Catechism 101: Belief - Week 3

0:11 Let's begin with a prayer. In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory now and forever. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Okay, good. So, for the last couple weeks, I've been giving background information on the creed. I talked about the Aryan heresy that kind of gave rise to this. It was the motive for it. Um Aras who said that

0:58 Jesus is not God. The bishops got together around the world from around the world. They got together in Nika in the year 325 to speak about this matter. They heard out Aras rejected his teaching that Jesus is not God since the scriptures attest to his divinity. And since the uh church has always believed that he is God, they wrote the first part of the Nyine creed. Okay, it wasn't finished until the next council, Constantinople, the 1, in the year 381. But and then last week we talked about the trinity. And the reason why I wanted to do that and really get into that, which I know that's a very confusing topic. I mean, even me talking about it, I'm confused while I'm talking. No one really understands the Trinity fully.

1:45 Obviously, you'd have to be God to do that. Um, so we get shadows. When we go to heaven, we'll know a lot more and it'll be a lot more pleasing. Um, but I wanted to talk about the Trinity because the creed is structured by the Trinity. The first part is about the father. The middle part, the kind of meat of it is about the son and his becoming man. And then the last part is about I believe in the holy spirit, the spirit of truth. That part about the holy spirit. So the structure of the creed is the trinity. Interesting point of fact is the creed grows out of the sacraments. Okay.

2:33 The Apostles Creed, which is the shorter one, which you would recognize from the beginning of the rosary. It's the much shorter one. That is a kind of putting together the questions that the priest would ask the catechuman, the person that is getting trained for baptism. And at baptism, you guys would recognize this if you've been to a baptismal uh liturgy, the priest asks the person that's getting baptized or their godp parentent if they're an infant. Do you believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth? Yes, I believe. Do you believe in Jesus Christ who was born and suffered for our salvation? Yes, I believe. And so on. Do you believe in the Holy Spirit in the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints? That's the creed. It's just taking a part by part and saying, do you believe these things? And eventually

3:19 it's just kind of compiled all together and it becomes the apostles creed. And in Isaiah it kind of takes that and fleshes it out. Just adds a lot to it um to further give this larger formula summary of what the what the faith is of what we believe as Christians. Okay. So today I want to get into the creed proper and it begins with the words in Latin it's credo I believe and then we say which is uh we believe okay in the eastern churches we say we believe in the plural in the in the Roman church they say kredo I believe okay

4:07 but I want to start with those words those are really important words we believe in one god uh the Father Almighty and so on and so forth. Okay. Why doesn't it speak more confidently like I know that one God exists? I know that one God exists the way that I know that this world exists the way that I know that I exist. The way that I know that you exist. I know that one God exists the way that I know fruit comes from trees. Why don't we say it like that with more confidence rather than saying I believe because believe belief kind of has that subjective feeling to

4:52 it like it's a personal thing. When people ask you what do you believe, they're talking about a personal matter. But that's today's world. That's how we take belief in today's world. In today's world, when somebody says, "I believe something," it's almost the same as saying, "My personal opinion on this matter is X, Y, and Z." That's not the case so much in the ancient world and it's certainly not what the church means by belief. What does the church mean by belief? There are a lot of great saints that talk about this. St. Augustine talks about this a lot. Uh St. John Henry Newman who was recently made a doctor of the church and actually the doctor of

5:38 friendship. Uh St. John Henry Newman has done wonderful work on this where he talks about different levels of knowledge. Okay, you can know something by experience. Let's say by it's we can call it empirical knowledge. This is the way that the modern sciences do things. I know that something is true when I can test it under a microscope and so on and so forth. I can prove it materially. Okay. But knowledge is much more extensive than that. We wouldn't be able to function very well if all we knew if if all we can be confident in is what we

