Against Heresies: Book IV
Chapter 40: The Same God, the Father, Punishes the Wicked and Rewards the Chosen Ones
It is therefore the same God the Father who has prepared good things with Himself for those who desire His fellowship and remain obedient to Him. He also has eternal fire for the ringleader of the rebellion, the devil, and those who revolted with him. Into this fire, the Lord has declared that those shall be sent who have been set apart by themselves on His left hand. This is what the prophet has said: “I am a jealous God, making peace and creating evil things;” thus making peace and friendship with those who repent and turn to Him, bringing them to unity, but preparing for the unrepentant, those who shun the light, eternal fire, and outer darkness, which are indeed evils to those who fall into them.
If, however, there is truly one Father who gives rest, and another God who has prepared the fire, their children would have been distinctly different from each other: one sending people into the Father’s kingdom, and the other into eternal fire.
But since one and the same Lord has indicated that the whole human race will be divided at the judgment, "as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats," and that to some He will say, "Come, blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you," but to others, "Depart from me, cursed, into everlasting fire, which My Father has prepared for the devil and his angels," it is clearly shown that there is one and the same Father "making peace and creating evil things," preparing appropriate things for both.
There is also one Judge sending both into a suitable place, as the Lord explains in the parable of the tares and the wheat, where He says, "As the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the world. The Son of Man will send His angels, and they will gather from His kingdom everything that causes sin and those who do iniquity, and will send them into a furnace of fire: there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Then the just will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father." Therefore, the Father who has prepared the kingdom for the righteous, into which the Son has received those worthy of it, is the same Father who has prepared the furnace of fire, where the angels sent by the Son of Man will send those who deserve it, according to God’s command.
The Lord, indeed, sowed good seed in His own field; and He says, “The field is the world.” But while men slept, the enemy came and "sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way." From this, we learn that this was the apostate angel and the enemy, because he envied God's creation and sought to make this creation hostile towards God. For this reason, God has banished from His presence the one who willingly and stealthily sowed the tares, that is, the one who brought about the transgression; but He took pity on man, who, through carelessness no doubt, but still wickedly due to another's influence, became entangled in disobedience. He redirected the enmity by which the devil aimed to make man an enemy of God, against the creator of it, by removing His anger from man and directing it elsewhere, sending it instead upon the serpent. As Scripture tells us, God said to the serpent, “And I will place enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” The Lord embodied this enmity when He became man from a woman and crushed the serpent's head, as I have explained in the preceding book.