Catechism of the Catholic Church Study 26
When God reveals Himself to man, man has two choices of responding. He can accept God, that response which we call faith, and any other response which is not faith. An unfaithful response to God is not always an outright rebellion or rejection, though in essence you either accept or reject God, there is no middle. What I intend to say is that this rejection need not be so explicit, but it can be implicit. For example, a man who idolatrously worships himself in practice while saying glories to God by his mouth alone would perhaps not be identified as an explicit rebel against God, but he is for sure against God in essence. For an acceptance of God will involve the entire life and being of the person in faith.
God’s light is a multifaceted
object in relationship to humanity. At once, physical light is a kind of light
from God as it is indeed created by God. Yet the meaning of light in the
Catechism is indeed more than just physical light, it is instead illumination
of the intellect by God, thus being called light in equivocation to physical
light. God is the light which man seeks when he seeks the ultimate meaning of
his life, that is to say, his purpose and what his life is directed to. Thus
God gives not only some sort of arbitrary grace and light which becomes the
meaning of man, instead He gives Himself to man for He is the meaning of man’s
life and every other creature.
That God is the
meaning of the life of man is in itself an article of the faith. In general,
the revelation of God will always be the standard of truth. However, without
that revelation we can never know whether God is the meaning of life or not.
For it is possible that God revealed that the meaning of the life of man is
something other than Himself. This is not logically contradictory nor
impossible. It is possible that God simply guides us to that meaning, but He
does not guide us back to Himself. Yet revelation informs us that such is not
the case. As opposed to a child who leaves his parents, God forms us to go back
to Him in the end.
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