Wow. I'm sorry I didn't look at this thread earlier!! I thought it was about Charismaniacs, and I don't care to entertain discussion of "spiritual gifts" at this time.
THIS, however, is a topic which is growing ever near and dear to my heart.
I see an awful lot of heat being exchanged on the subject. Wonder if we could all step back and ask some questions of ourselves and each other:
1. What is the ontology of God, at least as we know it revealed in the Holy Scriptures. It is this
1Jo 4:8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
1Jo 4:16 And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.
Here is a truth and a starting point to begin with. God IS love. Not the mushy sentimental "touchy feely" stuff that human beings try to pass off as love, and not the kind of "love" that really is a self-centered desire to have something, but real and true love. St. Paul further gives a description of love in 1 Corin. 13. It is completely "other centered," i.e., it thinks of and desires the BEST for the object of its affections.
Therefore, I would state that a good starting point would be to understand that God also desires this, even for His enemies:
Mt 5:44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
45 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
46 For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?
47 And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?
48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
Therefore, since God loves even those who hate Him, He is going to nonetheless give them that which is the very BEST thing in the whole universe --
He will give them HIMSELF, just as He will give Himself to us. In fact, God is so loving that He will indeed give Himself to every man, woman, and child who has ever lived.
BUT ----
Here's the rub....will WE be able to accept Him.
I have posted before a link to a paper called
THE RIVER OF FIRE. This is a very thought provoking paper and one I hope each of you on this thread will take a few minutes to read.
Here is the part I find most interesting:
Paradise or hell depends on how we will accept God's love. Will we return love for love, or will we respond to His love with hate? This is the critical difference. And this difference depends entirely on us, on our freedom, on our innermost free choice, on a perfectly free attitude which is not influenced by external conditions or internal factors of our material and psychological nature, because it is not an external act but an interior attitude coming from the bottom of our heart, conditioning not our sins, but the way we think about our sins, as it is clearly seen in the case of the publican and the Pharisee and in the case of the two robbers crucified with Christ. This freedom, this choice, this inner attitude toward our Creator is the innermost core of our eternal personality, it is the most profound of our characteristics, it is what makes us that which we are, it is our eternal face — bright or dark, loving or hating.
No, my brothers, unhappily for us, paradise or hell does not depend on God. If it depended on God, we would have nothing to fear. We have nothing to fear from Love. But it does not depend on God. It depends entirely upon us, and this is the whole tragedy. God wants us to be in His image, eternally free. He respects us absolutely. This is love. Without respect, we cannot speak of love. We are men because we are free. If we were not free, we would be clever animals, not men. God will never take back this gift of freedom which renders us what we are. This means that we will always be what we want to be, friends or enemies of God, and there is no changing in this our deepest self. In this life, there are profound or superficial changes in our life, in our character, in our beliefs, but all these changes are only the expression in time of our deepest eternal self. This deep eternal self is eternal, with all the meaning of the word. This is why paradise and hell are also eternal. There is no changing in what we really are. Our temporal characteristics and our history in life depend on many superficial things 'which vanish with death, but our real personality is not superficial and does not depend on changing and vanishing things. It is our real self. It remains with us when we sleep in the grave, and will be our real face in the resurrection. It is eternal.
God is a loving fire, and He is a loving fire for all: good or bad. There is, however, a great difference in the way people receive this loving fire of God. Saint Basil says that "the sword of fire was placed at the gate of paradise to guard the approach to the tree of life; it was terrible and burning toward infidels, but kindly accessible toward the faithful, bringing to them the light of day." 44 The same loving fire brings the day to those who respond to love with love, and burns those who respond to love with hatred.
Paradise and hell are one and the same River of God, a loving fire which embraces and covers all with the same beneficial will, without any difference or discrimination. The same vivifying water is life eternal for the faithful and death eternal for the infidels; for the first it is their element of life, for the second it is the instrument of their eternal suffocation; paradise for the one is hell for the other. Do not consider this strange. The son who loves his father will feel happy in his father's arms, but if he does not love him, his father's loving embrace will be a torment to him. This also is why when we love the man who hates us, it is likened to pouring lighted coals and hot embers on his head.
"I say," writes Saint Isaac the Syrian, "that those who are suffering in hell, are suffering in being scourged by love.... It is totally false to think that the sinners in hell are deprived of God's love. Love is a child of the knowledge of truth, and is unquestionably given commonly to all. But love's power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it" (Homily 84).
