SALVINO R. GALEA S.J., Founder YCW in India

Obituary

FR. SALVINO  R.  GALEA, S.J.

Founder of the  “Young Christians Workers”  in India

A native of Malta, Fr. Salvino Galea came to Bengal as a scholastic in the late ‘30’s, making his solemn profession as a Jesuit in the chapel of St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, on 2 February 1948, with the desire “to serve the Lord alone and the Church, His spouse, under the Roman Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ on earth” (Pope Paul III, A.D. 1540). Among the many factors that contributed to his priestly vocation was the active part he played as a young lad of 16 in the dispute between the Catholic Church in Malta and the Constitutional Party. Naturally, young Salvino came out strongly for the Church. An interesting incident took place in the Cafè Internazionale in Valletta, where he met with lawyers and older people who supported the Pope against the Constitutional Party. Three Hungarian barmaids happened to enter the Coffee House, and the conversation of the others turned from the Pope to the barmaids, that was quite disedifying. The young Salvino was shocked. “I started hearing comment that were not edifying. I had the courage to stand up, turn towards them and asked them whether this was the sincerity of their religious sentiments.” He went home and removed the badge of the political party, and while doing so, heard a voice speaking in his mind: “The Church can only rely on those who love the Church above all else.” Many years later, Archbishop Mercieca of Malta would declare, “That man (Galea) loves the Church.”  That was the love he brought to Calcutta and instilled into the hearts of the Young Christian Workers (Y.C.W.).

 When in 1946 the Superior General of the Jesuits issued a letter to the whole order on the  necessity of the social apostolate, a strange intuition told Fr. Galea that he would be assigned that work. Sure enough, he received a mandate to be Promoter of the Social Apostolate in Calcutta.  The problems of young wage earners  -   the exposure and shock of working life after the comparative security of home and school, the working conditions in offices and factories, the situation of injustice and exploitation  -  touched a raw nerve in young Fr. Galea. He felt the need to contact and group together the young workers, listen to the hard facts they brought from their work places and neighbourhoods, and help them to judge the facts in the light of Gospel values. He originally called his organisation “The Social Guild”, but on hearing of the Y.C.W. in Belgium, begun by Canon Joseph Cardijn, and realising that the two movements used the same methods, he switch over to the international Cardijn model. Thus was born the “Young Christian Workers” of India.

It was not merely a matter of  rallies and slogans, though these were in place when required. Rather, the achieving of lay leadership in the world of wage earners demanded serious study of the Gospel in the environment of work, acts of self-sacrifice, indoctrination into the Church’s social teachings, reporting and judgement of “facts of the week”, humanisation of the neighbourhood, daily public evening Rosary, and call to prayer. Canon Cardijn’s triad of “See - Judge - Act” was always handy, leading to campaigns of social awareness, of cleanliness in the areas,  the successful launching of “Ladies Only” trams and buses, pasting Easter and Christmas posters (“The workers of the world welcome Christ the Worker”) and monthly recollections. If anyone succeeded to form lay leaders in the working environment, it was Fr. Galea. He also made it compulsory for Y.C.W. leaders to work at least once a week in the newly established “Nirmal Hriday” Home for the Dying. Those were the days when the young Mother Teresa was struggling to consolidate her work in Calcutta. Fr. Salvino Galea was strong in his convictions, powerfully expressive of his views, gentle in his dealings with fellow humans, and persuasive of the needs of the young workers’ movement. Through all the words and actions there radiated a childlike and loving heart. Many senior men and women lay leaders in Calcutta and abroad draw inspiration from his training still today, and they remember him all their life. Good Fr. Galea’s personal influence was  the occasion of generous response to the call of the priesthood and religious life in the case of at least eight Y.C.W. members. From the Y.C.W. flowed naturally the Y.C.S. and L.T.S., the two movements for students, that use the same method. So much more good could have come out of his work were it not cut short by ill health and certain elements of opposition. He was compelled to leave India and return to Malta. No one can forget how he kissed goodbye the Y.C.W. flag as his train steamed out of Howrah station. Thereafter he made a brief appearance in India on a lecture tour of the seminaries.

