God has sown good seeds of grace and love into our world. But in the midst of all this good the enemy comes and sows evil. Why does God allow this?
I’ve been scandalized in the past seeing evil work its way even into the best places. I’ve been surprised to learn that even God’s friends can behave abhorrently and give in to sin. When people who are in a role of leadership or influence fall into sin, they confuse so many and can lead others away from God. Why does God permit this?
Is it a test for us who claim to be his followers? Is it meant to help us become stronger in our conviction?
When I wrote a series of blog posts on a review of the “Twilight” series, I reflected on the parable of the wheat among the weeds and used it as my basis for trying to find the wheat in the series. Recently, I reflected on it again and compared it to the scandals coming to light in the Church.
I used to think the desire to eradicate all evil was the correct response for a zealous apostle. Once I reflected on Matthew 13:24-30 again, I realized that God does not call us to gather all the evil for two reasons. First, He is the only just judge who will separate the evil doers from the worthy believers. Secondly, when we dismiss all this evil, we risk uprooting what is good.
Does this mean that we are cooperating with evil? No, we do not encourage or enable sin. We do spare the evildoers, for now, in order to save what is good.
In order for us to do this we acknowledge that God is calling us to exercise great patience, charity, compassion and mercy.
We trust that in time God who is just will pass judgment on all. In the meantime, we are to endure living among the weeds.
Envision a field of good wheat, growing among weeds. I imagine there is a great struggle between the two for the nutrients in the soil. The wheat must have to be that much stronger in order that it is not choked out by the weeds.
In the same way we must work to ensure we are practicing virtues and growing spiritually so that we will not be discouraged or scandalized when we see evil among what is good.
More of Tima’s musings can be found at: http://livingwater2009.wordpress.com/
Image: Field of Wheat
This is such a helpful post to me. I’ve been really struggling with this idea lately, trying to decide how much to fight what is so clearly wrong, and whether my lack of justification to judge is outweighed by the perceived need to fix the world. Sometimes I think no matter how long we face this struggle, we still are going to have to wrestle with it, because we can’t just sit back and accept things that are wrong–but knowing the appropriate way to witness, that’s the real key.