“What a gamble!!”
No gamble, Padre. Its just the fact of the condition we humans find ourselves in. Sometimes clients complain to me about the “injustice of it all”. I often tell them they might as well complain about the sun going up or going down.
” You must admit that John 3 does make salvation seem much more certain than that line makes it seem.”
I’m at the office Padre so I reply in haste with perhaps more later when I am home. John 3 is a great chapter in the Gospels, one the Fathers speak of often. Those who indeed “die to the self” so that they exist only to act in accordance with God’s will and to contemplate the uncreated divine light will experience complete theosis, they will become “divinized”, they will become “gods”, as a number of the Fathers noted, not by participation in the Divine Essence, but by adoption, which is our created purpose, the ability to fulfill which was lost in the Fall and restored by the Incarnation.
Adding to 7861, take a look at +John Chrysostomos’ Homilies XXV and XXVI on The Gospel of +John, Padre. I thought I could snip pieces of them here and there, but the whole is so good and holds together so well that really the best thing to do is read them in their entirety. The last part of XXV is particularly instructive about the Orthodox belief regarding what life the Christian is born into.
http://sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/114/1140030.htm
http://sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/114/1140031.htm