The difficulty for many Protestants I would imagine, is one of acceptance. If you have been raised in a family, worshipped with and agree with the tenants of their faith, your fully committed. Using your ability to reason, you accept as absolute truth, that which you have been taught. People of all religions do this as a common practice. In a very real sense, God comes to the devout of all religions with His Holy Spirit and souls are saved through that same spirit because the Holy Spirit is inseparable from the Father as is the Son, they comprise ONE GOD.

It is said in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that the Holy Spirit subsists in it. That the Holy Spirit, as it did at Pentecost, breathes it’s life upon the faithful through the Sacraments. Every Baptism, every Confirmation, every reception of Christ in the Eucharist, every properly made Confession, every Marriage blessed by God and His Church, every Ordination, every time a person is anointed while facing potentially looming death, the Holy Spirit floods that person with His Presence, God’s Grace.

Knowledgeable Catholics do not consider themselves loved by God above any human being and they trust that God will show His Mercy to all that profess His name and follow His commands.
What well informed Catholics trust to be true is that the safest route to heaven, the most knowledgeable guide, the army with the greatest arsenal of weapons to fight and destroy evil,
is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

It’s not that people can’t get to heaven by using another guide or taking a somewhat different route or making that journey with fewer means of self protection; it’s that they believe their salvation can best be worked out in the safety and power of it’s mystical body, the Church, whose Head is Christ. Catholics believe and say, in it’s highest form of public worship, through the anointed and consecrated priests, that is through Christ and with Christ and in Christ that ALL GLORY AND HONOR AND PRAISE IS OUR ALMIGHTY FATHER’S, FOREVER AND EVER. It is a profession of faith that unites all of the Catholic faithful with Christ as their High priest in perfect
adoration of God the Father.

The Catholic Church works with, in and through Christ to offer perfect praise to His Father, it offers PERFECT PRAISE because of Christ, and those who love, honor and obey Him.

A sincere Catholic doesn’t love God any more than a sincere Protestant, and God doesn’t love one more than the other, a sincere Catholic does believe that Grace, the gift of God’s presence in our souls is more easily received through the sacramental life of the Church and from the perspective of one who loves God and wants to spend eternity in His glorious Presence, that is a good thing.

The Old Testament reveals to humanity that there is only one God.

The New Testament reveals to humanity, the true and full nature of God. We do not know from the Old Testament that Jesus is the Son of God and the Word through which all things are created. In the Old Testament we are told that the way to God is through obeying His commands, His laws. In the New Testament we are told that the way to God is through His Son Who is the Truth and the Life and the Way.

That sounds more like the completion of revelation, than it does promise and fulfillment.

It is true that Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise but the fact that Jesus, the Word Incarnate actually entered into our humanity, became man, while remaining to be God, is the reason or purpose for the promise. Because Jesus is God, He stated, if you have seen Me you have seen the Father. This was as far as God could go in revealing Himself short of the beatific vision, which no man can survive while living.

The promise in the Old Testament was to the Jews, it was for them the Messiah was to come. In the New Testament the discover the Messiah is for all mankind. That was a rather dramatic change but it was not really a change, it was the completion of revelation.

If you were a Jew in the first century and then were baptized a Christian, it was no longer necessary to be circumcised it was no longer a requirement for salvation. If you had been eating pork on Saturday as a Jew you had broken the law and sinned against God but if on Sunday, you ate Pork as a newly baptized Christian, you have not sinned, you are still right with the Lord.
Dietary laws CHANGED. These things are most certainly in the Old Testament and they changed but only because Christ fully revealed what God wanted from His highest form of creation, obedience to His Son’s Words. That is why God the Father, at the transfiguration, stated, ” This is my Son of Whom I am well pleased, LISTEN TO HIM.”

Jesus Himself stated that He hadn’t come to take away the law and He didn’t, He simply gave humanity the perfect understanding of the meaning and purpose for the law. Unnecessary parts or components of the law were eliminated but the heart of the law concerning, the purpose for it’s existence, Love, remained. Love God above all else and love your fellow man as Christ loved and continues to love and you will have obeyed all of the laws.

