Does Evil Exist?

How difficult is it to talk about and explain and understand a concept so abstract, as nebulous as evil?

How do we explain concepts of love or hate, or jealousy to someone who has never experienced these?  But still, we all experience love, hate and jealousy and thus have an inner notion of what these are but it remains very difficult to define these concepts in words or even in our feelings.

Even so, we all know in our hearts about right and wrong, mercy and revenge, healing and killing but how do we define evil. What is evil? Is to hate under all circumstances evil, to seek revenge or commit murder, evil? If evil exist, who created it? God?

Everything was created, from the beginning, in specific ways to help us to understand this reality which we are born into, to understand this world we are living in,  if we are prepared to think, to seek.

Sometimes we give names to certain entities to understand a specific concept, though these ‘things’ do not actually exist because it is the absence or the opposite of things that do exist, the things that we do understand and/or experience.

Heat or warmth, is a form of energy that we experience every day. Our bodies need a specific amount of heat energy to maintain a specific temperature for normal functioning. When it cools down below the normal temperature we try to heat it up very quickly by putting on more clothes or do whatever is necessary. If it loses too much heat and the temperature goes below a critical level for a period of time the normal functions of the body will cease to be effective and death will follow. The problem was not that the body gained too much cold. No, it lost too much heat. Heat is the form of energy that is either present or absent. Cold is the lack of heat. When all heat is removed from the environment the temperature will fall to −273.15 °C (-459 degrees Fahrenheit). This is called Absolute Zero and the point where no more heat can be removed from a system – total absence of all heat.  The word ‘cold’ was created to understand the concept of the relative absence of heat. You cannot make something cold by putting ‘cold’ into it ( you can put a cold object on a warm object to cool it but you first have to remove the heat from the first object to make it ‘cold’!), you can only make something cold by removing heat  or make a cold object warm by adding heat ( not by removing cold!). Cold is not an entity, it is only a word, a concept to describe the lack of sufficient heat.

If you walk into a room at night and switch the light on, the light from the globe/light bulb lights up the room. You can only switch the light off again to make it dark again. You cannot switch darkness on (or off!). There is not a physical entity such as darkness – darkness is the word we use to understand the absence of light. If you remove all light, everything will be dark. But you cannot bring darkness in to remove light. Light is the only physical entity that exists, like heat is the only physical entity that exists. The opposite of light and heat is the absence of light and heat and we call these darkness and cold to understand the concepts even though they do not exist.

From these physical entities we can understand the term evil better. Evil is the absence of goodness, the opposite of goodness, the opposite of the ‘right thing’. People might ask why God created evil as He is the Creator of everything. Colossians 1:16 ‘For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by Him and for Him.’ God did not create evil. He is and created goodness, love, mercy, righteousness and perfection and created man to be just that – created them to His image. Genesis 1:31 ‘God saw all that He had made, and it was very good.’  But man is free to choose and it is the man who acts ‘evil’ by not doing what is right. Genesis 6:5 ‘The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. 6 The LORD was grieved that He had made man on the earth, and His heart was filled with pain.’  The right thing – love, mercy, gentleness, care, kindness, honesty, faithfulness - is what God created man to be. Genesis 1:27 ‘God created man in His own image’. By choosing not do live the way God meant man to be, is evil.

God created light not darkness; heat not cold; goodness not evil. It is our decision to stay in the light where we can see, in the presence of enough heat so that our bodies can function normal and we can physically live. It is our decision to stay in God’s goodness and be what He created us to be and be spiritually alive.

Man acts evil when he acts without love, when he gives false testimony, when he steals, commits adultery, covets, misuses God’s Name, commits murder – when He does not love God and his neighbour as himself - when he disobeys God. Man and the world bear the consequences of these evil acts not created by God.

 

Matthew 25:46 ‘Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.’

John 3:16 ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.’