This post is a followup from a previous one - Cum Res Malae Populo Bono Accidunt - earlier this week.I had the opportunity to listen to a sermon given by a Methodist minister on Job 1:1-12. Overall the sermon was rather well delivered. But I was struck by hearing the minister state that Job was one of his least favorite books because of the issue of suffering and the manner in which the Book of Job specifically and the Old Testament in general deals with it. Repeatedly the minister asked with respect to God punishing the disobedient out of His divine anger, "Is that the God we really have?" The answer is yes. Now that said, Job's suffering was clearly NOT punishment for past sins because the beginning of the first chapter in that book makes it clear that God gave Satan permission to afflict Job when Satan challenged God as to Job's faithfulness - that it was due solely to the fact that God has prospered Job. But God answers the challenge because He foreknew that in spite of affliction Job would remain loyal. Therefore, when the Protestant Pastor ascribed suffering to simple random accidents (basing that on what Rabbi Kushner concluded in his book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People"), I frankly felt the explanation unsatisfying and incomplete. While things that happen to us often seem like accidents, there are no accidents with God for He knows everything from beginning to end. Nothing happens without the concurrence of His sovereign will. Sometimes we talk about being in compliance with God's perfect will, and sometimes we talk about God's permissive will, but whatever the case may be, it is God's will that gets fulfilled and we can either comply with that will in our suffering, or wail and bemoan our fate, rebelling against God. Job did the former.
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| Lactantius |
Reconciling Man's Free Will with God's Sovereignty by Jim McCrea
Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence by Father Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure (1588-1657)
On the Anger of God and Of the Manner in Which the Persecuted Died by Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (4th century AD)
De Fuga in Persecutione by Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus
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| Tertullian |
The entire manner in which the Church Fathers viewed suffering and persecution is remarkably different that the manner in which we post modern people view it. If we say that we want to return to the New Testament Church, then we must think as the men thought who were taught by the Apostles. Here is a taste from Tertullian. Note that he discusses persecution which proceeds from God. To the extent that God permitted Satan to persecute Job, was not Job's persecution then permitted by God, and if yes, then do not the words of Tertullian below apply? See the difference between Tertullian's point of view and that of today's modern Protestant cleric (or even the typical Catholic Novus Ordo Spirit of Vatican II cleric):
Well, then, if it is evident from whom persecution proceeds, we are able at once to satisfy your doubts, and to decide from these introductory remarks alone, that men should not flee in it. For if persecution proceeds from God, in no way will it be our duty to flee from what has God as its author; a twofold reason opposing; for what proceeds from God ought not on the one hand to be avoided, and it cannot be evaded on the other. It ought not to be avoided, because it is good; for everything must be good on which God has cast His eye. And with this idea has perhaps this statement been made in Genesis, And God saw because it is good; not that He would have been ignorant of its goodness unless He had seen it, but to indicate by this expression that it was good because it was viewed by God. There are many events indeed happening by the will of God, and happening to somebody's harm. Yet for all that, a thing is therefore good because it is of God, as divine, as reasonable; for what is divine, and not reasonable and good? What is good, yet not divine? But if to the universal apprehension of mankind this seems to be the case, in judging, man's faculty of apprehension does not predetermine the nature of things, but the nature of things his power of apprehension. For every several nature is a certain definite reality, and it lays it on the perceptive power to perceive it just as it exists. Now, if that which comes from God is good indeed in its natural state (for there is nothing from God which is not good, because it is divine, and reasonable), but seems evil only to the human faculty, all will be right in regard to the former; with the latter the fault will lie. In its real nature a very good thing is chastity, and so is truth, and righteousness; and yet they are distasteful to many. Is perhaps the real nature on this account sacrificed to the sense of perception? Thus persecution in its own nature too is good, because it is a divine and reasonable appointment; but those to whom it comes as a punishment do not feel it to be pleasant. You see that as proceeding from Him, even that evil has a reasonable ground, when one in persecution is cast out of a state of salvation, just as you see that you have a reasonable ground for the good also, when one by persecution has his salvation made more secure. Unless, as it depends on the Lord, one either perishes irrationally, or is irrationally saved, he will not be able to speak of persecution as an evil, which, while it is under the direction of reason, is, even in respect of its evil, good. So, if persecution is in every way a good, because it has a natural basis, we on valid grounds lay it down, that what is good ought not to be shunned by us, because it is a sin to refuse what is good; besides that, what has been looked upon by God can no longer indeed be avoided, proceeding as it does from God, from whose will escape will not be possible. Therefore those who think that they should flee, either reproach God with doing what is evil, if they flee from persecution as an evil (for no one avoids what is good); or they count themselves stronger than God: so they think, who imagine it possible to escape when it is God's pleasure that such events should occur.
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