Years ago I was impressed by what I read about Helmut Thielicke as he toured the United States. When he was asked by a reporter what impressions he had of the American church as a whole he responded to this effect: the church is wide and lively but it seems not to understand the benefits of suffering. That from a German pastor and teacher who had remained faithful to the gospel even under the World War II regime of Adolph Hitler. Thielicke refused to conform to the Nazi effort to reshape the church to their own ends—and he was one of too few pastors in his day to stand firm even though his refusal might well have cost him his life. As it was he was sent off to internal exile until the Nazis were defeated. 

Since that first exposure I’ve read sections of a theology series he wrote called The Evangelical Faith. He has been dead for a couple of decades now—but the force of what he wrote still stirs my thinking. He was a man of remarkable courage and special insight: a model to follow. Let me share one of his central insights here. 

But first let me say why he caught my attention. As a teacher myself, with more than 20 years in college and seminary settings, one thing is certain: change happens! This is as true in longer stretches of time as in shorter stretches. My father, for instance, when he was a young man knew the daughter of a famous evangelist. Her father was concerned about the loss of many once sound seminaries—they had all turned to liberal theology and away from the Scriptures. So he helped launch a conservative evangelical seminary that would be as strong academically as any of the liberal schools, while remaining boldly conservative and fully devoted to the integrity of God’s word and to what it offers. His dream was fulfilled: the school is now a premier academic center. But the founder himself, were he still living, would certainly be devastated by what some teachers in that school now embrace and affirm. 

So, too, changes are taking place in the Bible college I attended in the 60’s, although not at the same pace nor with the same features. My lesson: change happens! And some changes, by any measure are needed and good. But what measures are used to make these decisions, whether good or bad?

One item is certain: there is a pattern of change in theological colleges. They seek to move from being less academic to being more academic; and with that shift they become less devoted to the Scriptures as an ultimate and authoritative resource. They also shift in their range of interests. Harvard College, launched in 1636 to train pastors, is now Harvard University and scarcely a bastion of evangelical biblicism today. Princeton became Princeton; Yale became Yale; and so on. Each began with an ambition to train students in the Word of God but that changed over time from a primary role to a marginal feature. Evangelicals can still be found in each setting, but the central thrust of each center has changed. And, dare I say, been reversed in some key aspects. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are now great universities, but good Bible Colleges? Ah, well . . . no. 

Yet new Bible colleges keep springing up. People want what faithful, humble, face-value-reading-of-the-text teaching centers offer. That appetite, I’m sure, comes from the impact of real conversions birthed by Bible content shared by faithful believers. On the other hand, droves of people would do almost anything to have a child attend Princeton, or Harvard, or Yale. And, with that, Bible colleges continue to become universities. 

Before I go on let me address a suspicion that may be forming in some readers: am I opposed to education? Or am I anti-intellectual? Is this a diatribe against those who like to think? Do I see the past as always superior to the future? 

My response is conflicted: I love studies. I loved getting every degree I ever earned. My time at King’s College, University of London, was saturated with exposures to every value and viewpoint under the sun and I loved the entire exercise. And what I’m reading at coffee shops on most mornings causes most of my friends’ eyes to roll. But I don’t like the loss of faith and faithfulness that I see as a pattern in so many academic centers. I grieve over it and I pray for a reversal of those trends. 

That’s where Thielicke came into my life. I think he nailed the issue better than anyone else I’ve read or heard. In a nutshell, he held that the cause of the changes I’ve noted in theological training centers is not a battle of conservative values versus liberal values. Instead it is a battle between Cartesian and non-Cartesian approaches to the study of Bible and theology. 

So, what is Cartesianism? And how can it be that influential? 

It is the approach to learning conceived by Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and adopted by those who led the Enlightenment transition away from faith. Let me say right away that Descartes, a studied Roman Catholic, believed he was being helpful to the defense of the Catholic faith against radical skeptics. The key feature of his approach was expressed by his aphorism, “I think, therefore I am” (Latin: cogito ergo sum). 

What did that mean? It was the outcome of his doubts. He took the tool of skepticism that was then being used by some of his companions to dismiss prior orthodoxies, and tested everything with it. That is, he sat down and began to doubt. After doubting everything he could think of he concluded that the one thing he could not doubt was the fact that he was sitting by his fireplace doubting—that is, thinking. That truth, he concluded, was one thing that is beyond doubt. And with that starting point he then restored the rest of the world to some level of certainty. If he existed, Descartes concluded, so does God because someone (God) had to have made him in order for his presence to be explained (this, remember, was a pre-Darwinian event). 

