Purgatory Thoughts

[BrewMax]

If they repent they are forgiven. If they ask for God’s mercy, mercy will be given to them. Unrepentent sinners whether he is a Christian will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. A Christian must confess his sins in order to have his sins forgiven.

Through, prayer sin can be conquered, and we can imitate Christ by not sinning. By man’s own power, he cannot combat sin. With God’s grace and continuous prayer, we can conquer sin.

There is a call for self-mastery of to avoid the temptation that leads a Christian to sin.

I agree that one should not willfully sin, but isn’t the fact that we cannot possibly avoid sin completely exasorbate the reason why Jesus came to sacrifice himself for our sins?

 

[peary]

Actually, the way I understand it, ‘purgatory’ is NOT a place but a spiritual condition of the soul after it leaves the body. He/She goes through a process of refinement.
We don’t know what the spiritual life is like on the other side, but we do know that nothing imperfect can enter heaven. When saints seemingly wrote about their experiences with purgatory, they were mostly attempting to convey something unexplainable in explainable terms, and relied heavily on symbolism dealing with purging and refinement.
Also, the CCC does not say that it is a ‘place’; it says that it is a state or condition.
Is the purgation of one’s soul a mandatory experience? No. It’s an individual process according to one’s needs. Many souls experience the Beatific Vision immediately after death. But one good thing is that we are on the way to Heaven regardless if we experience purgatory after death. That is true hope! God’s mercy and love is indeed infinite!

 

[Zooey]

My thoughts are that:
(A) The OP doesn’t understand what Purgatory is, nor what it does, and that
(B) OP also is reading into the Bible what s/he wants to find there, as opposed to what is actually there. As well as reading out of the Bible what s/he is trying to reject.

That’s the trouble with just accepting a premise without examining it properly…

But hey, that’s just me…

 

[sneakers]

Why Purgatory?

• last Sunday homily given by the Pastor of our parish - Fr. Joel McNeil.
  saintwilliams.org/node/332

I just listened to Fr. McNeil’s sermon. Excellent! Thank you for posting the link. I’ve bookmarked it!

God Bless,
sneakers

 

[Mannyfit75]

I agree that one should not willfully sin, but isn’t the fact that we cannot possibly avoid sin completely exasorbate the reason why Jesus came to sacrifice himself for our sins?

He did but we have to persevere to the end. Paul speaks of it a lot. Just because Jesus died on the cross, our sins are forgiven. However, the sins of the futures we have yet to commit have not been forgiven. We have to confess those sins first and obtain mercy.

Believing is not enough also. Protestants use this a lot. To believe goes much deeper than that. Believing is believing everything Jesus Christ had said and done. You have to believe that He build His Church on Peter, and the Apostle. That his Church will be with us until the End of the Age (when he comes in glory; when that time comes the Church will come like a Bride of the Lamb).

Jesus also told us that to inherit the kingdom of heaven, we must love God first, love our neighbor, and obey all his commandments. If you love Jesus, you obey his commandment. Obedience is demanded upon Christians to follow all of his commandments. When a Christian sins, he must confess the sins and repent, and he will then obtain mercy and he is saved.

You sin, you lost your salvation. This is very clear in Scripture.

Well, what does Purgatory have to do with this? Well, like I said. Nothing impure gets into heaven. All sin are not equal. John tells us in his letter in 1 John 5:16-17

If anyone sees his brother committing what is not a deadly sin; I do not say that one is to pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not deadly.

If a Christian dies in sin that is not deadly (venial sin in Catholic terminology), he goes to Purgatory. I have already posted several Scripture to imply Purgatory exist. If you wish to look at those please do so.

 

[Mannyfit75]

While most Protestants think Purgatory cheapens Jesus Christ death on the cross it doesn’t.

Jimmy Akin put it simply as he wrote in one of his tracts:

9. "It infringes on the sufficiency of Christ’s work."

*Okay. The idea here is that since purgatory involves suffering, it must some how infringe on the sufferings of Christ and imply they weren’t sufficient.

Wrong!

Remember: Purgatory is simply the last stage of sanctification. Sanctification in this life involves pain, for “For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. . . . [And] For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant” (Hebrews 12:6, 11), yet no one says that suffering infringes on Christ’s sufferings. In the same way, the suffering during the final sanctification in no way infringes on Christ’s sufferings or implies they were insufficient.

Quite the contrary! The fact is that the suffering we experience in sanctification in this life is something we receive because of Christ’s sacrifice for us. His sufferings paid the price for us to be sanctified, and his sufferings paid the price for the whole of our sanctification – both the initial and final parts. Thus it is because of Christ’s sacrifice that we receive the final sanctification in the first place! If he had not suffered, we would not be given the final sanctification (or the glorification to which it leads), but would go straight to hell. Thus purgatory does not imply Christ’s sufferings were insufficient; rather it is because of Christ’s sufferings that we are given the final sanctification of purgatory in the first place!*

 

[Mannyfit75]

Some charge Purgatory to be unbiblical. Jimmy also explains this very well.
Jimmy Akin:

What we have said so far should reveal the falsity of this charge. Purgatory is in no way an unbiblical doctrine. Rather, it is completely biblical on both implicit and explicit grounds. Implicitly, it can be derived from the biblical principles that we still sin till death but that there will be no sin in glory. Thus between death and glorification must come purification.

Explicitly, we not only have the witness of passages such as 2 Maccabees 12, but also the witness of passages describing our accounting before Christ in the particular judgment, including the especially vivid depiction of one escaping through the flames in 1 Corinthians 3:11-15.

Jesus himself adds to this when he speaks in Matthew 12:32 of a sin which will neither be forgiven in this age nor the age to come, implying that some sins (venial ones of which we have not repented before death) will be forgiven when we repent the first moment of our afterlife.

Furthermore, in Matthew 5:25-26, Jesus tells us: “Make friends quickly with your accuser, while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison; truly, I say to you, you will never get out till you have paid the last penny.”

In this parable God is the Judge, and if we have not reconciled with our neighbors before we see God, God will hold us accountable for the wrong we did to them. This is what the Bible means when it says that God will take our revenge for us, so we should not take it ourselves, because God will defend the cause of the poor and uphold the case of the widow. Whenever a poor person or widow (or anyone else) is oppressed or wronged, God will hold the oppressor accountable for what he did – unless the wronged person freely chooses to forgive the offender. In that case, God will not hold the offender accountable for the wrong he did on a human level (i.e., against the human he wronged), but unless he has obtained forgiveness from God for the wrong he did against God, he will still be held accountable for that.

Thus in our sins against others they are two dimensions – the human, by which we sin against our neighbor in the act, and the divine, by which we sin against God in the act. Thus theft is a sin against our neighbor from whom we stole and a sin against God, whose law we broke. We must obtain forgiveness from God for the divine aspect of our sin, but, as Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:25-26, we must obtain forgiveness for the human aspect of our sin from the human we sinned against. If we do not, God will hold us accountable.

Of course, since humans are finite beings, our sins against them can only merit finite punishment (compared to our sins against God, who is an infinite being, so our sins against him can merit infinite punishment). Because this punishment is finite, it must be temporary (for an eternal punishment is infinite since involves the reception of pain over an infinite period of time). But if this punishment we will receive when we are judged by God (according to Jesus’ parable) is temporary, then it’s purgatory. Thus Jesus says, “You will not get out until you have paid the last penny,” because there is a time when your finite punishment due to the finite, human dimension of your sins will be over.

In any event, more than enough has been said to show the inaccuracy of the charge that purgatory is an unbiblical doctrine. In reality, it is very firmly rooted in Scripture.