6:26 know materially. We wouldn't be because we probably wouldn't get out of the house. We would never get on the plane. We don't know what the intentions of the pilot is or the intentions of the pilot are. We don't know the drivers that are out when we're driving, what their intentions are, whether or not they're sober, for example, whether or not they're in the right state of mind to be operating a very dangerous vehicle. We don't know these things. We just kind of take it on faith that, hey, I'm going to go out and drive and I'm pretty confident that things are going to go okay. I can't be sure. I can't measure everybody that's going

7:12 to go out driving that day within a uh, you know, within a 10 mile vicinity of myself to know whether or not things are going to be safe for me. I don't know that, but we hope they are. We're confident on some level that they'll be okay. And so we get into the car and we drive. That's kind of an act of faith. We don't know what the intentions of the pilot is. When we get on a plane and we fly out to Michigan or we fly out to the Europe or something like this, we don't know that he has the intention of reaching that place, but we can be pretty confident. And we're going off confidence. We're going off hope and

7:57 belief that the system is going to work well. That's a different level of knowledge than empirical knowledge that we can test things to be true on a microscopic level through the scientific method. Even more so with things of God. And I'll give you an analogy by way of um relationship. A husband and a wife, a brother and a sister, a father and his son, a whatever, any kind of relationship, friends, we'll take husband and wife. You don't know that your husband or your

8:45 wife loves you. You have to believe it. The reason why you don't know that is because you can't take their heart, what's in their heart. You can't take that and measure it under a microscope. You can't prove it. And if you require proof to know with certainty and without any doubt whatsoever by empirical knowledge by being able to test and measure it, if you require that level of scrutiny for the love of your uh husband or wife, you're going to get yourself in a lot of trouble. It's not going to work very well. That's going to be a very bumpy relationship cuz you can get your wife flowers, you can get your wife candy, you can take your wife out on dates, you

9:31 can take her out on dates every single day and if she doubts your love for her, it doesn't matter how much you do. And same thing vice versa. Husband can do the same. At some point, there has to be belief. There has to be a I don't know for sure but I believe that this person is true in what they're saying because I trust the person in what they're saying. That's belief in this regard and it is a form of knowledge. It's a form of knowledge that is different from empirical knowledge that we can test things under a microscope and use a scientific method to know whether whether a thing is how a thing operates, how it functions, what its nature is.

10:18 This is a different form of knowledge. This is knowledge that is based on belief in the goodness and the trustworthiness of another person. That's what we mean when we say we believe in one God, the Father Almighty, and the rest of it. When I say when we say we believe in God, we're not just saying we believe that God exists. That's at the very basis of it. And it's true. We believe that God exists, but we're saying a lot more. We're saying we believe him. We believe in what he's shown us. We believe in what he's taught us. We believe in what he says. because we trust him. So do you see how in this regard belief

11:05 is born out of a relationship? I believe in someone when I know them, when I when I have a relationship with them, when there's an intimacy between me and that person, when there is a uh when there's time spent with that person, which is why prayer, for example, is so important for true faith. And none of this contradicts knowledge in the sense of empirical knowledge, like I can test things to be true and I can prove it by the scientific method. It doesn't go against that. It's just on a higher level. It's just a higher form. It's a different kind of thing. So when we say we believe in God, we're not just saying we believe that God exists. We're saying we believe in

11:51 God and everything that he says to be true because we trust him as such. And then to go on and say we believe in one God. That's a major statement, especially in the ancient world. To say that we believe in one god in the ancient world is a major statement and it's very countercultural in relation to the rest of the world because especially at that time the rest of the world was you know as you know pagan they believed in many gods in the Roman Empire. They had these many gods. You know, the empire had its own various uh towns and cities and families even down to the family. They had their own gods. To say that we believe in one god means

