The First Commandment: ‘You shall worship the lord Your God and Him only shall you serve’ (CCC2083-2089)

The context of this foundation commandment is the love that God has shown us prior to any merit or action on our part. This love has been seen historically through His liberation of the Israelites from Egypt, and through the coming of His Son Jesus Christ to redeem humanity. The just response to this divine initiative is for men and women to accept and worship Him. The human response is described as a ‘vocation’ which firstly embraces those who believe, but ultimately all humanity, since it is the same God who reveals Himself and who created the world. This vocation is to make God’s existence visible by living as ‘the image and likeness of God’, in accordance with the laws of His creation and His charity.

The first commandment embraces every aspect of religious life, including the virtues of faith, hope and charity. The infinite qualities of God are the sources of each virtue and draw out their consequences from those who accept Him.

The use of the word, ‘God’, means to confess His power and goodness, and therefore to trust His authority. This is the foundation of faith, and this in turn implies a moral commitment described by St Paul as the ‘obedience of faith’. The ignorance of God, therefore, is the most profound explanation of moral failure. Consequently this commandment demands that every believer nourishes and protects his or her faith. Purposeful ignorance about the faith is never an acceptable excuse for wrongdoing.

Here the Catechism raises the question about doubt, but divides doubt between purposefully doubting the Church’s teaching on a doctrinal/moral issue (voluntary doubt) and being unable to understand why the Church teaches the way it does on certain issues (involuntary doubt). The dangers of the first is that it can lead to incredulity as to the demands of faith, and then to heresy, the denial of revealed truths, and finally to apostasy which means the total repudiation of the Catholic faith. Involuntary doubt, when accepted as a sign of an enquiring mind, leads to spiritual blindness, the default position of most lapsed Christians.