What is Evil ...

And then there was poo.  In all the universe, for all time, there had never been anything before like poo.  No being could have ever imagined it.  How could something exist that could indeed be so utterly offensive.  Yes, poo may well be the most offensive substance in existence.  It smells bad.  It looks horrible.  It’s texture is repulsive.  One can only speculate at how horrible its taste must be, and even that thought is enough for some to throw-up (ironically producing possibly the second most offensive substance).  So why does poo exist at all?

Imagine for a minute your most favorite food, imagine it cooked to perfection, prepared by gourmet chef’s using only the freshest and highest quality ingredients – now imagine eating this delicacy until your heart, head, and stomach are completely content.  You are not overfull, you are not hungry.  You are completely satisfied and cannot even imagine eating again for at least a few hours from now.  This was normal life in heaven, before evil existed.  The food you would have consumed would have been converted into pure energy.  There simply was no waste.  There was nothing your body needed to separate and excrete.  100% of what you consumed was used and processed in your body, and provided exactly the nourishment you needed.  This was life in Eden.  This was the norm for Adam and Eve.  Poo, and waste byproducts, were a concept unknown.  No need to study something so offensive, when it was also completely irrelevant.

But with evil’s entrance to our world, came the inevitable entrance of poo.  The knowledge God would have Adam and Eve blissfully ignorant of, was on the topic of waste byproducts such as the entire digestive cycle including poo.  As the human body lost its perfection, it would now produce a number of toxins derived from its surroundings and diet.  No longer would perfect food from the tree of life be our daily supplement.  Instead we would have to “toil” or work to contribute towards our survival.  Our efforts would not yield perfect results, and the imperfect results would be what we subsist on.  All of this pain, heartache, and its link to evil – was the knowledge of Good and of Evil, that God would have kept our parents ignorant of.  It made no sense to compare perfection with what was not perfect.  They would have no basis to understand the comparison while they remained true to God.  But the devil knew, that experience would open their eyes to the addictive and destructive nature of evil.  He knew that a single bite of that forbidden fruit would immediately allow them to fully understand the concept of poo.  He did not lie when He said this was a knowledge only God had previously understood, and that like God, they would gain it too.  He simply omitted the fact that understanding poo is a level of information most people would choose to avoid.

There are those who say God created poo, just like God created evil.  He did not.  God created a method of dealing with both.  Poo, or waste byproducts, was a result of evil, it had no origin before that.  As disgusting as that substance is, it makes an excellent comparator for the nature of evil itself.  Evil is not just repugnant to God, it is naturally on its own – ugly, painful, smelly, disgusting, and something all of us should wish not to ever encounter.  Evil is the result of deviation away from all that is perfect.  Evil, as a logical matter has no place to wind up, but to become poo.  If God is the embodiment of fulfillment, love, and joy that brings life – evil by contrast will embody insatiable emptiness, hate and contempt, and pain that leads to death.

So how could something so horrific be embraced by so many, and then thought of as a good thing?  After all I have only ever heard of Alice Cooper actually eating poo in one of his concerts and that story could be the substance of urban legend.  If evil is so bad and so repugnant, and so painful, why do so many embrace it?  At least when you see poo on the ground, you take care not to step in it.  Not so with evil, people seem drawn to it, captivated by it, unable to escape its grasp.  The reason is marketing.  The first step in getting logical people to adopt something that is wholly repugnant is to lie about its features and nature.  We must distract people from the truth about evil, and make evil sound and look very good.  The second step in getting people to adopt something so horrific is to separate for as long as possible, the consequences of adopting evil from the actual act of embracing it.

