Old Testament Revelation

EWTN Global Catholic Radio and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Is to say, one who doubts the possibility of ever discovering truth, these attitudes are made, and they are made less by the way one thinks than by the way one lives. If we do not live as we think, we soon begin to think as we live. We suit our philosophy to our actions, and that is bad. Let me tell you the story of an atheist in London, England. I used to do considerable work in St. Patrick's Parish in Soho Square in that city. One Sunday morning, I came into the front of the church to read Mass, and I found a young lady standing in front of the communion rail, haranguing a congregation. She was saying to the congregation, there is no God. There is too much evil in the world. Reason cannot transcend sense. It is impossible to conclude to his existence. Every night she said, I go out to Hyde Park. I talk against God. I circulate England, Scotland, and Wales with pamphlets denouncing a belief in the existence of God. And on and on she went. By that time, I was up to the communion rail. I said to her, young lady, I am very happy to hear that you say you believe in the existence of God. She said, you silly fool, I don't. I said, I understood you to say just the contrary. Suppose I said that I went out every night to Hyde Park and talked against twenty footed ghosts and ten centaurs. Suppose I circulated England, Scotland, and Wales denouncing a belief in these ghosts and in their centaurs. What would happen to me? She said you would be crazy. They would lock you up. Well I said, do you not put God in exactly the same category as these fantasies of the imagination, namely ghosts and centaurs? Why then would I be crazy attacking ghosts and centaurs and you are not crazy attacking God? She said, I don't know, why? I said because when I attack these phantoms of the imagination, I am attacking something that is unreal. But when you attack God, you are attacking something just as real as the thrust of a sword or an embrace. You think I said that we would have any such thing in the world as prohibition unless there was something to prohibit? Could there ever be anti-cigarette laws unless there were cigarettes? How can there be atheism unless there is something to atheate? She said, I hate you. Well I said, now you have given the answer. Atheism is not a doctrine, it is a cry of wrath. There are indeed two kinds of atheists. There are the simple persons who are read a smattering of science and they conclude probably that there is no God, but the other type of atheist is that type that might be called militant, such as the communists. They really do not deny the existence of God. They challenge God. It is the very reality of God that saves them from insanity. It is the reality of God that gives them a real object against which they may dent their hate. Now after discussing the attitudes that any soul may take in the face of proofs, we will investigate the knowledge of God. First of all, how does God know? Well God does not know the way we know. We know by looking at things. God knows by looking at himself. We can get a faint idea of the way God knows from an architect. Before an architect puts up a building, he can tell you if he is the designer, the size of the building, its dimensions, the location of each room, its height, the number of elevators it will have, and so forth. How does he know all of this before the building is built? Because he is the designer of the becoming of the building. Now God is a cause, too, but God is not just a cause of the becoming of the universe, he is the cause of the very being of the universe, and just as an architect needs only look into his own mind to understand something of the nature of that which he has designed, as a poet knows his verses in his own mind, so God knows all things by looking at himself. He does not need to wait for you to turn a corner before he knows that you're doing so. He does not see little boys putting their fingers into the cookie jar and conclude they are stealing. Everything is naked and open to the eyes of God. For example, he does not just look down at a debutante at the coming out party and then be on tender hooks for the next five years wondering if she's going to find a man. There is no future in God, there is no past in God, there is only the present. We can get a faint idea of what this knowledge is from an example of this kind. Suppose you walked through a cemetery in which you saw a succession of gravestones belonging to the same family. As you walked along slowly you saw written on the first gravestone the inscription Ezekiel Hingenbottom, died 1938. Then you walked a little further and you saw another tombstone reading Hiram Hingenbottom, died 1903. A few steps more, Nahum Hingenbottom, died in 1883. And then still further on, Reginald Hingenbottom, died in 1861. These tombstones would indicate a succession of events that happened in space and time. But now suppose you flew over that cemetery in a plane, then you would see all at once. And that is how history must look to one who is outside of time. Another example may make clear the knowledge of God. Imagine you were looking at a motion picture reel. This motion picture reel has the full story or drama written on every single inch of it. Suppose the motion picture reel were