Lesson 1: The Unity of God
[The class begins with a welcome by Father Altier and the recitation of the Our Father. Following this, the course syllabus is distributed to all students}.
If you have the syllabus now, you will see basically what we will be doing. In the middle are the references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church that will correspond to what we are doing. What we will be doing is not taken directly out of the Catechism, so it is looking at things from a little different perspective. It is all the same truth; it is just a question of how it is explained. You will find there will not be anything in here that is different from what is in the Catechism, but the two should complement one another. Those are the paragraph numbers that correspond with the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
As it says there, please note that the sections on the Ten Commandments and Prayer found in the Catechism are not covered directly in class. That is quite unfortunate. However, what you will find is that in order to do any kind of justice to a class on prayer, we need another six weeks. If you are interested in it, there is actually a class I have taught on prayer. It is a set of six classes. [Please see DesertVoice Talks page to access the retreat on Mental Prayer.] The section on the Ten Commandments we cannot cover thoroughly; however,I will be handing out an Examination of Conscience to you when we talk about Confession, and that covers the Ten Commandments. [Please see DesertVoice Links page to access the Examination of Conscience text at Catholic Parents Online.]
There are some suggested reading materials. Again, all of these would be different catechisms that would approach things from a different perspective. Father Hardon’s The Catholic Catechism was probably the thing for orthodox Catholics that kept the faith alive for almost thirty years, because there really was not much out there that was good. Father Hardon then put out a question and answer catechism in 1981, which is really wonderful. It is about a thousand or so questions. Rather than a thirty-page essay on a topic, he broke it up into questions and then gives you the answer in a one-paragraph answer. It is a very handy thing. Everybody that borrowed one from me kept it – I have had to keep replacing it – so I know people like it. Father Trese’s book is excellent. Again, he is taking things from another perspective. As for the The Teaching of Christ, it is a much different perspective on things. It is fairly orthodox, but just a different way of looking at it. There is a compendium now of the Catechism of the Catholic Church; however, as I understand, it will not be available in the United States until April 2006. It is out in Europe.
I should point out, for those of you who are not Catholic, that if you are thinking about becoming Catholic and decide you want to become Catholic, you will need to contact your local parish priest. If you are not already baptized and at the end of the class you desire to become baptized, then that is something you can discuss with the priest. If you are baptized into the Catholic Church as an adult, you will also receive the sacraments of Confirmation and Holy Communion. If you have already received a Christian baptism (that would be any mainline Christian denomination), then you are already baptized – as Saint Paul makes very clear, there is one Lord, one Faith, and one Baptism – and the Catholic Church will not re-baptize you. If that is the case, then you need to make a profession of faith, which would basically be the Nicene Creed. Prior to that, you will need to go to Confession (we will spend two whole hours on Confession later in the course), and then also you will receive the Sacrament of Confirmation and your First Communion. That is for those who are looking at converting.
Anyway, with that, let’s dig in. We are going to begin talking about some general things regarding God, that there is only one God, and we want to talk about the attributes of God. Then in the second half of the class, we are going to talk about the Trinity, that God is three Persons but only one God. Now that is the single most difficult area in all of theology. What you are going to be getting throughout the class is basically a freshman-level college class, except the second half, where you will be getting a master’s-level class. I tell you that so you do not panic. Do not think that if you do not understand it that this class is going to be way over your head and you should quit. That is not it at all, because there is no easy way to explain the Trinity. In fact, for all eternity we will never understand the Trinity. I will tell you that again at the end. But the fact is that if you do not understand it, that is okay – nobody does, except God. My point in trying to get these things across tonight is just so you can understand that this is not something illogical. This makes sense somehow, and it can be explained. I do not expect that you are going to be able to go to work tomorrow and explain the Trinity to everybody at work, but I want you to be able to at least say, “Well, I don’t get it, but at least I saw it explained once.” That is what I am concerned about. If you do not understand the explanation of the Trinity, do not worry.
There is a lady who was received into the Church about ten years ago, and she has brought twenty-two more people with her since. Somebody asked her what her success was all about, because they had given all these tapes to people, and they do not even get past the first one. She said, “Oh, it’s very simple. I take the first tape and put it at the end; then they don’t panic when they hear the first one.” So if I were smart, I would put this at the end, except that everything else builds upon what we are going to do today. You have to start with the reality that God exists, so we cannot put Him at the end. We need to put Him at the beginning where He belongs.
