Main news for 1 December 2020

With regard to the life of the fallen humanity, sometimes involuntarily insinuates into mind the idea: what, if God, Himself or through specially assigned by Him people, rewarded immediately and encouraged good deeds, and repressed also immediately for the bad ones and punished for them? Would not we then be in a world if not ideal, at least much better than what exists today? It might seem at first sight that it was like that.

Who would have really wanted to do anything bad, knowing that he will immediately be punished? But hardly even in that case, people would have become better. For, the spiritual life of man is defined, first of all by the choice made by him. And this choice must be voluntary. And a choice made only by fear of a punishment to come, can in no way be called voluntary. Strictly speaking, it is not a choice at all: because we can call choice only a decision taken freely, without any external pressure.

Of course, not always the pressure leads to the desired results, sometimes inner freedom outweighs external influence, and the choice is made in spite of the situation, which doesn’t helps at all the free decision. But in our hypothetical world, the non-freedom guaranteeing the right behavior should exactly be the source of good! And then it would have turned out that people in such world didn’t become better at all, they only seem good, being obliged to play the corresponding role. But indeed, there is no playing role in the Kingdom, but live!

And God refuses to oblige people to do good. Paul, as a man of God, cannot not understand it, and also doesn’t want to oblige anybody to commit good deeds by force, even when it was a constraint not by force, but for example, with authority or with pressure of the public opinion. Indeed his purpose is not to oblige the addressee to behave well, but to show him the way to the Kingdom. Way, on which one can walk only freely.