Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and this is Ascension Presents.

You know, oftentimes if you're a Bible reader, if you're a Christian, if you're a believer

in Scripture in the Word of God, oftentimes people will say, how can you believe in the

Old Testament because there are these Old Testament laws?

You don't seem to be paying attention to all of the Old Testament laws.

It seems like you're kind of cherry picking the laws you like and you're ignoring all these

other laws in the Old Testament that you don't like if you're going to follow any of them,

you have to follow all of them.

That's a fantastic question.

It's a really great challenge and I think a lot of Christians, they don't know how to respond

to it.

So here are some thoughts.

Well, this will go back to Pope Benedict XVI.

He wrote a book called Jesus of Nazareth and in that book he was looking at the Old Testament.

And he was able to kind of break down, he pointed out that Scripture scholars are able

to break down the Old Testament laws into kind of two different kinds of laws.

There's what he called the apodictic laws and the casuistic laws.

The apodictic laws are those that are given by God, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill.

The casuistic laws are more like case-based, right?

So there's if so and so does such and such, then here's the consequence.

So apodictic laws and casuistic laws.

The apodictic laws are those commands that are meant to be the commands for all times

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