There’s another important application of the principle of having to own it first in order to be able to give it to God. It’s the concept of karma.
Essentially, if parts of your karmic body were created by all sorts of godless actions, they are deformed, impure and, essentially, broken, because they contain in themselves something that is incongruent with God, your soul will retain this incongruence in everything you do, so in order to come in alignment with God, you have to iron that stuff up. The evil that is contained in that structure needs to be removed – usually by a combination of understanding, remorse and suffering. This is a process of giving a part of your soul back to God, by making it free from the warping and defiling influences of all things that are incompatible with God. The process of purifying your soul and freeing it from evil is the process of bringing it back under God’s sovereign rule, because if sin and evil own it, God doesn’t.
Purifying external karmic substance, after having purified your own, essentially means to bring it back to God, by owning it yourself, claiming all the impurities and sins contained therein for yourself, and then purifying it with understanding, remorse and suffering the way one does with parts of their soul, because once you’ve integrated it into yourself in the process of purification, you own it. It’s your impurity and sin now, and once you purify it, it’s your pure karmic substance, to grow your soul, one kalapa at a time.
So, as you can see, people talk about surrendering everything to God, but reality of it is both more simple and more complex than what they envision. They would usually think it means giving away your wealth to poor people, while in reality it’s more akin to doing things with it that God would do in your place, and the only good way of doing it is by purifying your soul first, so that it is aligned with God and contains no parts that belong to the world or, even worse, to the Evil One.
There’s also a misapprehension some Christians seem to be under, and that’s the belief that “helping the poor” can justify some highly questionable actions. Let’s imagine an example of a man whose son is a self-serving satanic narcissistic bastard, who spends all his money on expensive shit, on his fellow sodomites, and on other evil activities. Since he’s constantly in debt and out of money, he keeps asking his Christian father to give him some. Since the father can’t deal with this situation properly, he gives him the money and rationalises it to himself by saying that Christ wanted us to give to the needy.
That’s not at all what Christ meant. Christ didn’t mean giving money to a whoremonger who ran out of money for whores and drugs. Christ didn’t mean giving money to a guy who wants to buy a gun to shoot his wife with but he ran out of cash. No, Christ meant giving money to the guy whose house burned down in a fire and whose children are now on the street. That’s what he meant. Financing sin is claiming its fruits for yourself. Financing evil people in their evil and debauchery is not very different from partaking in them yourself. You’re supposed to finance people of God who do things of God, because this way you will live under the Throne of God and partake in God’s glory. You’re supposed to remedy the evils of Satan and this world. You’re not supposed to give money to the needy criminals who fight God. That’s what I have to say about that.
Just one more thought here. To successfully implement something like this, self-discipline is needed because many sinful things pull at your sleeve and tempt you. For example, that father must stick to not giving his sinful son money for sinful things even if he asks for it. And since he is his son, that is not easy. He must always remember that God comes first.
Basically, conflict is necessary sometimes, and if you keep maintaining the line of least resistance, you can be pretty sure you're doing nothing Satan would object to.
I just wonder how many souls survived his direct attack, the number is probably small.
Oh, I think you would be surprised. If he attacks you directly, it already means you're an exceptionally hard target and his default methods of handling things indirectly were unsuccessful. Basically, you didn't get deceived by anything and remained faithful to God. So, if he had to handle you directly, you're already in the same group as Jesus. I think his success rate in this group couldn't have been very high. It couldn't have been zero either, since I had to deal with the remains.