From “The God Who Weeps,” by Terryl and Fiona Givens wrote. . . .
We find this theme repeated throughout the circles of hell. Those who sowed discord and division, find themselves bodily sundered in twain. Despising unity and harmony, they literally inherit the disunity and disharmony upon which they set their hearts. Those who, in the Revelator’s words, were neither hot nor cold in life, but pursued a safe middle path devoid of good or evil, find themselves eternally in the press of a huge crowd, following a fluttering banner to and fro, never to find a place in hell, and without hope of heaven. Astrologers and false prophets walk eternally with their heads on backwards. Because they choose to look elsewhere than to the real source of truth, so will they forever be barred from approaching whatever truth they now behold. Through examples of poignant and playful, Dante drives home the truth that hell is a prison we build for ourselves one brick and one choice at a time.
The experience of sin, then, is not an unalterable state we inhabit; it is a felt disharmony. The unhappiness of sin is nothing more than our spirit rebelling against a condition alien to its true nature. We have fallen out of alignment with ourselves, and with that God whose love we crave and whose nature we share. The separation from God is not a punishment inflicted by God, but the consequence of an existential reality of our own making. We have chosen to exist in a condition “contrary to the nature of God,” as an ancient American prophet named Alma explained. We are acting “contrary to the nature of that righteousness” which is the root of God’s identity and the source of His perfect joy.
God’s supreme happiness is not an arbitrary category of the divine nature; it is inseparable from the perfection of those attributes that He chooses to manifest through His actions—actions that He invites and empowers us to emulate. The alienation in need of repair is not of God’s arbitrary decree, or His anger or desire to punish. Neither is it purely a matter of human guilt or shame before the Divine Presence. It is a product of a freely chosen sinful condition that is incompatible with God’s holiness.
We experience this disharmony as guilt. We can treat guilt as an emotional inconvenience and tolerate or rationalize it until we grow spiritual calluses to deaden the pain. Or, we can treat guilt as a healthy prod to action, as the pain that signifies a deeper injury in need of remedy—an actual injury signifying real spiritual harm. Guilt is what we feel when we have positioned ourselves in opposition to laws and principles that exist eternally and independently of the mind. ~Givens and Givens, The God Who Weeps (Crawfordsville, IN, Ensign Peak, 2012) 82-83
