Are we paying the price for counterfeit gods?
I’m reluctant to lean in on this.
Every man and his dog has had a jab and jibe.
Mostly barks.
The twittersphere is in complete meltdown.
Lee Stroebel is removing him from his popular book The Case for Faith.
HarperCollins has reported to be pulling all his books.
The Christian community is up in arms, casting stones and removing logs.
The Ravi Zacharias scandal is disheartening to say the least, yet not surprising. Sadly, this is becoming all too common. Not long ago I wrote of a similar case in an article on Carl Lentz.
I too have experienced something similar that was closer to home. My former pastor, whose church my family had helped start and I attended all of my young adult life, was caught having an affair with the pianist on the worship team.
It’s become so clichéd it’s comical even writing it.
When I turned eighteen and was old enough to leave the church and form my own opinion on faith, God and Christianity I was on the cusp of packing it all in forever.
It took a trip to the UK and a meeting with a vicar in a pub over a pint to convince me otherwise. For an hour and half we sipped on our frothy British ales and exchanged a conversation about God, man and falling short of His glory. That night as I walked home under the dark November skies I realised it wasn’t so much the sin of my former pastor that was troubling, but the propping him on a pedestal that so many like me had done.
I’ve heard the same rhetoric all before. The same tripe being bandied about in the midst of the Ravi Zacharias debacle. Don’t hate the sinner, hate the sin. Who am I to judge? He or she without blemish and so on. It’s not constructive, it’s misleading and often misquoted
Did Ravi write good books, sure. Did my former pastor give good sermons, sure. So do we throw the baby out with the bath water? It comes down to discernment and wrestling with the Word. However, there are some basic fundamental truths. We can all agree that everyone is without sin, furthermore we all have opportunity to repent and take responsibility for our wrongdoings. Such is the gift of mercy and grace. However in Ravi’s context there’s lot of information out there to say otherwise and that he blatantly took an unrepentant heart to the grave. Rather than being another keyboard warrior, I’ll leave God to be the judge.
Clearly this story has rocked the Christian community, but events like these often tend to flip the mirror around. It’s a stark reminder of a greater sin played mostly on our part — foolish god-like projections. We see this manifested everyday in the media pushing a crazed celebrity culture. It’s no different from the pew to the pulpit on Sundays. Except it often costs us more and sadly many have left their faith in spite of it. For some, the reassuring signs of maturity are when grace and discernment eventually kick in. It’s a constant reminder to always ground ourselves in absolute truth, not man’s truth, but God’s truth with a capital T.
Despite the unconscionable hurt and pain caused to the victims, fans, followers and congregation, might this be a positive reminder: A man-made kingdom is not the kingdom of God and when you seek the former you’re susceptible to crumbling with it.