As we begin our considerations of the reality of God, we need to start with ourselves. Just take a second and recall an event in your life where you experienced the beauty and the grandeur of God’s creation. It could be standing at the Grand Canyon; it could be up at the Boundary Waters; it could be down at Key West, watching a sunset; it could be at Niagara Falls, someplace where you were completely awed with what God has done with His creation. Now as you think about that, try to think back and ask yourself, “What was going through my mind at that moment? What kind of thoughts was I thinking as I stood there in awe of what God has made?” As you run through your mind, various questions might come up. Now follow that up and ask, “Do animals experience these same thoughts? Do animals experience these same questions?” In other words, if your dog was standing with you as you were in awe, was your dog in awe? How many deer have stood in that same place? Were they in awe? Do animals experience these things? Can they even experience the beauty of what God has created?
All of these questions that we ask are very important because questions require a cause and effect. In other words, we see something and we have to ask: How did this happen? Where did it come from? As we see the effect, we have to ask the question about the cause. To ask a question, or to ask why, is the activity of a person. When you see the little persons who are about 1 ½ or 2 years old, their favorite question is “Why?” They will drive you crazy: “Mom, why is this?” You try to explain it, and they say, “Why?” Then you try to explain that, and they say, “Why?” They ask it again and again and again. The dog does not ask that because the dog is not a person, even if the bumper sticker says, “Animals are people too.” No, they are not. People are people; animals are animals. We need to be clear about these things. Anyway, to ask why is the activity of a person, and we ask questions because we are persons.
We are made in the image and likeness of God. That is what is on the first page of Scripture. Right there, on the first page of the Bible, we see one of the most important of all the truths that we can understand, that is, that we are made in the image and likeness of God. God is infinitely intelligent, and He knew our problems very well even before He created us. He knew that all of us at some point, in a moment of zeal, would say, “You know what, I’m going to read the Bible.” If we are going to read the Bible, where are we going to start? The first page. So what does He do? He takes the very first chapter on the first page and puts one of the most important truths that we need to know, that God exists and that we are made in His image and likeness. Well, we read a few pages into it, and we say, “This is a pretty long book. I think I’ll just read the New Testament.” So what do we find on the first page of the New Testament? That God became man, the other most important truth we need to know. First, we are made in His image and likeness; secondly, He became one of us. And so when we are tempted to think we are trash and we are junk and we are no-good and everything else, we have to look at Jesus and say, “Are we going to say that about Him?” He became one of us, and He elevated our nature to an almost infinite level.
But when we talk about being in the image and likeness of God, what does it mean? Well, this image and likeness is mostly interior. It is the mind and the will. If you think about it, Scripture tells us that God is truth. Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Old Testament many times over tells us that God is truth. In 1 John 4, we read: God is love. So we are made in the image of truth and in the image of love. The mind knows the truth, and the will loves. This interior reality of the mind and will, the interior reality of who we are as persons, is what is primary to being in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, to know who we are, we have to know who God is. If we are made in His image and likeness, how can we know who we are as persons if we do not know God, Who created us in His image and likeness in the first place? That is where it has to start.
But what can we say about God? If we are made in His image and likeness, the place to begin to talk about God is with ourselves, not that we are God, but rather we are made in His image and likeness, so we can begin to understand some things about God by coming to understand some things about ourselves. Again, we can ask questions. Why? We said it already, because we are persons. We ask questions because we have an awareness of ourselves. We have an awareness of what we are doing. Right now you have an awareness of where you are, and you might be asking questions like, “What am I doing here? Why am I here? Should I leave?” Anyway, it is this awareness of ourselves as doing things that brings about questions. We then ask: If we have it, does God have it? Well, put it into a different form: If we have an awareness of ourselves, does God have an awareness of Himself? He better, or we are all in trouble. Yes, He has a perfect awareness of Himself. So we can say: If we have it, God has it.
