Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible> as part of the orchestrated attack on our divine savior just like clockwork. Every year around this time, the major media come out with their so-called Easter commentaries and invariably they'll be denigrating or snide remarks, sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle made about what they refer to as the resurrection event. Complete with quotes from knowledgeable experts like college professors, ministers or biblical scholars. For example, we are assured by John Dominic Crossan, the former father John Dominic Crossan, who is a professor of Biblical theology at what you could call the former Catholic University of DePaul University. That we're assured by him that in fact our Lord did not resurrect from the dead and the reason they couldn't find his body is because our lord was buried in a shallow grave and then dog dug it up in a day. Now, how far the cross or excuse me, John Dominic Cross and comes to this kind of knowledge, is not clear to the rest of us.
Speaker 0 01:18 Your mortal or my personal favorite is the swoon theory. The spoon theory is our Lord went into a swoon when he was on the cross and then his friends pulled the nails, got him down, and three days later he appeared to everybody and they were amazed. It was as if he had resurrected from the debt. Besides the fact that ignores the reality. He's beaten half to death and they nailed to a cross in hanging there. You're not going to be out walking around in a couple of days. It also ignores the fact that the Roman soldiers were personally responsible to make sure that a man who they were making sure it was executed was executed. That's why I have the death blow with which Saint La Angina did. When he appears the heart of our Lord. That was a standard procedure. Make sure this guy's dead. They can report. We got the job done.
Speaker 0 02:07 So, but facts don't stand in the way of our, the modernist theories. It's a miracle to me sometimes to anybody would be stupid enough to propose theories like that, but it shows what death the enemies of God are willing to stoop to anyway. Why is it that they're so preoccupied with Easter? After all Good Friday is important day. That's the day when our Lord offering the holy sacrifice of the cross. He offered himself up and poured out his precious bud and saved us from sin and safe. That's why we call it Good Friday because he made that sacrifice. Why are the enemies so preoccupied with eastern and mocking eastern? Very. You see anybody denying that a Lord was crucified very frequently. They deny his resurrection. To understand that we need to take a culture, look at the significance of Easter and understand that like everything else in our religion, we need to go back to the beginning.
Speaker 0 03:17 We need to look it out. So let's review. Everyone. Know that when Adam was created, he's the perfect man and when God created him, among other things, he gave him three gifts. The gift of integrity, the gift of impassability, and a gift of the mortality. Okay, so what were they first? The gift of integrity. We've talked about that before as we know, that was the power. They kept all of Adam's senses and his imagination totally under the rule of right reason. What does that mean? It meant that he couldn't control his imagination, no distractions, and he didn't have to worry about that. Unlike us. It also meant that his emotions were being strict accordance with reason. For example, suppose he looked over and saw eve doing something wrong and thought to himself, this situation calls for anger. He would have been exactly as angry as it was reasonable for exactly as long as it was reasonable and then he could have instantly stopped being angry.
Speaker 0 04:22 No time to calm down, nothing gone like that. We don't know what that's like because we don't have the gift of integrity because of the gift of integrity. He didn't suffer from what we do, which is this inordinate desire. Percent spoke goods against the order of reason. We have that $3 word for that can cue percent. That just means our passions will drag us around if we're not careful. He had his passions totally under control, so that's the first gift. Integrity. Second, the gift of impassability. This is a power which is St Thomas points out. It preserved Adam from suffering partly to the use of his own reason by which he was able to avoid anything harmful and also partly through divine providence, which protects him so that no harm would come upon him unexpectedly. Some him impassability protected him from bodily suffering. Third, and the gift of immortality.
Speaker 0 05:21 Adam's soul like ours was just spirit. So the soul is naturally immortal. A human soul does not need a special gift from God to be a moral. A human soul is immortal by its very nature, by its nature, and that's part of the problem. And keep that in mind. We'll come back to that because we all remember from our study of spirit last fall when we looked at souls and angels, whenever we start thinking about these topics of spirit, we have to be really careful not to confuse herself with the pictures that we make in our imaginations. Our imaginations make pictures of material things, not spiritual things. Anybody that studied, she studied geometry already understands this principle. If you remember when he first learned about a geometric point that he didn't take up any space. Every time I can remember being in seventh grade and making points on a paper and trying to make them spawned small until I get a geometric point.
Speaker 0 06:20 It took me a while to figure out you can't do that no matter how you imagine the point it's wrong. We can understand with our Angela EMH is wrong because anytime we imagined one, it's already taking up space. Okay? That's because our imaginations make images of material things, material things, but because spiritual things are like souls are purely spiritual, we have to keep in mind that any image we make of them will automatically be wrong. Okay? So we can understand spiritual things or intellect, but the pictures we make are going to be incorrect because our pitch making faculty can't pitch your spirit, so let's not be misled by our imaginations. Now that was the precaution. Let's quickly review then the difference between spirit and that to review. We've already discussed this before. Remember that the difference between spirit and matter is that matter has parts matter, can fall apart and spirit does not have parts.
