I'm sitting here, thinking about the topic above. I'm at my brother's in Florida, and his companion is dying. She has congestive heart failure, and her life is terribly limited. So the end is in my mind. It just so happened that in my daily journeys through the New Testament I've come upon Matthew 13, where there are two parables about the end:
The tares (Greek, zizania, darnel), and the dragnet (Matt 13:24-30,36-43; 47-50).
Both really express the same thing:
At the end of the age, there will be a separation, a division made by the angels, and the good go into the "Kingdom of God," and the bad will go into a "furnace of fire."
The thing that impressed me the most was this:
The angels know. They know who we are. We may look like wheat, if we are darnel (tares, fake wheat), but they know. This separation is out of our control, and it's final. Permanent. No second chances.
Now this is really scary, and sobering. It makes me examine myself, and think about everyone I know. It makes me wonder about all the people I see on television, and in videos, and the writers on the internet.
And the question I ask myself is: Who really gets this?--A final separation, from which there is no appeal, no chance to say, "Can I have a do over," or "Oops! I was wrong!"
This is such serious business that I feel completely unequipped to discuss it. It brings the spiritual and the physical together in such a way that they collide with infinite force, and there is no time to change your mind.
I do not know how to say this more plainly: Examine yourself. I'm doing the same. The day is coming when there WILL be a final separation, and nobody knows when it is.
When you consider life from the angels' perspective, that of separation between good and evil, there's simply nothing more important than getting this right.
Examine yourself. Know who you are. Know what you are. The angels do. God does. Be sure you have the same understanding of yourself as God and the angels.
