLT'S PLAY BASED ON THE LIFE OF SIR THOMAS MORE, A Man for All Seasons, there is an incredibly poignant moment when More is brought before a makeshift court. The judge and jury are enraged because he will not side with their spineless scheme to support the king in his immoral decision.

Mounting the threat of death, they pressure More to join their ranks. But he stands quietly before them, refusing to acquiesce. They know very well the reason for his wordless response, but they continue to ply and bully, all in an effort to make him break his silence and speak. Still, More says nothing.

At one point, one of the judges says to him, "Your silence must then be construed as a denial of the affirmation we seek, because that is what the people will take it to mean."

Sir Thomas More, in measured words, replies, "The world must construe according to its wits. This court must construe according to the law."

They finally give up. They cannot break him. But he pays for his commitment to truth with his life.

It is with good reason that some of the finest novelists and playwrights have dug their narrative spades into the soil of injustice. Philosophers from the time of Socrates and Plato have placed supreme value in the virtue of justice in any civilized society. Aristotle went so far as to say that justice was the cornerstone of all ethics. Why? Because justice is the handmaiden of truth, and when truth dies, justice is buried with it. The silence that attends such a tragedy may well be the silence accorded the perpetrators, a haunting moment of truth.

Thomas More probably saw his precedent in Jesus, who stood before a similar court as He was being charged with, among other things, treason against the king. As Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate and those who accused Him, His demeanor was fascinating. His silence was nerve-racking to His questioners. They were hoping that in a war of words they could subdue Him. It was not by accident that their conversation, supposedly dealing with justice, actually ended up in a discussion of truth.

The sequence of events that brought Jesus before Pilate shows how organized crime also has an ancient legacy. Cowardice, treachery, falsehood, scheming, murder-all the passions that authors of fiction draw upon in their suspense novels-spring to life in the harsh reality of the most historic display of injustice in history, when truth was on trial.

The religious leaders wanted Jesus out of their way. But they were torn between two systems of law-their own and the laws of Rome. Try as they would, they could engineer no moral grounds on which to kill Jesus. But even if they could have constructed some scenario of moral justification, they did not have the authority to execute Him, which was their intended goal. It often happens that when the moral law protects the innocent, a ceremonial law is invoked to accomplish immoral ends.

Jesus committed an unpardonable offense in their eyes when He claimed to be equal with God. That, of course, carried no weight in a Roman court, as long as He did not pose a threat to Caesar. In the Greco-Roman world, it is said, to the popular mind all religions were considered to be equally true; to the philosophers, they were equally false; and to the magistrates, they were equally useful.

In short, Rome was no friend to Hebrew religion. The only hope of the high priest and his party, therefore, was to argue their case by representing Jesus' crime as a challenge to Caesar and a crime of treason. They no more cared for Caesar's well-being than Caesar cared for theirs. But the ploy helped their case.

Caught in the middle of all this was the weak-kneed Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. Old Testament scholar Dennis Kinlaw has astutely noted that poor old Mrs. Pilate never envisioned that her son's name would make it across history-etched into the Christian creeds. No doubt, he, himself, never gave thought to the momentous trial that would be permanently scripted into the story of civilization.

With all that Jesus said to Pilate, Pilate marveled most at His silence. The Bible says, "The chief priests accused him of many things. So again Pilate asked him, Aren't you going to answer? See how many things they are accusing you of.' But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed" (Mark 15:3-5).

The interaction between them gives us a critical look at how Jesus handled the skeptic's taunt and the religious person's anger at Him. Jesus had already been through an exhausting series of events. First, He had been arrested when Judas sold out for a meager sum of money and took Him to Annas, the father-in-law of the high priest, Caiaphas. After questioning Him, Annas sent Him on to Caiaphas, who shrewdly sought to justify a crucifixion by quoting Scripture, that it was imperative that "one die for the many."

Caiaphas, in turn, sent him to Pilate who, unknown to the priest, had been warned by his wife not to incriminate himself in this horrible plot. Discovering that Jesus was a Galilean, Pilate wrested an excuse to avoid making a judgment and sent Him to King Herod. But Pilate could not avoid his appointment with destiny. For Herod, after taunting Jesus, sent Him back to Pilate.

Jesus became an object flung from one set of hands to the other, as words and intentions were woven together to subvert the truth, all in the name of morality. When Pilate finished examining Him, he said to the religious authorities, "You brought me this man as one who was inciting the people to rebellion. I have examined him in your presence and have found no basis for your charges against him. Neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us; as you can see, he has done nothing to deserve death. Therefore, I will punish him and then release him" (Luke 23:14-16). And Pilate had Him flogged, in an attempt to somehow appease the crowd.

This was the moment the leaders of the synagogue had awaited, and in the will of God, this was the moment toward which all of history had been moving and by which history would be forevermore defined. There is much that can be said here, but it is Jesus' conversation with Pilate that occupies our attention.

THE OPENING LINES

The text, as we study it, does not begin with Jesus' silence. It begins with a brief interchange between Jesus and Pilate before Jesus refused to answer some of Pilate's questions. We would be prudent, therefore, if we first look at the answers He did give, because His silence is understood in the light of the words He spoke.

The first question Pilate asked Jesus was very straightforward: "Are You the king of the Jews?"

This was a specifically worded question. Pilate would have preferred to keep it an internal affair between the Jews. That way, he might possibly have been able to avoid any responsibility in the matter. The priests, on the other hand, knew they would have to drag Rome into the problem if they were to have the legal authority to execute Jesus. With these cross-purposes, the trial began.

To the question from Pilate about His kingship, Jesus countered with a question of His own: "Is that your own idea, or did others talk to you about Me?"

Pilate snapped back, "Am I a Jew? It was Your people and Your chief priests who handed You over to me. What is it You have done?" (see John 18:33-35).

Pilate was evidently irritated by Jesus' question, but he had obviously missed the point. What Jesus wanted to expose to Pilate was the concealed disingenuousness that lay behind his question-mere ceremonial curiosity. To answer a question for which an answer is not genuinely sought is only to prolong the charade. Jesus was closing in on Pilate to show him that he was really no different from those who were bringing the accusation against Him. The significance of this question is that the confrontation did not pertain only to one nation of people. This implicated the whole world. His accusers were willfully deaf to His answers, even as Pilate was performing a function of his office with complete disregard for truth behind his judgments. God was on the witness stand; humanity was playing its courtroom shenanigans.

An immediate lesson surfaces. We hear so much criticism from skeptics about what they often brand as "secondhand faith." It is implied that many people believe in God only because of the context of their birth or family or determined conditions. If the criticism is justified, and undoubtedly it sometimes is, why do we not show the same distrust of secondhand doubt? If it is possible for a person's belief to be merely an echo of someone else's faith, are there not hypocrites in doubt also?

Was this a genuine search on the part of this Roman governor, or was it the pretense of a procedure, reflecting no real will to listen? That was Jesus' point.

I have, on numerous occasions, heard some valiant questioner pile argument upon argument to challenge the Christian faith. The arguments begin to sound hollow when you recognize by the very wording that they are the expressions of another's voice or borrowed from some notable thinker. This is not to suggest the validity or the invalidity of the question or of the argument. This is only to assert that, many times, so-called reasons for rejecting the truth are so blended with individual prejudice that it is hard to differentiate between the question and the wanton desire of the questioner.

Some time ago, I was lecturing at a university on the assigned subject, "Ethics and the Invasion of Cyberspace." I was told that I was invited as the token theist so that there would be at least one speaker who would propose a transcendent basis for ethical judgments! It was a fascinating conference.

After the lecture, we sat down together for a lunch hosted by faculty members and student leaders. During the lunch, one of the faculty members said something like this: "All this philosophizing about an objective morality seems so highbrow and philosophically weighty. The basic question I have is very simple: How do we keep students from cheating?"

As I answered her question, I also reminded her that she was still dealing with the symptoms and ignoring the cause.

At the end of the lunch, a handful of students surrounded me with a flurry of questions. One of them, in low tones, said, "I really have a problem. I was asked by my professor to come and take in your lecture and to critique what you said. But the truth is that after hearing your arguments, I find myself agreeing with you."

"Well, then," I asked, "why don't you say that in your paper?"

"Oh no! I will be definitely docked in my grades if I concur with your reasoning. The professor had been certain that I would disagree with you and wanted me to offer a scathing rebuttal. I am a straight-A student, and I cannot afford to drop my grade."

"Are you sure your professor will penalize you just for agreeing with this position on ethics?" I asked her.

"I am positive," she said.

"Was your professor here at the luncheon?" I asked.

"Yes," came the obviously hesitant response.

"Who was it?"

There was an awkward silence and then an even more uncomfortable admission. "The one who asked you how she could keep students from cheating."

So much for the genuine hunger for truthfulness. I seriously had to wonder if a teacher such as that really wanted her students to learn not to cheat or only to learn to think as she did, even if it meant an entire life of pretense-secondhand doubt.

I am convinced that there are tens of thousands of students turned out of our universities whose minds have been trained to disbelieve in God, any contrary argument or evidence notwithstanding. The father of modern rationalism is the French philosopher Rene Descartes. His dictum-"I think, therefore I am"-resonates in the halls of philosophy. From that fundamentally rationalistic approach to existence, skeptics have extrapolated their own dictum-"I doubt, therefore I am an intellectual." For many, such doubting actually follows a particular intellectual, rather than squarely facing the questions of the intellect.

