Author: kevingdrendel

I am sixtiesh, an English Literature major in college and an attorney by profession. Faith informs my life, and this blog is about my faith journey.

Of Monuments, Saints Stephen and God, Our King Forever

We build monuments to kings, and even sometimes to martyrs, but only God endures.

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Heroes Square Budapest, Hungary

I recently returned from a trip to Budapest Hungary. Traveling to foreign lands and meeting foreign people expands our horizons and opens us up to new perspectives, and sometimes helps us to understand ourselves better.

I didn’t know much of Hungary before we left, not nearly as much as I know now. We had the intimate advantage of a guided tour by our own daughter who is living there now. She regaled us with some of the rich history that is proudly displayed throughout the sprawling city.

Budapest is a City full of strong, stately buildings and monuments to its past, good and bad.  We have our own monuments to the past that are no less stately, though many centuries more recent, but viewing the unfamiliar Hungarian monuments got me thinking.

Why do we do this? Why do we erect such proud monuments to our past?

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Reflections on Gauging the Light and the Dark

Though we have the greatest intellectual and cognitive faculties of any other creature in the world (that we know), we are limited in our knowledge and ability to understand.

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Depositphotos Image ID: 80301160 Copyright: SergeyNivens

I’ve heard the following Chinese parable a couple of times. It’s on my mind today:

An old farmer who had an old horse for tilling his fields. One day the horse escaped through the fence. When the farmer’s neighbors sympathized with the old man over his bad luck, the farmer replied, “Is it bad luck? Good luck? I don’t know?”

A week later the horse returned with a herd of wild horses from the hills. This time the neighbors congratulated the farmer on his good luck. His reply was, “Is it bad luck? Good luck? I don’t know?”

The next day, when the farmer’s son attempted to tame one of the wild horses, he fell off its back and broke his leg. The neighbors came around again and commiserated with the old farmer about his very bad luck, but the farmer’s reaction was, “Is it bad luck? Good luck? I don’t know?”

Some weeks later the army marched into the village and conscripted every able-bodied youth they found there. When they saw the farmer’s son with his broken leg they let him off. Now was that good luck? Or was it bad luck?

We like to jump to conclusions, and we have a tendency to jump to those conclusions pretty quickly. We do this even with ultimate, worldview positions. We have a tendency to want to measure everything by the tools that are convenient and familiar to us, but sometimes we need to be willing to venture off from the light of our comfortable positions into the darkness of unfamiliarity to gain a bigger perspective.

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Top Ten Navigating By Faith Articles in 2017

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Depositphotos Image ID: 57089233 Copyright: seenaad

As I reflect on the past year and look forward to the coming New Year, I am somewhat surprised by the top ten blog articles on this site based on the numbers. Many of the them are articles written in prior years. Only two of the top ten were written in 2017, and those are at the bottom. Six articles were written in 2015. I am not sure what that says about how I am trending as a writer!

For all of the people who have stopped by, read an article or two and for those who responded by a “like”, a comment or a share of what I have written, thank you! I have enjoyed getting to know some of you through your own writing, and I look forward to reading what you have to say in the coming year.

Top Ten Blog Articles of 2017

1.    The Ebla Tablets Confirm Biblical Accounts (2015)
2.    It is Well with My Soul: The Story (2014)
3.    C.S. Lewis on Individualism, Equality and the Church (2015)
4.    The Message in the Earliest Creeds in the New Testament (2015)
5.    The Story of Norma McCorvey (aka Jane Roe) (2015)
6.    Tuning In To God’s Frequency (2016)
7.    What if God is Cruel (2015)
8.    Timing the Walls of Jericho (2017)
9.    Have Christians Lost the Moral High Ground on Immigration? (2017)
10.   My Journey (2015)

Christmas Thoughts: Uriah’s Wife and The Redemption Plan of God

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My Christmas thoughts a year ago were focused on the women in the genealogy that Matthew included in the beginning of his Gospel. Tamar, Rahab and Ruth are all women whose stories foreshadow the ultimate redemption saga of God entered into our story as human being to redeem the world. The grand story of global redemption is what we celebrate at Christmastime, and these women are each instrumental in that global redemption story.

A total of five women are listed in the patriarchal lineage included at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel. The oddity of including women in a patriarchal lineage bears some investigation. Indeed, we find the redemptive theme when we look into it, and, that theme continues with the next woman on the list, but with a twist.

The twist begins with the fact that the next woman isn’t even named. The genealogy in Matthew reads like this:

Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth,
Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.
David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife[i]

Another oddity signals that something is different here. The stories of Tamar and Ruth were stories of kinsman-redeemers, women who sought the shelter and protection of the relatives of their deceased husbands, and, thereby, gave birth to sons who would carry on the line that would eventually lead to Jesus, the Christ (Messiah). The stories of the first three women, including Rahab, are also stories of trust in God that are met by God in His faithfulness.

The story of “Uriah’s wife” is another example of God’s faithfulness, but the human side of the story is one of unfaithfulness. Bathsheba is the mother who had been Uriah’s wife. She isn’t named, perhaps, for the scandalous reason that King David murdered her husband and took advantage of her.

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Sizing Up God

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Depositphotos Image ID: 147545805 Copyright: kamchatka

In ancient times people saw gods in the rocks and trees, idols they made and volcanoes and lightning and thunder. These were gods that were larger than they, but they were accessible. Their gods lived in their environment. Their gods were arbitrary, but they tried to appease them anyway.

Roman and Greek gods were larger than the material world, and they manipulated the material world for their own ends. They controlled volcanoes and earthquakes and lightning and thunder, but they were human-like, even in their imperfections. People could approach them. People could reason with and try to appease them.

Buddhist, Hindu and Eastern gods are not defined by the rocks, trees, lightning and thunder. They do not simply manipulate the material world. They are intimately and intricately part of the material world, and the material world is an extension of them, and the entirety of the material world is all ultimately one and the same in its essence.

Many scientists, like Einstein, who stood in awe of the universe, saw “god” in this way. People can fathom these gods/this god and understand them/it and seek to become one with them/it because these gods are made of the same stuff as people and all of the universe ultimately. These gods cannot be appeased. We can only hope to understand them.

But these gods are too small.

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