442. What is implied in the affirmation of God: “I am the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:2)? (part 1)
(Comp 442) This means that the faithful
must guard and activate the three theological virtues and must avoid sins which
are opposed to them. Faith believes in God and rejects everything that is
opposed to it, such as, deliberate doubt, unbelief, heresy, apostasy, and
schism. Hope trustingly awaits the blessed vision of God and his help, while
avoiding despair and presumption. Charity loves God above all things and
therefore repudiates indifference, ingratitude, lukewarmness, sloth or
spiritual indolence, and that hatred of God which is born of pride.
“In brief”
(CCC 2133) "You shall love
the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your
strength" Deut 6:5). (CCC 2134) The first
commandment summons man to believe in God, to hope in him, and to love him
above all else.
To deepen and
explain
(CCC 2083) Jesus summed up man's duties toward God in this
saying: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with
all your soul, and with all your mind" (Mt 22:37; cf. Lk 10:27:"… And
with all your strength"). This immediately echoes the solemn call:
"Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God is one LORD" (Deut 6:4). God has
loved us first. The love of the One God is recalled in the first of the
"ten words." the commandments then make explicit the response of love
that man is called to give to his God. (CCC 2084) God makes himself known by
recalling his all-powerful loving, and liberating action in the history of the
one he addresses: "I brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the
house of bondage." The first word contains the first commandment of the
Law: "You shall fear the LORD your God; you shall serve him.... You shall
not go after other gods" (Deut 6:13-14). God's first call and just demand
is that man accept him and worship him.
Reflection
(CCC 2085) The one and true God first reveals his glory to
Israel (Cf. Ex 19:16-25; 24:15-18). The revelation of the vocation and truth of
man is linked to the revelation of God. Man's vocation is to make God manifest
by acting in conformity with his creation "in the image and likeness of
God": There will never be another God, Trypho, and there has been no other
since the world began… than he who made and ordered the universe. We do not
think that our God is different from yours. He is the same who brought your
fathers out of Egypt "by his powerful hand and his outstretched arm."
We do not place our hope in some other god, for there is none, but in the same
God as you do: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (St. Justin, Dial. cum Tryphone Judaeo 11, 1: PG 6,
497). [IT CONTINUES]
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