The act of redemption redeemed us and also all creation, and its effects (power) transcends time. While all creation is redeemed it still looks forward for the completion and fulfillment of all things through the Second Coming of Christ. Therefore nature is not destroyed but redeemed. So creation is elevated because of Christ’s awesome act of love, His sacrifice for you and me which also restored us to a personal relationship with the Blessed Trinity.
Resurrection of Christ If Jesus, the Son of God merely died, the greatest event of history would have been nullified. But, Jesus the Son of God did not merely die, but rose from the dead. The Son of God did what no one had ever accomplished in their own power; He rose from the dead and thus conquered the power of death. While Jesus raised others from the dead, no one had been raised in their own power or directly from the power of God without an intermediary. Humanity was given a foretaste of the fact that we too will conquer death when upon Jesus’s death the graves of many were opened:
And suddenly, the veil of the Sanctuary [of the Temple] was torn in two from top to bottom, the earth quaked, the rocks were split, the tombs opened and the bodies of many holy people rose from the dead, and these, after his resurrection, came out of the tombs, entered the holy city and appeared to a number of people (Matthew 27:51-53).”
You may recall that non-Christian historians have confirmed the earthquake and darkness.
The Mediator of God God became man as free gift to us. In doing so Christ bore the past and future sins of the whole of humanity. Therefore He experienced in ‘his own nature the uttermost abandonment possible to human despair’.3
John Morton explains that even if we are trapped by sin and self absorption we have ‘the image of God so stamped on our nature as to make it in principle possible that he should visit us’.4
This is so awesome! The image of God is stamped on our very nature. Because we are created out of love God desires our response. If we are trapped by a particular sin or addiction we must want to get free. So we should see our local priest or pastor for help.
Love has Three Legs Like a three legged chair, love consists of three legs. Each leg is essential for our whole well-being. The first leg is the first commandment: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul.’ The second leg flows from fulfilling the first when Jesus said, ‘Love your neighbour…’ and the third, is when Jesus added, ‘…as you love yourself’. If you lack any one of these then you will not be whole – like a chair missing a leg you will topple over!
God created you because He loves you. It is in our very being to love God. He has given us a part of ourselves, our very soul, in order for us to communicate and love Him, ourselves and others. For those who have chosen to love God, these quotes from Teilhard de Chardin, the French philosopher and Jesuit priest are so beautiful:
Do you, Lord Jesus, ‘in whom all things subsist’, show yourself to those who love you as the higher Soul and the physical centre of your creation? Are you not well aware that for us this is a question of life or death? As for me, if I could not believe that your real presence animates and makes tractable and enkindles even the very least of the energies which invade me or brush past me, would I not die of cold?5
Myriads of worlds following their appointed course through vastness of space exist because He would have it so. But that self-willed souls should be won to love Him, and thus make love and not self the centre of their being – that costs what is represented by Gethsemane and the Cross. The world as a vale of soul-making is full of darkness and tragedy into which God himself must enter.6
For God has endowed each personality with a freedom he will neither bend nor constrain. Though he has ‘laid the foundations of the earth and put wisdom to the inward parts and understanding to the heart’ he will not by his peremptory [authoritative] power compel a single human will to obedience. This is the value that creation must entail to God, showing us at once the depth of his love and immensity of his sorrow in our fall.7
God created you to be in right relationship with everyone – a threefold relationship of God, self and others; and to be a trustworthy steward of the creation that God has bestowed on you. God created beauty for you to enjoy. Next time you see a beautiful sunrise/sunset, someone makes you smile, someone touches your heart or you hold a newborn baby in your arms ponder that God is a personal God. He longs to share His creation, His beauty, and His love with you.
God created you to also love yourself. It is through loving God and others that we can truly love ourselves. Can you truly say, ‘Thank you God for creating me as me’, rather than saying, ‘I wish I had a model’s legs, or butt, or nose’? We must accept ourselves, and show our gratitude to our Creator. God loves you for who you are – He views His creation, you, as very good.
God has created us. There is one significant part which we must contribute to. We have to want to share in God’s life as He has created us with an eternal soul. Sadly we want to fill it with everything but God. But we will only be truly fulfilled when we let God into our hearts, into our lives and become more like Christ. No one wants to be impotent, but we are impotent spiritually (our relationship with Him and thus knowing Him is severely affected) if we don’t make Him the most important part in our lives. We have to want God to guide and help us.
As we have read in the chapter, Evil: Does it Exist? there is a battle between good and evil. Reflecting on God as being a God of love we can question how there could be a morally neutral Creator. How could someone create something and then forget about it and not care when His creation is crying out for help? Professor Stephen Weinberg, Nobel laureate in Physics, challenges the concept of a God of love with a God of suffering. He says, ‘The God of birds and trees would have to be also the God of birth defects and cancer.’ But remember, this is physical evil. You may recall that mankind’s choice to defy God and reject His love has resulted in serious consequences. We must now face the repercussions.
