"To you who are my friends, I say, "Do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing they can do. I will warn you whom to fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has authority to cast into Hell. Believe me, He is the one to respect!"
3 comments:
The "authority to cast into Hell," the love and wisdom to lead us even there for our healing, and lead us out again.
And how we have this authority in our own choices oft times. What to make of the close proximity in this text to the sin against the Spirit? Chewing on that one.
~ "You can say bad things about me; but if you slander the Spirit that lives in me, and in all human beings-- which is the whole basis of your own sense of Truth-- How can you ever find your way out?"
I dunno, I tend to read that kind of saying as prescriptive, not legislative... As meaning: ~"Try not to fall into that sort of error; it could be very very hard to fix..."
Do we have "authority" to make choices that turn our lives hellish or heavenly?
Or do certain bad choices have their source in God's efforts to straighten us out? Having gotten my feathers singed in a recent internet fuss, I concluded that "The view is better from Joseph's pit than from Mose's mountain."
It isn't that Joseph hadn't fallen into a spiritually-unhealthy attitude... and it isn't that God hadn't chosen him for a certain task. Joseph knew he'd been given great spiritual gifts, but bragging about them represented a bad misunderstanding of what said gifts were for. The consequences included a period of embarrassing inconvenience.
But rather than thinking of this in terms of "reward vs punishment", it may be more like a manufacturing process: ~'That one needs to be trimmed a little right there!' Whereupon 'that one' duly screws up & gets trimmed.
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