Destiny is the ultimate purpose to which individual humans and angels, collectives and all creation is destined for, namely to be brought by the Father into unity with Christ. While individual humans and angels and collectives can resist their destiny and even seek to subvert the destiny of others, ultimately God’s purpose prevails. As the Lord said to Paul, after he had resisted God’s call for some time, “It is hard for you to kick against the goads” (Act 9:5). Jesus says that by virtue of the kind of chivalric death He would die on the cross that He would succeed at drawing or more literally, “dragging,” all to Himself (Jn. 12:32). At times this “dragging” comes in the form of compelling circumstances as when the Prodigal Son, after having wasted his inheritance and was reduced to life with the pigs in a pigpen, decides to stop resisting and fleeing from his destiny and returns home to his father. Another picture of destiny subverted by evil but brought back on track by Christ is represented in the Icon of the Resurrection in which Jesus descends even into Hades to raise Adam and all humanity out of death. Thus Jesus’ statement, “I will build My Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18) is a promise that the destiny of the Father for all shall be fulfilled in and through the Church. As Joseph learned through the ordeal of betrayal by his own brothers, what they meant for evil, God turned for God in order to save multitudes (Gen. 50:20). This understanding of destiny is foundational to why our Basileian charism is one of an authentic and relaxed spirituality in regards to our own individual journeys of transformation as well as the journeys of others. Such a feel for destiny encourages us to be ministerial rather than mediatorial. We rest in confidence knowing that “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22).
Also see Icon of the Resurrection, Restoration, and Theosis.