Back in his country, he was as involved as ever in youth ministry, preaching retreats, talking on social issues, and serving as confessor in Rome. And though his heart was intent on returning to India, he very sadly never made it; all those promises of a resident permit proved false. Advancing age slowed the pace. Diabetes was taking its toll;  the left leg was lost to it in November 1998, and other complications set in. His final months were spent in the Home for the Elderly Clergy, where, together with other priests and religious, he was well taken care of. The end came sweetly on 3rd. July ‘99. He died as gently as he had lived, his memory enshrined in the hearts of all who knew him.

May he rest in the Lord whom he had loved all his life.

CHRISTIAN MISSION

CHRISTIAN MISSION

                                                                                                            

“...but you will receive the power of the Holy Spirit which will come upon you, and then you will be my witnesses not only in Jerusalem but throughout Judaea and Samaria, and indeed to earth’s remotest end” (Acts 1, 18).

THE ORIGINAL MISSIONARY

            Mission begins with God, the God of divine exodus, who leaves his home and writes his mystery into the history of his people. He loves enough to extend himself in a total self-communication. “God is so incredibly in love with his creation that he personally invests himself in it” (Meister Eckhart). He could hardly wait for that day when man would suddenly awaken to the fact of God abroad as man, totally involved in a history and culture, member of a working class family, citizen of a nation oppressed; a God immersed in a world of births and deaths, with its experience of childhood, adolescence and adulthood, illness, insecurity and torture, of unemployment, work and leisure. And all with this purpose, that by the transfusion of the divine all ages and conditions of human living would be transformed, transfigured and elevated.

            In the Word made flesh, not only Spirit speaks to spirit, but Flesh speaks to flesh. Our flesh has ceased to be an obstacle; it has become a means and a mediation. It has ceased being a veil to become a perception. The Son of God did not come wearing his humanness like an overcoat, but rather brought the essence of being human to its capacity of revealing what God is like, The body of Christ is not clothed in idyllic silence, since the Incarnation means what it has always meant: something messy, noisy, smelly, bloody and painful. By becoming human, “God was writing his autobiography in the language of real flesh and blood” (Dorothy Sayers). In fact, he was in the person of Christ pulling and struggling with humanity in first-century Palestine and ever since, with his shoulder to the wheel of the human predicament, truly the Word made flesh, a force let loose in the world for man’s transformation. To believe this is good news, not only for modern man but for all humankind for all time.  A religion that constantly seeks the miraculous, the exotic, the other-worldly and  the defeat of nature, cannot help us to come to terms with our humanity, with the tasks of home and factory, of politics, school and church. Such a religion blinds us to the Risen One in the rising of the bread in the oven and the budding spring flower in the soil. Thus the full force of the tension between faith and hope are brought to bear on the world, thereby expressing itself, not by a flight from the world, but by a definite commitment to it. This is perfectly continuous with the Easter appearances of Jesus, which are quite clearly phenomena of mission. (“Go and tell.....”  “Go out into the whole world...”) Easter proclaims and promises the exodus from the world of sin and misery to one of “justice, peace, and the joy that is given by the Holy Spirit” (Rom 4, 17). It is the summons to transform the world, not fly or contemn it.

CHRIST CENTRED MISSIONARY

            All those who are centred on Jesus Christ must partake of his involvement or mission. And they will find God in the most unlikely places and human situations: in the hungry and naked, sick, criminal and oppressed.

