Question about evil and God's Will (Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence)

[hazcompat]

Matthew 18:3 and said, “Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children,* you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

This spiritual dependence on Jesus is a cause of Joy.

Peace

 

[CmGuy89]

I think you hit the nail on the head with regard to language. God is Sovereign, Omniscient, Omnipotent - the entire universe is willed into ongoing existence, despite man’s ill use of preserving it. I think we can call it his “passive” or “indirect” willing of both good and evil, not wishing to interfere in man’s free will. That’s saying we can petition/pray to Him to intervene and change the course of an evil action. Many saints have also done this, including St. Paul who asked that a thorn of suffering be removed from him. God denied the prayer, saying that His grace was sufficient for him.

Therefore, it is good to ask, but to be resigned when the answer is NO, trusting that he loves us so much that even his NO is for our good, and is hidden with regard to the result.

Keep in mind that it is good always to pray for deliverance, for instance from illness. Scripture is very clear about going to the physician for healing remedies. We don’t just lie in our sick bed and believe God wills me to be sick, without trying to get well. Follow? If we know a storm is coming, we batten down the hatches, and make real efforts not allow evil to befall us if we can prevent it.

I guess there is a balance to be kept then. To not resign oneself to passivity but at the same time to fully trust that God would never let things happen without a reason.

 

[Sirach2]

I guess there is a balance to be kept then. To not resign oneself to passivity but at the same time to fully trust that God would never let things happen without a reason.

 

[fhansen]

Now it would seem even St Alphonsus de Liguori argues this position. I realize it might not be wise to post snippets without context, so I’m going to post the whole few paragraphs he used to deal with it (emphases added):

Source: ccel.org/ccel/alphonsus/uniformity.iv.html

Please do enlighten me on this, I’m just very confused at this point. I’m not sure how to reconcile it with the Catechism, which says this:

There’s a fine line here. Scripture tells us that in God we “live, and move, and have our being”. God sustains our every moment of existence as well as actively enabling every move we make. When a murderer pulls the trigger God is necessarily involved in some way. And, directly related to that, God wills that the murderer be free to pull the trigger even as He desires no murder be committed. In any case our free will consists in God’s allowing our wills to oppose His own.That’s the meaning of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil where this freedom was put to the test. God wills that man freely chooses to align Himself with His will; God wills that man chooses Him.

The opposite of choosing Him is to end up in a pigsty, like the Prodigal, where good and evil are literally known. And God desires that the abuse of freedom that resulted in our being separated from Him, which we are both spiritually and physically, trapped here in a world where the Master, if there is one, seems to be gone and death is the only sure final fate of us all, in a world where man’s will reigns, with all the attending problems that causes, will lead us, with the help of grace/revelation, to see our need and return to Him again. That is the ultimate good which God desires evil to bring about: the rejection of evil, the restoration of creation to alignment with His will.