For argument sake, let’s just say that to my chagrin, after I die that not only do I still exist in some kind of an afterlife, but I become face to face with an almighty deity who is to condemn me. Well, at that point, I’d obviously believe.
So, why is it too late to believe/accept at that point? After all, the devil is said to have been face-to-face with, and a believer that God exists, and has been, according to scripture, from since before the world was made.
Why don’t humans have at least the benefit of the doubt in an afterlife, which the devil and his angles do? Why are the devils treated differently?
I’m relating this from personal experience. Since I’ve often mentioned it on other posts, I may be selling ice to eskimos, but here goes anyway.
My father was quite cruel, setting out deliberately to wreck my life and destroy my self confidence. He succeeded in doing both to a large extent, despite what all the new-agers say about how it all depends on us. Other people can and do damage lives, sometimes permanently.
On the night he died, he appeared to me in my room. I was shaken awake by something, rolled over and he materialised in the corner of the room near the door. He advanced towards the foot of the bed.
He started with an apology. We argued about a few things, and at the end he gave this truly terrifying scream, while trying to ward something off, and then promptly disappeared. I got up, turned on all the lights, checked all the cupboards, all the rooms, under the bed etc. It took me a while to get back to sleep I can tell you.
Now at that time I was an atheist, so I didn’t think such things were possible, and put it down to a bad dream.
Four days later my uncle turned up, and told me my father had died. However he said it was a mess, as his body wasn’t found for four days. It took a few seconds for the penny to drop, but I still remember turning towards the bedroom, counting backwards four days, and thinking to myself, “What the hell was that the other night?”
I became a Christian about four years later, and it actually had nothing to do with the apparition of my father. Since then I’ve had quite a number of “spiritual” experiences, the majority of them probably demonic, since God generally seems to stay rather quiet. Too quiet I sometimes think.
Now I don’t know how you think or why you’ve lost faith in God, but my father made the mistake of thinking God didn’t exist either, and that he could do what he wanted and get away with it. He found out just how wrong he was the night he died.
In fact we are given a chance the devil is not. According to the Catechism, the devil’s and demons’ fall is irrevocable - that is, they are finished. There is no Passion for them.
Part of the reason we have the gift of Christ’s offer of salvation is ***because ***we can’t see God. We depend on faith. If we could see Him, our fall would probably also be irrevocable.
Now why some people have faith, and others don’t, I do not know, even in almost identical experiences.
I shared digs with a bloke for a short while, who, along with his two brothers was taken off alcoholic parents and put into a cruel boys home with one of them (run by a church incidentally - not Catholic this time, but still …). The eldest brother had a slightly different story.
Concentrating on the younger two, they both had foetal alcohol syndrome, which gave their features a sligthly mongoloid look. However the bloke I knew did quite well for himself, since he always had faith in God, even in the middle of all that suffering. His other brother though perished when he drowned in a flood while trying to shelter from flooding rain, and his remains were washed up on a farm fence. Tragic.
Yet they both had the same upbringing, similar abilities or the lack thereof.
Now personally I think God has made an opening for the deceased brother, even though he was not a believer, on the grounds that God wasn’t fair to him. He’s not fair to a lot of people, with all due respect.
But why did one have an almost inbuilt trust in God, while the other did not. I don’t know.
But God does exist. So does the devil, and as my father found out the night he died, so does judgment.
