Written by Ravi Zacharias

Years ago, Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop penned their book, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? It was a book that warned of the decisions that were being made within a culture stepping into new and terrifying terrain. They saw clearly where we were headed. We are now there.

I narrow that title down to what is happening on the home front here in America.

Listening to the blistering political rhetoric, I am asked all over the world, “What has happened in America?” The question should go deeper. Whatever happened to the American soul? We are truly at the cliff’s precipitous edge and the fall could be long and deadly. Why? We have a deep crisis of the soul that is killing us morally and we have no recourse. We have no recourse because the only cure has been disparaged and mocked by the elite and the powerful. And those very ideologies are now presiding over the slaughter of our citizens while the abundance of speeches is inversely proportional to the wisdom they contain and Reason bleeds to death before our eyes.

These may be strong words but I am staggered by all that is happening around us while the powerful fiddle and bodies litter the floors of offices, airports, and even restaurants. How many families will be shattered and offered up at the altar of our foolishness?

Let me connect some dots to trace where the real killing is happening. Dare I say a kind of genocide stares us in the face? Genocide is defined as the mass killing of a particular group of people. I have started to ask myself whether genocide is the first step towards mass murder or has a kind of mass murder already taken place before we experience genocide and the mangled bodies? I propose to you that multiple killings have preceded the horrors with which we now live. Those killings prepared the ground for the literal burial of our own people.

Three killings in particular are as real as the carnage we see when suicide vests are detonated: the death of morality, the death of truth, and the death of reason. With such tragic exterminations, we now find ourselves in ever-present danger, constantly lectured to by those who have all the bodyguards they and their families need while the rest of us are sitting ducks for evil people whose rights are protected more than those of their slaughtered victims. Why is this happening? We are at war but not only with an enemy. We are at war within our own culture, and whether we will ever win over the enemy depends on whether we win this war within our own souls.

At first, how I connect these dots may seem far-fetched, but they are indeed connected. Some time ago Robert Shapiro, the well-known lawyer of the famed O.J. Simpson trial, was being interviewed by Megyn Kelly of Fox News. She asked if justice had been served in that case. In a mind-stupefying, pathetic answer, he said, “There is legal justice and moral justice. Legal justice was served.” Maybe it was rightly called the trial of the century: We have entered the twenty-first century having amputated law from morality. Welcome to the uncivil civilization legalizing murder. That an intelligent, educated, supposedly legal scholar can make a statement like that and think he has defended a noble cause is fatal to our culture. Maybe that’s why Shakespeare described Satan as “the prince of lawyers.” If that’s what legal theory espouses we are in great peril. I have no doubt many an honorable lawyer cringed at that response but probably none was shocked. This is where law has drifted and come unhinged from any moral moorings. When justice is decapitated and something can be legal but immoral, we know we have already killed the heart of what it means to be human. The morality of the beast is now normal. Is it any wonder that Nazi judges felt they were doing the “right thing” by upholding their legal prerogative that resulted in the death of millions? Our society is being dragged towards the morgue because the law has held the gun to the heart of morality.

Ironically, there was something in his response to be applauded. At least he granted there was such a thing as moral justice. So that leads to a deeper question: Should not Morality and Truth be inextricably bound together? That is at the heart of all judgments. What is the truth when a person is killed? But now, I dare say, not only does morality not matter, the truth doesn’t matter either. That has also been buried. If you want a snapshot of our times, here it is: Four brave Americans serving their country murdered by a bunch of hate-filled thugs, whose ideology we are not allowed to identify, received and presided over by a litany of lies, their bodies draped in the national flag, while assurance is given to the bereaved that the culprits will be hunted down, including the one because of whom they were killed. If that scenario doesn’t drive us to our knees, Lord have mercy!

We are in the graveyard of a culture when a most somber moment cannot compel the conscience to tell the truth. Oh, that the victims could have sat up for just a moment and stared down that heinous lie! But it was not to be.  One day it will be so as their blood cries out from the ground. As Muggeridge said, “The lie is stuck like a fish bone in the throat of the handheld microphone…. Truth has died, not God.” The noble thing to have done when that blunder was made was to admit a failure for whatever reason and ask for pardon, but not to bury the dead with a lie! As if it is not dark enough for a handful to tell a lie, even worse, in our culture today the lie is no longer a posture to be shunned. We celebrate power over truth, enshrouding the lie with our flag. That is a form of national murder. You see, a blunder is a momentary reality. Upholding a lie is a character flaw, sending that lie into eternity.

