It was a passing reference, really. Our pastor mentioned Pascal’s concept of humans caught between two infinities—capable of both greatness and wretchedness—and suddenly I was back in that Messiah College library decades ago.
I can still picture it: late evening, the quiet hum of fluorescent lights, my philosophy and apologetics paper spread across the table. I was supposed to be analyzing Pascal’s Pensées for a grade, but instead found myself encountering ideas that wouldn’t let me go. Ideas about human nature, about the paradox of our condition, about why the gospel is the only message that makes sense of who we really are.
I hadn’t thought about that paper in years. But hearing Pascal’s name in Sunday’s sermon stirred something—a recognition that what I’d wrestled with in that undergraduate assignment had been shaping how I understood the Great Commission all along.
Because if we don’t understand the human condition rightly, we’ll proclaim a gospel that’s either too small or too shallow. And as I think about our work through Concentric Global—equipping leaders for disciple-making movements across 160 countries—Pascal’s insights feel more relevant than ever.
This 17th century French mathematician’s paradoxical view of humanity might be exactly what our global leaders need to grasp as we engage in incarnational ministry in our communities and around the world.
The Thinking Reed
Pascal had this haunting image: humans are like reeds—fragile, easily broken, utterly vulnerable to forces beyond our control. “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature,” he wrote, “but he is a thinking reed.”
I remember reading that line in the library, looking out at students hurrying to class, and feeling the weight of it. Every person I could see was mortal, finite, subject to disease and death. A vapor could destroy us. An accident. A pandemic. Economic collapse. Betrayal.
When I was working with leaders in India, I met Samuel—a pastor whose church had been burned to the ground by extremists. He’d lost everything: the building, his home, his sense of security. As we sat together in Amritsar, I imagined him standing in the rubble as he told me something I’ll never forget: “Mike, I’ve never felt so small. But I’ve also never felt God so near.”
That’s Pascal’s paradox. We’re reeds—fragile, breakable. But we’re thinking reeds. We can comprehend the universe that crushes us. We can reflect on our own condition. We can reach toward infinity even while knowing our limits.
We are caught between two abysses—infinite greatness and infinite wretchedness.
The Mystery of Ourselves
Pascal believed humans possess genuine dignity. We bear God’s image. We can reason, create, love, seek truth. We’re capable of heroic sacrifice, stunning beauty, mathematical precision. We can contemplate eternity.
But we’re also profoundly broken. We’re driven by vanity and self-love. We distract ourselves endlessly—what Pascal called divertissement—the constant busyness and noise we use to avoid facing the deeper questions of our lives. We know what’s right but consistently choose what’s wrong. We long for meaning but settle for trivial pursuits.
Here’s how Pascal put it: “What kind of freak is man! What a novelty he is, how absurd, how chaotic and what a mass of contradictions!”
This isn’t pessimism. It’s honesty. And it explains why secular humanism falls short—it celebrates human potential while ignoring human corruption. It also explains why moralism fails—it demands righteousness from people who can’t produce it.
I think of the leaders we’re equipping through Concentric’s alliance partners—ministry workers in India facing Hindu nationalism, missionaries in closed countries across North Africa, and youth pastors in post-Christian Europe. They’re encountering people who embody this paradox: created for transcendence but mired in sin, capable of profound love yet prone to profound selfishness.
Our greatness proves our wretchedness—because only a noble being could fall so far. And our wretchedness proves our greatness—because we alone can recognize how far we’ve fallen and long to be restored.
Only One Solution
This is where Pascal’s brilliance intersects with the gospel in a way that makes me want to leap and shout.
He argued that Christianity alone explains the human paradox. We’re made in God’s image—that’s our greatness. But we’re fallen—that’s our wretchedness. And only Christ bridges this impossible gap.
Jesus is fully divine, addressing our capacity for greatness. Jesus is fully human, entering into our wretchedness. The incarnation isn’t just God’s rescue plan—it’s God’s confirmation that both our dignity and our depravity are real.
