Questionable Answers

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You can find out more about Rabi Zacharias and the team at www.rzim.org. You cannot say the answer is love unless you also ask the question of life's intrinsic value. Number one, you cannot talk of evil without assuming a moral framework and locating that evil in the heart of man. Number two, you cannot cry for justice unless you know the justifiable source of all law. Number three, you cannot say the answer is love unless you ask the question of life's intrinsic value, which leads you to the fourth and the final thing, our inescapable dependence on forgiveness, our inescapable dependence on forgiveness, evil, justice, love, forgiveness, evil, justice, love, concepts that skeptics have to overcome in their denial of the existence of God, and also ideas that are central to our understanding of humanity.

Welcome back to Let My People Think. When we left you last week, RZM's founder, the late Ravi Zacharias, was recounting an exchange with a fellow traveler on an airplane. The person was a skeptic but at the same time desired justice. In the same way, everyone, no matter what their ideas about God, desire love. Add to that the problem of explaining evil and you'll have skeptics wanting to change the topic. Today we'll pick up as Ravi continues with his examination of these foundational elements of humanity and why they must be understood within the context of a creator and his conclusion of his message, Questionable Answers.

Here's Ravi. The fact of the matter is even for the Greeks, justice was a virtue and justice is an indispensable element in our foundation. Socrates said justice is the firmest pillar of good government. Time is racing on and so I just want to ask you this simple question as I raise it and that is this. Can you cry for justice unless you know the justifiable source for all law?

Can you cry for justice unless you know the justifiable source for all law? And I wrote the book some time ago. Jesus talks to Hitler. My wife and a couple of colleagues and I were doing some research on it and we arrived in Nuremberg.

My wife's a sleuth. We couldn't get into the Hall of Justice where the judgment is held. We were not allowed but she got in and then a pssst, pssst, pssst got us in through the back door. So we got into the very hall where the judgment took place at Nuremberg. What is the first thing I noticed? There were two things in that same judgment hall, the Ten Commandments and a painting of the temptation at the Garden of Eden.

Has God really spoken? Millions had been sent into their gas ovens and here the men are being tried and the tribunal is sitting staring at them. What is in the backdrop? The Ten Commandments.

What is in the foreground? The temptation to redefine good and evil. That's why the prosecutor kept pushing and pushing when they defended themselves by saying we're operating according to the law of our own land. He said, ladies and gentlemen, is there not a law above our laws? Is there not a law above our laws?

Let me repeat question number one. Can you talk of evil without assuming a moral framework and talk of education without first looking inside the human heart? Number two, can you really cry for justice unless you know the justifiable source for all law?

Number three, you move from the definition of evil to the definition of justice. Now you come to the hunger and the search for love. The hunger and the search for love. What does your spouse expect from you? A promise made and a promise kept. A promise made, a promise kept. Love by definition is exclusive.

Love by definition is exclusive and it goes not only between spouses, it goes between children and the wonder that you see in the tiny little lives. The corporal once came to Winston Churchill and said, have I ever told you about my grandchildren? Churchill said, no, and I want you to know how much I appreciate it. So let me violate that Churchillian dictate and talk about my grandchildren.

We have four of them. Jude, who has just turned four, I don't know where he gets his vocabulary from, but he can keep talking in words and I look at him and I say, I don't know where you got that from. About six, seven months ago, he's sitting around the table. This little guy is a tiny little tyke you can talk your head off and a prayer is prayed around the meal and the father drew praise and the mother Naomi says, they all say aloud, amen. Jude looked at his mother and said, why is it when daddy prays, you have to say, amen?

And Naomi is born in an apologetic household. So she went on longer than she should have and giving him an explanation. She's going on and on and on and gives him the answer of the root of the word amen and what it means and all of this stuff. He finally throws his hands up into the air and he said, will somebody here please explain to me what on earth has just happened? Three and a half. How do you not sit and look at that little life in awe? Really? How do you not sit and look at that little life in awe and the splendor and that's why the father sings, is this the little girl I carried? Is that the little boy at play? I don't remember growing older.