            The secret of Jesus’ infallible insight and unshakeable conviction was his unfailing experience of solidarity with God, which revealed itself as an experience of solidarity with man and nature. This made him a uniquely liberated man, uniquely courageous, fearless, independent, truthful and hopeful. Why would anyone want to arrest, try and destroy him ? They found him too dynamic to be safe, too “missionary” to be pinned down ! He spoke about a power that they never understood: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; then you are to be my witnesses.” He could say that precisely because he had received that power already and increases it continuously by sharing it generously with anyone who is willing to witness to him even to the shedding of his blood, as he did. Those who enter this power by baptism are willing to be equipped for the mission of Christ. They are also willing to reassess their methods in terms of the personal, social and political spheres of human living today. Seminars on evangelisation are continuous with the ongoing conversion demanded by God speaking through the prophets.

PEOPLE CENTRED MISSIONARY

            Groups of people vary in size, location, character and the extent to which they welcome the faith or oppose it. But what they all have in common is the presence of the missionary among them, with the why and what he is trying to do. We find ourselves serving people  whose backgrounds and concerns vary enormously, yet  wonder whether the needs of human beings, as distinct from their temporal preoccupation, ever really change. Surely today, as in the past, human beings are in search of the transcendent, want to be affirmed, need self-understanding, yearn to discover meaning in life, require healing and reconciliation. In the best of worlds, people hinder and hurt one another. So there is the presence of the evangeliser.

            Mission and witness derive from a life that takes baptism seriously. Baptism introduced us into the  life of faith that we treasure above all other goods. We love our faith and love our fellow humans. What better way of expressing our love for them than by giving them our most precious possession, the Christian faith ? It is love that makes for missionary zeal. Bereft of every other talent, this one talent  no one can claim he or she does not have. The missionary heart of Jesus was set on his Father and his kingdom. Being one of us, knowing our pains and joys, Jesus reveals our deepest possibilities. Christ did not exhaust the potentialities of human nature, taken discretely. This would have been impossible in one historical lifetime. For instance, he was not a great painter or philosopher or statesman or a great husband, though we must admit he was an excellent teacher, combining in that activity a great amount of true art and poetry. But the point is that Jesus concentrated in himself all the power and energy that human nature is capable of for activating any of the evocations that a man or woman may choose, and he concentrated it to a degree that no one could muster, a degree so high as to make it fit to be used by God. This power was the power of his self-giving love at the service of the Word. Thus, in preference to all other possibilities, Jesus chose the essential and most distinctively human potentiality of all, the one that has the most radical claim on all men and women: self-surrendering love. Jesus was a person who tested life and was tested by it, searching out life’s meaning by listening carefully to what makes life really valuable, and he lived and died trusting that life and death are not bad jokes.

            Our discipleship is not without moral, institutional and political problems. Since we are wounded by sin, our capacity for commitment is limited. Yet, the value of discipleship is that it inspires a vision and provides a context for analysis and choice. A missionary is nothing if he does not personify Christ. Only a missionary who copies Christ faithfully in himself can reproduce his image in others. An apostle’s life is a tale of friendship with the Lord in order to be capable of acquiescing in a “missionary tension” in the martyrial sense of the example of Therese of Lisieux and Francis Xavier. Without this contemplative and apostolic tension of intimate communion with Christ that leads to the foot of the Cross, a missionary cannot proclaim him in a credible way. Witnessing to Christ is not a piece of mimicry, but a challenge to live our human adventure as authentically as he did.

CHILDHOOD AND HARRY POTTER

CHILDHOOD AND HARRY POTTER

The Limpid Years

In his old age, the English composer, Sir Edward Elgar, looked back to his childhood and wrote up some of the musical sketches that he had jotted down at that time. He called his new work “The Wand of Youth”, a sad and nostalgic piece, the opus of a man for whom childhood was “long ago and far away,” a time of innocence, a better time. We’ve all been there. And if we’re honest, something of the child still survives in us, that we can only lose to our great cost. Let the nine persist in the ninety ! In welcoming children (“let the children come to me”) and laying his hands on them, Jesus was conveying a practical parable about recapturing childhood; and his warnings about scandalising the little ones included protecting that beautiful child within us from being reduced to an ugly urchin. The controversy over adult vs. infant baptism was resolved in advance by Jesus’ word to the old night visitor, Nicodemus, “Unless you become like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” Nine days to ninety years, all baptisms are infant baptisms !