Speaker 0 07:26 Spirit is simple. You remember that being, which has no part does not occupy space being which has no part, there's not a occupies space. Anything that occupies space has to have arts space is what matter spreads. It's parts out in. Doesn't matter how teeny you get something if it has, if it's in space, it has. Part of being without carts has no spread space in it. I'd have nothing in common. It's spaceless then with no parts that you know, spread it all. It's superior to the need for space. Our soul has no car, so there's not occupied space. Since the soul has no part, it can't fall apart. Since it can't fall apart. It must, but there ain't age be able to live forever. It must be a mortal Adam. So like ours was by its nature immortal. He can't fall apart because it doesn't have parts.
Speaker 0 08:43 Okay, so what was the gift of immortality then? If the Adam's soul is immortal? What was the gift? Adam's body was just like ours. Its components apart. Arms like hey, yeah, et cetera. That means his body could naturally speaking fall apart. And so Saint Thomas points out by itself, his body had no natural way of preserving him from death. So this gift, the gift of immortality was above man's nature and preserved him from death by preventing his body and soul from separating. Because remember death names, our souls are separated from our bodies and this gift prevented that from occurring. But unfortunately, as we know Adam sin, and since all man fell on him, we've all inherited this disaster. We've all lost the three gifts. We lost the gift of integrity, which kept the passion's on there, the rule of reason. And now as we are all too bitterly aware, instead of acting with the gift of integrity and leading our passions with reason, we're all too often led around by our passion.
Speaker 0 09:51 That's why we have to do panics and modify ourselves to help get our passions in mind. So we're leading them and they're not leading us because we all know whether the leaders, if we left them second, we lost the gift of impassability instead of being able to avoid harm instead, as we all know too well, and the evidence is the fact that we have doctors in hospitals proved we're all subject to injuries, sickness and suffering. Third, we lost the gift of in mortality. We all have to die and all these are punishments for sin for that first sin, that original sin of that, but we still haven't mentioned the worst catastrophe. These are preternatural gifts. We also lost supernatural gifts. The worst by far away, the worst thing that happened as a result of Adam's sin as we fell from grace instead of being God's good graces from the very first moment of our conception like Adam, like he like the bus mother of God and like our Lord.
Speaker 0 10:55 Instead of being concede free from sin, conceived in the state of grace, we're all conceived in a state of original sin instead of being born as the children of God. Now as Ephesians two three points out, we are born by nature. Children of Wrath were born in sin and to make matters worse after we reached the age of reason as Romans three 23 points out, we've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So we're born children wrath, and after we reached age reason at some point online, we've at least committed video sin. What does that mean? I mean, thanks a lot to add them from the very moment of our conception. We're all members of a crime family to the family of man. Each and every one of us except our lord and the blessed mother. That's reality. Were members of that crime family at war against God.
Speaker 0 11:56 And then to add to that problem, we're all guilty. Atrophy reached age of reason of our own crimes against God. The bottom line is it all man are members of an enemy, family at war with God, and then all men who have reached the age of reason at some point are also guilty of personally offending God to boot. Now as if downward enough. As we pointed out, our souls are naturally immortal. Don't ever forget that. Why is that part of the problem? Because although they're naturally immortal, our soul don't have the natural powers take yet to heaven, and even if they could get to heaven, they don't have the natural powers to live the life of heaven. In fact, our souls don't even have the natural powers to get to purgatory.
Speaker 0 12:51 Now, just think what that means. That means naturally speaking, there's only one other choice that we can get by our natural powers. We can't get to purgatory and we can't get to heaven. Then we started realizing that what Adam's done for us has landed us in very, very dire stray, and there's still another huge problem that happened after Adam fell. Even if a man die with the ability to get to heaven, which is the same as saying, even if a man died in the state of gray, Adam's sin had slammed having shot. No Man, we're allowed in heaven was completely close to mankind. So here's the situation. After Adam fell. Instead of enjoying the gifts of integrity in past the ability and immortality, men suffered from concupiscence, suffering, sickness, disease, and death. Instead of enjoying the state of graves from the moment of conception, they suffered from original and actual sin.
Speaker 0 14:07 Instead of being born free children and God, they're born slaves to Satan after they died. Even if they died in the state of grace like Saint Joseph, heaven was close to them. Even if men died in the state of grace, but with some punch, you could still do it to them, so they went to purgatory. When they got done with purgatory, they still couldn't get into heaven, have Moose close to them. The very best they could hawk for was the limbo, the fog, the underworld, what we call in the creed and Ferraris or hell. Now, hell we don't mean Johanna Hill that the old English word is gone to mutations. We have more restrictively now, but it's sort of the air conditioning place of natural happiness, not in the world. You might think of knocked down where the demons and a devil and a down or roasting at a place of natural happiness that was the best they could do.
