The Meaning of Divine Providence

The captain is God!

One of the first things a new military recruit learns is that the captain is not only the source of all the recruit's material blessings, but he is also the ultimate authority. His word is law, and his decisions can literally mean life or death for those under his command.

The word "captain" means "who holds the highest place." In the Navy, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, Public Health Service, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the rank of captain is just below that of a rear admiral or, sometimes, a commodore. Typically, a captain commands a ship, but any master of a vessel over 65 feet long, even a petty officer or a civilian, is the captain. Thus Coast Guard Commander Sam Jordan (in the picture) is the assigned captain of the US Coast Guard Cutter Resolute (WMEC 620).

The captain is God!

In the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps, a captain is a junior officer, senior to a lieutenant but junior to a major. He is the most junior officer to command an identifiable military unit. In the Army and Marines, this is a company, battery or troop, whereas the equivalent unit in the Air Force is the flight. Lieutenants lead, but captains command. As on a ship, the land unit which the captain commands has its own administrative headquarters, its own dining facility, its own supply room, motor pool, armory and living quarters. Every item of supply the soldier or sailor gets or uses comes from his captain.

The captain is personally responsible for carrying out the ship's or unit's mission and for everything it, as well as its members or crew, does or fails to do. He publishes written orders and standing operating procedures which have the force of law. He has the authority to promote and demote soldiers and sailors under his command, and can punish them for infractions of military discipline, even if they're not guilty. In the land forces, the soldier or sailor can refuse the captain's punishment and demand a court martial, but the service member aboard ship has no such option. He must accept the captain's mast, and the captain doesn't have to prove or explain anything to anybody.

In a word, the captain is God!

Things were even more strict in ancient Rome. After a series of disastrous defeats, the Roman army evolved from a civilian militia into the most powerful military force of its time. Roman soldiers of Jesus' time were highly trained, superbly equipped professionals, armed with the latest in military technology and imbued with a discipline which is unequaled even today. Roman military officers had absolute authority over their soldiers, and the soldiers knew it. Anything the officer ordered his men to do got done. Anything!

A centurion commanded a century, a unit of one hundred men. Today we would call him a company commander who is, you guessed it, a captain.

The captain is God!

The story about the centurion's servant appears in both Matthew and Luke. In Matthew, the centurion approaches Jesus directly. In Luke, he sends prominent Jewish citizens to intercede for him. Those Christians who believe that the Bible is God's literal word point to this discrepancy as evidence of two remarkably similar, but nevertheless distinct, centurions. Catholics, on the other hand, are under no such constraint. There is no evidence that either evangelist was an eyewitness, so both had to rely on reports of others. The most likely (but not necessarily correct) view is that Matthew, a Jew used to working with gentiles, merely assumed that the centurion had met personally with Jesus, while Luke, a much more careful historian, seems to have not only taken great pains to report the actual facts of the encounter, but also to have done some research into the kindly type of man the centurion was. This officer seems to have been much like an American captain in Iraq; fulfilling his military mission and caring for his men while at the same time trying to promote good community relations, help the local civilians, and ease their transition into the sphere of influence of the occupying power. This specific centurion seems to be particularly, and uncharacteristically, careful not to offend contemporary religious sensibilities. (Of course, it is entirely possible that this particular centurion may have been a "closet Jew.")

In any case, it is clear that the centurion had a servant who was sick and wanted Jesus to cure him. He appeared to be familiar with the Jewish prohibition against entering the homes of presumed pagans. The main point he tried to make was that he recognized that Jesus didn't have to actually do anything to the servant, all he had to do is issue the appropriate order. Like the centurion's absolute authority over his soldiers, he recognized that Jesus had authority over nature, that his commands would be strictly and promptly carried out.