A DIFFERENT KING

Jesus was well aware of the contagion of doubt. That, in part, was His reason for remaining quiet. Pilate, of course, quickly dismissed any personal involvement in the proceedings by insisting that it was an internal matter within the Jewish community that had started the whole problem in the first place. Jesus then proceeded to pursue Pilate to the point that he would realize that it indeed was Pilate's concern, because Jesus' kingship did not have anything to do with the governance of a nation or of a culture, but had everything to do with the rule of the heart.

Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place" (John 18:36).

Pilate, somewhat taken aback, exclaimed, "You are a king, then!"

This was when the defining answer came. "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me" (v. 37).

Immediately, we notice that three dramatic assertions have been made.

First, that Jesus' kingdom was of such a nature that it was not procured by military might or power. Its rule is neither territorial nor political. If history has proven anything, it is that the spread of the gospel by the sword or by coercion has done nothing but misrepresent the message and bring disrepute to the gospel.

To be sure, Jesus was not talking here about pacifism or warfare. He was making a definite difference between the way His kingdom grows and the way earthly nations establish control. He was making a significant point to a prosecutor with political motives. His kingship cannot and will not be established by force or threat. This fact alone would have given Pilate reason enough to go beyond the surface of what was going on. It was really the nations of this world that were on the witness stand, and God who was doing the judging. Pilate ought to have known immediately that this was no Caesar standing in front of him. This was someone with a drastically different kind of authority.

At the risk of repetition, at this point I would like to recount an instance I have shared in some of my other writings. I do so now because I wish to carry this a step further.

Some years ago, a military general in Russia invited me to speak at a round-table discussion with seven members of the faculty who chaired different departments at the Center for GeoPolitical Strategy in Moscow. From the beginning, the atmosphere in the room was cold and antagonistic and the expressions upon their faces hard. One by one, their attacks came upon religion in general, and upon Christianity in particular with its history stained with bloodshed. I attempted to defuse one question after another but I could tell that the discussion was progressing nowhere because they kept reverting to Christendom's checkered past.

We suddenly came to a very tense moment. One of the officers, with great passion and antagonism in his voice, leaned toward me and said, "I remember as a child seeing a German soldier come into my home and shoot my grandmother to death. On his belt buckle were the words, 'God is for us.' That is what religion has done for our country!" he charged.

He was right. Perhaps he did not remember, or even know, that those buckles were not thus inscribed by the Nazis, but were remnant paraphernalia from the days of the Kaiser. As the Nazi war machine ground down into a serious lack of equipment, they had begun to use these remnants from a bygone era. That aside, from the days of Constantine, the symbol of the cross has been so repeatedly emblazoned on weapons of hatred and war that the message of Christ has been apprehended by what Nietzsche called "the will to power."

I paused and admitted to him that I partially agreed with what he had said.

That surprised him, and he cautiously lowered his guard. Then I said this: "But you know, General, Jesus never came to establish a government upon the people by force. He did not even talk about political systems. He came to rule in the hearts of people, and not by the establishment of political power. He asks to live in you, not to control your state."

With that, I went on to share my own personal testimony with them. I was on the verge of quoting what Aleksander Solzhenitsyn once said, that the thin line between good and evil does not run through states or ideologies, but through the heart of every man and woman. But I resisted, fearing that even that reference may have stirred political passion.

The officers were very quiet when I finished, some looking introspective and others reluctantly nodding their heads in agreement. The general who had invited me had a look of calm triumph over his face, as if to say, "There, gentlemen, is the answer you and I never thought of."

I then went on to ask them what seventy years of Marxism had done for their people. I reminded them of the emptiness in the lives of their youth, who were now living in one of the most lawless countries on earth.

As suddenly as the subject had been introduced in the first place, so dramatically did the tenor of the conversation change. It is ironic, I think, that the city of Moscow bears the scars of the brutality of both Nazism and Napoleon's exploits. There are reminders of what the Nazis did and markers of how far Napoleon came in his attempt to defeat Russia. Their names symbolize terror and war to the huge Soviet Empire. The still-vivid memories of their savageries make the Russian people ever skeptical of any power that threatens.

Yet, in an extraordinarily staggering statement about Jesus Christ, Napoleon said something that is almost unexcelled by any political leader. I quote it at length because of its incredible insight. I only wish I had had it with me when I met with these generals. Napoleon expressed these thoughts while he was exiled on the rock of St. Helena. There, the conqueror of civilized Europe had time to reflect on the measure of his accomplishments. He called Count Montholon to his side and asked him, "Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was?" The count declined to respond. Napoleon countered:

Well then, I will tell you. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions will die for Him.... I think I understand something of human nature; and I tell you, all these were men, and I am a man: none else is like Him; Jesus Christ was more than man. . . . I have inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic devotion that they would have died for me ... but to do this it was necessary that I should be visibly present with the electric influence of my looks, my words, of my voice. When I saw men and spoke to them, I lighted up the flame of self-devotion in their hearts.... Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of man toward the unseen, that it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred years, Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all others difficult to satisfy; He asks for that which a philosopher may often seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father of his children, or a bride of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He asks for the human heart; He will have it entirely to Himself He demands it unconditionally; and forthwith His demand is granted. Wonderful! In defiance of time and space, the soul of man, with all its powers and faculties, becomes an annexation to the empire of Christ. All who sincerely believe in Him, experience that remarkable, supernatural love toward Him. This phenomenon is unaccountable; it is altogether beyond the scope of man's creative powers. Time, the great destroyer, is powerless to extinguish this sacred flame; time can neither exhaust its strength nor put a limit to its range. This is it, which strikes me most; I have often thought of it. This it is which proves to me quite convincingly the Divinity of Jesus Christ.

Whatever else one may say in response, it is difficult to explain this away as mere eloquence. In fact, it was to counter mere eloquence and such artificial power that Napoleon said what he did. With unbelievable insight, he saw how Jesus Christ conquered. It was not by force, but by winning the heart.

Napoleon understood Jesus better than Pilate did. Pilate probably had no clue what Jesus meant when He said, "My kingdom is not of this world," or how far into the future this Christ would conquer-and that, without the methods by which empires are normally expanded, of which Rome was a prime example.

Having given the first part of His answer, Jesus moves to the second. "For this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me" (John 18:37).

This is one of the most defining statements Jesus ever made, both for His mission and for our ultimate condition. His purpose in coming was to testify to the truth. He already knew who He was. His testimony was to reveal to us who we are. His answers would not change under any pressure His accusers could apply. Whenever He spoke, He spoke the truth. His word was truth.

This conversation could have placed Pilate in a very unique place in history, on the side of that which was right, had he only asked his question and waited for the answer. Instead, in dramatic fashion, he responded to Jesus' statement that anyone who is on the side of truth listens to Him with an impatient dismissal, "What is truth?" and walked away. He did not wait for the answer and so proved Jesus' point that he was not really looking for the truth.

Pilate walked out of the hall abruptly and tried to set Jesus free. He just wanted out of the whole situation. He offered the crowd a choice. He would free a prisoner of their choosing, any prisoner, because it was Passover time. He hoped and probably felt sure that they would opt for the release of Jesus. But he was out of step with the determination of the religious leaders. Instead of calling for Jesus' release they cried for Barabbas, who had been imprisoned because of his part in a political rebellion. That itself showed that it was not Jesus' rebellion against Rome that prompted their motive; rather, it was their rebellion against God that was impelling their passions. This is how the Bible tells the story, as recorded in John 19:4-7:

Once more Pilate came out and said to the Jews, "Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him." When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, "Here is the man!"

As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, "Crucify! Crucify!"

But Pilate answered, "You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against him."

The Jews insisted, "We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of God."

The Bible then adds this:

When Pilate heard this, he was even more afraid, and he went back inside the palace. "Where do you come from?" he asked Jesus, but Jesus gave him no answer. "Do you refuse to speak to me?" Pilate said. "Don't you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?"

Jesus answered, "You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.

Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin." (John 19:8-11)

Finally, Pilate handed Him over to be crucified.

In many ways Pilate is a most pitiable character, for he lived in fear on every side. He feared Caesar, if perchance he conveyed that he did not deal with someone who was a threat to Rome. He feared the implications of what he was doing, because his wife had warned him that she had had a dream about Jesus and that he should not have a share in punishing that innocent man. He feared Jesus Himself, not quite sure who he was dealing with.

Pilate may well be the quintessential example of what politics has come to mean. He knew what was right but succumbed to the seduction of his position. In life's most severe tests of motives, there is a politician in each and every one of us. While Pilate was ignorant of the role he was playing, the priests justified their heinous deed, quoting Scripture in support of their cause. Divine purpose, political maneuvering, and religious fervor met in the plan of redemption.

It was to be God's Passover Lamb that Jesus came into the world in the first place. The world wanted to explain Him away by its own wits. He stood at the bar of God's grace and spoke mercy. It was at this point that the Lamb of God began to move to the moment of death.

There are four distinct references to Jesus' silence along this trail to His death. Let us probe them.

