Welcome everyone to lesson one of this course, An Introduction to Salvation History. Before we begin our study, let's begin in prayer. 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. Amen. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
All right. Well, this is fantastic. The first lesson of any course is very exciting. And this course is a 40 lesson long series of panorama of salvation history from the creation of the world, with Adam and Eve all the way to the redemption of the world in Jesus Christ.
And I want to begin the top of your notes here with this quote. It's one of my favorite quotes, passages from scripture here on the top of page one. It goes like this. Indeed, the word of God is living in effective, sharper than any two edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart from Hebrews chapter four verse 12.
I really, really love this particular passage because it kind of conveys the fact that the Bible is not just any old book, you know, it's not even just any old religious book, which there are absolutely many throughout the history of the world and different cultures. The Bible is something set apart. It is the word of God and it absolutely convicts our hearts and shows us truth and it shows us direction in our life. And so I think this is a good verse to begin our study with.
Now this first lesson is called divine revelation and its transmission. Now before we even jump into Genesis chapter one verse one, which we'll do in a couple of lessons, lesson three will begin that. It's really, really important to set the tone and build a foundation on understanding what the Bible is, why it is we even have the scriptures, how it's transmitted, how do we interpret it. So I want to do for this lesson one and in the next lesson lesson two, I want to provide this foundation so that when we build the house, we build it on solid stone because it's very easy just to jump into scripture and to start throwing some very interesting fun things out there.
But if you don't have the foundation, it's just not going to be as enriching. So this lesson and next lesson we'll cover, like I said, a fly by a 30,000 foot view on some of these very important points. But because of the time restrictions, we obviously can't go too much in depth, but I do have another course available to look for that. It's called an introduction to the Bible where we're going to go into all of these different topics and much more depth.
But suffice it to say for now, I'm in here and look at this first lesson, divine revelation and its transmission. Part one, how do we come to know God? So the first thing to keep in mind is the very first step really is the big questions about life. If anyone's paying attention, all right, and you pull your head out of the business of this life and everything that happens, the noise, the chaos, the busyness, eventually people begin to ask the big questions.
You know, when and how did the world come to exist? You know, is it a big bang? Is it created somehow? And why does it exist?
It doesn't have to exist. Why am I here? Why do I exist? Who am I?
I mean, I don't cause my own existence. I am here because something else caused me to exist. And so if that's true, where do I come from? Where am I going?
How do I get there? And even in this life, how do I become truly happy? Everything that we do, we do to be happy. And that's why we do anything.
So if we do good things or we do bad things, we do it because we think it's going to give us some sort of contentment and happiness. It's surprisingly to say even since, and people commit sin because it will give them an instant gratification or that pleasure. So we're all in pursuit of happiness and we want to know really how am I going to be deeply happy? Because a lot of the pursuits in this world, many people can testify to this, and I certainly can.
We have different pursuits, hobbies, interests, careers, distractions. You have various pursuits for various pleasures of different kinds because we think they're going to make us happy, but in the end we still feel unfulfilled. We still have this hole in our souls and we're wondering how is it going to be filled? So these are big questions.
How can I be actually happy? And how can I be happy if there's evil in the world? There are bad things that happen all the time and bad things that happen to good people. Why?
Why is there suffering? Is there any sense to suffering? And there's evil, so how can God exist? Does God exist?
And if he exists, why does he allow these bad things to happen? Who is God? Is he somebody, something out there that created the world and just kind of let it run on its own? Does God care about anything that happens on this earth?
Does he want anything for me? So I'm trying to share with you. These are all the big fundamental questions that if we are honest and we are paying attention, we realize that the answers to these questions must come from something beyond ourselves. They must come from something outside ourselves.
And the simple example of the pursuit of happiness where we fill this desire for happiness with all kinds of material things and yet we're still unsatisfied. So therefore perhaps happiness comes from something beyond myself. Okay? So beginning with this, probably I think the first question is does God exist because that gives us a perspective beyond the immediate now.
How do we know that God exists? And there are two ways to know that God exists. Another Roman numeral number two, the first way is what's called natural revelation. Okay?
