God is the Unbeginning Alpha and the Unending Omega
This is properly to be, and only this deserves the name of being – that which never was nothing, and never shall be nothing, which may always say, “I am.”
Man is, but look a little backward, and he was not, you shall find his beginning: and step a little forward, and he shall not be, you shall find his end. But God is alpha and omega, the beginning and the end.
But who can retire so far backward as to apprehend a beginning, or go such a leap forward as to conceive an end in a being who is the beginning and end of all things, but without all beginning and end? Whose understanding does it not confound? We cannot imagine a being, but we must first conceive it as nothing and in some instant receiving its being. Therefore, canst thou by searching find out God?
A man’s imagination may extend to suppose to itself as many thousands of years before the beginning of time as have been so far. Then let all the angels and people of all generations from the beginning be employed in nothing but calculating this. And then suppose a product to be made of all their individual sums of years. It would be vast and unspeakable, but yet your imagination could reach further. You could multiply that great sum as often into itself as there are units in it. Now, when you have done all this, you are never a whit nearer the days of the Ancient of Days. Suppose then this was the only activity of humans and angels throughout all eternity, all this marvellous arithmetic would not amount to the least shadow of the countenance of Him who is from everlasting. All that huge product of all the multiplications of humans and angels has no proportion to that never beginning and never ending duration.
Our Lives are Fleetingly Brief
But O, where shall a soul find itself here? It is enclosed between infiniteness before and infiniteness behind, between two everlastings. Whichever way it turns, there is no outgoing, whichever way it looks, it must lose itself in an infiniteness round about it.
Though we vainly please ourselves in the number of our years, and the extent of our life, yet the truth is, we are still only losing as much of our being and time as passes. First we lose our childhood, then we lose our adulthood, and then we leave our old age behind us also, and there is no more before us.
But though days and years are in a continual flux about Him, and they carry us down with their force, yet He abides the same for ever. He is the beginning without any beginning, the end without an end, there is nothing past to him, and nothing to come. He is all, before all, after all, and in all. He beholds out of the exalted and supereminent tower of eternity all the successions and changes of the creatures, and there is no succession, no change in His knowledge, as in ours. He is never driven to any consultation on any emergent or incident. He is in one mind, and who can turn Him?
The Being of God is Beyond Us
Now, canst thou by searching find out God? If mortal creatures cannot attain the measure of what is finite, O then, what can a creature do, what can a creature know, about Him who is infinite, and the maker of all these things? You cannot compass the sea and land, and how then can you comprehend Him who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand? (Isa. 40:10).
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Written by Guy M. Richard |
Sunday, April 16, 2023
Even though Jesus calls upon us to forgive our brothers and sisters “seven times in the day” (so long as they repent), this doesn’t mean that we are to allow ourselves to be mistreated. It is appropriate for us to put some “guard rails” in place or to talk with brothers and sisters who hurt us about steps that they can take to ensure that they don’t continue to do the same things over and over again. 

In my last post, I argued that Jesus’s whole point in telling the “Parable of the Unforgiving Servant” was to say to Peter (and to you and me by extension) that we shouldn’t have to ask how many times we should forgive someone when they sin against us. Knowing that we are like the first servant in the parable who was forgiven a debt he could never repay, we are to stand ready, willing, and able to forgive others no matter how often they may hurt us or how great the pain they may cause. Forgiveness is not optional for us as Christians. We are to forgive others in direct proportion to the forgiveness we have received from God. But if all of that is true, as I certainly believe it is, it inevitably raises the question as to whether or not we are obligated to forgive those who hurt us even if they never apologize or seek our forgiveness. Are we as Christians to supposed to keep on forgiving others no matter what?
Forgiveness is Relational
The short answer to this question is no; we are not called to forgive others “no matter what.” One of the reasons we know this is true is because, as we have previously said, forgiveness is always a relational category. It is never an end in itself in the Bible but always a means to the end of reconciliation (see my earlier posts on forgiveness). A relationship has been broken, and it needs to be restored. It cannot be restored, however, until and unless the sins that have caused the break have been dealt with. Once these sins have been forgiven, the relationship can be restored to its original condition.