For instance; if I were a salesman attempting to market an evil idea to you I could tell you the following … You sir, can I interest you in a guaranteed way to insure you will never really know the joy of loving someone else with your whole heart?  That woman you once thought to love completely will be so hurt by you, that over time she will seek comfort in the faithful arms of another guy.  I can add to that, you will lose everything of earthly value to you as it will someday be taken away or divided in half?  If you had kids, get prepared to see them only once in a while, while they learn not to trust or rely on you ever again – probably filling the void of your loss with drugs, prison bound behavior, or just loving some other dude more than you.  And the kicker is, enough time with this little evil and you are for certain guaranteed to die old and alone, after a meaningless life of emptiness and regret.  What’s more a trip down this aisle, and you won’t ever be able to say “no” again.  That’s right, your self-control will cease to exist (as if it ever did), and you will be a complete slave to very behavior that insures your doom, and you as the cause of pain to literally everyone you come in contact with for the rest of your life.  Interested?

Instead … the devil is smart.  He attacks you when your weak, after an argument about something meaningless you can hardly remember.  He puts in your path a sympathetic, caring, and attractive individual who’s own loneliness drives them to make bad decisions.  And there you have the makings of an affair.  At first it is considered risky, exciting, the lure of the forbidden and doing what you know you should not.  There is absolutely no pain involved immediately.  But it is coming.  The damage however is immediate.  Trust disintegrates.  The ability to maintain intimacy is destroyed.  The ability to truly love, is warped only into self-love.  All the destructive elements of evil are hard at work, long before the perpetrator is even aware of it.  And then, when evil has done a sufficiently good job at tearing away the fabric of a person, the pain comes.  And the pain ripples out, hurting those you would not expect, did not anticipate, and cannot prevent.  For the truth of pain is a constant for evil.  There is no escape.

Yet despite the facts of the damage done by evil, millions still choose to embrace it.  Part of the reason for this is that even limited exposure to embracing evil robs one of the self-control to cease future participation in it.  It only took a single bite of the forbidden fruit for Adam to degenerate from loving Eve so much he would share her fate, to blaming God for Eve’s existence and her participation in his fall from grace.  Adam lost his nobility, and he lost his power to choose.  When he lost his dominion over the earth, his most important loss, was that of self-control.  He was now slave to evil, bound by its chains.  It would take a savior to save Adam from himself, and us from ourselves.

There are those today, who have discovered the poo-like nature of evil, and desperately dream of relief from it.  They are sorry for their behavior, but unable to stop it.  They long for freedom, but lack the will to find it on their own.  But for those who see evil for what it truly is, they fall into two camps.  One group believes if they just try harder, they can free themselves from this evil, by their own sheer will.  The other group is aware of their addiction and has no answer for it.  Those who trust to removing evil from themselves on their own, or in partnership with Christ, fail.  They fail, and fail, and fail again.  They find themselves only able to seek forgiveness.  They become protective and begin to think the only way they will ever become pure is by controlling their environment including others around them.  They begin to focus on the sins of others, trying desperately to point out the error of other’s rather than face the failure in themselves.  They begin to think themselves better by comparison with other sinners.  And they completely lose sight of their condition, still locked in sin, with no way out.

The group, smart enough to realize they suffer from an addiction and are powerless to stop it face a choice.  They often rationalize that since there is no apparent way out, God will have to forgive them, for how He made them, and save them in heaven despite who they are.  They think themselves free of any religious restrictions or laws, and able through grace to do anything they please.  But what they forget is the poo-like nature of sin and evil.  Thinking yourself free to eat as much poo as you want, is no kind of freedom any rational person would ever want.  The whole point is to find a way of escape from the pain, not a highway to embrace more of it.

When one realizes they can do nothing to remove the sin from themselves, they can choose to allow Christ to do it for them.  In effect, to finally let the Savior of mankind, save them.  This is what it means to be saved, to be MADE free from sin.  12 step programs can manage behavior, but they cannot remove the underlying desire for the sin.  Christ can.  He can change how we think, what we want, what we like, what we enjoy, and what we do.  All we have to do, is let Him.  Our part in this is not to work harder, it is to stop working at all, and let Christ be the savior He is.  Our part is to learn through experience what it means to trust Christ with your own salvation.  This is what we are meant to do.  This is how we avoid poo, and the pain of all evil.  We quit wallowing in it, and allow our Savior, to clean us up, and free us from playing in it again.