Well, now we go to the next level and say: We have a body. Does God have a body? The answer is “no.” We come now to the first major distinction, and I will warn you, we are going to make lots of distinctions in these classes. For the younger people here, that is going to be somewhat difficult. You have been systematically taught how not to think. That sounds tragic, and it is. But you have purposefully, willfully, and maliciously been taught how not to make distinctions, because if you just keep everything broad, then everything is okay. As soon as you make a distinction, suddenly things are not so okay anymore. That is the way the media has done it, and unfortunately that is the way the education system is now set up, to make sure you do not make distinctions. We will make distinctions, and we will make lots of them because God made us to think.
The first distinction we have to make is what is primary with regard to persons and what is secondary with regard to persons. What is primary is in our interior structure, that is, the mind and the will. With regard to that which is interior, we can say: If we have it, God has it. We have a mind; we have a free will. We can think; we can choose; we can love. If we have it, God has it. What is secondary to us as persons is not said of God. Those are things like the body and the emotions. God does not have emotions. Emotions are part of our physical nature, not part of our spiritual nature. Therefore, the emotions are part of the body. God does not have a body; therefore, God does not have emotions. We read things in Scripture, such as God got angry. People say, “How could God get angry if He doesn’t have emotions?” God cannot get angry, but in order for us to be able to understand what is going on, God will present it in Scripture as getting angry because we look at it and say, “If that happened to me, I’d be really angry. And if I were really angry, here is what I would do.” God does not get angry, but God is just. He also is merciful. But in the justice of God, there are going to be things that follow from our actions. It is not that God is angry and vengeful and trying to get even, but rather God is just. God does not have emotions. We have emotions because of our bodies. When we see these sorts of things, we begin to understand that the study of God in this sense is the study of the human person, and the study of the human person is the study of God.
With that as the foundation, now we jump to the next level, that is, the existence of God. The Jewish people were different from all other nations on the face of the earth in that they had only one God. Every other society in the ancient world had a multiplicity of gods. The fact that it took the Jews centuries to be able to get rid of all the false gods that had worked their way in was one of the reasons they had so much trouble accepting Jesus. They finally get rid of all the false gods and they are doing pretty well, then Jesus comes along and says, “I am God.” Well, they did not like that because they had finally gotten to the understanding that there is only one God, and they thought this would make two, which, of course, it does not, and we will talk all about that. But the question is: Why were the Jewish people right and everyone else was wrong?
Israel is 150 miles long and 80 miles wide, a small, tiny, little country. It was in the backwaters. It was not exactly the place where most people were going to aspire to live. And so, why were they right when everyone else was wrong? If we put it into our arrogant Minnesota way of looking at things, let us just say that the people of Iowa said, “There is only one God,” and the other 49 states said, “No, there’s a multiplicity of gods.” We do not like Iowans being right, but why would the Iowans be right in this case, and we and everybody else in the United States wrong? You see, we come to another problem that we have: Americans think the truth is based on a poll, and if the majority of people think something, then it must be right. That is not true. The truth is objective. We have to conform ourselves to the truth. So why were the Jewish people right, but the other people in the Roman Empire, the Greek Empire, the Ethiopians, the Syrians, all the people of the ancient world wrong? It is because God is the Supreme Being. Therefore, a multiplicity of gods is impossible because there can only be one Supreme Being.
But suppose that there were two of them. Are we going to say that there are two supreme beings? Well, it is a contradiction in itself, but even if they were supreme, it means they are perfect. If they are perfect, that means they are not lacking anything. And that means they are identical. If they are identical, they have to be the same. They are perfectly identical, if that is the case, so there cannot be two of them. If there are two of them, one of them has to have something that the other does not. If that is the case, they are not both supreme beings because one has something more or one is lacking something that the other is not. And if one is lacking something, then he is not supreme. This becomes exactly the problem of all these pagan religions. They had a multiplicity of gods, and none of them claimed to have a perfect god. The Romans did not claim that their gods were perfect. The Greeks did not claim that Zeus, for instance, was perfect. He was the highest of their gods, but they did not claim that he was perfect. If God is not perfect, why worship Him? If God is not perfect, then you may as well go home and look in the mirror and bow down before yourself, because God is no different from us then. If God is not perfect, He does not deserve to be worshipped. We believe in a Supreme Being, One Who is perfect. To have more than one Supreme Being, that is, one who has the fullness of being, is a contradiction. Therefore, a multiplicity of gods is something that is impossible once you recognize that God is a Supreme Being.
