Permission, Freedom, and Service (11/09/24)
Veterans Day originated as “Armistice Day” on Nov. 11, 1919, the first anniversary of the end of World War I. Congress passed a resolution in 1926 for an annual
observance, and Nov. 11 became a national holiday beginning in 1938 and in 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower officially changed the name from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. Unlike Memorial Day, Veterans Day pays tribute to all American veterans, living or dead, who served their country honorably during war or peacetime. Serving in a war is the ultimate sacrifice; men and women give up time with their families, leave their homes, risk their lives and many return injured and scarred, both
mentally and physically.
(Discovery Mood and Anxiety, blog).
Given that we are about to reflect with gratitude on the sacrifice veterans make in service to their country, I was pondering again the subject of permission for the sake of the end (our freedom). I found the following article (by Rev. Eric
Carswell) aided in directing my thoughts. I share it here in the hope that it might do the same for you.
Blessings,
Pastor Ethan
The Laws of Permission Are also Laws of the Divine Providence.
There are no laws of permission by themselves or separate from the laws of the Divine Providence: they are indeed the same. When, therefore, it is said that God permits, this does not mean that He wills, but that He cannot avert on
account of the end, which is salvation. Whatever is done for the sake of the end, namely, salvation, is according to the laws of the Divine Providence. For, as was said before, the Divine Providence, keeping this end continually in view, is constantly moving in ways different from and contrary to a person's will. Therefore, at every moment of its operation or at every step of its progress, when it perceives a person to deviate from this end, it directs, bends and disposes that person in
accordance with its laws by withdrawing him from evil and leading him to good. It will be seen in what follows that this cannot be done without permitting evil. Moreover, nothing can be permitted without a cause, and such a cause is to be found only in some law of the Divine Providence which explains why it is permitted (Swedenborg, Divine Providence 234).
We are called to see the Lord as a God of infinite love, wisdom and power. We are told that the Lord is caring for each of us every least fraction of a moment. And yet this is not always the way it appears. God can
seem distant in sad situations, such as when a baby is born with severe birth defects, or at the tragic death of a child or of a young person just entering the prime of his life, or a parent leaving behind a spouse and children. The Lord can seem distant when elderly people feel lonely and useless and their natural bodies have gotten so old that they hinder them every moment. Such a person can feel burdened and like a problem for others. How are we to make sense of events that seem far more
destructive than constructive? How are we expected to feel?
When
someone dies, certainly our knowledge of the life after death can help us feel a sense of joy for that person as we picture him or her entering into the happiness and beauty of heaven. But sadness is also appropriate. We are separated from a loved one and can no longer directly express love, nor can we feel expressions of love from that person as before.
We know that when a person dies, the only thing that is really dead is something purely natural-the physical body. However, that physical body had been extremely important. By means of it a person's spirit
has been able to exist, to learn, to make choices and through these choices to serve others in this world. Though something merely natural, that physical body was very important. Similarly, when a tragedy strikes in this world, harming some other natural thing that has been of use, we can appropriately feel sadness at that loss. When a car that has safely carried a family for nearly one hundred thousand miles of trips large and small is damaged beyond repair by an accident, the sense of loss
need not be from a materialistic love. When something useful has been harmed or destroyed, this world is missing something. Certainly the Lord encourages us not to set our heart on natural things, but when we value the use a natural thing has served, we are valuing not so much the natural thing itself as the use.
Why do bad things happen? A wise answer is not a simple matter of saying, "It's the Lord's plan." If we assume that everything is determined to happen the way it happens, we can become apathetic. For example, a person can say, "I don't
need to wear a seat belt. When my time is up, I'll die and that is that." This perspective taken to an extreme would say we really don't need to worry about any decisions because the Lord is controlling all things.
However, the truth is that things happen that the Lord doesn't want to happen. There are things that happen that are extremely destructive of the goals He seeks to accomplish with His infinite love and wisdom. Some people have tried to understand bad things by thinking that God has only a part of the power that governs the universe. Some have seemed
to personify an evil force existing entirely separate from the Lord, vying with Him for control, and sometimes the Lord wins and sometimes the prince of darkness wins. But when we say the Lord's prayer, we end with the words, "For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever." We don't say "part of the power."