The first occurs when He is standing before the Sanhedrin, as narrated in Mark 14:60. Conflicting testimony was given by false witnesses. Their charges did not add up, yet Jesus remained silent. Contradiction itself ought to be self-indicting. When it is not, either truth or truthfulness has died.

The second silence occurred when, in the presence of Pilate, the high priests repeated their charges of treason, and Jesus remained silent. He knew that they were determined to crucify Him. It is difficult to bring a defense against religion without truth, especially when it is galvanized by a crowd. Any words of self-defense on Jesus' part would have been pointless.

I believe that Jesus' demeanor here is profoundly exemplary. It was the silence of truth in the midst of the noise of prejudice and hate. I have personally experienced situations like this and have witnessed others in a similar position. The one who stands silently in the face of mocking and hate-filled people exposes the scandalous capacity of hatred and, in his silence, speaks volumes of God's character.

The third moment of silence is in front of Herod and his band of mockers. They wanted a show. The Bible says this:

When Herod saw Jesus, he was greatly pleased, because for a long time he had been wanting

to see him. From what he had heard about him, he hoped to see him perform some miracle.

He plied him with many questions, but Jesus gave him no answer... .

Then Herod and his soldiers ridiculed and mocked him. Dressing him in an elegant robe,

they sent him back to Pilate. That day Herod and Pilate became friends-before this they had

been enemies. (Luke 23:8-9, 11-12)

This passage tells a fearsome tale. There are many who want Jesus to be nothing more than a miracle worker or an entertainer. And how ironic it is that enemies became friends out of a common desire to be rid of Him. Has anything changed since then?

The fourth time Jesus was silent was when Pilate became fearful, hearing that He claimed to be the Son of God. "Where do You come from?" he asked. But Jesus remained silent. He had already told Pilate where He came from. But Pilate did not have the courage to deal with His answer.

In the mix of these silent responses, there is a wealth of thought from God to us.

First, there is the silence of goodness in the face of orchestrated evil. The entire episode before the Sanhedrin was an effort to frame Him. They knew their power. He knew their weakness. They knew the letter of the law. He knew the spirit of the moral code. They did not know Him. He knew them.

Anytime evil becomes organized, its ferocity breathes the air of hell. There is nothing that can quench that fury. It cannot be stopped until it has accomplished its purpose. That is why hell is unending. Its nature is to burn on the inside, and no outward consolation or influence can change wickedness that is inflamed by numbers.

The second silence is the silence of perception. When evil justifies itself by posturing as morality, God becomes the devil and the devil, God. That exchange makes one impervious to reason. Certainly, the high priests represented that lot. Nothing, absolutely nothing that Jesus could have said would have convinced them of who He really was or caused them even to care. Their capacity to hate and their love for ceremonial law far exceeded any desire to know truth and goodness.

Jesus knew that their love for the law was nothing more than a desire to find ways to manipulate the law to serve their own immoral ends. Anytime Scripture is quoted for the express purpose of advancing one's selfish aims, light is turned into darkness.

In all of literature, there are very few passages that are as gripping and penetrating in insight as Dostoevsky's portrayal of the Grand Inquisitor in his book Brothers Karamazov. In a conversation with his younger brother, Alyosha, who was far more spiritually minded than he, Ivan, an atheist, is relating of a time when he, too, thought on spiritual matters. In fact, he had even penned a poem that he called "The Grand Inquisitor." It was the title Ivan had given to an aged chief cardinal heading the Spanish Inquisition. Alyosha asked Ivan to tell him about the poem, and Ivan narrated it as prose. It was based on events during the 1500s, in the Spanish town of Seville, when the Church was burning "heretics" at the stake. After giving the historical backdrop, Ivan began his story.

On a certain day that a large number of heretics had been tortured and burned under the complete and angry command of the Grand Inquisitor, suddenly, in the midst of all the appalling sounds and sights of torture, a figure quietly and gently appeared and walked among the suffering.

He came softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognized Him. ... The people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround Him, they flock about Him, follow Him. The sun of love burns in His heart, light and power shine from His eyes, and their radiance, shed on people, stirs their hearts with responsive love.

It is obvious that in Ivan's narration this figure is Jesus Christ, walking in simple guise among the people. Suddenly, the Grand Inquisitor came along in his carriage and saw Him. Recognizing who He was, he immediately had Him arrested and thrown into prison. That night, lantern in hand, in his coarse cassock, he came to visit his prisoner. The conversation is profound:

"Is it Thou? Thou?" But receiving no answer, he added at once, "Don't answer, be silent.

What canst Thou say, indeed? I know too well what Thou wouldst say. And Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old. Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? For Thou hast come to hinder us, and Thou knowest that. But dost Thou know what will be tomorrow? ... I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have kissed Thy feet, to-morrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire...."

When the inquisitor ceased speaking he waited some time for his prisoner to answer him. His silence weighed down upon him. He saw that the prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for Him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless lips. That was all His answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: "Go, and come no more.... Come not at all, never, never!" And he let Him out into the dark alleys of town?

Dostoevsky's genius reveals a brilliant understanding of the power of miracle, mystery, and authority. The Inquisitor lives in many a religious person's mind even today. We scream at Jesus but want no answer that will add to the claims He has already made. We want Him to leave and come no more.

Such was the mind-set of the religious authorities. Jesus' silence was purposeful. He knew what His questioners were about.

But His silence was not only one of character and perception, it was also the silence of consistency. By His silence He taught us how to fight slander. His behavior was in keeping with His teaching. This, over the years, has come home to me as possibly one of the most easily missed examples that Jesus set for us in the face of so much that was reprehensible in human behavior. His silence is a lesson that answers are not always the way to reason. To give in to the temptation to try to fight slander with words in most instances dirties both the slanderer and the one who has been slandered. Escaping from slander, therefore, is a hazardous task when the very accusation can become valid not because of the truth, but because of the lack of composure with which one seeks to defend oneself. Jesus made no such mistake.

I have been told of an incident that occurred some years ago. As I was not present, I was not privy to the details. But the same descriptions of the event came to me from several different sources. A Christian leader was being subjected to the haranguing and bullying of some in the church who wanted him out. There was no big killer argument that could be mounted. So petty and ridiculous charges were made with unmasked fury, leveled one after another.

To a person, the identical report came back that the most eloquent expression of the entire occasion was the example of the leader, who sat silently before his accusers with tears staining his face. He had nothing to say and yet, everything was communicated. The outbursts and the tirades of the attackers were nothing less than the poisonous venom of misguided lives. Such scenarios ought to be instructive of true power. The man who was the one accused looked like Christ in the midst of his enemies.

But finally, we must understand that the silence of Jesus was the silence of fis julled mission. His silence before those who were to take His life was predicted by the prophet Isaiah, eight hundred years before it took place: "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth" (Isa. 53:7).

It is a natural reaction to speak in our own defense, even when we are in the wrong. He remained silent, though He was innocent of the charges. His silence was for our sake, because He stands before the Father on our behalf.

At the heart of this entire episode is a truth that God had given from before the foundation of the world.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis wrote a magnificent passage illustrating this. Asian, the lion, is a figure of Christ. One of the children, Edmond, had betrayed Asian and endangered his siblings by selling out to the wicked witch, the Queen of Narnia, who had seduced him by offering him a taste of turkish delight. By the terms of the law, that betrayal merited Edmond's death. There was only one way to save Edmund: Asian must be delivered into the hands of the queen, which had been the real objective in her scheme all along.

Quietly and without resistance, the more powerful Asian submits to the queen's demands. After he was humiliated, he was bound to a table of stone, which represented the law, and killed. Edmond's sisters, Lucy and Susan, were totally despondent as they grieved over their friend. Suddenly, Asian appeared before them, triumphant over death. "What does it all mean?" they wondered.

Lewis, at this point in the story, makes this brilliant observation.

"It means," said Asian, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic

deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge only goes back to the dawn of Time.

But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before

Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that

when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the

Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."

That incantation that Lewis speaks of is the prior will of God, that He who knew no sin would willingly lay down His life to pay the price of sin. The Word of God, as promised, was fulfilled.

A DIFFERENT WAY

Does Jesus' silence, with all of the implications that we have drawn, reveal a contrast to others in similar situations who have claimed divine or prophetic status? Yes, it does. Dramatically so. He came with a message and a method that address three very significant differences on individuality and society. I speak of conversion, compulsion, and revelation. How is the Christian faith unique?

First is the issue of conversion. Jesus' message reveals that every individual, whether Jew or Greek or Roman or from any other civilization, comes to know God not by virtue of birth, but by a conscious choice to let Him have His rule in his or her individual life. Jesus' kingdom is not of this world, neither is our inheritance in His kingdom a world into which we enter by physical birth.

This is very important to understand. We are living in a time when angry voices demand with increasing insistence that we ought not to propagate the gospel, that we ought not to consider anyone "lost" just because they are not "Christians." "We are all born into different beliefs, and therefore, we should leave it that way"-so goes the tolerant "wisdom" of our time. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, strongly spoke out against the idea of conversion. When people make such statements, they forget or don't know that nobody is born a Christian. All Christians are such by virtue of conversion. To ask the Christian not to reach out to anyone else who is from another faith is to ask that Christian to deny his own faith.