Pascal wrote: “The Christian religion teaches men these two truths: that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him.”
This has massive implications for how we live out the Great Commission.
If we only emphasize human greatness—made in God’s image, capable of transformation, worthy of dignity—we end up with what Christian Smith calls therapeutic moralism. “You’re awesome! Just believe in yourself! God wants to help you reach your potential!” But that doesn’t require the cross. It doesn’t require resurrection. It’s just self-help with religious vocabulary.
If we only emphasize human wretchedness—total depravity, moral inability, worthlessness apart from Christ—we end up with a crushing message that doesn’t honor the image of God—the imago Dei—in people or give them hope that transformation is possible.
The gospel holds both truths in tension: you’re more broken than you ever dared believe, and you’re more loved than you ever dared hope.
The God Who Hides and Reveals
One of Pascal’s most profound insights was about divine hiddenness. He marveled that God reveals himself enough to be found by those who seek, yet remains hidden enough that those who don’t want to find him have excuse. I often pray for God to nudge my lost friends and family to seek Him.
“God wishes to move the will rather than the mind,” Pascal wrote. “Perfect clarity would help the mind and harm the will.”
I’ve seen this play out countless times. When our Concentric leaders gather for training—whether in Izmir, Cape Town, or Cebu—we’re equipping people to enter into messy, complicated cultural contexts where the gospel isn’t immediately obvious or universally welcomed.
God doesn’t overwhelm people with undeniable proof. He leaves room for faith. He provides enough light for those who want to see, enough shadow for those who prefer to ignore Him in the darkness.
This explains why some encounter the same sermon, the same evidence, the same loving community and walk away unchanged, while others are undone by God’s presence. It’s not that God is playing games. It’s that he respects human freedom while making himself available to sincere seekers.
The very desire to seek God is evidence that grace is already at work.
Pascal put it beautifully: “Console yourself, you would not seek me if you had not found me.”
This is not divine distance, but a kind of mercy—God revealing enough to invite love, not compel it.
What This Means for Making Disciples
So how does all this connect to the Great Commission? How does a 17th century philosopher’s view of human nature inform our work equipping leaders for disciple-making movements that multiply?
First, it means we proclaim a gospel big enough for the whole human condition. We don’t minimize sin or maximize human potential apart from grace. We tell the truth: you’re made for glory, but you’re enslaved to corruption. And Christ came to restore what was lost, to make you fully human again.
When I’m coaching a young leader in Latin America who’s trying to reach street kids involved in gangs, we talk about this. Those kids aren’t just “disadvantaged youth who need opportunity.” They’re image-bearers with infinite worth who are also trapped in cycles of violence and sin. The gospel doesn’t patronize them with pity or condemn them with judgment—it offers them Christ, who became human to lift humanity.
Second, it means we approach people with both humility and confidence. Humility because we’re reeds too—broken, prone to self-deception, dependent on grace. “There but by the grace of God go I.”
We’re not superior to those we’re serving; we’re fellow beggars showing other beggars where to find bread.
But also confidence because we carry a message that actually corresponds to reality. We’re not peddling wishful thinking or cultural preferences. We’re announcing that the Creator entered creation, that death has been defeated, that reconciliation is possible. We proclaim the most important news of all time — the only news that transcends time and brings hope to anyone ready to receive it.
Jesus as Israel’s True Representative
Israel’s story is Pascal’s paradox written large. Called to be a kingdom of priests, bearing the dignity of covenant relationship with God—and yet repeatedly drawn toward idolatry, self-interest, and moral failure. Greatness and wretchedness, embodied in a people.
N. T. Wright argues that Jesus saw himself as Israel’s true representative—the one who would embody and fulfill what Israel was always called to be, bearing the full weight of human wretchedness and opening the way to glory through his death and resurrection.
I carry a small coin from the time Jesus was a refugee in Egypt. One side bears the image of Archelaus; the other, a vine heavy with grapes—a symbol of Israel. When Jesus declares, “I am the True Vine,” he is not setting Israel aside, but embodying and fulfilling its calling—becoming the truest expression of what God intended for his covenant people, and through them, for the world.
