Transcript

When you were a kid, do you remember what it was like to look up at the stars?

Did you ever want to blast off into space and actually land on one of those planets out there?

There was a time in my life when I wanted to become an astronaut, yes.

Me too, but nowadays it reminds me that our idea of God, if we were to just come up with it on our own, it always comes short of who God is.

What does that have to do with the stars?

If you've ever been outside, away from the city, looking up at a clear night sky, you have this desire to experience the stars you see firsthand, to even fly there if you could.

Well, if we were in a sci-fi movie, maybe we could, but most of us can't. Are you telling me God is like one of those unreachable stars?

No, that's exactly what he's not.

See, God gives each one of us the desire and capacity to know and love him, but he also desires to reveal himself to us.

His desire is for us to know him and receive him intimately.

Stars are far off and, for the most part, not accessible to us.

Sometimes our experience of God might seem similar, that he is far off, distant...

And not accessible to us.

Exactly.

People have all these ideas about what or who God might be, a divine engineer who created everything and set it in motion, or a cosmic genie, or some mysterious force we can never understand.

Yeah, but that's not really what Christians say about God, right?

Scripture says, He is not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.

If it was just up to us, God would always seem far off.

But God comes to meet us on his own initiative.

How does he do that?

That's what's truly awesome.

Again, if God were just like a star, then his revelation of himself would be like a cloud clearing away so we could see him from a distance.

But God 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.

The big divine plan is that he wants to reveal himself in such a way that we actually are brought into communion with him.

So he does that in a way that we can actually understand.

Exactly.

The way God reveals himself to man is gradually and in stages.

Think about it.

From the very beginning of our existence, God put into everything he created an imprint of himself.

The stars in the sky, the plants, the animals, everything.

Oh, because we can come to know him through creation, right?

That's why God called everything he created good.

That's right.

And finally, he created man in his image and likeness and said it was very good.

Ever since then, even after man sinned, he still began to reveal his plan to a small group, to Noah and his family, then Abraham and his tribe.

And then gradually in stages, he showed mankind who he is through Moses in the nation of Israel and David in the kingdom of God's chosen people.

In every incremental encounter, God reveals more of himself to more of mankind.

I get that.

But is what God revealed to Moses and the Old Testament guys really that relevant to me now?

Each time God revealed himself in the Old Testament, he was not only revealing more about who he is, he was also slowly gathering us men and women back to himself.

God isn't a distant star that we just get to see at different angles through a telescope by his revelation.

Gathering us to himself for what?

Remember that line from the first paragraph of the catechism?

God wants us to become his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.

God spoke in many ways about who he is through others, but ultimately he speaks to us through his son, Jesus Christ.

Finally, in Jesus, God says everything he desires to say about who he is and who he desires us to be, his sons and daughters in the Holy Spirit.

But how can we know that it is all true?

Well, God knew what he was doing.

Christ sent forth the apostles he had chosen, commissioning them to proclaim the gospel.

And they did this through preaching and writing.

That's where we get the Bible then.

Yes, but not just that.

What Jesus handed on to his apostles is what we call the deposit of faith.

It is everything God chose to reveal about who he is, his real presence in the world and what he has done.

And since his desires to reveal himself to us, he speaks in two ways we can understand.

The first is sacred tradition, which is the living transmission of all that came from Jesus and was passed down to his apostles.

Then the apostles left bishops as their successors to hand on what Jesus gave them.

The second is sacred scripture, or like you said, the Bible, which is the speech of God that was put down in writing.

So tradition and scripture are the two different ways that God has communicated everything he revealed to his apostles and their successors all the way to us 2,000 years later.

But still, how can I trust that that is really all that God wanted to reveal?

Well, first, Jesus gave the church his ongoing presence in the Holy Spirit so that he could guide the apostles and their successors to teach what he gave to them faithfully.

Secondly, along with the Holy Spirit, he gave the authority to the magisterium to interpret, teach and protect what he handed on to the church.

Remind me what the magisterium is.

The magisterium is the teaching office of the church made up of the Pope and all the bishops in union with him.

Jesus gave them the responsibility of passing on the whole truth without it being distorted or changed.

Let me try to recap.

So God has shown us who he is and what he came to do.

He started slowly in the very beginning and now reveals everything to us through Jesus.

Jesus gave the Holy Spirit and his authority to the apostles and their successors so that they could pass on the deposit of faith through tradition and scripture that is passed on to us through the magisterium.

Exactly.

Because God's desire is to reveal himself to us in a way we can understand.

The good news is that Christianity is not a religion of searching the edge of the horizon, the top of mountains, the depths of the ocean, the heart of man and the limits of the universe for a hint of God.

The scandal of Christianity is that God broke into history in search of us.

Mankind laid the burden of proof at God's feet and in the fullness of time, he revealed the most powerful argument he had to win man's love, namely himself, Jesus Christ.

Do we know why God wanted to reveal all of this to us?

Because God is not a star.

He's a father.

He wants us to know him so we can have a relationship and be in communion with him.

Christianity is about relationships, our relationship with Jesus and with others.

God's desire is to reveal himself to us so that he can give himself to us.

Hi, my name is Emily.

And my name is Edmund.

Thanks for watching that video.

We made this video because we believe the Catechism of the Catholic Church is not just a collection of ideas, a set of rules, or a textbook.

Yeah, we believe the Catechism is a faithful echo of a God who desires to reveal himself to us.

Real and True makes videos and other content to re-transform this echo into a living voice for the modern world.

And right now, all these videos are made available for free in multiple languages, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

And right now, we're trying to go through the entire first pillar of the Catechism.

We hope to make even more videos to cover the entire Catechism.

And we want to do it in even more languages and continuing to make this resource available for free to everyone.

Yeah, so you can help us accomplish that by giving a one-time gift or a monthly donation.

Every little bit helps us accomplish this goal.

You can also show your support by sharing this video, subscribing to see more of our content.

And I invite you to check out realtrue.org

to learn all the ways you can support this mission.

Thank you.

Thanks.