1. The man of Faith.
You are, either, for Christ or against Christ. You are either a man of Faith or you are a man without Faith. There is no in-between. So on judgment day it is either the right side or the left side, i.e. the sheep or the goats.
Today there are a multitude of in-betweens who claim they can be saved. The man with two wives and two families, it seems, can be saved. The half-man and half-woman can be saved. The Evangelicals and the Imams can be saved just by an embrace. And the Jesuits and the Dominicans that do not believe in the mystery of transubstantiation can be saved. Is that so? Of course, not. The words of Christ are clear; ‘he who believes is saved. And he who does not believe is already condemned.’ ‘Already’ even if he is still alive? Yes, Christ said so.
Who is the man who has Faith? St. Paul defines Faith by showing what it does; he writes, ‘faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the argument of things that are not apparent.’
The man of Faith believes in all the Divine Truths that he cannot see. And because he believes, he can understand those truths….and believe in them with certainty, as certain as he has an arm.
This Faith is a gift from God for having perfectly repented for one’s past sins. The life of repentance is what St. John the Baptist preached in the desert; it is the spirituality of the Old Testament that prepares souls to be worthy to be an abiding place of God the Father. It prepares the soul to encounter God the Father…..not permanently because of the lack of preparation for the abiding of the Son and the Spirit.
This Faith is a supernatural gift from God. Man cannot attain it on his own. It is attained through prayer, which is one of the elements of the life of repentance, aside from Fasting and Good Works.
It is not the life of repentance nor the confession and absolution of the priest that forgives past sins. It is the Faith that God gives after the soul had repented, have confessed and had been absolved by a priest.
Faith is to be co-natural with God. It elevates the soul of man above his human nature, because it unites the soul to God. Thus man becomes totally in the supernatural level. The effect of this state of grace in man is that his faculty of intellect and will are enlightened so that man can know all that is true and all that is good, without any error.
Imagine, the man of Faith can know what is true, thus he will not commit mistakes. And he can know all that is good, thus he will not be open to evil. That is the description of a saint. Imagine if the head of state has Faith and rules side by side with a bishop or a Pope that has Faith. We would have a perfect society. Alright, I am dreaming; but we can dream once in a while, can’t we?
That is the reason why Christ came down to earth; for man to regain the Paradise he lost. Though He came and taught man how to return to paradise through Faith, history had shown man’s continuous infidelity to God. As Gilbert Chesterton wrote; ‘the Catholic Faith was never proven not to work; it did not work because it was never tried.’ Very few had really tried to have the Catholic Faith.
Keep in mind that what makes man free from errors and evil is not any effort on his part, but a pure gift of grace from God.
The proof of Faith in a Church is the four visible signs of the true Church as enumerated in the Nicene Creed; One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. Sometimes, knowledge and obedience to the commands of Christ is used to compliment the four visible signs.
2, The man without Faith
Man has a fallen nature. He failed his test in the garden of Eden by choosing his own private will over God’s expressed will. And because of this inherited fallen nature, he will continue to chose his own will over the expressed Will of God. And that is the sign of a man without Faith, or a man in the state of sin. Any act that man does that is not motivated by Faith is a sin.
Acts that are motivated by Faith are good works deserving of eternal life. Acts that are not motivated by Faith, as St. Augustine would say, ‘lacks goodness in them.’ And as such are evil acts.
Evil acts will always have some ingredient of goodness; what makes them evil is that it lacks ingredients of goodness. Therefore, a person without Faith will perform his acts defective of goodness. And as he continues in his infidelity, he will continuously run out of goodness in all his acts thus making his acts more and more sinful.
A man without Faith is destined to continuously descend to more sinful acts. He will only be capable of natural good acts. He will absolutely be unable to do supernatural acts that saves souls.
A man without Faith can never distinguish falsehood from truth. And he can never know the difference between evil and good. Unaided by grace, all his decision will be erroneous and evil. Governments are wondering how come there is so much graft and corruption and they cannot solve them. It is impossible to eradicate graft and corruption because these are embedded in the very soul of fallen man. These evils are part of human nature.
Imagine if the head of a nation has no Faith and the members of the Bishop’s conference have no Faith……or worse if the Pope has no Faith. Why, that would be hell. Do you think the ‘Great Chastisement’ mentioned in Fatima is something like this?
