What's So Divine About the Divine Law?

God is love - three Divine Persons living eternally in a relationship of perfect love. It is the nature of love to grow by giving new life. God created us to live in a loving family relationship with Him - a covenant. He gave us free will because love must be freely given and received. He invited us to be co-creators with Him and to participate in His divine life because people who love each other share in each other's lives.

How do limited creations relate to their perfect Creator? Even before Original Sin, human beings would have no way to relate to God. If human beings were to have any hope of a true relationship with God, God would have to bridge the gap between us. Jesus Christ bridged that gap by uniting His Divine Nature with human nature in the incarnation. By the grace he won for us through the power of His crucifixion and resurrection, human beings are given a share in His Divine Nature. Grace builds on human nature to make us divine. Some theologians in both the Eastern and Roman Catholic traditions believe that even if Adam and Eve had not sinned God would have acted to bring us divinizing grace so that we could relate to him in familial love.

The same problem now presents itself with our new grace-given divine nature as it does with human nature. Just as we are able to choose to be less than human, we can also choose not to live according to our divine natures. The Divine Moral Law guides us to live the divine life. By following its precepts, we learn to cooperate with grace so that we may live according to our divine nature. Divine Law teaches us to love perfectly so that we may love He who is Perfect.

The first thing you might recognize as you look at the divine moral law that God reveals to us through Sacred Scripture is that a lot of it is actually natural moral law. In fact, seven of the Ten Commandments (numbering them as Catholics do) are about our relationships with each other, and form very basic principles of the natural law. This is true for a couple of important reasons. First, there is no real separation between the natural law and the divine law. Both are pathways to the same ultimate goal - a perfect loving relationship with God. Secondly, even though we can know the natural moral law through human reason, God does not leave us to figure it all out alone. He helps us by reiterating the principles of natural law within Divine Revelation.

The purpose of the Divine Law is to teach us how to love God. We can only love perfectly if we are fully human. Natural law prepares us to fulfill the divine law. Furthermore, natural law points the way to divine law. When human being use their powers of reasoning to try to find perfect happiness, they discover that nothing in the created world can bring perfect happiness. The thirst for more leads us to divine law - to a relationship with the only Source of all Goodness.

A covenant is a sacred family bond. More than a simple contract, a covenant cannot be broken. Even if one member of the covenant breaks the sacred trust, the relationship does not end. This is the lesson of Noah. The Original Covenant with humanity - the covenant of Creation - will never be broken because of humanity's sins. All of the specific covenants - with Abraham, Moses, David - are continuations of the Original Covenant. The New Covenant established by Jesus is the fulfillment of the Original Covenant.

Through Christ, we have perfect intimacy with God. Not only did Christ defeat sin and death, through Him we actually gain the indwelling of God in our souls. Through the Eucharist, He intimately unites His entire being to ours.

A Covenant is a relationship of love. It creates a family.

Creation: the Original Covenant in which God creates humanity to love Him and to receive His love through Creation.

Noah: the Original Covenant is preserved by God's promise never to revoke the Covenant by humanity's sin.

Abraham: God begins to heal the Original Covenant by focusing on one faithful man and teaching Him to trust.

Moses: God teaches humanity how to love by giving the Hebrew people the Divine Law.

David (the kings): God spreads His Covenant further into the world

Jesus: God perfects the Covenant and makes it universally available.

Divine Law guides us to love God and neighbor. The greatest laws are "Love the Lord your God with your entire heart, mind and strength" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." All other laws are based on these.

The two main sources of Divine Law are the Ten commandments and the teachings of Christ. The first three of the Ten Commandments teach us to put God above all things - to love Him with our entire beings. The last seven tell us to love our neighbors. The Commandments give us the minimum requirements of love.

Jesus' teachings bring us to the fulfillment of love. He takes us beyond action to the condition of our hearts. He then shows us what it means to love perfectly by offering Himself for our sins. Christ calls us to love one another as He loved us - to cooperate with grace in order to become perfect in love.

In Lamb's Supper Scott Hahn explains why the Eucharist is the fulfillment of the Covenant





Hardcover. In his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI explains how human beings are called to love God through love of Creation, through love of neighbor and by directly loving God.






Hardcover. In his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI explains how human beings are called to love God through love of Creation, through love of neighbor and by directly loving God.