Originally posted on Navigating by Faith: (c) Can Stock Photo / halfpoint Amazingly, the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew lists five women. In a patriarchal society governed by paternal lineage, that fact should jump out at us and cause us to take notice. What is God saying? What was He doing? How should we view…
Families and Christmas can be messy. The vast majority of us do not live in a Hallmark world. The fact that Christmas season always sees an uptick in the incidence of suicide is testament to the fact that the gap between Holiday cheer and reality can be a big on
But there is hope! Christmas is the remembrance of God stepping into world like a light shining in the darkness.
Last year at this time, I began a series of blogs on the women listed in the genealogical lineage of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. That a total of five women are even listed in his genealogy is kind of mind blowing. Genealogies, especially in the First Century patriarchal world, are dominated by men. What are these women doing there?
It occurs to me that maybe God is saying something particularly important by including five women in the genealogy of Jesus.
For starters, God’s view of women, I believe, has always been higher than patriarchal history gives them credit. After all, God made us, male and female, in His image. Men are only half the image of God if you do the math.
But something else is going on as well. When you dig into the stories of the people in the lineage of Jesus, the Messiah, the Savior, surprises are plentiful. His lineage isn’t particularly saintly. It’s “complicated”.
Jesus came not only as a light in the darkness of the world; he came as a light in the darkness of his own lineage. The story of Tamar is just one such example. She is the first woman listed in that lineage.
Amazingly, the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew lists five women. In a patriarchal society governed by paternal lineage, that fact should jump out at us and cause us to take notice. What is God saying? What was He doing? How should we view that today?
We can gain insights by looking at the women who are listed. The first woman listed is Tamar. Her story is found in Genesis 38, and it is a wild one for people of polite sensibilities.
Tamar was the wife of Judah’s oldest son, Er. Judah was the fourth son of Jacob (son of Isaac, son of Abraham). It might seem odd that Judah, the fourth son, is the one from whom Jesus (the Messiah) descends, but that is only a minor oddity compared to the rest.
“The historian’s test of an individual’s greatness is ‘What did he leave to grow? Did he help men think about new ideas with a vigor that persisted after he was gone?’” H.G. Wells
H.G. Wells, the great English writer considered “the father of science fiction”, was a forward thinker, believing in the progression of man in the vein of the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. He was no friend of orthodox Christianity, nor of any religion. (See Wikipedia) “None of his contemporaries did more to encourage revolt against Christian tenets and accepted codes of behaviour, especially as regards sex….” (See Britannica).
It’s ironic I suppose, then, that I am thinking about Jesus as I read his words.
Wells expressed a hope in his writing “that human society would evolve into higher forms”. He believed from early on in the “doctrine of social progress”. (See Britannica) World War I impacted the idealistic hopes of his youth, but Wells continued to believe that humankind could progress through knowledge and education.
I wonder what Wells would say today?
How much have we progressed?
Wells’s last written work, Mind at the End of its Tether, written at the outbreak of World War II, suggests some further erosion in the hope of his youth. He painted a very bleak picture of the future of mankind in which nature itself rebels against the evils of men.
Would his waning optimism have shriveled altogether if he had lived long enough?
Though H.G. Wells visited with both Lenin and Stalin, he probably didn’t know all the details of the atrocities that Stalin (particularly ) committed. A grim estimate of people killed at Stalin’s direction is 40 million! (See ibtimes)
What would Wells have thought about the progression of mankind if he knew the truth? What if he knew of all the genocides that occurred and would occur in the 20th and 21st centuries alone? (See The worst genocides of the 20th and 21st Centuries)
Should we really measure humankind by their greatness?
What about the goodness of humankind?
An atheist friend of mine challenged me to prove to him that the world is a better place with religion (and Christianity in particular). I don’t recall exactly how I responded to him, but I have thought about his challenge since then.
We can’t deny that bad things have been done by people in the name of religion, including Christianity. I would not deny it. But what of the good?
H.G. Wells poses a question about greatness. My friend poses a question about goodness. What of our goodness?
Originally posted on Navigating by Faith: Copyright: alefbet editorial use onlyArchaeological site, City of David in Jerusalem, Israel on May 9, 2017 This blog article is prompted by a Christmas tax article. Yes, Christmas and income taxes go together. Who would’ve thunk it?! In Luke 2:1, we read that Caesar Augustus sent out a decree…
King David statue outside his tomb in Mount Zion Jerusalem, Israel. The Messiah is a direct descent of King David.
