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Love covers a multitude
of sins
It occasionally reappears in our midst an old question about the penalty called retaliation. It continues to exist or it has been revoked by Jesus?
The penalty of retaliation, which others call the law of retaliation it is the strict reciprocity of the crime and the sentence, appropriately called retaliation. This law is often expressed by the maximum eye for eye, tooth for tooth. This is one of the oldest laws existing in our world, whose origin found in the Code of Hammurabi in 1780 BC in Babylon. Moses, sometime later, consecrated it in Israel.
As it is said in the issue 764 of The Spirits' Book the penalty of retaliation, as was applied in antiquity, but not binding. What force in the world is, in fact, God's justice and it is obviously God who applies it.
Known in spiritual doctrine as the law of cause and effect, it appears in the Gospel summarized in one sentence what Jesus said to the Apostle Peter: "Peter, keep the sword because whosoever shall kill with the sword shall perish by the sword."
The accuracy of such penalty may, however, be mitigated by another law which became known thanks to the apostle said: "Love covers a multitude of sins", a phrase that is part of the 1st Epistle of Peter, chap. 4, verse 8, which means that many people can change the map of their life loving, helping, doing good, an idea that Divaldo Franco summed up in a well-known phrase: "The good that we do nullify the evil we have done."
The issue was examined by Allan Kardec in the text entitled "Criminal Code of the Hereafter," which is part of the chapter VII of 1st Part of the book Heaven and Hell.
According to the encoder, when it comes to the regeneration of who bilked the next, repentance, although it is the first step, it is not enough. It needs to gather to repentance, atonement and reparation.
Repentance, atonement and reparation are therefore the necessary conditions to erase the traces of a fault and its consequences.
Repentance says Kardec, softens atonement, paving the way for the hope of rehabilitation, but only the repair can nullify the effect destroying its cause. If it was not so, forgiveness would be a grace, not a cancellation.
When Peter wrote the epistle to which we refer, he certainly was referring to the atonement, which can be perfectly softened and even excluded by the practice of goodness and love, which are the highest expression of love.
In the spiritist literature we find several examples of it. Often one should miss a whole arm, in the face of a crime committed in the past, and loses only one finger. With regard to compensation, this however does not occur.
Let’s remember what Kardec said about it:
"The repair consists in doing good to those who had done evil. Who does not fix it mistakes in life, through weakness or ill-will, it will find a further existence in contact with the same people who it has complaints, and conditions voluntarily chosen in order to show them recognition and do them as good as evil they have done. Not all faults lead to direct loss and effective, in these cases the repair operates, making up what it should be done and it has been neglected; fulfilling the duties neglected, the missions unfilled; doing good in compensation to the wrongdoing, this is becoming humble if it was proud, kind if it was austere, charitable it was selfish, benign if it was perverse, it was idle industrious, useful if it was useless, frugal if it was intemperate, trading in short words for good bad perpetrated examples". (Heaven and Hell, Part 1, chap. VII.)
The important thing, however, is that all this can be done not necessary under great suffering, in the face of slowing remembered in good time by the apostle Peter, summarized in the phrase: "Love covers a multitude of sins."
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