The Vegan Lifestyle

It is always best to obey God. Whether we believe in God or not, we will always be greatly benefited when we obey his commandments.

God has no need of anything from us. It does not change him a bit whether we obey or not. It does not diminish his power and holiness.

It is obvious that God did not implement his ten commandments for his benefit. It is solely for the benefit of man that God instituted his moral laws. With these, man can attain lasting peace and happiness.

Some people see God as a strict disciplinarian. They do not like the idea of God commanding them not to do this and that. They believe they are free, and nobody should tell them what to do or what not to do.

This is because we consider the ten moral laws as commandments. Exodus 20 verse  1 says “And God spake all these words, saying, …” It is very clear that these are words of God, and “he spake”, and not “he commanded”.

We hate being commanded to do a thing, and we do not obey especially if it is hard for us to do. That is a natural human attitude: we want to be free from duties, and we want easy life.

Let us change our belief about God. He is a God of love and mercy. His loving kindness and tender mercy endure forever. He is a loving Father who always wants the best for his children. He will not surely burden us with commandments that are very hard for us to follow. What kind of father is it that heap heavy burdens on his children? If you cannot do it to your children, how could you expect a very loving and merciful God to do it? Are you more loving and more merciful than our heavenly Father?

When God spoke the words, he enables and empowers us to do them. There is an inherent power in the word of God. When God said “Let there be light…”, light appeared from nowhere at an instant. There was no finding and waiting – it came from his word as he spoke it.

The same power was inherent in his words when he spoke his moral laws to the Israelites at the foot of Mt. Sinai, and that power is still present in his words today. When God said “Thou shalt have no other gods before me…”, he empowers us not to be idolaters. When he said “Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy”, he empowers our mind to remember it always; he gives you the means, time and strength to keep it, and he give you his Holy Spirit to keep it holy. When God said “Thou shalt not kill”, he made us loving and merciful persons and  enables us to forgive not only our neighbors but our enemies as well.

You might not believe in this. But I dare you:  surrender your life to God, believe in his word by faith, and you will see the result. You must believe. To believe is to see.

Let us not talk about spiritual blessings that God showers on us when we believe his words for we do not see them directly until they manifest in physical forms or conditions. Let us speak of good tangible things that God give us whenever we obey his words.

Let us take our body as an example. In the very beginning, God chose the best diet for us: fruits, grains, nut and vegetable. When men started eating flesh meats, their frontal lobes were destroyed and lost their conscience and spirituality. They became more animalistic and started devouring each other. Being unspiritual, they forgot the moral values spoken to them by God, and they wallowed in the quagmire of  sin, and has not been able to get get out from it until now. Their indulgence and intemperance in meat eating brought upon them untold miseries and afflictions from uncurable diseases that are only known in our modern time.

Refusal to keep the sabbath day can weaken our body and endangers it to a host of illnesses and diseases. Latest findings in chronobiology confirms the strong undestructible link between the perfect functioning of the human body with sabbath keeping. Inherent in the human body, that governs the immune system, and the myriads of functions of the organs in the body, is a biological clock that precisely follows a seven-day cycle known as circaseptan. Heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, waking and sleeping cycle, hormonal production, healing processes, and all metabolic processes in the body are governed by this seven-day cycle. When we desynchronize ourselves with this cycle, we bring upon ourselves unbearable maladies.

No wonder, God instituted the seventh day as a day of rest. Some Christians have their sabbath on Sunday. But Sunday is not the seventh day of the week – it is the first day. You are not synchronized with the seven-day cycle when you keep your sabbath on Sundays, and this will tamper with the normal functioning of your immune system, and other metabolic processes in the body.

God promised to bless those who keep the seventh-day sabbath holy. The physical and the material blessing are evidently manifold, much more the spiritual blessings if we can only open our spiritual eyes to see them.

Is Saturday the seventh day? What are the evidences to prove it?

This is a question that has not been fully settled up to now. Not that there is no answer to this question, but because people refused to accept the facts due to biased opinion, or religious bigotry.

Let us set aside the so many verses in the Bible that prove the fact that Saturday is the seventh day. Not all people believe in the Bible, and so we should take the proofs from outside it.

Our first source is history. This is the chronicle of important events that occured in the past. One of that event was the changing of the calendar from Julian to Gregorian. It was done in October 5, 1582 of the Julian calendar. On March 11 of that year, the vernal equinox appeared, and it was 10 days ahead of the actual vernal equinox which usually falls on March 21. The vernal equinox is very important to the whole Christian world – it is the reckoning point in determining the Easter Sunday and the Holy Week in general. Therefore, the pope, Gregory XIII issued a bull to correct the anomaly. A German mathematician and astronomer worked out a solution by modifying the original calculation by an Italian astronomer. On October 5, 1582, which was a Friday, the correction of the Julian calendar was made by removing 10 days from it, thus October 5, 1582 became October 15, 1582. That day started our present day calendar, the Gregorian calendar.

