Chapter 10
WHAT SHOULD THE PHILIPPINES DO AS A YOUNG NATION?
The band of old nations includes China and Japan, Sweden (about 5,000 years old, the oldest in Europe and perhaps in the world) The Philippines is among the band of young nations. So, as they said, we will need a “lot of sack of rice to eat” before we can measure up to them in terms of maturity, wisdom and power.
We cannot compare ourselves with the U.S. which became a nation in the 18th century. The Philippines became a nation only when A.D. 1900 (or the 20th century) began. In a way, we are 200 years behind the U.S., as a nation – as an organized government. Before that, we were a colony of Spain – slaves.
Is experience and along with it, a long period of time, with its many pains, rises and falls, be needed for us? Is it the only way to attain maturity? Shall it take us not just centuries but millennia to become a matured nation in character?
Fortunately, there is a short-cut! There is shorter path than the time-consuming trial and error experience. And it is the way of the Spirit called Humility – of learning from others and above all, learning from God.
I have a favorite proverb which my younger brother told me. It says, It is wise to learn from our own experience howbeit often very costly. But it is much wiser to learn from other people’s experience because there is no cost except your own humility and willing heart.
We have the classic duel of wisdom between the 3 friends of Lot and the fourth one, who was very young, named Elihu.
The prize of that famous duel was the conversion of Job back to God. As we knew very well, Job lost his faith in an almighty and loving God because of the series of misfortunes that befell him and his family (Job 1-2).
Not to waste our time in the details of their debates and conversations, we knew as well that Job’s three friends failed to restore Job back to his faith in God. Twenty nine long chapters (from chapter 3 to chapter 31) were extensively devoted to Job’s debate with his three wise friends and these friends’ mighty attempts to set Job back to order! But they failed.
Strangely, it was the young Elihu who succeeded to bring Job back to his faith on God – this time a more solid fire-tested faith.
It didn’t take long for Elihu to persuade Job. Only 6 short chapters 32-37. What made Elihu effective?
Not years! Not age!
Let us let Elihu answer it for us. He started his speech to Job and his three friends, “I am young in years, and you are old; that is why I was fearful, not daring to tell you what I know. I thought, ‘Age should speak; advanced years should teach wisdom.’[1]
Is that so? Is it only age or advanced years or experience that gives wisdom?
Elihu corrected himself, “But it is the Spirit of God in a man, the breath of the Almighty, that gives him understanding. It is not only the old who are wise, not only the aged who understand what is right.[2]”
We have another example in David to prove our point. He testified before God, “Oh, how I love Your law! I meditate on it all day long. Your commands make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever with me. I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on your statutes. I have more understanding than the elders [or the ancients of old] for I obey your precepts.”[3]
His son, Solomon, followed David. As a matter of fact, Solomon surpassed all including his father David in all wisdom. For Solomon took a step further than his father, to wit: he collected proverbs and studied them. We have some of them compiled as The Book of Proverbs made part of the Old Testament.
A Proverb is defined as a long experience said in a short sentence. It is often a sad or painful lesson learned from a harsh and costly experience of other individuals, often repeated and reconfirmed by many other people. Hence a proverb is usually a reliable rule or guide to anyone who would like to travel life more safely using the proverb as his guide.
Not content with theory, Solomon applied what he studied and, too bad like us, experimented with violation. For example, he violated God’s warning not to marry foreign women because they would badly influence him, making him dumb instead of wise – Read 1 Kings 11. Solomon was not satisfied with theory and listening, he experimented, both the obedience side and the disobedience side. His autobiography, called the Ecclesiastes (which followed the Book of Proverbs), was his proverbs applied. In chapter 2, he said that he was very careful in his experiments. But when he “denied [himself] nothing [his] eyes desired; [he] refused [himself] no pleasure”[4] and even if he said, “In all this my wisdom stayed with me”[5], he eventually wondered from the wise and correct path. 1 Kings 11 recorded how far Solomon had left the right path and had taken the path of adultery, harlotry, and idolatry – all fatal sins!
That is why, all of you who read Solomon’s autobiography, the Ecclesiastes, should not take the book by bit and pieces and following what he says in one chapter. For it is a running record or chronicle of a life’s total experiment, namely: experiment with the pleasures of life including sin. Solomon took the deadly road of epicurism – or the pursuit of happiness through material things, physical pleasures and leisure. It is opposite to what Jesus Christ taught us, namely: That happiness should be attained through the practice of Divine Love, that is, by loving God above all and your neighbor as yourself, -- by working hard and smartly and becoming productive (as emphasized by the Parable of the Pounds and Talents – Matthew 25 and Luke 19) – and then, by sharing those spiritual and material riches to the poor (Matthew 25:37-40) and not by refusing to share as what the young rich man did (Matthew 19:16-30) – and not by living the epicurean-materialistic-hedonistic philosophy of “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you will die” espoused by the old foolish rich man in the parable in Luke 12:13-21.
