Is Affliction from God?
By W. S. Sadler
THE MISSION OF PAIN AND THE LANGUAGE OF DISEASE. NO. 5.
“Fools, because of their transgression,
And because of their iniquities, are afflicted.”
AFFLICTION is the portion of those who through ignorance, folly, or wickedness, have been led into transgression. It may not be clear to some just what part God acts in this affliction; for suffering is not a part of God’s original plan for the human family. We may sow thorns and thistles in our yards, and God will permit them to grow; but we must bear in mind that He did not inspire us to sow these evil seeds, which, when they have grown, will pierce our hands and those of our children. The inspiration to sow thorns and thistles came from beneath; but after they were sown, God permitted them to grow, that their thorns might be the means of correcting us of the disposition to sow any more of the same kind of seed. It is not the purpose of God to afflict mortal man, nor to cause unnecessary suffering to any of His creatures. We read this plainly in Job 37:23: “Touching the Almighty, we can not find Him out; He is excellent in power, and in judgment, and in plenty of justice; He will not afflict.” But when man persists in sowing the seeds of affliction, God permits him to have the way of his choice, and so allows affliction to overtake the wrong-doer as he journeys on in the path of disobedience, in the hope that it will prove to be the correction of his wickedness. So that it is only in this sense that affliction can be said to come from God, in that He permits it as a consequence of transgression, and for the purpose of leading transgressors to acknowledge their offense and seek His face. “In their affliction they will seek Me early.” Hosea 5:15. Our Heavenly Father keeps back the full harvest of transgression until every resource of His love and mercy is exhausted, and then He permits justice—the law of sowing and reaping—to begin its operation; and this is Heaven’s last resort to save the sinner from the destruction that will be the inevitable consequence of his continued wrong-doing. If you should take a knife and scratch yourself till you had made a running sore, the moment you ceased to inflict the injury, nature, the power of “divine healing” within you, would begin the work of repair. You scratch it again and again, but nature faithfully heals the wound. All the while “physical forgiveness” is being manifested, just as when you do something morally wrong and ask God for forgiveness, He freely grants it the moment you “cease to do evil” and begin to do well. But if you should keep up indefinitely this process of scratching, by and by the time would come when the extent of the injury would pass beyond the power of repair within the body, and you would have a chronic sore, an ulcer. Thus you have despised God’s physical forgiveness. Shall we continue in transgression that healing may abound?—Certainly not, no more than we would think of continuing in sin that grace might abound. There is a limit, not to God’s love and forgiveness, but to the extent to which human beings can persist in physical or spiritual transgression, and be able to find repentance and healing at the time they seek for it. It is the sin of presumption to continue in transgression expecting God continuously to bestow upon us either spiritual or physical healing just to save us from the pain or inconvenience of suffering the consequences of our wrong-doing. So, to continue the illustration, if you persist in inflicting physical injury upon yourself, the time will surely come when the healing power within will cease to act, and then, physically, you have reached the condition analogous to that of the soul which has finally rejected light and truth, trampled underfoot the blood of the covenant, and forever grieved away the Spirit of God, which alone had power to give repentance. The one is the close of physical probation; the other is the unpardonable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost,—the close of moral probation.