- 44 - 7. 6 The return of the redeemed souls to God Ever since the Redemption was achieved by Christ, those who have fallen away from God have been free to make use of the redeeming opportunity thus offered to them. • Satan’s prisons have been thrown open by Christ’s victory, and his captives have been free to return to their homeland. Whether or not they avail themselves of the opportunity rests with them. Christ has indeed built the bridge. • But whether it is used to return home is left up to each individual, who may not shirk the hardships attendant upon the journey. Consider what hardships the prisoners taken in the Great War (World War I) were ready to undergo after peace had released them from their captivity, wandering from the farthest steppes of Siberia with bleeding feet, week after week, in their efforts to make their way back to their homelands. The prisoners of Satan must do likewise if they would find their way back to God's homeland. Christ will help them through his spirit world to overcome the hardships they will face in their wanderings. His messengers show them the way, strengthen, encourage and comfort the travellers, and raise to their feet those who have stumbled and fallen from exhaustion. But the homewardbound travellers must not turn back and re-enter the ranks of the enemy by deserting God; if they do, it will take all the longer before they again come to the resolution: ‘I will arise and go to my Father.’ • But every one, without exception, will see the day on which he can no longer appease his hunger for peace and happiness at the troughs of evil, and he will finally set out on the homeward path. For some, the span of a single human life will be sufficient. Others must suffer for hundreds, and still others, for thousands of years, far away from God in their search for the gold of happiness, which they seek in the counterfeiters’ dens in the realm of darkness, led by Satan’s minions from one will-o-the-wisp into another. It is their own fault that they must pass through repeated human incarnations, and that they are so slow to find the Road of Light that their loving Father and His Son, the great Redeemer of the fallen, have built for them.
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