conscious. If it were, it would know the whole story. But if you and I were to know the whole story, we would have to wait until that screen, or rather that film, was unrolled upon the screen. We would only know successively what the reel knows all at once. And that is the way it is with the knowledge of God. Now coming a little more closer to that knowledge. Because God knows all things and because he is creator, it follows that every single thing in the world was made according to an idea or a pattern existing in the divine mind. Look round about you, you see a bridge, a statue, a painting, a building. Before any of these things began to be, they existed in the mind of the one who designed or planned them. In like manner, there is not a tree, a flower, a bird, an insect in the world that does not in some way correspond to an idea existing in the divine mind. The pattern of them has been wrapped up as it were in matter. What our knowledge does, what science does, is to unravel and unwrap as it were this matter in order to rediscover the ideas of God. And it's because God put his ideas or patterns in things that we are assured of the rationality and purposiveness of the cosmos. It is that that makes science possible. If there were no human minds in the universe, if there were no angelic minds, things would still be true because they corresponded with the idea existing in the mind of God. Naturally we cannot bring up a subject like the knowledge of God without meeting certain difficulties. One of the most obvious ones is, well if God knows all things, he knows then what is going to happen to every single soul in the world. He knows for example whether I am going to be saved or I am going to be lost. Therefore I am predetermined. Well that was an argument that was used a few centuries ago and as a matter of fact it was part of the philosophy of eastern peoples. Now in order to understand the knowledge of God you must make a distinction between foreknowledge and predetermination. The two are not identical. God indeed does foreknow everything but he does not predetermine us independently of our will and our merits. Let's suppose that you knew the stock market very well and because of your superior knowledge of business conditions you said that such and such a stock within six months would be selling ten points higher than it is now. Suppose six months later it actually sold ten points higher. Would you have predetermined and caused it to be ten points higher? Although you foreknew it. There were other influences whether or not besides your superior knowledge. To make it still more concrete, in the early colonial days of this country a farmer set out for the town to make some purchases. He had gone by the short distance and he came back and he told his wife he had forgotten his gun. His wife was a perfectly good determinist and his wife argued this way. Either you are predestined to be shot by the Indians or you are not predestined to be shot by the Indians. If you are predestined to be shot by the Indians, the gun will do you no good. If you are not predestined to be shot by the Indians, you will not need your gun. But the husband said suppose I am predestined to be shot by the Indians on condition I do not have my gun. And in like manner God knows all things but he still leaves us with freedom. How can God influence you and still leave you free? Well consider various kinds of influences. First turn a key in the door. There is the impact of something material on something material and the result is the opening of a door. That is one kind of influence. The influence of a material thing on another material thing. But there is still another kind of influence. In the springtime you plant a seed in the garden. The sun, the moisture, the atmosphere, the chemicals in the earth all begin to use an influence upon that seed. It certainly is not the same kind of action as turning a piece of steel in a lock. There are tremendous capacities for growth in that seed. And what most awakens the seed to growth is something invisible, namely the sun. Now go a stage higher. Consider the case of a father talking to his son, trying to influence him for example to become a doctor. What actually influences the son is some invisible truth as well as the deep love of the father for the son and of the son for the father. What love actually does is to bring out in the son a free act. The son is not obliged to do exactly what his father wants. He is free to do the contrary. The truth and love have so moved him that he regards what he does as the very perfection of his personality. Later on he may say, I owe everything I have to that conversation I had with my father. I really began to discover my true self. Now in some such mysterious way as this, God works upon your soul. He does not work like a key in a lock. He works less visibly than a father on his son. But there are the same mysterious words, I and you. Because God is the very embodiment of love, his love inspires you to be what you were meant to be. A free person in the highest sense of the word. The more you are led by God's love, the more you become yourself. And it is all done without ever losing your freedom. That still leaves another great problem, namely the problem of evil. You may ask, if God is power and love, why does he create this kind of world and why does he permit evil? We