Jesus not only did not find such faith in Israel, he doesn't find it much in modern Christianity, either. For millions of Christians, the virtue of faith is considered the sole necessity for eternal salvation. From this idea, it is only a small step to the misleading concept that having faith somehow "makes" God save us, which is only another small step to the mistaken belief that we can "make" God do anything we want Him to, regardless of what He wants, as long as we have sufficient faith that He'll do it and say the magic words, "In Jesus' Name." Thus, if there is a world wide pandemic and I don't want to take recommended precautions against catching it, all I have to do is pray "in Jesus' name" and have enough faith that I'll be OK, and I will. To prove how strong my faith is, it may help to gather in large, unvaccinated groups, sing and breathe on each other, not wear masks or not wash my hands!

Guess how that works out in practice!

One occasionally sees evidence of this belief in the pews of Catholic churches. One or more members of the congregation will litter the church with homemade leaflets that assure the gullible that if they will perform some ritual, usually including duplicating and further distributing the instructions, they will definitely, absolutely, positively receive whatever it is they want, no matter how outrageous. Usually the ritual is a repetitious appeal to the Blessed Mother or some saint for the purpose of badgering God into granting the requester's wish. It takes so long, weeks or even months, that elderly senile participants are likely to forget what they are doing or why, but it does give them hope and keep them occupied for a time, which is probably no bad thing. On the other hand, the implicit disrespect shown to Almighty God, His mother, and whatever saint is invoked in this deplorable attempt to manipulate God for one's own purposes, not to mention the potential for scandal involved, is troubling, to say the least.

Educated Catholics, on the other hand, believe that faith is a human faculty oriented toward truth, as wisdom and understanding are, and that it is directed toward God's will, not the other way around. We tend to side with our Muslim brothers and sisters in our belief that the best way to get along with God is to submit to His will, whether it's what we want or not. (The word "islam" means "voluntary submission.") We believe it is inappropriate to think that we know better than He does what the right thing to do is, and that we can make Him our servant, instead of the way things really are. The idea that humans can control God by having faith that He is going to do what we want (or any other criterion) is a pagan concept that denies His absolute authority. The centurion understood that. Both stories suggest that, although he wanted the servant cured, he left the decision about if, as well as how, totally up to Jesus.

Even today, there are millions of Christians who see God as a besieged combatant, locked in an ongoing struggle with the devil in which human souls are pawns being sought after by both sides as a way of keeping score, like the "Help Jesus Win" graphics that the Russians posted on the Internet to help get Donald Trump elected. Others view God as an embittered petty tyrant, an "invisible man living in the sky," making onerous laws to keep people from having fun, trying their faith with conflicting messages, gleefully threatening them with never-ending torment for infractions of His rules, and cursing them with a lifetime of adversity to test their loyalty to His supremely inflated ego. Their God is mean, vindictive and vicious, and, except for their ill-defined "friend" Jesus, who satisfied His thirst for cruelty by suffering and dying, would have no problem whatever with sadistically torturing them for all eternity simply for being what He Himself made them - fallible human beings.

That is decidedly not the Catholic view!

The gospel, the "good news of salvation," is that there is no such struggle; our loving God is firmly in control, and everything is going according to plan. We even have a special feast day, the Feast of Christ the King, to celebrate our belief that God is king, and Christ is God, and everything is OK. While we say that God permits evil so that good may come of it, we do not suggest that God's plan is occasionally frustrated and that He has to play catch-up when something doesn't go His way. No, the fact is that everything that happens has been foreseen by God since before the first moment of creation, and is an integral and necessary part of His plan. As a free act of His love, God has not only made the universe the way it is, He has made us the way we are, beings endowed with free will. And to have free will, we have to be able to make voluntary choices between what is in our best interests and those of our neighbor or not; to choose between good and evil. To have a choice, there has to be evil, as well as good, to be chosen.

And to have the virtue of faith, we must choose to believe that God knows what's He's doing, and that His will is what's important, even if it's other than what we want.

