CAN CONFLICTS AND DISPUTES BE TOTALLY

ERADICATED?

By Cyrus E. Ellorin,
Court Annex Mediator for Bukidnon
 Before I begin, permit me to render my due respect to
our Muslim brothers and sisters.

I will be dealing with some of the teachings of the Jesus,

who to our Muslim brothers and sisters, is Isa, a great prophet. I
will also be talking to some laws or commands given by the God
of the old testament of the Bible, who to our Muslim brothers
and sisters is Allah, the great God.
 The proponents and advocates of Alternative
Dispute Resolution (ADR) are looking forward to a
possible paradigm (model that forms basis for something)
shift , I repeat…. paradigm shift in dispute resolution
from Rights based litigation thru the established court
process, to Interest based litigation with the procedure
called mediation.

Are they looking forward for this thing to happen?

….. or , they are dreaming only as a matter of inspiring
them in their efforts and goal of reducing the backlog of
court cases?
 It is hard to expect for something to change if the agent
of the expected change is not based on the hard facts of reality.
It is hard to imagine that the best efforts to develop effective
mediators will lead to the dreamed shift to Interest based
litigation thru mediation. If that is to happen, lawyering will
become a thing of the past.

What causes disputes and conflicts? Someone said that

the three spoilers of one’s life are greed, vice and boredom.
These are fertile grounds for conflicts. Then we have erroneous
value systems. And even when one has the proper values, when
these values buoy that person to feel impeccable (so perfect to
be beyond criticism), he automatically soars to moral or spiritual
ascendancy, and thinks of himself as correct and all others
wrong.
 But the most serious cause of problems in
human relations are values that are wrong,
because they led people to complications
caused by the wrong values.

Why is our country now the only member

of the United Nations which does not have a
divorce law? It used to be us and Cyprus?. . . I
think, some years ago.
 Some years back Korina Sanchez of ABS-CBN
hosted a debate on tv, about divorce. Some of our best
lawyers were on the pro, while leaders of our dominant
Christian church were on the opposite. The lawyers were
devastated.

Our country is vaunted as the only Christian

nation in Asia, with only about 10% non Christians,
mostly Muslims. So the Christian segment of our society
applauded the religious leaders for showing that God
hates divorce, citing verse 16 of chapter 2 of the book of
the minor prophet Malachi of the Holy Bible.
 But examining the Hebrew word that was translated as
“divorce” ,will show that it Is not. The Hebrew word shawlack
which means “to send away” has been mistranslated in some
Bible versions as “divorce”. Most likely, the debating religious
leader sof our dominant Christian church did not know about
that mistranslation in the Bible version they used.

What God, the author of the well known first law on

divorce, actually hates is, . . . the sending away of a wife without
giving her a bill of divorcement that will allow her to be legally
married to another man.

The Hebrew word for divorcement is ker-ee-thooth',

(and not shawlack) From H3772; a cutting (of the matrimonial
bond), that is, divorce: - divorce (-ment).
 “For the LORD, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth
putting away;” (Mal 2:16)
“For I am the LORD, I change not;” (Mal. 3:6)

God hates sending or putting away a wife from her

husband, without being divorced from him, yet that is what is
now happening in our nation who claims to be called by the
name of the Lord, being a Christian nation.

Women in our country continue to be separated from

their husbands without the benefit of divorce because there is
no divorce law. Based on our human law, and God’s law, both
spouses can be easily entangled in an adulterous union with
another mate because they are still technically married to each
other. Are our lawmakers and government swallowed by this
ungodly value of not allowing a divorce law to be enacted in
congress?

Lucifer must be gleefully sneering at us for our being

naïve in believing his deception that “God hates” divorce!
 The unGodly setting about the non-existence
of a divorce law in our country, as well as the
universality of the Christian opposition to
polygamous “one flesh” union allowed by God
are beyond the control of each individual.

But it is not beyond each person to study the

Biblical and historical truths about divorce and
plural patriarchal man-woman “one flesh” union
to free one from the human deceptions attached
to what God does not prohibit.
 Hebrew, the language of God and of His chosen people,
Israel, does not have a word that is equivalent to the word
“marriage” which word began to be used only during the middle
ages when Roman Christianity solely dominated the Christian
world. Man and woman had always been united in a “one flesh”
union by their God provided love for each other, without the
need for any authority to declare them as husband and wife.
They become husband and wife by their own act of loving each
other resulting to their becoming “one flesh” in a copulative act.
Gen_2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his
mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be “one
flesh”.
Matt 1:24 Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the
angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife:

The couple did not go to the temple for the priest to

declare them as husband and wife.

