was very good.
Everything wonderful!
A few years ago I was able to take a couple of amazing trips. After speaking on The Revelation for a group of missionaries in the Czech Republic, I had the opportunity to walk through the remains of the Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau. A short time later I travelled to Cambodia and ate bugs with Sareth.
One Sunday after I returned I began my message with a slide show. I set the show to music: one song. As we watched the slides, Louis Armstrong crooned his famous song, “What a wonderful world.”
I see trees of green, red roses too I see them bloom for me and you And I think to myself what a wonderful world.
As he sang we watched images from Auschwitz and Birkenau where two million people (mostly jews) were systematically exterminated. And we watched images from the killing fields and Tual Sleng Prison.
Between 1976 and 1979 (while I was playing soccer and dating my new
girlfriend), something like 12,000 people were imprisoned and tortured in Tuol Sleng - tortured by fatherless children between the ages of ten and fifteen who had been trained in evil by the Khmer Rouge. Of the 12,000 imprisoned, seven survived. Most of the rest were taken to the fields, where they were murdered as loudspeakers in the trees blared music, to drown out the sound of the screaming. Something like 1.7 million, were murdered in Cambodia, 30% of the population.
As the slideshow drew to a close, I sang: “And I think to myself . . . What the hell is going on?” We don’t normally ask stuff like that in church. But if we ask it at all, isn’t that the very best place to ask?
What the Hell?
What the Hell is going on? (Maybe the question is the answer) Maybe Hell is going on.
People have turned Tuol Sleng and Auschwitz into museums. I like that, because I think we don’t take evil very seriously. Or maybe a better way to say that is that we all
deny evil—we take it so seriously that we deny it.
But Tuol Sleng and Auschwitz are happening right now—in places like Sudan; even in Denver—perhaps not a million at once, but a little girl here, a little boy there. We
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read about some cases but probably not the worst. There are people I know that have suffered as much or maybe more than those in Auschwitz or Tuol Sleng.
Years ago I prayed, “God, would you be more real to me?” In other words, “Jesus, I want to see you.” The next week I met Elaine. She’d been moved here by some folks in the graduate program at Colorado Christian University. They helped her relocate and hide her tracks. Elaine wanted to meet me because she heard that I might believe her story and be willing to pray.
Elaine’s father had been very involved in a satanic coven. What was done to her is more horrifying than Auschwitz and Tuol Sleng. I probably wouldn’t believe these things ever happened, except for the fact that I now have seen too much and encountered too much to deny it’s reality: My wife will experience the same visions that Elaine experiences when we pray for her; I’ve been wakened to things choking me in the night; I’ve seen the demonic manifest and I’ve witnessed the beauty and power of Jesus as he reveals his victory at the cross and in our lives.
And yet… the evil that came against Jesus on that cross is so horrifying, I’ve wanted to deny it… but couldn’t. I used to ask people to come help us pray—the “spiritual people.” Some would say: “It can’t be true. She must have made up the story,” or if not that, then, “Well, it’s her fault. She chose it . . . chose evil.” We all want to deny evil.
I remember walking through the rooms in Birkenau at Auschwitz praying, “Thank you, God, for the memorial that is this place, so we can not deny this place. And surely if it happened to six million people here, we can’t deny it may have happened to a little girl in a garage in America.” Evil in people; Evil in our world!?
When Susan, my wife, was seventeen years old, she woke out of a sound sleep. The room was dark and she smelled death. In terror, she looked at the foot of her bed to see a figure appear, blacker than the darkness, like a shadow in the very fabric of reality. It lifted its empty arms and said, “You’re mine.” …What is that? What the hell is that? Who made that?
What is evil?
Trying to answer those questions is what theologians call “Theodicy:” the study of the problem of evil. At least for Americans, it seems to be the biggest obstacle to faith.
Who made evil?
People say, “How could I believe in an all-powerful, all-loving, good God when six million Jews were exterminated in Germany and two million Cambodians were slaughtered in the Killing Fields?” If God made everything, and all that God makes is good, where did evil come from?
American Christians love what is known as the “free will defense.” That is, we “chose or choose evil.” “That’s where it comes from,” folks say. “We have free will.”
