Seem’s it is God That Forgives ,Ultimately, Only GOD Can....
I will pray for their souls. How’s that?
In conjunction with this post, please read:
FORGIVE AND FORGET—NOT
http://truthinconviction.us/weblog.php?id=P3380
This can be looked at from a very different perspective than reward and punishment, both Earthly and Heavenly.
To do this, look at the idea of tyrants, victims and suffering. A tyrant is a person who oppresses others, and gains by that oppression. But tyranny is dependent on victims. An important axiom is that a tyrant *cannot* make another person a victim—only they can do that, by seeing themselves as a victim.
A tyrant can injure, be cruel to, oppress, even kill someone, but if they reject victimization, if they shrug it off, if they are indifferent to it, even in being killed, they deny *gain* to the tyrant. And this is where the miraculous happens. Oppressing others who refuse to be victims is exhausting. Resistance radically increases the amount of work and energy the tyrant must use, to the point where they can no longer continue.
This is more so, because tyrants are weak in the first place. They use tyranny to make things easier for them. With resistance, they fold and are undone.
And this brings up the concept of suffering. For most people, suffering in an indulgent art form. If they get a paper cut, instead of just putting on a band-aid, they agonize about the unfairness of paper and the world in general. They focus on why “they are being punished”. They pay far more attention to it than it deserves. Were they instead to just ignore it, it would lose all importance.
Someone once said, if there was just one thing Heaven would wish for people to do, it would be to stop suffering. It is their choice, and it shows a very poor picture of humanity.
And this, in turn, brings up the subjects of sin, reward and punishment. Most people think of sin as just that. If you don’t sin, you will be rewarded. If you do, you will be punished. If not by men, then by Heaven. As such, it just seems to be another form of “luck”, which is also rewarded or withheld by Heaven.
But this is not the only way of looking at it. What we call sin may create its own punishment. For example, if a mother tells her child to not touch a hot stove, it may be a good analogy for sin. If the child obeys, they do not burn their finger. If they disobey, they get burned.
In either case, it was not the mother who rewarded or punished her child. Nor was the hot stove at fault, it just *was*. It was the act of disobedience by the child that resulted in the injury.
So how does all of this relate to an enemy? It means that for your enemy to be a tyrant to you, you must cooperate with them, by being a victim. Unless you do so by just suffering, instead of resisting, all your enemy accomplishes is to exhaust themself.
Their punishment for their “sin” of tyranny is to use themselves up. So by refusing to play along, you do not stand in the way of their punishment. If you suffer and play a victim, you stand in the way of their getting their just desserts.
I do not suggest that this accounts for *all* sins, for indeed, Heaven may, at its discretion, actively punish as well those sins that it finds most repugnant. But this does clear the air of the petty sins of man, the mostly trivial complaints, the paper cuts, that most people focus on to indulgently suffer over.
“Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”
This is a tough one. I will not participate in any attempt by a government to take freedoms away from my family.
I’ll pass.
Killing them keeps you that way.
Thanks, thanks.