The death of morality, the death of truth; then we come to the last, the death of reason. Aristotle reminded us that the first law of logic is identity. We must identify what we are talking about. A particular identifiable characteristic is indispensable to the referent. We must identify the characteristics of the thing we define. That is necessary to understanding the thing and to resisting contradiction. But as destroyers enter our lands and desire to pillage and kill, we are led by rhetoric that kills the first law of logic, the law of identity. We are told that identifying the enemy is not that important; strange that the same logic is not employed to all other local inimical ideologies but only seems to apply to Islam. Honest Muslims themselves wish to call it for what it is but our clever linguistic sleight of hand seems to restrict us from such identity—and so we bury our dead without identifying why the killer killed them. First, we try to mitigate our peril by this incredible new coinage, “radicalized,” that conveniently shifts the blame from the active shooter to the remote controller. Now we don’t even wish to identify what controls the remote controller. Propaganda that kills identity is deadly to the soul of a culture.

We are sliding into the future with evil stalking us but no morality, no truth, and no reason to guide us. America may be flirting with a self-inflicted mortal wound. Or it could well be a killing that is designed by a postmodern ideology masquerading as political correctness. When liberalism, whose legitimate child is relativism, has played itself out it will be a Pyrrhic victory to find ourselves in the hands of those whose identity is no longer in doubt. And when they are in control, the very means they used to hide their identity will be silenced as well. They will preside over the last rites of politically correct enforcers and a “free press” that abused freedom and celebrated the lie ‘til they themselves were silenced, buried by the truth they never wanted to expose.

There always has been, and is now more than ever, only one hope for rescue. If we abide in God’s truth revealed in his Son, then we shall know the truth and the truth will set us free. That is why I say again and again that we must dispense with our verbal arsenal that speaks only in terms of right and left. We have forgotten there is an up and a down. May God help us! We need His transforming power to change our thinking and to give us a hunger for what is true. True freedom is not in doing whatever we wish but in doing what we ought. That has been buried in America. And only one who knows the way out of the grave can give us a second chance to live: Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life that sets us free from within first, before we learn to deal with the lies around us.

As my prayer for this July 4th, I think of the great hymn by Isaac Watts prayed often in moments of drastic transition. I have added a fourth verse for our times:

Our God, our Help in ages past,
Our Hope for years to come,
Our Shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal Home!

Under the shadow of Thy throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine arm alone,
And our defense is sure.

Before the hills in order stood
Or earth received her frame,
From everlasting Thou art God,
To endless years the same.

We need thee now as ne’er before,
We mourn the wisdom gone;
Transform our land forevermore—
Redemption through your Son.

This article was originally posted at RZIM.org

They say there are no atheists in the foxhole.

Even fewer when death is certain.

None once the final curtain falls.

God’s Word declares, “The fool hath said in his heart ‘there is no God’” (Psalm 14).

For three decades, until his death in 1953, Josef Stalin was the mass-murdering atheist dictator of Soviet Russia.

He was also a fool.

In his 1994 book, “Can Man Live Without God,” famed Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias recounts a story he heard firsthand from British Journalist Malcomb Muggeridge “that stirred [him] then and still does even yet.”

Muggeridge had collaborated with Svetlana Stalin, Josef Stalin’s daughter, on a BBC documentary about her God-hating father. She recounted his last act of defiant rebellion against the Creator: “[A]s Stalin lay dying, plagued with terrifying hallucinations, he suddenly sat halfway up in bed, clenched his fist toward the heavens once more, fell back upon his pillow, and was dead.”

“[H]is one last gesture,” observed Zacharias, “was a clenched fist toward God, his heart as cold and hard as steel.”

In my experience it is something common among atheists: an inexplicable, incongruent and visceral hatred for the very God they imagine does not exist.

Indeed, Romans 1:20 notes, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

Yet excuses they make.

Psalm 19:1 likewise observes: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

The manifest intentionality and fine-tuning of all creation reveals design of breathtaking complexity. The Creator is of incalculable intelligence and infinite splendor. As I see it, atheism provides a case study in willful suspension of disbelief – all to escape, as the God-denier imagines it, accountability for massaging the libertine impulse.

Wouldn’t the atheist “suspend belief”? you might ask.

No, the phrase is properly “suspension of disbelief.” It is defined as “a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.”

In the case of the atheist, or the “freethinker,” as they paradoxically prefer, that which is unbelievable is that somehow everything came from nothing – that there is no uncaused first cause; that God does not exist, even as knowledge of His being is indelibly written on every human heart and proved by all He has made.

Be they theist, atheist or anti-theist, on this nearly all scientists agree: In the beginning there was nothing. There was no time, space or matter. There wasn’t even emptiness, only nothingness. Well, nothing natural anyway.

