They say life is short. How do you want to live life to the fullest? Do you want to live for 969 years like Methuselah, or just a few seconds and die? Why did God allow us to live and die?
There must be a reason. Adam and the first 10 patriarchs in the bible lived for 900 years at the average, but after that, God said men must live on earth only up to 120 years.
Moses did lived that long for the purpose of his mission to bring back God’s people to their land of inheritance he promised to Abraham, otherwise, he should have died in Egypt at 80 years old. All people died except for two men, Enoch and Elijah, who went up to heaven without dying.
As an avid bible reader, my conclusion is that God has a plan and can only be discerned by knowing His timeline from beginning to end.
Fairy tales usually start with a prince charming meeting a beautiful princess, they fell in love with each other, got married and they lived happily ever after.
But in real life, according to the film, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, living happily was just at the beginning of the story. You have to struggle every day to make it happen.
That is the story of Adam and Eve. At the start of their relationship, they lived in a beautiful garden and directly communicated with God. It was a perfect life with no worries at all. The twist of the story came when Satan, the adversary, came into the scene and introduced sin to them. The first couple fell into the trap and the effect was too disastrous.
The entire human race will now have to struggle in life until death.
Now, God laid down His grand plan to save mankind from the clutches of sin. He declared war against Satan, and man became the center of the struggle between good and evil.
He promised that He will send His Son to deal with Satan.
Up to this day, an unseen war is still raging between God and the devil, and the evidence is seen overtly in the day-to-day lives of man.
As a flashback, story starts with Abraham, an Iraqi from the ancient town of Ur who lived sometime in 2166 BC. From his seed a kingdom, the nation of Israel, was created.
From this nation, the seed of the woman would originate the promised Messiah to save mankind from sin. From the bible, the history of Israel as a people and nation is well documented up to this day.
There were so many twists and turns highlighted in a series of diasporas of this people of God from Ur of Chaldea, to Haran in Turkey, to Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and to all of Europe and the world until the end of World War II in 1945. In 1948, after 1,900 years, their diaspora finally ended and settled back into their land of promise. This is the gist of the entire bible from Genesis to Revelation.
What is the relevance of this biblical account to the affairs of man today? As we await the return of Jesus Christ for the final showdown with Satan, man will experience more wars and pestilence worldwide, and this is summarized as the tribulation period.
Satan will hasten his agenda to rise above the stars and sit at the mountain of God as he envisioned at the beginning of time. Obviously, he will never succeed so he will unleash his fiery darts to convert millions of people to his evil scheme and gather many souls to join him in an eternal life of suffering in a lake of burning sulphur.
Spirit beings do not have spiritual death and will live on and on, but man, having both a physical body and a spirit, can die physically but not spiritually. God will dismantle the components of man by returning the dust particle back to dust and judge the spirit to live in eternity with Him in His kingdom in heaven or with Satan in hell.
This is a Judeo-Christian belief, a linear progression of timeline, which is contrary to the oriental religious belief of a circuitous and never-ending cycle of spiritual life, jumping from one form to another.
Was the destructive Supertyphoon Yolanda an act of God or an act of Satan?
The story of Job was a test for man to endure sufferings from Satan’s hands. He was a rich man with beautiful children, but Satan removed all these blessings from him, and said, “naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I will depart.”
But in the end, when he passed the test of sufferings, because he was resilient in his belief in God, his blessings doubled and became more prosperous than before. Indeed, Satan is cunning and deceitful and can twist situations in his favor, and if man is not keen and observant enough to understand his sufferings, he becomes frustrated, lose hope and would even curse God.
Filipinos can learn lessons from Job and his strong faith in God. Let us hope and pray that our present leaders would deliver us from this quagmire of poverty and hunger and awaken the minds of the rich and powerful to share their blessings to those in need.
Our suffering as a nation of 104 million people will eventually end, but our fate is in our hands. Let us not allow the devil to prevail in our country and the world. As Jesus said, according to John 12:47, “For I did not come to judge the world but to save it.”
Mariano is a retired Philippine Army brigadier general who served in the field as Infantry and Intelligence officer.