Why the Good God Punishes

At this point some people stand up and say that the Lord is not good, because of the rod and the threats and the fear. Plainly they have misread the Scripture that says, “And whoever fears the Lord will turn back in his heart”; and worse, they have forgotten his love — that for our sake he became a human being. The prophet’s prayer suits him far better: “Remember that we are dust” — which means, feel with us, since you know the weakness of the flesh from having suffered it yourself. In just this the Lord our Instructor is entirely good and beyond reproach: out of the sheer greatness of his love he feels with each person’s nature. [a]

“For there is nothing the Lord hates.” He certainly does not hate a thing and at the same time want it to exist. He does not want a thing not to exist and then himself supply the cause of existence to the very thing he does not want to exist. And he does not want a thing not to exist while it does exist. So if the Word hates anything, he does not want it to exist. But nothing exists whose existence God did not cause. Therefore nothing is hated by God, and nothing by the Word either — for the two are one, that is, God. As he has said: “In the beginning the Word was in God, and the Word was God.” If, then, he hates none of the things he has made, it follows that he loves them; and he will love the human being far more than the rest, and rightly so, since a human being is the noblest of all the things he created, and a creature that loves God. So God loves human beings; and therefore the Word loves human beings.

Now whoever loves something wants to do it good, and what does good must in every way be better than what does not. But nothing is better than the Good. So the Good does good. And God is agreed to be good. Therefore God does good. And the Good, precisely because it is good, does nothing but good. So God does every good there is. And he does no good to a person without being concerned for him, and he is not concerned for him without taking care of him. For what does good on purpose is better than what does not do good on purpose. But nothing is better than God. And doing good on purpose is nothing other than taking care of people. So God is concerned for us and takes care of us. He shows it in practice by training us through the Word, who truly works alongside God’s love for us. But the good is not called good because it possesses virtue — any more than righteousness is called good because it possesses virtue, since righteousness is itself a virtue. It is called good because it is good in itself and by itself.

There is another sense in which what is useful is called good: not because it pleases, but because it does good. Everything that righteousness is, then, is a good thing — good as a virtue, and good as worth wanting for its own sake, not as something that gives pleasure. For righteousness does not judge in order to win favor; it gives each person what he deserves. And what benefits follows from what is useful. So righteousness answers to every aspect under which goodness is examined, and the two hold equal properties equally. Things marked by equal properties are equal and alike. Therefore righteousness is a good thing.

“Then how is it,” they say, “if the Lord loves people and is good, that he grows angry and punishes?” We must handle this as briefly as we can, since working through it does help in training the children rightly and serves as a necessary aid. Many of the passions are cured by punishment, by having the harsher commands driven home, and by being taught certain principles. Rebuke is a kind of surgery on the soul’s passions. The passions are like an abscess on the truth, which has to be lanced open with the knife of rebuke.

Reproach works like a medicine laid on the skin. It dissolves the hard calluses the passions have formed, cleans out the filth of a loose life, and brings down the swellings of pride, restoring the patient to the sound and true condition of a human being.

Warning is the regimen prescribed for a sick soul: it lays down what the soul must take and forbids what it must not. And all of it works toward salvation and lasting health.

Consider too the general of an army. He fines offenders, has them beaten and put in chains and publicly disgraced, and sometimes even has a man put to death — and what he aims at is good, since he does it to warn those under his command.

In the same way our great General, the Word, the commander of the whole universe, warns those who throw off the restraint of his law, to subdue the passions of the soul. His purpose is to release them from the slavery, the error, and the captivity of the enemy, and to bring them peacefully into the sacred harmony of citizenship.

So then: alongside the persuasive kind of speech there is the kind that urges and the kind that consoles; and alongside the kind that praises there is the kind that blames and reproaches. This last is the art of censure. Censure is a mark of goodwill, not of ill will. A friend reproaches, and so does a man who is no friend; but the enemy does it out of contempt, the friend out of kindness. It is not out of hatred, then, that the Lord scolds us. He suffered for us himself, when he might have destroyed us for our failings. Being good, the Instructor slips into censure by way of rebuke with consummate skill, using his sharp words like a whip to rouse a mind gone sluggish. Then he turns and tries urging the same people again. Those who are not moved by praise are spurred on by censure; and those whom censure does not call out to salvation, being as good as dead, are roused to the truth by open denunciation. “For the beatings and the discipline of wisdom are for every season.” “Teaching a fool is gluing a broken pot together, and waking the wits of a man past all hope is like making dirt feel.” That is why he adds, plainly, “rousing a sleeper out of a deep sleep” — and nothing is more like death than that.