Then: bang! Everything. Nonexistence became existence. Nothing became, in less than an instant, our inconceivably vast and finely tuned universe governed by what mankind would later call – after we, too, popped into existence from nowhere, fully armed with conscious awareness and the ability to think, communicate and observe – “natural law” or “physics.”

Time, space, earth, life and, finally, human life were not.

And then they were.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Christian author Eric Metaxas notes:

“The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces – gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ nuclear forces – were determined less than one-millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction – by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 – then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp. … It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?”

Secular materialists claim it can’t be – that such explanation is a “God of the gaps” explanation and, therefore, must be banished from the realm of scientific inquiry. They demand that anything beyond the known natural is off-limits. Atheists attribute all of existence to, well, nothing. It just kind of happened. Genesis 1:1 of the materialist bible might read: “In the beginning nothing created the heavens and the earth.” Even in the material world that’s just plain silly. Nothing plus nothing equals something? Zero times zero equals everything?

And so, they have “reasoned” themselves into a corner. These same materialists acknowledge that, prior to the moment of singularity – the Big Bang – there was no “natural.” They admit that there was an unnatural time and place before natural time and space – that something, sometime, somewhere preceded the material universe. That which preceded the natural was, necessarily, “beyond the natural” and, therefore, was, is and forever shall be “supernatural.”

Reader, meet God.

In short: the Big Bang blows atheism sky high.

Fred Hoyle is the atheist astronomer who coined the term “Big Bang.” He once confessed that his disbelief was “greatly shaken” by the undisputed science, writing that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.”

Albert Einstein, who is often dishonestly characterized as having been an atheist, agreed that God-denial is foolishness. He once said of non-believers: “The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’ – cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

“I’m not an atheist,” added Einstein. “The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

Illustrious NASA scientist (and agnostic) Dr. Robert Jastrow (1925-2008) put it this way:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Yes, with time and chance, even science may eventually catch up to God’s Word.

Written by Ravi Zacharias

President Barack Obama’s address at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, 2015 has reverberated through the corridors of the world and provoked shock and dismay in numerous quarters. Even a professor at the University of London commented on his shallow understanding of the Crusades. I hesitated to write anything on the subject because it would drag me into politics or into a sobering critique of Islam. I am not sure that at a time like this either distraction would be wise, so let me keep it to the minimum.

For those who did not hear the talk, it is sufficient to say that it was the most ill-advised and poorly chosen reprimand ever given at a National Prayer Breakfast. I have been to several and have never, ever heard such absence of wisdom in a setting such as this. ‎I wasn’t at this one but have heard the speech often enough to marvel at the motivation for such thoughts. President Obama basically lectured Christians not to get on a moral high horse in their castigation of the ISIS atrocities by reminding them that the Crusades and slavery were also justified in the name of Christ.

Citing the Crusades, he used the single most inflammatory word he could have with which to feed the insatiable rage of the extremists. That is exactly what they want to hear to feed their lunacy.  ‎In the Middle East, history never dies and words carry the weight of revenge.

There is so much I would love to say in response but shall refrain. The President obviously does not understand the primary sources of either faith for him to make such a tendentious parallel. The predominant delight in his remarks would be in the Muslim world and the irreligious. The next day Geraldo Rivera, opining favorably, made the oft repeated lie that more people have been killed in the name of God than in any other cause.

Try telling that to the Chinese and the Russians and the Cambodians and the victims of the Holocaust! ‎Such intellectual ignorance gains the microphone with pitiable privilege. If a thinking person doesn’t know the difference between the logical outworkings of a philosophy and the illogical ones, to say nothing of the untruth perpetrated, then knowledge has been sacrificed at the altar of prejudice.

But let me get to the President’s final statement, after he had wandered off into erroneous territory. That final remark was true. He said, “It is sin that leads us to distort reality.” He was right. In fact he embodied it in his talk. But there is good news for the President. At least in the Christian message forgiveness is offered for sin. In Islam it isn’t. You must earn it. May I dare suggest that if Christians had been burning Muslims and be-heading them, he would have never dared to go to Saudi Arabia and tell them to get off their high horse. He unwittingly paid a compliment to those who preach grace and forgiveness. That is the dominant theme of the Gospel. That is why we sit in courtesy listening to the distortion of truth, the abuse of a privilege, and the wrong-headedness of a message.

I cannot recall when I have heard such inappropriate words at so important an occasion, in such a time of crisis. The world is burning with fear and apprehension. We need a message that will inspire and encourage and redeem. Ironically, two years ago when Dr. Ben Carson spoke and made some comments about our medical plan and the tax system, the White House demanded an apology from him for straying into controversial terrain, because it felt his comments showed disrespect for the President.

