Persecution Comes from God

On flight in persecution.

My brother Fabius, not long ago you asked me — some piece of news or other had just come in — whether or not we ought to run away in a persecution. I said a little against it on the spot, as much as the place and the moment allowed; and then, because certain people were rude, I carried the subject off with me only half handled, meaning to set it out more fully in writing. Your question had got me interested in it, and the times themselves had already been pressing it on me anyway. The more persecutions threaten, and the more of them there are, the harder we are bound to think about how faith ought to meet them. And the duty of thinking it through carefully falls on you no less than on me — you who, by not accepting the Paraclete, the guide into all truth, have naturally been on the other side from us on other questions as well. [a]

So I have handled your question in order. We have to settle first how the matter stands with persecution itself, whether it comes on us from God or from the devil, so that we may have firmer ground under us about our duty when it arrives; for you know anything more clearly once you know whom it comes from. It would be enough, in fact, and would shut out everything else besides, simply to lay down that nothing happens apart from the will of God. But I do not want us pulled off the point. Put that way, the statement would open the door at once to those other debates, if someone answered: then evil and sin are both from God, and from here on the devil is in the clear — and so, for that matter, are we.

The question in hand is persecution. About that, for the present, let me say this much: nothing happens apart from God’s will — and persecution above all is worthy of God and, so to speak, needed by him, for the approving, or if you like the rejecting, of those who profess to be his servants. For what comes out of a persecution? What else does it produce but faith approved and faith rejected? And in that the Lord is certainly going to sift his people. Persecution, by which a man is declared either approved or rejected, is simply the judgment of the Lord — and judging belongs to God alone. This is the winnowing fork that is even now cleaning out the Lord’s threshing floor, by which I mean the church, winnowing the mixed heap of believers and separating the grain of the martyrs from the chaff of those who deny him. And this is also the ladder Jacob dreamed of, with some seen climbing to higher places and others going down to lower ones.

Persecution can be looked at as a contest, too. Who proclaims the match, if not the one who offers the crown and the prizes? You will find its edict in the Revelation, setting out the rewards by which he spurs men on to win — and first of all the rewards of those whose distinction it is to win in persecution, since in that victorious struggle they are in plain fact wrestling not against flesh and blood but against spirits of wickedness. And you will see that the judging of the contest belongs to that same glorious One who calls us to the prize; he is the umpire. The great thing in persecution is that the glory of God is advanced, as he tests and rejects, lays on and takes off. And what concerns the glory of God will surely come about by his will.

And when is trust in God stronger than when the fear of him is greater and persecution has broken out? The church stands in awe. Then faith is more eager in its preparing and better disciplined — in fasts, in meetings, in prayers, in humility, in kindness among brothers and in love, in holiness and self-control. There is room, in fact, for nothing but fear and hope. So this one thing by itself proves the case plainly: persecution improves the servants of God, and therefore cannot be charged to the devil.

Someone will argue like this. Injustice does not come from God but from the devil; and persecution is made of injustice — for what is more unjust than that the overseers of the true God, and all the followers of the truth, should be handled like the vilest criminals? Therefore persecution appears to come from the devil, since it is the devil who commits the injustice that persecution consists of. Here is what we ought to understand. You do not get persecution without the devil’s injustice, and you do not get faith tested without persecution; but the injustice that the testing of faith requires does not authorize the persecution, it only supplies the means. In reality the will of God goes first, with a view to the testing of faith, which is the reason for persecution; and the injustice of the devil follows after, as the instrument of persecution, which is the way the testing is carried out. [f]

It works the same way in other matters. The more hostile injustice shows itself toward righteousness, the more it provides occasions for the very thing to be attested that it opposes as an enemy — so that righteousness may be brought to completion by way of injustice, as strength is brought to completion in weakness. For God chose the weak things of the world to confound the strong, and the foolish things of the world to confound its wisdom. So even injustice gets put to work, so that righteousness may be approved by putting unrighteousness to shame. The devil’s service here, then, is not volunteered but conscripted — persecution is the Lord’s own appointment for the testing of faith, while the injustice of the devil is what performs it, supplied so that a persecution can be got up at all. And so we hold that persecution certainly comes about by the devil’s agency, but not by the devil’s origination.

