118. Why God doesn’t give us enough grace to overcome sin
118. WHY GOD DOESN’T GIVE US ENOUGH GRACE TO OVERCOME SIN
Brother Lawrence, in The Practice of the Presence of God, says that every time he sins, and remembers that he sins, and repents, he says to God: “See? Thus shall I always do if You do not give me the grace.” This is admirable humility, but it also poses a puzzle: If God could give us the grace to avoid any sin, why doesn’t He? Obviously we can’t blame Him; it is we, not God, who sin. But if He could stop us, what good and loving reason does He have for not stopping us? What good does it do us to be left alone to sin?
God permits some to fall into sin so that by acknowledging their sin they may be humbled and converted, as Augustine states . . . through God’s mercy temporary blindness is directed medicinally to the spiritual welfare of those who are blinded. . . .
Every evil that God . . . permits to be done, is directed to some good . . . sometimes to the good of others: thus He directs the sin of tyrants to the good of the martyrs. . . (I-II,79,4).
There are two answers to the question of why God deliberately does not give us grace to avoid sin: to deal with our pride and our ignorance. If God prevented us from sinning, we might then sin even more, by pride, which is the worst sin of all. We would also be ignorant of ourselves and our weakness of will, our blindness of mind, and the disorderliness of our passions.
Both reasons come under the reason of truth. Humility is an intellectual virtue before it is a moral virtue, for it consists essentially in an accurate knowledge of our own faults and weaknesses. It does not mean having a low opinion of ourselves, but an accurate one.
God is a pragmatist, like a doctor. He tolerates necessary bad side effects in order to cure a worse problem. In order to cure a worse disease, He refuses to cure a lesser one. Trust your Doctor.
This applies not only to the withholding of grace to avoid personal sins, but also to allowing great evils to occur in the world. God never acts arbitrarily, unwisely, unjustly, or unlovingly. Everything He does, and everything He chooses not to do, is for our good. Even a horrible evil like the Holocaust He must have allowed only to prevent an even greater evil. We seldom see it. Perhaps if Hitler had not erupted into history, the Hitler—like character that lies hidden in all of us (what Max Picard called “the Hitler in ourselves”) may have caused the whole world to become Nazi—like in a way that would have been even more harmful because it would have been more disguised and more universal. Sometimes the evil has to rise to the surface to be seen. The addict has to “hit bottom” before he can be cured.
The point is not that we can know such things. We can’t. We can only speculate, and the point of such speculation is simply to open our minds and imaginations to possibilities, to give God some “wiggle room”. We can know the general principle, that “in everything God works for good, with those who love him” (Rom 8:28), because God has revealed this to us, and God cannot lie. But we cannot understand all the instances or applications of it, because we are not God. (Duh!) That’s why faith is needed. We “see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor 13: 12). We must trust the Great Physician.
That “in everything God works for good, with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose”, startling as it is, is the logical conclusion that necessarily follows from the very nature of God, from three of the most basic and essential attributes of God, namely wisdom, power and love. If Rom 8:28 is not true, then God is not God, for He would then be ignorant, weak, or wicked. He is ignorant if He does not know what is ultimately best for us. He is weak if He knows and wills it but cannot do it. And He is wicked if He wills what is for our worst, not for our best.
Therefore all evils that God allows are like dung: they can be used to fertilize some good growth. We can learn from our mistakes. Sin is the very worst thing in the world, worse even than pain (see point #102 above); but even our sins can be made to work for a good end, if only they fall on their faces and creep through the golden door of repentance. We experience this every time we go to Confession.