So those who are blessed are those who have chosen well, and those who are cursed are those who have chosen poorly. So eternally speaking, the strong-willed
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survive, and life is a test to see whose will is up to snuff. “There’s evil in the world as a result of our own free will.” That’s what folks usually say.
The great philosopher Jack Handy from Saturday Night Live on NBC once said: Sometimes when it’s raining and my children ask, “Daddy, why is it raining?” I like to tell them, “Because God is crying.” And when they ask, “Why is God crying?” I say, “Because you’re bad.”
So do you laugh? Do you not laugh? You’re trying to figure that out, aren’t you? Because it’s kind of true . . . but kind of not true. God knows the future. Right? He knows the End at the Beginning. Right? So even if we had “free will,” he knew what we’d do with it. Why would he create beings that he knew would make him cry? …then call them bad?
Free Will?
Maybe free will helps explain the perpetuation of some evil, but what about natural disasters and babies born with birth defects?
Christians often say, “That may not be the result of your choice today, but it is the result of Adam and Eve’s choice long ago.” Well, that may be true. Adam and Eve were
guilty, but why didn’t God just kill them and start over? Or never make them at all?
How could “man” explain the origin of evil?
How could “man” choose evil unless there was evil to choose?
Why was there a garden, if the whole world was a garden? It sounds like there was evil outside the garden.
Why did God put a poison tree smack dab in the middle of the garden? Who let the snake into the garden?
Who made “man”- Adam and Eve? Because they’re defective; they are really poor choosers.
Good Will?
If Adam and Eve had “free will,” they sure didn’t have “good will.” That is, they could make random decisions but not good decisions. How could they? They didn’t have knowledge of good and evil—which isn’t very “free.”
And if they had a “free will” they didn’t know what to do with it. They could go to 7-11 and pick Pepsi or Coke (a dog can do that). But they couldn’t call one thing good and another thing evil.
As we’ve seen, it’s not yet the end of the sixth day. Adam and Eve are not yet fully made in God’s image, so the snake can tempt them to make themselves in God’s image…because they’re not yet completed in God’s image. (Do you know anyone that is? Anyone without sin? Adam and Eve are half-baked. Do you know anyone “half- baked”?)
Well, you’ve got to wonder: What was God thinking - letting two, half-baked, naked people run around a garden with a poison tree planted smack dab in the middle and
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an evil serpent on the loose?
You see, the idea that evil is simply the result of our bad choice or choices must not be the deepest story, either then or now. And if Adam and Eve had “free will,” it must not have been very good free will. Their free will was what got them in trouble.
By the end of Genesis chapter 3, Adam and Eve are not free but dead and doomed to die because of their choice. If they had a free will, they lost it: dead in their trespasses and sins; in bondage to the devil; by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (Eph. 2:1-3)
Joshua (which is the Hebrew pronunciation of “Jesus”) says to the children of Israel, “Choose this day whom you shall serve.” The story of the Old Testament is that ultimately all choose evil… or can only choose evil. Joshua says as much five verses later, “You are not able, to serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:19).1
The Apostle Paul writes, “None is righteous, no not one . . . no one seeks for God, no one does good . . . no not one.” (Romans 3:10-11) By the time we get to Friday afternoon on the sixth day, where the Messiah hangs on the poison tree on the hill of shame, it’s clear: All of fallen humanity has chosen evil and rejected the Good who is crucified before them.
So we’ve all chosen evil, but we didn’t create evil. Where does the snake come from?
Where does evil come from?
Well, a snake is a critter made by God. But what about “the satan” (the adversary) that inhabited the snake? Where does it come from? Where does evil come from? And what’s the deepest story?
Genesis 1:1-2 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was without form and void [nothing and empty, unreal and
waste], and darkness . . .
What is darkness? Well, it is . . . not. It is a no-thing, no light, an absence, nothing. “Nothing” is so hard to talk about, because it’s not there. And yet, as soon as you call it “nothing,” you turn it into “something.” But, of course, it’s really nothing.
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.
The deep is the Hebrew word Tehom. The Psalmist writes, “From Tehom you will raise me.” (Psalm 71:20) When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into the Greek in Jesus’ day, they translated this word as Abussos. Abussos is abyss in English.