One of India's leading "saints," Sri Ramakrishna, is said to have been for a little while a Muslim, for a little while a Christian, and then finally, a Hindu again, because he came to the conclusion that they are all the same. If they are all the same, why did he revert to Hinduism? It is just not true that all religions are the same. Even Hinduism is not the same within itself. Thus, to deny the Christian the privilege of propagation is to propagate to him or her the fundamental beliefs of another religion.

If conversion is individual and not by virtue of birth, this leads us to the next issue of compulsion. The teaching of Jesus is clear. No one ought to be compelled to become a Christian. This sets the Christian faith drastically apart from Islam. In no country where the Christian faith is the faith of the majority is it illegal to propagate another faith. There is no country in the world that I know of where the renunciation of one's Christian faith puts one in danger of being hunted down by the powers of state. Yet, there are numerous Islamic countries where it is against the law to publicly proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, and where a Muslim who renounces his or her belief in Islam to believe in anything else risks death. Freedom to critique the text of the Koran and the person of Mohammed are prohibited by the laws of blasphemy, and the result is torturous punishment. One must respect the concern of a culture to protect what it deems sacred, but to compel a belief in Jesus Christ is foreign to the gospel, and that is a vital difference. The contrast is all too clear.

It is in this matter of conversion and compulsion that political theory emerges. As I stated earlier, the gospel is not to be spread at the point of a sword. When Christendom has resorted to such methods, it was not the gospel of Jesus Christ that was propagated, but a political theory that used the gospel for the benefit of power-seeking institutions and individuals. People are justifiably fearful when they think of religion in tandem with political control. Jesus' method was to touch the heart of the individual so that he or she responded to Him out of love for Him, rather than from compulsion or control.

Contrast this with the practice of Mohammed. However one might wish to interpret it, the sword and warfare are an intrinsic part of the Islamic faith. Even the best of apologists for Islam acknowledge the use of the sword in Islam but will mitigate it by saying that in each instance it was for defensive purposes. I suggest that the reader read the Koran and the history of Islam for himself to determine whether this was so.

As for the executions that were carried out at Mohammed's behest, his apologists argue that they were not so much ordered by him as carried out on his behalf. Here again, I would recommend reading the narrative to see if this defense is in keeping with the historic record.

But even the best of Muslim apologists is hard-pressed to navigate around Mohammed's own injunction to kill, illustrated in a verse from the Koran known as the ayatus-saif, or "the verse of the sword."

But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor due, then leave their way free. (Surah 9.5)

One Islamic scholar takes off on this passage and makes this comment:

And a traitor guilty of high treason is an outlaw and may be killed by anyone without any

special authority. May God guide us all to the Truth and spread peace and unity amongst

mankind!'

I shall say no more on this very difficult and divisive issue here because any comment would breed hard feelings, and that is not my desire. What it clearly boils down to is this. Where Islam and Christianity do agree is that truth is supreme; however, they see truth finally revealed in different persons-in Islam through Mohammed, and in Christianity through Jesus Christ. This is why a comparison between the two persons is necessary.

This brings us to the final matter. At the heart of all this lies one issue. Jesus' silence does not mean He does not speak. He reminds us that He has already spoken in His Word, the Scriptures. Here, the final source of authority is truly divergent from other faiths.

The Muslim sees the Koran as the perfect and final revelation of Allah. Allah was the revealer, and Mohammed was the receptor. The very words were dictated to him. He, to them, is the last and the greatest prophet. The proof of his supremacy is the beauty of the Koran. It is the book that is considered to be the ultimate expression of perfection and the repository of truth.

The difficulty here is manifold. How does one sustain that this written text is perfect? Let us consider just one troublesome aspect, the grammatical flaws that have been demonstrated. Ali Dashti, an Iranian author and a committed Muslim, commented that the errors in the Koran were so many that the grammatical rules had to be altered in order to fit the claim that the Koran was flawless. He gives numerous examples of these in his book, Twenty- Three Years: The Life of the Prophet Mohammed. (The only precaution he took before publishing this book was to direct that it be published posthumously.)

A further problem facing the early compilers of the Koran was the number of variant readings of some of the important texts. Now, in recent times, scholars have begun to look at the Koran and have raised some very serious questions regarding its origin and compilation. This has sent many Islamic scholars scrambling for a response.

What one does need to grant is that the poetry and the style are beautiful. The postmodern, visually controlled mind has much to learn about the place of beauty in speech. But the question before us is whether this book can be considered to be the word of God. Also, considering that Islam claims Mohammed to be a prophet to the world, the "miracle" is limited to one language, a significant portion of which is considered incomprehensible, even to those who know the language. In other words, to truly see the miracle, one has not only to speak Arabic, but also to be highly sophisticated in it. Rather narrow and highly restrictive is a claim such as that.

As for truth and the Hindus, the terrain gets very rocky. Gandhi, for example, said, "God is truth and truth is God." But what does that mean? It does not answer the more fundamental question of whether the existence of God is true or false. Shankara, one of the principal exponents of Hinduism, evaded that question by saying that while a person may worship God, it is only an inferior way of expressing truth. Ultimately, the worshiper moves to the supreme truth that he is identical with God. The bottom line is that the Hindus point to their scriptures as truth. Here, the challenge is very complex.

The Hindu scriptures actually fall into two broad categories-the Smriti and the Stud. Smriti means, "That which is remembered." The authors are many and the assertions they make are diametrically different. In this corpus lie the speculations of Indian sages, ranging from the profound to the utterly bizarre, by their own admission. Sruti, on the other hand, means, "That which was revealed." This is the eternally true revelation of the devout Hindu.

If this revelation is eternally true, then the religion cannot claim that all ways are true for the simple reason that some religions deny the eternal veracity of the Vedas. Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians would deny such a claim. As a matter of fact, even some Hindu scholars would deny that claim. Either their denial is true, or the claim of the Hindu is true.

But, there is a deeper question. If "that which was revealed" is the eternal authority, then the logical question for pantheism, which claims that all is one, is, Who is doing the revealing? To even attempt to answer this would take a book by itself. Some words from Sri Ramakrishna will reveal the problem.

God alone is, and it is He who has become this universe s the snake I bite, as the healer I cure." God is the ignorant man and God is the enlightened man. God as the ignorant man remains deluded. Again, He as the guru gives enlightenment to God in the ignorant.

We see the mind-boggling implications of such a view of God and revelation. If all that exists is God, then all that we know is either God in ignorance or God in enlightenment. The question arises, then, that when Buddha rejected the Vedas, was he God in ignorance or God in enlightenment? When Mohammed posited monotheism and the way of submission to Allah, was he God in ignorance or God in enlightenment? So run the sequence of questions when all that exists is God. The revealer and the receptor are the same, only in different stages of truth.

By dramatic contrast, the Christian view of revelation is given to us in the Scriptures. The claim of the writers is set forth clearly:

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Pet. 1:20-21)

The Bible also says that "in the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Heb. 1:1-2).

What, then, is the difference? Is it only one of a claim? No. First of all, in contrast to the Koran, the Bible was written not by one author, but by several human authors. The Bible was written over a fifteen-hundred-year span, by writers from various backgrounds, times, and learning, who, under God's inspiration, wrote down the revelation. Over that vast span of time, their message is one-they point to the birth, the death, and the resurrection of God's Son, Jesus Christ. When you think about it, that is an incredible confluence of thought over nearly two millennia. The spread itself defies natural explanation. Long before all converged in the person of Jesus Christ, His coming was envisioned, foreshadowed, and described in detail. After His death, the written Scriptures spoke of the life so dramatically born, lived, crucified, and risen. In other words, God has spoken and given to us His Word. And the climax of that Word is the person of Jesus Christ. The written Word is complete. He is perfect. He reminded us that the Scriptures cannot be broken-His Word never falters.

Further, in the fulfillment of the prophecy, as He stood silent, He showed another aspect of scriptural authority. The Bible is not merely a self-referencing book, but a book in which history, geography, and the miraculous content of prophecy and other acts were subject to the principle of verification. Some of those supernatural elements we have already seen in the other chapters, claimed and defended.

Thus, when Jesus stood before His accusers in silence, He had already prophesied in His Word centuries before that He would be silent before them. They knew the Scriptures and were even spoken of in them, but they suppressed the truth to justify their unrighteous lives. Both attitudes converged in fulfillment. They who marveled at His silence lost the wonder of what He had said. By His words and His silence, and by their words and their deeds, we see that the trial was exactly as God's Word stated it would be. We see in that His regard for His Word and our disregard for it.

Are we willing yet to listen and to see ourselves portrayed in the Scriptures? In a world of noise, the silence of God can be terrifying. Martin Luther once cried out, "Bless us, Lord! Yea, even curse us. But please be not silent!" Thanks be to God, He is not silent toward us. That is why the apostle Paul said to young Timothy:

But as for you, continue in what you have learned ... and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. (2 Tim. 3:14-17)

One more thing needs to be said. Just before Sir Thomas More went to his death, his daughter, Margaret, asked him why he couldn't just give verbal consent and mutter words of support to the king without having to really mean them. She justified that life-saving ploy by saying, "You are the one who told me that it is the thoughts that one looks at and not the words. Just say it. Don't mean it." More's response to her is brilliant.

It's a poor argument, Meg. When a man takes an oath, he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water [he cups hands], and if he opens his fingers, thenhe needn't hope to find himself again. Some men aren't capable of this, but I'd loathe to think your father one of them.'

