The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

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Love is work. To those who don’t think so, you have not known in reality what it is to love; perhaps you have only heard about it in fairy tales. And even in fairy tales there is a challenge that the prince or princess must undergo. Because this is an inescapable truth in the real world: love is work. Any parent, for one, knows how this is so. This is the world we are presented with. One realizes, however, upon certain milestones, that the work is worth it. If it were not so, that conclusion just might be the death knell of the human race, at least of civilization. But by the mercy of God, we do find meaning in the toil. Even though there may be many a time when we feel we are at the end of our rope.

Now, Satan did not realize what he was doing when he was contending with God on how things would turn out in the universe, and the world at large. For all his works of pure evil, he did not comprehend it: that his spoiling, his making a wreck of things made a worthy ground for creation. This being why things are as they are is in large part by that adversity. Without Satan, there would be no such thing as adversity at all, and many, many things that are present in our reality would have been only of academic value. When there was only Heaven, love was free, not work, “ask and it shall be given you”. Everything was in synchronization, true love was like an everyday happenstance. Everything worked out, not just in the end, but moment to moment, and there was no thing like pain. Things were sheer perfection.

Satan’s “gift”to all of us was that of imperfection itself. It was the invention of pain. This was the new thing that he thought was so great, the opposite of good. What the Devil did was that within creation, now love is no longer effortless, but instead, that love needs to work at whatever it faces. Love costs. That this invention of pain, that it is for the most part not fun. God Himself must struggle to give meaning to anything. And God Himself must to die to be a sacrifice for His creation. Now, there is randomness rampant in the cosmos, disasters to kill and maim great swaths of population without thought as to who is deserving and who is not. At whatever random place you end up, life is ultimately unfair. No one gets what they deserve. And true love, the very meaning of life, is impossible. But this: this is a test worthy of the children of the greater God. That is why God let it happen. This is the new meaning of life, found in the struggle.

This is not to say that evil will ultimately be forgiven: it just shows how God handles adversity: it is with such skill that it looks like Satan is doing God’s will. This is in no wise the case; Lucifer does everything in opposition to what he perceives is God’s will. But the Devil ultimately struggles in vain. You cannot win against the God who is love. This is where the whole issue of pride comes in, that somehow, the thought was undertaken that the creation could somehow prove greater than the creator. Not Satan’s way, can this be so. Evil by its very nature cannot sustain itself, much less a world.

In this world at large, Satan is its prince, for how else could he have tempted the Lord with all the world’s kingdoms? This is a world where evil is easy, and good is hard. So life is the ultimate test of whom you belong to, your very existence the knowing: will you do the work that God intended for you, or will you go the path of least resistance, to follow only that which is easy, and what gives you advantage? The children of God know what the answer to that is, and we prove it in our surviving. We fight the good fight. We finish the race.

And so is this existence now become a worthy test to see who we are that are God’s children, for us to prove themselves worthy of the life we are given. The children of darkness, the Devil’s own, shall they fail the test, and the wages of sin is death. But fear not, for it has been foretold from the first how you will choose. Courage, child. God is love.