We are counting the days down to Christmas, and this is the time of year I tend to write Christmas-themed pieces. Kind of fitting I guess! The Christmas season is always a great time for reflection of the amazing thing God did when He entered into the history of His own creation and became one of us. It’s a time of great hope and a time to appreciate what God has done for us. In this piece, though, I look back from the birth of Jesus, the seed of Jesse, father of David, to David, remembering the human frailties and predisposition to be led astray, and God’s heart for those who have a heart for Him.
Copyright: alefbet editorial use only Archaeological site, City of David in Jerusalem, Israel on May 9, 2017
This blog article is prompted by a Christmas tax article. Yes, Christmas and income taxes go together. Who would’ve thunk it?!
In Luke 2:1, we read that Caesar Augustus sent out a decree for a census. It turns out the census was declared so that the Caesar could tax people. I didn’t know that before.
That previously unknown fact (unknown to me at least) isn’t what caught my eye or what prompts this article, though. The article is also not about unjust taxes that burden the poor and avoid the rich. This article also isn’t about the controversy over whether Luke is accurate about the census and the timing of it.
What prompts me to write this piece is the reference to a previous census and previous tax and the surprising and shocking…
I was reflecting before God this morning and praying when the following question arose in my head: whether it is more important to believe the historical fact of the biblical stories or to believe the stories themselves.
For whatever reason, the story that occurred to me as I was thinking about this is the story of Lot’s wife. After they left Sodom, a place that was known for its wickedness and sin, a place in which God could not identify even 10 good men, she turned back (against the orders of God’s angels that led them (delivered) them out of Sodom), and she turned into a pillar of salt.
Is there really a pillar of salt somewhere in the vicinity of Sodom where lot’s wife turned back? Does it matter?
As I was thinking about the question, it occurred to me that the story is what matters. Sodom is representative of depravity, wickedness and sin, the nature of the world around us in which we live, the state of a person who has not given himself or herself over in loving submission to the God who made us. God calls us out of that sinful state to follow Him. This is true whether Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt or not.
In the Midrash, Lot’s wife is identified as a Sodomite. Sodom was her hometown. We read in Genesis that Lot was slow to leave when the angels warned him to get out. The Midrash suggests that Lot’s wife didn’t want to leave, and she left only reluctantly. The Hebrew word translated “looked back” implies a “wistful regard”. (See the Pulpit Commentary on Genesis 19:26 in BibleHub)
Looking back was as much an act of the heart (desiring to be back in Sodom) as a physical one. The application to us is that we should not be tempted to look back wistfully on the sinful lives we once lived. It’s like a dog returning to its own vomit. (Proverbs 26:11 and 2 Peter 2:22) Why would we turn back to the sin from which we escaped? And yet we are tempted to do that.
Returning to the point of the question that flitted into my mind this morning, I am reminded that “all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness….” (2 Timothy 3:16) The Scripture is what is useful, not (necessarily) that the stories are true. The critical truth of most stories is contained within the story itself.
I am not necessarily suggesting that the Bible is full of nothing but fanciful stories, religious and fables. (I tend to believe they are mostly, if not wholly, factual.) But, for those who have trouble reconciling the stories with historical fact, this is for you. The quantum of proof necessary to believe a biblical story may seem lacking in some cases, but reconciling historical fact with story isn’t the critical point. The story is the point.
Christmas is a time of reflection for most of us, a time to reflect about the past year and our journey to this “place” that we find ourselves. It’s a time to reflect on God and the amazing introduction of Himself into our history almost 2000 years ago. That is the part of the message in a manger: God emptying Himself of all His privilege and position as Creator of the universe and inserting Himself as a weak, vulnerable child into a humble family in a lowly province of the Roman Empire. this is only the beginning of a Message in a Manger.
God put eternity into the hearts of men said the writer of Ecclesiastes, and Jesus is the answer to that longing that is built into us. We live imperfect, flawed lives, and then we die. The writer of Ecclesiastes says that “all is meaningless.” We came from dust and to dust we return, but when Jesus Christ was born, he introduced the antidote to that condition of sin and death.
The sins and wrongs of fathers and mothers pass down to their sons and daughters and have done so from the beginning. In Jesus, God introduced a new lineage and a new possibility. Born a man, but also born of God, through Jesus comes the answer to the finite frailty that is humankind.
The birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the core of the Gospel. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, all of our hope…
(c) Can Stock Photo / halfpoint
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