Another way of looking at this is that there has to be a first cause. That is, there has to be one being that caused everything else to exist. Again, going back to cause and effect, every effect must be contained fully in its cause. The example I always use is a pool table. If you are playing pool and you line up the cue ball and the 3 ball, and you hit the cue ball at 30 mph and it hits the 3 ball going 30 mph, the 3 ball cannot go 40 mph. The 3 ball can only go as fast as the ball that hit it, or slower, but it cannot go faster. The effect must be contained fully in its cause. When you look around at all the things that exist, you have to say, “Where did they come from?” You can even ask that of yourself, “Where did I come from? From my parents. Where did they come from? From their parents…and their parents…and their parents.” Pretty soon, you get back to Adam and Eve, and you say, “Where did they come from?”
Even if you want to believe in the idea of evolution, you can say, “Well, they came from all these animals and eventually it was a protozoa someplace back there in the primordial soup.” And where did they come from? “Well, there were these two atoms racing across space and they crashed into one another. The Big Bang!” Where did the two atoms come from? Who made them move? These are the things that the scientists who attempt and attempt and attempt to try to convince us of all these things cannot explain. They can only go back so far, and that is as far back as they can go. But something had to exist. Even if you want to look at it from the Big Bang point of view, something had to exist – Someone had to exist – before the two atoms. Just think about the astronomical odds of two atoms crashing into one another. It has never happened since. You would think with all the atoms flying around out there at high speed that some would crash into one another and there would be another Big Bang. It never happened. So if in fact that occurred, the astronomical odds of two submicroscopic particles crashing into one another at high speed are pretty small. And then, who made them move? Even if they existed, who made them move? Who got them going at that kind of speed to be able to make this happen? You see, somebody had to make the things. They did not just happen by themselves. Somebody had to move them.
The point of this is that there cannot be an infinite chain of instrumental causality. Let me explain what that means. An instrumental cause means that there is something that is making something else happen. Right now you are taking notes. Your pen is the instrumental cause of the writing on your paper. You are what is known as the “agent cause.” You are making the pen work. If your pen is working all by itself, we have ourselves a problem. It is clearly something diabolical if your pen is the cause of its own writing. So the pen is merely an instrument. The same is true with us. Parents are instruments in the production of a child. The parents are partially the cause of the child. The parents provide the body; God provides the soul. There is an instrumental causality. The child did not cause himself to exist. The parents were the instruments to bring about the existence of the child. Well, you cannot keep going back, saying, “What caused this? And what caused this? And what caused this?” Eventually, there has to be a first cause, something that was not caused by anything else, something that exists from all eternity, because nothing can be before him. If you say, “Who created that one?” And you say, “It’s the one who was before him.” Then you say, “And who created that one?” Eventually, when you are talking about instrumental causality, you have to get all the way back to the very beginning and say, “There has to be someone who simply has existence, someone who is not caused by anything else and exists on his own.” That first one all the way at the end of the chain is the one we call God, the One Who was not caused by anything else, the One Who caused everything else to exist but was not brought into existence by anything or anyone, the One Who caused movement to happen but was not moved by anybody else. That is the One Who is God.
So why can we say that God exists? The easiest way to be able to understand it (actually, the easiest way is to go outside and look around) is that you see an order in creation. Order does not happen all by itself. What happens all by itself is entropy. Everything just sort of collapses into chaos and quits. But you see an order in creation. Again, it just simply points to the fact that there has to be someone with intelligence who has put all of this in order.
Now we attribute many different perfections to God. We say that He is all-wise, all-loving, all-powerful, all-good, all-merciful, all-just, and so on. Yet God is perfectly simple. Does not all this division somehow imply that there is a multiplicity in God, that somehow He can be divided up? The answer is “no.” In God, there is no composition of any kind. In other words, we as human beings are made up of body and soul. We have emotions. The body is made up of all kinds of different chemicals and elements. There is no composition of any kind in God. God is perfectly simple. When you think about it, Jesus told us that we have to become childlike to get into heaven. Why? Because we are made in the image and likeness of God, and God is perfectly simple. So the more simple we become, not simpletons but simple, the more God-like we become. The more childlike we become, not childish but childlike, the more God-like we become.