The makeshift court and More's own family reasoned with him that he could say something without meaning it. More reminded them that the word of a person was only as good as he is. One's word was one's life.

This is an enormous truth. That is why Jesus did not fear His accusers. He was committed by His Word. He, above all, lived a life where the word and life were identical. Of no other life can this be said. Either there was a breakdown within one's word, or there was a breakdown between the life and the word. Jesus, by honoring His Word, offered them and us His life. He did not merely die for justice. He died in prophetic fulfillment, demonstrating that you cannot kill the truth. Therefore, in a real sense, they could not destroy Him either.

I once saw a poster on the wall in the office of a school principal. It simply said, "If you cannot understand me in my speech, how can you understand me in my silence?"

The world will try to interpret truth by its wits. The Christian interprets truth by His Word-and by His silence.

IS THERE A GARDENER?

"WHY ARE YOU CRYING? WHO IS IT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR?"

That was the question asked of Mary when she went to the garden where the body of Jesus had been laid in a tomb. During the few short years that the disciples had with Jesus, their conversations had abounded with questions. There is, therefore, a tender note of indictment when this question is asked of them. This actually has overtones of a question He had asked them on more than one occasion. To His earliest followers, He had asked, "What do you want?" He had asked the same of the disciples of John the Baptizer-"What did you go out to see?" One has to presume that He repeatedly stopped them to ask of themselves what it was that they wanted God to be in order to merit their approval.

During their years with Him, their inability to grasp so much of what He said wins both our sympathy and our bewilderment. Indeed, they were with One who was like no other, and therefore, their tentative posture every step of the way is understandable. But how much more specific did He have to be before they were clear as to who He was?

The trail to this question is actually one that spans the breadth of human existence and goes back across millennia to another setting, when the first man and woman were placed in a garden and the questions of life and death began. In brief, the story of Jesus of Nazareth could be succinctly told around the setting of four gardens. I have selected this as the framework in which I want to present some of the most convincing evidence of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ in history and in the religions of the world.

HIDING TO SEEK

Many years ago, philosophers Anthony Flew and John Wisdom drafted a parable, posing the question of God's existence in the following way:

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing growing side by side were many flowers and many weeds. One of the explorers exclaimed, "Some gardener must tend this plot!" So they pitched their tents and set a watch.

But though they waited several days no gardener was seen.

"Perhaps he is an invisible gardener!" they thought. So they set up a barbed-wire fence and connected it to electricity. They even patrolled the garden with bloodhounds, for they

remembered that H. G. Wells's "Invisible Man" could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen. But no sounds ever suggested that someone had received an electric shock. No movements of the wire ever betrayed an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never alerted them to the presence of any other in the garden than themselves. Yet, still the believer between them was convinced that there was indeed a gardener.

"There must be a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves."

At last the skeptical explorer despaired, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"'

The point of the parable is clear. How many times have we ourselves asked that we might see God, just to be assured that He is actually there? But with all of our waiting and watching, like the explorers looking for the gardener, we do not see Him, yet still we contend that He is there. The atheist looks pleadingly and says, "Show me God." Our answers seem evasive because we do not have any visible body to point to. Flew and Wisdom ask the question of us: What is the difference between an invisible, elusive gardener and no gardener at all? It is a question well taken.

Philosopher John Frame responded with a brilliant counterpoint. This is his parable.

Once upon a time, two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. A man was there, pulling weeds, applying fertilizer, and trimming branches. The man turned to the explorers and introduced himself as the royal gardener. One explorer shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries. The other ignored the gardener and turned away.

"There can be no gardener in this part of the jungle," he said. "This must be some trick. Someone is trying to discredit our secret findings."

They pitched camp. And every day the gardener arrived to tend the garden. Soon it was bursting with perfectly arranged blooms. But the skeptical explorer insisted, "He's only doing it because we are here-to fool us into thinking that this is a royal garden."

One day the gardener took them to the royal palace and introduced the explorers to a score of officials who verified the gardener's status. Then the skeptic tried a last resort, "Our senses are deceiving us. There is no gardener, no blooms, no palace, and no officials. It's all a hoax!"

Finally the believing explorer despaired, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does this mirage differ from a real gardener?"'

John Frame's point is equally well taken. There is so much intelligibility and specified complexity in this world that it seems willful and prejudiced to try to explain it away with no intelligence behind it. Can morality, personality, and reality be reasonably explained without a personal, moral first cause? How does one explain some of the features of a garden apart from there being a gardener? What kind of proof for a gardener will suffice anyway? What if the gardener did come and was seen and desires that our trust in his work not be dependent on only a direct sighting of him, because the essence of our relationship is not the constancy of sight and intervention, but the steadfastness of trust and sufficiency?

Between the taunt brought by Flew and Wisdom in their parable and the answer given by Frame in his parable, where are we left? Is the evidence for the existence of God merely a matter of perspective? Can each side just deride the other and leave it at that? Interestingly enough, the last question the disciples faced when they went looking for Jesus addresses the questions raised by these very parables. Is there a gardener in this combination of flowers and weeds that we call Planet Earth?

It is a bit of a winding path to follow. But when we get to the end, the reason for this journey might open up new vistas. The goal will be to see whether or not He has spoken to us and how Christ has revealed God to us.

IT BEGAN IN A GARDEN

The biblical narrative opens with the words "In the beginning." The focus moves quickly to the world God created, the crowning point of which was the creation of man and woman. The context shows a world of relationship, purpose, and beauty, with natural law set in place and stewardship over creation entrusted to human beings.

Tragically, naturalism (in which all reality is explained in natural terms) and theism have collided in these opening verses of the Bible. Instead of understanding the intention and the context of those to whom the revelation was given, the naturalist mocks the Bible's description of God's act of creation as bereft of scientific sophistication. On the other extreme is the theist who tries to make the record of creation look like a cosmologist's dissertation and then struggles to defend it.

No portion of Scripture ever claims to be a piece of scientifically technical material, intended to satisfy a technician's mind. I have repeatedly heard popular iconoclasts ridicule the ancient belief that the earth was flat and the belief that the world was created in 4004 B.C., declaring these assertions to be taught in the Bible. They never pause to prove their point by showing you where they have read that in the Bible.

Since that historic and histrionic Scopes trial in 1925, any discussion between a theist and an atheist on the question of origins is treated as if only a fool would now hold that a supernatural origin to this world is plausible. As frequently as that landmark trial is dragged into the conversation, castigating the Christian view of origins, I have discovered that most who talk about it have never even read the script and the context surrounding the trial. (They have seen the movie, to be sure.)

In this closing chapter, it is not my intention to reopen that conflict because there are already superb works that bring this debate into modernday dialogue. But that snub at the hands of capable challengers still hangs over us like a pall. I return to it for a brief moment only to point out the fallacy and prejudice embraced then and espoused even now. If the tables were turned and the method used then against the theist were used against the naturalist, the derision could be just as loud.

A PAGE FROM THE PAST What was that fallacy? Let us start with the backdrop, which itself was a travesty. The trial took

place in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. The emotions ran deep, as the media harnessed an event and tailored it to full entertainment value. Predictably, the larger points were missed. There were so many issues that were woven through the proceedings that one has to wonder whether the setting, the arguments, or the process had anything to do with the specifics of the case. If today one were to analyze the questioning by Clarence Darrow of William Jennings Bryan, it would be readily seen that Darrow's answers to an equally adept challenge would have been at least as unconvincing. His whole scheme was to persuade Bryan to take the stand in defense of the miraculous and then to destroy him. Bryan thought he was up to it, and for him, it was the equivalent of getting O. J. Simpson to try on the glove. The supernatural elements of the Scripture as caricatured by Darrow did not fit the "scientific" framework, and Bryan looked bedraggled and defeated.

But was that really the way to determine whether the Bible could be trusted as a document on origins? Herein is the fallacy. Can particulars of a world-view be defended without first defending the world-view itself? It defies logic that something so methodologically tendentious could be taken as compelling proof. Any brilliant lawyer can tell you that in most trials, when only selected facts are permitted into the courtroom, any adept wordsmith can construct a farce. The added component of the media only compounds the sham.

Think of this. One of the questions for which Mr. Darrow demanded an answer of William Jennings Bryan was where Cain got his wife. That could be a fair question if it were permitted that the Bible could first be defended in its intent and content, and if the assertion were also made that it contained every detail of how human reproduction began. But none of that was even given possibility. So let us reverse the questioning and challenge the naturalist to, in effect, answer the same question. How did the first Homo sapiens get "his" or "her" partner? Predictably, our entire values orientation is defined on answers to this. Could Mr. Darrow have sounded very persuasive here?

How did human sexuality and marriage emerge in the evolutionary scheme of things? I would like to have asked Mr. Darrow to explain how the "Big Bang" came to confer on sexuality the enormous combination of intimacy, pleasure, consummation, conception, gestation, nurture, and supererogatory expressions of care and love. All this came from the explosion of a singularity? In no other discipline would so much information density be swallowed up under the nomenclature of chance. In case Mr. Darrow was not forthcoming with an answer, I could help him even with the most modern research.

William Hamilton of Oxford has offered one theory (this is serious, by the way): "Sex is for combating parasites." You see, in warm and rich climates where microscopic parasites threaten the stable health of their hosts, the hosts mess up the attacking power of these foes through sex and procreation. That is the reason sex came to be: to stay ahead of the game!’