That was how man and woman became husband and

wife since Adam and Eve.
 The law or procedure on divorce authored by God, thru
Moses his servant, is found in chapter 24, verses 1 thru to 4, in
the book of Deuteronomy, the last and fifth book of the Torah,
which to the Jews is their complete Bible containing all the laws
God exclusively gave for their nation as God’s chosen people.

In the Bible, however, in its 66 books that include the

book of Revelation of the New Testament, nowhere can be found
a case of a man divorcing a wife.

King David, who Paul described as the “man after God’s

own heart”. did not divorce his first wife Ahinoam when he
decided to take as wife Abigail , the widow of Nabal, who
refused David food assistance thru his men when King David was
still a vagabond, fleeing from the forces of King Saul. Eventually
the wives of King Saul were taken by King David after the former
died in battle., with God’s approval.
 The only recorded divorce in the Bible is God divorcing
himself from the kingdom of Israel, with a warning to the
kingdom of Judah.

In America and elsewhere, divorce is a necessary step

before another marriage is legally possible, which is not unlike
the custom of the Romans whose men of power and authority in
government and their armed forces, they resort to, when
deciding to get the attractive wife of a subordinate male. The
divorce is automatically effected, without much procedure .
The union of Adam and Eve is not the model of our
monogamy because this couple had not yet fallen to sin when
they became “one flesh” in a copulative act after God gave Eve
to Adam to become his wife.
 The real origin of our monogamy only marriage standard
Is the Roman culture, albeit, embossed with the Edenic ideal, by
Christian teachers and evangelists.
As recorded by Caius Seutonius, the private secretary of
Emperor Hadrian, who had access to the secret archives for the
Ceasars, Julius Ceasar married four successive women, mostly by
divorcing the former wife, with his first divorce before he was
18 years old. He committed seven adulteries with married ladies
of the highest quality including Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt,
and Servilla the mother of Marcus Brutus, to whom he
presented a pearl costing six million sesterces (equal to two
hundred thirty two thousand, one hundred and seven dollars) as
of the time of the writing of this book), and at the same time
seducing her daughter Tertia.*
The only act of unchastity attached to the name
of Julius Ceasar was his sodomy with Nicomedes, the king of
Bithynia. Fornication and adultery were considered as acts of
unchastity only among women, but not among the male
Romans, who practiced it as opportunity comes.*
* The History and Philosophy of Marriage, Boston,1869 by James Campbell
 Thus, Christianity is enmeshed with the monogamy only
marriage standard of Rome, made palatable by the influence of
the teachings of the ministers of the gospel who insist on
monogamy only marriage based on the union of Adam and Eve.

The God who has the power to execute His salvation plan
for humanity which He created in spite of man’s choice against
His will and principles, allowed this monogamy only marriage to
become the Christian standard so that male missionaries and
teachers of the gospel of salvation will only have one wife and
become totally acceptable among Christianized nations who
look on polygamy as barbaric, to be able to preach the gospel of
salvation by faith alone, and not by good works, nor by faith in
addition to good works or vice versa, among them.
 The time, however, has arrived when belief and
acceptance of Jesus as savior may no longer need missionaries
who practice monogamy only.
Thousands, even millions of Muslims who never saw or
heard Christian missionaries are accepting Jesus as savior after
being visited by Jesus himself in their dreams and visions. Their
exact number is unknown with each of them keeping their new
identities only known to a few. God is saving them in the
absence if missionaries whose lives are at risk in their countries.

In ancient times when the nation of Israel was ruled by

God in a Theocracy, it was the men who were recognized by
God to entertain jealousy on their wives.
 In Numbers 5:12-13 God talks about the case of a
suspicious husband who feels jealous. But because the husband
has no way of knowing whether his wife committed infidelity to
him, or not, God provided a procedure as follow:

• Num 5:15 Then shall the man bring his wife unto the
priest, and he shall bring her offering for her, the tenth part of
an ephah of barley meal; he shall pour no oil upon it, nor put
frankincense thereon; for it is an offering of jealousy, an
offering of memorial, bringing iniquity to remembrance.

• Verses 16 to 25, describes what the priest do inside the

temple, foremost of which the wife who is the subject of her
husband’s jealousy is presented to the Lord.
• Num 5:27 And when he hath made her to
drink the water, then it shall come to pass, that, if
she be defiled, and have done trespass against
her husband, that the water that causeth the
curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and
her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and
the woman shall be a curse among her people.

