kent lee's blog & ramble

Imagine that you are a Gentile, such as a Roman or Greek, and put yourself into a first-century pagan mindset. What would you think if you heard of a man who went around healing people? You would probably think that he was a god. What if you heard of a man driving out evil spirits and granting divine forgiveness of people’s sins? You would think he was some kind of god. If you heard of a man raising someone from the dead, you would surely think of him as a god. What if you heard of a man miraculously feeding a crowd, and controlling the weather by commanding a storm to stop? You would think he was a god. Now put that all together - one man doing all those things. He is not just a god -- not just a weather god, a nature deity, or a divine prophet. It soon becomes apparent that he is a divine being with power over all those things. He has power over nature, over matter, over health and disease, over life, over death. He is not just a god, but something more than that. By the time h...

What does it mean to you that Jesus was a man? We hear a lot about him being God (and later blog posts in this series will address that), but we don’t hear as much about his human side. Luke emphasizes this aspect of Jesus, and it’s important for understanding how we relate to him.     He grew up in the small farm village of Nazareth, which means that he lived doing hard work and manual labor for the first thirty years of his life before he became an itinerant rabbi (a travelling teacher and preacher). He may have been a carpenter, though that’s not clear. The word translated ‘carpenter’ in the original Greek New Testament (tektōn) could refer to a carpenter, builder, stonemason, craftsman, or other occupation. He nonetheless would have worked like others around him - not an easy life. And growing up in a farm village, he would have been acquainted with farm work, too. He was in a low socioeconomic class, like the majority of people in Palestine in his day, and would...

Imagine living as a Jewish person in the province of Judea around the time of Jesus. Not only do you live under Roman oppression and taxation, but the Romans have carved out the province from the rest of Palestine so that it has few economic centers or resources, making the area fairly poor. On top of that, the corrupt provincial governor “King” Herod (and sons) has also oppressed the land as a cruel dictator, and has imposed his own additional taxes to support his life of luxury and his grand building projects. While the Romans venerated their Emperor Augustus as a god-like hero, empire-builder, and peace-maker, the Jewish people would view him less favorably. Luke 2 sets up an implicit contrast between Augustus, in all his power to make life difficult (say, with an inconvenient census), and the Son of God, who is born to a peasant woman and lives among the common people. Furthermore, his birth is announced to shepherds, who were one of the lowest social classes in that time. This ...

Particularly in Luke, we see a Jesus born and raised in the backwaters of insignificant Jewish towns - born in Bethlehem, and growing up in the small farm village of Nazareth. You would think that if God mainly cared for or wanted to influence the powerful and mighty of the world, then Jesus should have been born in Rome, or Athens, or Alexandria, or at least Jerusalem. Instead he is born to a peasant girl named Mary in the middle of nowhere, at a time when the province of Judea suffered under poverty and oppression. Incredibly, her peasant son changed the world. But he never did it by allying himself with the rich and powerful or even seeking them out in order to implement his program. Usually if you want to start an influential movement, even as a grassroots movement, you would still recruit some wealthy donors and celebrities or leaders to promote your movement. Jesus did it totally opposite. He did not even focus on winning over the religious establishment; in fact, he often chall...

Who is Jesus to you? Reflect on that for a minute. Your mind will probably first turn to some standard explanations that you learned in church. But do you really understand what that means very deeply? Is it an understanding that really challenges your spiritual life? Jesus was a very complex character. He is a complex person, and far more complex as God and man in one. We can better know and appreciate him when we pull away from the two-dimensional Sunday school representations of Jesus, and see him as a real person who lived and acted in history with other people. And as a person he is more fascinating and mysterious because this man is also a member of the divine Trinity who walked among us. These concepts have real implications for how we live. This blog is the first in a series that will look at some insights from different parts of the New Testament, by touching on different perspectives of Jesus, especially viewed within the bigger context. The New Testament writers show u...

Warum läßt Gott es zu? Warum erfahren wir Leiden, and warum so viel Unrecht und Leiden in dieser Welt? Das können wir wirklich nicht wissen oder beantworten. Keine Religion, keine Theologie, keine Apologetik, keine philosophische Theorie oder Rahmen ergibt irgendwelche Antwort, die wirklich geht. Keine wirklich passt. Also ich versuche hier nicht, diese Problematik eigentlich zu addressieren. Ich kann nur ein paar kleine Gedanken dazu geben.  Imago Dei Wir sind nach dem Gottesbild erschaffen, im ,,imago Dei" gemacht. Wir denken oft daran, daß das heißt, wir haben Seelen, Bewustsein, moralischen Sinn, eine Fähigkeit für ein Verhältnis mit Gott, und so weiter, und das stimmt natürlich. Aber es gibt noch mehr im uralten Sinne, d.h., in der uralten nahosten Kultur, worin die Erschöpfungsgeschichte in 1. Mose zusammengesetzt wurde. Es heißr auch, daß wir als Vertreter Gottes hier gestellt sind. Als vetreter und Angehöriger Gottes, sollen wir seine Erschöpfung ...

Why was the OT book of Jonah written, and how is it to be understood? An honest reading of the book screams 'hyperbole', as there were so many obviously hyperbolic and metaphorical elements. If we take the Bible seriously, we should respect the genre and intention of the various sections of the OT in their cultural context. The book was clearly never intended as historical, and one need only look to a few good scholarly Jewish references on the book if the literary nature of the book is not apparent. In fact, understanding it as a sort of parable or such makes for a more theologically profound and more powerful interpretation than a simplistic, Sunday-schoolish literal interpretation. Apologetic attempts to defend its "historicity" lead to rather awkward explanations, as well as reliance on an account of a 19th century British sailor who was supposedly swallowed by a whale and lived - which turns out to be a made-up story and an urban legend in evangelical circles. I...