Prosperity and adversity, life and death, poverty and riches, come of the Lord.
All Commentaries on Wisdom of Sirach 11:14 Go To Wisdom of Sirach 11
Prosper of Aquitaine
AD 455
God in truth has created the body and the spirit of every single human being. Besides the diversity each person may choose to pursue, there is an infinite variety created by God beyond what could be voluntarily achieved by everyone in what each person receives at the beginning of his or her existence. But there are those who would upset us and many who would lead us astray with their vain sayings and false opinions among those who presume to be in the know about unknowable things, having attributed these original differences to fate (even if it does not exist) and to the stars. But we are firmly convinced that God the creator forms all the different types and models of things according to his will from the original elements, and although the nature of the spirit is of one kind and the body another, he deals with them according to the methods most agreeable to him. And surely these acts of God would not have been withdrawn from human knowing if there was a reason for them to be known; or it would be clearly revealed why everything happens the way it does, if it were not sufficient to know that it happens in this way. The Lord said to Moses, "Who has given speech to humankind and who has made the dumb and the deaf, the seeing and the blind? Is it not perhaps I the Lord God?" And again in Isaiah, " "Have I not made the sterile and the fecund?" says the Lord." In the book of Ecclesiasticus there is the saying, "Good and evil, life and death, poverty and riches come from the Lord." And Job says, "The tents of robbers are at peace, and with impudence they provoke God, even though he has given everything into their hands."
