GOD'S PERMISSIONS


FRIDAY, FIRST WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 

1 Sam 8:4-7,10-22; Ps 89:16-19; Mk 2:1-12

God’s Permissions within the Divine Plan

As we have repeatedly stated, all things in creation obey the will of God naturally, except the rational creatures. God made the rational creatures to possess free will and a rational faculty by which they choose to obey or disobey God. Man, exceptionally, enjoys this free will among the material creatures; God made us to govern ourselves and freely choose to obey and serve the Creator. God relaxed the rigidity of his divine will as applicable to non-rational creatures to accommodate the free will he gave to man. The idea of the permitted will of God derives from this condition. It is what follows from the free will God gave to the rational beings. What it means is that God does not strictly order man in his thoughts, words, and actions, but permits him to freely choose his own course of action for his own particular end or ends. Since no other end is more beneficial to us than God and the ends he places for us, the permission also includes our suffering evil: pains and death that follow our sinful or irrational choices.

God chose Abraham and called him. His call did not impose any necessity of answering on him, but rather allowed him to choose to follow or not. God prompted him to choose rightly by the promise of blessings he made to Abraham. He sustained the free vocation to communion with him through his descendants, who received part of the fulfilment of the divine promise to their father Abraham when they became a nation under God. The reading from 1 Samuel recounts how they decided to have a king in place of God, who had been ruling them through the judges and prophets. “All the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. ‘Look,’ they said to him ‘you are old, and your sons do not follow your ways. So, give us a king to rule over us, like the other nations.’” Samuel tried to dissuade them, but they insisted on having a visible king who would ride before them and fight their wars. God permitted them to exercise their free will after they had understood the implications. “The people refused to listen to the words of Samuel. They said, ‘No! We want a king, so that we in our turn can be like the other nations; our king shall rule us and be our leader and fight our battles.’ Samuel listened to all that the people had to say and repeated it in the ears of the Lord. The Lord then said to Samuel, ‘Obey their voice and give them a king.’” In granting or permitting the human will, God follows us in love in our chosen path of sin, death, and evil, not to condemn, but to rescue and save us whenever we cry out to him.

God consistently puts his infinite power and divine will within our reach at all times because of his infinite love for us. The same love made him assume the nature of the end we desire in order to save us from death and destruction. Because his people desired a visible king to rule over them, God adopted the house and throne of David to make his Son the Son of David, who would rule over his people. The infinite compassion of our God is manifested in the Gospel when he saw the faith of those who brought the paralytic before him against every odd. “He was preaching the word to them when some people came bringing him a paralytic carried by four men, but as the crowd made it impossible to get the man to him, they stripped the roof over the place where Jesus was; and when they had made an opening, they lowered the stretcher on which the paralytic lay. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, ‘My child, your sins are forgiven.’” Sin, which is disobedience to God’s will, paralyses us and makes it impossible for us to act with divine authority. The paralysis is due to the absence of the Holy Spirit, God’s life, within us. Our healing involves believing in the word of God, filling our minds and hearts with the same word of God, and putting it into practice daily. His Word will rule over us. Since the Word is Spirit and Life, He will revive us spiritually and make us pleasing to the Father. “Happy the people who acclaim such a king, who walk, O Lord, in the light of your face, who find their joy every day in your name, who make their justice the source of their bliss.”

Let us pray: Attend to the pleas of your people with heavenly care, O Lord, we pray, that they may see what your divine will decrees must be done and gain strength to do what they have seen. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.   

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