My! How different prescriptions look today to ancient cures. Imagine what the late-night comedians could do with this material. The laughter could be even more hilarious than the derision afforded to Bryan.

The shredding of fine points bereft of a studied understanding of the base of truth on which it all stands is an illicit process in which anything can be made to look absolutely idiotic. You do not form a conclusion on the presence of a gardener by studying only one bush. There is much more.

And here we see in small print what really should be the larger point. A glance at the sidebars of the trial actually betrays where the real prejudice lay, as it does to this day. On the third day of the trial, the judge asked a minister present to open in prayer. The controversy engendered was almost a circus in itself. But in spite of Clarence Darrow's strong objection, the judge allowed the prayer to proceed. Darrow's team of attorneys then rounded up a group of ministers to sign a petition objecting to the prayer on the grounds that their particular theological persuasion was not represented in it. That objection was denied by the judge. Finally, they submitted another petition signed by two Unitarian ministers, one Congregationalist minister, and one rabbi. It stated that they believed that God had shown Himself as much in the wonders of the world as He had in the written Word, and hence, a prayer that did not reflect that was abhorrent to them.

One can only shake one's head in disbelief. How ironic that "the wonders of the world" were placed on equal footing with God's spoken Word, while all along the very case being argued was whether these wonders required natural or supernatural explanation. You see, the real issue was not the explicability of the material world. The real issue was whether God had spoken through language as well as through nature.

Eden surfaced again-"Did God really say that?" Is there only a garden to look at, or is there also a voice with which the gardener speaks?

In the same manner as that small-town trial, we bring this prejudice to Genesis and think that we are capable of deciding whether God acted in six days or through fifteen billion years. That was not the intention at all. The four major thoughts of the Genesis text have been lost in the volume of extraneous debate. The principal thrust in the opening pages of Genesis is that God is the Creator and that He is both personal and eternal-He is a living, communicating God. The second is that the world did not come by accident, but was designed with humanity in mind-man is an intelligent, spiritual being. The third thrust is that life could not be lived out alone but through companionship-man is a relational, dependent being. The fourth aspect is that man was fashioned as a moral entity with the privilege of self-determination-man is an accountable, rational being.

Three significant relationships entail: that of man toward God-the sanctity of worship; that of man toward his spouse and fellow human beings- the sanctity of relationship; and that of man toward the created order-the sanctity of stewardship. Upon and from the first flow the other two.

If this order is contrasted with that of the naturalist, the following pattern emerges. The impersonal universe brought itself into being and just happened to strike upon the conditions in which life could arise-the elimination of any ultimate purpose. Somehow over time, in order to thwart disease and destruction and to survive, procreation brought multiplication-the materiality and amorality of sex. Codes were developed that were mutually beneficial-the cultural and relative nature of morality.

Every assertion in that paradigm flies in the face of reason and intuition. It is scientifically and existentially incoherent. Take just the first. Bare nothing has never been known to produce something. Can one scientifically explain how a state of absolute nothingness can bring about intelligent processes and results? However one wants to disagree on the processes, the fact is that this is an ontologically haunted universe. By that, I mean that the ultimate cause of our being and our very mode of thinking demand that what we are and how we came to be cannot just be dismissed as "it happened." There is intelligibility running through our veins, and from that we cannot run.

Every deduction of the naturalist can be readily countered, from our coming into being to the relationships we experience with others, to the moral imperatives in our lives. That is why, may I add, millions, indeed billions, in this world will never shrug off the supernatural no matter how high the naturalist raises his volume. Not because those billions are fools, but because plain intuitive certainty tells them that something with such spiritual and physical complexity just cannot come from nothing.

You see, in the Genesis account, the question is not whether the garden was by design or by accident. That was the most reasonable recognition. Rather, doubt was planted as to whether or not God had spoken and given the ground rules for life. The answer from the naturalist is a thunderous "No!" To accept that God has spoken is to surrender the first principles of naturalism. So the real debate is distracted by mockery and by name-calling. The difference between name-calling and calling one by name is world-views apart. I will explain this when the argument is unfolded. But at the outset, we see that the difference between a silent world and one in which God has spoken is the dramatic line of division between the theist and the naturalist.

A VOLUME OF SILENCE

Some time ago, I had to undergo an examination using magnetic resonance imaging to diagnose a disc herniation in my lower back. This was one of those experiences in which the examination seemed to be at least as distressing-if not more so-than the problem itself. I was laid on a movable table and slid into a narrow tunnel where the door was shut on me. The confines were so small and the darkness so grim that I am convinced that whoever designed it must have received his or her inspiration from studying Egyptian sarcophagi. Humor aside, it was a terrifying experience, especially for one who is claustrophobic, as I am. Moments after the door was shut, I was in a pitch-black, silent world. Long, fearsome seconds ticked away, and then at last the technician's voice crackled through an electronic speaker in the capsule, "Before I begin, do you have any questions?" he asked. Did I ever have questions! I nervously blurted back, "Sir! Will you be there the whole time that I am in here?" He answered, "I promise you, Mr. Zacharias, that I will be here through the entire length of the procedure."

Just recounting the incident sends a shiver through me. I want you to know that even a total stranger's voice was of immense comfort to me in this closed box that had me in its clasp. As I lay there, a horrifying thought suddenly came upon me. In the naturalistic scheme, humanity has been tossed into this closed system called the universe, and we are hurtling through space, with no voice out there to speak to us. There is nobody to ask us if we have any questions, and nobody to tell us that he is there for us. As one comedian put it, "We are in this together, alone." We are on our own. That is the world Darrow was, in effect, arguing for. And it is a world the Bible soundly rejects. God is, and God has spoken.

You see, if there is no voice from without, we are the cause and the keepers of the garden. All relationships may be legitimately redefined. We speak to ourselves. We define ourselves. We regulate ourselves. Free society mocks any self-regulating body, yet when it comes down to living in a community, that is precisely what we do. Notice the number of laws the free world must enact in order to keep us from destroying this garden because there is no gardener but us. The naturalist is merely looking for himself. There is no one to speak to us but ourselves.

God, by contrast, hung it all on one law-to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. That is not enscripted in the planets; it is written for us in His Word. By His grace, He has placed this law into our hearts. When we toss it out of our hearts, questioning if He has indeed spoken, innumerable laws must be written in the place of God's law, and countless agencies must be formed to enforce those laws.

There is yet a further point of inference. From this silent, lonely world within, there logically followed a disintegration of those very relationships that Genesis revealed as being sacred. Genesis did not tell us how Cain got his wife because in the world of which God is the Creator, that is a secondary concern. In fact, when God spoke to Adam and Eve of the priority of husband and wife over father and mother, there were not even fathers and mothers at that time. Genesis did tell us that a man and a wife were in a loving, binding relationship, blessed by God, and progenitors of the human race through the establishment of the home. The home and the family were God's idea, not ours. Cain rejected that, murdered his brother, and broke the hearts of his parents-and the family was ruptured. The garden became a jungle of fear and death.

Those same implications are with us today, as the following story illustrates. Some years ago, Edmund Gosse wrote a very powerful book entitled Father and Son. It is the gripping and true account of a son's struggle between the faith of his father and his own growing doubts of God's existence. His father was a marine biologist while he, the son, was a lecturer in English literature who later became the librarian at the British House of Lords. In the book he traced his journey into skepticism to the day when he finally told his father that he was through with God and could no longer bring himself to believe in His existence.

The father wrote back in the most heart-wrenching terms. Toward the end of the book, Gosse quotes that letter in its entirety, and says, "It buried itself like an arrow within my heart." Here are some excerpts from his father's letter.

My dear son,

When your mother died, she not only tenderly committed you to God, but left you as a solemn charge to me, to bring you up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. That responsibility I have sought to keep before me.... Before your childhood passed, there seemed God's manifest blessing on your care; for you seemed truly converted to Him.... All this filled my heart with thankfulness and joy... .

[But] when you came to us in the summer, the heavy blow fell upon me; and I discovered how very far you had departed from God. It was not that you had yielded to the strong tide of youthful blood ... it was that which had already worked in your mind ... sapping the very foundations of faith. Nothing seemed left to which I could appeal. We had, I found, no common ground. The Holy Scriptures had no longer any authority.... Any oracle of God that pressed you, you could easily explain away; even the very character of God you weighed in your balance of reason and fashioned it accordingly. You were thus sailing down the rapid tide towards eternity without a single authoritative guide (having cast your chart overboard), except what you might fashion and forge on your own anvil....

It is with pain, not in anger that I [write] ... hoping that you may be induced to review the whole course, of which this is only a stage, before God. If this grace were granted to you, oh! How joyfully should I bury all the past, and again have sweet and tender fellowship with my beloved son, as of old.

So ended the letter. Edmund made his response, telling the reader that he had a choice, either "to retain his intelligence and reject God" or "to reject his intelligence and submit to God." This is how he closed his book, speaking in the third person:

And thus desperately challenged, the young man's conscience threw off once and for all the

yoke of his "dedication," and as respectfully as he could, without parade or remonstrance, he

took a human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for himself.

