In the Hand of God

There is a book called the Wisdom of Solomon. It is written in Greek, and it is written the way Solomon would have said it, by somebody who had lived a long time after him and had watched what happens to people who stop believing that anything matters. He lets those people talk first, and does not argue with them. He lets them say the whole thing out loud, and it takes a while.

“Our life is short and it hurts. There is no cure when a man dies, and nobody has ever been known to come back out of the grave. We happened by accident. Afterward we will be as though we had never been here at all. The breath in our noses is smoke, and thinking is a spark going off in the beating of our hearts.” “When it goes out, the body turns to ash and the spirit scatters like thin air. Our names will be forgotten in a while and nobody will remember anything we did. Our life will go past like the mark a cloud leaves, and blow away like mist when the sun gets hot on it. Our time is a shadow going along a wall. There is no coming back. It is sealed, and nobody returns.” So, they say, we may as well: “Come on, then — let us have the good things while they are here, and use up the world while we are still young. Let us fill ourselves with the expensive wine and the perfumes. Let us not let one spring flower go past us. Let us put rosebuds on our heads before they wilt. Let us leave the marks of our good time everywhere we go, because this is all we get.”

And then, in the middle of the same speech, without changing their voices, they turn to the people who are in their way. “Let us push the poor man who does what is right. Let us not spare the widow, and let us not care about an old man’s gray hair. Let our own strength be the law of what is right, because being weak has never been worth anything.” “Let us wait for the man who does what is right, because he is inconvenient to us. He gets in the way of what we do. He tells us we have broken the law we were taught. He says he knows God. He calls himself God’s servant. Just looking at him is heavy work. His life is not like anybody else’s and the roads he walks are different. He treats us as though we were counterfeit coins and keeps away from our ways as if they were dirty, and he says the end of a good man is a happy one, and he boasts that God is his father.” “Well then — let us find out whether any of that is true. Let us see what happens to him at the end. If he really is a son of God, God will help him and pull him out of the hands of his enemies. Let us try him with insults and with pain, so we can see how gentle he is and find out how much he can stand. Let us give him a shameful death — he says himself that somebody is going to look after him.” And the writer says, quietly: that was what they thought, and they were wrong. Their own evil had blinded them. They did not know God’s secrets. God made people to last, and made them like his own everlasting self. It was through the envy of the Accuser that death got into the world, and the people on his side are the ones who find out about it.

Then the writer answers all of it. “The souls of the good are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them.” “In the eyes of people who do not understand, they looked as though they had died. Their going away was counted as a disaster and their leaving us as being wiped out — but they are at peace. Even if they were punished in front of everybody, their hope is full of living forever. They were put through a little, and they will be given a great deal, because God tested them and found them fit for himself. He tried them the way gold is tried in a furnace.” “And when their day comes they will shine out, and run to and fro like sparks through dry stubble.”

After that Solomon’s own voice speaks, and the first thing he does is take the crown off. “I am a man who dies, the same as everybody. I came from the first man, who was made out of the ground. I was nine months growing, like anybody. When I was born I breathed the same air everybody breathes, and I fell onto the same earth, and the first sound I ever made was crying, the way they all do. I was wrapped in cloths and looked after with worry. No king ever had a different beginning than that. There is one way into life for everybody, and one way out.” “So I prayed, and understanding was given to me. I called on God, and the spirit of wisdom came to me. I put her in front of thrones and crowns, and next to her I counted riches as nothing. I did not compare any jewel to her, because next to her all the gold in the world is a little sand, and silver counts as clay. I loved her more than health and more than good looks, and I chose to have her instead of daylight — because the light that comes off her never goes out.”

Then he lists the things she taught him, and it sounds like a boy who has been let into a workshop and shown everything in it. “He gave me true knowledge of the things that are: how the world was made, and how its pieces work; the beginning and middle and end of times; the turning of the sun and the changing of the seasons; the going round of the years and the places of the stars; the natures of living creatures and the rage of wild animals; the strength of winds and the thoughts of people; the different kinds of plants and what is in a root. Everything hidden and everything plain — I know it, because wisdom taught me, and she is the one who makes everything.” “She is the breath of the power of God, poured clean out of the glory of the Almighty; nothing dirty can get into her. She is the brightness of the everlasting light, and a mirror with no smudge on it, and the picture of his goodness. She is one, and she can do everything; she stays herself, and she makes everything new; and going into good souls, age after age, she makes them friends of God.” “She is more beautiful than the sun and higher than all the order of the stars. Put her next to daylight and she comes first — because after daylight comes night, but nothing evil ever gets the better of wisdom.”

The writer walks through the old stories one at a time — Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses — and shows wisdom going along beside each of them and getting them out of trouble. Then he goes over the plagues in Egypt and the years in the desert again, slowly, comparing what happened to the Egyptians with what happened to Israel: water out of a river they could not drink, and water out of a hard rock for people who could. And in the middle of all that comparing, the writer stops arguing and starts praying.

“You have arranged everything by measure and number and weight. You can show your strength whenever you want to, and nobody could stand against your arm. The whole world in front of you is like one grain on a set of scales, like a drop of dew in the morning falling on the ground.” “But you have mercy on everybody, because you can do anything, and you look past what people do wrong so that they will change. You love everything that exists, and you hate nothing that you have made — because you would never have made a thing if you had hated it. And how could anything have lasted, if you had not wanted it to? Or been kept, if you had not called it? You spare them all, because they are yours, Lord. You love the things that live.”

Then the writer takes up one more argument, and he takes it up gently. He is talking about people who worship things that were made instead of the one who made them. “They looked at fire, and the wind, and the fast air, and the circle of the stars, and rushing water, and the lights in the sky, and decided that those were the gods who run the world. Well — if it was their beauty that pleased them so much, they should have learned how much better the Master of them is; the one who made them is where beauty started. And if they were amazed at how strong those things are, they should have worked out from that how much stronger the one is who made them. You can tell how great a maker is by the size and the beauty of what he made.” “You cannot blame them very hard. They may have gone wrong while they were looking for God, and wanting to find him. They spend their time among the things he made; they search carefully; and they trust their own eyes, because the things they see are beautiful. And yet they are not quite excused either. If they were clever enough to work out the world, how did they not find the Lord of it a good deal sooner?”

Then he tells a small story to show what he means. “A carpenter goes out and cuts down a tree. He takes the bark off neatly and works the wood well and makes something useful out of it. He burns the scraps to cook his dinner and fills himself up. And then there is one piece left over that was no good for anything — a bent piece, full of knots. So, having nothing else to do, he carves it carefully. He shapes it into the likeness of a man, or of some animal, and paints it over with red. Then he makes a little hollow in the wall for it and fastens it in with iron, so that it will not fall down — because he knows perfectly well that it cannot hold itself up.” “And after that he says prayers to it about his money, and his wife, and his children, and is not embarrassed to be talking to a thing that was never alive. He asks a weak thing for health. He asks a dead thing for life. He begs help from what has the least ability to help anybody. And when he is going on a journey, he asks for a good trip from something that cannot put one foot in front of the other.”