When did they? Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the years. How it is interspersed then with laughter and tears.

Love. I'm an itinerant. I spend half of my life on the road. My colleague and I were in another part of New York this week speaking. They're all young actors and actresses and one of those film coaches looked at me across the table and said, what do you love to do best?

I said, I'm not making this up. You want to know what I love to do best? And I've told my wife this so I won't be embarrassing her. What I love to do best is when I know that that evening I'm going to be having dinner with my wife. It's the beauty, the marvel, the wonder of love and it is the nature of love to bind itself. Free love is a contradiction in two words.

There's no such thing as free love. It's the nature of love to bind itself and your spouse mainly just gives you a compliment says Chesterton in taking you at your word. Love. Look at a little child and the heart beats with delight and joy.

Look at your spouse and hold them and embrace. You understand what the love means and when you look at the prodigal son returning to know that the father is running out of the house to welcome him, you fully understand what he'd been missing all those years squandering his life in a pigsty for momentary fleeting pleasures when he could have had the embrace of a love that is committed. Where does this love come from? How do we define love?

And so I say to you this simple statement. You cannot say the answer is love unless you also ask the question of life's intrinsic value. You cannot say the answer is love unless you also ask the question of life's intrinsic value. Number one, you cannot talk of evil without assuming a moral framework and locating that evil in the heart of man. Number two, you cannot cry for justice unless you know the justifiable source of all law. Number three, you cannot say the answer is love unless you ask the question of life's intrinsic value, which leads you to the fourth and the final thing are inescapable dependence on forgiveness. Evil, justice, love, forgiveness, these questions are raised in the lexicon of the skeptic. You cannot escape the word evil, psychiatrists are saying now it's there, there's no other explanation. Even the skeptic with moral reasoning is crying out for justice.

Every one of us has our heart hungering for love. I remember an amputee from a recent war who was given two prosthetic legs standing on those metal legs. She was asked what the biggest difference was now that she could stand.

She said, because now I can get a hug legitimately, fully. One other veteran from Afghanistan where some fireworks had landed there and blown some of their bodies apart. This woman was being rushed. She was brought in to see one of the recent Super Bowls in her uniform without one arm and she told her story. When they were taking her away, she was sobbing and one of her comrades said are you in a lot of pain? She said I've lost my hand, my ring is in that hand. And one of these men under cloak and dagger operation went back to that roof and brought it back for her and she was flashing it on her other hand now. Search for love, the search for attachment, evil, justice, love and then forgiveness.

Mike Sonnenberg and I were colleagues at NIAC. You know the tragedy of their son Joel and how he was hit by a trailer truck. And in their book and in their testimony, they talk about the fact of how they were willing to forgive this man who did such damage to a young life.

Till the judge himself says, never seen anything like this. The grace, gift of forgiveness, what happened recently in Charleston when people thought riots would break loose and these African American families come back to church and say, we forgive you. Overnight, the man in Chattanooga would kill now five soldiers, fifth one with his injuries succumbed and the families asking to be forgiven for what happened, the pain that they are suffering to see what their son had done. This thing called forgiveness is a desperate need in your heart and mine. We all go wrong. We all follow the shadows rather than falling the light. We all look at ourselves and say, why in the name of reason did I make such a choice?

Why did I do it? And you kneel before the cross and you find that forgiveness is given to you and to me. Where does the secular thinker go for? There's a breakdown, the longing. Jim Baker, after he'd created havoc in the ministry that he'd founded, cleaning the bathrooms and is told somebody's here to meet you in the waiting room. He didn't want to go.

All the water from the bathrooms sloshed all over his overalls. He said, you want to come? You want to come and see this guest?

And he comes out and who's there? Billy Graham. Billy's a big man. Jim was not that tall. And Jim Baker said to have the arms wrapped around me of the man who is the most trusted person in America as a speaker wrapped around me, the most distrusted speaker in the country. He said, I'll never be able to describe for you the feeling of what it felt to have his arms around me and embracing me and say, Love you, Jim.