Sir Edward Elgar was near to what Jesus meant when he saw childhood as a time of innocence and wonder; that some of the things that adults take for granted are, when seen through children’s eyes, signs and illustrations of the creative love of God: “All things bright and beautiful......the good Lord made them all.” Their sense of wonder sees life as something new, a gift untainted by sin and familiarity. The Christian mystic, Thomas Trahern, described this marvellously by picturing a newly born child reflecting in wonderment on its entry into this world. Children easily have a sense of God and his presence in the world that adults too easily lose. In each one’s own way, the little ones reproduce the stories of obedience to God’s call. For example, the story of the boy Samuel. “Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli.” That story shows us how the open wonderment of childhood needs the experience of age to interpret the marvellous and unexpected. Samuel heard the word of God, but only knew it for what it was after Eli explained what he must do if he heard it again. Children have the capacity for great faith and forgiveness. Many thousands of people, including children, died in the concentration camp in Ravensbrook during World War II. Near to the body of a child a prayer was found. “O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will, but also those of ill-will; but do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us. Remember the fruits we have borne, thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this. And when they come to judgement, let all the fruits which we have borne be their forgiveness.”

Teaching Adults

Not all children display such virtues, and it’s easy to sentimentalise them.

 But at the very least, young children have much to teach adults who have observed their sense of adventure and discovery. When a child chases a butterfly, tries to tie up his shoe lace for the first time, begins to jabber words and sentences that only gradually begin to make sense, adults can be amused and touched. Sometimes, something more happens. Adults can rediscover important things they had forgotten about. A child asks, “Why is that flower red ?”, or, “Why do I have to go to sleep now ?” “Why’s that man got no hair on his head ?” You can just answer that question and leave it at that; or else you can begin to question all the things you had taken for granted; and sometimes, because you’re an adult with an adult’s experience, the questions are more searching. But there is more. Their questions can be devastating: “Why is that child crying ? Where’s her mummy and daddy ?” “Why are those children so thin; and why are they dying ?”

Some of the foolish things we have done we hope they won’t do. In this calamitous world children are often the first to suffer from the violence of adults. Nothing seems so tragic or monstrous when children die with nothing to eat, unless it be those who are brutalised by human sin, cynics before their time, never having known love and hope and peace and justice.

The Period of Childhood

Yet life is more than pain and puzzlement. Besides telling them to be like little children, Jesus told his followers (his “little ones”) that God was their Father, the most reliable and loving of all fathers, and that “all will be well and all manner of thing will be well.” According to Thomas Aquinas, the child is “potentially a person”, with the capacity through appropriate formation to grow in wisdom and virtue. The characteristic of being human is the ability to find meaning through myths and belief systems by which sense is made of the world. The Christian tradition provides what is of value, giving meaning to childhood and family. For example, children bear the image of God, are worthy of respect and dignity, having an uncorrupted and spiritual nature, capable to being virtuous and heroic, ever redeemable, whatever their misdemeanours, and destined for eternal life. Childhood’s meaning in society is represented in rituals, namely, “bar mitzvah”, cubs and scouts/guides with their distinctive roles and practices. Through these transitional rituals a society guarantees the integrity of this period called childhood.

On the other hand, a society for which the education of children is essentially about pressing a child into adult or pseudo-adult roles as fast as possible has lost patience with the commitment to guarantee the integrity of the childhood period. Think of the misshapen phenomenon of “child soldiers” in revolutionary outfits or of movies where children seriously ape adults. When childhood as an icon has been lost, the void is filled with an impoverished substitute, marked by an uncritical view of the child as “consumer” or “mini-adult”, or as a means of cheap labour, or simply as an object to be tolerated. This is a travesty of the distinctive significance of children, of their dignity, destiny and rightful place in the divine scheme of things. Persistence of the travesty and a veto on the rituals and roles proper of them will compel the children to create their own mythical world. In today’s terms, they will do a Harry Potter.