Here’s the nub of the issue: he reversed roles. Before Descartes all of Christian Bible and theology started with God, not with Descartes (or some other Cartesian successor). So instead of “In the beginning was the Word” we now have, “In the beginning was cogito“. Revelation had been given a inferior standing to reason. Or, to underscore the reversal, reason had been made greater than revelation. Man was the new measure of all truth. God was now an object of doubt until human reason could find a way to restore his status. 

With that reversal came another tendency: accommodation. Reason, with its new Cartesian primacy, had to find a proper set of values for measuring what should be doubted and what should be affirmed among the pantheon of possibilities. 

The answer to that question came by returning to the starting point of the Cartesian process: with the self.

What, then, offers the greatest benefits to the self? Self had been raised (unwittingly, I suspect) to a god-like status by Descartes, so that revelation—including God’s words and even the Logos/Jesus himself—now needed to be measured by what reason finds useful and satisfying. All of knowledge needs to be accommodated to the needs of the Self, and each Cartesian thinker has that as an ultimate aspiration. The task is so challenging that universities took it on as their main order of business. Thus Thielicke’s complaint: the roles of God and man had been reversed. And with that, the purpose of education itself. 

I conclude by cheering Helmut Thielicke’s courage, both during World War II and as a German seminary professor: he was in favor of reversing faulty reversals, no matter what the social and personal consequences might be. May many of us follow in his footsteps.

At times I’ve been cheered on by others with a hearty “way to go!” The cheer celebrates a moment of progress or success. And there are other ways way is used.  In the Bible the term often serves as a moral metaphor. 

Listen, for instance, to Jesus: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). In what sense is he “the way”? For context Jesus was answering Thomas who had asked Jesus what he meant by a promise to go to “prepare a place” for them. The disciple, no doubt, wanted the name of a location where they could meet if they were separated. 

Jesus gave him a location, but it was expressed in moral and relational terms rather than as a spot on some map. The lesson? God himself is the real destination of a life in Christ; and no road leads to God except by knowing Jesus: “No one comes to the Father except through me.” 

Another intriguing use of ‘way’ is as a label for Christ’s followers. Paul, for instance, referred to the Christianity as the “Way” at times—”I persecuted this Way to the death” (Acts 22:4); and “I confess to you [Felix] that according to the Way, which [my foes] call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers . . .” (Acts 24:14). While that tag failed to stick it was a strong metaphor for the early church. 

But what of the moral metaphor? In the Old Testament we find way used regularly as a picture of living rightly—of staying on the straight path rather than the crooked. Just after giving the ten commandments in Deuteronomy, for instance, Moses used the imagery of a moral pathway in exhorting the Israelites to respond to their calling: 

You shall be careful therefore to do as the LORD your God has commanded you. You shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. You shall walk in all the way that the LORD your God has commanded you, that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land that you possess. (Deuteronomy 5:32-33) 

This translation of “way” in the singular here points to a collective and characteristic set of attitudes and behaviors that reveal God’s own character: he has a certain manner of living that his people are called to engage as their own. 

Later, in Deuteronomy 10:12-13, we find God’s own character set out as the touchstone for all moral conduct, now reinforced with the plural use of “ways”. 

And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the LORD, which I am commanding your today for your good? 

This, too, became the basis for Israel’s reception of lasting security amid all the hostile nations around them. 

For if you will be careful to do all this commandment that I command you to do, loving the LORD your God, walking in all the ways, and holding fast to him, then the LORD will drive out all these nations before you . . .” (Deuteronomy 11:22-23). 

This sort of listing was not tied to a single era or writer. We find it throughout the Bible as it captures a practical and compelling reality: God offers clear and reliable patterns. He is loving, just, and righteous. All who belong to him will travel in the same directions that he travels. 

So how did the early church label, “Way”, emerge? Did it relate to God’s ”ways” as cited in Deuteronomy and elsewhere where his laws were in view? Perhaps, but I suspect the main linkage came from the Thomas episode that we noted a moment ago. The apostles realized that Jesus, alone, is the way to a relationship with God the Father. The church, then, is affiliated with Jesus as the way to God and as representatives of God on earth. 