That basically means that we can know that God exists using our reason alone by again, being honest, observing everything from an objective way, removing emotions, removing perhaps attachments to sin or attachments to this world, thinking beyond any kind of hurts or wounds or betrayals that we might have experienced. If we look at the world, we can know with reason alone that there must be a God. All societies, all religions, all cultures from the beginning of time, all of them have realized this fact that there must be some sort of divine being out there and they're in search of understanding that divinity. Even today, I mean, today secularism is growing rampantly, agnosticism.
There's this phenomenon of the nuns, right? In oh, in the as the nuns, those people who have no religious affiliation at all, they just say, Hey, I don't believe anything. I don't identify as anything. They're called the nuns and that is rapidly rising.
But you begin to look at some of these trends and you realize that the atheist, the agnostics and the nuns and even today, modern culture, they're wrestling with these big questions. Can God exist? The reason alone, we can say yes. And let's look at two ways in which we can observe this.
The first is by just simply paying attention to the structure and the beauty and the order of creation. Now, this could be at the macro level where you go out first thing in the morning and you see that sunrise over the mountain landscape or over the beach or the sun sets over this again, the beautiful mountains or the fields or the beach or wherever you are, the sun sets provide this perspective, at least for me and I know for many other people, you realize that is extraordinarily beautiful. You go take a walk through creation. I'm originally from California.
The Sequoia forest up there in the northern part of California are absolutely extraordinary and I've traveled around a lot. You just walk through creation. It's absolutely incredible. So that's like the macro level of creation, how beautiful, how structured and ordered it is.
But even if you go to the micro level and you're a scientist and you're studying, you have to be a scientist, you could be taking biology or chemistry in high school for goodness aches and you're studying the atomic structure of things, the cellular level of biology. It's extraordinary to see how there's whole worlds practically speaking in an atom and in a cell and it's all structured and beautiful and harmonious. Albert Einstein was famous for saying that mathematics convinced him of the existence of God. Because only an intelligent creator could have put all of this together.
An example that I like to think of when you see a sleeping baby, there's something so beautiful and so peaceful, you know there had to have been a creator of this perfect innocent child. And you're not just grateful that they're not screaming and they're finally sleeping, but just seeing a sleeping infant, the sleeping baby is just incredible. So this is true. Any person at any time can just observe creation and realize there had to have been an intelligent designer, an intelligent architect of all of this.
Now I want to share with you this quote and all of my Bible studies I like to provide of obviously lots of quotes from scripture that goes without saying, but also bring in catechism quotes as well. So when we're going through these studies together for salvation history and my other courses I'm offering, whenever you see the abbreviation CCC that stands for Catechism of the Catholic Church, and then of course abbreviations for Romans. So I want to dive in to Romans chapter one and Paul has a lot to say about this phenomenon of observing the fingerprints of God so to speak in creation. So this is what he says Romans 1 18 through 21.
The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness. And here here's a point here. For what can be known about God is evident to them because God made it evident to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made.
So that's what I was talking momentarily ago is the structure and beauty and order of creation at the macro level at the micro level everywhere you see these invisible attributes of his eternal power and divinity. That's powerful stuff. But he goes on as a result they have no excuse for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him things. They became vain in their reasoning and their senseless minds were darkened.
And so Paul is touching upon a point here that answers many people's questions and they say well you know if you can just look at creation and look at the beauty order structure, harmony of creation and realize wow this is there must be a designer, an architect of all of this. Why doesn't everybody come to that conclusion? Well Paul is saying it's because of their sin. It's because of our attachment to sin and wickedness and rebellion against God where we choose to reject God and the true worship of God because we're attached to our different pleasures.
Okay, our pursuits that take us away from him. So it's actually this choice where I want to go after these lesser goods or these flat out evils and as a result your mind is darkened and this is what Paul is saying. So this is one way to know again simply put that God exists by observing the order of creation. There's another way and that is to observe our own inner moral inclinations and our spiritual faculties.
You know the spiritual faculties that we have it are intellect and our will. And so the catechism, CCC Catechism of the Catholic Church comments on this paragraph 33. Quote the human person with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience with his longings for the infinite and for happiness. So what I was saying at the beginning of this lecture, we all long for something that can't really be filled by temporal things, right?
