521. No One Enters Heaven on the Basis of Mercy Alone

If people have not been taught about heaven, the way to heaven, and the life of heaven for those on earth, they think that acceptance into heaven comes from a pure mercy extended to people of faith, people for whom the Lord intercedes, so that admission depends solely on grace. They therefore think that anyone at all can be saved out of good will; and some people even think that this includes the inhabitants of hell.

However, they do not know anything about human beings, that our quality depends on our lives and our lives on our loves. This applies not only to the deeper levels of our volition and intellect but even to the outer aspects of our bodies, with the physical form being nothing but an outward form in which our deeper natures manifest themselves in practice. This means that our love is our whole person (see above, 363). Nor do they realize that the body does not live on its own but from its spirit, and that our spirit is our actual affection, with our spiritual body being nothing more than our affection in the kind of human form it presents after death (see above, 453-460). As long as these facts are not known, people can be led to believe that salvation is nothing more than the divine pleasure that we call mercy and grace.

169. Throughout the created universe, in its largest and smallest instances alike, we find these three--purpose, means, and result. The reason we find them in the largest and smallest instances of the created universe is that these three are in God the Creator, who is the Lord from eternity. Since he is infinite, though, and since in one who is infinite there are infinite things in a distinguishable oneness (as explained in 17-22 above), these three are a distinguishable oneness in him and in the infinite things that belong to him. This is why the universe, being created from his reality and (if we look at its functions) being an image of him, retains these three in each of its constituent details.