12:37 a rejection of the other gods. It necess necessitates exclus exclusive belief in one this one god. Now I do want to say this. There are certain things we can know and then certain things that we can't know and that we must believe. Okay. The things that we can know about God is that he exists. That's the main one. We can know that God exists not because we can test him under a microscope obviously, but we can know that he exists because it's kind of obvious. I'm going to I'm going to give you the argument that the catechism gives and that the church in her tradition gives. Okay, we can know that God exists based on two things. Two

13:25 things mainly. We can get into St. Thomas Aquinus's five ways of knowing God. That's they're very good, but um I don't want to bore you with the whole argument. And then I don't want to truncate it either cuz that's not fair to St. Thomas and that's not somebody I want to be unfair to. So, uh I'll tell you what the catechism says. We can know that God exists based on two things. The world and the human person. Okay? The world. When you look around the world and you look at its beauty, okay? You look at how complex it is and it's extraordinarily complex, right? I mean, just do like, you know, astronomy 101 or biology. Well, no, biology is going to get into humanity,

14:11 but ecology. Do anything that studies the natural world. You'll realize it's extraordin Discovery Channel. you'll realize that it's extraordinarily complex. There's so many parts, so many different parts, so many distinct parts, so many moving parts, and yet it all seems to work in this fashion where everything kind of works together. Everything kind of supports everything else. Like you realize, believe it or not, we need spiders. I'm sorry to tell you guys, but somehow we need spiders. Okay? They're gross and they're awful things, but we need them. Okay? Okay. It's part of the way that God created the world. Everything kind of works together and yet everything is so different and

14:57 diverse. That's kind of already getting to a creator, an intelligent designer, that somebody designs these things, that these things don't happen on accident. I give this example uh often actually. Just look at the room that we're in. The room that we're in is pretty complex and it's structured in its complexity. It's a structured complexity. Okay, there are pillars. Inside of those pillars, you don't know this probably, but inside of those pillars are steel bars. Okay, and they go, I think, 6 ft down, something like that. Um, they're holding this whole thing up, thank God. There are lights that run over here so that they can so we can have lights. There are these windows.

15:43 There's uh these walls that have all the wood framing that's holding it up. There are these lights. There's air conditioning. There's the floor. Okay. There's all kind and much more that I'm not saying right now. This roof, there's much more that's going on. This whole thing is put together. You're not going to look at this thing and say, "Oh, wow. I'm so happy that these pillars just happen to fall in perfect symmetry with each other to hold up a roof and that all that wood came and fell in exactly the right places and dimensions to create this hall where a couple hundred people can fit in here and that even windows were slapped onto it by accident. Can you guys believe it? It's like a miracle or something. It's not a miracle. It was designed. That's

16:31 it. This room is pretty complex and yet it's put together. And the fact that it's put together in complexity tells us that somebody probably put it together for a reason, for a purpose. And indeed, that's exactly what happened. Okay? It was designed so that it can hold people for various functions. The world is by multitude of degrees incalculably more complex than this room is. And yet it all fits. And then the universe beyond that, by the way, which we won't even get into how vast it is. And it all kind of comes together

17:17 harmonically with a purpose in mind that points to a designer. You're not going to look at this room and say, "Wow, it all accidentally happened like this. That's amazing." How can we look at the world which is much more complex and harmonic and unified and say that it all happened on accident? And then the human person is the second thing that we can look at to talk about how we can know the existence existence of God. The human person who in himself now this is where biology would come in. I'm I know nothing about biology. I have to say that right now. But biology would come in and say like yeah the human person the human body is very complex

18:03 and is unified for specific functions to act like a human being. Okay. But even more than that, the human person who can know more than the material world, who can abstract from the material world and come up with concepts. In fact, many human people even create their own worlds in their heads and write them down in books like the Lord of the Rings for example and many other things. They can create their own worlds. Sometimes they even create their own languages. Okay. The human person who can communicate ideas by putting them into sounds making them intelligible for the other person to understand and communicate ideas with one another. The human person who can think beyond just the confines of the

18:50 material world and know that something more exists and that we should seek after it. The human person who can express love through symbols like giving flowers over and write poetry. The human person who can replicate the world through art and can speak about the world through music. The human person who can ask and answer the question, why are things the way they are? And seek answers to that question and do deep dives into that question. The human person who can recognize beauty, who can create beauty and then recognize it.