Satan will not be free to do anything against the servants of the living God unless the Lord grants him leave — either so that he may overthrow Satan himself by the faith of the chosen, which proves victorious under trial, or so that he may show the world that men who go over to the devil’s side were in fact his servants all along. Take the case of Job. The devil could not have visited him with any trial unless he had received authority from God — not even in his property, until the Lord had said, “Look, everything he has I put at your disposal; only do not stretch out your hand against the man himself.” And he would not have stretched it out even then, unless afterwards, at his asking, the Lord had granted him that permission too: “Look, I hand him over to you; only spare his life.” In the same way he asked for an opportunity to tempt the apostles, and had it only by special allowance, since in the Gospel the Lord says to Peter, “Look, Satan asked to sift you like grain; but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail” — that is, that the devil should not be granted power enough to put his faith in danger. From this it is plain that both things belong to God, the shaking of faith and the shielding of it, since both are asked of him: the shaking by the devil, the shielding by the Son. And certainly, when the protection of faith is committed entirely to the Son of God, who begs it of the Father, from whom he receives all authority in heaven and on earth, how utterly out of the question it is that the devil should have the assaulting of it in his own power!

And in the prayer laid down for us, when we say to our Father, “Do not lead us into temptation” — and what greater temptation is there than persecution? — we acknowledge that it comes about by the will of the one we are begging to exempt us from it. For this is what follows: “But deliver us from the evil one.” That is: do not lead us into temptation by handing us over to the evil one; for we are delivered from the devil’s power just when we are not handed over to him to be tempted. Nor would the devil’s legion have had power over the herd of pigs unless they had got it from God — so far are they from having power over the sheep of God. I might say that the bristles of those pigs were counted by God as well, let alone the hairs of holy men.

It has to be granted that the devil does seem to have power — and here power genuinely his own — over those who do not belong to God. The nations were reckoned by God once for all as a drop from a bucket, as dust on the threshing floor, as spittle of the mouth, and so were thrown open to the devil as a kind of free holding. But against those who belong to the household of God he may do nothing by any right of his own, because the cases marked out in Scripture show when — that is, for what reasons — he is allowed to touch them. Either the power of trial is granted him with a view to their being approved, whether he is challenged or does the challenging, as in the instances already mentioned; or else, to secure the opposite result, a sinner is handed over to him as to an executioner whose business is to inflict the punishment, as happened with Saul. “And the Spirit of the Lord,” Scripture says, “departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled and choked him.” Or the purpose is to humble a man, as the apostle tells us when he says that a stake was given him, a messenger of Satan, to batter him; and even this sort of thing is not permitted against holy men unless at the same time the strength to endure is brought to completion in weakness. The apostle himself, likewise, handed Phygelus and Hermogenes over to Satan, so that by being chastened they might learn not to blaspheme. You see, then, that the devil more properly receives his power even from the servants of God — so far is he from having it by any right of his own.

Since these cases occur in persecutions more than at other times — for then there is more approving and rejecting among us, more abusing and more punishing — their happening on a large scale must be permitted or commanded by the one at whose will they happen even in single cases: by him, I mean, who says, “I am he who makes peace and creates evil” — that is, war, since war is the opposite of peace. And what other war does our peace have than persecution? If persecution in its outcome brings decidedly either life or death, either wounds or healing, then you have the author of that too. “I will strike and I will heal; I will make alive and I will put to death.” “I will burn them,” he says, “as gold is burned; and I will test them,” he says, “as silver is tested.” For when the flame of persecution is burning us up, then the steadiness of our faith is proved. These will be the fiery darts of the devil, by which faith is given a service of burning and kindling — yet by the will of God. [q]

Who can doubt this I do not know, unless it is people with a flimsy, cold faith — the kind that takes hold of those who come together in church trembling. For you say: since we assemble without any order, and assemble all at once, and flock to the church in large numbers, the pagans are led to make inquiries about us, and we are afraid of waking their alarm. Do you not know that God is Lord of all? If it is God’s will, then you will suffer persecution; and if it is not, the pagans will stay quiet. Believe that with complete assurance, if you really do believe in the God apart from whose will not even a sparrow, worth one assarion, falls to the ground. And we, I take it, are worth more than many sparrows.