Their relationship was permanently severed. How did it all come about? Darwin's Origin of Species fell into the hands of young Gosse, and that was the beginning. The more he thought of it and wrestled with it, he concluded that if need be, he was willing to forfeit everything-including fellowship with God and with his family. If there was no home for the heart in any ultimate sense, why should there be one in any temporal sense? With Darwin's volume in hand, Edmund forged a purpose that had no compass but one of his own making.

This true story serves as a real but reflective throwback to what happened in the garden as God created it. The heart of the question was raised: Has God really spoken? When Adam and Eve questioned the authority of God, the allurement placed before them was that they could become as God, defining good and evil. What the tempter did not tell them was that good and evil as defined by God are rooted in His character, and there is nothing contradictory in God. Good and evil as defined by fallen humanity are born out of a spirit of rebellion that results in the disintegration of life. Can any reasonable person not see the difference as it has been played out in human history?

We live amid the devastation of the three sanctities: worship, relationship, and stewardship. Charles Darwin himself feared that the philosophical ramifications of natural selection had dire entailments. "Nature red in tooth and claw" was not just a poet's description, but the reality of a rebellion from a transcendent moral law. The mockery and ridicule in the Scopes trial was not the mockery of an intellectual over a lunatic. It was the mockery of the voice of man over the voice of God.

In the first garden, God spoke, and humanity denied that He had. Humanism was born, and man became the source of meaning.

ROCKS AND HUNGER

Now we come to the second garden, and here a strange twist is added. The question in this setting was not so much whether God had, in fact, spoken, but whether what He said could be contoured into something other than what He meant. The setting was ideal for distortion because it was not so much a garden as it was a desert. Gardens can seduce one by the beauty of the surroundings, delighting in the aesthetic while denouncing the moral. By contrast, deserts can generate mirages so that what is actually unreal and imaginary looks real. In the first, the deception is that of the will; in the second, the disorientation is that of the mind. The very paradigm is shifted, and truth is at the mercy of the imagination.

Jesus was hungry and physically weak, and the tempter stormed Him with a series of taunts. One of those gibes thrown was, "Jump, and see if Your Father will honor His word." Every temptation was fused with the same challenge: "Why don't You do this Your own way and prove Your autonomy?"

What, then, is the twist? In Eden, the question was one of the text: Did God actually speak?

Here, it is one of context: Change the meaning of the text, and you play God. While in the first setting humanism was born, in the second, religion without truth was born-a form of polytheism, many gods, or pantheism, in which individuality is exalted to divinity. The irony here is that though Jesus was divine, He could not lay claim to His power without forfeiting His mission.

The inability to think in context is so manifest in the moral conflicts that we live with today. Every major moral battle we fight is either because we deny the text or because we justify the contrary by appealing to a different context. By the change of a word or by justification of some other kind, nothing is essentially good or evil anymore.

Something far-reaching comes to birth as a result. Common sense tells us that we cannot live without a moral law. But how does one generate a moral law if God has not spoken? The only answer is to arrange a morality of one's own design that, though mystical and transcendent, is attainable by one's own efforts. This way we appeal to our spiritual bent and at the same time incorporate our self at the center. If we can be good without God but retain a religiosity, we win both the secular and the sacred.

The New Age philosophies came in order to satisfy this demand. What better way to apply an economic theory of supply and demand than to manufacture a religion that is in limitless supply and can be tailored to fit one's personal demand? A personalized religion with an impersonal God-that's what it is. This kind of religion by its nature has an immense capacity to reflect the pragmatic, a chameleon's dream. In the desert, the temptation was not to invent a naturalistic explanation as much as it was to reinterpret the revelation by massaging the context.

No religions have done more to prove the reality of this temptation than Hinduism and Buddhism. With repeated effort, noted scholars and practitioners have tried to shade the truths of Christianity and make them resemble their own world-views. Verses such as, "The kingdom of God is in you," or "I and My Father are One" are used to sustain pantheism. Some of the most renowned Hindu philosophers have strained to make this point and tell us there is no difference. Any reading of the context in which these statements in Scripture were made shows clearly the illicit use of the texts by those who seek to distort them.

This reasoning is in violation of both logic and theism. What begins with a subtle departure from the truth by the allurement of self-deification ultimately results in the deification of everyone and everything. Such a world would be destroyed by powers of conflict because every power would claim autonomy. That is why Hinduism's epics are full of war and killing as an integral part of being gods and goddesses. Animal features emerge on the divine, the stories behind them leaving one utterly puzzled. And into the mix of polytheism and pantheism, other divinities are added-rivers, wind, and fire. The world of god-making had begun.

The Christian Scriptures are dramatically different. When God sent the plagues upon Egypt in the Old Testament, they were designed to show that He alone was supreme over the objects that they had deified (rivers, planets, creatures, magic, and so on) and that there was no other like Him. Nature, humanity, and every other entity or quantity is distinct from God. We cannot try to eliminate that distinction with impunity. From pantheism to the worship of nature, the temptation of the desert is still with us today, to have religion without God.

Rejecting the text of God in the first garden paved the way for humanism, and rejecting His context in the second led to polytheism or pantheism-many gods or self-deification.

THE GARDEN OF PAIN

The third garden is the point on which I wish to truly focus because, by any standard of measurement, here the Christian faith offers an answer for which no other system even pretends to find a substitute.

Having withstood the test in which He was challenged to go His own way, in this garden Jesus now kneels at the most desolate moment of His mission. It was to accomplish this mission that He resisted the urge to invoke the supernatural as an easy way out.

All the Gospel writers place Him at Gethsemane when the betrayal by Judas took place. Matthew in particular gives us an extensive look at the anguish of Jesus in those moments preceding His arrest. That garden has become synonymous with loneliness, sorrow, pain, and death. The events that took place during those hours had to be a source of great embarrassment to the disciples when they were happening and an even greater humiliation when they reported it after the fact. They do not flatter themselves here, and the reason they do not is because they had never expected to see Him or themselves in this time of horror. This was not what they had "come to see." How could the Son of God be in such anguish and in the throes of death? Was not death itself the greatest enemy to be conquered? How could it conquer the Author of life?

Once they understood the purpose and the means of His death, it became the riveting truth of the gospel they preached with unshakable conviction. The apostle Paul said, "We preach Christ crucified ... Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:23-24). He went on to add, "I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Cor. 2:2).

What is the cross all about? How can that which the Greeks considered foolishness and over which the Jews stumbled (see 1 Cor. 1:21) be described as the power of God? To this day, it does not sound like a work of power to any kingdom builder. Pascal once referred to humanity as the glory and the shame of the universe. In the cross, we see why that is an appropriate description.

COMING CLOSE TO THE CROSS

Theologian Martin Hengel has written an extraordinary book called Crucifixion: The Ancient World and the Folly of the Cross. Hengel takes the reader through the grim and historic details of all that crucifixion meant and implied, and in particular, the crucifixion of Jesus. In his summary at the end he makes several points. I will present just a few of them.

Crucifixion was a political and military punishment, and while the Persians and Carthaginians inflicted it upon high officials, the Romans used it on the lower classes-slaves, violent criminals, and unruly elements in society.

Crucifying an individual satisfied principally a lust for revenge and brought great sadistic pleasure. It was the triumph of the state.

By displaying the victim naked, at a prominent place, crucifixion represented the uttermost of humiliation.

Often, the victim was never buried, so that wild beasts could feed on the carcass.

Think about it. If death in itself is a "defeat," how much more a death in which politics, revenge, and power inflict their mark on the crucified one. These are institutions and attitudes with which we measure influence. To the disciples, principally Jewish, this punishment signified the loss of everything. Anger, power, pride, and cruelty were victorious over the One who claimed to be God.

Millennia later, we see the symbol of the cross on necklaces and on church steeples so often that we have no concept of what it meant and accomplished. In fact, if it were truly expounded upon, we would take offense at the preacher. Hengel helps us in his concluding remarks:

It is impossible to dissociate talk of the atoning death of Jesus or the blood of Jesus from this "word of the cross." The spearhead cannot be broken off the spear. Rather, the complex of the death of Jesus is ... that ... Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock, much less passing on "old and full of years" like the patriarchs of the Old Testament. Rather, he died like a slave or a common criminal, in torment, on the tree of shame.... Jesus did not die just any death; he was "given up for us all" on the cross, in a cruel and a contemptible way. Reflection on the harsh reality of crucifixion in antiquity may help us overcome the acute loss of reality which is to be found so often in present theology and preaching.

I might add, "The acute loss of reality which is to be found so often today, both in preaching and in hearing." We do not seem to have the capacity to reflectively hear anymore, even if it were preached.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate. Here, the love and hate did not just happen. The paths were chosen. Those who hurt Him hated Him. Those who hated Him, He loved. Those who killed Him wanted to be rid of Him. By allowing Himself to be killed, He made it possible for them to live. The crucifixion of Jesus was the embodied expression of rebellion against God. His desolation was a profound attempt to break apart the very being of God, in the Holy Trinity.

