Tertullian, Antidote for the Scorpion's Sting 5

So you have my God's will: a remedy has been found for this affliction. Now let us consider another blow, concerning the quality of that will. It would take too long to prove my God is good; the Marcionites have already learned that from us. For now, it is enough to say 'God,' which forces the conclusion that He is good. Anyone who presumes God is evil cannot hold both positions: either he must deny the existence of the God he calls evil, or he must admit that the one he calls God is good. Therefore, the will of the One who is good is good—unless He is good, He is not God. The goodness of what God wills also proves this; I mean martyrdom, because only a good God wills what is good. I argue that martyrdom is good before the same God who prohibits and punishes idolatry. Martyrdom resists and opposes idolatry, but nothing evil can resist evil—only what is good can. We do not deny there is rivalry among evils and among goods, but this case is different. Martyrdom does not compete with idolatry over some common wickedness; it competes over its own grace, because it frees from idolatry. Who would not call good that which frees from evil? What is the opposition between idolatry and martyrdom if not death and life? Life is credited to martyrdom to the same degree that death is credited to idolatry. The man who calls life evil has death, which he calls good. This is the perversity of men: to reject what saves, accept what destroys, seek danger, avoid the cure, and finally desire death rather than healing. Many also shun medical help—fools, cowards, and the falsely modest. Medicine seems cruel with its scalpel, cautery, and burning mustard plasters, yet being cut, seared, and stretched is not evil because it brings useful pain. It is not rejected because it causes sorrow; because it necessarily causes sorrow, it is applied. The horror of the procedure is excused by its fruit. The patient who screams, groans, and bellows under the doctor's hands will afterward heap those same hands with praise, call them master artisans, and deny they were ever cruel. So martyrdoms also rage, but for salvation; God may cure through fires, swords, and every bitter thing for eternal life. You will marvel at the Doctor too: He mostly applies remedies whose qualities match the complaints—helping through perverse means, by the very things through which we suffer. He checks fevers by piling on greater heat, quenches burning by inducing thirst, gathers excess bile with bitter draughts, and recalls the flow of blood by opening a vein. Yet you would blame God, even a zealous God, if He chooses to contend with the cause and benefit by rivaling the injury: dissolving death by death, scattering killing by killing, shaking off torments by torments, evaporating punishments by punishments, conferring life by taking it, helping by wounding the flesh, saving by taking the soul. What you call perversity is reason; what you call cruelty is grace: thus the eternal God heals through temporary means. Praise your good God, however harsh He seems: you have fallen into His hands, but happily; He has also fallen into your afflictions. Man always strikes the bargain with the doctor first; in the end, he draws the danger of death upon himself. He had received from his Lord, as from a physician, a most useful discipline for living under the law (Genesis 2:16-17): he might eat of every tree, but abstain from only one, which the Doctor Himself knew was trouble. He listened to the voice he preferred, broke his fast, ate the forbidden fruit, and gorged on transgression until he grew raw in death—most worthy to perish utterly, because he chose it. But the Lord, sustaining the heat of the sin until the medicine was ready, gradually compounded remedies: all the disciplines of faith, even those rivaling vice—rescinding the word of death with the word of life, scraping the hearing of transgression clean with the hearing of devotion—so that even when the Doctor commands death, He excludes eternal death. Why does man now balk at suffering from the remedy, when he never balked at suffering from vice? Does it displease him to be killed for salvation, when it did not displease him to be killed for perdition? Will he gag on the antidote who swallowed poison?