Some people claim that the good man obeys God's laws, while the evil man does not. These people put far too little faith in the absolute power of God. God's laws are of a strength far beyond that of puny man to break them. Go ahead, just try to violate the law of gravity, or the law of conservation of momentum. The Ten Commandments are not laws, they are commandments. That's why they are called the Ten Commandments; if they were laws they'd be called the Ten Laws, as the foregoing are. Human laws are not based on them any more than popular music is based on the Song of Songs, regardless of who claims otherwise. They are God's basic prescription for a happy life, and we voluntarily violate them at our peril. It is no wonder that human beings have independently incorporated some of them into our legislation in our attempt to promote socially approved behavior. But nobody disobeys God's laws. It simply can't be done. The good man carries out God's plan voluntarily by doing good; the evil one involuntarily by doing evil. But both of them perform their assigned role of carrying out the divine plan of salvation in which all of us, good and evil alike, are honored and privileged to participate.

God, who knows everything all at once, knows what choices we are freely going to make before we make them. He has known from the beginning of time what you are going to choose completely voluntarily to do at 8:35:42 PM next Thursday, and has already incorporated that act or omission into His grand scheme. That there is evil in the world is due to the fact that human beings, beginning with our first ancestors, put it there. The creation stories in the book of Genesis makes it quite clear that the devil not only did not create anything, he didn't destroy anything, either. Almighty God simply does not allow that to happen! It was cooperation with the serpent, even after having been thoroughly warned, that the human race destroyed the blessings of Paradise and brought upon itself the evils we now endure as the price of our many sins and the sins of those who have littered the way before us.

Many believers don't accept this. They don't understand how God can know ahead of time what we are going to do and yet allow us freely to do it or not. Their doctrine ranges from a belief that there is no such thing as free will; that we are merely automatons, going about our daily activities like gears in a clock, doomed, in spite of what we want, to be saved or damned by God's prior intent. The other end of that spectrum is that there is no objective reality at all, that each of us exists in isolation, the illusion of reality, like that portrayed in "The Matrix," only a distraction which we must overcome to attain salvation.

Some people also have trouble with evil in the world. They balk at the idea that the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the Holocaust or the Black Death or human slavery could be part of the plan of a loving God. They point to "the problem of evil in the world" and assume that since evil is a problem for them, it must also be a problem for God. Sometimes they claim that God is the author of evil, that destructive events are manifestations of God's displeasure with completely unrelated human activities, such as, for example, that the floods, wildfires and temperature extremes in the world of climate change are His punishment for some United States not outlawing abortion!

The lack of acceptance is really a lack of trust in God. Proverbs 3:5 says, "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding." Another way of saying this is that, in His management of the universe, God does not consider Himself bound to what we can understand or agree with. As Isaiah 55:8-9 says, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."

We can get a glimmer of understanding, if no more, from an examination of history. The World Trade Center attacks killed about 3000 people, but they directly resulted in the liberation, at least for a generation, of millions of Afghans from the tyranny of the Taliban, one of the most evil and oppressive regimes in the modern world. The Holocaust killed over 6 million innocent Jews, but created the State of Israel, a 1900 year old dream of a perpetual homeland for all Jews everywhere. The Black Death killed one third of the world's population, but the sanitation measures and preventive technology in countries where it was endemic today permit the highest population densities of history. And evil as slavery was (and is), the 40 million or so living descendants of American slaves, however disadvantaged, are far better off in this country than they would be today in impoverished and war-torn Africa.

Billions of people all over the world easily use refrigerators and television sets and automatic transmissions without really understanding how they work. Yet they assume that because a particular situation is not to their liking, God must be having trouble with it, too. But a larger appreciation of the true significance of the term "Supreme Being" requires an acknowledgment that God has the power not only to have created the universe and to keep it continually in existence moment by moment, but also the power to include in it such things as free will and random uncertainty which are still part and parcel of His divine will. He is that powerful and wise!

So, as the centurion understood, all of nature is indeed like a military unit or ship under command, forging ahead full speed toward its intended eternal objective, exactly on course and precisely on schedule. The engineer doesn't need to know what the navigator is doing; the stokers don't have to be concerned about the activities of the stewards. Everything is being taken care of. All the crew; ratings, officers and petty officers, are productively at work at their assigned duties, everything is laid out according to SOP; everyone and everything is ready for inspection....

And the captain is God.

John Lindorfer