This is why we continue to pray for the peace of Jerusalem and for God’s redemptive purposes to unfold across the Middle East. God has not abandoned his purposes for his people or for that land. Even now, Jewish and Arab followers of Jesus bear witness to reconciliation in the midst of deep fracture—living between the very infinities Pascal described.
And now he sends us—incarnationally—into our own communities to continue what he started, abiding in the True Vine in humility and gratitude.
Third, it means we’re patient with the process. Pascal argued that we can’t be argued into faith through pure logic alone. The heart has its reasons that reason doesn’t know. Conversion involves the whole person—mind, will, affections.
This has shaped how we train leaders in Concentric. We’re not creating programs that manufacture decisions. We’re equipping people to walk alongside others, entering their questions, their doubts, their cultural contexts, becoming true friends, and trusting the Spirit to do what only the Spirit can do, walking as Jesus walked (1 John 2:6).
Presence Over Presentations
I think of my friend in Indonesia working with Muslim-background believers. The journey to faith is slow, costly, communal. It requires presence, not presentations. It necessitates a lot more conversations over cups of instant Indonesian coffee than my stomach can ingest or my jittery caffeinated hands can support. Relationship, not rhetoric. It’s incarnational disciplemaking—becoming part of the fabric of people’s lives, demonstrating the kingdom, inviting them to taste and see.
Living Between the Infinities
Here’s what I keep coming back to: we’re sent into a world of people who are simultaneously magnificent and miserable. They’re made for eternity but distracted by trivialities. They’re capable of profound love but enslaved to self-interest. They sense their lostness but resist being found.
Just like us.
And the only hope—for them and for us—is the gospel of Jesus Christ, who entered our wretchedness to restore our greatness, who died to give us life, who rose to inaugurate a kingdom that will never end.
When our Concentric leaders gather this year—whether in person or virtually—to strategize about creating disciple making movements, reaching the unreached, equipping emerging leaders, planting churches that plant churches, we need to carry Pascal’s insights with us.
Because if we don’t understand the human paradox, we’ll either despair at human corruption or naively trust in human goodness. We’ll proclaim a gospel that’s too small or too sentimental.
But if we grasp what Pascal saw—that we’re reeds who can think, creatures caught between two infinities, beings who are simultaneously wretched and glorious—then we’ll proclaim the one message powerful enough to address our true condition.
We’ll announce that God so loved this broken, beautiful world that he sent his Son. And now, as the Father sent Jesus, Jesus sends us.
Not because we’re adequate. Not because we’ve arrived. Not because we’re superior to those we serve.
But because grace found us while we were still seeking, transformed us even as fragile reeds, and now sends us into our neighborhoods and communities around the globe to make disciples who will make disciples.
That’s the Great Commission filtered through Pascal’s lens: humble about our weaknesses, confident in Christ’s power, honest about human nature, hopeful because of the gospel.
It’s what I wrote about all those years ago at Messiah College, though I didn’t fully understand it then, and I probably still don’t grasp its infinite depth. The more years I live into this calling, the more I’m aware of my own greatness as an Imago Dei and wretchedness as a fallen, self-deceived sinner who clings to the hope of the cross as my all.
It’s what I’ve witnessed in living color across six continents as God moves through ordinary, broken people to advance his kingdom.
And it’s what I pray for every leader connected to Concentric: that you would embrace both your wretchedness and your calling, knowing that the same God who found you while you were lost now sends you to seek the lost.
Between the infinities of glory and ruin, Christ meets us—and then sends us to a world still living between them.
From that meeting place, we carry his presence into the paradox, bearing witness that the reed can be redeemed, that the broken can become whole, that wretchedness need not have the final word.
Because the One who bridged the infinite gap now bridges it through us.
And take heart—He is with us always, even to the end of the age.
How does this resonate with you? I’d love to hear your thoughts—especially as you engage in the work God has called you to.
Where are you seeing both human wretchedness and human greatness in your context?