Producing their Potter

The Harry Potter novels of J.K. Rowling are a big hit with the youth of today, and the movie based on the first novel, “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” is the sensation of today. Harry and schoolmates want to escape from the straitjacket of adult discipline and religious conformity. They want their own way to freedom, which includes making use of sorcery and magical animals, which in turn is why certain religious interests have condemned the books. Actually Harry and friends want to save the world, even if they whiptail it upside down. At the denouement Harry has to cross wands with the sinister Lord Voldemort, an arch-wizard bent on global thraldom. It is essentially youthful joie de vivre against the controlling mind of the overbearing adult, white magic against black, good against evil  -  and guess who wins at the end and how.

Heroes without Power

Children have an entirely healthy desire to turn the world around. and this desire is an echo of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Like Jesus, the young Harry Potter rejects totally all worldly power and success -  yet another echo of Jesus’ option to join the sinners in the Jordan, followed by his rejection of religious and political power in the desert, and finally his refusal to use force at Gethsamane. Jesus himself said that his kingdom was not of this world, but the children would be at home in it. Every child not only wants to turn the world upside down, but to save it; and that is why children identify with Harry, with Robin Hood, with Huck Finn in his saving of the slave, Jim, and with George Lucas’ creation, Luke Skywalker. The final scene of the first of the Star War movies gives us an insight to every boy’s desire for recognition as hero and saviour.

Imaginative Redemption

 Somehow for Christian education to touch the boy/girl at the deepest level, our practical theology must place Jesus in that heroic context, offering a meaningful non-soppy heroism to children today, connected to the cosmic milieu in which their minds now operate. The George Lucas stories, the Narnia books, the Potter novels, and the “Lord of the Rings” all vivify the desire of children to live in a world that they can master and mould, escaping from one they patently can’t. That so many also want to escape from Christianity also is a problem that deserves the most careful thought. For instance, they have no time for those whose Christianity is merely nostalgia for a buttoned-up past, or for a Christianity that is largely the intellectual empire of those governed by fear of the present or future, or fear of youthful freedom. The children crave for a story of redemption that will capture their imaginative world, so that when they leave school they are equipped not with stale news best forgotten, but with a life story that is coherent, relevant and vitally central to them. It’s no fault of theirs if they are not, or the Harry Potter storywriter’s; it’s ours.

                                                                                                        

CHRISTMAS STORY: BOWLED OVER

“BOWLED”  OVER !

A  Christmas  Story

            Once upon a time a little boy lived with his parents, poor peasants, in a simple hut in the woods. The parents loved their child, and he returned their love and was a good son to them, young as he was. 

            Also living with the family was the grandfather of the little boy.  He was old and frail and no longer able to work.  He sat all day in his chair, and when he came to table he was so shaky that he could hardly eat, and often made a great deal of mess around his place.  One day his trembling hand caused him to drop and break his platter and spill all the food on the ground.

            The boy’s mother was furious.  She shouted at the poor man, shook him and said that henceforth he would eat all his meals from a wooden bowl as he was not fit to eat from a plate like normal people.

            Ashamed and humiliated, the old man withdrew from the table to a corner, where,  isolated and lonely, he ate only from a wooden bowl like a baby.

            One day the little boy’s parents went out to do some Christmas shopping and on their return noticed their little boy with a knife and a block of wood. Curious, they asked, “What are you doing ?  What are you making  ?”

            “I’m making bowls for you both to eat out of, when you are old, so that no one will shout at you”, he replied in innocent simplicity.

            His parents were bowled over, shocked into a realisation of what they had done. They burst into tears, embraced the old man and drew him back into the family circle, where he lived out his days, cherished and honoured. Every Christmas, the two little unfinished  wooden bowls were placed lovingly under the Christmas tree as a touching reminder of the change of heart.