19:38 All that speaks to something in the human person that's crying out to something more than just the material world. And in the words of CS Lewis, I'm not going to quote him because I don't have the quote, but I'm going to paraphrase him. He says, "For every desire, there's a fulfillment of that desire." So, for example, I feel thirsty, there's water. I feel hungry, there's food. I feel uh lonely, there's people. And we can keep multiplying this. I feel like there's more to life than just the

20:25 entire world. And indeed there is. I feel the need for immortality to live forever, eternal life. And indeed there's a corresponding satisfaction to that desire. Just like there's a desire just like there's a corresponding satisfaction to every desire that we have. And human history the whole of human history speaks to the need of eternal life. Speaks to the need of union with God. And indeed there is a corresponding satisfaction to that need. And God makes himself available. Okay. Those are the two ways that we come to know the existence of God by uh studying the world and studying the human person.

21:11 Okay? And there's a lot more to say about that. Whatever. I'm not going to get into that too much. Atheism stuff. I'm not going to get too much into that. Um there are really good books on that. Uh Father Andy wrote a really good book on that. What's that called? Thoughtful theism. Okay. You're free to purchase that. He does a good job. um on the level of belief that's what I know that's what I can know by thinking by my reason alone there are many things that I cannot get to by my reason alone and that God has to tell me last week we talked about the trinity there no way the human person can just think about things so much that he's going to get to realize that God is a trinity of persons in one God impossible

21:57 God that's the inner life of God he has to tell us that thank God he did. Okay. Jesus revealed the trinity to us. So, we take it on belief. This is an instance where I say I don't just know that God exists, but now I believe that God exists also and that he's trinity because Jesus told me and I trust what Jesus says. Jesus is trustworthy and he told me that God is father, son, and holy spirit. And he says that explicitly, quite explicitly in the gospel of Matthew at the end. I take that on belief. I trust in what Jesus says and I believe it. Now I take that belief and I seek to understand what I believe. In the words of St. Ambrose,

22:42 faith seeking understanding. I believe in what Jesus says and then I seek to understand it. And I'm not going to fully understand it because I'm not God. And it's the great mystery of the Christian faith anyways and it's about the inner life of God. But there's a lot that I can come to know. A lot of which we talked about last week, for example. And then there's an infinite amount more that we'll never know. Not in this life. And that we'll get closer and closer to for the rest of eternity in heaven. Which is why heaven is always going to be fun cuz we'll always get to know more and more about God and always love him more and more based on what we know about him. But that's how belief works. I trust in the trustworthiness of the other. And so

23:28 I believe in what he says and then I seek to understand. It's like in a relationship. Again, men and women get married day one. They believe that they love each other. They spend the rest of their lives trying to understand that I believe what this other person says and I spend the rest of my life trying to get to know this person. It doesn't happen on day one. So it is with Christianity. So it is with our faith. I believe in what Christ says and then I seek to understand him. Very good. What does Jesus say? Well, there's a really interesting thing that happens over and over and over again in the gospels. If you notice, people will come up to Jesus and they'll

24:13 say, "Have mercy on me." You know, the blind pre the blind guy on the side of the road. Have mercy on me, son of David. Have mercy on me. Okay? And Jesus will come up to that guy and say, "Do you believe? and he says yes. And then Jesus does the thing for him. He heals him. He gives him sight. When the woman with the hemorrhage touches the fringe of Jesus's garment, she does so because she believes in this guy. She She believes that he's the healer. Can does she know this for a fact? You can't know that. You can't know that. She believes that he can heal her. Can she know that by testing his abilities under a microscope? Obviously not. But she believes it because she's heard his

