God's Intention For The Human Race

Fourteenth Sunday in Course 2025

We must never forget the Father’s intention for all human beings. It’s easy enough to do that when all around us we see greed, power-grabs, and one human being harming or destroying another. God never intended that to be our destiny. What God wants for every human being is to raise us to divine live, to divinize us by making us perfect, that is complete images of His Son, Jesus. Keep that in mind and much of Scripture will make more sense.

Look at the central text of today’s psalm-prayer: “He has changed the sea into dry land; through the river they passed on foot; therefore let us rejoice in him.” That’s a song from the Exodus of Israel, when under the guidance of Moses, God’s prophet, they passed through the Red Sea as on dry land, and later, when under Joshua, they passed over the River Jordan into the land of promise. This is also a picture of God’s intention: for all humans to pass over death into eternal life, and ultimately to be reconstituted in glory in union with the Blessed Trinity.

Isaiah personifies not just the Jewish nation, but all peoples, as the city Jerusalem. He was probably picturing the Israelite capitol, Jerusalem, as he knew it, but God’s intent is that there be a new Jerusalem for all peoples in heaven. That’s Revelation-talk, of course, and the apostle John saw it and wrote about it clearly in the last book of the Bible. The prosperity promised by Isaiah was not gold and silver and silk garments, but the grace that elevates us to divine status, freely given and merited by Christ in His life, death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven.

St. Paul, writing to the Galatians, expands on that theme. For him, and for all Christians, the death of Jesus was certainly an unjust execution of a just man, but was our pathway into the kingdom of God. Jesus dying on the cross was and is a perfect sacrifice, atoning for sins as the perfect Lamb offered at a New Passover. So circumcision, which made a man Jewish, was no longer the way into God’s people. Baptism brings us by faith into God’s new people, the Church. Baptism gives us participation in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. So we can boast of the cross because it is our pathway to glory.

Jesus, then, establishes the new kingdom through His sacrifice, and continues that as we commemorate His death when we celebrate Eucharist. In today’s Gospel we see Him sending missionaries throughout Israel, giving them instructions on how to behave. They would act like Jesus, poor and giving to all, relying on the generosity of others even for food. They would establish the kingdom of Christ not with sword and fire, but with humility and spiritual liberation. That won the hearts of many people and prepared them for the joy of hearing, seeing, and touching the Messiah when He came to their towns.

In our day, we can win souls for Christ and His Church in the same way, humbly giving to others and helping them to discover that only in Christ can any of us reach fulfillment and solve the biggest human problem, the one that causes war and division. In Christ, we can solve the human problem of sin and eternal death.