I know that without various experiences of suffering I wouldn’t be who I am today. Good can come from suffering, e.g. our character can be formed and strengthened by the experience of suffering. Also it can make us value more what God has given us and can inspire us to be a better person if the suffering was caused by our wrong-doing. We can tend to be like spoilt children when we have not experienced suffering and therefore unable to identify or really relate to those who do suffer. I don’t have all the answers, but I know that God is a God of love and that suffering will cease after our existence on earth; Scripture reveals that for those who choose to follow Him God has the ultimate victory, and there will be no more tears or suffering.
Know Yourself God created us to be fulfilled and so to be fully human. We can only achieve this by knowing and loving God, ourselves and others. As St Augustine explains you can only truly know yourself by knowing God. We also know ourselves through the eyes of those who love us. Through their compliments and insights we can see who we are and how we can become more like Christ.
As the reformer, John Calvin pointed out, we must first contemplate God and from that spring we may truly gain self-knowledge of ourselves: ‘…it is evident that man never attains to a true selfknowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look at himself’.8
Therefore you have intrinsic value – from the past, from the present (ongoing) and in the future. Additionally you can obtain selfknowledge from spending time with God in prayer and by sharing His love with others. You are also valuable from what you can contribute through so many different ways. One practical way you could do this now would be to pray for someone, or think of someone who doesn’t get many visitors or phone calls and let them know someone cares by just seeing how they are. This simple gesture is a form of sharing God’s love with others. Also a smile normally doesn’t take much effort, but its power is amazing. So go on share a smile with someone soon.
You could also encourage someone by telling them how much they mean to you – w
hen did you last tell someone in your family that you love them? I hope it wasn’t on your wedding day! These actions are valuable – so valuable for their contribution in sharing God’s love and bringing joy and love to someone else’s heart.
So many people think that only Christians can share God’s love. They think the sacred and the secular should be separate. But you don’t have to be a Christian to share the love of God – because God is love! Because of the Incarnation the presence and action of God is active in the world, there is no dichotomy between what is sacred and what is profane (secular). In other words there is nothing strictly profane. Therefore we can be touched by God’s love as the ‘profane is saturated with [the] efficacy of the sacred’.9 Therefore we can be touched by God’s love and thus grace through gazing at a beautiful sunset; listening to uplifting or engaging music; giving oneself to another person in self-less love; being loved; being forgiven; a smile; romantic gestures; and caring for the environment, etc.
The best source of love is to draw from the origin and fount of love – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. However, do not wait until you feel you are Christian before seeking to love others. Your attitude of self-giving does matter. It matters now – it touches the heart of God!
A personal religion has the task of creating the kingdom of God on earth now, as we discover from the prayer revealed by Jesus. ‘Our Father in Heaven, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth, as it is in Heaven.’
As we have discovered earlier in God: Fact or Fiction? it was always God’s intention for His kingdom to reign on earth. That was what the Garden of Eden was about – a kingdom of love and peace. It is only due to mankind’s rejection of God’s love and that God respects our free will that there is not real love and peace existing on the whole earth. As there is still evil being perpetrated in the world, God does not reign yet except in the hearts of those who truly love and obey Him. But from Sacred Scripture (in the book of Revelation) you can read and know that God will reign, and that there will be true love and peace on earth when Satan is defeated forever.
Believe it or not, we are all searching. We are searching for truth, including love. Do we not recognise and embrace truth within our relationships of true love? God is love (1 John 4:16) and it is in God that we find true fulfillment. We can never exhaust our knowledge of things and thus can’t exhaust our ability to continue loving unless we consciously seek to do so.
We see people abandoning themselves in awesome love experienced between a husband and his wife or those who seek to forsake all including conjugal love (sexual relations open to being fruitful) for the sake of the kingdom as Christ affirmed in Matthew 19:12.
Another aspect of the personal God which is reflected in humans is that of good humour. How can science explain why the structuring of words can trigger a response of laughter? Yet depending on our character, personality, morality or culture, we will either laugh or not laugh at a particular joke. Such good humour brings joy to one’s soul and to others too.
Eternal Love God revealed Himself to the people of the old covenant. Firstly He created mankind in His image and likeness which expresses His great love. He also called Israel to be His bride whom He called to faithfulness and loved her so faithfully and tenderly.
In the new covenant the Church is the bride of Christ. God is equated with love and truth. God first revealed His teachings to the Church (Apostles) and then the Church faithfully handed on (tradition) God’s self-communication, His revelation by producing the New Testament.
God created us for eternity! He didn’t say, ‘Hey I’ll create Simone and play with her until I get bored, and then obliterate her with a lightning bolt and watch her atoms explode!’ God created you to live and enjoy eternity – He gave you an imperishable, thus an eternal soul. He created heaven so that after you die, according to how you loved God, self and others, you have the choice to live there forever.
