Alright, so we are moving right along here. The topic for this lesson, lesson eight, is an overview of salvation history. We're gonna do all of that in one hour, right? And this is a very, very challenging task to try to summarize all of salvation history in just one hour.
But we're gonna do the best that we can, looking at the main highlights, the main themes that really run from Genesis to Jesus, from Adam, the first Adam, the head of the original creation, to the new Adam, Jesus Christ, the head of the new creation. Okay, so that's what we're going to do. And to start off, we're gonna look at the first paragraph of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that has a really amazing opening, not just for the Catechism, I think, but it's gonna serve us very, very well for this lesson looking at salvation history. It really highlights all the various aspects of what we wanna accomplish in this lesson here, looking at salvation history.
And it reads like this, it's on the top of your notes, if you're following along otherwise, and enjoy this quote. Catechism paragraph one says, God infinitely perfect and blessed in himself in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all of his strength.
He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin into the unity of his family, the church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son as redeemer and savior. 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. End quote.
That is so absolutely beautiful. You would do well, you would do well to read that and reread that and take it to prayer, and meditate on it and just take a section by section of it and contemplate it's really, really well written and well done. And so it really highlights what's going on here in salvation history. God draws close to man.
God seeks after man. The history of world religions is that man is trying to seek after God. And then through sin and through ignorance, we make all kinds of mistakes. But in the Judeo-Christian religion, it's God who seeks after man, who loves him.
And he calls man to seek to know and to love him back with all of his strength. God wants to bring us back into the unity of the church because this unity of humanity had been destroyed by sin and he wants to heal that and to reverse that. And he's going to do this through Jesus Christ. Why?
And here's the kind of the crescendo. And one of the main themes I'm going to highlight for you this whole lesson is he does this in order to make us his adopted children and heirs of blessed life. That is mind-blowing. We cannot take that for granted.
We cannot leave it at the level of cliche where we say, yeah, we're God's children. We're God's children. We need to spend time thinking about what that means and how we become God's children. Because we lost that filial relationship with God due to sin and the history of salvation is restoring that.
All right, so that quote is very, very beautiful. And it leads us into this introductory section. So we've got three parts to this lesson. An introduction part one, looking at the Old Testament and then part two is looking at Jesus Christ and the New Testament.
So in this introduction, this first major section, and I think this is really important, it's going to help anybody for understanding the overview of salvation history. And by the way, I think every single Christian, every Catholic needs to have this particular framework in their brains solid, whenever they study scripture. If you don't understand what I'm trying to share with you right now in this lecture, nothing else in scripture is going to make sense. There is a method to the madness as the expression goes.
There is order, there is a plan of God's revelation, God's salvation, that goes from Genesis to Jesus. And you got to understand how that works in the covenant. So I really do firmly and passionately believe this particular lesson is probably one of the most important lessons of this whole series. That's probably hard to argue, but it's really, really important because it provides the framework, the structure, the plan, the design of the Bible, okay?
All right, well, close parentheses. My little impassioned appeal there. I really understand this as best as you can. And a good way to understand what divine revelation, or excuse me, what salvation history is, is divine revelation.
It's understood as progressive, ongoing, divine revelation. And we talked a lot about divine revelation. I believe in lesson two of this series here, what that is, why it's necessary, et cetera. But it's God revealing himself to us, right?
There's no way that we could ever understand who God is because we're temporal and he's eternal, we're finite and he is infinite, but God reveals himself to us because he loves us. He's not bound to reveal himself to us. He's not obligated to save us. He's perfectly blessed and sufficient unto himself.
But he does love us so profoundly and deeply. He reveals himself to us that my friends is what salvation history is all about. Ongoing divine revelation. God revealing himself to us from the beginning of time until Jesus Christ.
And he desires to reveal himself to us. He desires to share his own divine life with us as this Patikasim paragraph one says, in order to make us his adopted children. In paragraph 52 on that theme goes on to say, God who dwells in an unapproachable light, and buoyant that and understand it, right? And he dwells in unapproachable light.
