first off my question is aboutreconciliation. I am kind of confused and need to be cleared up on it. Does going and confessing your sins no matter the sin clear you of guilt… like seriously after you die and go to judgment it is not even looked at… like it didnt happen. Like there isnt some kind of oops yeah forgot that you need to pay for this or that even though you confessed.
My reply is long, but it ought to help you understand the answer to your question better.
Sin comes with two sorts of consequences: eternal ones and non-eternal ones. Look at the first sin - that of Adam and Eve. They experienced two things for their sin. First, they lost the presence of God as they left the Garden of Eden. Second, they came to experience sufferings of a more “earthly” sort: Eve’s childbearing became painful, Adam had to work hard to grow food to eat, etc.
That first sin was a very nice prototype of all sin. In other words, it shows us what sins are like. When one sins mortally, he loses the presence of God. This is hell. he also brings upon himself all sorts of other, finite sufferings. In technical term, losing the presence of God is called eternal punishment, and those other ones are called temporal punishments.
The important thing to recognize is that the temporal punishments are not so much punishments inflicted on a person by God as they are sufferings that naturally come with sin. Remember that we are made for eternity with God. Nothing else can satisfy us. However, every sin is in some way a case of trying to take ultimate fulfillment in
things rather than in God. So whenever a person sins - whether by stealing, committing adultery, being wrongfully angry, etc. - he is attaching himself to
things and finding happiness in them. A man who steals takes happiness in the thing he steals. A man who commits adultery takes happiness in sexual pleasures. A man who is wrongfully angry takes happiness in the feeling of pride that comes with his anger.
These things can never really fulfill a person, but as you know, when a person does something he begins to become attached to it in at least
some way. So, when a person sins, he ends up becoming attached to things that don’t ultimately make him happy. This leads to suffering. It leads to suffering in this life, when a person has to deal with his attachments and the consequences of them - like an angry and hurt wife for an adulterer.
What happens when a person comes to judgment? When a person dies, all those things they were attached to are gone! All that is left with God. But God does not yank the person away from all of those things. Every soul must come to Him freely. So that person must detatch from all of these things, and as he does this, he suffers. That is called Purgatory.
So the answer to your question is that in one sense, Reconcilliation makes it so that at judgment a person’s sins are not even considered. They have been forgiven. In another sense, however, those sins still need to be dealt with due to the attachment (in techincal terms, temporal punishment) that came with those sins. So they will be dealt with, in Purgatory. But it is not as though the individual is being scolded by God, or anything like that. On the contrary. It is a time of God’s healing of the wounds of that person’s soul and purifying the soul for an eternity with Him in Heaven.
Peace and God bless
