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.”

If we had been the victims of such offenses we would know how painful and miserable it is. But we should also remember that there might be times we did these offenses too, and so we must learn to put ourselves in the other persons’ shoes. Even in the direst temptations and severest trials, there can never be an excuse for idolatry, envy, lying, stealing, and murder. We can only live in a truly peaceful world if we have the unity—no matter the differences in our economic backgrounds and intellectual capacities—to live without offense to others, not to take away from them what is rightfully theirs, and with great respect and reverence to the rights, authority, and culture of other people around us.