When we reason without faith

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

“BY the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons, he drives out demons.” (Lk 11,15) That was the reaction of some unbelieving Jews when Christ drove out a demon from a possessed person. They did not realize that their reasoning was marked by a contradiction.

Thus, Christ pointed it out to them. “Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid to waste,” he said. “If Satan is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?” To top it all, Christ told them what should have taken place if the demon was driven out.

“If I, then, drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own people drive them out? Therefore, they will be your judges. But if it is by the finger of God that I drive out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.”

It’s when we see, think and reason out with faith that we can discern the will and the powerful ways of God in our life. It’s faith that gives us the whole picture of things, blending well the different aspect of our life—the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, the temporal and the eternal, etc.

And faith means that we always do things—starting with our thoughts and intentions, and then with our words and deeds—with Christ and for Christ. And because of that, we would always be thinking and caring for the others, for everybody and for everything else, because that is what Christ does. Christ has no other business than to love all of us, to sanctify and save us, even all the way to offering his life.

We need to train ourselves to have the very mind and heart of Christ because that is what we are meant for. We need to strongly and widely propagate this truth of our faith about ourselves, helping one another to pursue and achieve that goal as best that we can.

In the gospel cited above, Christ also tells us how to protect ourselves from demonic attacks. And that is simply to be with him always. When our relationship with Christ is not strong, deep and abiding, we open ourselves to the tricks of the devil and to possible demonic possession and even infestation.

To be sure, we are already given all the means for us to be with Christ always. We have the Church, the enlightening doctrine of our faith, the inspiring examples of many saints and holy men and women, starting with Our Lady and St. Joseph. We have the sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist where Christ himself gives us his own self as our Bread of Life.

Given the state of today’s world culture and lifestyle, marked as they are with an overload of data and all sorts of information that tend to displace the indispensable role of faith in our life, we should realize that we have a lot of work to do to correct the dangerous tendencies we are having these days.

Special attention should be given to the young ones and those who in their effort to pursue higher levels of the sciences, arts and technologies, tend to set the faith aside and prefer to be guided only by their own human faculties.

Let’s strengthen our conviction that only with Christ, with faith can we see things properly and reason out properly too.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com