That is what happens in the prayer life. As you grow in holiness, you become more simple. That is just a natural movement in the spiritual life. You look at the saints and they are extraordinarily simple. They cut right to the heart of the matter; they see right through things; they do not have all kinds of clutter in their lives. They are just simple. In fact, I am told there are two different kinds of brain waves, the brain waves in children and the brain waves in adults. Mother Teresa of Calcutta had a heart attack in California, so they hooked up some electrodes to her brain. I do not know why, the doctors did not tell me. They were checking her brain waves, anyway, and they found something extraordinary. Mother Teresa of Calcutta had the brain waves of a child. She had become childlike. This is a woman who could stand in Washington, D.C., in front of President Clinton and all of his cohorts, and slice and dice them with a smile on her face; she just cut right to the quick. People would challenge her on things, and she was completely unruffled. She saw right through to what they were doing, and she simply answered the question. She was simple. The problem is we think that as adults we have to be more complex. The more complex we become, the more impressive we are somehow. It is just the opposite. We have to become childlike. We have to become simple.
God is perfectly simple, so for this reason all of the attributes that we talk about with God are actually identical in themselves. In fact, they are identical with the Divine Being. We look, for instance, at somebody who is very loving and we say, “That’s God-like.” We look at somebody who is wise and we say, “That’s very God-like.” We see somebody who is very merciful and we say, “That’s God-like.” And it all is, but God is love. So everything we can say about God ultimately comes down to one point: Love. It is just a different aspect of His love that we can recognize, but in God it is all love. That is all He is; that is all He does.
People are terrified of God. Why? God is love; there is no reason to be afraid of God. Scripture talks about the fear of the Lord, but that is not servile fear – that is filial fear. The difference is that servile fear is being afraid, quaking in fear, being terrified, and so on. Filial fear is the fear of offending God because you love Him so much. For those of you who are married, I hope you love your spouse so much that you would never want to do anything to offend that person. It is not that you walk around on eggshells being afraid that if you do something the person is going to blow up and have a fit. What I am talking about is that you would fear that in your own weakness you might actually do something to offend this person, and that is something you do not want to do. You do not walk around in fear, but filial fear means that out of love you would not want to do anything ever to offend that individual. We are to love God above all else. Jesus made that very clear: Love God above everything else. Love God first, neighbor second; that is the first and greatest commandment, with your whole heart and soul and strength. Therefore, if we have that kind of love for God, we will have the filial fear that we would never want to offend God by our actions.
Again, to say that God is simple means to say there is no composition in God. That means there is no body. There is nothing physical in God that can break down. Therefore, we can say that God is not body and soul. He is not substance and accident, which we are. He is not essence and existence, power and action, nature and person, passive and active, or anything like it. He is absolutely and perfectly simple. Everything else goes right out the window, and all of it comes down to His perfect and absolute simplicity.
With that in mind, can God change? There was a very unfortunate theological idea floating around a number of years ago that was called “process theology.” That was the idea that somehow the core of God stayed the same, but on the outside He changed. First of all, that implies we can split God up somehow, which we just said we cannot do because He is perfectly simple. And if He is perfectly simple, there cannot be any change. There is no change in God. But what is change? How does change occur? Change implies a cause and effect. If God can change, it means there is something that can cause Him to do something, something outside of God that can make Him do something. Well, there is nothing that is outside of God. Remember, all effects are contained in their cause. God caused all things that exist to be; therefore, everything is contained within God. Nothing is outside of Him, meaning that nothing is bigger than God that can make Him do anything.
Now what is time? Time is the measure of change or movement. So is there any time in God? The answer is “no,” and the reason is because God is eternal. Eternity is duration without beginning or end, without sooner or later. It is a complete lack of succession of moments. There is not a before or an after with God. There is not “wait a minute” or even “wait a second” because there are no seconds or minutes or hours or days with God. It is an eternal or permanent now. Everything with God is seen in the present. There is no beginning or end. Right now, as God looks down upon us, He sees the creation of the world happening, He sees us sitting right here, and He sees the end of the world simultaneously. He does not look and say, “Oh, I remember when the world began way back then, and, yes, eventually the world is going to end.” No, He sees it all simultaneously. It is all happening at once. God sees everything in the present, not in the past or in the future. Everything is in the present. We do not have that ability right now, but in eternity that is the way it will be. Everything is seen only in the present now, and God wills everything as you do it. For us, tomorrow is still in the present. For us, whatever we do, we are doing right now, and God wills it as you do it. He is not willing what you will do in the future, because He sees you doing it right now. Even though you are sitting right here, He sees what you are going to do tomorrow and next week and next year, and He wills it only in the present. Time exists only for material bodies, but God is completely immaterial. There is nothing physical in God; there is no matter in God. He is purely spiritual, so there is no time in God.
