Salvation history is the story of God’s plan to rescue his people from sin and death.
It is the story of how God created mankind to love Him and be loved by Him, and how mankind failed to follow that plan, and how God will bring man back to Him.
The story begins in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve’s fall from grace and God the Father’s promise of the Messiah or Savior.
Unlike secular history, salvation history focuses on matters and events from a divine point of view.
God slowly reveals Himself to the chosen people in the stories of the Bible where prominent Old Testament characters foreshadow the life of Jesus.
God reveals Himself to his people throughout their often painful history:
Creation is the foundation of “all God’s saving plans,” the “beginning of the history of salvation” that culminates in Christ. Conversely, the mystery of Christ casts conclusive light on the mystery of creation and reveals the end for which “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”: from the beginning, God envisaged the glory of the new creation in Christ.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 280
The Old Testament in 5 minutes:
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.”
Genesis 12: 1-3
The basic story of God revealing his plan and Jesus as our Savior:
The Jewish roots of salvation history:
That is why those who regard the fact that Jesus was a Jew and that his milieu was the Jewish world as mere cultural accidents, for which one could substitute another religious tradition from which the Lord’s person could be separated without losing its identity, not only ignore the meaning of salvation history, but more radically challenge the very truth of the Incarnation and make a genuine concept of inculturation impossible.
Pope John Paul II, Address to Symposium on the Roots of Anti-Semitism, 31 October 1997
God promised a savior for mankind:
The mother of Jesus has her foot on the head of the serpent:
The Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of the Catholic Church
For Love Alone:
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