I recommend the book of Ecclesiastes as the best autobiography book people of today, most especially the young, should study, keeping in mind the first and the last chapters for these chapters contain the final conclusions of Solomon’s Great Experiment in life with Epicurism (that is, Materialism, Hedonism or Mammonism).
So, for Solomon, it was wise to learn from one’s own experience. But usually it is a costly experiment. A costly one because he included the violation. He did not concentrate or stay with the positive side, that is, obedience. We do not know if Solomon found again God after he lost him (1 Kings 11). The Scriptures or history book does not tell us. Losing God, your Father and Savior, is the biggest loss a being can not afford in his life nor for all eternity. We would rather lose wife, child or friend, rather than our Father. For to lose a wife, we still have a loving Father to help us recover her. And recover her He will for He can! But to lose God, who can help us find Him?
If there is a crucial lesson we can learn from reading the book of Ecclesiastes, it is about not losing God in exchange of mammon or physical riches with its pleasures. That is why the final conclusion of Solomon (did he write this last chapter only after he was bed-ridden due to AIDs, STDs, cancer, whatever? We do not know): “Now all has been heard; here is the [final] conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments…”[6]
He counseled all youth a few paragraph earlier that they should “remember their Creator,” not in their old age, but in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble will appear…before your eyesight grow dim…before your strength left you and you tremble…before the songs of the bird become faint in your ears…before all desire for living is lost and despair and hopelessness prevail… before we go ‘to our eternal home and mourners go about the streets… yes, we are reminded to remember Him before the silver cord is severed or the golden bowl is broken, before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, or the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns unto the earth and the spirit returns to God who gave it, yes, in short, before we die!
That’s the best proverb or lesson we can glean from Solomon’s all-time-great autobiography, the Ecclesiastes! REMEMBER YOUR CREATOR WHILE YOU ARE YOUNG – FEAR HIM AND OBEY HIS COMMANDMENTS. DO NOT SERVE MAMMON IN PLACE OF GOD. MAMMON MUST BE USED TO SERVE GOD. This is what also the Lord Jesus Christ forewarned us in Matthew 6:24 in His famous Sermon of the Mount.
Finally, a proverb is a truth. It speaks of a truth. Actually, it is a confirmation of a truth already revealed by no less than the Great Teacher of all time, Jehovah our Eternal Father, our God.
But as it was with our first parents, Adam and Eve, we preferred the other way, namely: personal experience – of trial and error – of experimentation – of independent probe without God’s participation nor guidance. This is often long and painful and very costly, in terms of blood, sweats, tears and life, and not just in terms of money or physical resources.
This longer path God called The Tree of Knowledge of [Knowing] Good and Evil. We can imagine a tree forming one major path [the trunk] divided into many major sub-paths [branches] and then divided into mini-paths [twigs]. This is what we officially call today as Science with its many branches and sub-branches. As a matter of fact, Science has gone very small, so to speak, to its minutest twig that we now hear words like nano-meters, nano-thermometer, nano-robots, genetic engineering, micro-biology, nutritional immunology, genome, nuclear energy, neuroeconomics, bioinformatics and other micro-sciences which all pertain to the study of microscopic atom and its tiny parts.
Now we cannot step back and abandon Science. We are now at the tip of our curiosity – at the tip of our risky adventurism. We cannot scrap everything as if nothing happened. No. We must instead not tarry from doing the last two steps of the whole process of sciences – that of making the conclusion/s and recommendation/s. In other words, WHAT ARE THE LESSONS? WHAT IS THE PROVERB? THE PRINCIPLE? THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WHOLE MATTER?
In my case, it is the same with Solomon: REMEMBER YOUR CREATOR WHILE YOU ARE YOUNG or while there is still time left – while it is not too late – FEAR HIM, above all, LOVE HIM ABOVE ALL AND OBEY HIS COMMANDMENTS out of love. DO NOT SERVE MAMMON IN PLACE OF GOD. MAMMON MUST BE USED TO SERVE GOD and fellowmen.
