THE SUBLIME TRUTH ( Page 2) |
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| Jesus once compared the rich man’s passage to
heaven to the camel’s passage through the eye of a needle. He
said in another context that you either serve God or mammon (wealth)
- you can’t have two masters. These teachings bring to light
the truth about the first commandment prohibiting idolatry. Paul in
his letter to Galatians says that greed is a form of idolatry. In
today’s context idolatry is not keeping a picture or statue
in a house or temple but serving with all one’s mind, soul and
heart the mammon or wealth. This is not just a rich man’s problem
either. Even poor people are not free from the evil of greed. Irrespective
of what you possess, you must be poor in spirit. The spirit of non-attachment
to material possessions is the key. ‘To be’ is more important
than ‘to have’. People can make money to live but must
not live to make money. We must depend only on God and not on wealth.
The ‘Contemporary English Version’ of the Holy Bible gives
a unique translation of the first part of the Sermon on the Mount.
In place of the old translation of ‘ Blessed are the poor in
spirit’ or the more modern ‘ Happy are those who are spiritually
poor’ this version begins the sermon with the words ‘God
blesses those people who depend only on him’. This version makes
more sense to me. This is applicable to all the verses of the passage
called the beatitudes. When we trust in God and depend on him and
him alone, life becomes much more liveable, much happier and more
serene. |
| Some people feel strongly that they cannot or must
not believe anything that science cannot prove. The unprecedented
progress in science during the early part of the twentieth century
made many people lose their bearings and think that science had answers
for every question. In those days it was fashionable to deny the existence
of God. The idea of creation was substituted by that of evolution.
What is the relevance of a God if we are not created by Him but are
pure products of evolution? But today the situation has changed. After
the giant strides taken by science in the twentieth century, many
have come to realise that science does not have all the answers. In
fact, when we find the answer to one question, ten new questions pop
up to baffle us. Those branches of science that deal with cosmic and
biological evolution cannot explain or even guess as to how or where
it all started. Where did the matter or energy for the big bang come
from? How did the first unicellular organism come into being? Science
has no answers to such questions. These are beyond the scope of science.
At one stage some scientists, just to prove the irrelevance of the
idea of God, tried to argue or convince themselves that the first
unicellular organisms were formed by mere chance, by the chance combination
of certain chemical substances. But then they had no idea of the complexity
of the D.N.A. molecules or of that miraculous “something”
called life – at least not as we have today. But then again
in no science book can you read that God created life or man or the
universe. It is not for the scientist to say if there is God or not.
Even as we do not turn to the Bible or the Vedas to learn about nuclear
physics or computer technology, so too, we do not turn to textbooks
of science to learn about God. |
| There are also those who are scared at the thought
that their faith will be compromised if they accept certain facts
proved or taught by science. I happened to come across many such people
during my long teaching career. Rose Mary was the brightest student
in one of my matric batches in Zambia. She told me that she did not
intend to take Science for university courses. The reason was her
fear that higher studies in science might cause her to lose her faith.
She thought that knowledge of science and faith in God cannot go hand
in hand. On another occasion at the end of a discussion on the Big
Bang and cosmic evolution one student approached me with the question:
“Do you believe all this?” When I answered in the affirmative,
the next question: “Don’t you believe in God?” For
these people the basis of their faith is not God or Christ or truth,
but a few verses from the Bible. They want to believe that the time
lag between the creation of the universe and the creation of the human
being is 144 hours or six days, the seventh day being the day of rest.
But it is a generally accepted fact today that from the creation of
the universe to the creation of man it took something like 15 billion
years. For these people it is not enough to believe that God created
this universe and everything in it, all the living beings and humans.
For them faith means believing that all this was done in six days.
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| What is crucial to their faith is some passage from
the first chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. If we insist
that these verses of the first chapter must be taken literally should
we not take literally the verses of the second chapter as well? If
we do that we will be faced with a sharp contradiction between the
two descriptions of creation. In the first chapter we read that creation
of man came after all other forms of life were created. According
to the second chapter man was created first and all other living beings
were created later. Those who insist on taking every verse of the
Bible literally should have the tough job explaining this contradiction.
What a sensible believer should do is to try and grasp the message
of such passages instead of taking the literal meanings thereof. For
example, let us take these two chapters. The first chapter gives us
the order of creation, life in water first, then on land and finally
man in the image and likeness of God. The message of the second chapter
is that every thing was created for man, that man is the centre of
creation. |
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