In the Light of Eternity: Pain and Restitution

Nothing makes our bad choices, our rejection of love, good.

A bad choice goes on being a bad choice. That’s one reason I remain sorry for the bad I have done and intent on not repeating errors.

God asks for our consent to goodness, truth, and beauty. He lets us live with the consequences, though God stands ready to redeem. What do I mean?

I do not mean that bad deeds become good deeds.

No.

However, God has eternity to give new meaning to the pain we have experienced and to contextualize the evils done. We often forget eternity when we look at the world and try to account for what happened. God keeps working in history, doing what God can, to balance billions of free decisions, a cosmos governed by the prudent laws God created, and the best outcome for all God’s creatures.

The greatest good happens, but given all the variables, one would not expect to see all the pattern. This would especially be true in hard instances of bad human choices. The impact is horrible, but the healing, learning, and restitution may take long ages. Blessedly, God and the immortal souls God created have plenty of time: eternity.

No argument against the justice of God can work if it relies only on what we can see. We do not know what has happened in the soul of the one who has died. We do not have a complete report on the pain of the tyrant.

We can, of course, see (in a limited way) how this works even in as short a time as is possible in this life. A person might be fired unjustly from a job. That injustice, due to a misuse of freedom on the part of a boss, will have consequences as quickly and as surely as can be in this cosmos. The Judge will rule and the injustice of the boss will not be forgotten, though this might take time to manifest. God and the immortal soul of the boss has the time. The injustice is never good in itself, but (as friends have experienced) the injustice can be used over time to strengthen a person and in the arc of history bring a meaningful triumph to the one fired.

The stone the builders rejected becomes the Cornerstone.

The Cornerstone goes on being the Cornerstone for eternity and so the evil remains evil, to be condemned, but the good is triumphant. No meaning is given to the bad choices that love must allow. We would not expect to see this resolution in our limited lifetimes particularly for great evils that involve many. Who knows what good is slowly coming from the natural and human evil of the sinking of RMS Titanic?

The deaths remain a result of a broken cosmos and wicked human choices. Some good came of this evil immediately: we woke up to our bad choices in many ways. For the individual souls, what hath God wrought? Some justice is visible now, but little time has passed.

God’s mills grind slow, but sure.