Do God's Will

By DJ Love

Do God's Will explains the basics of Catholic teaching for the laity to understand. It delves into why the Church does what it does, where its practices come from and the rationale behind them. Then it presents the elements of living a spiritual life, which culminates with an in-depth understanding of the Crucifixion as the greatest act of love ever done. This book is useful for parents and teachers who wish to give children a solid foundation for a Christian life, as well as for teens and young adults to help them to understand why we do what we do. In addition, it is useful for anyone who is considering becoming a Catholic, or others who want a basic understanding of what the Church is and why it teaches what it does.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456603205

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Children

Acknowledgments

There are a number of people whose contribution I want to recognize. I wish to thank Father George, Jack, Jennifer and Sue for being instrumental in helping God’s efforts to reclaim me from me, even though I continue to resist Him every day. I further wish to thank my friend Paul for his support, encouragement and advice, and especially for his inspiration. Jesus said that we will know a tree by its fruit. Paul’s children are a testament to the depth of his spirituality and saintliness. He is the finest example of Christianity of my acquaintance.

For permission to quote from copyright I offer my heartfelt gratitude to those who provided it. I also apologize to any holders of copyright who I have been unable to trace. In particular, I wish to offer my heartfelt thanks to Barrie Schwortz and STERA, Inc., for the use of the two photographs of the Shroud of Turin. In addition, I wish to express my thanks to the people at eBookIt.com who were invaluable at bringing this book to market.

It is not those who say to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven but the one who does the will of my Father.

Jesus

Matthew 7

INTRODUCTION

With all due respect, the Catholic Church does a lousy job of teaching itself to its own. Most lay Catholics grow up with little understanding about why we do what we do. The sacraments, which are the lifeblood of the Church, often become mindless rituals empty of any meaning to their participants.

FOCUS, the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, estimates that 50% of all Catholic college students stop going to Mass by Christmas of their freshman year. By senior year this figure is 70%. It is a reflection of the poor foundation so many Catholic youth receive at home, in parochial schools and in their parishes. At the heart of this problem is that those who teach them -- their parents, CCD teachers and parochial school faculty -- often know almost as little about what the Church teaches and why as those who they teach by word and example.

Among the Documents of the Second Vatican Council is the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. It explains that in order to understand Scripture we must keep it in its contexts. These include textual, historic and cultural. To them I would add linguistic as well. Trained in history among other disciplines, it is from this standpoint that I endeavor to explain many of the concepts included herein.

I am not a theologian, nor a member of the clergy. I possess no academic degree in theology. Then again, neither did any of the Apostles. In some ways, this can be an advantage over academic theology, since the latter sometimes overlooks what is so obvious to the historian. Besides, if I have listened to God and written what He wants then no credentials are necessary; and by the same token, if I have not listened well to God and written what He wants then no credentials would help.

This book is written by a layman for laymen in terms they can readily understand. It covers only the basics but does go in depth into them. I am no expert, nor would I be comfortable being called one. I can only relate how God has shaped and taught me, to the extent that I have allowed Him to do so.

Hopefully, this book will help Catholic parents and educators to give Catholic youth a better grounding in our faith tradition. It may also be useful for people who come from other traditions, especially those who are considering becoming Catholics, since so much misunderstanding exists among various other Christian denominations about the Catholic Church. I have used this same material for many years to teach those who wished to convert to the Catholic faith, as well as cradle Catholics from early teens to elderly adults.

It is always with trepidation that I agree to teach. In the Letter of James it says, Few of you should be teachers because those of us who are teachers will face a stricter judgment. I am too much of a sinner to make it even harder on myself to accept the gift of salvation. My consolation, though, is that the same letter also assures us that if we lead someone else to God then it will cover a multitude of our own sins. Therein lies hope…

There are two conventions which this book will follow. When giving Scriptural citations, I will provide only the chapter rather than specific verse. This is because we should always strive to keep passages from the Bible in all of their contexts. If you want to look them up, read the whole chapter. Secondly, I will at times repeat some of those quotes in more than one chapter, when applicable to each.

