Alma 42

Not sure why this next topic bugs you: the apparent injustice of dragging sinners—which at some level we all are—into an existential state of misery.

Some review. After God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden, where they were supposed to work the ground but not have it feel like work, he posted a flaming sword above the Tree of Life. Why? Because humanoids had now become like himself to the extent that they had conscience and a growing innate sense of right and wrong. He absolutely did not want them to live forever like that, since they’d gotten there by disobeying him. A really bad precedent.

He gave them a limited time to regret their actions and reform themselves. He had a plan and instant eternal life was not an option. When his plans get frustrated he does too.

So without a ticket to endless life man obviously had to die. Being die-worthy is a way of being lost. Or “fallen,” we say.

So they not only got kicked out of the garden for becoming more like God but they got disconnected from any access to God, physical or spiritual, however one may parse those terms in the early primordial consistency of life on earth. They’d have to fend for themselves. Extreme justice, as you’ve noted, for a poor diet choice.

Maybe that’s why they started to push back. Self-sufficient by compulsion they soon got selfish, obsessed with their bodies, and proud as the devil.

Life then became a kind of probation, what we give to criminals we want to reform but don’t have the heart to lock up or kill. It’s a time to prepare themselves, by constraint, for real freedom.

As awkward as this plan may sound on paper, er, plates, it proves indispensable to human longevity. Without a chance to change and reconstitute ones soul there’d be nothing but Tree-of-Lifeless ontology. Who knows what that would be? And why gamble on it being good? God says his hands are tied and we have to believe him because he’s the only one who could tie his own hands.

So, soul-change is a necessary, though insufficient, condition for humans to live forever. Without some kind of mercy-gambit, the plan would collapse like those card-houses you built when you were little. God has to keep a semblance of justice or his character is blotched. He has to strain injustice through some mechanism of mercy, which he has to have to be God as much as he has to have justice.

God felt compelled to condemn every descendant of Adam and Eve forever, based on that one indiscretion, since they’re all genetically pieces of Adam and Eve and he’d threatened those two with death if they ate his offsite fruit.

Mercy, always the bastard twin of injustice, had to depend on a third trajectory, one in which God himself assumed the punishment he’d decreed. It’s a soteriological Möbius strip in which God’s two-sided yin-yang personality traits, justice + mercy, become one side by a simple half-twist of fate he performs on himself.

Only threats of proportional punishment seem to induce change. In this case, eternal punishment as the requisite opposite of eternal reward.

Philosophical questions always arise. I can’t help you with all of them. Try:

How can you repent if you don’t sin?

How can you sin if there’s no law to sin against?

How can you have a law against something without a punishment for breaking it?

Etc.

Well, God defines justice, it seems to me. He doesn’t submit to some higher regulator of principle beyond himself. So if he decided what’s a fair punishment in this case, we’re stuck with that. But it’s not only about principle. It’s pragmatic. God knows that people instinctively fear reprisal. A lot of what we call conscience is that fear.

For example, if we didn’t punish murderers, wouldn’t more people murder? (Which, as you know, often seems a simple solution to chronic annoyance.) Threats whip people into behavioral modification, most of the time. That’s my take on human nature.

Higher-level thinking (maybe): The absence of law would make questions of justice, injustice, and mercy completely moot.

Suffice it to say, God has laid out his plan as I’ve described it, with a law, punishment, change-contingent probation, post-mortem assessment, justice, mercy, the whole shooting gallery. All with God’s rep riding on its success—not that he has anyone to answer to. Certainly not to you or me, my son.

Justice will nab the violators, be sure of that. Mercy will claim the penitent, be equally sure. That Great Reconciliation we’ve always heard about fixes any glitches in the system. Maybe I should say that God built it into the system as its own incandescent glitch. Don’t try to psych him out. He’s got his intentions, which we can’t fathom, don’t have either to capacity or right to fathom. So get used to it. He had this all worked out before any of us who’ve ever existed ever existed.

Life remains a gift, even if it doesn’t grow on Trees. It’s more like a river. Take a drink. Don’t wait to be badgered by angels to do so. God has built the plumbing into you. So use it, that’s what it’s for.

Speaking of intentions, watch yours. If you intend bad for people, it boomerangs back to you.

And if you remain troubled about these concepts, switch your trouble to a form of introspection: look at your own flaws, not God’s.

Accept that justice and mercy coexist, even cohabit, and that God has worked them out so that everyone has access to the latter, not by denying justice as a concept but by accepting his reconciling of it with mercy in the way I described.

Acceptance of not only his prerogatives but his solutions to the seemingly insoluble should make us all grovel a bit. Nothing wrong with that. Lap up some dust. It won’t hurt you.

And when you’ve had enough for awhile, teach others. Keep a cool head, bow it from time to time, and tell your friends and even enemies what I’ve told you. Make an old man happy. Amen.