God is love. If we really believe this truth, we know that God never hates, never punishes, never takes vengeance. As Abba Ammonas says, "Love never hates anyone, never reproves anyone, never condemns anyone, never grieves anyone, never abhors anyone, neither faithful nor infidel nor stranger nor sinner nor fornicator, nor anyone impure, but instead it is precisely sinners, and weak and negligent souls that it loves more, and feels pain for them and grieves and laments, and it feels sympathy for the wicked and sinners, more than for the good, imitating Christ Who called sinners, and ate and drank with them. For this reason, showing what real love is, He taught saying, 'Become good and merciful like your Father in Heaven,' and as He rains on bad and good and makes the sun to rise on just and unjust alike, so also is the one who has real love, and has compassion, and prays for all." 45
XVIII
Now if anyone is perplexed and does not understand how it is possible for God's love to render anyone pitifully wretched and miserable and even burning as it were in flames, let him consider the elder brother of the prodigal son. Was he not in his father's estate? Did not everything in it belong to him? Did he not have his father's love? Did his father not come himself to entreat and beseech him to come and take part in the joyous banquet? What rendered him miserable and burned him with inner bitterness and hate? Who refused him anything? Why was he not joyous at his brother's return? Why did he not have love either toward his father or toward his brother? Was it not because of his wicked, inner disposition? Did he not remain in hell because of that? And what was this hell? Was it any separate place? Were there any instruments of torture? Did he not continue to live in his father's house? What separated him from all the joyous people in the house if not his own hate and his own bitterness? Did his father, or even his brother, stop loving him? Was it not precisely this very love which hardened his heart more and more? Was it not the joy that made him sad? Was not hatred burning in his heart, hatred for his father and his brother, hatred for the love of his father toward his brother and for the love of his brother toward his father? This is hell: the negation of love; the return of hate for love; bitterness at seeing innocent joy; to be surrounded by love and to have hate in one's heart. This is the eternal condition of all the damned. They are all dearly loved. They are all invited to the joyous banquet. They are all living in God's Kingdom, in the New Earth and the New Heavens. No one expels them. Even if they wanted to go away they could not flee from God's New Creation, nor hide from God's tenderly loving omnipresence. Their only alternative would be, perhaps, to go away from their brothers and search for a bitter isolation from them, but they could never depart from God and His love. And what is more terrible is that in this eternal life, in this New Creation, God is everything to His creatures. As Saint Gregory of Nyssa says, "In the present life the things we have relations with are numerous, for instance: time, air, locality, food and drink, clothing, sunlight, lamplight, and other necessities of life, none of which, many though they be, are God; that blessed state which we hope for is in need of none of these things, but the Divine Being will become all, and in the stead of all to us, distributing Himself proportionately to every need of that existence. It is plain, too, from the Holy Scriptures that God becomes to those who deserve it, locality and home and clothing and food and drink and light and riches and kingdom, and everything that can be thought of and named that goes to make our life happy" (On the Soul and the Resurrection). 46
In the new eternal life, God will be everything to His creatures, not only to the good but also to the wicked, not only to those who love Him, but likewise to those who hate Him. But how will those who hate Him endure to have everything from the hands of Him Whom they detest? Oh, what an eternal torment is this, what an eternal fire, what a gnashing of teeth!
Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the everlasting inner fire of hatred," 47 saith the Lord, because I was thirsty for your love and you did not give it to Me, I was hungry for your blessedness and you did not offer it to Me, I was imprisoned in My human nature and you did not come to visit Me in My church; you are free to go where your wicked desire wishes, away from Me, in the torturing hatred of your hearts which is foreign to My loving heart which knows no hatred for anyone. Depart freely from love to the everlasting torture of hate, unknown and foreign to Me and to those who are with Me, but prepared by freedom for the devil, from the days I created My free, rational creatures. But wherever you go in the darkness of your hating hearts, My love will follow you like a river of fire, because no matter what your heart has chosen, you are and you will eternally continue to be, My children.
You see, what we become here in relationship to Jesus Christ is what we will be forever. If we hate Christ here and in this life, we shall be unable the change ourselve in eternity, and that love which the Father gives will torment us, for we do not wish nor desire us. Souls filled with lusts of every kind will still desire those fleshly passions, but will burn with the torment of having those lusts INFULFILLABLE forever.
We can hope that perhaps there is still the ability for change in the next world, but it seems that Scripture denies this:
Heb 9:27 And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment
Why warn men of this if they can repent after death? Certainly St. Paul spent a great deal of time on this subject, and I think there is a reason. The Judgment is nothing less than the PURE AND TRUE LIGHT OF GOD revealing us as we really are. All pretense is stripped away, and in neverending eternity, our state is sealed. If we have hated God and His Christ, we continue in that eternal mode, tormented to be in the very presence of the One we have hated forever. His love will be a river of fire, but as such, will not be warm and loving, but harsh and hateful to us, not because there is any hate in God, but because we hate Him.
This, I think, answers BOTH ARGUMENTS found on this site: God is NOT the author of an eternal torment that never ends, making Him an evil person worse than any tyrannt ever known by man could hope to be, but it does not deny the Scriptures either which warn the wicked God haters of an eternal STATE OF TORMENT, which comes about by their own free will rejection of God and His kingdom.
I do hope you will read the whole article. It is very well written, but most of all, it has the honor of God's character at stake. It is not He, but WE, who send ourselves to our final estate.
Let us therefore live lives of continued repentance before Him, changing ourselves, by HIS GRACE AND HELP UPON OUR WEAK EFFORTS, into the likeness of Christ Jesus, so that upon seeing Him, our hearts will be filled with joy and not terror and revulsion.
Cordially in Christ, our only hope,
Brother Ed