He wants to communicate his own divine life to the men he freely created in order to adopt them as his sons in his only begotten son. By revealing himself, God wishes to make them capable of responding to him, of knowing him, and of loving him far beyond their own natural capacity. So this natural capacity that the Catechism talking about is what we were saying in lesson two, natural revelation, we human beings, because we have an intellect, we're able to understand things more profoundly than any other animal on the face of the planet. We can know that God exists using reason alone with our own natural capacity, that there must be an unmoved mover, right?
The first cause of all things, who brings everything into existence and maintains it in existence. This first cause is omniscient, and omnipotent, and has all these various attributes. But that's all we can know, right? That's pretty much as far as we can get.
And therefore God reveals himself to us, as this paragraph says here, to make us his adopted sons in Jesus Christ, his only adopted son. That's how we become children of God. We're not children of God just because we're human. We're children of God because we're united to Jesus Christ, who is the one true son of God.
And keep these, the steam firmly planted in your brain as we move throughout the highlights of all the scripture here in the various stages of salvation history. And this is something that the church isn't just teaching. It's found very clearly in so many passages of scripture. And we have two references here for you for the sake of time.
First John chapter three verse one, a very beautiful verse, where St. John says, see what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and so we are. And we are, we are children of God, and that isn't cliche. And that isn't something that would be taken lightly.
If you are in a state of grace, you are a child of God. If you are not in a state of grace, you have the potential to be saved and redeemed and become a child of God. And that's the whole drama of salvation, right? To be saved and delivered from Satan's and death in order to be brought into God's family.
So if you are a baptized person in a state of grace, you are a child of God. When you have no right to be, but it's just because of God's love for you that he has redeemed you. In 2 Peter 1, 4 is another beautiful verse, where Peter says, he has granted to us his precious and very great promises that through these, you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion and become partakers of the divine nature. So again, we're finite, we're temporal, we're just creation, we're dust, right?
But God wants to make us partakers of his divine nature. That's incredible. He wants to give us his own triune life and thereby make us his children. Okay, so this is what it's all about.
This is what God wants to do for us. So salvation history is the study of this progressive self-revelation of God to humanity in order to make us his divine sons. Because really the Bible, the whole story, the Bible is therefore one unified story, one whole story in which God is searching for mankind, searching for us to redeem us and to bring us into right relationship with him once again. Okay, that is the overarching theme really of what this is all about.
Now there are different stages of salvation history. Now keep in mind I have another course here on scriptureandtrition.com, a 40 hour long course where we go through all these stages and a little bit more detail, understanding the highlights and the main points of this progressive self-revelation of God in salvation history. So we're only doing the fly by view right now. So these 12 stages I go through in detail in that other lesson.
So you want to make sure that you stream that and follow that and you're gonna get a much better, you're gonna get a deeper dive I should say into these periods. And many people have pointed out with these periods, it's a division that is recognized by many. I really do recommend however, the Ascension Press, the Bible timeline that Jeff Caveman's and his teammates put together, it's just really, really well done. So you want to pick that up on Ascension.com.
But essentially you have number one primeval history, which is the creation of the world, the fall from grace, the flood, the tower of battle, those major stories. The period of the patriarchs, three is Exodus, four is wilderness wanderings, and they're here in the notes. Okay, five is conquest and the judges. Then you get to the United Kingdom underneath David and Solomon and then Sincum's in and splits the kingdom in period seven that divided kingdom.
And then there's the exile from the Promised Land and the return back to the Promised Land, followed by the Alexander in period called the Maccabean period, but it's the period where Greece will kind of rule the world during the time. And then those are the 10 major highlights and 10 periods of the Old Testament, which then brings us to the New Testament, number 11, Jesus Christ, and then finally the church, which is what the period that we're in right now. And that's actually a really important point. Don't read Salvation History or study Salvation History as it's some done and completed thing in the past.
We are part of Salvation History. We are part of this period of the church right now in which we go out and proclaim the gospel to all nations, bringing them into the unified redeemed body of Christ and the New Israel. So all of these periods of Salvation History, our ancestors, right? These are our older brothers and sisters in the faith who have gone through the periods of trial and tribulation and testing that they've had to gone through in order to cling to God or they've sinned and been redeemed by God.
