The Dialectical Principle in All Life
Moving on now into the problems of daily life, I want to underline the attitude of faith which unties every conceivable knot, and leaps over every high wall. It is really only a reiteration of what we have already seen, for faith is always just faith; but it concerns the problem of our divided outlook.
It is obvious that life is a mixture. As we have already seen, both good and evil are to be seen
everywhere, in nature, in man, in politics, in industry. We never meet with one without the other: health–disease: prosperity–adversity: riches–poverty: love–hate: kindness–cruelty: life–death. We meet with these right in our personal lives; in our own hearts, in the family, in business, in church fellowship. Now it is human nature in us to want to embrace the one and flee from the other. But we can’t solve life’s problems that way. We can’t escape the inescapable. Victorious living, indeed, means the ability to handle life’s adversities as successfully, redemptively, and with as much understanding as life’s prosperities. To do this, once again, we must go to the root of things. We must see all things as God sees them. It must be God looking through our eyes at our (His) problems, God thinking His thoughts in our minds concerning them, and God working in us to will and to do of His good pleasure.
Let us go back once again to the beginning. We have our book of revelation–the whole Bible–so it is not difficult to trace the revealed mind and ways of God. He has not left us in bewilderment. His purpose and plan of grace is plain from Genesis to Revelation: all is centered in His Son. He was before all things, all was created by Him, and all is for His own pleasure (Rev. 4:11). But He also foreknew the long, long trail to that final consummation, when He will gather together in one all things in Christ, in the new heavens and new earth wherein will dwell righteousness.
We have already seen that nothing exists without its opposite: to say yes to one thing is to say no to its opposite: to love one thing is to hate its opposite: light can only shine visibly in contrast to darkness: life “swallows up mortality.” But when the Creator in His purpose of love and grace brought into existence His own “opposite,” created beings in His own likeness, that their emptiness should be swallowed up by His fulness, their weakness manifest His strength, their darkness radiate His light, He foreknew and foresaw what might and did happen–that a great rift would appear in the harmony of His universe. As all negatives are the hidden, submissive partners to their positives, as the female to the male, as minors to majors, in the union of the two all life in thought and action being reproduced, so were we to be as the created to our Creator, as bride to Bridegroom, as servants to Master, as sons to Father. But as free selves, we could do what no other pair of opposites could do, we could refuse to keep this “first estate” of creature to Creator; we could aspire to be as God, the minor as the major, the darkness as light, the weakness as strength; and we could upset the equilibrium of our world. This is what God foresaw that we should do, and Lucifer and his angels before us. It meant the appearance of a whole principle of evil not in existence before, a negative that defied its positive and would replace it, a darkness that would be as light, an evil that would claim to be the good, a devil (and man) who would be God. The prophet boldly said of God that He “created evil” (Is. 45:7), and it is true in the sense that a created being has the potentiality, the freedom to refuse to keep its own estate, and in refusing, to bring into manifestation the negative kingdom of evil as a power, “the power of darkness.”
This was the warning God gave Adam and Eve: Beware of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Good they knew already, for all that God had created He pronounces to be “very good.” The not-good (evil), the hidden opposite to good, was unknown to them. Let them beware: the existence of such an actuality as evil (in Lucifer and his hosts) was there before their eyes in the symbol of that tree. But into the trap they fell. No longer was the world within and without a world of pure goodness. Another spirit was working in them, the negative spirit of disobedience, infecting them as it infected all nature. There was not only the Yes of God’s goodness around them, but the No of God’s wrath on evil; and life had become a dichotomy, the clash of arms resounded through nature, the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness in mortal combat.
But both are still God’s kingdoms, the kingdom of His Yes, the kingdom of His No; the kingdom of His grace, the kingdom of His wrath. We quickly begin to lose our way, if we are deluded into thinking that the foes in this war are of equal status. That never has been, nor could be. Major and minor, positive and negative, and so on down the line of all pairs of opposites, can never ultimately move from their created relationship, no matter how a satanic or human self may try to inflate itself from a nothing to a something. It is only bluff, self deceit, false imagination, although it may and has caused all temporary upsets and discords in our world, and ends in an actual sphere of outer darkness for those who continue in it. No one has ever been on the throne of the universe but the perfect God Himself, perfect in foresight, perfect in plan and action, perfect in power, perfect in love.