Does God know all things? The answer is “yes.” Does He know them the same way we do? The answer is “no.” He does know everything and He knows them perfectly; however, He does not know them the same way we do. For us, knowledge comes from the outside. We are sensible persons, meaning that we gain things through the senses. We touch things, we taste things, we smell things, and so on. We get everything through the senses. For instance, if you taste something and you say, “This tastes like soap,” how do you know that? “This tastes like cardboard.” How do you know? Because you tried it. We were babies one day, and we stuck everything in our mouths; we know what it all tastes like. Plastic, soap, cardboard, whatever it happens to be, it all went in there! We got experience of it, so we know what these things are like. But we can only get knowledge from the outside. A lot of things we come to understand not so much by what they are, but by what they are not, because we have to compare them to other things and we get things through the senses. We know the realities outside of ourselves, and through acquiring knowledge of other things, we come to a knowledge of ourselves.
Just think back to the Garden. God created Adam as an adult; he did not have any experience of anything. There he sits in the Garden, all by himself. He does not even know who he is. So God creates all the animals and brings them one at a time to Adam, and Adam has to name them. It was by naming the animals that Adam came to realize that none of the animals was a person and that he was entirely different from all of the animals. That is why only after doing that, God put him into a deep sleep, and then created Eve, because he realized that he was a person, he was made to love, and there was no one to love. There was no one who could receive his love, and there was no one who could return his love. Oh, I know dogs like to wag their tail and lick your face. Dogs can emote in your direction; dogs cannot love. They can have emotions, but love is not an emotion. Adam was created to love, and he did not have anybody to love. When he wakes up, not only does he see the most beautiful of all God’s creatures, but he also sees the highest and most perfect of all God’s creatures: a woman. Thus, the great rejoicing that there is another person, someone equal to him, someone whom he could love, someone who could receive his love and return his love. That is what he found, and that explains the immense joy Adam had, because otherwise he was alone and he was made for a purpose he could not fulfill. He came to know who he was by coming to know who he was not. He was not a horse. He was not a cow. He was not any of the animals he named. Then he finds another person, and he finds out who he is by being in relationship with that other human person. That is the way it works for us.
With God, it is the other way around. His being and his knowledge are identical; this means God comprehends Himself perfectly. God knows Himself, He comprehends Himself perfectly, and by knowing Himself, He knows everything else, because everything else exists in Him, and so He knows it perfectly. Again, the effect has to be contained within its cause. God is the cause of everything that exists, everything is contained within Him, and He knows Himself perfectly; therefore, He knows perfectly everything else that He has caused to be. He knows it from the inside out. That is why He knows our thoughts. It is why He knows everything we are about. If you read a medical manual (the things are about 4” thick and they are thousands of pages long) and you ask any doctor, they will tell you that they have barely scratched the surface in their knowledge of the human body. They can write thousands of pages about it, and they hardly know anything about it. God knows us perfectly.
That is a scary thought, too, because He knows what we did and why we did it. There is a priest by the name of Father Scheier. He was one of these “Father Groovy” types who wore the rainbow vestment with the big butterfly on the front of it; he was cool. That is all that matters these days; you have to be cool. Anyway, Father Scheier got into a head-on collision with a truck. The truck won and Father Scheier died. He stood before God (this is his own story) and he said, “I always thought I would have an opportunity to explain myself. I stood before the Lord, and He said, ‘This is what you did, and this is why you did it. And this is what you did, and this is why you did it. And this is what you did, and this is why you did it.’ All I could do was say, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ And He said, ‘Your judgment is hell.’ Then I heard the voice of a woman say, ‘But, Son, give him another opportunity.’ He said, ‘Mother, he’s been a priest for ten years, and he has been a priest for himself, not for Me.’ She said, ‘Give him one more chance. I will work with him. If he doesn’t get turned around, then You can do with him what You will.’” At that point, he was given a second chance to come back. That is why he could tell the story of what happened to him. He was medically dead, but he stood before the Lord for judgment. Go to Leaflet Missal and you can get the tape. He was on Mother Angelica’s telling the story a number of years ago. If you want to watch it, it is right there; you don’t have to take my word for it. God knows everything. He knows every thought; He knows every reason; He knows every motivation of everything we do. We are not going to be able to fool Him. We are not going to talk our way out of anything. We are not going to change His mind.
