NPNF2-08. Basil: Letters and Select Works - Holy Bible Institute

Homiletical.of qualities. By adopting these views many have ere now fallen into polytheism, but Hemakes peace and creates evil. Unquestionably He makes peace in thee when He bringspeace into thy mind by His good teaching, and calms the rebel passions of thy soul. AndHe creates evil, that is to say, He reduces those evil passions to order, and brings them to abetter state so that they may cease to be evil and may adopt the nature of good. ‘Create inme a clean heart, O God.’ 593 This does not mean Make now for the first time; 594 it meansRenew the heart that had become old from wickedness. The object is that He may make bothone. 595 The word create is used not to imply the bringing out of nothing, but the bringinginto order those which already existed. So it is said, ‘If any man be in Christ he is a newcreature.’ 596 Again, Moses says, ‘Is not He thy Father that hath bought thee? Hath He notmade thee and created thee?’ 597 Now, the creation put in order after the making evidentlyteaches us that the word creation, as is commonly the case, is used with the idea of improvement.And so it is thus that He makes peace, out of creating evil; that is, by transformingand bringing to improvement. Furthermore, even if you understand peace to be freedomfrom war, and evil to mean the troubles which are the lot of those who make war; marchesinto far regions, labours, vigils, terrors, sweatings, wounds, slaughters, taking of towns,slavery, exile, piteous spectacles of captives; and, in a word, all the evils that follow uponwar, all these things, I say, happen by the just judgment of God, Who brings vengeancethrough war on those who deserve punishment. Should you have wished that Sodom hadnot been burnt after her notorious wickedness? Or that Jerusalem had not been overturned,nor her temple made desolate after the horrible wickedness of the Jews against the Lord?How otherwise was it right for these things to come to pass than by the hands of the Romansto whom our Lord had been delivered by the enemies of His life, the Jews? Wherefore itdoes sometimes come to pass that the calamities of war are righteously inflicted on thosewho deserve them—if you like to understand the words ‘I kill and I make alive’ in their obvioussense. Fear edifies the simple. ‘I wound and I heal’ is at once perceived to be salutary.The blow strikes terror; the cure attracts to love. But it is permissible to thee to find ahigher meaning in the words, ‘I kill’—by sin; ‘I make alive’—by righteousness. ‘Though ouroutward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.’ 598 He does not kill oneand make another alive, but He makes the same man alive by the very means by which Hekills him; He heals him by the blows which He inflicts upon him. As the proverb has it,lviii593 Ps. li. 10.594 δημιούργησον.595 cf. Eph. ii. 14.596 2 Cor. v. 17.597 Deut. xxxii. 6, LXX.598 2 Cor. iv. 16.101