Further, the Lord shows it very clearly about himself when he pictures his own many-sided, many-purposed farming: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the farmer.” Then he adds, “Every branch in me that bears no fruit he takes away; and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, so that it will bear more fruit.” A vine that is not pruned runs to wood. So does a person. The Word is the pruning knife: he clears away the wild shoots and forces the impulses of the soul to bear fruit instead of running to lust.

Rebuke addressed to sinners has their salvation for its aim, the word tuned to each person’s conduct, the strings now tightened, now slackened. That is why Moses said, and said it plainly: “Take courage. God has come near to test you, so that his fear may be among you and you may not sin.” And Plato, who learned it from this source, puts it beautifully: “Everyone who is punished is in truth being treated well, for he is benefited; the soul of a man justly punished is made better.” And if, as Plato too holds, people under correction receive good at the hands of the righteous one, it is agreed that the righteous one is good. Fear itself, at any rate, does good and has been found to be for our good. “For the soul that fears the Lord will live, because their hope is in the one who saves them.” And this same Word who inflicts the punishment is the judge. Isaiah says of him, “The Lord assigned him to our sins” — plainly meaning, as one who corrects sins and sets them right. That is why he alone can forgive our wrongdoing, he who has been appointed by the Father as Instructor of us all; he alone can tell disobedience from obedience. And while he threatens, he plainly has no wish to do harm in order to carry the threat out. By putting fear into people he cuts off the road to sin and shows his love for them, still holding off, still announcing what they will suffer if they go on sinning. He is not like a snake, which devours its prey the moment it takes hold.

God, then, is good. And the Lord speaks again and again before he moves to act. “My arrows,” he says, “will finish them off. They will waste away with hunger and be eaten by birds, and there will be an incurable arching of the body. I will send the teeth of wild animals against them, with the fury of snakes that crawl in the dust. Outside, the sword will leave them childless; and inside their rooms, terror.” For God is not angry in the way some people imagine. Mostly he threatens; in everything he has urged humanity on and shown what ought to be done. Frightening us so that we will not sin is a good device. “For the fear of the Lord drives sins away, and a man without fear cannot be counted righteous,” says the Scripture. And God does not punish out of rage, but for the sake of what is righteous, since it does no good for righteousness to be set aside on our account. Every one of us who sins chooses the punishment by his own free choice, and the blame lies with the one who chooses. God is blameless.

“But if our unrighteousness sets off the righteousness of God, what are we to say? Is God unrighteous when he brings his anger down on us? Certainly not.” So he says, by way of threat: “I will sharpen my sword, and my hand will take hold of judgment. I will pay my enemies what they are owed, and repay those who hate me. I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword will eat flesh, from the blood of the wounded.” It is clear, then, that those who are not at war with the truth and do not hate the Word will not hate their own salvation either; they will escape the punishment that falls on enemies. “The crown of wisdom,” as the book of Wisdom says, “is the fear of the Lord.” And through the prophet Amos the Lord has laid out his way of working very plainly: “I overthrew you as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were like a stick snatched out of the fire; and still you have not come back to me, says the Lord.”

See how God, out of his love for what is good, is after repentance, and how, through his way of threatening, he quietly shows his love for us. “I will turn my face away from them,” he says, “and show what will happen to them.” For where the face of the Lord is turned, there is peace and rejoicing; where it is turned away, evil comes in. So the Lord does not want to look on evil things, because he is good; but when he looks away, evil springs up of itself through human unbelief. “Look, then,” says Paul, “at the goodness and the severity of God: severity toward those who fell, but goodness toward you, if you stay in his goodness” — that is, in faith in Christ.

Hatred of what is evil belongs to the one who is good, precisely because he is good by nature. So I will grant that he punishes the disobedient — punishment is for the good and the benefit of the one punished, since it is the setting right of someone who resists — but I will not grant that he wants to take revenge. Revenge is recompense for evil, and it is exacted for the benefit of the one who takes it. He who teaches us “to pray for those who mistreat us” would not want to take revenge himself.

