Paganism was about fear; personifying the capricious, random, and sometimes deadly “elemental spirits of the world” (to quote St. Paul). The revelation that the God above all God’s actually spoke to man must have been incomprehensible until the initial hearing of that truth (the preaching of the Gospel) which revealed that God spoke from the beginning to Adam, and even revealed Himself (Moses on Sinai and elsewhere), but again, always through the word.\n<\/p>\n
This too ties into why the Old Testament was so violent. In a world ruled by fear and the flight from death, the Lord God had to be mighty in battle, as the God who protected his people from the dark capriciousness of the other gods. <\/p>\n
Moreover, only a God mighty in battle, could, when the time was right, reveal Himself as the God of love. Once that happened, once the Father revealed Himself through the Son, the fear that gripped the hearts and minds of men started to fade (at least in Christendom), so that the Old Testament accounts appear almost incomprehensible to us today (“How can a God of love sanction the killing of other people?”).\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lent is usually a struggle, Holy Week, while laborious, is the reward. For many priests, the final Anastasi (resurrection service) is not Saturday night, but the Agape Service on Sunday, maybe because you can finally relax. The gift of Holy Week however, is the text — the stichoi or verses that recount with penetrating clarity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[1],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6215"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6215"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6251,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6215\/revisions\/6251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}