But how strong is this connection? Very strong. In part because of an additional facet to this relational use of way. Just after Thomas asked his question Philip followed up with his own misunderstanding. Since Jesus would not offer a location as the destination of the “way” but made the Father their destination, Philip then followed-up: “show us the Father; and it is enough for us.” 

Jesus answered him: 

Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? (John 14:9-10) 

Just as Jesus had shifted the ground under Thomas’s question, he did the same with Philip’s question by ignoring the premise that the Father is accessible as a separate and tangible figure who can be seen. Instead he shifted to a relational ontology by speaking of his mutual indwelling with the Father. The Father and the Son are One even if they are eternally distinguished as the Father and the Son. 

This theme of the triune ontology continued in the conversation between Jesus and his apostles. In John 16:13-15 Jesus noted the communicating presence of the Spirit in their triune relationship. And later, in John 17, we find that the church is also united with Christ, and through Christ, with the Father. Paul also spoke of this union in organic terms: of the church as members of Christ’s body. The church, then, is both bonded to the Way and represents him as the Way on earth. As such the relational theme both precedes and explains the moral theme: that the God who is the Way then expresses his ways in calls for righteous conduct in the commandments. And those who are in the Way begin to live after his ways—thus fulfilling the commandments from the heart. 

Yet it is a common mistake to reverse this order. Many people see life as a progression of choices. All behaviors, they believe, are measured by a moral corollary that some behaviors are right and others are wrong. A “good” person is one who usually chooses “good” behaviors; and the “bad” person gets that status by making “bad” choices. Morality is the product of choices. 

Yet the Way is a heartfelt bond—not the activities of a morality play—as the church is characterized by her union with Christ. How does union make a difference? 1. Faith is a participation in Christ  2. As a believer now lives “in Christ” Christ’s righteousness establishes his or her standing before the Father, and, 3. The Spirit’s work in the believer’s heart begins to remake it after Christ’s heart—which is to love the Father and those the Father loves. 

The moralistic alternative—of religion as gathered individuals who are striving to meet God’s demands—misses the union of Christ and his church. That, in turn, confuses the function of the laws noted in the Deuteronomy texts. 

To restate the issue: the moralist takes God’s commandments to be ends in themselves. Each individual is a moral practitioner and user of God’s goodness so that God serves as a moral resource to be drawn upon for the enhanced moral standing of the actor. In the process the moralist looks at his or her own “goodness” as the destination of life, rather than God himself. Thus they slip into the errors of both Thomas and Philip: they miss the relational metaphor and as a result they set up a utilitarian destination—effort-based faith. 

So let me summarize the “way to go” for those who love God. His triune way is the pattern of mutual love and shared glory that he invites us to join. That way is holy, not because there are a set of prescribed behaviors that God has adopted because they are “good” or “holy” in themselves. Instead the relational being of the God who “is love” (John 4:8 & 16) shares himself in ways that are “good”. 

But that goodness is in God himself—as in his character of loving, of acting with justice, and in establishing righteous—and not in activities, spaces, or places . . . as if God somehow enacts or infuses goodness as free-standing qualities. Thus when religious but un-Spirited people embrace various behaviors as moral ends in themselves they do so in order to achieve their own goodness as a moral destination. But think of the rebuttal to that notion as Jesus answered the wealthy moralist: “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18). 

So in Jesus we meet the “way” the “truth” and the “life” as a person and not as a place or discrete activity. He calls us to love him with all we are. And with that we begin to meet and surpass any calls to keep his commandments. See, for instance, Romans 13:8-10. Why and how? Because we now know and love the One who, alone, is God. And he makes us, collectively one with his Son—the bride of Christ. 

What a way to go!

The irony wasn’t lost on me. All my writing of the past three months evaporated in a keystroke. The subject of my writing? Sin. The cause of the lost file? A computer virus that wiped out both my back-up file and my hard drive. I hadn’t made any print copies of the project so I had no way to recover what was lost except to rewrite it from scratch. The broken condition of some computer savvy sinner had intruded in my life in a very painful way.

Minutes later I was walking through the city sidewalks of London praying. I knew that the Bible has a number of imprecatory psalms—psalms that ask God to bring judgment down on the heads of those who have given themselves over to evil. All the words I needed for a feisty psalm were roiling through my heart as I stormed ahead. But the actual words expressed were a simple repetition: “Thank you, Lord, thank you, thank you, thank you!” Again and again. For more than thirty minutes. 