This year’s National Prayer Breakfast speech was a blunder in thought. But there was a silver lining. In the end, President Obama blundered into the truth. Sin distorts… and only Jesus Christ restores the truth. Christ will ever rise up to outlive His pallbearers. Even presidents will have to get off their high horses then and recognize the Lord of life and hope and peace. There will be no speech making then. Only a prayer of surrender… which is what the National Prayer Breakfast was meant to be in the first place.

Originally published at RZIM.org.

Attorney, author and columnist David Limbaugh is a man after my own heart. He’s also a man after my own mind. That is to say, as both a fellow member of the bar and follower of Christ, I tremendously appreciate how David approaches the hot button issues of the day. He carefully probes them within the framework of an objective, lawyerly and evidential analysis. He is a master communicator and never fails, in any case, to deliver deeply persuasive closing arguments in the court of public opinion.

With his latest book, “Jesus on Trial: A Lawyer Affirms the Truth of the Gospel,” Limbaugh remains true to form. In fact, having read nearly every manuscript he’s penned, I believe this to be, hands down, David’s best and most important work to date. While managing to make each sentence of each chapter in this page-turner fascinating, Limbaugh also provides proof beyond any reasonable doubt that Jesus Christ, in both His historical and spiritual respects, was, and is, exactly who He said He is: God incarnate, the living, physically resurrected Savior of the world and the only, yes, that means the exclusive, path to God the Father.

I’m one of those guys who regularly dines on a word diet cooked up by the master chefs – Christian apologists and theologians like C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Ravi Zacharias, R.C. Sproul and Josh McDowell, to name just a few. With “Jesus on Trial,” not only does Limbaugh chef-it-up with the masters, he prepares a multi-course meal that, if read with an open mind, will satisfy, both spiritually and intellectually, every consumer, from the most ardent skeptic to the most devout believer.

This is not merely a book of Christian apologetics. I have never read a more convincing, comprehensive and well-arranged biblical, cultural and, indeed, scientific exegesis for the one-stop shopper – for the spiritual sojourner exploring, like most of us, the greatest of all questions. Namely, “Who am I, how did I get here, why am I here and where, if anywhere, am I going?”

Most importantly, David offers, with a spirit of humility and compassion that, for anyone who knows him, has come to define his character, a GPS to heaven. He lays out the biblical road map to eternal salvation.

In a recent column entitled, “Why I wrote ‘Jesus on Trial,’” Limbaugh captures, in part, why this book is the most wide-ranging Christian non-fiction I’ve come across. He explains what makes it quite different from any other. “It is on Christian apologetics, which means it defends the Christian faith and its truth claims,” he writes, “but it also includes my personal journey from skeptic to believer and a discussion of basic Christian doctrine.”

The book incorporates “a thorough discussion of the full humanity yet full deity of Jesus Christ, an examination of the Bible’s miraculous unity, many examples of undeniably fulfilled prophecies that are too specific to be dismissed, a comprehensive review of the evidence pointing to the reliability of Scripture, a look at the subject of truth itself, proof of God’s existence, and much more.”

As for the “much more,” Limbaugh adds, “I also thought it would be vitally important to include chapters on subjects that plague seekers and even some believers with doubt – science and the problem of evil and suffering.”

In many ways this was the aspect of the book I most enjoyed. Limbaugh’s superlative talent for clearly articulating and differentiating between scientific facts and the pseudoscience fiction embraced and propagated by the church of secular humanism, is so well done that even the most rigid atheist may well second guess his own blind faith. In a universe so incomprehensibly designed and fine-tuned that it gives smoking gun testimony to the glory and supremacy of its Designer, to deny, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that this Designer even exists, requires a faith most blind. Limbaugh drives home this reality in a winsome yet compelling fashion. Any intellectually honest atheist who is not hopelessly and haplessly invested in the pleasures of moral relativism, the chief fuel source for the materialist gravy train, will be left no choice, if he’s honest with himself, but to re-evaluate his entire worldview.

I read a lot of books and very rarely, almost never in fact, do I review them. Halfway through chapter 1 of “Jesus on Trial,” I knew a review was coming.

If you’re a faithful believer, Limbaugh’s masterpiece will strengthen your faith. If you’re a faithful non-believer, it will weaken it.

Either way, your soul will be the better for having read “Jesus on Trial.”

To say this is “highly recommended” is a gross understatement…if you have the time, give it:

We encounter an incredible diversity of cultures, lifestyles, and faiths. Unfortunately our conflicting identities and beliefs often exclude others. Is there truth to real acceptance and inclusion? Join in discussion with renowned international speaker and Christian philosopher Dr. Ravi Zacharias. Extended Q&A following the dialogue with Dr. Zacharias and Michael Ramsden, speaker and Director at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University.