It's got to be filled by something infinite. It's an infinite desire for happiness. Okay, he goes on. Man questions himself about God's existence.
In all of this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the seed of eternity we bear in ourselves irreducible to the merely material can have its origin only in God. End quote. Boy, that is incredible.
So what the catechism is pointing out here is we all long for happiness as I said before. We all long for love, right? We want to love and we want to be loved. I have not met anyone who has said I don't want to be in a healthy loving relationship, whether that's with your parents or siblings or just really good friends or a spouse, children, whatever it might be.
Everybody wants to be loved. All right, everyone wants to love. And this is an internal infinite desire that nothing on this earth can fill. And that's why we search for God's existence.
Well, I can't fill this void, this whole for happiness and love. Then something beyond this earth has got to fill it. And this is what the catechism is talking about as well. This is just kind of a proof of our soul.
We have a soul that is irreducible to the merely material. So as human beings, we have these spiritual faculties in our soul. We have an intellect and a will that no other animal has. I don't care how intelligent the animal might be in the animal kingdom.
I don't know if people say apes and dolphins and dogs or whatever it is. They don't simply have the intellect like the human person has an intellect, the ability to abstract and understand the truth, the good and the beautiful, to have conversations about eternal questions like all humans do. Never I was like to say, never once have I come home from work and walked into my library at home and found my dog sitting at my desk reading Aristotle wondering metaphysics and asking questions about metaphysics. Never once.
Never once has anybody found a school of dolphins swimming around in the ocean asking what's beyond the great big reef. They just simply don't do that. They're animals. They have instincts.
But human beings, we have an intellect to perceive universals, to perceive what is true, what is good, what is beautiful, to ask these big questions. Same thing with the will. The will is this ability to choose what is right, what is wrong, to choose what is good, true and beautiful and to reject what is false and ugly. So animals can't do this.
These are characteristics of something that goes beyond the mere material biology that we are because human beings are body soul composites. So when we analyze the order of creation, therefore, and we analyze our own moral inclinations, our spiritual faculties, our desire for the infinite, our longing for happiness, these things really begin to tell us there must be a God. Now St. Thomas Aquinas following Aristotle has many proofs for the existence of God.
I'm only going to talk about one of them here and it's called the first cause. There must be a first cause. All right. An unmoved mover that causes everything else.
So everything in this world is caused by something else. I'm here because of my parents. My parents are here because of my grandparents and so on and so forth, but you can't have an infinite regress. There must be a first set of parents at the beginning of time.
And this is true for all of creation, whether it's trees and acorns and acorns come from a tree and so on and so forth. There must be a beginning and there must be something that is not caused in and of itself but causes everything else. There must be something that exists and always has existed and always will exist, something that is existence itself. It was not caused by anything, but it causes everything else.
That Aristotle says is the divine. It is God. Thomas Aquinas, of course, elaborates on this and in our other course. We'll talk about this in a lot more detail, but suffice to say for now, there must be a first cause, sufficient in itself, that causes everything else.
That thing is God. That thing God has put together our moral inclinations, has created the world in its beauty and harmony. It's fantastic. So we were then created with this eternal, not eternal, but this immortal soul, this, the soul that lives on forever and the purpose is to live with God.
The purpose is to be united for God. We cannot be satisfied by anything less than God. We were created by God for God and St. Augustine said this most famously when he said, our hearts are restless until they rest in the oleur.
Beautiful, beautiful quote and it's true and we, again, for paying attention, if we can detach ourselves from some of the things that keep our eyes pointed to this earth, we start to look upwards, we realize how true St. Augustine's statement is. All right, so that's what's called natural revelation. We can reflect using reason alone and come to the conclusion that there must be a God.
However, reason is not enough to know who or what God is. We can know some of his various attributes. God is sufficient in himself. He's existence itself.
He's all knowing, all powerful, etc. These various attributes, but we can't really know much more of that. We need something to take us to the next level. And that brings us to this next section here on page two.
We need divine revelation. Okay, so we're created by God. We're created for God. Hi, this is Dr.
Nick Leibish. Thank you so much for listening. If you like access to my complete courses, please visit ScripturedInTradition.com. God bless.