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In establishing his covenant with the Israelites, God also established three different leadership roles: priests, prophets, and kings. The role of the Israelite priests was to offer sacrifices as God described to Moses and his brother Aaron; Aaron and his descendants were to be the priests. The prophets were God’s spokesmen; he commissioned them to proclaim his laws and to warn the Israelites of the consequences when they violated these laws. Beginning with Saul, God appointed kings over the Isr …

The vast majority of Christians believe that baptism is a means of salvation—Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans, Methodists, and even some Calvinists. Only Baptists and those springing from the radical side of the Reformation reject this.On the part of Catholics, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that baptism is “necessary for salvation” because “God has bound salvation to the sacrament” and that the Church “does not know of any means other than bapti …

Everett Ferguson, a Protestant elder, biblical scholar, and Church historian, has written what’s perhaps the definitive work on the subject, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. Ferguson spends hundreds of pages carefully combing through the evidence to expose the first five hundred years’ worth of Christians thought about baptism.His findings are neatly summarized on page 854: Although in developing the doctrine of baptism different authors ha …

Throughout my priestly ministry, I have always heavily preached the importance of frequent confession. In my homiletics, I stress the spiritual goods of the sacrament and their effects on our souls. Regrettably, many of the faithful dismiss the invitation and settle for the oftentimes tragic minimum of once a year. Every once in a while, however, someone will be stirred by the Holy Spirit and will start going to regular confession.On one such occasion, a middle-aged woman (not from my current pa …

God is eternal: he is outside of time, he has no beginning and no end. As described in the very beginning of the Bible, he created the universe and everything in it by his word, by willing it all to be. But creation does not just exist as a neutral construct. Because it is conceived, created, and kept in existence by God, it is good in itself; the very existence of God’s creation glorifies him. This is seen in the cry of the Seraphim heard by the prophet Isaiah: “Holy, holy, holy, the Lor …