The best example of learning from others, especially from God’s teachings, is the boy Jesus himself. At only age 12, he startled the wisest of Israel with his wisdom. The young Jesus’ example showed to us, that youth is not a disability – that it is not a disadvantage – it is not a hindrance – we can achieve high level of wisdom and maturity as a nation or as a people if we depend on the Spirit of God for wisdom. For as Paul said, to paraphrase: “We can come to know the deep things only God knows but which He prepares to give to His beloved through His Holy Spirit. The Spirit searches all things even the deep things of God – the mysteries – the profound wisdom. For if by our human spirit, we come to know human knowledge, so, by God’s Spirit we can come to comprehend the cosmic and heavenly wisdom of God. In a word, Christ’s mind be in us! We would have Christ intelligence!”[7]
As a young nation, IT IS INDEED FAR WISER AND PROFITABLE FOR US TO SKIP TO PERSONALIZED SCIENCE AND TO HASTEN TO NOW LET OUR FELLOW NATIONS’ STINT WITH SCIENCE DIRECTLY TELL US THE LESSON, THE PROVERD AND THE CONCLUSION!
Instead of “experiencing it ourselves first and then, to learn”, let us make use of the empirical data, voluminous findings, and above all, the deaths of our fellowmen as the more-than-enough materials to lead us to conclusion – to teach us wisdom.
Though it is wise to learn from our own experience, and that we will not fail to do with whatever past and remaining time we may have, but we will do better if we limit or even halt our experiments in violations, simply learn the lessons of disobedience from our fellows, thus avoid the painful consequences and thus save much of our time and life to concentrate and spend more time experimenting-experiencing the positive side, when it concerns the action, namely: to focus on obedience.
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America has many faults and inadequacies still. Being the leader of the world, she is accused of favoring her own people at the cost of the others. She is accused of sucking the wealth and resources of other nations in order to give luxury and a life of paradise to her people. Someone wrote a book that for America, that is, the U.S.A., to let each one of her families live in affluence, some two poor families elsewhere in the world affected by her systems are forced to go hungry every day!
But that is now at the international level – nation-to-nation aspect. The Philippines is not better, therefore, we cannot go on accusing America, because we have not even attained the state of equality or egalitarian democracy in our own country among ourselves!
That is why when Valenzuela strong man Chavez and others accused the U.S.A. for the present poor state of the world, Americans retorted, “Do not assign on us your own ineptness and failure to provide well for your own people. Do not hide your own incompetence and evade from you own accountability by focusing the blame on us.”
That is point for America. We share the blame for our own miseries. I want to believe, much of the blame. Although I also know that America has done many things that have contributed to worsen our poverty. This is not the right place to discuss them. It is enough to state that America has to admit her own responsibility and we, too, have to admit our own faults.
Seen in retrospect, the Filipinos are very immature still. But shall we also shed much blood in order to attain the same state of maturity? China did not reach its present progress without decades of civil war – brother against brother in the wars of the Communists (Leftists) versus the Democrats (Rightists). Same with Korea and Vietnam which were divided into Left (Communism) and Right (Democracy).
Shall we?
Is bloodshed the only way to learn and reach higher level of maturity? Or is there other way?
Yes, there is another way – the way that Elihu in the Book of Jobs described as “learning by the aid of the Spirit of God” – the way of sympathy – the spiritual skill of fellow feeling – which does not require one to experience it in life painfully before learning it. Someone expresses this kind of learning in contrast to actual experience in this way: “It is wise to learn from one’s own experience, howbeit it is often very costly to the person; but it is much wiser to learn from other people’s or nations’ experiences because it does not cost anything for the person save one’s humble mind and willing heart.”
Note the words “wise” to mean “good”, and “wiser” to mean “better”.
That is the way of humility. But how can we possess or progress or improve our humility if we fan the flame of pride through cockfighting, boxing, and other types of proud competitions? Love for God, sympathy for the poor, love for the neighbor and love for self – these must consist our motivation, not pride should form the reason of our actions.
So the nation has to answer that question to Jesus Christ who taught humility as His greatest quality. “Learn from Me –Meekness and Humility. For I am meek and humble. And then, you will find rest.”
Rest from quarrels. Rest from war. Rest from revenge. Rest from suits. Rest from anger. Rest from hatred. Rest from worry. Rest from fear. Rest from all troubles.
It means peace – inner peace. Happiness. It means progress because cooperation and unity will be attained.
I think that is the way! The course of action we should better take. And I think Christ says “Amen!” to that!
The Government will do better to do that!
In this retrospect, meekness or gentleness or humility is not weakness as most people falsely believe that meekness is weakness. It is not. For by meekness, humility and gentleness, wars are prevented. So, how can that be weakness if meekness accomplishes what strong armies could not?
Behold, it is only the proud who says, “Meekness is weakness” to invalidate Christ!
But the time is coming when HUMILITY, GENTLENESS AND MEEKNESS WILL SHINE. It comes in a time when the opposite pride and arrogance and vanity will have turned this world into crimson rivers and then into gray ashes!
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