Love you, Jim. Where do you go for these definitions of evil? You can't quantiaspilot tens of thousands of lives and wash your hands of it. Evil is real. You can't just say justice without finding the moral soil that generates our laws. You can't just talk about love in the abstract sense because love comes from the agape love of God who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. That love of God. And then when you come to this whole area of forgiveness. So I want to take you to two very basic thoughts in conclusion.

Where do these converge? Evil, justice, love and forgiveness. They don't converge on a secular philosopher's tomb.

They don't converge on an ethical philosopher's tomb. There's no forgiveness. When I wrote my book, The Lotus on the Cross, Jesus talks to Buddha. I won't name the country but one country banned it.

They banned it because my last line is this. Jesus offers forgiveness to the person and Buddha says, I can't. And the leading educators and the politicians in the country said we cannot allow this book here because it gives Jesus the power to forgive. And it doesn't tell you that Buddha forgave. My colleague in that country went and saw the educators and said, find me the place where Buddha offers to forgive you for your sin and we will include it in the closing line.

They couldn't. The book is now available in that country. It's true. It's true what I have just told you, forgiveness. C.K. Chesterton says this in his Everlasting Man, which was the last link in the conversion of C.S. Lewis. That's a tough book, one of Chesterton's toughest books.

But C.S. Lewis said that was the last point for him and he made it because of that. And here's what he says in his Everlasting Man. Life is a game of knots and crosses. The knot, the circle, represents the most basic monotony of life. The most eloquent symbol of a pagan temple was a serpent with a tail in its mouth, a complete circle. But for the Christian, it is not a circle. You must put the cross inside that knot, inside that zero, and the four extremities of the cross will pierce that knot. The four extremities of that cross will pierce that knot and that transcendent meaning and that transcendent light comes in. Otherwise, life is a monotonous zero like the myth of Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill only to watch it roll down.

Here's the second, Martin Luther. I was lately looking out of my window and I saw the stars in the heavens and God's great beautiful arch over my head but I could not see any pillars on which the great builder had fixed this arch and yet the heavens fell not and the great arch stood firmly. There are some who are always looking and feeling for the pillars and longing to touch them and because they cannot touch them, they stand trembling and fearing lest the heavens should fall. If they could only grasp that pillar, then the heavens would stand fast for them.

I'll tell you what the pillar is on which these vast heavens and God's plan stands. It's on the foundation of the cross of Jesus Christ. That's why the hymn writer says, I sometimes think about the cross and shut my eyes and try to see the cruel nails, the crown of thorns and Jesus crucified for me.

But even could I see him die, I would but see a little part of that great love which like a fire is always burning in my heart. And it is the same thought that comes through from a different hymn writer. What language shall I borrow to thank you dearest friend, for this thy dying sorrow, thy pity without end, oh make me thine forever and should I fainting be, Lord let me never, never outlive my love for thee, oh sacred head once wounded with grief and shame weighed down, now scornfully surrounded with thorns thy only crown. The older I get, the more I'm enamored with the fact that in the Christian message, the story of Bethlehem leading to Calvary and to the empty tomb is the only one that gives to us not only the answers, but even helps us justify our questions. For the secular mind, even the questions are unjustifiable because in all of these there are no answers in the secular worldview for evil, justice, love and forgiveness.

And today more than ever, where our laws are being shaped with no transcendent point of reference, you wonder how much longer a nation can have when a nation's firmest pillar is justice and good government. Take the message of Jesus with you and the cross of Jesus Christ with you. Will you please pray with me? Heavenly Father, I thank you so much for your Holy Spirit who brings conviction. If there's any heart today overcome and consumed by evil, will you please bring deliverance? We long for your love. We'll see it in the gift of a little child.

We see it in the gift of marital love, but most importantly, we see it in the gift of your son, who you sent into the world for our salvation. Lord, please help us to find your forgiveness. And as this week unfolds, we pray that we will have precious truths revealed to us and hear from you in clear terms what you want from us. And we will hear your voice so clearly in the precious name of our Lord and our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. Evil, justice, love and forgiveness.

