Submission to the Will of God follows once we start thinking as God thinks. The classical example cited for seeing the Will of God in suffering is the story of Job in the Old Testament (See the Book of Job, chapters 1-42). At the outset, let us try to clear a possible misunderstanding about the need and relevance of human suffering. It is not that we are condemned to suffering needlessly as if God is powerless about it nor that we are helpless in controlling and curing the causes of our sufferings. God's purpose in allowing suffering in the world is part of an overall strategy to accommodate the humans who are spirits with bodies. In the words of the priest-paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." The primacy of spirit over matter is the underlying reason why we encounter suffering through which the spirit emerges victorious over the clutches of our body and mind. In other words, the transformation of our personality requires that the spirit within us, with the aid of the divine spirit, is able o conquer the tyranny of the material inclinations of our body, aided by our mind. Our sufferings, therefore, can be valuable means to transform ourselves if we are prepared to take them as challenges in our life.
Given the above precautions of understanding , we may see how God accedes to the challenge of Satan to test Job, the righteous one. Satan wanted to prove that in adverse circumstances even the just would turn against God. On withdrawal of all his blessings and infliction of severest of calamities even to his very person, Job always thanked and blessed the Name of God. He did it by saying that God has given and God has taken away; let His Name be always blessed. On being defeated in his challenge, the Satan withdrew from the scene and God blessed Job all the more doubling all his blessings he had earlier. However, Job was not exempt from the normal human reactions to sufferings and even tried to justify himself before God by seeking reasons for his sufferings. It was a time when sufferings were considered to be punishment for one's own if not of the sins of one's ancestors. Job could not reconcile himself to the idea that he might have sinned in his life or displeased God in any way. The challenge of God to Job to fathom the reasons for simple and fundamental events like the foundation of the universe and its measurements etc., completely unnerved Job. The conclusion Job was supposed to draw was that unless God lets someone see the inner secrets of His counsels, the humans were to blindly accept the structure of the world, including suffering, as it is. He saw the need of accepting the Will of God in everything as He is the One for Whom everything is possible. Accepting inevitable sufferings in our lives as the Will of God does not mean that we have to be content with our fate doing nothing to alleviate our suffering or improve our situation. On the contrary, often it is because we fail to be vigilant and proactive that dictators like Hitler and Mussolini were able to create havoc in the world dragging it into violence and mayhem during the second world war. Instead of being ready to sacrifice ourselves for just causes, our selfishness gets the upper hand and the result would turn out to be out of our control. To save our own life we have to be ready to sacrifice it, according to Jesus, and such a person is not afraid of anyone or anything except God. We have seen in the previous Post that to be afraid of God is not different from loving God and we should not make a difference between the two with the intention to carry forward our own will.
We have to still tackle the important question about how to come to know the Will of God. If the purpose of this knowledge is to do the Will of God, we have different models in the Bible. As we have seen above, Job accepted as God's Will whatever happened to him, good or bad, wealth or poverty, health or disease, fame or ignominy, honor or dishonor etc. This is an acceptable method, provided one does not feel condemned to fate and therefore unable and unwilling to correct the course of events when they go against human dignity. For, human dignity is the touchstone whereby we may come to know the Will of God irrespective of the source of authority demanding our compliance. If someone, therefore, claims to represent and speak for God, we will have to take out our touchstone to verify the claims. As for the correct representation of human dignity, we shall have to fall back on the authority of Jesus Christ as shall be seen in the next Post. Complete surrender to the Will of God, whatever happens to us, is a valid and sure sign of our complete faith and trust in God. This, however, has to be arrived at by a personal decision borne out of reflection and meditation on the Word of God and not from insinuations of interested parties who are on the look out for exploiting vulnerable people. Ignorance of the Word of God had led people in the middle ages to produce "Deus ex Machina", i.e., "God out of machine" when no suitable solutions to problems were available. Invoking God for anything and everything, ignoring common sense, science and technology is the present day equivalent to such attitudes. Such invocations or ascriptions of events to God's power are acceptable as they can be implicit remembrance of God and prayer to Him for favors received. They are unacceptable as explanations or reasons why such and such events happened as they may lead to superstitions and consequent malpractices. Because St. Augustine was guided by the inner voice "tolle," "lege", i.e., "take, "read" a certain passage of the Bible, some people have adopted a method of randomly opening the Bible to find out God's Will from the first verse they see. The weakness of this method consists in the fact that while Augustine had the inner voice after consistent and prolonged meditations on the Word of God, people today can hardly spare ten minutes for meditation and prayer. After immersing oneself in the daily grinds of routines and conforming oneself to the standards of the world, what kind of inner voice one can have? As we have seen above, the priority should be to think as God thinks by adjusting our standards to the mode of God's thinking. This is the first condition for knowing the Will of God for us in particular instances. This general principle was followed in the Old Testament by the priests of the Lord by resorting to Urim and Thummim and by the prophets of the Lord by consulting Him each and every time they pronounced the Lord's Will. However, not every priest was considered suitable for using Urim and Thummim (See Nehemiah, 7: 65) nor every prophet for consulting the Lord.