Why the odd response? Because a number of years earlier I’d had another painful moment. I won’t go into the particulars here . . . only to say that it was another event where sin was ugly and active—and, in response, I was ready to write some vinegar-flavored psalms to memorialize the experience. But on that day there was another piece in play: Scripture memorization. I had a packet of verses to memorize with a new verse for each day. That day my verse was 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “In everything give thanks for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” I was stunned by this pairing of a terrible moment and a blissful verse—it wasn’t an accident. The verse was meant for that day and that occasion. It was so startling that I responded by shouting at God. 

“Thank you, thank you, God! Are you happy now?! But for what? I don’t get it!” 

Still, I kept reciting the verse again and again—for most of a half-hour. And I become increasingly and genuinely thankful. Not through some self-stirred reformation of heart but by the dawning of a major insight: God was giving me a chance to grow! I could either live by faith or I could treat the world as a broken place where God operates as a peripheral figure who can only pick up the pieces after a crash. The verse-for-the-day was my chance to toss out that very lame version of God. 

Here’s what happened: the longer I gave thanks the more I had eyes to see the world—including my immediate situation—as God’s turf. He remains in control even in the face of sin and some badly damaged relations. So my prayers weren’t changing him but were changing me. I was learning to treat God as the only true God, an active God, and a caring God. 

That first exercise set me up for every personal tragedy that has since followed—including my lost writings about sin. Including the moment when my father’s death was reported to me. Including some painful moments among my professional relationships. Including a host of hurtful moments that come with life in a broken world. 

“Thank you, Lord, thank you, thank you, thank you! This hurts so much . . . but I know you love me! You’re God and I trust you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” 

Since then I discovered that this insight is a foundation for living by faith. The apostle Paul, in Romans 1:21-22, summarized the pathway of Adam’s rebellion when he linked a refusal to give thanks to a refusal to treat God as God: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools . . .” 

Thanksgiving and wisdom, linked as inseparable companions in the Bible, are now paired in my heart. It doesn’t mean that sin doesn’t bring pain. It does! It doesn’t ensure a proper response every time a challenge comes. But it offers a different way of viewing life so that sin is never given an ultimate status. God is still in charge, always and in every way. 

And—to finish off where I started this testimony—my second effort in writing about sin was more informed than my first draft could ever be. And for that I’m eternally thankful! As for the computer savvy sinner, may God have mercy.

The Bible is a faith-producing book. As we read it boldly and regularly it generates a response: a growing confidence in God and, with that, a sense of entrustment. The Bible is also brutally honest. It tells stories of misguided faith and un-faith. For the faithful reader those stories help in navigating a dangerously skeptical world.  Yet for other readers the Bible stirs spiritual indigestion—what the Bible writers refer to as hardened hearts.

So there are two common paths in reading: either we find Scriptures more and more captivating; or we stagger through a page or two and then close the book in order to move on to things more useful to the real world we live in. Our hearts are either increasingly tender to God’s words or hardened by them.

What makes the difference? I can only guess at all that must be involved—heaven alone knows—but I do know that my own reading of the Bible on a given day is either vicarious or detached. That is, I find myself owning what the text reports as connected to my own life narrative; or I treat it as a story that has little more significance to me than the story of Hansel and Gretel. And if I own the narrative it begins to own me.

This morning in my reading I was drawn into the events of the narrative of Exodus. Never mind that I’ve read this section at least a hundred times by now. I was still instantly aligned with Moses in a special way. I just returned from a month in Rwanda a little over a week ago. In my time in Kigali I found my heart aching to see deeper transformation in my own life as I offered myself to others. I felt a keen sense of compassion for the Rwandans that only sharpened my sense of inadequacy. I wondered how God is working and how I might be part of that work.

“Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.” [2:23-25] 

“And God knew” caught my attention. This is not a detached and indifferent God but a God who hears and knows the human condition. His commitment to the Patriarchs was to bless the world with the Son who would finally resolve sin. And Rwanda knows about sin—not just the horrors of the recent genocide but the ongoing distortions of empty and hungry hearts. God knows. But how many Rwandans know that God’s great blessing is for them?

