I don’t think its a punishment that God puts on a person - once a person sees God as evil they are lost to the truth - its a punishment they have brought on to themselves - I know people who scofff everytime God is mentioned - I was sitting by someone last night at work who was saying God is evil and vindictive - there is nothing I can say to him that will change his thought on this.My brother gets angry at the mention of God and there is nothing I can do about that either - I have tried - its how he has choosen to see it.
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I am sure some people do look for the truth again and do come back - most never look again and see God as fiction or evil - so by doing this they condem themselves.
God with boundless mercy is ever ready to take a person back.But if a person has blinded themself from God they are truely lost.
I don’t think any of us who are/were spiritually deaf and blind became that way because we
freely chose it. Proverbs 14:12 - “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” Sin just seems right and reasonable, in many cases, to blinded eyes. Justifying anger was one of my most intrenched misunderstandings.
Psalms 51:5 - Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, And in sin my mother conceived me.
From the moment I was born, I was subject to death and that, to my understanding, indicates a sin nature already present (even though we’re protected from being liable to judgment until the age of reason or so).
Perhaps ‘spiritual genetics’ is involved in determining to what
extent someone is born spiritually deaf/blind. And that state, coupled with nurture, sets a course until an Intervention takes hold, hopefully, and wakes us up.
William R. Crews (“The Awakening Hour” program) has a booklet called “Religious but Lost” that addresses the problem of being blinded into thinking one is saved when they are not. He tells of preachers who preached for years before coming to the realization that they were alseep the whole time. Mr. Crews was one of them.
The other night I was listening to an interesting talk by Sam Harris on “Free Will” (youtube). He ‘illustrates’ his conclusion that there is no such thing as ‘free will’ rather convincingly, through reason and personal experience. (Except the three-legged stool is missing a leg.) “The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides.” - Henri-Frederic Amiel. “It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.” - Werner Heisenberg
One thing that Sam Harris said ties into this topic is, “I cannot take credit for the fact that I don’t have the soul of a psychopath.”
And therein lies, from my experience, one of the key ‘rubs’ between the blind and the ‘awoken’. At one time, I didn’t recognize that my biting sarcasm came from the same seed of iniquity in my soul, as the serial killer who followed the bidding of the seed further down the road. I cried, “Not me!” instead of “I Am That”. “It is not Goodness to be better than the worst.”
My self-righteousness came from
comparing myself to others (and there were always ‘worse’), rather than seeking a way to
identify with my
mirrors in the world. I truly didn’t think I
needed a Savior.
Fifteen years ago, I spoke like your co-worker and acted like your brother. My ‘case against God’ was akin to that of Richard Dawkins’ oft-televised mini diatribe. The only reason I am sober today is because my desire to get out of the hell of alcoholism was greater than my desire to avoid hearing the word “God” spoken of favorably. It was a grind, to be sure, but I kept trudging - and then, in time and to my utter amazement, I discovered,
for myself, the God of the psalm sung in Mass as a child, “God is Love”.
The folks in AA had something I wanted: sobriety. But the longer I stayed sober, the more I saw that ‘just sobriety’ wouldn’t be enough because it was a deeper misery that drove me to alcoholism in the first place. I began to desire the ease with life and the kindness others had (and was shown to me) for those beginning the Journey all raw and beat up, angry and desolate, with huge chips on both shoulders.
In the Biblical sense: I had been ‘provoked to jealousy’ (envy). I wanted what some had that was better than what I had. Now, in the beginning, it didn’t take much to satisfy that. But as I progressed, the bar raised and, eventually, I saw others with an the inner peace - and I longed for that most of all. Just had to be willing to do the nessary excavations.
‘Jealously’ is when
I have something I think I
need to keep me happy - and am terrified of losing it. ‘Envy’ is when I want what someone else has because that ‘something’ seems to be making them happier than I am.
In a spiritual context, such envy was a very good thin, from my experience.
Romans 11:11 - I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles,
for to provoke them to jealousy.
Not sure how well the plan to provoke the ‘delusionally/self-righteously good’ among us to envy by the Light within us is going. I do pray that God will give us more Time because what I heard on TV about the New World Order the other day sounds truly dismal. That we will keep our ‘freedom of religion’ but there will be no Jesus in the mix of ‘Gods’/paths: Jesus is ‘divisive’, and they wish to promote ‘unity’.