That God is good, everyone admits, even against their will. That the same God is righteous will not need many more words, once I bring in the Lord’s own saying in the Gospel, where he speaks of him as one: “That they may all be one; as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me. And the glory you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one as we are one: I in them, and you in me, so that they may be brought to completion in one.” God is one, and beyond the one, and above the Monad itself. That is why the word “you,” which points with emphasis, singles out God, who alone truly is, “who was and is and is to come” — the one name, “he who is,” holding all three divisions of time at once. And that the one who alone is God is also the only one truly righteous, our Lord will testify in the Gospel itself: “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, so that they may see my glory, which you have given me; for you loved me before the world was founded. Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you, and these have known that you sent me. And I have made your name known to them, and will go on making it known.”

This is the one who “visits the wrongdoing of the fathers on the children, on those who hate him, and shows mercy to those who love him.” For the one who set some “at the right hand and others at the left,” thought of as Father, being good, is called what he alone is — “good”; but as he is the Son in the Father, being his Word, from the relation the two have to each other, the name of the power being measured by an equality of love, he is called righteous. “He will judge a man according to his works,” he says — a fair balance; for God has made the face of righteousness known to us in the person of Jesus, and by him, as by even scales, we come to know God. The book of Wisdom says the same plainly: “For mercy and anger are with him, since he alone is master of both” — master of the atonements, and pouring out anger in proportion to the abundance of his mercy. “And so is his rebuke.” For the aim of mercy and of rebuke alike is the salvation of those who are rebuked.

That the God and Father of our Lord Jesus is good, the Word himself will testify again: “For he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked”; and again, when he says, “Be merciful, as your Father is merciful.” And more plainly still he says, “No one is good but my Father, who is in heaven.” Besides these he says, “My Father makes his sun shine on everyone.” Notice that here he declares his Father to be good and to be the Creator; and that the Creator is righteous is not in dispute. Again he says, “My Father sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” In that he sends the rain, he is the maker of the waters and the clouds. In that he sends it on everyone, he holds an even balance, righteously and rightly. And being good, he sends it on righteous and unrighteous alike.

Here, then, is how we conclude, and conclude clearly, that he is one and the same God. The Holy Spirit has sung, “I will look to the heavens, the works of your hands”; and, “He who made the heavens dwells in the heavens”; and, “Heaven is your throne.” And the Lord says in his prayer, “Our Father in the heavens.” And the heavens belong to the one who made the world. So it is beyond dispute that the Lord is the Son of the Creator. And if the Creator above all is agreed to be righteous, and the Lord is the Son of the Creator, then the Lord is the Son of the one who is righteous. That is why Paul says, “But now the righteousness of God apart from the law has been made plain”; and again, so that you may get a better idea of God, “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ, upon all who believe; for there is no difference.” And bearing further witness to the truth, he adds a little later, “through the forbearance of God, to show that he is righteous, and counts righteous the man who has faith in Jesus.” And that he knows what is righteous to be good shows in his saying, “So the law is holy, and the commandment holy and righteous and good” — using both names for the same power. But “no one is good” except his Father. So it is this same Father of his who, being one, is made known through many powers. That was the point of the saying, “No one knew the Father” — the Father who was himself everything before the Son came. So it is truly clear that the God of all is one only: good, righteous, Creator, and the Son in the Father, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

But rebuke given out of concern is not out of keeping with the Word who saves. This is the medicine of the divine love for us, the medicine that brings the blush of shame to the surface and makes a person ashamed of his sin. If one must censure, one must also rebuke — when the time has come to wound an unfeeling soul, not fatally but healingly, buying exemption from everlasting death with a little pain.

Great is the wisdom in his instruction, and many are the ways he works for our salvation. The Instructor bears witness to those who are good and calls forward to better things those who have been called; he turns those who are rushing to do wrong away from the attempt and urges them to change to a better life. For the one is not left without testimony when the other has been testified to, and the grace that comes of that testimony is very great. Besides, the feeling of anger — if it is right to call his warning anger — is full of love for us: God stooping to an emotion for our sake, for whose sake also the Word of God became a human being.