God created man to share in his own blessed life. It is love which compels one to share. In revelation, by which God addresses and gives himself to man, and the faith in which man responds to God, man has union with God; the desire for God is written in the human heart.
When we had fallen away, God sent his Son to teach us and to heal us In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life. Christ fulfilled the hidden oracles of the prophets and brought to completion the Jewish faith in the most unexpected way. He was rejected by the Jews but it is through his death we have union with God and forgiveness of sins.
Uniting His cross to ours takes away the "coating" we get on our hearts caused by sin and selfishness. Only a cross will remove this coating. Suffering given to God allows us to love again. It can reinforce belief in God when one has gotten lax in their faith. This proves sin, evil, and love are all spiritual forces. When we partake of the body and blood of Christ, it nourishes our faith, takes away our sins, and gives us communion with God. Only by living the Gospels does man have a real connection to God that reaches to the center of his heart. They give man a feeling of love and joy and makes him feel complete like nothing else does. Jesus is a life force whose words have actual power. When you take the path of worldly distractions or evils, you can feel how it kills the Holy Spirit within you, how it kills love. Then it takes a cross and sacrifice to get it back. This is not something psychological. Following God's law is life-giving, not following it takes away it's life-giving feeling.
Only a Deity that is love could have created the personality of a cat or dog. One gets that love from following God's commandments. Something had to have been here all along and it was God. It is fascinating the love that created a cat is found by practicing what the Gospel teaches and that sin and selfishness takes that love away. We love because we were made in His image. Think of a rose. In fact, think of all of God’s flowers. They are exquisite masterpieces that only a loving God could make. Not only are they beautiful, but they give us honey, which is another gift from God. As Simone Weil said: “In everything that gives us the pure, authentic feeling of beauty, there really is the presence of God. There is, as it were, an incarnation of God in the world, and it is indicated by beauty.” You experience God when you enjoy his creations. Think too, of an orange. It is a beautiful, vibrant color. It is refreshingly delicious, and it is very intricately made. It is a gift from God and a reason to believe. When enjoying an orange, one should marvel at the sun which is a separate entity from the earth but allows the seeds that become the orange to grow, along with water and soil. God had the sun be at a precise distance from the earth so it could make things grow.
The Catholic faith has an intricate economy of grace and fullness of belief that other Christian religions don’t seem to have. But it can miss out a little on teaching how to have a more personal relationship with Christ as our Lord and Savior that other Christian denominations do. But I found the Catholic faith to have a more fullness in expressing God in its worship and beliefs. Some Christian religions fault the Catholics for having Baptism at birth but Catholics every year at Easter reaffirm their baptismal promises that their parents made for them. They also fault them for the Eucharist, but Jesus said: This is my body. This is my blood. God wanted us to have communion with him through the Eucharist. His body nourishes us and his blood, which ratified the predicted last and final covenant, takes away our sins and is life giving.
Other religions that are not Christian and aetheists find fault with Christ’s miracles, saying that they didn’t occur. One argument they give is the overt miracles would have stopped the development of the soul because it could no longer be tested. By being tested, that is how the soul develops and expands love. They argue that if God absolutely manifested himself, people would become like spiritual robots and couldn’t develop love the right way. But the miracles might have been needed for the birth of the Church. To prove Christ was divine. Who made creation, after all, would have the power to alter it. He unites us to God as love in the center of our hearts.
We must have freedom to choose love for love to be effective. This means God has to be hidden to some degree for our salvation to be worked out. We need free will to develop love but free will can also lead to sin and alienation from God. If the miracles were added, how Christ fulfilled the obscure ways in the Old Testament in which he was predicted and how he taught love and took sin away when we unite our cross to His, proves it is undeniable the Creator came to teach his people love and to take away their sins. All throughout the Old Testament in obscure ways, Christ was predicted. It is interesting, that the Creator of Life, would teach us His Word that enlivens life, while behavior that is not life giving, takes away His life in us. When God sends us a cross, it allows us to love better and believe again more fully. Jesus gives us freedom. Freedom from sin and freedom from those psychological defects that interfere with love and really being psychologically free. You need to be free to truly love.
The earth itself allows us to grow spiritually by allowing us to develop virtue and love. The physical allows the spiritual to develop. No other environment but the Earth would allow us to grow spiritually and be tested. Interaction with our fellow man and choosing to do good and be responsible by being challenged by life on Earth allows us to develop character and discipline which can develop into virtue which develops into love. It is interesting, as spiritual beings, that virtue develops into love and vice takes away our ability to love, until we suffer a cross, repent, and sacrifice. Then we love again and believe more fully again because the vice took away love from our soul clouding our relationship with God. Because we are spiritual beings, we only have true love and have true joy by uniting our cross to Christ's and by living out the Gospel. Because we are spiritual beings, only by doing what is right and true gives us the right kind of joy and love.
