Whence Evil?: Did a Holy God Create Evil-Part 2

In the last post, I examined whether God, who created everything, also create evil. Drawing on Scripture the answer is a resounding NO. In our search to understand the wrath of God,  I think we need to look more closely at the attributes and nature of evil. That is the subject of this post.

There are millions of people in the world today who have or who are now experiencing evil in a most horrific way. I am not one of them. I have felt the breath of evil in my life, and who has not, but not the hammer blows that can crush the human spirit and kill life and liveliness. Does that make me ineligible to write about evil? I am sure some will say “yes”. But the Bible says a lot about the origins and the objectives of evil, so I will do my best to put together this picture, mostly from the word of God. I believe that we all need to understand evil, if for no other reason than to know how to stand against our enemy, who is a liar, a deceiver, and who is relentlessly aggressive. Two great books on this subject are ‘Evil and the Justice of God‘ by N.T. Wright and ‘Unspeakable‘ by Os Guinness.

Evil is a force or power – a shadowy, mysterious, hidden dimension of the visible and invisible worlds. It is a Negative Force. We meet this force in the Genesis account when this mysterious force, epitomized in the serpent, lies to Adam and Eve and temps them to disobey God. We meet this same power again in the account of Cain and Abel. Speaking to Cain, who felt rejected by God, God says:

“If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you but you must master it” (Genesis 5: 7 NIV).

The study notes in my NIV bible interpret this part of the passage “sin is crouching at your door”: “The Hebrew word for ‘crouching’ is the same as an ancient Babylonian word referring to an evil demon crouching at the door of a building to threaten the people inside. Sin may thus be pictured here as just such a demon, waiting to pounce on Cain” (NIV Study Bible). This Scripture reminds me of a similar passage: “Your enemy the devil prowls around like roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith” (1 Peter 5: 8, 9 NIV).

Evil is a destructive force. It is anti-God. It has no power to create. It can only uncreate or decreate. The only power evil has is what we give it (more on this below). Evil ‘s mission is to destroy God’s creation, to reduce order and organization to chaos and confusion, to kill life, to replace light with darkness, to bring disease where there is health, despair where there is joy, squalor where there is beauty, and war where there is peace. Evil wants to undo God’s redemptive plan at work today in the Kingdom of God by stealing joy and peace, killing life and liveliness, and destroying relationships – our relationship with Jesus, with others, and even within our selves. Evil wants you to believe that life has no meaning or purpose. Ultimately, evil desires to dethrone God. One of the hallmarks of evil is hubris defined as “extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence”. Evil always overplays its hand. God hates evil.

As I was praying over this section, I had a vision of God and, I believe, evil, which helped me understand the vast differences between the Creator and the one who wants to uncreate. I saw God, or at least one representation of God, seated on a throne. God and His throne looked like they were carved out of crystal, even solid diamond. He was sharp, hard, solid, pure, and transparent. Light was all around God and shining through Him. There was no darkness in God. As the light passed through God, it was refracted into all the colors of the rainbow. God was radiant, and brilliantly lit, raised up high above me. I stood at His feet awestruck at the beauty, majesty, and value of God. After all, He was one giant diamond.

But Scripture reminds me that this in only one dimension of God’s character. God is also a living, personal presence. Eugene Peterson in The Message translates 1 Corinthians 3: 16 – 18 this way:

“Whenever, though, they turn to face God as Moses did, God removes the veil and there they are – face-to-face! They suddenly recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. And when God is personally present, a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation is recognized as obsolete. We’re free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of His face. And so we are transfigured, much like the Messiah, our lives becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like Him”.

Then I saw something else in a different location – not in the presence of God. It was a dark amorphous fog, hugging the ground. It flowed and oozed over the ground and the word ‘slithering’ came to my mind. It was shadowy with no fixed form or substance. As I watched, it would sometimes pile up into a towering cloud-like form with no well-defined shape, making itself appear large. It could not destroy anything, it could only ooze into whatever it flowed over if there was an opening. It kept searching, moving, looking for an entry into whatever stood in its path. Like fog, it could also limit visibility, preventing whatever if flowed around to see clearly. It brought confusion and fear. I knew I was looking at a force or power we call evil. Perhaps I was seeing a representation of the personification of evil — satan..

What a contrast! The one was solid, beautiful, and filled with light. It exuded power and purpose. It was also a Spirit, personal, present, and life-giving. The other was a dark fog, amorphous, aimless, and brought with it, wherever it went, darkness and confusion. It had no power, but yet it was menacing. It was a being of some type, but not one easily defined. I guess I would call it a quasi-being.

Evil rising up, fed by a fallen humanity, has manifested itself in the 20th century in multiple times and places. The horror of the Western Front in WW1, the death camps in Nazi Germany in WW 2, the killing fields of Rwanda and Cambodia are some of the more egregious examples. God’s creation and His creatures were savagely, brutally destroyed and when one asked “why?” there was only silence. There was no why. In more mundane, everyday ways evil kills through addictions of all types. It isolates people from each other, sowing distrust, and causing loneliness. Evil has no meaning – it is random, dark, and destructive. Evil is the absence of good – evil sucks up life, goodness, and light into the spiritual and emotional equivalent of a Black Hole.

In Scripture, evil is personified by the devil or satan – in Hebrew ‘the accuser’, also known as a liar and the deceiver, the relentless enemy of God and God’s people. N.T. Wright in his book ‘Evil and the Justice of God’ writes:

“The biblical picture of satan is thus of a nonhuman and nondivine quasi-personal force which seems bent on attacking and destroying creation in general and humankind in particular, and above all thwarting God’s project of remaking (or restoring – my word) the world and human beings in and through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit” (pg. 109).

Speaking of satan, Jesus says to the Pharisees:

“You are of your father, the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is liar and the father of lies” (John 8: 44 NKJV).

Satan’s principle weapon is sin, manifested in pride, which is the root of Sin, or idolatry.

Satan is not equal and opposite to Jesus. Jesus reigns over all powers and principalities, including satan (so why does Jesus allow evil to continue to operate? See the next post for my answer to that question). Even though Jesus defeated the forces of evil at the cross and demonstrated His victory with His resurrection, setting us free from bondage to satan, evil is still active in the world today. We make two mistakes with evil: we underestimate the scope and power of evil or we overestimate the presence and influence of evil. Both are dangerous.

So, back to the question – if Jesus created everything, but is incapable of creating evil because God is all light and in Him there is no darkness, what is the origin of satan, the prince and author of evil?

In the next post I’ll answer that question and explain how while satan is evil, our choices provide satan with the power he needs to go on the offensive against God.

Praying against a spirit of fear,

John