25:00 words. She's heard his preaching. She's heard many things about him. She sees him as a good man. She sees him as a godly man. She sees him as sent from God. So she goes up and she touches the fringe of his garment and she's healed of her hemorrhage. What she in the gospel it says she spent her whole life give whole life savings giving to doctors to heal and they couldn't heal. and she's healed immediately. And Jesus says, "Your faith has healed you." When the Canaanite woman whose daughter is possessed by a demon, goes to Jesus and says, "My my daughter is severely possessed by a demon," Jesus ignores her. The apostles say, "Get this lady away from us." And so on. And uh she's

25:49 pleading and pleading and Jesus even kind of insults her and says, "It's not fair to take the children's bread and give it to the dogs." And she says, "Yes, Lord, but even dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table." And Jesus says, "Wow, your faith is amazing. Go. Your daughter is healed. Your your faith has healed her." Right? the centurion, the gentile centurion, the the soldier that's in charge of a hundred. Uh his son, servant, whatever, depending on the translation, is sick. Okay? And Jesus says, "I'll come and I'll I'll I'll I'll heal him." And the guy says, "You don't have to come. I have people under me. I tell them go and they go. I tell them come and they come. I tell them, do this and

26:35 they do it." You know what he's saying there, by the way? He's saying just like I have authority over people, you have authority over nature. He's saying that he's God. Just like I have authority over people. I tell them what to do and they listen to me cuz they have to. They obey me. You have authority over nature, over sickness because you're God and it has to obey you. You're the author of nature. And so Jesus says, "Even in Israel, I've not seen such faith." And then he tells him, "Your son is healed." His faith healed him. You see this motif constantly in scripture. People ask Jesus for a healing or a miracle or something like this and he asks them, "Do you believe that I can do this?" And

27:22 they say, "Yes, I believe." And then he does it. And up north in uh Copper it says that Jesus went there and he didn't do many he didn't do any miracles just a couple healings because there wasn't much faith there. So even the works of Jesus, the way that I see it is that Jesus being the son of God, being divine, obviously filled with the Holy Spirit, his power is just ready to be unleashed on the world. Unleashed. Okay? But it's the lack of faith of the world, of us that keeps it from reaching various areas that it wants to go to. It's not a lack of desire on God's part to give us

28:08 grace. It's a lack of faith or desire on our part to receive it. So it happened in copper. Why is that the case? Because again I go to the back to this idea. Faith requires trust. That's what it means when we say we believe in one God. It means way that we trust in him. That's what that means. And that can't be reduced to knowledge the way that we can talk about knowledge gained from the scientific method or empirical knowledge. And thank God for that. Thank God for that because faith is so much greater than knowledge. It's a form of knowledge and it's a much greater form of knowledge cuz it's one that requires relationship.

28:54 In a relationship, in a marriage, you can somebody can badger their wife or badger their husband all day and say, "Prove to me that you love me. Prove to me that you love me. I'm not going to believe it until you prove it to me." That's a horrible That's not a relationship anymore. It's just not a relationship anymore. It's a broken one. It's one that's going to need a lot of healing. It's one that's going to need to build a lot of trust between the people. But it's certainly a wounded one and one that's quite difficult to live through. And so it is in our relationship with God. When we say we believe in God, one God, we're speaking of not knowledge, but we're also not speaking of belief in the modern sense where this is my personal opinion about the matter.

29:41 It's not personal opinion. This is I trust in this God that I worship and it's a public opinion that I hold. I trust in him and it's one that we hold in together. A public opinion we say it in the creed. That's why we say it in the mass. We recite it together. We're proclaiming publicly that this is what we believe. This is whom we trust in God. The father, the son, and the spirit. Okay. Very good. Israel knew this in the Old Testament. God revealed himself to Israel

30:27 that God is one. That God is one was very controversial in the old in the ancient world as I say because all the nations believed in many gods. It was countercultural and the early the early Christians were charged by many Romans by uh for atheism. Okay, St. Irenaeus said if they charge us with atheism, if what they mean by that is that we don't believe in the Roman gods and yes, we're atheists. We're not atheists obviously, but uh what he meant by that is yes, we reject the Roman gods. We believe in just the one God. The Romans uh called the Christians of the early centuries atheists because they didn't believe in the gods of the empire. And everybody believed in the gods of the empire.