And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. [Moses] looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. . . . When the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” [3:2-4]

To be honest this is a place in the narrative where my connection is lost. I’ve never seen a burning bush that signaled God’s immediate and overt presence. Yet, as I paused to think, I did have a moment many years ago when God called out to me from the Bible—in the Sermon on the Mount—that was as real to me as any voice speaking out of a fiery bush. But that was many years ago and seemed to be a thousand miles removed from my time in Rwanda. 

What did catch my attention is that God takes initiatives when he hears people cry out to him with real needs. I paused in my reading long enough to say in my heart, “Okay, Father, what about today? Are you still working? How about Rwanda today? How about us here in the States, Lord?”

As I continued reading I followed God’s stages in recruiting Moses to be his earthly representative. Moses was charged with meeting the Pharaoh, with offering miraculous signs, with rescuing Israel. Once again the narrative in the text was a million miles away from my own life narrative—it was becoming story rather than a captivating reality to me. Until I came to the next chapter. 

But Moses said to the LORD, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.” Then the LORD said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now therefore go , and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.” [4:10-12]

That was where Moses and I became one in an instant. I’m deeply aware of two things in life: of the needs and opportunities all around me; and of my inadequacies. And God was speaking as certainly to me as to Moses: “Who designed you? Where is your focus? On your inadequacies; or on me?”

In that moment I became vicariously aligned with Moses through all the stages of confrontation that followed. It’s not that I view myself as dueling with some Pharaoh-like figure, but that I view myself as an instrument made by God for purposes that leave me feeling utterly inadequate yet with a continued calling for me to trust him. It had once again become a faith-producing book.

What I noticed as I continued to read was that the distinction between Moses and Pharaoh in the text was not so much their belief that God exists—Pharaoh was soon asking Moses to pray to the LORD on his behalf!—but in whether they entrusted themselves to God as to the one true God. For Pharaoh the LORD was just a new god who needed to be added to the pantheon of gods he already tried to placate and manipulate. For Moses the LORD is the God who hears, who speaks, and who knows: the only true God.  Moses, despite his doubts, entrusted himself to the LORD in a growing commitment. And by the end of the narrative the LORD had brought judgment on “all the Gods of Egypt” so that there was no doubt about who is really in charge of the universe. [12:12]

Readers will notice that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened—sometimes by God and sometimes by his own doing—so that it might sound as if he was simply a victim of God’s arbitrary rule. But that misses the point of all Genesis and Exodus (and the rest of the Bible) that human conduct, whether good or evil, is always heart-based: our hearts are free either to love God or to hate him. Some hold fast to Adam’s relative autonomy—of trying to negotiate a treaty with God while still holding on to a godlike independence in whatever space that can be carved out for self—while others repent and return to the reality that the LORD alone is God! 

So God started working in Exodus 2 with two men who lacked faith. As the events unfolded Moses responded hesitantly at first, yet with a tender heart; and Pharaoh tried to fend off God’s advances with less and less success. God simply created more and more circumstances that called for responses of faith. Or—to return to our starting point—either to a response of faith or to a response of arrogant opposition.

By the end of chapter 12 I found myself worshipping God. I don’t know how he might use me in my longings for Rwanda (and for the United States and more) to know his love, but I know this much: he made me as I am and I need both to trust him and to entrust my life to him. He can do whatever he wants with me and with others. I trust him wholeheartedly because “he knows” me and all our current realities. Praise God!

This is a new iteration of a story I’ve used in talks and in earlier informal compositions.

The Bible will strike most objective readers as odd, very odd.  Why?  Because it has so much gross content: sin, arrogance, murder, incompetence, hatred, brazen betrayals, and much more.  The startled reader who takes up the book without having a prior faith commitment is likely to ask, “Is this the best God can offer us as his own ‘Word’?”

It’s a fair question, given that evil erupts in just the third chapter of the whole and is finally resolved with just two chapters to spare at the end.  As those who take God to be the ultimate communicator and who treat the Bible as the written venue for his sharing his heart with us, what do we make of this downbeat approach?

The answer comes by reversing a single mistaken expectation that many readers bring to the Bible: the book does not intend to present a godly world.  Instead God let’s sin happen and then traces its outcomes.  In the Bible God lets the blame for sin rest on humans.  He allows sin but does not cause it.  He never perpetrates evil yet we find that in his remarkable mercy he often rescues sinners.  In fact he freely offers mercy and rescue from the beginning to the end—and his own son is the agent of rescue though it costs him his son’s life.