are not going to give here a complete explanation of evil, and a complete explanation of evil cannot be given here below. We will only just give certain indications of why it is possible. Let us begin with the question, why God made this kind of world. Most realize that this is not the only kind of a world that God could have made. He might have made 10,000 other kinds of worlds in which there would be no pain and no struggle and no sacrifice. But this is the best possible kind of world that God could have made for the purpose that he had in mind. Notice the distinction we are making. For example, a little boy says to his father, who is a distinguished architect, I want you to build me a birdhouse. The architect designs a birdhouse. It is not the best house that that skilled father can design, but it may be the very best house that the architect could design for the purpose that he had in mind, namely to build a house for sparrows. Now that brings us to this other question. What purpose now did God have in mind in making this world? The answer is that God intended to build a moral universe. He willed from all eternity to build a stage on which characters would emerge. He might have made a world without morality, without virtue, without character. He might have made a world in which each and every one of us would have sprouted goodness with the same necessity, for example, that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. But he chose not to make that kind of a world, not to make a world in which we would be good as fire is hot and ice is cold. He willed to make a moral universe in order that by the right use of the gift of freedom, characters might emerge. What does God care for things piled into an infinity of space, even though they be diamonds? For if all the orbits of heaven were so many jewels glittering as the sun, what would their external but undisturbed balance mean to him in comparison with a single character which could take hold of the tangled skeins of a seemingly erect and ruined life and weave out of them the beautiful tapestry of safeness and wholeness? The choice before God in creating the world, therefore, lay between creating a purely mechanical universe teepled by mere automaton machines or creating a spiritual universe in which there would be a choice of good and evil. All right, granted then that God chose to make a moral universe in which there would be character. What was the condition of such a universe? He had to make us free. That is to say, he had to endow us with the power to say yes and no and to be captains of our own fate and destiny. Morality implies responsibility and duty, but these can exist only on condition of freedom. Humans have no morals because they are not free. We do not condemn ice because it is melted by heat. Praise and blame can be bestowed only on those who are masters of their own will. It is only because you, for example, have the possibility of saying no that there's so much charm in your character when you say yes. Take the quality of freedom away from anyone and it is no more possible for him to be virtuous than it is for the blade of grass which he treads beneath his feet. Take freedom away from life and there would be no more reason to honor the fortitude of martyrs than there would be, for example, oh, to honor the flames which kindle their faggots. Is it, therefore, any impeachment of God that he chose not to reign over an empire of chemicals? If God has deliberately chosen a kind of empire not to be ruled by force but by freedom, and if we find that his subjects are able to act against his will as stars and atoms cannot, does this not prove that he has possibly given to those human beings the chance of breaking allegiance in order that there might be meaning and purpose in that allegiance when they freely chose to give it? Here we have, then, a mere suggestion as to the possibility of evil. It's bound up with the freedom of man. Man who is free to love is free to hate. He who is free to obey is free to rebel. Virtue in its concrete order is possible only in those spheres in which it is possibly to be vicious. A man can be a saint only in a church in which it is possible to be a devil. You say, well, if I were God, I would destroy evil. Well, if you did that, you would destroy human freedom. God will not destroy freedom. If we do not want any dictators on this earth, certainly we do not want any dictators in the kingdom of heaven. And those, therefore, who would blame God for allowing man freedom to go on hindering and thwarting his work are like those who, seeing blots and smudges and errors in a student's notebook, would condemn the teacher for not snatching away the book and doing the copy himself. Just as the object of the teacher is sound education and not the production of neat and well-written copy books, so the object of God is the development of souls and not the production of biological entities. And you say, well, if God knew I would sin, why did he make me? God did not make any of us the sinners. We make ourselves. In that sense, we are creators. Therefore, the greatest gift of God to man's heart of grace is the gift of human freedom and the power to love him in return. Kasha. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the U.S., call 818-331-3549. And please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio.