Church of the Holy City

Evil and God’s Providence

Evil and God’s Providence
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
January 17, 2010

Joshua 1:1-9 John 9

The past several weeks have caused me to ponder the issue of evil. Our church was broken into, and some important things were stolen. Among the things stolen was the church computer, which makes it pretty near impossible to work out of the office now. Then my email box was hacked into. The criminal locked me out of my own mailbox and I had to enter all 165 of my addresses one by one into a new mailbox I had to create. Then we all heard about the terrible earthquake in Haiti, and the devastation it has caused that country. These events can all evils. And we are made aware that contending with evil is a part of the human condition.
I need to make a distinction in this discussion, though. The church vandalism and my email box violation are the result of evil human actions. The earthquake in Haiti is a natural disaster that was not the result of human evil. These are two different kinds of evil, and in the space of this talk I can’t talk about both. I will confine my discussion this Sunday to the issue of human evil.
But we need to keep in mind one very important point. No matter how awful things look, God presides over human affairs and human events. Jesus tells us:
29Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. 30And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows (Matthew 10:29-31).
Swedenborg adds his voice, to teach us that all the events in the world, and in human behaviour, are under God’s care,
. . . every least thing that happens in the world, whether to evil people or to good people, is under divine providence, and particularly that the divine providence is active in the smallest details of our own thoughts and actions and is therefore universal (DP240).
To our finite eyes, it certainly may not look like it sometimes. There’s a verse in a Gordon Lightfoot song about the wreck of an iron tanker that sunk in the seventies, killing its whole crew. The line is,
Does any man know
Where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The Searchers all say
She’d have made white fish bay
If she’d put fifty more miles behind her
It is indeed hard to understand why certain events happen in the world, if God is truly watching over us; if every hair on our head is numbered.
We can take two positions when we think about divine providence. The two positions are simply to affirm providence or to deny it. We will find evidence to support either position depending on which position we take. For those who believe in providence, there is plenty of support. And for those who deny providence, support is not lacking. God’s providence is part of one’s belief system, and like God Himself, cannot be proven to those who refuse to believe. If we remain open to God, we will see countless signs of His power and governance. But if we close our minds to God, we will not see providence anywhere. We will close our mind to any evidence that could present itself. Swedenborg writes,
If we convince ourselves of human prudence to the point of denying divine providence, then when we do happen to see, hear, or read something when we are thinking about it, we do not really notice it. In fact, we cannot, because we are not open to anything from heaven, only to what comes from ourselves (DP 235).
The choice is ours.
When Swedenborg discusses the issue of evil, his perspective is almost exclusively from the person committing the evil—not the victim. So in my discussion, I will first discuss evil as a human choice, then I will make some suggestions about how to react to evil that happens to us.
One thing that needs to be said at the outset is that not everything that happens is God’s will. God governs everything, certainly. But this doesn’t mean that everything that happens is according to His will. He does not will child abuse, or murder, or war, or theft, or any other evil that humans do. These deeds are permitted by God, but not willed by God. But even the deeds that are permitted, but not willed by God, God still governs. Swedenborg writes,
There are no laws of permission that are simply that, or that they are separate from the laws of divine providence. They are the same thing; so saying that God allows something to happen does not mean that he wants it to happen but that he cannot prevent it because of his goal, which is salvation (DP 234).
As I said above, Swedenborg’s discussion of evil is almost exclusively from the point of view of the person committing the evil. God cannot, by divine power, keep evil humans from acting on their evil. He has given every human free will, and God Himself is bound to that law. To take away free will would be to take away our very humanity, and this God will not do. So we cannot be forced to be good by God. We cannot be forced to refrain from evil by God. This is only common sense. And it is to common sense that Swedenborg appeals in discussing this point,
Everyone recognizes that none of us can be compelled to think what we do not want to think or to intend what we do not want to intend. So we cannot be compelled to believe what we do not believe; or to love what we do not love, and certainly not anything that we do not want to love. Our spirit or mind has complete freedom to think, intend, believe, and love (DP 129).
Civil law can restrain behaviour. But no law can change the way a person feels and thinks. And when the law is not around, God cannot restrain an evilly motivated individual from acting on his or her desires.
So how are we to react to evil when it happens to us? There are healthy ways, and there are unhealthy ways. One unhealthy way is to blame the victim. This way of thinking makes the victim somehow responsible for the evil that happened to them. In rape cases, some will suggest that the woman was asking for it, or that she enticed the rapist. This was more the case in the past than it is today, I think. We are now taught everywhere that No means No! Blaming the victim can also occur in abusive relationships. The victim of family abuse can feel that she or he set the abuser off, or somehow caused the abuser to become violent. Sometimes blaming the victim can become very generalized. I heard some people say about 9/11 that God had removed His protection from the U.S. because of its sins. In more immediate cases, I have heard that evil can happen to an individual or institution because they are harbouring negative energy and they thus attracted the evil. None of these responses to evil are healthy, nor are they accurate. It was with these responses in mind that I chose this morning’s reading from the New Testament. In it, Jesus’ disciples ask him, “Who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:1). Jesus replies that neither him nor his parents caused the blindness. The story then proceeds to talk about Jesus’ divine power when he heals the blind man.
Our response to evil is to meet evil with love. Jesus tells us, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:27-28). This is a hard lesson. We are so often tempted to stew on the evil that someone has done to us. We think about them, we grow in our resentment, and we grow in our hatred for the other person. This does nothing but burn up our own soul. It does nothing but cloud our heart with negativity and hatred. It makes us miserable. In AA we call that giving someone free rent in our heads. We are going to encounter evil. We are going to meet with people who are set against our wellbeing. Their evil is between them and God, and they aren’t our souls to care for. If we can’t think positive thoughts about those who do evil for us, we can dismiss them from our minds and think about more positive matters. People who commit evil are sick individuals. They need a doctor more than they need our resentments.
We also need to be careful about how we view others. We are not in a position to decide whether another person has done actual evil. It could well be that actions we perceive as evil were in reality actions that deflated our self-interest, or that challenged our egos. When we take offence, we need to take a good look at ourselves, and see what part we played in the resentment that could be starting. I think Robert Frost has written a very wise poem on this issue. In it, he writes about one reaction to evil that shows a wonderful composure and equanimity. It may be a hard example to follow, but I think it is a good model for us to strive for. His poem is called The Draft Horse, and I will conclude this talk with it:

With the lantern that wouldn’t burn
In too frail a buggy we drove
Behind too heavy a horse
Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.

And a man came out of the trees
And took our horse by the head
And reaching back to his ribs
Deliberately stabbed him dead.

The ponderous beast wend down
With a crack of a broken shaft.
And the night drew through the trees
In one long invidious draft.

The most unquestioning pair
That ever accepted fate
And the least disposed to ascribe
Any more than we had to hate,

We assumed that the man himself
Or someone he had to obey
Wanted us to get down
And walk the rest of the way.