But here is the point. He did not die as a martyr for a cause, as others have done; nor was He just nonviolent so that the enemy would surrender through public outcry, as still others have done. He did not even die because He was willing to pay the price that someone else would live. He came to lay down His life so that the very ones who killed Him, who represented all of us, could be forgiven because of the price that He paid in the hell of a world that does not recognize His voice. Those who had rejected the text and manipulated the context of His Word saw and heard what God incarnate disclosed of reality. Every feeling they experienced, every state of mind, every utterance was the opposite of what Jesus felt, did, and said. His counterperspective stands in brilliant and sharp contrast, even as He invited them on the basis of that death to come to Him for forgiveness, because He longed to reach out to them.

In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky writes these lines of God's invitation:

Then Christ will say to us, "Come you as well, Come drunkards, come weaklings, come forth ye children of shame...." And the wise men and those of understanding will say: "0 Lord, why do you receive these men?" And he will say, "This is why I receive them, 0 ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this." And he will hold out his hands to us and we shall fall down before him ... and we shall weep ... and we shall understand all things! ... Lord, thy kingdom come.

Henry Nouwen, whose short life was characterized by a deep commitment to Jesus Christ, tells of a very moving personal experience. Nouwen, as some might not know, was a distinguished scholar, having taught at the University of Notre Dame and at Harvard University. He gave it all up to work with the mentally retarded at a center in Toronto. In his book The Return of the Prodigal Son he brings to life one of Rembrandt's paintings.

He had been profoundly affected by Rembrandt's depiction of the prodigal son returning to the waiting father, in whose arms he was clasped. Nouwen journeyed to see the original painting and admitted to being apprehensive, lest the work be less than what his imagination suggested. This is how he words the impact, after sitting in front of the painting for four hours:

And so there I was; facing the painting that had been on my mind and in my heart for nearly three years. I was stunned by its majestic beauty. Its size, larger than life; its abundant reds, browns, and yellows; its shadowy recess and bright foreground, but most of all the light-enveloped embrace of father and son surrounded by four mysterious bystanders, all of this gripped me with an intensity far beyond my anticipation. There had been moments in which I had wondered whether the real painting might disappoint me. The opposite was true. Its grandeur and splendor made everything recede into the background and held me completely captivated.

Rembrandt's embrace remained imprinted on my soul far more profoundly than any temporary expression of emotional support. It has brought me into touch with something within me that lies far beyond the ups and downs of life, something that represents the ongoing yearning of the human spirit, the yearning for a final return, an unambiguous sense of safety, a lasting home.

Those closing lines strike deep into my own soul-'An unambiguous sense of safety, a lasting home." I have lived half of my life out of a suitcase, sometimes seeing this world more from thirty-seven thousand feet in the air rather than on terra firma. I have to check and recheck where I have left my passport and wallet and all the other things that form the luggage of life on the road. I lock my suitcases each time I leave the hotel room and twirl the combination lock. There are visas from places near and far stamped in my passport. Border officers or guards have carried out their routines dozens of times in my life. I walk ever conscious of being on foreign soil, with an over-the-shoulder awareness. Oh! for an unambiguous sense of safety in a lasting home. It is the reality of the cross cut deeply into my soul that brings comfort of a final home that awaits me. I can identify with the songwriter who wrote,

0    Love that wilt not let me go,

1    rest my weary soul in Thee;

I give Thee back the life I owe,

That in Thine ocean depths its flow

May richer fuller be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,

I dare not ask to fly from Thee;

I lay in dust life's glory dead,

And from the ground there blossoms red Life that shall endless be.

When the missionary John Paton arrived in the New Hebrides in the mid1800s, he began translation on the New Testament. First, he had to reduce their language to writing. He worked with his young helper to come up with the vocabulary. He did not know how to illustrate the word believe. Finally, when he leaned completely on a chair in such a way that his whole weight was on it, the concept of trust emerged. John 3:16 now reads in their Bible, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever throws his whole weight on Him, will not perish but have eternal life."

Such is the procurement of the cross. A form of Christianity that goes by that name but loses sight of the cross is not Christian. A "religious" person that thinks nature and the cross portend no difference understands neither. His cross is the hill from which our gardens are addressed. His was a crown of thorns. His voice rings above the sounds of hate and torture and death, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."

This carries us beyond the text and the context to the contest-whose way? God's way or ours? The Garden of Gethsemane pointed Jesus to the cross.

THE LAST GARDEN

From the Garden of Gethsemane, which preceded the Cross of Calvary, we move now to the final garden. After Jesus was crucified, two men came and asked Pilate for permission to take His body down from the cross and entomb Him. They were men who, when Jesus was alive, were afraid to follow Him openly. One was Joseph of Arimathea, whom the Bible describes as a secret follower. The other was a teacher who had earlier come to Jesus at night so that he would not be seen in His company. His name was Nicodemus.

Nicodemus and Joseph brought a sack of myrrh and aloes and, along with spices and strips of cloth, they wrapped Jesus' body in keeping with Jewish custom. But His enemies were nervous. They went to Pilate and asked to have a guard placed around the tomb because they feared the body would be stolen by His disciples who would then claim that He had risen from the dead, just as He had declared He would.

This I find startling. Utterly startling! Jesus' enemies evidently knew what Jesus meant better than His own followers did. The disciples were hiding in fear of being arrested and sharing in Jesus' fate. But His enemies evidently understood that Jesus had said that He would rise again from the dead after three days. Often, those who reject the message have greater fears that there might be a haunting truth to it than those who claim to believe it. They took extra precautions to guard against it. However, they could not permanently fight off God. This is how the Scriptures describe the closing moments of this part of the story:

At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in

which no one had ever been laid.... They laid Jesus there.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the

tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!"

So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in.

Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen.

Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)

Then the disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been.... They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?"

"They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him."

At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

"Woman," he said, "why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?"

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."

Jesus said to her, "Mary." (John 19:41-42; 20:1-16)

What a moment that was-a moment that spanned the breadth of the four gardens. From the text in the garden, to the context in the desert; from the contest in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the contrast, indeed, the culmination, in the garden where they laid Him. He was Lord of the universe, yet He called this simple woman by her name. Everything suddenly bloomed with meaning. The story of life was now seen through the eyes of her risen Lord. It is no wonder that she reached out just to touch Him. God is personal, God is relational, and God sees in an eternal sense. The victory was that of Jesus over those who would silence Him, then and for centuries after. He not only spoke, He also called them by their names. That is the difference in our world of anger, hate, and rancor. Name-calling is the symptom of our breakdown. How can we fully enter into the wonder and exultation that must have now pulsated through the very beings of those who loved Him and followed Him and whose names He called so tenderly?

I was reading recently the following words of a historian as he described the day the Second World War ended.

Men wept, unable to restrain themselves. . . . Feelings pent up and damned behind the mounting walls of five successive torturing, introverted years, had to erupt. They welled up like gushing springs, they overflowed, they burst their banks, they tumbled unhindered and uncontrolled. Frenchmen with tears streaming down their faces kissed each other on both cheeks-the salute of brothers. They kissed the GI, they kissed everyone within range. The storm of emotion burst. Home and country beckoned, loved ones were waiting .. . loved ones ... were calling across the gulf of absent years. Man was at his finest amidst the grandeur of this moment of liberation. A noble symphony arranged by the Great Composer had reached its thunderous finale and, as the last triumphal chord swelled into the hymn of Nations, man looked into the face of his Creator turned towards him, a vision of tenderness, mirrored for an instant by the purity of his own unrepressed torrent of joy and thankfulness. At such a moment, mountains move at the behest of man, he has such power in the sight of God."

Only one who fought that war can truly understand what these words mean. A battleground had suddenly turned into a celebration of life, when mountains moved, flowers bloomed, weapons were put away, and the sound of loved ones' voices could be heard once more.

Only one who has known the bondage and enslavement of sin and the emptiness it brings can fully fathom the liberation of the cross and the glory of the resurrection-to hear His voice again. No wonder the world of Christian thought is so adorned with a wealth of music. They are the sounds of finding that there is more than just a garden.

When Jesus speaks and says, "I am the way the truth and the life," He claims what no other did. When He says, "My sheep listen to My voice; I know them, and they follow Me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of My hand," He speaks as no other does. The Bible says that though God has spoken to us through the prophets and the apostles, His climactic expression is in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ (see Heb. 1:1-2).

In the second chapter of the Book of Philippians, the apostle Paul says this of Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (vv. 6-11)

This Jesus called Mary by name and asked her, "Why are you crying? What are you looking for?"

Author Ken Gire tells this lovely story. A little girl who lived at the edge of a forest wandered off one day into the woods and thought she would explore all the dark secrets of the forest. The farther she wandered, the denser it became, till she lost her bearings and could not find her way back. As darkness descended, fear gripped her, and all her screams and sobs only wearied her till she fell asleep in the woods. Friends, family, and volunteers combed the area and gave up in the thick of night. Early the next morning, as her father began his search afresh, he suddenly caught a glimpse of his little girl lying on a rock and, calling her by name, ran as fast as he could. She was startled awake and threw her arms out to him. Wrapped in his tight embrace, she repeated over and over, "Daddy, I found you!"

Mary discovered the most startling truth of all when she came looking for the body of Jesus. She did not realize that the person she had found was the One who had risen and that He had come looking for her.

Perhaps if our naturalists would stop looking only for a gardener, they might be surprised at who they would find, or should I say, at who finds them. They might actually hear Him call them by name also and might truly understand the gardens and the deserts of this world for the first time.

He is not dead. He is alive in the best sense of the term. The celebration has begun.

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