Pope Benedict, in a Christmas message mentioned something about the unstoppable decline of civilisation. No chance of ever recovering even a little? None, whatsoever. With men without Faith driving the world like drunken drivers do we really expect a happy ending? Yes, peacefully in a ditch.
The world can only offer a false hope that leads to despair which the world is trying hard to keep out of mind through myriads of distractions, the quality of which is getting as worse as the state of the Faith of the world.
While the non-Catholic world is careening to destruction, the catholic church of the Vatican is committing suicide by drinking countless heretical poisonous doctrines from Pope Francis’ ‘Love without dogmas,’ to his ‘all go to heaven’ because of the ‘mercy and compassion of God, two virtues that neither appear among the theological and moral virtues as taught by the Catholic Church. Mercy is found in Beatitudes but it is of a kind that is completely different from Pope Francis’ mercy.
Our world is worse than Sodom and Gomorrah and there is no Abraham to plead to God. And if ever there is, and I think there is since the true Church will continue to exist, there are no ten or five for whom God would spare this world from being destroyed by fire, as Scriptures prophesied.
The world is exactly like at the time of Noah. It is filled with sin; and we have no valid reason for being sinful because Christ came and taught us how to repent and obtain the gift of Faith that forgives sins. No valid reason. Only excuses.
If we look at ourselves, each one of us, we shall see that we have all contributed to the infidelity of the world. The Justice of God demands that we must share in the punishment. But God in His goodness will bring down the punishment gradually to give everyone one last chance. Just one last chance. Then judgment. We see the world, like the destructions in Middle East, going back to the stone age, preparatory to judgment day, wherewith God will destroy the world by fire…..
Because of the prophesied ‘decay of Faith’ and the ‘waxing cold of Charity’ everything will go worse; the world the Vatican, the bishops, the priest, you and I.
3. What do we do. Jump ship and board the lifeboats.
Learn how to make an Act of mature Faith. The Catholic Church has two thousand years of holy writings by the Saints to guide us. We have no excuse. For the more grievous judgment is in store for us to whom much is given.
Here is how to make a mature Act of Faith. You must know the true God. Know that He had spoken and established a Church to propose His truths down through out all generations.
Well, you must know all the truths He taught; not so much concentrating on the truths but on the One who spoke. And not concentrating on the truths proposed by the Church but concentrating on the Church who proposed the truths.
Then, you must believe the God who have spoken and believe in the Church who proposed the truths. Since God and the Church are the means by which the truths are aught to us, to deny just one truth is equivalent to rejecting the one who gave it and therefore to deny all the rest of the truths; this is either God or the Church. With Faith, you believe all or nothing.
The defect of the Protestants is that they do not believe in the means through which the truths are transmitted to us. They believe truths because the truths are convenient thus they believe because of their private judgment; and not because it is a declaration of a God or a Church.
Many Catholics accepts certain truths and reject others; like they believe that the Catholic Church is the true Church but they do not believe in the intrinsic evil of Family planning. When they speak this way it means they really do not believe in anything. They only have an opinion on everything. And that is not Faith; it is not believing. It is merely having an opinion.
You see, to believe God means to know everything He said and believe in everything He said because He said it. That takes a lot of time;…..knowing everything He said. Though everything He said is found in the Catechism (like the Compendium of the Catholic Church by Pope Benedict.) And, also, to accept the correct interpretation of what God said proposed by the Catholic Church and further explained by the Fathers of the Church. Again, that will take more time too learn. St. Benedict and Blessed John Newman knew that this will take time and not everybody have that much time. So they tried to find how this could be simplified.
God knows everything. He knows the heart of men. He does not have to wait for man to make a mature Act of Faith to gift him with the theological virtue of Faith. All He needs and all He is waiting is for a soul to show the proper disposition. If a soul shows that he is willing to believe with his mind and heart all that God had taught and proposed to the Church to teach, he does not have to go through all those steps. The ‘willingness to believe’ if ever he came to know the truths is convincing enough for God. Such was the case with Dimas. He was willing to believe everything Christ taught if he could learn them. But he run out of time. Though unable to do so, Christ rewarded him with the gift of Faith. With Faith he went straight to heaven; ‘this day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.’
So in short. Man can receive the gift of Faith from God if he has a mind and heart that is disposed to believe, if he knew, all the truths Christ taught. How easy and so simple. Now, we really do not have any excuse not to have Faith. If we still do not have Faith, we really deserve to go to hell. But I just heard, Pope Francis had just taught the heresy of universal salvation and seems to have abolish hell?