Wednesday, October 26, 2016

10-Minute Catechism : Which God do Christians believe in? (Lesson 1)



10-Minute Catechism
Lesson 1 – Which God do Christians worship? 

Memory Verse:
In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. (Hebrews 1:1-2 RSV-CE)

                A lot of people today say that they believe in God. A lot of those people who believe in God would also call themselves “Christians” in the general sense of meaning that they (occasionally) go to Church and claim to have a personal relationship with God. It’s worth asking, though, whether most of these people actually have a sense for who God is, or if they’re simply defining God as a sort of generic, benevolent Deity that they occasionally feel the need to ask for help from. In fact, Christians, if they’re going to be called Christians at all, believe in a very specific God with a specific personality and history.
                So who is this God? Well, saying that He is THE God might be true, but it’s also pretty unhelpful. Imagine you were talking to a friend about her new boyfriend. Let’s call the new boyfriend “John Doe”. If you asked, “Who is John Doe?” and she answered, “Well, he is THE John Doe!” she might have technically answered the question, but she really didn’t provide any useful information. Much more helpful, given the pervasive nature of social media, would be for the two of you to creep his Facebook timeline until you got a sense of the guy.
                Well, the same is true with the Christian God. Christians believe that God has a history, like your friend’s creepy bf John Doe, and it’s posted up all over the Internet….and in bookshops and hotel rooms everywhere. It’s found in an amazing collection of books called the Bible. And it tells a story of God slowly revealing himself to people until, finally, He comes himself to Earth to make everything plain.
                You see, according to the Bible, God is like a really good high school math teacher. The teacher doesn’t walk into class on the first day of ninth grade and say, “Ok. Let’s learn everything about Calculus.” No. Instead God revealed Himself step by step. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (the big book that contains all of the Catholic Church’s teachings) identifies three major stages of God’s relationship with people:

  1. Creation – God creates the world and everything in it, including the first people (Adam and Eve). At this point, God’s main focus is on teaching people to care for everything that He created. Man messes that up and God has to start over with Noah.  You can read about this in the first half of the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. 
  2.  Election – God chooses a specific group of people, the Hebrews, by calling Abraham, a man who lived in ancient Mesopotamia, to leave his home and move into the land that we now call Israel or Palestine. Abraham follows God’s call and so also chooses God in return. Through the law that he gives the Hebrews, he teaches the world what holiness really means.
  3.   Incarnation – God decides to go for the last stage of his revelation. He comes to Earth himself in the person of Jesus Christ around two thousand years ago, who was born and raised from the Hebrew people. The whole New Testament is about Jesus, but the basic story is contained in the first four books of the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

         At each stage, God increases the level of intimacy with humanity. He goes from choosing a species (humans), to choosing a people (the Hebrews), to choosing a person (Jesus Christ), so that each time he comes closer to forming a deep, personal relationship with us. That final person, Jesus Christ, has a history, a past, and even a character that we can really connect with. It follows that to know God, we need to focus on studying this history by reading what is written down about him in the Holy Bible. 

Prayer: Heavenly Father, as we begin our study of your Holy Scriptures, help us to understand what you expect of those whom you have chosen for yourself. Give us a willingness to learn with humility, eagerness, and prudence, so that we may always make You the object of our study, and not our own prejudices and misconceptions. We ask this through the same Christ our Lord. Amen. 
  
Additional Readings:
Catechism of the Catholic Church 51-67
Genesis 1:1-2:2
Genesis 22:1-18
Luke 1:26-36; 2:1-21

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