God gave us the chance to cleanse ourselves through the Holy Baptism and through the second baptism which is the Sacrament of the Holy Confession.
„All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations. To whom you shall forgive their sins, they shall be forgiven and to those to whom you shall keep they shall be kept.” (Matthew 28, 18-19)
It is this power given to the Apostles, bishops and priests to cleanse you. Therefore we come and say: I commited a sin! But you had the power to cleanse yourself of that. If you did not cleanse yourself of it, God engrained in you the conscience and the conscience is that one which decides if you go in the eternal hell or in the eternal heaven.
We say that God punishes. It is not true. God does not punish. God only takes His hand off us and then the devil does what he likes.
God allows the devil to act against us, because being Most Kind He cannot intervene (and He does not even want it, because then He would overcome this attribute He has, His utmost kindness)
But in order to let justice be fulfilled God allows this disequilibrium. God does not condemn the fall of the man. God condemns his lack of willingness to rise. Thus Christ was crucified for us and shed His blood for us till the last drop and understood the limits the man has, because that is why He incarnated Himself as a man to see how much the human nature can bear. And He saw how much the man can bear. He went and carried His cross, He fasted, He prayed, He starved, He cried, He understood the pain, He could realize what you feel when someone slaps you unfairly and He finally came to say: Father, forgive them because they do not know what they are doing! Father forgive them their sins.
Therefore if He did all these, if He understood the helplessness of the human nature, if He left baptism for repealing the original sin and confession for all the other sins and if the man does not want to drink from the spring of his authentic redemption it is absolutely justified what our conscience will decide: the eternal hell. The only issue that remains is why eternal? Here is why it is eternal: because heaven is eternal too. Because you had been given all the chances to avoid the eternal hell. God would like to forgive you but your conscience does not allow this! We shall go to the right or to the left depending on the sentence given by our own conscience.
From father Nicolae Tănase, The Ideal Husband, the Ideal Wife, Anastasis Publishing, Sibiu, 2011, p. 185-186.