• Num 5:28 And if the woman be not defiled, but

be clean; then she shall be free, and shall
conceive seed.
Here is bad news for some of us.
In God’s government, it is not a joke for wives to become
unfaithful to their husbands. However, God did not provide for
wives to be jealous of their husbands because God did not
prohibit man from having more than one wife. But a woman is
nowhere allowed by God to be under more than one husband.

Now it Is the other way around, with religious leaders

and ministers of the gospel recognizing female jealousy, based
on the human law prohibiting a husband from having more than
one wife.

Human law is on the side of the wife when her husband

decides to love and help a destitute unmarried woman who is
single-handedly supporting her child or children.

This is an illustration of a conflict of values, that is,

between the value set by God versus the value set by man.
 Flavius Josephus, the famous Jewish historian who was
used by the Roman force under Titus for the Jews to surrender,
when their temple was about to be destroyed in AD 70,
referred to the practice of their fathers to have many wives at
the same time, a practice that was stopped by the Roman
Empire in the year 393 CE.

Later,after a series of church councils starting with the

council of Niciea, the Christianity of the Roman Empire
adopted as God’s law on marriage, the legislated Roman Law,
as absorbed from the Greek custom, that a man is limited to
only 1 wife, while at the same time leaving him to have
mistresses.
 As Jesus exactly said in Mat. 13:33, “The kingdom of
heaven (Christianity) is like unto leaven (leaven in Biblical
language is a symbol of sin), which a woman (woman is the
Biblical symbol of church) took, and hid in three measures of
meal, till the whole was leavened.”

The joint anthropological study by Princeton and

Stanford universities* clearly show how this socially imposed
monogamous only marriage in the western Christian civilizations
was instilled in the human consciousness for centuries by the
Christianity of the Roman Empire, - to Christians whose whole
lives were made possible by their partaking 3 measures of meal
a day.
*Walter Scheidel. scheidel@stanford.edu

This is a historical fact that was successfully hidden

from the human mind by Christianity.
 St. Augustine, one notable early church father of Roman
Christianity, has said:

“For by a secret law of nature, things that stand chief love

to be singular, but things that are subject are set under, not only
one under, but, if the system of nature or society allow, even
several under one, not without becoming beauty.
For neither hath one slave so several masters, in the way
that several slaves have one master. Thus we read not that any
of the holy women served two or more living husbands; but
we read that many females served one husband, when the
social state of the nation allowed it, and the purpose of the time
persuaded it: for neither is it contrary to the nature of marriage.
For several females can conceive from one man: but one
female cannot from several men (such is the power of things
principal) as many souls are rightly made subject to one God.”
(As quoted by Tom Shipley in his: MAN AND WOMAN IN BIBLICAL LAW”,
Prepublication Proof readers’ copy, 2004, forefront page.
www.newcovenantpatriarchy.com)
 The Bible is replete with records of the people of God, Israel, with
men having more than 1 wife.

The prophet Samuel who was used by God to anoint David to

become king to replace king Saul, was the only son of Hannah, the favored
one of the two wives of Elkanah.

Jesus, the savior of humanity and our supreme mediator, was born
from the nation of Israel, from the tribe of Judah, the son of Leah, the first of
the four wives of Jacob, who he less favored than his second wife Rachel.

Humanity has so fallen from the standard of God’s righteousness and

principles to the extent that what is unGodly is promoted, while the Godly
values are belittled and labeled as barbaric. That was how the Greeks looked
upon the custom of the Jews to have plural wives at the same time, and that
is how Christianity today looks on that God allowed practice of polygamy.
This is good news!

But the day is coming when Jesus will return to establish

God’ s government on the earth for 1000 years, at which time “loose”
women, that is, without husbands, will be looked upon with reproach (to feel
ashamed. . . (for). . . something wrong -Microsoft® Encarta® 2009).

Isa 4:1 “And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man,
saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be
called by thy name, to take away our reproach. ”

But even before that time comes, the organized power who is
responsible for these wrong values to flourish will be destroyed, so that . . . . .
as prophesied, . . .“the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and
the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in
thee: “
 The belief in “dualism” drove honest minded, but deceived, men to
forsake their wives and society to live a life of solitude rather than stain
their bodies with the pleasure of sex that dualism call evil.