We have in the Old Testament an instance of resistance to the Will of God, a completely opposite attitude to that of Job, in the interesting and beautiful story of prophet Jonah (See Jonah, chapters 1-4). The story has added significance in elucidating the ways and means to know the Will of God, as Jonah was specially called by God to fulfill a mission. Against the command of the Lord to go to the great city of Nineveh to denounce it for its wickedness, Jonah set sail for Tarshish in order to escape from the power of the Lord. The story goes on to narrate how the Lord defeated Jonah's purpose ultimately throwing him back on the shores of Nineveh by means of a whale. Hemmed in by the power of the Lord Jonah announced the Word of the Lord: "In forty days Nineveh shall be overthrown" (Jonah, 3:5). The people of Nineveh believed the Lord's Word and they sat in sack cloth after announcing a public fast. No one was exempt including the king and even animals were bound by the decree of the king to fast and do penance. After seeing how they abandoned their wicked ways, the Lord repented and did not bring about the destruction He threatened to unleash.
Jonah was sore at the way the Lord changed His mind and blurted out the reason for his first refusal being his knowledge of the Lord as gracious and compassionate, long-suffering and ever constant, and always willing to repent of the disaster . Jonah was afraid that dealing with such a person was going to hurt badly his Ego and so he did not want to take up the mission assigned by God. Resistance to God's Will comes from our own Ego in different ways. As long as He grants our wishes, we are all for Him and the moment our will is thwarted we try to run away from Him to our protected shell. The rest of Jonah's story tells us how God teaches him by practical lessons why the Lord is the way He is. To know this is essential for knowing God's Will as we have detailed above about the mode of God's thinking. There is a sense in which God's Will cannot be thwarted by us and yet it is incumbent upon us to follow His ways and do His Will. Here we have the mystery of predestination and free will that cannot be treated in this brief Study. (To be Contd).
Given the above precautions of understanding , we may see how God accedes to the challenge of Satan to test Job, the righteous one. Satan wanted to prove that in adverse circumstances even the just would turn against God. On withdrawal of all his blessings and infliction of severest of calamities even to his very person, Job always thanked and blessed the Name of God. He did it by saying that God has given and God has taken away; let His Name be always blessed. On being defeated in his challenge, the Satan withdrew from the scene and God blessed Job all the more doubling all his blessings he had earlier. However, Job was not exempt from the normal human reactions to sufferings and even tried to justify himself before God by seeking reasons for his sufferings. It was a time when sufferings were considered to be punishment for one's own if not of the sins of one's ancestors. Job could not reconcile himself to the idea that he might have sinned in his life or displeased God in any way. The challenge of God to Job to fathom the reasons for simple and fundamental events like the foundation of the universe and its measurements etc., completely unnerved Job. The conclusion Job was supposed to draw was that unless God lets someone see the inner secrets of His counsels, the humans were to blindly accept the structure of the world, including suffering, as it is. He saw the need of accepting the Will of God in everything as He is the One for Whom everything is possible. Accepting inevitable sufferings in our lives as the Will of God does not mean that we have to be content with our fate doing nothing to alleviate our suffering or improve our situation. On the contrary, often it is because we fail to be vigilant and proactive that dictators like Hitler and Mussolini were able to create havoc in the world dragging it into violence and mayhem during the second world war. Instead of being ready to sacrifice ourselves for just causes, our selfishness gets the upper hand and the result would turn out to be out of our control. To save our own life we have to be ready to sacrifice it, according to Jesus, and such a person is not afraid of anyone or anything except God. We have seen in the previous Post that to be afraid of God is not different from loving God and we should not make a difference between the two with the intention to carry forward our own will.