And all these great stories, right? That's our heritage. That's our story. So we're part of this.
Don't read this as if it's some done thing in the history book or in the Bible or the case maybe. All right, so those are the different stages of Salvation History. Now, all right, so I've said that Salvation History is the study of this progressive self-revelation of God. Well, at the heart of that statement is the covenant.
The biblical covenant is so important because this is the way in which God reveals himself to us by establishing covenants with mankind. So I want to spend a little bit of time here talking about what covenant is. You're not going to understand the Bible. You're not going to understand really the overarching theme of sonship if you don't understand covenant.
OK? And before I forget, before I move on, I always like to tell my students when I'm teaching classes here, Salvation at its core is a sonship. Now, if you go and take a survey after church on Sunday at some point and you ask people leaving the church, hey, what is Salvation? Most people are going to say, oh, I'm forgiven.
Am I going to hell? Like, whoo, OK, that's true. Yeah, your sins are forgiven. That is one aspect of Salvation.
But you're freed from something in order to be free for something else. OK? So yeah, you're free from your sins. Your sins are forgiven in order for you to be a child of God.
Salvation is really a filial adoption. It's divine sonship, United of Jesus Christ. That's what Salvation is all about. And it is accomplished through the covenant.
So the covenant is that narrative thread that goes through all of the Bible. So this covenant begins in Salvation history from the creation of the world. It goes all the way to the end of the scriptures and really into our current time with Jesus Christ. In the series of God, sorry, the series of covenants between God and humanity.
So God reveals himself in covenant. OK? That's a great way to understand how this all of this together. Salvation history is the progressive self-revelation of God in covenant.
OK? Also, one more time. Salvation history is the progressive self-revelation of God in covenant. All right.
So God saves us from sin, brings us back to himself as his sons and daughters. And that brings us to the definition of covenant. What is a covenant? Because we have covenants all over the place.
You've got covenants in real estate, where if you have an HOA, you've got this covenant deed, and you're not allowed to have chickens or something in your backyard, or you can't park an RV out there, or whatever it is. Covenant is way more important than that. Covenant is, according to the Catholic Bible Dictionary, covenant is a kinship bond between two parties with conditions or obligations established by oath or its equivalent. In other words, really, covenant makes family.
You have two parties, two individuals, two groups of people. And when they ratify a covenant together, they become family. And so all covenants, we don't have time to get into all this now. But all covenants have an oath at its form.
You swear an oath that you're going to observe the covenant and the terms of the covenant. Like, I swear, I'm going to do this. You swear you're going to do that. Those are the terms we swear an oath to uphold it.
And then there's a sacrifice. And there's a meal. And there's always blessings and curses that are attached to the covenant. If I break the covenant, I'll be cursed.
If I uphold it, I'll be blessed. And so on and so forth. But really, a covenant is making family, right? It's kinship.
It is a family bond that has been established. And again, that connects with the theme of sonship. God is trying to make us as children, make us as family. When prior, we were just estranged from him.
OK, so I had said that covenant involves oath. And so to swear an oath in Hebrew is Shavach. In your notes, S-H-E-V-A. Sometimes you're going to see it written out S-H-E-B, B as in bravo, A.
Shavah. But Shavah literally means to seven oneself. All right, as the Hebrew scholars point out. To seven oneself is literally to swear an oath.
It's the same Hebrew word, right? So it's kind of weird to swear an oath, a covenant oath is to seven yourself. But it's important then, because seven becomes, in scripture, the number of the covenant. Seven is not the number of completion.
People say this all the time. And that's wrong. 10 is the number of completion. 10 is the number of totality and perfection.
Not seven. Seven is the number of the covenant. You can say it's the number of completion. In as much as it's related to the covenant, that's true.
The seven is covenant. 10 is completion. We have 10 fingers and 10 toes. Even in scripture, you've got 10 commandments because it summarizes the perfection of the natural law written on our hearts.