“For Wisdom opened the months of the dumb and made eloquent the tongues of babes” (Book of Wisdom: 10, 20).

ANGEL POEM

ANGEL POEM

May angels rest beside your door,
May you hear their voices sing.
May you feel their loving care for you,
May you hear their peace bells ring.
May angels always care for you,
And never let you fall,
May they bear you up on angel's wings,
May they keep you standing tall!

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If we have faith, and belief,
that we are in God's care,
then we can believe that the
Lord is with us everywhere.
His angels have been sent
to protect us from any harm,
and to teach us about love,
and keep our spirits calm.
This heavenly love surrounds
each of us every single day,
and today, because you are so very special to me.
I asked the angels to bring
a little more love your way.

---------------------------------

A Little Wisdom

A mirror is only as good
As the reflection in it.
Worry enough to anticipate trouble
But not so much as to bring it about.
Look back to where you have been
For a clue to where you are going.
Melt the icy fingers of fear
With the sunshine of hope.
Step by gentle step,
You can overcome the greatest sorrow.
The sweetest grapes
Are picked from the vineyard of friendship.
Find something you truly believe in,
And everything else will have meaning as well.

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CHRISTIAN LIFE LIKE THE OLYMPICS

 Christian life like the Olympics
The Olympics represent the pinnacle of athleticism, training, and competitiveness, going all the way back to ancient times. The apostle Paul used illustrations from the world of athletics in several of his letters. In three Epistles, he used the image of all-out racing to urge vigorous and lawful pursuit of spiritual growth and service. Four times Paul spoke of his own growth and service in terms of his own such race.

To the gifted but immature believers in Corinth, Paul wrote, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize” (1 Corinthians 9:24). Here, Paul compares the disciplined effort necessary for spiritual growth to an Olympic athlete’s effort to win the prize that awaits only the winner of a race. Growing Christlikeness does not just happen on its own. God certainly “works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13), but the believer must cooperate with God by exerting responsible and serious effort to follow what the Holy Spirit teaches. “Anyone who competes as an athlete does not receive the victor’s crown except by competing according to the rules” (2 Timothy 2:5). For the disciplined believer, the prize is the “upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14, ESV). To what does God call the believer? It is to become like Jesus Christ in heart and lifestyle (Romans 8:28–30).

The true believer demonstrates the reality of God’s work in his heart by enduring all sorts of tests in the development of Christlikeness. The believer is in training, much as an Olympic athlete must train for a race. No pain, no gain. That is why the writer of Hebrews exhorted, “Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (Hebrews 12:1–3). Jesus is portrayed as the finest runner, the One who set the pace, our model and hero in life’s race. Just as a runner in the Olympics must dispense with anything that would hinder his running, we must disentangle ourselves from sin. As a runner in the games must keep his eyes on the finish line, so we must keep our eyes on Christ and His joyful reward.

Some believers in Galatia had lost faith in God’s grace and were returning to a legalistic, performance-based religion. Paul wrote strong words to them: “You were running a good race. Who cut in on you to keep you from obeying the truth? That kind of persuasion does not come from the one who calls you” (Galatians 5:7–8). The true Christian life can be lived only by faith—faith in the pure Word of God and faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. To follow Satan’s deceitful advice to try to earn God’s grace and free gift of salvation is to stumble in our race. Trusting our own works only insults God and does us no good.

Paul wrote with similar urgency to believers in Philippi, “Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.’ Then . . . I will be able to boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor in vain” (Philippians 2:14–16). Paul encouraged the Philippians’ pure faith and likened his own labor on their behalf to running a race. He had invested hard work and deep suffering in teaching them God’s story, and he wanted his exertion to pay off—much like an Olympic athlete deeply desires his sacrifices to result in victory.