Speaker 0 15:00 So when we talked about our Lord descending into hell on Good Friday, holy Saturday, that's where he was a place. Natural athletes. We're Saint Joseph Forest where Moses was where Adam and eve or they had to wait. So now we have the context of Holy Week. Once we understand what the situation was, who went through realize that Christ, the Lord came as the new Adam to fix what was wrecked. We can start putting each into perspective and then we can see why these columns are always attack it. How does Easter fit into the picture? Christ, our Lord taught a specific body of truth that must be believed to be saved. The curls, those trues is of course contained in the apostles creed. That's our faith, the true Fay without which it is impossible to please God. And scripture says, but we need to remember something else. <inaudible> is a special power, a supernatural power that gives light to our intellects a power to you.
Speaker 0 16:06 See the world in a different light, and because of that, our faith is supposed to penetrate every aspect of our lives. Literally everything we see are under undergo. We are supposed to understand in the light of Fay, in the light of eternity, but you don't need me to tell you that's a difficult proposition and we're not alone having a difficult proposition. There are 12 men that spent three years with our Lord watching him perform miracles, learning the faith. Where were they on Good Friday. How many of them were standing at the foot of the cross? Why only one he yet they knew he was the true lamb of God that had come to take waste into the world. They knew from the beginning. That's what Saint John Baptist the Baptist called him, right when the apostles first learned of him, they knew from the beginning there he was on the cross conquering sin and Satan during the crucifixion, and where were the apostles?
Speaker 0 17:11 They had to pay, but it hadn't penetrated their lives yet. Our Lord, his greatest work on Good Friday, pointing out the precious blood for the forgiveness of sin, but who believed it out of them? Only one. So each your politic pattern that we've seen before in the gospel. I remember how Christ our Lord told the crippled man, your sins are forgiven, and the Pharisees got all agitated and thought what's going on and then our Lord in order to demonstrate that what he said was true. It's something spiritual that we can't see the forgiveness of sins in order to demonstrate that something is true. He performed a miracle. That's something in the material order that we could see the spiritual miracle, that the man's sins were forgiven. Nobody can see that he performed a miracle. The pro, what he's saying is true. The visible healing of that crippled man who he said, get up, take up your bed and walk.
Speaker 0 18:09 That visible healing is a confirmation of the spiritual healing. Spiritual realities are invisible, and so God does miracles to strength in our faith and to prove that what he says is true and reasonable and that we can believe it, that he's reliable. Let's tie all that together so we can see the context of Easter. Adda had been created in the state of grace, in friendship with God, and enjoyed the gifts and integrity to pass ability and immortality by sin before fifth grade and the gifts and sold himself and his posterity. That's us, into slavery to the Dell and man was incapable of making amends to God for this terrible offense that Adam had done. Therefore, Christ, our Lord became man in order to lay down his lie and pour out his blood as a substitutional victim for man to be that true lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world and his agony in the garden and agony is a Greek word referring to combat.
Speaker 0 19:19 Our Lord took the sins of mankind all home from Adam's first original sin to last, now be committed right before the crack of doom. He took all those on him and then in his suffering, death on the cross, he made reparation for all those sins by a sacrifice on the cross. He blotted out all our sins and by his merits, he one for us, the restoration to grace and friendship with God, and he liberated us from slavery to Sin and Satan. That's what he did on Good Friday. Okay, but remember, the only thing the witnesses could see on Good Friday was our Lord dying on a cross dating up scourge with his flesh hanging off him, blood pouring off and nailed to a cross. That's all they could see. They couldn't see him conquering sin and Satan. Those were spiritual and invisible realities. This is where Easter comes in.
Speaker 0 20:20 Remember, death is one of the punishments for sin and just as our Lord performed the physical healing of the crippled man in order to prove that he had forgiven his sins, salsa, Christ, our Lord performs his Great Mirror called the resurrection. In order to prove that he has conquered sin and Satan, he came busting up out of that to monies to morning and even dragged some others that bother their tombs as well. At the same time, in order to confirm our faith in his word and in his work, in order to prove that since he had conquered death, something we could visibly see, he had also conquered sin and say, and the enemy understands that now we can see clearly why they spend so much time trying to deny or ignore Easter. If the week and your faith in Easter, if faith in calories weekend and they're doing a darn good job, let's rock close with a thought from that great bishop and doctor, the church, Saint John Chris System. If Christ is not risen, then we have no guarantee that God has accepted his death as redemption. And if God has not accepted Christ, death is redemption, then nothing has been accomplished. And the work of salvation has yet to be done by Christ has risen. Indeed, he has risen.
