So how do we know him? That's the question because our insulate can only get so far. Natural reason isn't quite enough. Tonight we can know he exists, great.
We can know his perfection is great, but we can't really know who he is in himself. And for that we need divine revelation. There's natural revelation on the one hand, very helpful, very fruitful, but we need something further because God is infinite and we're finite. Because God is eternal and we are temporal.
He needs to reveal himself to us because we just simply can't understand who God is, right? He's the creator. We're the creatures, right? And there's this huge divide.
It's an infinite divide, really. The creator of all things and we the little creature, I mean, come on. So because our intellects are darkened, our will is our weakened by sin. We're not going to get too far with natural revelation.
We're not going to get too far with intelligence. God is going to come down to our level. So in various points in history, various religions and cultures, and they tried to attempt to reach out to God, try to understand God. But because we are finite, because we are temporal, because we have intellects that are darkened and will is our weakened through sin, they have fallen into all kinds of various error, idolatry, paganism, okay, in religious and moral matters.
Okay, so the Judeo-Christian tradition is entirely different than all other religious traditions, because it's not man going after God, so much as it is God coming after man. In the Judeo-Christian religion, God reveals himself to humanity in order to redeem us, to bring us back to himself. That, my friends, is exactly divine revelation. God revealing himself within history, in words and deeds, in order to bring us back to himself.
That's totally unique. And without it, we would be up a creek without a paddle. There's this great Eastern proverb I ran into once. You might know it.
It's the blind men and the elephants. I think it's very helpful in this particular example, because in the proverb, you got these men who are all blind, they've never seen an elephant before. One guy is holding the tail of the elephant and saying, oh, the elephant must be something like a long rope, right? And then another guy is touching the side of the elephant, and saying, oh, no, an elephant's like a big wall, strong and sturdy.
Another guy is touching the tusks, and it's like a sword, and so on and so forth, right? They don't have portions of what this elephant is. They need the big picture. Well, in the Judeo-Christian religion and tradition, God gives us that big picture.
Still, yes, it's profound, it's mysterious. We are still temporal, we're still finite. We're never, ever, ever going to plumb the depths of who God is, but because he reveals himself to us, we get even farther than we would have otherwise. Okay?
God comes down to our level, he speaks our language to tell us about himself, how we can dwell with him, how we're to be moral creatures, free creatures, because God is holy to be reals, he's holy, right? Holy, holy, holy, and that we must be holy as he is holy. If he didn't tell us this, we would have no idea. And ultimately, he reveals that he's three persons of one God, right?
There's no way a human intellect could ever figure that out, right? Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God, so he reveals this. Now, Revelation in Greek literally means unveiling, and that's beautiful because it's God who unveils himself to us. If he didn't, there would be just this veil that perinearly, all the time, like we will not understand who God is.
Okay? All right, so the catechism, uh, rips on this part, paragraph 52 here, now it really explains this beautifully by saying it by natural reason, man could know God with certainty on the basis of his works. But there is another order of knowledge which man cannot possibly arrive at by his own powers, the order of divine revelation. And that's why I've been unpacking for you for the last 20 minutes or so.
So we can know God on the basis of his works with certainty. By the way, that's an act of faith or a, um, an article of faith, excuse me, it's an article of faith. We can know God with certainty. But we need a divine revelation to go further.
So it goes on, through an utterly free decision, God has revealed himself and given himself to man. This he does by revealing the mystery, his plan of loving goodness formed from all eternity in Christ for the benefit of all men. God has fully revealed this plan by sending us his beloved son, our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. I love that line, an utterly free decision.
I mean, he did this out of love. There's nothing that we could ever give to God. Like he is perfectly sufficient unto himself, right? He possesses all perfections totally and completely.
We do not add to his glory, but the reality is he wants to share his glory with us. He wants to share his own life, his trinitarian life with us. So through a free decision for love, and this we can't leave this at the level of cliche, my friends. This is truly profound.
God doesn't need us at all. And yet he desires to reveal himself to us by revealing his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, as well as the Holy Spirit. Okay. So that's why he reveals himself out of love for us.
Now Jesus is at this point here. Jesus is the fullness of God's self-revelation. From the moment Adam and Eve, from the moment that they send, God promised he would redeem humanity, and he would again make us partakers of the divine life. And that's a great line from 2 Peter 1, 4.
But as soon as they send, he promised redemption. He promised there would be a new woman in her seed who would crush the head of the serpent. So just as in the order of creation, you have a man and a woman who were created in a state of and a state of grace, and then they fell and brought humanity to sinfulness, to original sin, we call it. So there would be a new man and a new woman who would be created also in a state of grace.
That's Mary's immaculate conception, the fact that Jesus is God. So he has no sin, of course, and they would bring us redemption again. So one man and one woman in the order of creation, a new man and a new woman in the order of redemption. He promised this immediately, but it took time, right?
He revealed himself gradually in stages throughout all of time, ratifying covenants with humanity, right? We're going to talk about this. We're going to do a one-hour overview of the covenants of salvation history down the line here in this course. But of course, if you look in scripture tradition.com, I got a much longer 40-part series as well, where we go through salvation history a little bit more slowly.
But this order of revelation happened gradually and in stages from Adam to Noah to Abraham to Moses, then David, then finally, once his people were prepared, he revealed himself perfectly in he is true God and yet he is also true man. Okay. So in Jesus, God's self revelation, his self unveiling is total and complete because Jesus is God, right? So in Jesus Christ, God said all that he wished to say, Jesus fulfills the promises and the prophecies and the typology of the Old Testament to answer our questions, the questions that we began with.
Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? How do I get there?
What's the purpose of suffering? How am I going to be truly happy? The answer is always Jesus. It really, truly is.
It's simple. It's profound at the same time. But the answer to all of our questions is Jesus Christ.