Concepts that are essential to our understanding of what it means to be human and concepts that undeniably point us to God. Stay tuned. Ravi will be right back. You've been listening to Aussie AM's founder, the late Ravi Zacharias, and the conclusion of his message, Questionable Answers.

Keep listening to find out how you can listen again or order this message. My father-in-law and I often speak wistfully about fine used bookstores that we have visited. He tells one story, however, that has all the others soundly beaten. He was in a sophisticated bookstore in Toronto which caters to the academic community rich in classical tradition. Suddenly, in came a roughshod man in greasy overalls who bellowed to the owner, how much does it cost to buy 128 feet of books? Obviously bewildered by this request, whenever before had he sold scholarly works by the foot, the owner replied, what exactly did you have in mind? It turns out that the buyer had been sent by a group of trade union leaders who were hosting their educated counterparts in management in an effort to break a deadlock in some highly volatile negotiations. So the union leaders decided to decorate their offices with the length of books.

Why? To convey the intimidating air of being ideological heavyweights and to terrify the opposition. Funny, I think, don't you? Solomon reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun, and so I suspect that this was not the first such scenario in history. After all, jockeying for literary superiority is as old as the printed page. No doubt many of us has had occasion to purchase, as classics, books that have served ulterior purposes, giving the appearance that we are wise. Groucho Marx once responded to an author from the moment I picked your book up till I laid it down.

I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intended to read it. I suspect there are books like that in your own experience which, while not provoking laughter, have never entered the mind. One critic said of Stephen Hawking's famed book A Brief History of Time, which shattered all records on the bestseller list in the United Kingdom, that it would be the most bought and least read book in recent memory. And yet, who of you has not entered another world or gained a life-changing insight just from reading a book? Friends, don't take the power of reading for granted. I am absolutely convinced that the books you and I read possibly help mould our lives more purposefully and eternally, I might add, than we ever realise. As King Solomon once said of making many books there is no end, but finding of wisdom preserves the life of its possessor. For that, I would like to say, only the book of all books the Bible has the answer. You can order today's message by calling us at 1-800-448-6766 asking for the message titled Questionable Answers.

Or, order online at rzim.org or rzim.ca for those in Canada. While you're online, be sure to check out the other resources we offer, like Abdu Murray's book Saving Truth. Here's Abdu as he talks a little about why he wrote this book. Hello everyone, it's Abdu Murray with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries and I'm excited to tell you about my book Saving Truth, Finding Meaning and Clarity in a Post-Truth World. You know, I wrote Saving Truth because I was seeing a phenomenon emerge, whether I was at university campuses or the halls of government or in various other venues, even at churches, where I was seeing that we were living in a post-truth world. A post-truth world is one that doesn't reject truth, but our preferences matter more. So while they might say, truth is there, they'll also say, I don't care.

So I wrote the book to answer the question, how can we actually offer truth to a culture that seems not to want it? See, we're now engaged in what I call the culture of confusion. When you think about it, confusion has become a virtue and clarity has become a vice.

If you're confused sexually, you become heroic. If you're confused morally, you become progressive. And if you're confused religiously, all paths lead to God, well that's tolerant. But if you're clear on sexual boundaries, you're a bigot.

If you're clear on moral boundaries, that's regressive. And if you're clear that there is only one way to God, that's considered intolerant. So confusion becomes a virtue and clarity becomes a sin. Within the pages of Saving Truth, I'm trying to bring us back to the understanding that clarity on freedom, clarity on truth, clarity on sexuality, clarity on science and faith, and clarity about multiple religions can actually give us true freedom.

We're obsessed with having our preferences, but the Bible is all about giving us freedom. I wrote this book with Christians and non-Christians in mind as well, because Christians have a lot to learn about this topic, just as much as non-Christians do. And if we can come together with a shared love of the truth, maybe we can make an impact, individually and globally. It's my prayer that God uses the book to richly bless you. Saving Truth, finding meaning and clarity in a post-truth world. Let My People Think is a listener-supported radio ministry and is furnished by RZIM in Atlanta, Georgia.