God Answers the Righteous at Once

… brightness benefits in no small measure those who look on them. Indeed, Christ said to the holy apostles: “Let your light shine before people, so that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). So we shall be radiant, with the glory from God moving all around us and, as it were, clothing us, the glory he would grant to those who devote themselves to righteousness.

When these things are yours, he says, then you will cry out, and God will hear you; while you are still speaking he will say, “Here I am” (Isaiah 58:9). For “he listens to the prayers of the righteous” (Proverbs 15:29), as it is written. And as the Psalmist says: “The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer” (Psalm 34:15).

Because he is good, he will grant the requests of those who ask, but not to all at once. To those who have excelled in righteousness, however, he holds out what they ask without any delay and lends them a most ready ear, so that over each of their requests they say with joy: “He heard my voice from his holy temple, and my cry before him will come into his ears” (Psalm 18:6). So the cry “Here I am,” while the righteous man is still speaking and lifting up his prayers, shows plainly the generosity that will not delay and the great readiness of God who gives.

“If you take away from yourself the bond, and the stretching out of the hand, and the word of grumbling, and give your bread to the hungry, and satisfy the humbled soul, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your darkness will be as noon, and your God will be with you always” (Isaiah 58:9–11).

The choicest lessons, even if people hear them many times, still bring benefit. So the all-wise Paul writes to those who believed through him: “To say the same things to you is no trouble to me, and for you it is safe” (Philippians 3:1). So in many ways he comes to us saying the same things, making plain the roads to good standing and describing the splendor of the rewards to be given to the saints. He does this to make them still more eager to choose to do the things by which they would become worthy of honor and would find the generosity that comes from above, from him.

So he says, “If you take away from yourself the bond, and the stretching out of the hand” (Isaiah 58:9). By “bond,” I think, he means wickedness of character, perversity and love of quarrels, and, as it were, tying knots of trouble against people and searching out crooked schemes, so as at times to bind people fast and throw them into snares of hardship from which there is no escape.

For a person must be straightforward and easy to approach, if he aims to be watched over by God and longs for the gifts that come from him. And by “the stretching out of the hand” he perhaps means taking bribes and reaching after shameful gain; for we sometimes say …