31:12 They had to worship Caesar. Uh and many Christians were killed because they wouldn't worship the emperor. They had to worship him as if he's God, the son of God, as if he's the bridge between heaven and earth. And to go a little further on that, whenever the emperor would come out with a statement, it was called analion. You know what that word means? The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, not our Lord Caesar Augustus. But when Caesar would come out with a statement for the empire, a policy change, something like this, it was called an ewangelon. good news because he was perceived to be the son of God,

32:00 the bridge between heaven and earth as the emperor of this empire and whatever he said was good news for the people. It was salvation for the people and it was required by them to accept it as good news. That's why the gospels are written the way they are. Jesus is set up as a kind of counterpart to Caesar. What Caesar aspired to be but could not be. Jesus actually is. What Caesar's proclamations were good news of salvation to the people were not salvific. It was not good news for the people. Jesus's word, his proclamation is a good news that actually does save the people. That's why Jesus is set up as this kind of uh actualization of what Caesar only

32:46 aspired to be but could not be. Jesus is the true king. is a true emperor. That's why the gospels are called ewangelon. Okay, actual good news, the good news of Jesus Christ. And why the early Christians were persecuted and killed for the first 300 years until the edict of Milan 313. Uh because they wouldn't worship Caesar. They'd worship Christ, not Caesar. And they proclaim Christ is the true emperor. Caesar is the emperor of the Roman Empire. That's fine. And we give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. But Christ is the emperor of the world. He's the god of the world. That was seen as a threat to the empire. So they were killed off until they weren't anymore.

33:37 It's radical proclamation of one God. The Judaism and Christianity's radical proclamation of only one God was seen as a threat to the various societies and cultures around the world. And yet they insisted on it. Uh in the Old Testament, God says, "Here, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God." And they would say this prayer repeatedly is uh obviously had to struggle with this because they proclaimed only one god against the belief of the various cultures around and uh you know

34:24 obviously had a difficult time with that. They renounced those gods and with that they renounced the deification, the divonization of political actors, the emp emperors and things. Hammurabi was not a god as much as he said he was. Caesar was not a god as much as he said he was and so on. They rejected that because they sought to reject idolatry. Israel didn't always succeed in this unfortunately in the Old Testament. Read that. That'll tell you. Um but idolatry is essentially when we reduce God to something that we can grasp with our mind, something that we can fully understand, something that we can comprehend and incomprehending control. This is why people worship many gods. Why they carved their own gods you know the psalms and St. Paul these talk

35:11 about how the peoples worship the work of their hands. people would carve their own gods, worship them in order to kind of manipulate them um supposedly manipulate nature through them so they can have control over things. When you worship the one true god, what you're saying is I I don't have control over this. When you worship many gods, the gods of your family, the gods of your nation, you make a a quid proquo with these gods. Okay? You do this for me. I'm sorry. I'll I do this for you and you'll do this for me. I will offer you this incense or this food or in some cases unfortunately this child and in re in in uh in response you will give me

35:58 such and such a thing rain. You will give me um food for my family. You will give me riches. You will give me popularity. You will give me so on and so forth. Okay. It was this quit proquo deal with the gods. And in having that kind of deal, they sought to control the power of the gods. That's really idolatry where we reduce God to a uh material and or a reduced version form of him in order to control him. But it doesn't work obviously and these things end up becoming kind of demonic. To worship the one God, what we're saying is God is God and I'm not. Neither is anything else. Nothing else is God

36:44 except the one true God. And him I trust. In him I trust. Not in myself. Not in any of the powers of the world. Not in the sun or the moon as gods. Not in anybody else. I trust in the one God. To him only can I give my life. Do I give my life fully. Okay? And he is the one that's in in control of all things. And guess what? I can't manipulate him. I can't control him. I must obey him. I must surrender myself to him. I must entrust my life to him and trust that he is good. Trust that he loves me and trust that he will take care of me, that he will guide my life, guide my feet on the path to life.

