03 March 2009
Patristic Quote of the Day
The second reason is so that he would abrogate in an even more just manner the sentence of death, which he had imposed with justice. God wanted to fulfill his own statute by suffering, so that he would not enforce it by a command, as he himself says: "I have not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it." God's promise of good things for good people is unreliable, if what has been established by God for the wicked comes to nothing. -- St. Peter Chrysologus, Sermon 72B, par. 5
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7 comments:
So it’s God who imposes death upon us? Who established it for the wicked? God, not satan?
So St. Peter would say, and even more, so St. Moses recorded: "I am the Lord; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal."
St. Moses said a lot of things that need to be interpreted in and by the Light of Christ (Who Himself provided the earliest "new" interpretations of Moses).
But St. Peter? He would? Did he???
St. Peter Chrysologus - the original quote.
What do you find in the NT that negates or alters the words of Moses I quoted?
Negate St. Moses? Heaven forbid! Nor alter his words, either. It's a question of how we understand them when we, unlike Jews, see that Jesus is the one speaking them. He said He had not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them, so we assign *fulfilled* meanings to them, meanings that were first manifest in Him.
He also said the devil was the murderer from the beginning.
The devil is a murderer from the beginning indeed. Hating life, wanting to take it from us. But Trinity throughout the Scriptures reveals Himself as the God who as Creator has the right to take and to give. Not only did He explicitly say so under Moses, but righteous Job confessed:
The Lord giveth and THE LORD TAKETH AWAY. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
We are told that in all this he did not sin.
And what a comfort this is to Christians! Our pilgrimage ends precisely when our Lord, the Giver of Life and the Victor over Death, determines it shall. He kills and He makes alive. But a killing received from His hand is itself the gift of life - we experience this already in a thousand ways before we stop breathing.
And that is the Christian way to understand all such passages about God giving, taking, killing: as you said, God knows when the time is best for each of us to depart this Earth. He arranges the time accordingly.
But He isn't the one who kills us, ever. Satan is.
The story of Job illustrates the point. Is not God who kills, and not God who afflicts. It is satan, as specified explicitly from the beginning of the story. It was satan, by God's leave.
And God trumped satan by using thos afflictions to purify Job, to Job's ultimate glory.
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