A Father Who Keeps his Promises.
A book by Scott Hahn.
God’s Covenant Love in Scripture. A Father Who Keeps
his Promises.
In the book A Father Who Keeps his Promises author Scott Hahn examines the “big
picture” of salvation history. He explains God’s love in terms of the Covenant
relationship that follows through from creation up to Final Judgment. He sees
God as more than simply a wise creator. He understands God as also a loving
Father; a father in whose image we are made, to live as his children by
adoption through his Grace.
Hahn argues that from the very
beginning God established a covenant with mankind. This covenant is ‘a sacred
family bond’ in which individuals give themselves to one another in loving
communion. God called Adam and Eve to share his blessing in the covenant of
marriage. But being mortal beings, we have all broken God’s covenant due to the
sinful desires and weakness of human nature. Hahn analyses that “the essence of
sin is our refusal of divine sonship, because of its sacrificial demands”. Because of this rejection, we have all earned
the just consequences of our actions, which is death through sin. The Bible
tells us, ‘the wages of sin is death’. Sin kills the life of God within us.
Consequently, we need God’s mercy and grace in order to lift us up out of this
mire of sinfulness.
Hahn tells the story of how God
embarked on a plan to redeem the human race through love. God used Noah to
begin the process of cleansing the Earth. God pledged to Noah to keep him safe,
along with his family, and promised never again to wipe out the human family
that way again. Through Noah, “God’s covenant with the human race grew to be a
household of several families.” Next, God chose Abraham to become for us the ‘Father
of Faith’. Even so, with human nature being weak and sinful, it took many
direct interventions in the life of mankind to get our attention and
cooperation. Being rebellious children, God had to find ways that cut through
our stubbornness and resistance. “Israel had to learn about God’s
love the hard way.” But because God is a loving Father, he persevered. Having
made us in His image, with a reasoning intellect and free will, he faced to
problem of how to redeem mankind in its entirety. He found the only way
possible to achieve salvation for mankind. Sin was too large an obstacle for
any one man, no matter how obedient and loving he might be, to overcome on his
own.
God promised Abraham the ‘Promised
Land’ where his descendants might be blessed as a nation, and then as a
kingdom. God’s covenant was gradually fulfilled through the lives of Abraham’s
descendants. Hahn argues, “In considering Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel
and Leah, and then Joseph, it is abundantly clear that God works through real
people with real lives – like us – in the ongoing plan to father his covenant
family.”
God then used Moses to lead the
twelve tribes of Israel out
of captivity in Egypt
and to “ratify a national covenant that made them a holy nation”. He called
them to occupy the Promised Land of Canaan as their inheritance.
God established a covenant with David
to build a worldwide kingdom, establishing an everlasting throne with the son
of David “who was destined to rule – with divine wisdom – over all the nations,
united as a royal family in their common worship of the heavenly Father within
his house, the Jerusalem temple”.
In the sacrificial language of the
Old Testament, only by presenting the blood of an unblemished lamb could the
sins of mankind be lifted and washed away for those who believe in Christ. In
New Testament language, through the mystical washing away of sin, that God made
it possible for mankind to join themselves to him by allowing the Holy Spirit
into our hearts and minds and bodies. This is only possible because we are made
alive in Christ, and Christ in us. The solution to our sin came in the form of
God becoming man in the person of Jesus Christ. God took on our weak and sinful
nature in order to heal and perfect us, but also to elevate us to share in his
own life of divine ‘sonship’ in order to make us one with the Father. “Christ’s
death atoned for our sin by taking it out right at its source” by his rising
again to life in the resurrection. Death was unable to hold Christ because he
was without sin (sinless). “Since the
ultimate form of suffering is death, the ultimate moment of love comes at the
time of death when we accept it and make it a sacrificial gift of self.”
Hahn continues on to explain that
“Salvation history reveals sin as literally a broken home…sin is primarily a
broken relationship”. Jesus was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy
Spirit. After his Resurrection Jesus gave us a period of forty days in which he
revealed himself to his disciples. Jesus told them of a wonderful gift that the
Father was going to send, the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes to
us through the sacraments in a powerful way. The purpose of the sacraments is
to be instruments through which the Holy Spirit works its healing Grace upon
and within us. Jesus instituted the sacraments and now administers them to us,
beginning with baptism and coming to the pinnacle in the Holy Eucharist. It is
the greatest of the sacraments because it is the true food and drink of eternal
life. Jesus said, “If you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you are one with me
and I am one with you.”
Hahn summarizes his thesis saying,
the church catholic is God’s worldwide family that the Father sent the son to
establish by the Spirit. We love the church as our mother and revere it as
Christ’s bride. As good children we obey its teachings because we love and
trust that Jesus will be true to his word. Jesus is the way, the truth and the
life. As God’s children we are earthly pilgrims heading home to heaven. This
makes death a homecoming and heaven a true homeland.