37:31 Okay, that's why as the the Bible um develops from the Old to the New Testament, we learn more and more about God. You know, this makes sense actually. I mean, maybe this is a surprise to people, but scripture, the Bible has 73 books. And between the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of the New Testament, there's like, depending on when you date Moses, some say in the 1500s BC, some say in the 1300s BC. Um, let's say it's 1500s BC. That's 1500 years of time that elapses in the writing of

38:17 scripture and many authors in between. So the understanding of God and God's revelation to humanity, this is happening slowly over time until we get to the new new testament with the coming of Christ and when we get the full revelation of God. And what does Jesus teach us about who God is? In the Old Testament, we realize God is one God. He's not many gods. He's one God. that he is the creator god which means that he has created all things. It's not like in ancient mythologies where like even in our own in Numa Elish for example the creation narrative of ancient Mesopotamia where the world is created by uh a violent act

39:04 of the of a war between the gods in heaven and then human beings are created by the blood of one of these gods who was assassinated by her son god or nephew god something like this whatever it Genesis, Judaism, the Old Testament says, "No, there's one God and he created everything in the beginning." And he created it day by day, not literally day by day, okay? Symbolically, but he created it step by step. And he looked at it and he said, "It is very good. It's not an not a result of violence and war among the gods. It's good. God spoke it into creation. He has it in mind. He chose

39:50 it. He loves it. It's a good thing. The thing that he's done, everything that he's done is good. That's the Old Testament. That's the That's the uh proclamation of the Old Testament faith of ancient Israel, even in the context of all these various mythologies and paganisms. And this idea of God, this understanding of God is developing more and more over time. This is something we'll spend more time on divine pedigogy and these things. But by the time we get to Christ, Jesus comes and he says, "Yeah, not only is he is he your creator and your master and the giver of the law and the one that teaches you how to behave best as human beings as he knows since he created us." But when you pray, pray like this. Our

40:36 father, that's how Jesus reveals God. That's a major development. You know how many times God is called father in the Old Testament? Only 15 in the whole Old Testament. And those are not personal father like Babi the way that we would say it in Sudat. Okay. It's like the father of creation. distant kind of like uh he's just the the maker of all things. So he's kind of like the father of it by analogy by metaphor but not personal father. When Jesus says it, he says, okay, which is to say that we have a personal

41:21 relationship now. We are becoming, we've become children of God in Christ. And God is actually our father. And that we can call upon him in this intimate way the way that a little son or a little daughter can call upon her dad with that level of intimacy, that level of familiarity. That's absolutely unique in the New Testament. That's what we learn about God. So, so that the Nine Creed says we believe in one God, the Father Almighty. And it makes it very, it's very concerned to make that point cuz we don't just believe in the God, the creator of the world. Obviously, he created the world. Fine. We don't just believe in God as the the way that the

42:07 deists do that that God kind of set things in motion and then leaves it alone. No, we believe in a very personal God. We believe in a God that is very intimately involved in our lives and that loves us with the love of a f that that the love of a human father for his children is only a shadow of and that God's love for us is infinitely greater than that on that level of affection and intimacy. Okay, I think I'm running out of time. So with that, I'm going to stop here. We'll end in a Hail Mary. I'm going to go on next week to speak about speak more about this first clause of the Father and probably get into the second uh when we get into Christ. Okay. In the name of

42:54 the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. The Father, the Holy Spirit. Amen.