That brings us to the next point: If God already knows everything, and He knows what you are going to do tomorrow, does that mean you are forced to do it? Do you have to do something just because God knows you are going to? No. I always say that I know most of you, at least within the next 4 hours or so, are going to be sound asleep. All of us, within the next 24 hours or so, will certainly go to sleep. Well, you could say, “I’ll prove him wrong. I’m going to stay up for 48 hours.” Okay, my knowledge is not perfect. I know this is the case because that is the normal human pattern. God, on the other hand, knows perfectly. He knows if you are going to fool me and stay up for 48 hours, so He will say, “Everybody else will be in bed, but not this one.” And He knows it perfectly. He knows why you are going to do it, He knows what you are going to be doing, and so on. But does it force you to do it? The fact that I know you will go to bed within the next 24 hours, does that force you to go to bed within the next 24 hours? No. You will not go to bed because I knew you would; you are going to go there because that is the reality of what you have to do. Well, God’s knowledge of what you will do does not force you to do it. He simply sees it as a present reality, but again, He sees it now in the present. He does not see what you are going to do tomorrow in the future. For you, it is in the future; you have not even thought about what it is you are going to do yet. But He even sees it happening right now in the present because He knows all things.
If God knows everything already, why pray? Does that not seem kind of dumb? If He knows everything already and He knows how and why, why should we waste our time praying? Choices flow from the human will, and God’s grace can influence the human will. God deals with us as free beings. He created us with a free will, and God is never going to violate that freedom. It is the way He created us; it is the way He will treat us. He will never violate that in the least because God is perfectly just. He is not going to create us one way and then treat us another. God created us with free will; He treats us as free beings. His grace can influence our will, but He will not force us ever to do anything. We will talk about that much more as we go along. Jesus told us to pray; He told us to pray always. In His providence, God grants His gifts and graces on the condition that we ask for them. Jesus said, Ask and you will receive, knock and it will be opened to you, seek and you will find. We have our part to do.
We have to pray, but it is not praying just in order to get something. If you had a friend and the only time they ever called you on the phone was when they wanted something – give me, give me, give me – is that not what we do to God if the only time we go to pray is when we want something? God wants us to love Him. He wants us to be in a relationship with Him. If you are in a relationship with somebody and you are in love with that person, you will do anything for them. You talk with them regularly, you have a relationship with them, and if they need something, you will not hesitate to give it to them. But if the only time you hear from somebody is when they say, “Hey, can I borrow fifty bucks,” after a few times you are going to say, “Wait a minute, the only time this person ever calls me is to borrow fifty bucks. I’m not going to answer the phone anymore.” Well, what do we do to God? We need to pray always, Jesus said. That does not mean to ask Him for everything – give me, give me, give me – it means to be in union with God, to seek His Will, to conform ourselves to Him. That is what it is all about.
Let us talk for a minute about mercy and justice. Is it a contradiction to be perfectly merciful and perfectly just at the same time? Well, what does it mean to be just, first of all? The classical definition of justice is giving to each person what is due. As the Creator of all things, God is the norm of justice. Having decided to create the world, God must by His wisdom and goodness give to His creatures everything they need to achieve the goals He has set for them. It would be against His nature as Infinite Goodness to give us an end and then withhold from us the means to be able to achieve that end. For those of you who are parents, would you give your kids something to do and purposely sabotage it so there is no possible way they could do it? “Put this puzzle together…but I’m keeping a couple of pieces so you can’t put it together. Ha-ha, isn’t that funny?” What parent is going to do that? What parent would watch their kids be completely frustrated because they think the whole thing is there and they cannot figure out how to put it together because the parent withheld the pieces they need to be able to do it? God is our Father. He loves us, and He is not going to say, “Here’s the purpose for which I created you, but I’m not going to give you what you need to be able to do it.” That would violate His goodness. Again, it is a matter of justice. He gives to each what is due. He created us for a purpose, so He has to give us what is necessary.
