The Big Lie
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Hope is the realization of and the full commitment to reach our potential – to be like God and live like God forever in union with Him. God created us to be saints!
This is very hard and very few people realize or commit to it. As Jesus said, “The road is hard that leads to life and only a few take it.”
If God is All-good, powerful and wise, then why is it so hard to do what he created us for. Better question, why do I not even desire to become a saint? Because something tragic happened to us at the beginning.
God created the first humans and then he placed his divine life in the soul, breathing His Spirit into them, making them adopted sons and daughters of God. And he designed their soul, the intellect, feelings and will to find it easy to know what was right and good, with a natural desire for the good and an aversion toward evil and they could easily choose it. So in the beginning, doing what led to our full potential was set up by God to be easy.
But we have an adversary, Satan, a fallen angel who is a liar and a murderer from the beginning. He is the absolute destroyer and He seeks only one thing, to destroy us and to destroy the Fatherhood of God in the world.
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Satan is the absolute destroyer.
He seeks to destroy us by spreading a lie that sows doubt in the goodness of God.
The lie is this: God is not your Father. He is a master, and you are his slaves. He keeps you under his control by his moral laws and commandments. If you want to be free and like God, then you must break free from God and religion and make your own rules, you gotta determine for yourself what is good and evil, right and wrong. Then you too will be gods.
In his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope Pope St. John Paul II writes: “As we know from Revelation, in human history the “rays of fatherhood” meet a first resistance in the obscure but real fact of original sin. This is truly the key for interpreting reality…(Satan) attempts to abolish fatherhood, destroying its rays which permeate the created world, placing in doubt the truth about God who is Love and leaving man only with a sense of the master-slave relationship. As a result, the Lord appears jealous of His power over the world and over man; and consequently, man feels goaded to do battle against God. No differently than in any epoch of history, the enslaved man is driven to take sides against the master who kept him enslaved.”
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We see the strategy of Satan in Genesis chapter 3
The serpent said to the woman, "Did God say, `You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?" And the woman said to the serpent… ‘God said, `You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'" But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
The implication is this: God is keeping you from happiness by his moral law. God told you not to eat of the tree because he does not want you to become like Him. He is not a loving Father. He is a master and you are his slaves. It’s God’s laws that have enslaved you.
With this lie, the devil sowed doubt in the goodness of God, this doubt led to fear of God and disobedience. “Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. This is what man’s first sin consisted of.” CCC 397
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Our first parents said “No” to God, refusing to love him by doing his will.
By this act they separated themselves from God, casting away His presence from their souls, losing the gift of being adopted children of God and dong irreparable damage to themselves.
With original sin, the powers of the human soul have been wounded. And this wounded human nature is passed down to the children of Adam and Eve to all people.
We have received a soul that is inclined to distrust God and disobey him. We are inclined to say “No!” to God. That is why all subsequent sin, the Catechism states, follows the same pattern, a failure to trust the goodness of God that results in disobedience toward him. (397)
Humanity separated itself from God by a resounding “No!” That “No!” has been repeated by every individual human throughout human history because every human inherited a fallen and wounded human nature inclined to this “No!” to God, inclined to turn away from him in disobedience and sin.
Receiving a human nature inclined toward sin and away from God, all people have followed suit, we have all sinned, we have all turned away from God placing ourselves on a trajectory away from him, unable to turn ourselves around. We found ourselves in a state helplessly headed to eternal destruction.
We need someone who could save us and reconcile us to God. We needed a mediator. Someone who could reconcile and reunite humanity to God.
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Jesus Christ saves us and reconciles us to God in three steps:
1. Incarnation: In his Incarnation the Son assumed and united all of humanity and every person in himself. Thus, reuniting God and man in his person. He did so that he might give His “Yes” to God in place of our “No!”. He came to love and do the will of the Father as man and on behalf of every person.
2. Paschal Mystery: Through his passion death and resurrection, Jesus substitutes his love and obedience to the Father for our collective refusal to love and obey. In this way Jesus atoned for our faults and made satisfaction for our sins to the Father. (CCC 623; Trent DS 1529) As Cardinal Ratzinger will say: He burst our “no” open by means of a stronger and greater “yes.”
3. Ascension and Pentecost: Finally, Jesus ascends to the right hand of the Father in heaven from where they send the Spirit into the souls of believers. The Spirit then receives the Son in the souls of Christians so that the Son may empower everyone to say “Yes” to God. The Son comes within us to do the will of the Father in and through us until we are fully conformed to Christ, and he returns us to the Father so that God may be all in all.
In this He is the one mediator between God and man.