61. Brief Analysis

Surely everyone knows that God is compassion and mercy itself. He is absolute love and absolute goodness. These qualities constitute his underlying reality or essence. Surely, then, everyone sees the contradiction in saying that compassion itself or absolute goodness could look at the human race with anger, become our enemy, turn away from us, and lock us all into damnation and nevertheless continue to be his own divine essence, to be God. Attitudes and actions of that kind belong to a wicked person, not a virtuous one. They belong to an angel of hell, not an angel of heaven. It is horrendous to attribute them to God.

The fact that things like this have been taught is clear from direct statements made by many of the founders, the councils, and the churches as a whole, from the first centuries of Christianity right up to the present day.

It is also clear from indirect evidence. There are derivative teachings that must have come from thoughts like these as their source, the way effects come from a cause or bodily actions from a brain. For instance, the notion that God needed to be reconciled to us; that he was in fact reconciled through his love for his Son and through the Son’s intercession and mediation; that God needed to be appeased by seeing his Son’s final wretched suffering, and that this brought him back and more or less forced him to adopt a merciful attitude; that God went from being our enemy to being our friend and adopted us (children of wrath that we are) as children of grace.

(For the point that it would be merely human behavior for God to assign the justice and rewards of his Son to unjust people who begged him for it on the basis on their faith alone, see the last analytical section in this little work [§112].)

92. Brief Analysis

“Cutting those days short” means bringing the modern-day church to an end and establishing a new church. As mentioned before, Matthew 24 is about the successive states of decline and corruption within the Christian church leading up to its close and end, and about the Lord’s Coming, which happens after that.

The reason why no flesh would be saved if those days were not cut short is that the faith of the modern-day church is based on the idea of three gods, and no one who has that idea can get into heaven. Therefore no one with that faith can get into heaven either, because the idea of three gods is present in every detail of it. For another thing, that faith contains within itself no life from acts of goodwill. As I have shown in §§47– 50 above, it is incapable of being united to goodwill or producing any fruit in the form of good works.

There are two things that build a heaven within us: truths that lead to faith and good actions that come from goodwill. Truths that lead to faith bring us the presence of the Lord and show us the way to heaven. Good actions that come from goodwill give us a partnership with the Lord and bring us into heaven. There we are each brought into a light that accords with how much desire we have for what is true, and into a warmth that accords with how much desire we have for what is good. Faith in its essence is a desire for what is true, and goodwill in its essence is a desire for what is good. The church is a marriage between faith and goodwill; see §48 above. And heaven and the church are united. Faith, goodwill, and heaven (as I have demonstrated fully in the preceding pages) do not exist in the churches that are built on faith alone.