PART ONE

STRUCTURE

CHAPTER 1 – WHAT IS THE CHURCH?

The word which most closely represents what we think of as a family is the Hebrew term berith. It more accurately describes what we might call a household, though. The most pointed example in Scripture of a berith is Abraham in the Book of Genesis.¹ His household included his immediate or nuclear family, and his extended family (in the persons of Lot and his wife) as well as his servants. His household servants were so numerous that when a foreign power invaded Canaan, he offered his services to the priest-king Melchizedek of Salem (the future Jerusalem) to help defend the land. In those days, a band numbered less than eighty combatants while more than that constituted an army. Abraham went to war with ‘an army’ of 318 household servants.² Extrapolating from that, we can surmise that his berith numbered approximately 1,000 persons, along with attendant flocks of livestock. Even prior to this event, they had grown to such a size that Abraham and Lot agreed to separate because their combined flocks threatened to exhaust the land which they occupied together.

Such as it is, berith is as close as we can come in Hebrew tradition to what we consider to be a family. Its Latin equivalent is conveniens, from which we derive the English term ‘covenant.’ When we discuss covenants, then, we are addressing the nature of a family relationship. In Biblical terms, this usually refers to a family relationship between God and His people.

In Hebrew law and tradition, to establish a berith, or covenant or family relationship, required an oath. The ancient Hebrew word for oath is shibathaim, which literally means ‘to seven oneself.’³ It derives from shaba, which means ‘seven.’⁴ The latter term is also the root for saba, which means ‘fullness and completion.’⁵ When we see the number seven in Scripture, it is always bound up with a covenant in some way. To swear a seven, then, entails forming and/or maintaining a family relationship. The Greek term for oath is mysterion, from which we derive the English word ‘mystery.’⁶ Every oath employs a spoken word and an action. For our purposes, we will gloss over most of the actions unless critically important. Each primary covenant oath with God also entails a promise.

The first instance of using a seven to create a family bond is in Genesis 1. God creates the world for six ‘days,’ and then rests on the seventh.

‘Day’ is a misnomer. The Hebrew term Genesis uses is yom.⁷ Yes, the familiar Yom Kippur traditionally means ‘Day of Atonement’ but yom actually means ‘period of time.’ This same word can mean day, week, month, year, decade, century, millennium or epoch. Every English translation of the Bible substitutes the word day when actually it is more appropriate in this case to employ the term epoch. Better still would be to say simply period of time. The inaccurate translation accounts for widespread confusion among Christians who interpret Scripture literally. Creationism starts with this error. Of Jesus, Pope Benedict XVI wrote, …he is freedom from a false slavery to literalism and a guarantee of the solid, realistic truth of the Bible…⁸ Ultimately, it is impossible to be both a Catholic and a Fundamentalist.⁹ Benedict also noted that there is a second, different creation epic in the Book of Jeremiah.¹⁰ To be sure, there is literal truth in Scripture.¹¹ However, this is not the same as the interpretational error of literalism. The literal truth in Genesis 1 is that God created the world in six yoms, or periods of time, and not literally in six days.

The first chapter of Genesis is not literally about how long it took God to create the universe but rather is a theological statement about the establishment of a covenant or family relationship between God and his creation. While it contains historic and scientific information, the Bible is not a history or science text but is a statement of theology.

Science and religion together compatibly explain the world in which we live. Pope Benedict wrote, "Now, more reflective spirits have long been aware that there is no either-or here. We cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God…does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the ‘project’ of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complimentary – rather than mutually exclusive – realities."¹² Pope Pius XII wrote, The Church does not forbid that the theory of evolution be an object of research in so far as it is confined to the investigation of whether the human body is the development of some other body already extant and alive; but the Catholic faith maintains the doctrine of the immediate creation of souls by God.¹³

Some atheists use science as a mask, hiding behind it to lend ‘authority’ to their belief. Curiously, it is atheism rather than religion which is diametrically opposed to science. Because it is logically impossible to prove a negative, it is incontrovertibly impossible to prove that God does not exist. There is no experiment that an atheist can conduct to prove empirically that their belief is valid. Thus they attempt to hijack science and pretend that it agrees with their belief, which is patently absurd. Yet they constantly try to characterize anyone who believes that God exists as stupid, simple minded, quaint and superstitious. This is not real science. In fact, the man credited with being the founder of modern scientific method was Roger Bacon (1214-1294), who was a Franciscan Catholic priest.

