By REV. LUNA DINGAYAN
www.nordis.net

“Your word is a lamp to guide me and a light for my path.” — Psalms 119:105

Bible Week Celebration

The designation of the Third Week of January as Bible Week is an attempt to recognize the importance of the Scriptures in our national life. This however should not surprise us since our country is supposed to be a predominantly Christian nation. Perhaps, it would be more surprising if the Scriptures were not given due importance as it should be in a Christian country.

Celebrating Bible Week or mere knowledge of the Scriptures does not a Christian make. For the Scripture to have significant impact, we should allow Biblical values and principles to mold and shape our way of life as a people and as a nation – not only our own individual personal life, but also our social, economic and political life. As the Psalmist says, “Your word is a lamp to guide me and a light for my path” (Psalms 119:105).

For instance, the enduring values of justice, honesty, and mercy – what Jesus Christ our Lord would call the weightier aspects of the law – should be reflected in the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona. Like Jesus Christ our Lord we should look more into the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law.

The Devil Quotes Scriptures

The Bible mirrors life itself. Interestingly, it contains the beautiful as well as the ugly, the good and the bad. Biblical stories are not only about the good things people can do; they are also about evil things people are capable of doing. For instance, we have King David taking the beautiful wife of his own soldier Uriah, or King Solomon having one thousand wives and concubines, or King Ahab grabbing the ancestral land of Naboth, and many others.

The problem with the Scriptures is that people tend to emulate the evil things rather than the good things. And worse still, the Scriptures are often used to justify evil deeds. A popular expression goes that the devil even quotes the Scriptures. Hence, we need to really search the Scriptures and discover what lessons they try top convey to us for the living of our days.

Minority Report

The Bible is a minority report. It is written from the point of view of a persecuted minority, who are struggling to be faithful to their God in the midst of powerful empires that dominated their land and people. The Exodus Event and the Christ Event are the two central events in the Old and New Testaments, respectively. But these two events are not found in the official records of the history of the ancient empires that dominated Israel. They are not included in the majority report.

However, this does not mean that the Exodus and the Christ events did not happen. The testimonies of the persecuted minority were preserved in the Scriptures to teach us two very important lessons in history. First, that genuine history can only be understood more fully from the perspective of the victims rather than the victors of history. And secondly, that the God of history can be found working on the side of the victims of history, but the big question mark would be: Is the church also present where God is at work? # nordis.net