Ever been stymied by the difficulty of understanding why Scripture implies God sends sufferings to "test" a person, when presumably He knows how much we love him? Yes, I know we can mutter that He knows better than we do whether it's good for us in the long run to suffer or not, but that doesn't answer why the term "test" keeps coming up. You can try to explain it away by saying that it really means something like hardening us for battle, but the plain meaning of "finding out" -- whether we have faith, whether we love God, what kind of stuff we're made of -- is there and still has to be dealt with.
One answer hadn't occurred to me till I read it today. From the Office of Readings today, a letter by Saint Augustine:
Scripture says: He [the Spirit] pleads for the saints because he moves the saints to plead, just as it says: The Lord your God tests you, to know if you love him, in this sense, that he does it to enable you to know.
That is St. Augustine for you: good at pointing out the obvious answers -- obvious in retrospect, that is. It had never occurred to me that one "tests" a thing not just to find out of what stuff it's made, but to lay plain the evidence for others to know and see.
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