Alternatively, you could choose the place where there is no love! Just imagine, being somewhere where no one can love. It would be hell! Atheist Jean-Paul Satre noted in his play No Exit, that the gates of hell are locked from the inside by mankind’s free choice. I would like to add to that analogy that Satan has written on the gates, ‘Push’, like sadly, the inhabitants have pushed God away. Only if such a person did not believe Satan, the Father of Lies, and trust in their Creator then they could pull the doors and be free. Only if they had pulled God to them, trusted and loved Him and others then they would not have to be there.
I acknowledge there are inadequacies to this analogy, that is of having the ability to escape hell. We must remember that only those who have rejected God, withheld love from or hated others, or followed Satan, will have chosen to be there. As for Christians we say to God like Jesus did on the Cross, ‘Thy will be done’. To those who have consciously rejected God, God the Father will reluctantly and sadly say, ‘Thy will be done’ to His child who has chosen not to follow Him.
In Crossing the Threshold of Hope Pope John Paul II explores whether it is God who rejects an individual as a consequence of one’s turning their back on God or whether the human person does the rejecting. He speaks of our being judged on our works of charity which have been fulfilled or neglected with the just being destined to eternal life. He then speaks of another verdict: ‘There is a destination to eternal damnation as well, which consists in the ultimate rejection of God, the ultimate break of the communion with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Here, it is not so much God who rejects man, but man who rejects God.’10
Taken alone the above is not so straight forward. While hell will be for those who chose it by rejecting God, we must not forget that no one can say for certain who is there. Some fundamentalist Christians unfortunately say, ‘All Catholics are going to hell’, which their misguided judging goes against Sacred Scripture which they hold so dear. But in 1 John 4:2 the author states that proof of the spirit of God is ‘any spirit which acknowledges Jesus Christ, come in human nature, is from God’. Catholics clearly do this.
By consigning all non-Christians and some denominations to hell these fundamentalists forget a fundamental part of God’s nature, His mercy. What about the prayers of loved ones? As I have covered in Born to be Free, my earlier book, praying for the dead is very important.
St Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313-386 AD) is honoured as a Saint by the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion. In 1883 Pope Leo XIII declared him a Doctor of the Church (someone who lived an exemplary life and contributed greatly regarding theology and doctrine). St Cyril says:
…if a king were to banish certain persons who had offended him, and those intervening for them were to plait a crown and offer it to him on behalf of the ones who were being punished, would he not grant a remission of their penalties? In the same way we too offer prayers to Him for those who have fallen asleep, though they be sinners. We do not plait a crown, but offer up Christ [most probably meaning the Eucharist, the sacrifice of Christ re-presented] who has been sacrificed for our sins; and we thereby propitiate the benevolent God for them as well as for ourselves.”11
Praying for the dead is in Sacred Scripture, but only in some Bibles that have not had books removed, such as the Book of Maccabees. These differ only regarding the Old Testament. If we implore God’s mercy, like the Scripture of the widow persistently begging the judge, then He will hear us. Recognising a sincere and truly repentant heart He will be merciful. I love St Faustina’s analogy that a drop of water is like all our sins, the sins of all mankind, compared to the ocean which represents God’s love and mercy for us.
Heart Burning with Love It is enchanting that a relationship with our loving God is so similar to that of falling in love with someone here on earth for the first time. It’s what we call being-for and being-with someone. Your heart burns with fire and you are eager, almost desperately passionate to know more and more about this person. And you seem to have only room in your mind for that person alone. It’s as if God has let
us have love for someone of the opposite sex, and yet at the same time yearns for us to love Him. What an unselfish God, to create us like this! Millions of Christians go through the experience of their heart burning with love for God when they discover that they can have a personal relationship with their loving God and then seek to build that friendship and build their love of Him. It is also amazing that the love-burning heart matures, and instead of a love ingrained in feelings, we love from experience, knowledge (reason) and faith given by the Creator. As a result our love is much deeper, self-giving and real.
St Catherine of Genoa expresses the power of such love: O that I could tell you what the heart feels, how it burns and is consumed inwardly! Only I find no words to express it. I can but say, might one little drop of what I feel fall into Hell, Hell would be transformed into a Paradise.12
God’s love is so intensely personal that there are no conditions put on that love. No matter what you do God always loves you. God will never stop loving you. Yes it is possible to fail or disappoint God. But He will not stop loving you. He will not stop wanting the best for you. He will not stop wanting your life to be transformed to be more and more like Christ.
Sacred Scripture depicts such an intensely personal unconditional love. The parable of the Prodigal Son shows the Father watching out for His son. He was longing for Him to return. Then when he was returning the Father did something much undignified for his status; he ran. It’s not like he would have shorts and running shoes at hand. He didn’t even care about his clothes. He ran to embrace and show his love for his long lost child. He immediately restored his repentant son to his full dignity having denied his own.
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