Dualism teaches that while the spiritual or non-material realm was

created by the great God of all gods, the material world was created by a
lesser evil god, and therefore any pleasure derived from the body thru sex is
evil because it is derived from matter, the body, which is evil. The early
fathers of Roman Christianity thus taught that unless sex is done purely for
the purpose of procreation, the same is sin, a teaching that persists today,

We also have our hidden agenda of greed called materialism, and

many more.

Clearly then, for as long as we are soaked with our hidden selfish
motives and our minds are clouded by ungodly values, conflicts will always
be there, for lawyering to flourish.
 We come now to what rabbi Jesus, the supreme mediator of
humanity, brought from heaven : divine principles and truths on how
we can have peace on earth. In his sermon we call the beatitudes,
Jesus said: Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the
children of God.

This is us co-mediators! We are peacemakers as mediators. Our

sure tools to sharpen our effectiveness as mediators are the principles
and truths from heaven that Jesus expounded which are recorded in
the Bible for us to learn.

Then, where are we to begin from the many principles and

teachings of the greatest rabbi of all time, Jesus?
 This is not an evangelistic talk; I know we are Christians
because we believe in Jesus Christ as our savior; but, neither do
I stand, nor represent any Christian group or creed. Moreover, I
can not escape from the fact that if we are interested in knowing
absolute truths, there is no other source of this but the word of
God.

Nicodemus, one of the most learned Jews about Jewish

laws went to see Jesus by night to avoid the embarrassment of
consulting the “unschooled” Jesus.

Nicodemus accepted the fact of Jesus as having came

from God, and he did not have any idea of discrediting him like
the other Pharisees.
 The first instruction from the “unschooled” Jesus was for
Nicodemus to “be born again”. What that means, .. . is for us to read
the words of Jesus. What is clear is that Jesus was talking of heavenly
spiritual things that is a necessity to solve earthly problems like the
disputes and conflicts all of us are engaged to mediate.

Then Nicodemus, whose knowledge about law can possibly

surpass those who hold high positions in our judicial system, was the
first recipient of the greatest message from God to humanity:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting
life. Jn. 3:16
 I believe with all my heart that those words of
Jesus is the single key to solve all our problems,
disputes and conflicts in this wide world which has
been subjected to all forms of wrong value systems.

A wealthy man asked Jesus about the greatest

commandment. If I were to answer that in our setting
now, as a husband, it is Rep. Act 9262 which make it a
serious offense to do “violence” against our wives, even
in words.

I almost went to prison for that. Thanks to my

wife who moved for the dismissal of the case.
 But, back to the answer of Jesus to the inquiring
wealthy man:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself.
(Matt. 22:37-39)
 We can summarize the truths revealed by Jesus
to Nicodemus:

1).Be born again in our mental or spiritual

orientation, whereby, those old orientations of
erroneous values we dearly hold to ourselves, have to
totally die first by replacing it, with a total 2) belief on
Jesus, only, as savior from whom we obtain salvation
that is totally encompassing - not only for our
condemned souls but for the consequences that can
result from those wrong values in us that provide the
arena of conflicts and disputes.
• In short, once those wrong concepts and
values are gone from us, its end results are
gone with it, too. And we become born again
as “new creatures”, to borrow the words of
evangelists.
 But what is the importance of this great
commandment to each of us?

The new creatures that we are, after being born

again, have to totally fill our hearts with genuine love
that can only come from God who is love, for us to love
God with all our heart and with all our soul; and, to
love our neighbor as ourselves.

Our neighbors include our enemies because

Jesus also said “love your enemies”.
 Can we still be in conflict with anybody
when our heart is already filled with love for
God and our neighbor?

Yes, because we are still imperfect as

human beings, but reconciliation can be done
without a mediator. How?

Our great mediator has the answer.

 Jesus’ instruction to one who realizes he did wrong to
somebody is as follow:

Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first
be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.
(Matt. 5:24)

And for those who had been wronged by those who do

not realize it, Jesus’ prayer is for us to follow: “Father, forgive
them; for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

No mediation in these two settings of reconciliation!

 Ladies and gentlemen – my co mediators. What I have
just discussed is a substantive starting part, to fulfill the dream
on how our work of mediation can be successful.

1). By dying in essence with all the ungodly values in us

so that we can be born again by 2).believing the supreme
Mediator, Jesus, and the absolute truths he taught, and by
3). internalizing the greatest commandment: to love God with
all our heart and soul, and, our neighbor as ourselves; for
without God in us, there is nothing good we can do.

The paradigm shift has to start in us.