Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Chapter XL.—One and the same God the Father inflicts punishment on the reprobate, and bestows rewards on the elect.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
1. It is therefore one
and the same God the Father who has prepared good things with Himself for
those who desire His fellowship, and who remain in subjection to Him; and
who has the eternal fire for the ringleader of the apostasy, the devil,
and those who revolted with him, into which [fire] the Lord4425
has declared those men shall be sent who have
been set apart by themselves on His left hand. And this is what has been
spoken by the prophet, “I am a jealous God, making peace, and
creating evil things;”4426
thus
making peace and friendship with those who repent and turn to Him, and
bringing [them to] unity, but preparing for the impenitent, those who
shun the light, eternal fire and outer darkness, which are evils indeed
to those persons who fall into them.
2. If, however, it were truly one Father
who confers rest, and another God who has prepared the fire, their sons
would have been equally different [one from the other]; one, indeed,
sending [men] into the Father’s kingdom, but the other into eternal
fire. But inasmuch as one and the same Lord has pointed out that the
whole human race shall be divided at the judgment, “as a shepherd
divideth the sheep from the goats,”4427
and that
to some He will say, “Come, ye blessed of My Father, receive the
kingdom which has been prepared for you,”4428
but to others, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting
fire, which My Father has prepared for the devil and his
angels,”4429
one and the same Father
is manifestly declared [in this passage], “making peace and
creating evil things,” preparing fit things for both; as also there
is one Judge sending both into a fit place, as the Lord sets forth in the
parable of the tares and the wheat, where He says, “As therefore
the tares are gathered together, and burned in the fire, so shall it be
at the end of the world. The Son of man shall send His angels, and they
shall gather from His kingdom everything that offendeth, and those who
work iniquity, and shall send them into a furnace of fire: there shall be
weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the just shine forth as the sun
in the kingdom of their Father.”4430
The Father, therefore, who has prepared the kingdom for the
righteous, into which the Son has received those worthy of it, is He who
has also prepared the furnace of fire, into which these angels
commissioned by the Son of man shall send those persons who deserve it,
according to God’s command.
3. The Lord, indeed, sowed good seed in His own
field;4431
and He says, “The field is the world.” But while men slept,
the enemy came, and “sowed tares in the midst of the wheat, and
went his way.”4432
Hence we learn that this
was the apostate angel and the enemy, because he was envious of
God’s workmanship, and took in hand to render this [workmanship] an
enmity with God. For this cause also God has banished from His presence
him who did of his own accord stealthily sow the tares, that is, him who
brought about the transgression;4433
| 4433 The old Latin translator varies from this (the Greek of
which was recovered by Grabe from two ancient Catenæ Patrum),
making the clause run thus, that is, the transgression which he had
himself introduced, making the explanatory words to refer to the
tares, and not, as in the Greek, to the sower of the
tares. | but He took compassion upon man, who, through want
of care no doubt, but still wickedly [on the part of another], became
involved in disobedience; and He turned the enmity by which [the devil]
had designed to make [man] the enemy of God, against the author of it, by
removing His own anger from man, turning it in another direction, and
sending it instead upon the serpent. As also the Scripture tells us that
God said to the serpent, “And I will place enmity between thee and
the woman, and between thy seed and her seed. He4434
| 4434 Following the reading of the LXX.
αὐτός σου τηρήσει κεφαλήν. |
shall bruise thy head, and thou shall bruise his heel.”4435
And the Lord summed up in Himself this enmity,
when He was made man from a woman, and trod upon his [the
serpent’s] head, as I have pointed out in the preceding book.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