One insight is uniquely important: God confronts evil by letting evil expose itself as evil once and forever.  A better day will come.  In the meantime God allows every heart real freedom—even the freedom to hate him.  Only then are we truly free to love him.  The heart cannot be coerced to love: it is always free either to love or to hate.  The Bible is a story of these two options expressed as human history. 

Let me try to make the point with a parable.

The Strange Cruise

The builder of the greatest of all cruise ships, after the final work of fitting out, turned over command to the captain to begin her inaugural cruise.  The ship was crowded with cheering passengers who lined the railings as the crew threw off the mooring lines.  A harbor pilot was present to guide the great boat out of the harbor—a harbor with only one jagged shoal to avoid—to the open sea and on to the gala cruise.

The propellers stirred up a full wake and the ship began to make good headway when the pilot whispered something to the captain.  He nodded and then, to the amazement of all those on the bridge, ordered “full speed ahead.”  The ship’s heading was directly towards the shoal!  It took only a few minutes—with all protests stifled by the captain’s glare—for the ship to reach the terrible threat.  She shuddered as a massive gash was torn under the waterline, the rocks easily ripping through the double hull.  As the ship plunged forward her many bulkheads were breached one after another until the flooding waters caused her to list heavily.

Most of the startled passengers raced for their cabins, some for security and others to collect precious possessions.  But the damage was too severe for any delays.  The great liner shuddered, rolled suddenly and was fully capsized in just moments.  The harbor was deep enough that those who fled within the boat’s belly were now captives in the interior cabins, kept alive by air pockets and able to see only by means of their dim emergency lights.

Yet within minutes the terror felt by the passengers was replaced by new emotions.  Some wondered if this was some sort of “reality” experiment and began to smile as they looked for hidden cameras.  Others began to search for rooms that were less flooded and, once in place, restacked the furnishings so that the former decks became the new overheads, and vice versa.  Ceiling fans were draped with bedspreads to serve as tables of a sort.  The upside-down quickly became the right-side-up.  The idea that this was a grand game show grew stronger and stronger.  Yet as time passed some crew members appeared telling everyone to move to areas in the hull where rescue divers would be likely to arrive.  But they were not welcomed—“you’re lying!”

Some even formed a Cruise Committee made up of the most confident and imposing proponents of the extreme reality show theory.  Their first act was to round up and imprison crew members who were trying to ensure a fair and proper distribution of salvaged food and drinking water.  As days passed those who had better emergency lights began to offer their cabins as tanning booths—for a price.  Fights also broke out between those with dry rooms and those whose rooms were partly flooded. 

Those who wanted to take over the better rooms depended on the Committee for Security to help them drive out the former occupants—for a price.  Others who already had dry spaces soon realized they needed to guard their cabins by investing in the Security Committee.  Within a week of the capsizing all those who were aligned with the Committee were thriving and a special banquet was planned.  The Committee Director assumed that some of the reality show hidden cameras were certain to be in the Grand Room, so everyone gathered there, pushing aside soggy debris to provide a dance floor on the former ceiling.

As the party was well underway some shouting broke out.  A few crew members who had managed to avoid capture came into the great upside-down hall, accompanied by a man in an orange wetsuit.

“I’ve come from the surface!” he called out.  “We have a set of rescue chambers now attached to the hull ready to get you out of here.  On the surface we have a ship waiting to take you on board.  You’ll be safe if you follow me!”

Those passengers who had not joined the Committee for Security began to cheer, but only for a moment.

“Stop him” the Director thundered.  “He’s lying!  He’s a plant by the crew and he’s just trying to interrupt our cruise adventure!  Only true believers can win the jackpot!”

In just moments the man in orange and his crew member companions were all captured and dragged away.  Then the party resumed. 

But some passengers who believed that the capsizing was real—and not part of a strange reality game—began to look for a rescue capsule.  That group, a small minority, found the capsule and were rescued.  But the others preferred their cruise, even as the air turned toxic, the food and water ran out, and the battery-powered lights died.  So did the passengers.

For those who were rescued a remarkable banquet was held the following noonday in the brilliant sunshine of the beautiful harbor hotel.  It was sponsored by the builder of the capsized cruise ship.  His son had been lost during the rescue efforts, but he still gave himself freely to the survivors, delighted that they were alive and well.