Therefore to Him, and this is all-important to us, there never has been an unmanageable division, a dichotomy. He works all things after the counsel of His own will, evil as well as good. Evil serves His purposes as much as good. The devil is His agent.
The Bible makes it plain that, not only did He foresee the invasion of evil, but that He actively intervened to use it for His glory. Of us men in our evil ways it says that He hardens us (for we are all Pharaohs by nature), and is glorified in the hardening and its consequences (Rom. 9:17): not indeed that He may destroy us, but that by making us sample the fruits of our rebellion, as many as possible of us may repent of our ways and be saved, for “He hath concluded us all in disobedience, that He may have mercy on all.” Of the inanimate creation travailing in pain, we have already pointed out that it is God Himself who has subjected it to its present condition, not of its own volition, but in deliberate anticipation of the glorious deliverance to come (Rom. 8:20). There is then this connection here, in the whole creation, between experience gained through suffering and subsequent glory, a lesson which we humans can learn intelligently and accept willingly. Good is faced with evil, and only by conquest of it becomes established goodness.
This is how God is establishing His eternal Kingdom which shall never be moved (Heb. 12:28, 29). He Himself has planned and produced a creation which could and did go into reverse. It split wide open the positive goodness of all things and exposed the hidden opposite, bitter to sweet, lie to truth, hate to love, selfishness to unselfishness. And how did God meet this revolt? By Himself becoming the opposite to Himself–God becoming man, the Strong becoming the weak, Spirit taking flesh, and finally the Sinless becoming the sinner, Life becoming death. As captain (pioneer, trailcutter) of our salvation, He led the way by being perfected in the sufferings we suffer and by conquest of them. God tasted the duality of good and evil, tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin. But in being tempted he was totally victorious, in suffering His faith never failed, “faithful to Him that appointed him in all His house”: and tasting the final form of evil, death for every man, He drank the cup to the dregs in the perfect obedience of faith, and thus destroyed in His resurrection him that had the power of death, that is the devil, and delivered his bondslaves from the fear of him. That is to say, He deliberately embraced evil, the worst evil Satan has it in his power to inflict. He permitted it to strike Him with all its force, and indeed to overcome Him in the flesh. He died at the hands of the evil one. But He died in the inner triumph of faith. This is revealed to us in Heb. 5, where we read that at Gethsemane He obeyed His Father to the limit, but in accepting the coming Calvary He first prevailed with Him by strong crying and tears that He should be saved out of death, “and was heard” because of His filial faith. By this means, by obedience and faith, He turned the evil back onto its perpetrator, and instead of being destroyed Himself, by His resurrection from the dead He destroyed the destroyer. He turned evil to good–by faith; and as the first pioneer on the road of salvation which we tread (Heb. 2:10), He made a way of faith possible for all of us who will go through, believing Him in like “evil” circumstances. For us also, then, our evil will be our good. That is why in the same chapter, the writer says that the spiritually mature will, by going victoriously through life’s experiences, learn to “discern both evil and good.” When we are in spiritual infancy we judge things by outward appearances. If a situation is pleasant, it is good; if unpleasant, evil. But as we grow in the Spirit, we learn that all that comes to us is good if accepted in faith, and the only evil in the world for us is our inner unbelieving attitudes. Good and evil are not in our circumstances, but in ourselves, according to our reaction to them.