Well then: if it is clear where persecution comes from, we can satisfy your doubts at once and decide, from these opening remarks alone, that men should not run away in it. For if persecution comes from God, it can in no way be our duty to run from a thing that has God for its author. Two reasons stand against it: what comes from God ought not to be avoided, and it cannot be evaded either. It ought not to be avoided because it is good — for everything must be good on which God has cast his eye. Perhaps that is the thought behind the sentence in Genesis, “And God saw because it is good.” Not that he would have been ignorant of its goodness if he had not seen it, but the expression is meant to show that it was good because God looked at it. [u]

There are indeed many things that happen by the will of God and happen to somebody’s harm. For all that, a thing is good precisely because it is God’s: divine, and reasonable. What is divine and is not reasonable and good? What is good and is not divine? And if the common perception of mankind takes it otherwise, remember that in judging, man’s power of perception does not settle beforehand what the nature of a thing is; the nature of a thing settles his perception. For every particular nature is a definite reality, and it lays it on the perceiving power to perceive it exactly as it is. Now if what comes from God is genuinely good in its own nature — and there is nothing from God that is not good, since it is divine and reasonable — but seems evil only to the human faculty, then all is right on the one side and the fault will lie with the other. In its real nature chastity is a very good thing, and so are truth and righteousness; and yet many people find them distasteful. Is the real nature of a thing to be sacrificed on that account to the sense of perception?

So persecution too is good in its own nature, because it is a divine and reasonable appointment; but those to whom it comes as a punishment do not find it pleasant. You can see that, coming from him, even that evil has a reasonable ground — when a man is cast out of a state of salvation by persecution — just as you can see that you have a reasonable ground for the good as well, when a man’s salvation is made surer by persecution. Unless a man perishes without reason or is saved without reason, and both depend on the Lord, he will not be able to call persecution an evil: while it is under the direction of reason it is good, even in respect of the evil in it. So if persecution is a good in every way, because it has a ground in nature, we lay it down on solid grounds that what is good ought not to be shunned by us, since it is a sin to refuse what is good. Besides which, what God has looked upon can no longer be avoided at all, coming as it does from God, from whose will there will be no escaping. Therefore those who think that they ought to run away either charge God with doing what is evil, if they run from persecution as an evil — for nobody avoids what is good — or else they count themselves stronger than God: which is what a man thinks who imagines he can get away when it is God’s pleasure that such things should happen.

But someone says: “I run away — which is my part — so that I may not be destroyed by denying him. It is for him, on his side, to bring me back before the judge’s bench while I am running, if he chooses.” Answer me this first. Are you sure that you will deny him if you do not run, or are you not sure? If you are sure, you have denied him already: by presupposing that you will deny, you have handed yourself over to the thing you presupposed, and it is idle now to think of flight to avoid denying, when in intention you have denied already. But if you are in doubt on that point, then, with your fear wavering uncertainly between the two outcomes, why do you not presuppose instead that you are able to play the confessor’s part? That would add to your safety, so that you do not run — just as presupposing denial is what sends you off a fugitive. [w]

The matter stands like this: either both things are in our own power, or they lie wholly with God. If confessing or denying is ours, why do we not anticipate the nobler of the two, that is, that we shall confess? If you are unwilling to confess, you are unwilling to suffer; and to be unwilling to confess is to deny. But if the matter is wholly in God’s hand, why do we not leave it to his will? Recognize his might and power in this: as he can bring us back to trial when we flee, so he is able to screen us when we do not flee — yes, even while we are living in the very middle of the people. Strange behavior, is it not, to honor God in the matter of flight from persecution, because he can bring you back from your flight to stand before the judgment seat, and yet, in the matter of bearing witness, to dishonor him deeply by despairing of any power in his hands to shield you from danger? Why do you not rather take this side, the side of steadiness and trust in God, and say: I do my part, I am not leaving; God, if he chooses, will be my protector himself. It suits us better to hold our place in submission to the will of God than to run away at our own will.

Rutilius, a holy martyr, fled from persecution again and again, from one place to another; he even bought his safety from danger with money, as he thought. And for all the complete security he thought he had arranged for himself, he was seized in the end when he least expected it, brought before the magistrate, put to the torture and cruelly mangled — a punishment, I believe, for his running — and after that he was given over to the flames. So he paid to the mercy of God the suffering he had dodged. What else did the Lord mean to show us by this example, but that we ought not to flee from persecution, because it does us no good if God disapproves?