24. God is One. The strongest affirmation of the Jewish faith is that of Dt 6:4: “Hear, O Israel, the lordour God is one lord”,which may not be separated from its consequences for the faithful: “you shall love the lordyour God with all your heart, with all your soul and all https://hookupdate.net/escort-index/columbia/ your might” (Dt 6:5). 52 The one God of Israel, the lordwill be acknowledged as the one God of all humanity at the end of time (Zc 14:9). Sg 6:9).
Israel is called to acknowledge that the God who brought it out of Egypt is the only one who liberated it from slavery. This God alone has rescued Israel and Israel must express its faith in him by keeping the Law and through the cult.
The affirmation “The lordis one”was not originally an expression of radical monotheism, for the existence of other gods was not denied as, for example, the Decalogue shows (Ex 20:3). From the time of the Exile, the faith affirmation tended to become one of radical monotheism formulated through expressions like “the gods are nothing” (Is ) or “there is no other”. 53 In later Judaism the profession of Dt 6:4 becomes one of monotheistic faith; it is at the heart of Jewish prayer.
In the New Testament the profession of Jewish faith is repeated by Jesus himself in Mk , quoting Dt 6:4-5, and by his Jewish questioner who quotes Dt 4:35. The Christian faith also affirms the oneness of God for “there is no God but one”. 54 This oneness of God is firmly held, even when Jesus is recognised as Son (Rm 1:3-4), united with the Father (Jn ; ). For the glory that comes from the one God is received by Jesus from the Father as the “only Son full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14). To express the Christian faith, Paul does not hesitate to divide into two the profession of Dt 6:4 to say: “For us there is one God, the Father. and one Lord, Jesus Christ” (1 Co 8:6).
25. God the Creator and providence. The Bible opens with the words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gn 1:1); this heading dominates the text of Gn 1:1-2:4(a) as well as the whole of Scripture which recounts the divine acts of power. In this opening text, the affirmation of the goodness of creation is repeated seven times, becoming one of the refrains (Gn 1:4-31).
In different formulations, in different contexts, the affirmation of God as Creator is constantly repeated. Thus in the narrative of the Exodus from Egypt, God exercises power over the wind and the sea (Ex ). In Israel’s prayer, God is confessed as the one “who made heaven and earth”. 55 The creative action of God is the foundation and assurance of the salvation to come, likewise in prayer (Ps 121:2), as well as in the pronouncements of the prophets, for example in Jr 5:22 and . In Is 40-55, this creative action is the basis of hope for a salvation to come. 56 The sapiential books give the creative work of God a central place. 57
The God who loves Israel is confessed as unique and calls each one to respond to that love by a love ever total
The God who creates the world by his Word (Gn 1) and gives human beings the breath of life (Gn 2:7), is also the one who shows solicitude towards every human being from the moment of conception. 58
The Latin translation has creation ex nihilo “from nothing”
Outside the Hebrew Bible, the text of 2 M 7:28 should be mentioned where the mother of the seven martyred brothers exhorts the last one in the following way: “I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth, and see everything that is in them and recognise that God did not make them out of things that existed”. An interesting aspect of this text is that the creative action of God serves here to ground faith in the resurrection of the just. The same is true of Rm 4:17.