Another passage in which Paul uses the metaphor of a race is Galatians 2:1–2. There Paul tells how he had visited Christian leaders in Jerusalem in order to check with them the gospel he preached to the Gentiles. What was his reason for taking such care? “For fear that I was running or had run my race in vain” (NAS). It was vital to Paul that he knew, believed, and taught God’s truth. This was the way that he “ran his race.”

It was in peaceful confidence that Paul approached the end of his life. Anticipating his impending martyrdom in Rome, he wrote to his young protégé, Timothy, “The time for my departure is near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:6–8).

We don’t know if Paul had been an athlete in his younger years. In these references to the Olympic races, he certainly showed deep interest in and understanding of competitive running. He used that understanding of the Olympic races to illustrate the basics of the Christian life.

A runner must train for his race, know the rules, and commit to winning. A believer must endure hardship, exercise absolute and enduring faith in the Word of God, and keep his eyes on the goal. In the power of the cross, the believer grows more and more like the Savior. Despite obstacles, challenges, temptations, and even the threat of death, the Christian continues to run the race Christ has marked out for him.

WHY STUDY THE OLD TESTAMENT?

"Why should we study the Old Testament?"

Answer: There are many reasons to study the Old Testament. For one, the Old Testament lays the foundation for the teachings and events found in the New Testament. The Bible is a progressive revelation. If you skip the first half of any good book and try to finish it, you will have a hard time understanding the characters, the plot, and the ending. In the same way, the New Testament is only completely understood when we see its foundation of the events, characters, laws, sacrificial system, covenants, and promises of the Old Testament. 

If we only had the New Testament, we would come to the Gospels and not know why the Jews were looking for a Messiah (a Savior King). We would not understand why this Messiah was coming (see Isaiah 53), and we would not have been able to identify Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah through the many detailed prophecies that were given concerning Him [e.g., His birth place (Micah 5:2), His manner of death (Psalm 22, especially verses 1, 7–8, 14–18; 69:21), His resurrection (Psalm 16:10), and many more details of His ministry (Isaiah 9:2; 52:3)].

A study of the Old Testament is also important for understanding the Jewish customs mentioned in passing in the New Testament. We would not understand the way the Pharisees had perverted God’s law by adding their own traditions to it, or why Jesus was so upset as He cleansed the temple courtyard, or where Jesus got the words He used in His many replies to adversaries. 

The Old Testament records numerous detailed prophecies that could only have come true if the Bible is God’s Word, not man’s (e.g., Daniel 7 and the following chapters). Daniel’s prophecies give specific details about the rise and fall of nations. These prophecies are so accurate, in fact, that skeptics choose to believe they were written after the fact.

We should study the Old Testament because of the countless lessons it contains for us. By observing the lives of the characters of the Old Testament, we find guidance for our own lives. We are exhorted to trust God no matter what (Daniel 3). We learn to stand firm in our convictions (Daniel 1) and to await the reward of faithfulness (Daniel 6). We learn it is best to confess sin early and sincerely instead of shifting blame (1 Samuel 15). We learn not to toy with sin, because it will find us out (Judges 13—16). We learn that our sin has consequences not only for ourselves but for our loved ones (Genesis 3) and, conversely, that our good behavior has rewards for us and those around us (Exodus 20:5–6).

A study of the Old Testament also helps us understand prophecy. The Old Testament contains many promises that God will yet fulfill for the Jewish nation. The Old Testament reveals such things as the length of the Tribulation, how Christ’s future 1,000-year reign fulfills His promises to the Jews, and how the conclusion of the Bible ties up the loose ends that were unraveled in the beginning of time.

In summary, the Old Testament allows us to learn how to love and serve God, and it reveals more about God’s character. It shows through repeatedly fulfilled prophecy why the Bible is unique among holy books—it alone is able to demonstrate that it is what it claims to be: the inspired Word of God. In short, if you have not yet ventured into the pages of the Old Testament, you are missing much that God has available for you.