To be sure, like creationism, the theory of evolution is flawed. Paleontology demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of new species arose directly following the periodic cataclysms which have afflicted this world over billions of years.¹⁴ Likewise, the overwhelming majority of extinctions occurred as a result of those catastrophes and not because of natural selection; and that the inception of almost all new species occurred in the aftermath of those mass extinctions. Biology shows that it is impossible for the simple cell, the fundamental building block of all organic life, to have evolved. Without any one of its component parts, it cannot function. Darwin himself wrote that absent proof of a transformational species, his theory is false.¹⁵ Over the past 150 years, no one has ever irrefutably identified one. While some scientists treat evolution as fact, it is nothing more than a somewhat inaccurate theory. Science does demonstrate that natural selection occurs but it is not the primary engine of evolution.

There is nothing incompatible between science and religion. Albert Einstein observed, [in the laws of nature] there is revealed such a superior Reason that everything significant which has arisen out of human thought and arrangement is, in comparison with it, the merest empty reflection.¹⁶ Creationists have begun to hide behind the term Intelligent Design but there is a difference between that and their belief. On the other side of the coin, an atheist physicist once told me that when he dissected the first split second of the Big Bang theory, the only logical answer was that there had to be someone or something to start the universe.

Genesis 1 depicts the first covenant unto itself between God and his adopted family.¹⁷ God ‘speaks’ creation into being. Ten times, foreshadowing the Ten Commandments, He ‘says’ what is to exist and creation complies. This is the spoken word of the oath. Then He makes a point of resting on the seventh yom in order to complete a seven deliberately, swearing the shibathaim. Creation itself is His action. The promise attached is that we will enjoy Paradise with Him forever. As Pope Benedict put it, Creation is oriented to the Sabbath, which is the sign of the covenant between God and humankind.¹⁸ Sabbath, of course, comes from shibathaim.

Then we punted it. Genesis 3 depicts the sin of Adam and Eve. We will explore the nature and consequences of Original Sin in Chapter 3. For now, it is sufficient to note that they rejected God and His covenant by means of their sin.

Henceforth God commenced to rebuild the covenant, starting with the same Adam and Eve who rejected the initial one. There is a distinction between the first covenant with all of creation and the second covenant with Adam and Eve. Pope John Paul II wrote, Genesis One is a covenant unto itself.¹⁹ In Genesis 1, God’s covenant is with adam (pronounced ah-DAHM). The second covenant is with adamah. In Hebrew, adam means ‘mankind.’²⁰ The first covenant, therefore, is with all of mankind and the rest of creation. God’s re-establishment of the covenant in Genesis 3, the second covenant, is with adamah.²¹ This Hebrew term literally means ‘of red earth’ but is also and exclusively the proper name Adam. When God began to rebuild the covenant, He did so with and through the most basic building block of society, a married couple. This relationship and its progeny is what we in Western Civilization think of primarily as being a family. We call it the nuclear family. God’s promise attached to this covenant was to send a Savior. Genesis 3 cryptically states this but both Christians and Jews alike have always interpreted it as meaning that.

Thereafter, with each renewal of the covenant God expanded how many people it included. Scripture depicts numerous covenants. However, there are seven primary ones from Creation to Jesus by which God established and then rebuilt His family.

The third covenant was through Noah. It included what we think of as an extended family, which included Noah and his wife, their sons and their sons’ wives. God’s promise was never to destroy the world with a flood again.

