963- Is God concerned personally with each individual? Isn’t God too great and aren’t we too small for each individual in particular to have any importance in the divine sight?
“God is concerned with all created beings, no matter how small they may be. Nothing is too small for God’s goodness.”
964- Must God be concerned with each of our actions in order to reward or punish us? Aren’t most of such actions insignificant to God?
“God has established the divine laws that regulate all your actions. If you violate them, the fault is yours. Obviously, when people commit an excess, God does not pronounce sentences on them by saying, for example, ‘You are a glutton and I am going to punish you.’ But God has set a limit: maladies, and sometimes death, are the consequences of excess. Thus the punishment – it results from breaking a law. Everything happens this way.”
All our actions are subjected to the laws of God. No matter how unimportant they seem to us, they could still be a violation of those laws. If we suffer the consequences of such violation, we have only ourselves to blame. We are thus the artisans of our own future happiness or unhappiness.
This truth becomes evident in the following moral: A father has given education and instruction to his son, i.e., the means of knowing how to conduct himself. He cedes a field to him to cultivate, and says to him, “I have given you the rules to follow and all the necessary implements for rendering this field productive, thereby ensuring your living. I have taught you how to understand those rules. If you follow them, your field will yield abundantly and will furnish you repose in your old age. If you do not follow them, it will yield nothing and you will die of hunger.” Having said this, he leaves him free to act as he pleases.
Is it not true that the field will produce in the ratio of the care taken in its cultivation and that all negligence will rebound by harming the harvest? The son will therefore be happy or unhappy in his old age according to how he has followed or neglected the rules outlined by his father. God is even more provident, because God warns us at every moment whether we are doing right or doing wrong by sending us spirits to inspire us; however, we do not listen to them. There is also this further difference: God gives us recourse through new lives to repair our past errors, whereas the son of whom we have been speaking will not have the same opportunities if he misuses his time.
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