376th Meditation
“God is treating you as his sons. Has there ever been any son whose father did not train him?” (Heb 12:7).
At first these words may sound frightening to some. But this fright is not justified, because our Father wants nothing more than to give us the formation we need to reach our goal.
How strange it would be if God did not care about us and simply let us continue in our wrong ways! How different is our Father’s love from the seductive voice of the Evil One!
In his “Short Story of the Anti-Christ”, author Vladimir Soloviev describes the Antichrist’s encounter with a dark power who introduces himself to him as “his father” and addresses the following words to him:
“I love thee, and ask for nothing from thee. Thou art so beautiful, great, and mighty. Do thy work in thine own name, not mine. I harbor no envy of thee. I love thee (…), I demand nothing of thee, and I will help thee. For the sake of thyself, for the sake of thine own dignity and excellency, and for the sake of my own disinterested love of thee, I will help thee!”
Here the difference becomes totally evident. While the Heavenly Father wants to form us in His image and sends us the Holy Spirit so that we do not fail our goal, the spirit of evil generates illusions to trap man in his vanity and blind him. It pretends to love him selflessly by leaving him as he is.
Our Father, on the other hand, does His best to draw us to Himself through love and lead us to holiness. He loves us and grants us salvation, but He does not leave us at the mercy of our misery, but wants to lead us out of it.