UNITED WORLD June 5, 2020
Today’s devotional on
the epistle of the apostle Paul to the Galatians, chapter 3, ended on his
reminder that in Christ Jesus, we are all one. And with this unity, we are
heirs of the patriarch Abraham (formerly Abram of Ur, from the empire of
Babylon of the Chaldean people), and heirs of the promise made by GOD to him,
that in him and his descendants, all the earth would be blessed.
The world has never
actually been a united community, except in very rare catastrophic cases like
wars and pandemics. But today we see that although people have been issued a
universal protocol to maintain in order to contain the CoViD-19 pandemic,
culturally we are still divided, especially with the social distancing and the
mask-wearing rules.
A few things that have
brought us unity these days though, are the issue of racism, abuse of those in
authority, and the sometimes brutality of a few of those who are tasked to
enforce and maintain security, defense, law and order. It’s as old as man
itself, but demographically, we see that more than half of the world’s
population belong to the unfavored side—the coloreds, the have-nots, the
prejudiced, the disadvantaged. And maybe the graphic videos we saw on these
cases compounded the sentiments of the downtrodden through the ages and brought
people of different cultures and persuasions together in pitching a call to
stop the systemic oppression we have witnessed and many of us have been
subjected to. Some have even pretentiously joined the bandwagon (like a few
celebrities we know), but they are just as easily called upon and exposed.
In our shores we have
the anti-terror bill, and the militants among us undoubtedly have their
emotions high. But if some news reports in other ASEAN countries the past weeks
were to be believed, if this issue comes to court, I have no doubt the report
that ISIS sympathizers and militants are actively training in their new bases
in Indonesia and the Southern Philippines would be held up as being threats to
national security and therefore, proper justification to the bill.
Unfortunately, it seems our rulers are having difficulties managing information
and intelligence themselves, while actively condemning social and alternative
media, where simple folk like us depend on our appetite to know and understand
what is happening around us and with our relatives and friends from the other
corners of the world.
One thing to note
however is that just like we use eyeglasses to see things better, maybe we
should also use the proper lenses to see the world better, and to know and
understand more deeply what is happening and what we should do. And the best
lenses are the Words of GOD in the Bible. Galatians chapter 3 verse 24 says
that, “The Law (of GOD) was our schoolmaster (our teacher) to bring us unto
Christ, that we might be justified by faith.” And this Law was, in apostle
Paul’s time, the Torah, as summed up in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20)—the
sixth of which says, “Thou shall not kill,”; the eighth, “Thou shall not
steal,”; the ninth, “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbour,”;
the tenth, “Thou shall not covet...anything that belongs to thy neighbour,”;
and the first, “Thou shall have no other gods before Me.”
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