You've got the 10 plagues because it's the total destruction, perfect and complete destruction of Egypt and so on and so forth. So seven is the number of the covenant. So to swear an oath means to seven yourself. And when you swear this oath, you form family bonds.
And that brings us to the difference between what a contract is and a covenant. There's a lot of work done by various teachers on this. But Scott Hahn, Dr. Scott Hahn, is probably one of the greatest describing the differences here between covenant and contract.
Now a contract is an exchange of goods and services ratified by a promise. Sworn by a given promise. It's an exchange of goods and services with a promise. Now a covenant is an exchange of persons sworn by an oath.
And that's a big, big difference. A contract is like, hey, look, I'm going to pay someone to come mow my lawn. I'm going to give him 20 bucks. And there you go.
It's an exchange of service with a promise of payment. This is true for all employment. I'm going to work for such and such a company in exchange for this salary. And there you go.
And you can break it off. You're going to get my two-week notice. So I get fired because I was sleeping on the job for whatever it might be. Now that's just an exchange of goods and services.
I'm going to go into the store by groceries, pay this amount because that's how much the groceries cost. But a covenant is an exchange of persons. I am yours. You are mine.
And then the two greatest examples of this is that of marriage, two people who are complete strangers. They're not related anyway. They shouldn't be right. And they swear an oath to be one flesh until death.
They part. And the other example is adoption. Adoption of a child who is not related to you by blood, but you love them and bring them into your family. You swear an oath that they are yours and you are theirs.
And they have all of the obligations, responsibilities, and privileges, and joys, obligations that any other child would have, as adoption of a child. And significantly, these two images that of marriage and adoption become the images given to God and scripture of how he brings us into his own family. You got the image of the natural imagery, of the divine bridegroom. God is the divine bridegroom.
We have the bride as his people. And then also, Sun Shep, which is the theme that we're going to zero in on this lecture. So a great example that Dr. Han uses that's very, very shocking and stark is that of prostitution and marriage.
In prostitution, you have an exchange of services, with payment given, which is pretty bleak and pretty sad. But that same act in marriage is the exchange of persons. It's a complete self gift of one spouse to another. And so it's very, very stark contrast between the same act.
But in prostitution, it's shallow and it's devoid of all meaning. It's just this exchange of services. But in marriage, it's this beautiful, giving, loving act. Right?
That's the difference here between the contract and the covenant. Looking at this one, D, the sexual act of intercourse, whatever it might be. OK? All right.
So that's the difference between covenant and contract. Covenant makes family. And this is what God desires to do for us, to make his own adopted children. All right.
So covenant, a couple of little point here. In point D, covenant in Hebrew. In Greek, you got the two terms there, Buriet and D. F.A.K.
in Greek. It's often translated as testament, not to say there. But for right now, I think broadly speaking, it's safe to say, you know, testament. You got the Old Testament, New Testament.
The Old Testament is the Old Covenant, right? The covenant that God makes with the Israelites, some of the Jews, even the new covenant in Jesus Christ, as I'm going to demonstrate to you, sums up and perfects and completes and fulfills the Old Covenant in the Hebrew Scriptures. And there are five covenants in the Old Testament, five major covenants that lead up to Jesus Christ, who fulfill them all in his blood. And these covenants are given successively.
There is a plan. And catechism 53 lays this out for us very, very nicely. It says, the divine plan of revelation is realized simultaneously by deeds and words, which are intrinsically bound up with each other, and shed light on one another. It involves a specific divine pedagogy.
Now, pedagogy, by the way, is just like a teaching method. So it involves a specific divine teaching method. God communicates himself to man gradually. He prepares him to welcome by stages the supernatural revelation that is to culminate in the person and mission of the incarnate word of Jesus Christ.
All right, end quote. So again, salvation history, as I said, is God's self-revelation, his progressive self-revelation through covenants, right over time. And so what catechism 53 is telling us is that there is a plan. There is a pedagogy.
It's specific because God is a wise teacher. He just doesn't unload on poor humanity, broken down by sin all at once. He teaches us gradually, it says, and in stages the various moments of his supernatural revelation.