The relational nature of forgiveness means that we have no obligation to forgive someone with whom we do not have a relationship. That is because there is actually no way for us to forgive in this case, because genuine forgiveness—at least in the way that the Bible talks about it—is always unto the restoration of a relationship. And this is impossible if there isn’t a relationship to begin with. There should no doubt be something akin to forgiveness that takes place in these kinds of situations. We ought not harbor bitterness and anger toward people for the things that they do to us, even if we don’t have relationships with them. We need to let go of the hurts that strangers may cause so that they don’t consume us or eat us up on the inside. But we can’t forgive them really and truly, because forgiveness is always unto the restoration of a relationship, and, if there isn’t any relationship to restore, then there cannot be any forgiveness.
Forgiveness sometimes requires confronting others.
The relational nature of forgiveness also means that we have no obligation to forgive someone who does not apologize and seek our forgiveness for whatever hurt he or she has caused. This is because genuine forgiveness is impossible without both sides participating. One side must apologize and be willing to seek forgiveness and the other side must be willing to forgive. Without both of these things happening, reconciliation is unattainable.
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As Dr. Sanford demonstrates, taken together, all of this evidence indicates that every man and woman on earth today is a direct descendant of one man—“Y Chromosome Adam”—and one woman—“Mitochondrial Eve”—who were created in a state of genetic perfection, less than ten thousand years ago, just as God revealed in the sacred history of Genesis.

Part I
(LifeSiteNews) — A recent article in the journal Scientific American by Allison Hopper entitled “Denial of Evolution is a Form of ‘White Supremacy’,” managed to pack an enormous amount of scientific, historical and theological misinformation into a brief attempt to convince her readers that an acceptance of the “science” of human evolution would destroy the traditional Christian reading of Genesis which, she alleges, is and has been used to promote “white supremacy” for hundreds of years. In this series of articles, we will show that the pseudo-scientific molecules-to-man evolutionary hypothesis has actually been used and continues to be used to justify racism and to destroy faith in the only firm foundation for a culture of universal brotherhood: The Catholic doctrine of creation and the traditional Catholic reading of the sacred history of Genesis.
Genesis and the Myth of White Supremacy
Hopper begins her article by alleging that the Mosaic account of the creation of Adam and Eve and history of their descendants Cain and Abel has long been used to justify “white supremacy.” Without citing any evidence from the Bible or from Church Tradition, Hopper claims that Genesis has led Christians to believe that Adam and Eve were white-skinned and that “dark skin” was a consequence of the curse that befell Cain after murdering his brother. According to Hopper, recognition of the “fact” that the first humans evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees in Africa would redound to the glory of dark-skinned people in Africa and throughout the world and help to dissolve the myth of “white supremacy” that the Christian reading of Genesis has promoted for so many centuries.
It is a sad testimony to the extent to which contemporary western intellectuals receive indoctrination rather than education that a contributor to Scientific American was allowed to publish libels against the Mosaic account in Genesis without any serious “fact-checking” by her editors. Where, we would like to know, do the Scriptures or the Fathers of the Church, tell us that Adam and Eve were “white-skinned”? Where does the Bible or the Tradition of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church teach that Cain acquired dark skin as a consequence of murdering his brother Abel?
These falsehoods may have been bandied about by some anti-Catholic members of the KKK, but they have no basis in the Word of God as understood in God’s Church from the beginning. The mere fact that a writer for Scientific American would publish this libel, with the full permission of the journal’s editors, shows that the first prejudice that all of them need to overcome is the myth of molecule-to-man evolution’s “supremacy” over the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation as a coherent account of the origins of man and the universe that fosters universal brotherhood.
Genetics, Paleoanthropology and the End of the Evolutionary Hypothesis
In recent decades several excellent books have been written refuting the alleged evidence for human evolution. In a short article like this, we can only summarize the most important evidence against the hypothesis of human evolution and refer our readers to the sources of that evidence.
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