The fourth covenant was through Abraham. What in Hebrew terms was a berith is to us a tribe. God’s promise to Abraham was that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in heaven. Given that Jews, Christians and Muslims all look to Abraham as the progenitor of their faiths it is fair to say that God has already fulfilled that promise. There are even scholars who identify Brahma and his consort Saraiwasti in India with Abram and his wife Sarai.²²

With the fifth covenant, God’s family became a nation. Moses led twelve tribes out of Egypt. They together comprised a confederation. Thus it was appropriate to confer a law code upon them. At the heart of the law is love of God.²³ The basis of God’s law of love for his people is the Ten Commandments. God gave them to us not to impose a series of ‘Thou Shalt Not’ commands but as an act of love, to help us to understand how we reject His.

Beyond the Ten Commandments, there was a fuller law code based not on Egyptian but Sumerian law. Moses grew up in the household of Pharaoh. His education was Egyptian, and some of the wording of the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, also known as the Pentateuch, attributed to the authorship of Moses) is Egyptian in character. Yet the code he expounded to the Hebrew nation came primarily from Sumerian law. It reflected the preservation of Hebrew heritage and tradition from Abraham, prior to their migration to Egypt.

Abraham originated from Mesopotamia, most likely in the northwest part of that region. Scripture says that he came from Ur, which archaeologists traditionally identified as being in the southern part of the country. However, recent archaeological evidence points to northwestern Mesopotamia as the real location for Ur. This makes more sense in terms of Scripture as well because Abraham’s father-in-law resided in Haran, which is also in the same vicinity. The laws and traditions of the Torah are those which Abraham brought with him from the land which Sumer no longer governed but whose civilization continued to permeate.

Archaeological evidence demonstrates that the Sumerians migrated into Mesopotamia from the vicinity of the mountains of Ararat.²⁴ This region is the traditional repository of Noah’s Ark. The nearby territory around Lake Van in what is now the border area between Turkey and Iran. Egyptologist and archaeologist David Rohl identified that place as the location for the historic Garden of Eden.²⁵

A subtle example of the application of Sumerian law occurs in Genesis 12. There Abraham cryptically went on a journey from place to place without explanation. In Sumerian law, if a person walked off the boundaries of a piece of property then they created a claim to that land. If no one disputed the claim then the land legally became theirs. What Abraham was doing was marching off the boundaries to the Promised Land in Canaan. Since Canaanites observed their own law, they failed to recognize the significance of what he did. In Abraham’s mind, at least, the land belonged to him. Because Arabs trace lineage back to Abraham through Ishmael, both they and Israelis today claim a right to the Holy Land from Abraham’s actions in Genesis 12. To Moses, God’s promise is this same Promised Land.

The sixth covenant was through David. God promised David that he would become the master of many nations and that the Messiah would come from his lineage. Between David and Solomon, Israel became an empire. Beginning with Joshua’s invasion of Canaan, the Hebrews gradually conquered the land during the next two hundred years or so. David completed the conquest with the capture of Jerusalem and subjugated all of the peoples on the borders of their land. Solomon entered into more than 600 marriages to cement alliances with other nations.

While many scholars dwell on the mysterious Queen of Sheba, more intriguing was Solomon’s marriage to the daughter of the King of Tyre. This city-state was part of the Phoenician trading empire. They founded Carthage and established outposts down both the eastern and western coasts of Africa. DNA evidence proves that the rare genetic trait of the Levite tribe of Hebrews resides in the blood of black Africans in the southern part of that continent, in the region which still today produces an abundance of gold and diamonds, and perhaps then served as the legendary site of King Solomon’s Mines. The King of Tyre wanted the alliance in order to acquire a port facility on the Red Sea. Solomon controlled the city of Eilat, known later as Aqaba.

