This morning I received a late Christmas present—Cabbigat came to visit us.
Cabbigat is the father of Anita, one of the first believers among the Antipolo Ifugao people living on Luzon in the Philippines.
Anita and my wife, Lou, worked together day after day translating the New Testament for her people. And the truths she found in the Scriptures made a tremendous impact on her life.
And the result of the new life which Anita found in Christ made an equally impressive impact on the lives of her family, relatives and friends. One by one her brother and three sisters also believed in Jesus.
But Cabbigat and his wife, Bugan, still clung to their pagan beliefs. After all, Cabbigat was a shaman. He was responsible for offering animal sacrifices to the Ifugao spirits. Good health, safety and prosperity all depended on these sacrifices. Cabbigat knew these spirits intimately—and they were capricious. Life was fearful. You never knew when one of them would cause sickness, accident or even death.
So Cabbigat continued to make the required sacrifices of chickens, pigs, water buffalo and cattle. Not just once, but again and again. Life was difficult and the thought of death terrifying. It was unthinkable to abandon the way of the spirits.
And yet, there were three powerful, irrefutable truths that Cabbigat was forced to deal with in view of Anita's witness to him. First: If there is only one God who alone is supreme, and if he is the creator and the sustainer of everything, why then should we sacrifice to lesser deities and beings?
Second: If this God is the source of everything, why would He need our feeble sacrifices and offerings? And third: Anita claimed that if Cabbigat and her mother died without believing in Christ, they would never see her again!
Cabbigat pondered these claims. A few nights later he had a dream. In his dream, he saw a suspended cross swinging back and forth in the air. And he heard a voice saying, "Yahhuy ustuh dedan u-unnuden!" ("This is the true way to follow!")
Today as Cabbigat and I visited, he told me about his dream. As he was telling about it, he paused,—profoundly impressed. I could see by the gleam in his eye that he was reliving the entire experience again. Then he said, “When I woke up, I exclaimed, ‘That's it!’ And that's when I believed. Now I no longer fear death because of my faith in Jesus. I can't imagine why some of my friends want to live forever on this earth anyway." (His wife, Bugan, too subsequently believed.)
Then he paused and said musingly, "Perhaps I never would have believed if you hadn't come to translate God's Word for us."
Then it was my turn to sit and muse; "What a neat Christmas present! Thank you, God, for the privilege of hearing Cabbigat's testimony of praise today. And thank you, too, for the privilege of translating your Word for the Ifugao people. Yes, thank you, Father, for giving us your Son to save us—a gift too wonderful for words! (2 Cor. 9:15 NLT)