The change did not alter in any way the sequence of the days in a week, nor changed the names of the days of the week. It was purely a subtraction of ten days from the Julian calendar to correct the error and to  synchronize it with the actual solar year. So, Friday of October 5, 1582, was the same Friday of October 15, 1582. It was just a renaming of date, and not of day.

The Julian calendar, named after its proponent started to be used in 45 B.C. From then on up to the time of Christ until October 5, 1582, the seventh day which was the weekly sabbath observed by the Jews was the same and unaltered, and it has remained the same up to this day.

Other irrefutable proofs come from astonomical observatories around the world. Astronomers can pinpoint with precise accuracy important events or days in history by looking at the position of the stars and the galaxies recorded in observatories. And it jibes with the fact in history that the seventh day is really  Saturday and cannot be another day of the week.

Another proof that I will present is quite incredible. This has something to do with the latest discovery in chronobiology of a cycle that governs the life of all plants and animals, including human beings. This is the circaseptan cycle or seven-day cycle that happens every seven days. Its is indeed very incredible that blood pressure, heart beat, and other processes in the body follow a cycle of 7 days. These bilological parameters either peak or wean according to this cycle. And it was found out that most of the human processes become well stabilized or well  rested during the seventh day. Is it a mere coincidence that these biological parameters such as heart beat, and blood pressure should stabilize and synchronize with this  7-day cycle?

Th above discovery could be a proof that we always  suffer the consequence of sin. Trasgressing the fourth commandment to keep the sabbath day holy will indeed tell upon our health. When we work during the sabbath, and try to de-synchronize ourselves with the seven-day cycle, we create health problems for ourselves and suffer the consequence of sin. And this cycle is unalterable – it is permanent and fix throughout the whole universe. All heavenly bodies follow various cycles that are ultimately founded upon the seven-day cycle.

Is Saturday the seventh day? YES! By history, astronomy, and by the seven-day cycle discovered by chronobiology, Saturday is beyond doubt the seventh day of the week.

Are biorhythms really true?

In the 70’s biorhythm became popular. More big manufacturing companies used them to improve the performance of their workers by charting their physical and mental “highs”. Airline companies used them to avoid plane crashes by grounding their pilots who are “low” on their biorhythm scales.

Some people do not believe in biorhythm. To them, it’s sheer nonsense, and if ever it does come true, it’s just pure coincidence.

Coincidence or truth, the fact remains that more people believe in biorhythm. Psychologists and psychiatrists endorse it, and more business companies are using it.

More people have not known what biorhythm is. Some have not even come across that word. Others have known it but are silent for fear of being taunted as ignorant or superstitious.

I am a believer of almost everything — events, conditions — for the simple reason that they do exist. Even superstitious beliefs become true when you believe it. And biorhythm is not superstition or quackery. We do have a biological clock inherent in us that governs all our body functions. Modern science call it chronobiology.

I had a bad experience that could be related to the “high” and “low” of my biorhythm. I began to notice it when I was in 3rd grade. My father had just died on July 23 of that year. My mother could not afford to send us to school, so I was not able to enroll. My uncle, my father’s brother, enrolled me eventually, but it was in August already — two months late from the start of classes.

I can still remember how I was embarrassed one afternoon on the 3rd week of August during our Arithmetic class. My teacher asked me a question and I could not answer it. Instead I rubbed my nose, and when the teacher asked another question, I rubbed my nose again. All my classmates laughed and I was so embarrassed and ashamed standing uncomfortably that I was more unable to answer my teacher’s questions.

Not that I didn’t know the answers. The previous April that year, I was awarded First Honors in our class. I declaimed the whole 14 stanzas of Dr. Jose Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adios” translated in Visayan dialect during our closing exercises that April, and the old folks wondered how a lad like me memorized and declaimed it completely without errors.

I was wondering then why it happened. Now I know that it was simply a “low” in my biorhythm. And ever since I’ve learned about biorhythm, I noticed the precise regularity of my “ups” and “downs” in life. and all months of August bring me mental blocks, depressions, illnesses, accidents, failures, etc. It seems all three phases of my biorhythm — physical, intellectual, and emotional — converge at the lowest point in the bio rhythmic scale during the second and third week of August.