The natural law is written not only on the heart of man, but also in the Sacred Scriptures. The natural law can be known by any human person; however, in it's secondary precepts it is known "only by a few and with a great admixture of error" (St. Thomas Aquinas). But why is this so? The Catechism of the Catholic Church answers this question bluntly and directly: "Because of sin the natural law is not always perceived nor is it recognized by everyone with equal clarity and immediacy." For this reason, says St. Augustine, God, "wrote on the tablets of the law what men did not read in their hearts." How awesome our Father is! He always provides for his weak and struggling children. We fail to read what God put into our very nature as human beings, so God writes "a book" -- indeed a veritable library! -- for us. What God told the Hebrews many years ago is valid for the post-modern man of today; indeed it's valid for all time.
I answered, concealed in the storm cloud,
at the waters of Meriba I tested you.
Listen, my people, to my warning,
O Israel, if only you would heed!
Let there be no foreign god among you,
no worship of an alien god.
I am the Lord you God,
who brought you from the land of Egypt.
Open you mouth wide and I will fill it.
But my people did not heed my voice
and Israel would not obey,
so I left them in their stubbornness of heart
to follow their own designs.
O that my people would heed me,
that Israel would walk in my ways!
At once I would subdue their foes,
turn my hand against their enemies.
The Lord's enemies would cringe at their feet
and their subjection would last forever.
But Israel I would feed with finest wheat
and fill them with honey from the rock.
Let there be no foreign god among you, no worship of an alien god. Again and again in history, after a period of repentance and reform, Israel would lapse into foreign worship; they would adopt the ways and modes of worship of the nations. Yet many of the nations worshiped gods who demanded child-sacrifice. Thus Israel herself at times practiced the abominations of child sacrifice and adultery. These are well-documented historical facts, which we will demonstrate in a future posting on this blog. Whenever the First Commandment is broken in public on a large scale, the Sixth and Fifth Commandments follow. It's not my opinion--it's history.
Today, led by the United States of America, there is acceptance of abortion by the majority of the cultures and by the legal systems. There is also a popular acceptance of contraception, whether is it admitted to or not. This is child sacrifice. Preborn babies, children at the very beginning of life, are sacrificed the the gods of money, convenience, and political correctness. The sanctity of the marriage bed, which used to be open to transmission of human life as per the natural law and the Sixth Commandment, is sacrificed to the god of overpopulation propaganda and the god of popular opinion. We are no different from the ancient Israelites and the nations of pagan antiquity that surrounded them.
O that my people would heed me,
that Israel would walk in my ways!
At once I would subdue their foes,
turn my hand against their enemies.
The Lord's enemies would cringe at their feet
and their subjection would last forever.
But Israel I would feed with finest wheat
and fill them with honey from the rock.
Will we be rewarded for respecting life and protecting our brothers, especially the most vulnerable? On the other hand, will we be overrun by our enemies, both temporal and eternal? Only you and I can answer this question. We do this by the way we live our lives.
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