The Phoenician Empire extended well beyond the Mediterranean Basin. They were trading partners with the Celts all along the western coast of Europe. They traded for tin in Cornwall, located in the southwest corner of what is now England. The archaeologically disturbed site at America’s Stonehenge in New Hampshire may have been a Celtic settlement but includes a Phoenician inscription. They may have established an outpost in the upper Mississippi Valley to acquire copper from the ancient mining district around Lake Superior. (Copper and tin alloyed together makes bronze, which fueled the Bronze Age.) While many people think that the famous Bimini Road is evidence of Atlantis, the layout is identical to Phoenician port facilities in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. A Phoenician shipwreck lies off the coast of Patagonia in Argentina, along the eastern coast of South America. Inscriptions suggest that their trading vessels probably visited India, Australia and New Zealand. So secretive were the Phoenicians about their trade empire that when a foreign ship followed one of theirs into the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar, the captain of the Phoenician craft deliberately ran his ship aground to prevent anyone else from discovering where they went.

Prior to their association with Israel, the Phoenicians worshipped the same demonic cult as the Canaanites, which the Celts in turn borrowed from the Phoenicians. However, a Phoenician inscription found in Ohio delineates the Ten Commandments.²⁶ Another in Colorado asserts that El (which in Semitic tongues means ‘lord’) and Yah (short for Yahweh; more about this in Chapter 2) is the one God and should be the only one worshipped.²⁷ This is indicative of the impact which Solomon’s marriage to the daughter of the King of Tyre had on the Phoenician culture.

Simply put, for a brief time Israel in combination with Tyre may well have been the most powerful empire on earth. No history textbook would dare to say this since it is contrary to the conventional view. Yet, in 1977 the modernization of the radiocarbon-14 dating method proved that cultures in Western Europe were at least as old as those in the Near East.²⁸ This exploded the traditional Cradle of Civilization theory, although it still appears in standard school textbooks on history.

The seventh and final expansion of the covenant is through Jesus. The only time that He uses the word covenant in the Gospels is during the Last Supper. In instituting the Eucharist, He told the apostles, This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the covenant, which shall be shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins. On Holy Thursday, His institution of the Eucharist pronounced the spoken word of the oath which expanded the covenant to include everyone. On Good Friday, He enacted the oath with His death on the cross, the physical action in conjunction with the spoken part from the previous night. On Easter morning, He fulfilled the new covenant with His resurrection. After His resurrection, Jesus instructed the apostles to go and teach all nations.²⁹ During His ministry, He said that His message was first for the Jews and then for everyone else.³⁰ This clearly demonstrates His purpose to include all people in His covenant.

Jesus’ oath completed a set of seven oaths. His oath, then, is an oath of oaths. More precisely, it is the Oath of Oaths. The Triduum (Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday) is the quintessential moment in and out of all time. His oath, His sacrifice, His death, His resurrection exists once and for all. Everyone may now accept His covenant and become members of the family of God. Outside of time as we know it, His death and resurrection exist continuously. There is an obvious logic and elegant beauty in the Triduum. The entire Old Testament culminates in this moment. All that has followed depends upon it, and there is no need for further covenants.

Others have offered variations on this theme, which we know as Salvation History. In 1894, E.W. Bullinger identified seven primary covenants in the Old Testament.³¹ Together with that of Jesus, his count made eight. More recently, Scott Hahn presented six total covenants.³² He fuses the first two from my list together as one covenant. My organization of them seems to fit best, though, since it delineates seven, which culminates in Jesus.

Doctor Hahn is a man of immense humility. Originally a Presbyterian theologian, he was determined to follow the evidence to the truth and to follow the truth to wherever it led him. He converted to Catholicism and is now a full professor at Franciscan University at Steubenville.

My son took several courses from Doctor Hahn while studying there. This gave me the opportunity to conduct a running conversation with Doctor Hahn through my son as a conduit. It is uncertain to me whether Doctor Hahn was aware that he was interacting with me or simply conversing with my son. However, it did provide us with the chance to exchange ideas. Subsequently, my son received the Sacred Theological Doctorate, summa cum laude, along with the Licentiate in Sacred Theology, magna cum laude.

As a result of our interaction, Doctor Hahn changed his stance from his original doctoral dissertation. I pointed out, owing to