Top Ten Navigating By Faith Articles in 2017

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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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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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Distinctions Make All the Difference

Key distinctions between religions come into greatest focus as we celebrate Christmas, which is the recognition and acknowledgement of the birth of the Christ child.

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Photo courtesy of Tyler Drendel

Ravi Zacharias has spoken to orthodox theological scholars of Islam and orthodox theological scholars of Christianity around the world. He speaks from experience when he says that those orthodox scholars who know the sacred texts do not say that the God of the Quran and the God of the Bible are the same deity. Pluralism is a positive and important cultural value, and we can value pluralism without sacrificing distinctions or truth.

We don’t embrace the beliefs of “Flat-earthers” in the name of pluralism. They are free to believe what they want to believe, but we shouldn’t let the flat earth position affect how we do science or how we view the world because of pluralism. An appreciation and respect for different cultures and ways of viewing and living in the world should not dictate an embrace of positions that are inherently contradictory with each other or compel us to abandon reason or truth.

In the clamor and noise of the connected world in which we live, we are tempted to minimize or ignore differences. We often only see a rudimentary and distorted view of things, and we are apt, therefore, to come to incomplete and inaccurate conclusions without a nuanced understanding of those things. We might be tempted to think that all major world religions are fundamentally geared in the same direction, being merely different approaches to the same end. We might be tempted to think that Christianity is a very politically orientated and conservative, western worldview that is arbitrarily exclusive and, therefore, elitist.

Ravi Zacharias grew up Hindu in a world in which Buddhism, Islam, and other religions were more prevalent than Christianity. His background lends some credibility to his observation that no religion offers redemption like Christianity does. Other world religions offer a way of attainment that must be earned. Christianity is unique in this respect in its view of God and our relation to God, and Christianity is uniquely accessible to all people in all places to the same extent.

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Our Transcendent Hope

Llife is short and tenuous. Whether we live to be a hundred or 80 or only 8, life will end. What, then, is our hope?

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A very close friend of mine was expressing concern about the state of the world recently. He expressed concern about Donald Trump the Korean dictator, like a bully provokes a mass murderer. I was not prepared for such an existential discussion, and I did not respond very well.

I recognize, though, the the concerns are real. I was haunted by the specter of nuclear war as a child growing up in the 60’s and 70’s. I even bought a poster of a mushroom cloud to hang on my wall, not because I wanted the world to end in a ball of fire, but because it was a reality I couldn’t ignore.

But we do learn to ignore realities like that. I no longer have a poster of a mushroom cloud, and the threat of nuclear war no longer looms in my psyche like it did in my teenage years. Though it is no less likely to happen. (Maybe even more likely now!)

Maybe we lose our angst over these things because they are hard to live with them. We learn to push them back into the recesses of our consciousness. We displace the angst with busyness, entertainment and other distractions.

The fact is that life is short and tenuous. Whether we live to be a hundred or 80 or only 8, life will end. This is a harsh, but true, reality, though I’m afraid it isn’t very helpful “advice” for someone who is laboring under the burden of the weight of the world. I wish I had said something different (or, at least, more).

I firmly believe this world is not all there is. We thirst, and water exists to quench our thirst. We hunger, and food exists to sate our hunger. It makes sense that, if we yearn for something transcendent, something transcendental exists to satisfy our existential longing.

We all seem to “know” this, but the world is so full of a thousand superficial answers to the ultimate existential question that we hardly have any idea what to believe. We might be tempted to seize on the first or closest one or easiest answer, like responding to that Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes mailer declaring you might be the winner. For some people, hope springs eternal.

Others are tempted to abandon any hope of an existential answer. The resign ourselves to the material world, trying to squeeze whatever temporal pleasure and benefits while they can out of this myopic existence.

Is there proof of something transcendent? How can we know? These are serious and heartfelt questions.

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