The Bible gives us classic examples of this. The most famous, of course, is Job. He was the outstanding man of faith of his generation, for God called him a “perfect and upright man,” and God says that of no man unless his faith can be counted unto him for righteousness. But to him material prosperity was the obvious evidence of the favor of God. Then the tempests blew. Storm on storm swept over him. His faith bent beneath them, but never snapped. Some of the most glorious sayings of a faith under the cross were wrung from his tortured heart. He began in the fulness of faith: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” But faith deteriorated, as always, through controversy, though still appearing in the flashes through the thunder clouds: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him”: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day on the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God”: “When he hath tried me, I shall come forth like gold.” It was a grim faith, an enduring rather than enjoying faith, magnificent, set by the Holy Ghost in James as the standard of endurance for believers of all time; but it lacked one transforming element: it was not an understanding faith. He had to fight his way through blindfold. Perhaps he could have known earlier, if he had “broken” earlier. Who knows? It takes long enough for the Lord to break any of us, for we only break when we listen to His voice. The Lord spoke to Job in these closing scenes of the book, and gave him such a revelation of His majesty that Job was in the dust before Him; he had heard of Him before; now he saw Him. And what did he see? One who works all after the counsel of His own will, evil as well as good; for it was given to him to see and to record for us what lay behind his horrible trials–God using Satan, even stirring up Satan to bring external trials on Job so severe that all the watching hosts of heaven and all believers through history could learn the lesson: that God can implant such a faith and love for Himself in a fallen human that it transcends all that the world can offer and all that the devil can inflict (1 Pet. 1:6-8). That revelation was of more value to Job and to us all than all the earthly blessings restored to him. There once for all is it recorded for us that Satan is still a servant of the Almighty–which is the very key to this problem of good and evil.
Joseph is another famous example. How far he clearly saw God’s purposes through the years of shocking adversity, and equally through the first years of his fabulous prosperity, we do not know. We do know that he never lost the inner certainty that it was God who had given him those youthful dreams, for if he had, he never could, years after, have met the sudden challenge of the butler’s and baker’s perplexity over their dreams with the statement, “Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell me then, I pray you”; nor could he, two years later, have faced Pharaoh and his incredulous court in that dramatic scene, when Pharaoh told him that he had heard he wan an interpreter of dreams, and without a moment’s hesitation he answered, “It is not in me; God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace.” But certainly it all came clear to him when, in another moving moment, he saw his ten brethren standing before him, and “remembered the dreams which he dreamed of them,” and later quelled their guilty fear by exclaiming, “Be not angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither; for God did send me before you to preserve life…God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth…so now it was not you that sent me hither, but God”; and once again when he was dying, “Fear not…as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it for good.”
Here is God’s perfection, as we come out of the tunnel of our investigation. “The tree of knowledge of good and evil.” The divided outlook. Life, instead of being one good whole, has fallen into two opposing parts; the pairs of opposites have become enemies instead of friends and partners. Therefore life in the human must always be a tension, a constant propounding of problems with no adequate solution, a constant oscillation between the pleasurable and the painful. But when we raise our sights from the human to the divine, the whole picture changes. All started with God, all ends with God, and there is only One with whom He has to do: from eternity to eternity all is centered in Christ. Therefore whatever intervenes in history, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be caught up into the stream of His purposes of grace in Christ. If the devil appears on the scene, then the devil must be His agent. If the fall of man adds to the chaos, then we learn that He had already foreseen that and the fallen first Adam was to be only a type in reverse (Rom. 5:14) of the last redeeming Adam. This same Christ would Himself embrace the consequences of sin, stone for it, conquer it, and then produce out of the wreckage of fallen humanity a new race of sons to occupy the highest position in the universe, to share the throne of Him who is made “higher than the heavens,” better than the angels, seated at the right hand of the majesty on high, “the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.” Evil, then, would be to Christ an agency for good; not that evil comes from God, or is anything but Evil; but faith utilizes it for good, because faith understands that God reigns in the darkness as well as in the light (Ps. 139:12), and that God fulfils His own purpose through adverse circumstances which expose to man his inability, and spur him on to the receiving faith which liberates God to work. Therefore adversities of all kinds are sent from God, purposed by God, each as it exactly suits our condition, that we may learn and re-learn that “when I am weak, then I am strong.” Good and evil thus cease to be divided to the eye of faith; they are reunited by the alchemy of the cross and resurrection, where self-reactions have died, and the living Christ deliberately furthers His victorious and redemptive plans through the assault of His enemies.
—The Deep Things of God