We have to still tackle the important question about how to come to know the Will of God. If the purpose of this knowledge is to do the Will of God, we have different models in the Bible. As we have seen above, Job accepted as God's Will whatever happened to him, good or bad, wealth or poverty, health or disease, fame or ignominy, honor or dishonor etc. This is an acceptable method, provided one does not feel condemned to fate and therefore unable and unwilling to correct the course of events when they go against human dignity. For, human dignity is the touchstone whereby we may come to know the Will of God irrespective of the source of authority demanding our compliance. If someone, therefore, claims to represent and speak for God, we will have to take out our touchstone to verify the claims. As for the correct representation of human dignity, we shall have to fall back on the authority of Jesus Christ as shall be seen in the next Post. Complete surrender to the Will of God, whatever happens to us, is a valid and sure sign of our complete faith and trust in God. This, however, has to be arrived at by a personal decision borne out of reflection and meditation on the Word of God and not from insinuations of interested parties who are on the look out for exploiting vulnerable people. Ignorance of the Word of God had led people in the middle ages to produce "Deus ex Machina", i.e., "God out of machine" when no suitable solutions to problems were available. Invoking God for anything and everything, ignoring common sense, science and technology is the present day equivalent to such attitudes. Such invocations or ascriptions of events to God's power are acceptable as they can be implicit remembrance of God and prayer to Him for favors received. They are unacceptable as explanations or reasons why such and such events happened as they may lead to superstitions and consequent malpractices. Because St. Augustine was guided by the inner voice "tolle," "lege", i.e., "take, "read" a certain passage of the Bible, some people have adopted a method of randomly opening the Bible to find out God's Will from the first verse they see. The weakness of this method consists in the fact that while Augustine had the inner voice after consistent and prolonged meditations on the Word of God, people today can hardly spare ten minutes for meditation and prayer. After immersing oneself in the daily grinds of routines and conforming oneself to the standards of the world, what kind of inner voice one can have? As we have seen above, the priority should be to think as God thinks by adjusting our standards to the mode of God's thinking. This is the first condition for knowing the Will of God for us in particular instances. This general principle was followed in the Old Testament by the priests of the Lord by resorting to Urim and Thummim and by the prophets of the Lord by consulting Him each and every time they pronounced the Lord's Will. However, not every priest was considered suitable for using Urim and Thummim (See Nehemiah, 7: 65) nor every prophet for consulting the Lord.
We have in the Old Testament an instance of resistance to the Will of God, a completely opposite attitude to that of Job, in the interesting and beautiful story of prophet Jonah (See Jonah, chapters 1-4). The story has added significance in elucidating the ways and means to know the Will of God, as Jonah was specially called by God to fulfill a mission. Against the command of the Lord to go to the great city of Nineveh to denounce it for its wickedness, Jonah set sail for Tarshish in order to escape from the power of the Lord. The story goes on to narrate how the Lord defeated Jonah's purpose ultimately throwing him back on the shores of Nineveh by means of a whale. Hemmed in by the power of the Lord Jonah announced the Word of the Lord: "In forty days Nineveh shall be overthrown" (Jonah, 3:5). The people of Nineveh believed the Lord's Word and they sat in sack cloth after announcing a public fast. No one was exempt including the king and even animals were bound by the decree of the king to fast and do penance. After seeing how they abandoned their wicked ways, the Lord repented and did not bring about the destruction He threatened to unleash.
Jonah was sore at the way the Lord changed His mind and blurted out the reason for his first refusal being his knowledge of the Lord as gracious and compassionate, long-suffering and ever constant, and always willing to repent of the disaster . Jonah was afraid that dealing with such a person was going to hurt badly his Ego and so he did not want to take up the mission assigned by God. Resistance to God's Will comes from our own Ego in different ways. As long as He grants our wishes, we are all for Him and the moment our will is thwarted we try to run away from Him to our protected shell. The rest of Jonah's story tells us how God teaches him by practical lessons why the Lord is the way He is. To know this is essential for knowing God's Will as we have detailed above about the mode of God's thinking. There is a sense in which God's Will cannot be thwarted by us and yet it is incumbent upon us to follow His ways and do His Will. Here we have the mystery of predestination and free will that cannot be treated in this brief Study. (To be Contd).
No comments:
Post a Comment