Just How Does God’s ‘Perfect’ Mercy and Justice Work?

ethics, things that last, judgmental. judging, mercy and justice, Canon Law

God’s mercy and justice are perfect.  And therein lays a conundrum for some.  Just how, they wonder, does perfect mercy and justice work?

In our human world, mercy and justice are very imperfect. Justice is said to be administering what is reasonable, right, or deserved – reward or punishment.  Mercy, on the other hand, is showing leniency or being compassionate, refraining from inflicting some due punishment.

Justice and mercy can be linked in our world, but sometimes they are not.  Sometimes there is no mercy and sometimes even justice seems to be in short supply.

With God, however, this is not the case.

As Deacon James Toner wrote recently:

“To have inadequate mercy is to be pitiless and cruel; to have excessive, or mistaken, mercy is to be unjust and credulous. We are called both to mercy and to justice, knowing that only God can perfectly reconcile the two.”

We know that if we sin, God will forgive us – if we confess our sins and we are repentant.  He will not hold our sins against us.  His forgiveness is always there for us, all the while we are here on earth.  So God’s mercy is perfect.  It is there for all, all of the time.

But what about when we die and receive our particular judgement?  Will God’s mercy be extended to us after we die?  And how does perfect justice work?

Questions

Some, even most souls will probably have to spend time in Purgatory.  As Rev 21:27 states, “nothing unclean will enter [the City of God], nor any[one] who does abominable things or tells lies.”

As the CCC tells us (1030/31):

“All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven. The Church gives the name Purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned.”

But, as CCC 1033 says,

“To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell.”

So Catholic teaching is clear:  If we die in a state of unrepentant mortal sin we are condemned to hell.  There will be no mercy.  This stands to reason.  God does, after all, give us an entire lifetime to confess, repent, and avail ourselves of His mercy.   So once we die we get His justice.

But where will a confused person end up?  Where will a person who doesn’t think certain sins are not really sins end up?  What if someone thinks not going to Mass on Sunday, pre-marital sex, abortion, or sodomy are not sins?  Will God show mercy in such instances?  How will His justice work?  Will that person end up in heaven, purgatory, or hell?

Omniscience

Since God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8) no human being can answer these questions with any certainty.  But let’s not forget that God knows our thoughts.  He knows if someone is truly sorry for his or her sins.

On the other hand, God also knows if someone has willfully chosen sin over virtuous behavior.  And God knows if someone has decided that a sin (or sins) he/she has committed over and over is not really a sin.

Similarly, God also knows what led an individual to come to such a conclusion.  In all probability the individual allowed the father of lies to sow seeds of confusion, or outright chose to believe the father of lies.  In either case, he or she has put his or her own desires above God’s teaching.    This is the sin of pride.

As Proverbs 16:18 says, “Pride goes before disaster, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

And as CCC 1859 points out, “Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin.”

Death, Judgement, Heaven or Hell

When we die there will be no opportunity to plead for mercy, or to try to offer any explanations for our actions or inactions.  Indeed there will be no need for any of this because God already knows how we have lived our lives and the whys behind our actions and inactions.

At the moment of our death our fate is sealed. As soon as we die we are judged.  Our soul – our spiritual being – does not get to ask for mercy or forgiveness once it has left our body.

According to the Catechism (1021 and 1022):

“Death puts an end to human life as the time open to either accepting or rejecting the divine grace manifested in Christ.”

“Each man receives his eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in a particular judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness of heaven – through a purification or immediately – or immediate and everlasting damnation.”

The Gate is Narrow

Of course, none of this may worry some Protestants who believe in the errant teaching of “once saved always saved.”  They may be in for quite a surprise when they die, however.  As St. Paul says in Philippians 2:12, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

But many Catholics may be in for a surprise as well.

Jesus tells us, “How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life. And those who find it are few” [Mathew 7:14].  These words should really get our attention!  Jesus is flat out telling us that many people won’t get to heaven!

This should worry any Catholic who thinks missing Mass on Sunday is no big deal, even though doing so deliberately is a mortal sin.  Catholics who choose not to go to Mass on Sunday are breaking the third and possibly the first commandment of the Decalogue.  Will God be lenient in how He judges people who have not kept His Commandments?   And will His mercy override His justice?   Will a poorly developed conscience save a person from hell?

Again, no one can say for sure, but an earthly judge would say, ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse.’  God’s Word is readily available to everyone and anyone in the civilized world.  There is no good reason for being ignorant of God’s truths.

Rejecting God

Similarly Catholic teaching on sins such as sex outside of marriage and sodomy is God’s teaching.  If Jesus didn’t explicitly address these issues to His first century Jewish audiences it was simply because these practices were already forbidden by the sixth Commandment and were unspeakably horrible to the mentality of the day.

But the apostles were certainly not silent about these things.  They had the mission of taking the Gospel message to the pagan world in which (much like Western cultures today) these immoral practices were rampant.

The Didache also clearly spells these out as sins in Part II #2.

And lest we forget, Jesus told his apostles, and us, in Luke 10:16, “Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”

So rejecting Catholic teaching on what is and is not sin is equivalent to rejecting God.  An angel named Lucifer rejected God.  We know what happened to him.

Expecting that God’s mercy will be extended to us after we die is probably a bad bet.

Divine Mercy

But, one might ask, didn’t Jesus tell Sr. Faustina that His mercy is limitless?  Isn’t this why we celebrate the Feast of Divine Mercy?

This would indeed seem to be the case . . . sort of.  As Fr. Hugh Barbour explains it:

“[T]he message of divine mercy (to Sr. Faustina) is not that ultimately no one is lost, but rather that, you might say, there’s absolutely no excuse for being lost, because God’s mercy has descended to you in every way conceivable and lavishly throughout the course of your human life, that the least little sign of repentance will be answered with a merciful response on the part of God.”

The key word here is repentance – sincere regret and remorse.  But we need to feel that regret and remorse while we are still living.  We need to ask for God’s mercy before we die.  Once we are dead, it’s too late.

And since none of us know when we will die it’s a good idea to “GO TO CONFESSION,” as Fr. Z is so fond of writing.

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5 thoughts on “Just How Does God’s ‘Perfect’ Mercy and Justice Work?”

  1. Pingback: Watered Down Christianity Only Gets it Half Right - Catholic Stand

  2. In September, of 1995, my wife, my daughter and I went to a Marian conference in Chicago. While we there listening to the speakers, a thought came to my mind about how souls go to hell. Now no one was talking about this subject, for some reason I just started thinking about it. Before I go on, I must tell you that I have read several messages that state that God does not send souls to hell, that the soul sends itself to hell, and I had wondered how this could happen. Well as I said, I was thinking about this, and it is like this, darkness is sin and light is God. Now if a person lives in a room or cave of compete darkness and has been there for along time, when that person comes into the light, he or she can not stand the light so the person goes back in to the dark room. This is like a soul that has lived in sin, when the soul dies, it cannot stand to look at God, Who is pure Light, so the soul drives itself into hell. Now the next day I was praying before Jesus in the blessed sacrament, the Holy Eucharist, when I began to think of this again and it was like this, a soul who lives in sin lives in darkness, but if the soul, while still living would let some light in, then when the soul died it would be like a person, who was in a dark room but let some light in. So then when the person went into the Light, he or she would be able to squint their eyes and look at the light and eventually be able to open their eyes all the way. This would be a soul that, when it died was not pure enough to go to heaven, so it went to purgatory. All souls are different some have to squint harder then others and some can adjust faster to the light and some live always in the light, their eyes are wide open, these go straight to heaven.

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