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Link to share: https://hanglberger-manfred.de/en-mercy-and-justice-of-god.htm
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The Mercy and Justice of God Or Subsidiarity of God Again and again I hear the accusation: A Father-God is unjust who is merely loving and merciful. For then the conscientious and loving man would be treated in the end by God in the same way as the inconsiderate and selfish man - and that is unbearable for our sense of justice.
At that point I always like to share a personal experience: An 85-year-old man who knew he was approaching death said to me: "Father, I have done everything wrong in life, I am afraid of dying." I knew that he was a very hardworking man, and that he had a great reputation in town. He was married, had raised three sons and had achieved quite a lot economically. He was considered very generous and helpful. But as a young man he had fathered an illegitimate child in a superficial relationship with a maid on his parents' farm, but the child died soon after birth. I knew about this fact from one of his sons. I said to him, "I think you have done many good things in your life. But perhaps you have not accomplished an important task. And it is so important that it now covers everything else before death." He looked at me with wide eyes and asked, "What do you mean, Father?" I said to him: "You have three sons and a daughter. Your sons are dear to you, but you did not take your daughter into your heart and did not mourn her death. Because you were glad that she did not stay alive and thus that you were free again for a - as it was called at the time - "befitting marriage". From a human point of view, that's understandable. But your daughter is also your child, and you must take her into your heart, accept her inwardly as your firstborn child. And tell her that you're sorry today for completely denying her. And if there should be a picture of her, have it multiplied and give one to each of your sons and tell them the name of the child and that they should all respect this child as their sister and let her belong to them internally. Trust that God will not punish you for your misstep, but that He will lead you to your child in eternity. If you perceive the pain in your child's soul over the fact that her father rejected her inwardly and did not love her, and then take this deep pain of your child into your own heart and let it work there, then you will experience reconciliation with your daughter and God will rejoice with both of you that love has finally triumphed.“ Because this is my conviction: God "punishes" us only with the torments of love that the ways of reconciliation demand of us. Because true love makes us able to feel and sympathize with the emotional pain of people that we have caused them through our behavior. There are no closed doors with God. But he leads us to the doors that we have closed and invites us to accept and suffer the pain that it costs to open these doors and seek and walk the path of reconciliation. And in many cases there is reconciliation only when our love - by God's grace - is great enough to perceive the pain of the other and to take it into our heart and suffer through it. In this way, with God, mercy and justice are linked without contradicting one another.
But we should not wait until after death to be willing to perceive the pain of those who have suffered as a result of our behavior. The more unprepared and surprised we are confronted with these mental tasks, the more shocking and painful it will probably become. The more we tackle these reconciliation tasks already in this life and open ourselves inwardly to them, the more happiness and inner peace we will find already in this world. And above all: The fear of dying will be significantly less, as I have been told by some people, who have consciously approached death and who still managed to resolve unpleasant conflicts beforehand.
Manfred Hanglberger Translated by: Ingeborg Schmutte
Link to share: https://hanglberger-manfred.de/en-mercy-and-justice-of-god.htm
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