The idea of God’s justice oftentimes comes up when we talk about sin. When we talk about the so-called “vindictive God of the Old Testament,” we need to be careful we do not say that as a matter of justice God owes it to Himself to require full atonement for every sin, because we cannot. Sin has an infinite effect and we cannot make up for it. Since He is the highest authority, God has the right to grant pardon to anyone He desires. Therefore, He can forgive the repentant sinner, even without requiring any corresponding atonement, or even any atonement at all. God can do what He wants. It is a matter of justice and mercy. When we talk about the “vindictive God of the Old Testament,” you have to remember that God does not change. He cannot change. All of a sudden, we have the God of the New Testament, He loves – but the God of the Old Testament does not. It is the same God, and God has not changed at all. If you go back to the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy when God reveals Himself to Moses, what does He say? The Lord, the Lord, a merciful God. That is how He reveals Himself! He is merciful. He is loving. That has not changed. He is also perfectly just; He gives to each what is due. So when we look at the mess in the world today, we cannot look at God and complain at Him. Whose fault is it that the mess is out there? Not God’s. It is our own fault. We will talk about that when we talk about evil.
Mercy, on the other hand, is the readiness to relieve the defect or misery of another out of a sense of loving good will. God’s mercy is His benevolence, or his good will toward us in so far as it removes our tribulations, especially the tribulations caused by sin. Forgiveness of sin, then, is not merely a work of mercy; it is also a work of justice, since God is normally going to demand from the sinner repentance and atonement. The harmony of God’s mercy and justice is seen perfectly on the Cross. On the Cross, Jesus offers the sacrifice to take away our sins, but He also offers the sacrifice that makes atonement for our sins. It is perfectly just and it is perfectly merciful. So we see them both at the same time in the same action. On the Cross, we see that there is absolutely no contradiction between mercy and justice.
Does God love? We have already answered that a number of times. Yes, He does. But what is love? We think of love as an emotion. I used to ask the kids that were coming in to get married, “Why do you want to get married?” They would look at me with stars in their eyes and say, “Because we’re in love.” And I would say, “Well, that’s nice. What does that mean?” “Oh, it’s this nice feeling we have in our hearts.” That is real cute, but it is not reality. That is not what love is all about. It is nice to have the emotions that go along with love, but you get the other side of it too. There is nothing more painful than being hurt by somebody who claims to love you. Yes, you have the wonderful emotions; when you are married, that happens two or three times a year. Then you get the other stuff too. Most of the time, it is pretty even. It is not about emotions.
But let us look at the emotions for a moment. Why do people get angry? It is because something happens outside of them that causes them to react. Something causes it to happen. So what is love? It is not an emotion. Love is an act of the will. It is not caused by something else. Love is an act of the will based on what we know, so love is a virtue. Look at Saint Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. In Chapter 13, he makes it very clear: There are faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love. Faith and hope are going to go away; love remains forever. You enter into the love of God, so it is a virtue. Love is very simply defined as doing always what is best for the other. It is not selfish. Love is the opposite of selfishness; love is the opposite of using another person. There are only two ways you can treat another person. You either love the other person, or you use the person. There is not anything else. Love is about seeking only the good of the other, serving the other, trying to build the other up, developing the holiness of the other, and so on. That is what it is all about, and that is not always a real happy thing. When you have to serve somebody, sometimes it is painful, sometimes it requires a lot. Look at the Cross. What did it require of Jesus to love us? Literally, to die. Love is dying to self in order to live for the other.
And so the idea of marriage is two persons serving one another, two persons loving one another, two persons giving and receiving. That is what marriage is all about. If it is truly lived the way it is supposed to be, it would be the most beautiful thing in the world; and it is, when it is properly lived. So that is the goal for married couples: to learn to love perfectly. Why? Because heaven is loving perfectly, and marriage is preparation for eternity. What is the very purpose of our existence? We are made in the image and likeness of God, and God is love; therefore, the purpose of our existence is to love and to be transformed to become love itself. That is what the Lord wants from us. If we are going to be transformed to become love itself, it means to be transformed into Jesus Christ. That is what the goal of the Christian life is all about: transformation in Christ.
With that in mind, let us take a break. [End of Lesson 1]
FUNDAMENTALS OF CATHOLICISM BY FATHER ALTIER PING!