Deuteronomy 12:32, Leviticus 26:1
Revelation 22:19
Acts 17:29

(1 Timothy 2:5) There is no one else that can mediate with God for us. If Jesus is the ONLY mediator, that indicates Mary and the saints cannot be mediators. They cannot mediate our prayer requests to God. Further, the Bible tells us that Jesus Christ Himself is interceding for us before the Father: “Therefore He is able to save completely those who come to God through Him, because He always lives to intercede for them” (Hebrews 7:25). With Jesus Himself interceding for us, why would we need Mary or the saints to intercede for us? Whom would God listen to more closely than His Son? Romans 8:26-27
describes the Holy Spirit interceding for us. With the 2nd and 3rd members of the Trinity already interceding for us before the Father in heaven, what possible need could there be to have Mary or the saints interceding for us?

Source: http://www.gotquestions.org/prayer-saints-Mary.html

But again, that all changed with the birth of Christ. It was now possible to see the image of God in human form. He had a body and a face and even if the future renderings were not precise, they still represented Jesus the Christ, the second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. So the early Church’s artwork depicting our Lord was no sin. Just as it was not and is not now a sin to memorialize the crucifixion of our Lord by placing his likeness on wooden crosses.

As far as statues of Mary and Joseph and other saints are concerned, Catholics do not worship these images, they use them to call to mind the holy lives they lived on earth with the hopes of emulating them for the glory and pleasure of God. While lifting their minds to these spiritual ideals, the faithful ask for the powerful intercessory prayer the Church teaches they can offer on our behalf. You certainly don’t have to believe this is possible or necessary but if it’s true, you are missing out on some pretty powerful spiritual aid. But you will most likely do as you were taught.

1. “You shall have no other gods before me” no where does this say except for my son. It says you will only pray to God, Not the father, the son and the holy ghost. It does not says to end you prayers with “In Jesus name we pray, Amen”.

2. “You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments” No where in this does it says build a giant cross or a giant cross with Jesus on it. It does not say build grandiose churches with statues of saints and the virgin Mary to pray or pay respects to. In fact he specifically says DO NOT DO THIS, For I am a jealous God.

I just want to know how between the time of Moses and the righting of the books of the new testament, these fundamentals can completely change. End of Quote

Good questions!

In your first question you take a passage from the Hebrew Scriptures i.e. the Old Testament and set it apart from the New Testament in which new commandments and new understandings are presented by Christ. It’s important to know the purpose, or maybe better stated, the meaning of the Old Testament. Everything revealed in the Old Testament pre figured and pointed towards the promised Messiah, the new and everlasting covenant in the Blood of the Pascal Lamb, Jesus the Christ. Whatever understanding existed before His entering into humanity, it was now fully revealed in the Person of Christ. Moses permitted under certain conditions, divorce. It was done, as Christ Himself stated, because of the hardness of the hearts of the people at that time. But Christ said that what God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Divorce was explicitly forbidden. On a different occasion, when questioned by a scribe, Christ was asked about the two greatest commandments and He answered the way the Jews would have known was correct but then He said that there is to be a new understanding of how you are to treat your neighbor, you are to treat them as I do. Which we know is unconditionally and even unto death.

These are but a few examples of how we are to view the Old Testament. What had been partially revealed then was now fully revealed in Christ. God the Father only alluded to His Son in the Old Testament, especially through Isaiah but now through the Gospel writers, the Son was fully revealed and the relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit was fully revealed in the New Testament. If you really look closely at all the inter related passages regarding the triune nature of God, you come to the reality that by praying to any one of the three Persons, you are praying to them all. It has to be that way because there is only one God but that God has three natures. This is understood by the Catholic Church as an unknowable mystery that must be taken on faith but will be revealed fully upon our physical death and our soul coming before this God. This is sort of a long answer so a little later I will attempt to answer your second question.

1. “You shall have no other gods before me” no where does this say except for my son. It says you will only pray to God, Not the father, the son and the holy ghost. It does not says to end you prayers with “In Jesus name we pray, Amen”.

2. “You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments” No where in this does it says build a giant cross or a giant cross with Jesus on it. It does not say build grandiose churches with statues of saints and the virgin Mary to pray or pay respects to. In fact he specifically says DO NOT DO THIS, For I am a jealous God.

I just want to know how between the time of Moses and the righting of the books of the new testament, these fundamentals can completely change.

/praying