By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM
Part 9
Who hasn’t heard — or uttered — this common fatalistic objection: “Since God can see the future, He knows whether or not I will be saved. If I will be saved, no matter what I do, I will be fine in the end. If I will not be saved, what is the point of obeying God’s law?”
This is a fatalist objection, as it implies that God’s foreknowledge of my future conditions my choices. But it does not. Knowledge of the future is not control of the future. Knowledge is knowledge, purely and simply. Simply because God knows my future choices it does not mean that He is causing them. My choices are mine. He simply knows them ahead of time; that’s the difference. Things will happen, not because God foresees them; He foresees them, because they will happen.
Take for example a farmer who does not sow the seeds in his field. God foresees the amount of wheat the field would produce if the farmer had sown the seed, and He also foresees the loss of the harvest because of the farmer’s laziness. It is the same thing with us. God foresees our salvation or damnation as resulting from our own behavior, our own choices in life. He does not force our will to choose the good instead of evil.
St. Augustine was one of the greatest minds of the world. His answer to this question is both simple and effective: “Just as you do not compel past events to happen by your memory of them, so God does not compel future events to happen by His foreknowledge of them.” In other words, you remember past events in your life but you do not change them, because they have already happened due to your free choices in the past. God knows past, present, and future events, but He does not cause them by knowing them. He knows my future because I freely choose what I will do with it, and He knows my choices.
How silly would one be if one thought that “God foresees whether or not I shall be run over by a bus in the street today. My destiny is fixed. Therefore, no matter what I do, I cannot escape it. It makes not the slightest difference whether I keep to the footpath or walk in the center of the traffic, neither looking nor listening.”
If you thought in this fashion, and acted accordingly, and you were run over by the bus, then yes, God foresaw the accident, but you caused it: He had nothing to do with your being an idiot. But if you took due precautions as you crossed the street, God also foresaw your getting to the other side in one piece, but He did not cause it: He knows how you would cross the street.
This is the basic principle of God’s knowledge: He knows all of my choices, not only past, present, and future, but also all possible choices I could have made but did not. His knowledge is infinite.
Once we come to know more and more about God’s nature, our belief in His infinite greatness should naturally lead us to supreme adoration of Him, and the full service of our lives. To know God and not to love Him is an aberration of the intellect and the will. And our belief in His holiness urges us to be faithful to the promises and vows we made before Him. Yes, belief in God’s love and goodness leads us to love Him in turn. Belief in His bounty and Providence leads us to thanksgiving and trust. Belief in His creation and Fatherhood leads us to respect all things as works of His hands and to love all people as members of our family, children of the same heavenly Father.
Belief in His truthfulness and wisdom leads us to faith in His word, and obedience to His commands. Belief in His fatherly care and interest leads us to pray to Him and converse with Him.
This is the good side of reality, when we draw the natural consequences of our belief in God. The bad side of reality is when we, miserable sinners, believe and do not act according to our belief, meaning, when we sin.
When we pray the Hail Mary, we do not say to our Lady, “Pray for us saints.” We say, “Pray for us sinners.”
We do this because we are sinners, and her divine Son reminded us that even the just man sins seven times a day.
Yes, the reality is that all sins offend God, even those most secret, but some sins are more particularly directed against God Himself. For instance, a sin against the First Commandment is polytheism, or the belief in many gods, as pagans do; or atheism, the denial of God’s existence, which is also an aberration of the human mind; or agnosticism, the denial that God can be known by our minds, which is just a self-confessed ignorance.
Then there are also the sins contrary to worship of the one true God, such as idolatry, or the adoration of a false god or a mere creature, and there are veiled forms of idolatry like the virtual adoration of money, power, or prestige. Superstition is the aberrant belief that certain practices magically constrain God or our future in determined ways, like the use of a horoscope in our era.
Contrary to hope and trust in God are despair, presumption, divination, and putting God to the test. Contrary to love of God are irreligion, indifference, and ingratitude.
Against the Second Commandment are the sins contrary to service of the all-holy God, like the violation of just vows. The crises in the Church today caused by scandals among the clergy are a blatant and sad example of the violation of vows.
Contrary to God’s veracity are sins like perjury, when a person lies under oath, taking God as his witness; also the teaching of false doctrine, very common today among liberal and progressivist theologians, as well as those who deny or willfully doubt God’s Revelation.
Contrary to His holiness and majesty are blasphemy, or attacks upon God or His saints, sacrilege or the violation of something sacred, and simony (buying or selling spiritual things).
Contrary to the Third Commandment is a refusal to rest and worship on Sunday in the manner prescribed by the Church. St. Augustine says, “The essence of religion is to imitate the one whom you adore.”
The Triune God
So far we have investigated God’s attributes according to natural reason. We have not touched on the belief in the Holy Trinity because our minds are not able to consider it without the help of divine Revelation.
That is, we believe in the Triune God not because it makes sense through pure reasoning, but because Jesus revealed it to us.
Next article: The Most Holy Trinity.
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(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
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