Coffee Talk Redux is a reflection on things God is teaching me. In some cases the ideas for these topics come from the Coffee Talk group that I meet with weekly at the Vintage Coffee Bistro located in Lambertville, Michigan. At other times the Redux topic may arise from some conversation I may have had with someone, or a thought that crossed my mind, or perhaps something I read somewhere, or maybe a combination of all of these. In any case think of this as a discussion on what God is teaching us to help us grow in our understanding of His will.
So last night at our Coffee Talk we talked for awhile about the fact that everything that is good comes from God. God Himself is infinitely good and all of His creation is ordered to His goodness. We know that this is so since in Genesis 1:31 after the creation event God saw everything that He had made, and indeed, it was very good. God has willed that everything be endowed with His goodness and that man himself is destined for goodness and to give praise and glory to God. Man is called to have a personal relationship with God. Of all the creatures that God has created only man is endowed with the ability to know and love God who is his creator. Man is to express his faith in God and to give his free assent and respond to God’s grace. God is sovereign over man and has freely given a share of His divine providence to man so that man can complete the work of God’s creation for man’s own good and for that of his neighbor.
But God made man in His own image with an intellect and a free will and man oftentimes does not have the humility to even understand this relationship that he is to have with God. By this grace from God of being able to choose which path they wish to travel man can go astray through this turning away from God’s will and the goodness of all the things that He gives us with the result that man sins and brings into God’s creation moral evil. St. Augustine in his book the City of God has this poem about this:
Those things are Yours, O God. They are good, because You created them.
None of our evil is in them. The evil is ours if we love them at the expense of Yourself -
these things that reflect Your design.
Man abused his freedom right from the time of the Garden of Eden when he fell to temptation and that which is evil. Man with his moral conscience though still desires to do what is right to do, to do the good, but he is wounded by this original sin. Hence man is in a state of division. Both life as an individual or as a society is a constant struggle between good and evil, between being in the light or being hidden in darkness.
God Himself is not the cause of this moral evil that is found in man since sin resides within the free will of man. But God does allow this moral evil to exist since God in His infinite goodness respects the freedom of His creatures and ultimately knows how to derive good from this evil. St. Augustine on this said that Almighty God…, because He is supremely good, would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in His works if He were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself. The best example of how God brings out good from evil may be seen in the greatest moral evil ever committed wherein God’s only Son who was perfect and without sin was rejected and murdered through the sins of man from all time and from this greatest of evil God’s grace abounded all the more, so that, just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 5:20-21).
God being all powerful and infinitely good took this one act of evil and sin against His Son and brought out the greatest of all good by glorifying Christ for our redemption. For as Paul says in Romans 8:28, We know that in everything God works for good for those who love him. By choosing Christ man is released from the bondage of sin and through our communion with Christ we will know the truth and the truth will make you free. This spiritual freedom taught by the action of the Holy Spirit working within us is where our freedom may be found and this freedom gives us the power to make the right choices and to avoid evil and sin. By accepting this freedom and responding with our humility and obedience we will come to recognize that all of the goodness in our lives and the world comes from God.
Jealousy as a human emotion disappears since we recognize that all of the goodness we have and all of our achievements or what we see that others have are not because of our own actions but are gifts from God. Recognizing this is true freedom and eliminates the pride and arrogance that leads to a competitiveness that separates us from one another and that separates us from God. For if we start to think that we achieve these things through our own actions then we believe that we are a god and that we do not need God or that God does not exist. Worse yet we may even get trapped into a prosperity gospel wherein we expect God to give us even more because of our own self-perceived righteousness or entitlement not recognizing that God sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. We then cannot have charity which is faith in action because we believe that what we have we truly earned on our own or deserved and that if others just worked a little harder they could enjoy the same prosperity that we may have.
But if we recognize that all we have is because of God then we realize that what we have is really not ours but is God’s and that we should share what we have from God with others. Charity as a theological virtue is how we show our love for God above all things for His own sake and how we show our love for our neighbor for the sake of our own love of God. Without charity we are nothing since as Paul says in Colossians 3:14-15, Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. This same perfect love we should have for each other is the same love of the Holy Spirit that flows between the Father and the Son and together their perfect harmony is the one God that is found in the three persons of the Holy Trinity. St. Augustine said that this Love is the fulfillment of all our works. There is the goal; that is why we run: we run toward it, and once we reach it, in it we shall find rest. © Ronald L. Fournier – 2008
