What God’s Up To on Planet Earth?. Mark J. Keown

      The Real Problem: Evil

      You may have heard Christians talking about the fact that sin is the main problem in the world, and in a sense it very much is. Sins are attitudes and behaviours that are contrary to God’s ideals and goodness. Sin begins in the heart with attitudes and thoughts that violate goodness. Where behaviour is concerned, sin includes not only actions that actively violate God, other people, his world and ourselves, but also includes false attitudes and the failure to act when we should (‘sins of omission’). That being said, while sin is a fair description of the human condition, the problem caused by the Fall goes a lot deeper than just human sin. The problem is in reality ‘evil’ – the antithesis of God who is ‘Good’.

      When God created the earth, it was ‘very good’.29 At the Fall, evil was let loose. As noted above, evil was permitted before the Fall in the person of Satan, in the physical form of a snake. However, until the Fall, Satan, while evil, was restrained, unable to directly infiltrate creation. Adam and Eve were in a perfect, innocent relationship with God. If they had remained in that state, they and creation could not have been distorted by evil. Satan however, was lurking, waiting and looking for his opportunity to corrupt humanity and creation, like a thief looking for an entry point.30

      He got his opportunity when God forbade Adam and Eve from eating the fruit. Satan spoke to Eve and, through her misinterpretation of God’s word, was able to seduce her to disobey God. At that moment, when they ate the fruit and God withdrew, Satan got his chance. He and his minions (demons, evil spirits) were let loose. He was able to find a foothold and began corrupting every dimension of the earth, distorting humanity and all of creation. This corruption is seen in natural disasters and death in the natural world. In humanity it is also seen in death, disease, pain, male dominance over women, racism, suffering, war, violence, oppression and greed leading to poverty.31

      Satan has gained such a hold over the world that by the time of Christ, when Jesus went into the wilderness to face Satan, the devil was bold enough to offer him the kingdoms of the world if he would bow down to him.32 Unlike Eve and Adam, who failed in the garden, Jesus resisted the temptation, refusing to bow down to Satan.

      So the real problem God and humanity have to deal with is evil. At its heart, evil is found in the form of the person of Satan and his demons seeking to steal, kill and destroy God’s world and humanity.33 However, it would be wrong to blame Satan entirely. We humans are responsible for our own actions. Sin is seen in an individual way with each person doing wrong. It is reflected corporately in structures and institutions which are corrupted. One example is the Nazi movement in the mid-20th century. Sin here is structural and its influence is horrendous. Sin in all its individual and corporate forms is a microcosm of the macro problem of evil. It is evil expressed through fallen humanity.

      Some people tend to use the word sin in a light and fluffy way. They can see the problem with extreme examples of evil such as the Holocaust, genocide or infanticide. But, they might ask, what is wrong with a few personal ‘mistakes’? What’s the big deal? But what is at stake here cannot be trivialised. When we understand the cosmic dimensions of good and evil, sin can no longer be seen in a frivolous way – sin is evil, evil is disgusting; it stands against God, humanity, love, creation and all that is good. It is a violation of the cosmic goals of God in his world, his dream and project. So while God loves us infinitely and wants us to live forever in a loving relationship with him, the cosmic problem of evil stands in the way.

      We are all capable of good, but we are also all more than capable of evil – we are a mixture of good and evil and our motives are never fully pure. We are all sinners before a pure and holy God. We are all guilty of failing to keep the standards of God.

      We have all at some time or other failed to worship God as we should. We have all disobeyed him. We have all blasphemed his name. We have all disobeyed our parents. We have all lied, twisting and distorting the truth for personal gain. We have all stolen something in our life whether actively or passively. Actively, all of us have at some point in our lives taken something that did not belong to us. Passively, we have also participated in evil by failing to share what we have, denying others their inheritance as God’s children, they being poor and we being rich. According to Jesus we have all committed adultery. Jesus said to look with lust at another person is adultery.34 All of us have dehumanised and objectified someone else in this way at some time or another. We have all been guilty of putting others down, of saying something judgemental, of failing to give God the glory he deserves, of failing to honour others as we should. We have all judged others on some basis, whether it is by their looks, race, power, weakness or whatever. We are all, to some degree or another, participants in evil.

      At this point you may feel that I am being a bit harsh. One thing you might think is that many of the horrible things humans do is due to the people involved being sinned against. We see this for example when a desperate person, who is a victim of injustice, commits a robbery to feed his or her family. Often violent crime is understandable to a degree if the offender is a victim of crime. This is profoundly true. Not only are we participants in wrongdoing, we are also victims of wrongdoing. In fact, the more we are sinned against, the more we are broken and marred and fall into sin.35 Those that sinned against us are culpable before God. Yet, we too remain responsible for our sinful responses. That this is true actually reinforces the essential point: the world is broken, we are all sinners and not only are we committing sin, we are often sinned against. All this amplifies the problem of evil.

      If you are not sure whether you are in fact guilty of sin in this sense you might like to turn now to appendix one (at the back of this book) which asks us to check whether we are in fact guilty of sin against the Old Testament standard of the Ten Commandments or the New Testament standard of the two Great Commandments.

      We could continue this discussion looking at a host of ideals that Jesus and other Bible writers have passed on to us and we will see that again and again we are all guilty before God.36 We are all, as the Bible puts it, sinners. We are all participants in and victims of evil, and we are all in need of being saved from this predicament.

      We are a product of our sinful world, so much so that, in a sense, we can’t help but sin. Even one of the founding fathers of Christianity, the Apostle Paul, laments his inability to do the good he knows he ought to do.37 This is the universal human experience. We are sinners before a righteous, holy God. We are subject to the power of sin, enslaved under sin’s power,38 the power of evil. There seems to be no way out! ‘For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God!’39