Jul 19 Sun
Will God ever abandon us to our weakness? Will He always be there for us?
One way God shows his power is by condemning sin. He is just.
Yet God’s power, justice, and mercy are one, so He judges with clemency and governs with compassion. “Love and truth will meet; justice and peace will kiss.” God accepts our sincere repentance.
We, too, ought to practice a similar quality: to be just, one must also be kind.
We sin, and so we need God’s “pity;” we are weak, and so we need God’s “strength.”
God wants what is best for us. When we want what God wants, the Holy Spirit expresses it within us. So even though we don’t “know how to pray as we ought,” the Holy Spirit prays for us, asking for what is best.
And yet there is evil. One reason God permits ongoing evil is that those who do evil or cause others to sin can repent.
At the moment of death, everyone will receive “his eternal recompense in his immortal soul.” This is the PARTICULAR JUDGMENT by Christ.
Following the example of Christ, the Church warns the faithful of the sad and lamentable reality of eternal death, also called ‘hell’. The burning and wailing and grinding of teeth are the punishment of eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can have the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.
But both the Church and Christ want no one to be lost, and for God, all things are possible. Who can oppose His actions? Will He, who is all-powerful and good, ever abandon us to our frailty and leave us to wander at the mercy of our unfaithfulness?
Just as rain waters the earth, so God, through His grace, restores strength to those weighed down by the burden of sin and death. He is faithful and always keeps His word.
No power can stop the irresistible force of His mercy.
On the Day of Judgment, all men will appear in their own bodies before Christ’s tribunal to render an account of their own deeds. This is the general or LAST JUDGMENT.
The future Last Judgment calls us to conversion now, since everyone who hears about it, as Christ told the crowd in the parable of the weeds, still has time.
Right now, therefore, this is the acceptable time, the day of salvation for us. This truth should inspire in us a holy fear of God and a commitment to the justice of the Kingdom of God, that is, to align our lives with the Gospel as soon as possible.
We must become fertile soil—free of thorns and stones, carefully plowed and weeded. It is up to us to be the good soil in which “one yields a hundredfold, another sixty, and another thirty.”
The world cries out that it thirsts for Christ. It calls for peace, but does not know where to find it. Only God can transform this arid, stony ground, full of thorns, into a fertile field, and the rain and snow of His help will fall from above.
Pic: Medieval parchment of the Final Judgment.