Can they feel like they made the wrong choice and turn back to God? If not, why can’t they? Why is it that a mere 90 years or so on earth determines the fate of their entire eternity?
I’m chatting with someone on another forum (on a different website) and the subject turned to this question.
Thanks in advance
That’s a good question.
What do you understand by the term “eternity”? If you think it means, “day after day, year after year, forever and ever” with each day being a ‘24 hour day’ like on earth, etc.’ then it would seem like so much ‘time’ to spend in hell for, as you say, a ‘mere’ 90 years on earth would not be fair.
But is that what eternity is? Time is a temporal concept. God created it, so He (and where He ‘exists’) is outside of it. God doesn’t experience existence as day after day, etc. One way of presenting it would be that eternity, outside time and space, is like an endless ‘now’. . . Picture yourself as experiencing joy after joy without time ever seeming to pass, and that is a rough approximation.
So, ‘time’ is out of the picture. ‘90 years’ is not stacked up against ‘1,000,000,000,000,000,000 years plus forever’.
Can people change after death? It doesn’t seem likely, because there is no ‘time’ after. If all is ‘now’, there is no real ‘before’ or ‘after’. There is just what one decides at the moment of death, where one has the last instance of ‘time’ to make the decision. And it’s a free decision. One can always repent up to that last instant.
And finally, there is the idea that an unrepented mortal sin (it is important to remember ‘unrepented’. A person could sin mortally in life and repent at the time of death, and be forgiven, so nobody goes off to hell saying, “I’m sorry, I repent!”) which took up, say, ‘90 years on earth’ is somehow OVER WITH when it comes to eternity. It isn’t (if it is unrepented). IOW, if you look God in the eye at the time of death and say, “I know that having sex outside of marriage was wrong, but I said then and now that it would be worth hell to have that experience, and I’d do it all over again if I had the chance, no matter what you say”. . . you not only sinned in having the sex, you are sinning AGAIN by refusing to repent. See, at the time of death if you don’t repent a mortal sin, you ARE sinning (mortally), and because eternity is a kind of ‘now’, you keep on sinning. Your choice. You know it. You make the choice freely.
I know people will say, "Surely nobody would be so foolish’. Well, let’s hope you’re right. Maybe people will be given clarity at the moment of death (because we know God will give us sufficient grace to accept salvation if we choose it), and maybe in looking at Christ’s crucified but glorified body, all our petty pride and vices will be ‘melted away’, and we will acknowledge our sin, and our unworthiness, but beg for God’s forgiveness, not just out of ‘fear’, but with the perfect knowledge that we would have the power to throw that away from our own egomania, and all the things we did in life out of spite and selfishness, and we’ll regret every evil deed and thought, with a pure and unselfish regret. We can hope that is so.
The Church has not stated that anybody is in Hell. We are free to believe in private revelation (pretty much all of which has said that there ARE those in hell), or we’re free to believe that even if a saint THOUGHT something was hell, it was really only purgatory or something. Any way we choose, we need to walk a tightrope between despair and presumption. Despair would have us ‘eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’, and think, “Heaven is for the perfect, and I’m not perfect. I might as well give up, because no matter how hard I try, I probably will go to hell anyway.”
And presumption would say, “Hell? That’s only for EVIL people. I’m a nice person. Hell is for people like Hitler. I’m just going to enjoy myself here on earth and relax, because I’m SURE to get into heaven. Why worry?”
Instead, let’s consider (as we approach Advent) those Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. We KNOW we’re going to die. We KNOW we’re going to be judged. That leaves two ‘destinations’. . .where do YOU want to be, and how (with God’s help) can you get there? That’s the real question.
urgatory will do its work from the response of those still on earth. It seems for those who are in a state of hell one of the probable reasons why they cannot repent lies in the fact that one their wills are now permanently fixed which is the least reason why and two the grace of God even when it is sent to them is totally rejected. I do not think if God can save a soul immediately before death by sending to the soul His life saving grace and mercy that He would decide not to send it. The Lord could never refuse to save a soul in hell if His Grace was available to do so. Only those who refuse His Grace inwardly meaning those who still hate after receiving the grace are really condemned.