On the Earth, there is suffering, but suffering allows someone else to be tested for compassion. It is a result of free will which is necessary to be tested and to develop love. Because we are spiritual beings, suffering united to God purifies and turns into love. It can remove the poisons of the world (ego, selfishness, sin) so that we can have compassion. Suffering makes one realize what is important in life. It can allow us to love better, to understand better, to mature, and to become disciplined. Suffering can transform. It can actually make one feel reborn. Suffering allows the divine to penetrate into what is human when uniting it to Jesus’ suffering on the cross. It is amazing that sometimes only suffering united to Christ's cross can make you really love again. This is because we are spiritual beings. And it also allows you to see the truths St. Paul taught in his letters that had to have been revealed to him by Christ. But without a cross you really can't understand them.
As Jerry Ryan in Spiritual Life magazine said: “It is only when we are confronted with an ambiguous and disconcerting reality that authentic faith can develop.” Faith is our acceptance of the destruction which God affects in us in order to conform us to God. This allows us to believe and to have true love and joy. Those who do evil do not love rightly again unless they are sorry and confess their sins and God sends them a cross. They did not lose God and the ability to love because of conscience. For most people anymore, conscience tells people that it is right to do something wrong to someone because of faults they find with that person. That it is right to be selfish. Faith dies without giving love. Since God is love, love is the only way you can know him. Faith and love you cannot separate. One is not true without the other. Faith allows death to be an instrument for man’s transformation and fulfillment. Without knowing one would die, man would not develop spiritually. Like the silkworm who dies and then becomes a butterfly, we are transformed when we die too, and if we have loved, we unite to the God who is love. Something had to have been here forever and it was God. It could not have been anything but a God that guided creation and made our extremely complex bodies with sight, hearing, speech, and emotions, so we spiritual beings could learn to love and be tested. We were made in God’s image but we are fallen due to pride. Because we are spiritual beings, we don’t find what we subconsciously crave with prestige and wealth. That craving is only filled by communion, by following the Scriptures, by purification (a cross and fasting) and by sacrifice. That proves we are spiritual beings. You only feel the right kind of love and the right kind of joy by doing what's right and true because of this. Consider people who feel important.The feelings people actual experience aren't that great but they are too busy thinking they are important to realize it.They probably have never known something better. Feeling egotistical causes you to lose access to your center which is God. You lose the ability to love. Doesn't that prove hat there is a higher purpose in life? Theoretically, you'd think being important would be the most important thing to achieve in life. That it would be life's highest pinacle. Then why doesn't it bring honest love and honest joy unless we are spiritual beings? Why does allowing our passions to dictate our behavior which cause our selfishness result in unhappiness and the loss of the ability to really feel love and joy unless we are wired by the Creator to only feel that way when we give unselfishly to others and love Him?
Throughout the Old Testament, in many obscure ways, Christ was predicted. Those predictions were fulfilled in a definitive manner. One such prediction was when God had asked Abraham to sacrifice his son to prove Abraham loved God above all else. While they were going to the place God told Abraham to do it, his son Isaac asked him where the lamb for the sacrifice was. Abraham told his son, "God will provide one." God stayed Abraham's hand from carrying out the sacrifice of his son and instead Abraham sacrificed a ram. Later, lambs were used as a sacrifice as a sin offering or a fellowship offering and John the Baptist called Christ "The Lamb of God." God provided the sacrifice by sending his Son to die for us. He died because he told the Truth. Before the Exodus, the blood of lambs were sprinkled on the doorposts of the Israeli houses in Egypt to ward away death. As the Son of God, Christ's sacrifice is offered, and when we unite our cross to his, it takes away sin which is spiritual death because that is the death of love. Then by following the Gospels we truly love. His life and death and resurrection that enabled us to be united to Him was the new, predicted covenant ratified by his blood.
There is a few other things I would like to add that right now I do not know how to incorporate into the main body of this essay:
I mean do the Satanists profess that the Devil will be victorious in the afterlife? How? He will be victorious on earth for a time, but his spirit is incompatable with the spirit of love which is heaven so he can never gain entry there to try to destroy it. He never created anything.
Also, the Jews profess they are the Chosen Race. Yes. They are. They are the chosen race which God used to bring salvation to the world through Jesus Christ. Those of us who God said are his people, are those who profess he is their God.
EWTN Catholic Broadcasting Station: The Spendour of the Truth
New City Press
