By Manuel Mariano Jr.
Part One
FAITH means the strong belief in God, the existence of a supreme being beyond our mental capacities to comprehend. Being the first cause and the creator of everything, He must be someone who has no beginning and ending.
Human beings attempting to conduct investigation on Him are finding it disastrous and maybe tagged as a “doubting Thomas,”an apostle of Jesus Christ who wanted to see His wounds when He was on the Cross.
I have read the book of Karen Armstrong, History of God, and I found the book lacking in divine inspiration.
Armstrong admitted, “How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean? Did the New Testament really teach the elaborate and highly contradictory doctrine of the Trinity, or was this, like so many other articles of the faith, a fabrication by theologians centuries after the death of Christ in Jerusalem?”
She added, eventually, with regret: “I left the religious life, and once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable Him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about Him, He became too remote to be a reality…. Is modern atheism a similar denial of a God which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?”
Now, let’s investigate, too, what the authors of the bible had to say. There are 66 books in the Christian Bible written by 40 authors in a span of 1,400 years. Were they really inspired by God to write about a history of a God who communicated with His creation?
Moses was the author of the first five books of the Old Testament and tagged as the greatest prophet that ever lived. He talked face to face with God and received from Him the tablets containing the Ten Commandments.
After him, no other prophet met God like he did. That God identified himself as “I am who I am,” the name that He will be known to all generations.
Contrary to Armstrong’s comment that the idea of God in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another, she’s refuting that the God who talked to Abraham is not the same God who talked to Isaac and to Jacob.
Was Moses not credible in his writing of the Pentaeuch telling about the history of God from Creation, the beginning of time, space and matter? How can he possibly invent stories thousands of years before he existed without someone telling him that?
How about the succeeding authors after Moses, like Joshua, Samuel, Daniel and all the prophets who predicted all things to happen in the future? Theologians said, most of their prophesies became true and, thus, considered accurate?
If Armstrong is to be considered a prophetess, is her work, too, inspired by God? Or did Satan authored or inspired her to create other gods to confuse man?
To be concluded
Mariano is a retired Philippine Army brigadier general who served in the field as Infantry and Intelligence officer.