Wednesdays in Chicago - Destruction and Foreknowledge

Destructive Calamities (Disasters)

 

737. What is the aim of God in visiting mankind with destructive calamities?

"To make men advance more quickly. Have we not told you that destruction is necessary to the moral regeneration of spirits, who accomplish a new step of their purification in each new existence? In order to appreciate any process correctly, you must see its results. You judge merely from your personal point of view, and you therefore regard those circumstances as calamities, because of the temporary injury they cause you.  But such upsetting things are often needed in order to make you reach more quickly a better order of things, and to accomplish a few years, what you would have otherwise taken centuries to achieve."

 

738. Why doesn't God employ other methods instead of destructive calamities for impacting the future of mankind?

"He employs them every day, for He has given to each of you the means of progressing through the knowledge of good and evil. It is because man profits so little by those other means, then it becomes necessary to chastise or attack his pride, and to make him feel his weakness." 

 

A century in your world is but the length of a flash in eternity, and therefore the sufferings of what you call days, months, or years, are of no importance; let this he a lesson for your future use.

 

- But the victims of those circumstances are still victims?

"When you consider an earthly life as it is by itself, and how small a thing it is in comparison with the life of infinity, you would attach to it much less importance. Those victims will find, in another existence, an ample compensation for their sufferings, if they have suffered them without murmuring."

 

Regardless if our death is the result of a public calamity or of an ordinary cause, we are compelled to go when the hour of our departure has struck.  The only difference is that, in the case of public calamity, a greater number go away at the same time. If we could raise our thoughts high enough to contemplate the human race as a whole, the calamities that now seem so terrible would appear to us only as passing storms in the eventual destiny of the globe.

 

Foreknowledge

 

856. Does a spirit know beforehand the kind of death to which he will succumb in the earthly life?

"He knows that he has exposed himself by the life he has chosen to die in some particular manner rather than in another; but he also foresees the efforts he will have to make in order to avoid that danger, and he knows that, if God so permits, he will escape it."

 

858. How is it that those who have a premonition of their death generally dread it less than others?

"It is the man, and not spirit, who dreads death.  Those who have the premonition of their death think of it as a spirit, rather than as a human. He understands that it will be a deliverance, and he awaits it calmly."

 

859. If death is inevitable when the time appointed for it has arrived, is it the same in regard to all of the accidents that may happen to us in the course of our life?

"They are often small enough to permit our (the spirits) warning you against them, and sometimes of enabling you to avoid them by the direction we give to your thoughts.  We do not like physical suffering, but all this is of little importance to the life you have chosen.  Your true fatality consists only in the hour at which you have to appear in, and disappear from, the sphere of bodily life."

 

- Are there incidents which must necessarily occur in a life, and that spirits will not avert?

"Yes, but those incidents you, in your spirit-state, foresaw when you made your choice. Nevertheless, you must not suppose that everything which happens to you was 'written,' as people express it. An event is often the consequence of something you have done by an act of your free will.  Had you not done that thing, the event would not have taken place. If you burn your finger, it is not because such an incident was preordained, for it is a trifling inconvenience resulting from your own carelessness, and a consequence of the laws of matter. It is only the great sorrows, the events of serious importance and capable of influencing your moral state, that are foreordained by God, because they will be useful to you in your purification and instruction."

 

861. Did the man who commits a murder know, in choosing his existence, that he would become a murderer?

"No; he knew that, by choosing a life of struggle, he would incur the risk of killing one of his fellow-creatures; but he did not know whether he would, or would not.  For there is, almost always, deliberation in the murderer's mind before committing the crime, and he who does deliberate is free to do or not to do. If a spirit knew beforehand that he would commit a murder, it would imply that he was predestined to commit that crime. No one is ever predestined to commit a crime; and every crime, like every other action, is always the result of determination and free will.

 

869. Why is the future hidden from man?

"If man knew the future, he would neglect the present, and would not act with the same freedom, because he would be swayed by the thought that, if such and such a thing is to happen, there is no need to occupy myself with it; or else he would seek to prevent it. God has willed that the future should not be revealed, in order that you, yourselves, often prepare the way, without your knowing it, for the events that will occur in the course of your life."

 

870. Since it is useful that the future should be hidden, why does God sometimes permit it to be revealed?

"Because in such cases, the foreknowledge, instead of hindering the accomplishment of the thing that is to be, will facilitate it, by inducing the person to whom it is revealed to act in a different way from that in which he would otherwise have acted. And it is often a trial. The prospect of an event may awaken ethical thoughts. If a man becomes aware, for instance, that he will receive an inheritance to which he had not expected, he may be tempted by a feeling of desire at the prospect of adding to his earthly pleasures, and he may desire for the death of that one to whose fortune he will receive, in order that he may obtain possession of it more speedily.  On the other hand, this prospect may awaken in him only good and generous thoughts, and if the prediction given is not fulfilled, it becomes another trial, or an opportunity in which he will learn from the disappointment.