In a very real sense, there is not a single thing that happens apart from the Lord's government. Nothing is completely out of control. But this does not mean that bad things are what the Lord wants to have happen. Instead, we are told that some things happen
directly according to His will, some things happen only partially according to what the Lord would wish, and some things happen contrary to what He would want. Such things are said to be "permitted" by the Lord.
Why are they permitted? Why doesn't the Lord intervene to stop such bad things? The reason is that He cannot without causing far greater harm than benefit. The key reason why He cannot intervene when we might want Him to is that it is absolutely essential for our happiness that genuine freedom exist. Without freedom we cease to be human, and it is
only to the degree that we receive a genuine humanity from the Lord that we can feel happiness. But it is also important for us to recognize that bad things that happen are not always a consequence of our own choices or of some lesson that we need to learn.
While it is true that the Lord works to bring some good out of all things that happen, even those which are terribly destructive, it is not necessarily the way the Lord would most want us to gain that benefit, and doesn't necessarily reflect a problem that we needed to face. When a person faces a series of challenges in his life,
sometimes the way he looks at it is reflected in the words, "I guess the Lord is trying to teach me something." If this implies that the Lord chose those events with a lesson in mind, I think it does not reflect the way the Lord really operates. He never wishes that bad things happen, even for the sake of teaching us some lesson. When destructive things happen, it is always something that has been permitted.
The Lord is constantly working to accomplish His goals in our lives. But there are two other influences that He permits that can interfere with what He wants. First, our
individual freedom can cause us to make choices that hurt us and others. We know that people can make profoundly bad decisions that have terrible consequences. But there is also a second force, one that exists because hell exists. Accidents, sickness and other tragedies can occur with consequences far exceeding the significance of an individual person's choice. A moment's inattention while driving can result in a terrible car accident. Is the driver responsible for this consequence? I don't
think we should think so.
A person can slip, fall and hurt himself, perhaps even lose his life.
Is he responsible for his death because of where he placed his foot or for being in a situation in which he could slip? I think not. Some bad things happen because the Lord permits even the evil spirits of hell some freedom. They, using their life which they have received from the Lord but have perverted, can produce tragedies in this world. These tragedies do not reflect a proper consequence of choices by people in this world. The hells by their influence can produce sickness and natural
disasters. They can produce tragedies that seem so random and without clear explanation that they sometimes get called "acts of God." But in reality it would probably be wiser if we called them "acts of hell." We are called, though, to trust that even in these terribly destructive events, we have not been abandoned by the Lord.
Consider the following words:
From this it may be seen how far someone errs who believes that the Lord has not foreseen and does not see the smallest individual thing with a person, or that within the smallest individual thing He does not foresee and lead, when in fact the Lord's foresight and providence are present within the tiniest details of all the
smallest individual things with him, and in details so tiny that it is impossible to comprehend in any manner of thought one in many millions of them. For every smallest fraction of a moment of a person's life entails a chain of consequences extending into eternity. Indeed every one is like a new beginning to those that follow, and so every single moment of the life, both of his under-standing and of his will, is a new beginning. And since the Lord foresaw from eternity what every person was
going to be like in the future and even into eternity, it is clear that providence is present in the smallest individual things, and, as has been stated, is governing all people and diverting them so that they may be such, this being achieved by constant re-shaping of their freedom (Swedenborg, Secrets Of Heaven 3854).
We are called to trust in the Lord's loving care. This trust will not be an easy matter to come to at the moment a tragedy has occurred. At times, we will inevitably have to go through feelings of sadness and even anger. But the Lord
would lead us to a peacefulness that can follow our initial reactions. May our trust in the Lord grow stronger each day. This trust will come as we face the ups and downs of life and seek to acknowledge that even through things that are not the Lord's will, He can still work to accomplish some good. We can ask for an underlying peace even as we deal with problems and sadness. We will never be able to see things as the Lord does, but may we wisely use the capabilities we have, and try to do our
part to make this world a better place, more like the heavenly kingdom that the Lord wants for all of us.