In the Revelation, the king of the abyss is Apollyon or Abaddon, “destruction.” The abyss is where the devil is bound for one thousand years. Maybe that is where the snake comes from, or at least the evil in the snake.
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translated as “Hell.” “The earth was formless and void, and darkness was on the face of Hell.” Maybe that’s where evil comes from: the abyss.
But who made it and what is it?
Let me ask it this way: How do you make darkness? Technically, you can’t . . . because it’s not there, for it is . . . not, nothing, no light. It’s not a substance but an absence.
How do you make darkness?
Well, I think this is the best I could do: Imagine if I turned on a spotlight – a spotlight shining on me. “Let there be light!” Imagine that. And imagine the shadow. What if I pointed at the shadow and asked: do you see it? Do you see the shadow? Do you see the darkness? If you were to answer “yes,” you’d be wrong. No one ever “sees a shadow. What you “see” is the light and a place where there is less light. You perceive an absence of light, because you see the light around the absence of light – the shadow. But a shadow is what is not.
Now imagine if I danced in that spotlight and I asked, “Did you see the shadow move?” Correct answer, “No, it’s not there.” You would have seen the absence of light move. Isn’t that weird? My shadow would look alive.
Is it alive? NO.
It’s the shadow of the living.
My shadow looks like a living person. Is it a person? NO.
It’s the shadow of a person.
Imagine that shadow. And check this out. It would’ve been there, even before you “saw” it, or thought you “saw” it. Imagine if I turned off the light: the shadow would still be there. I mean, the less light would still be there . . . that is, the dark part. The whole room is shadow, you just can’t perceive the shadow until you’ve seen the light. The light defines the shadow, reveals the shadow and judges the shadow.
What if the whole world is in a shadow?
Well, you wouldn't know it until you saw the light. What if there is a light brighter than the sun?
Then our whole world might be in a shadow.
What if your whole world is in a shadow, a complete shadow? What would you be? Blind… and you wouldn’t know it. People would talk about dark and light, but you would have no idea what they were saying.
Jesus said a lot of folks were blind in His day. They thought they could see, but they were blind. They didn’t see the light.
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darkness is its absence. Light defines darkness, but darkness does not define light nor comprehend light. “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not comprehended it.” (John 1:3 NASB) Without light, there could be no dark. Physicists say even space and time are somehow dependent on light, so without light there would be no space or time for the dark. So even though the darkness cannot comprehend the light, it is dependent upon the Light.
Well, my point is: I really can’t create darkness, because it’s not actually there. I can only create an absence of light. Darkness is a negation, a no-thing, a no light. I can’t create the dark; I can only cast a shadow in the light.
But now, what if I was the light? Not holding the spotlight, but actually the spotlight. How then, could I, the light, cast a shadow? Light can’t make shadows. Light can only reveal shadows, which are an absence of light. If I was the light, I couldn’t make a shadow . . . unless I, the light, made something like Peter Hiett (in the flesh), who would then cast a shadow in my light. (That is, the light could only make a shadow by making something that’s not, in itself, light.) If you were the sun, you could never make the night . . . unless you made the earth, which would cast a shadow called night.
But now, what if I, the light, decided to fill someone like Peter Hiett? What if I, the light, decided to fill the earth with my glory? What if I, the light, decided to fill all things? Well then, there would be no more shadows, only the knowledge of shadows; the knowledge of light and dark, but no more dark.
What if one day we have a knowledge of good and evil, but no more evil? Wouldn’t that be a wonderful world?
Check out these Bible verses:
• “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (I John 1:5). • Jesus said, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12).
• Paul wrote in Ephesians 4 and 5, “He who descended is also the one who ascended
far above all the heavens that he might fill all things . . . . At one time, you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.”
• In Revelation 21, the bride is a city, and the city radiates the glory of God. Verse 23:
“The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the lamb.”
• Revelation 22:5: “And night will be no more.”
And I think to myself, “What a wonderful world!” So:
If God is light, evil must be darkness— not light. If God is the way, evil must be lost-ness—not the way. If God is truth, evil must be lies—the untruth.
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If God is creator, evil must be desecrator.
If God is love, evil must be its negation—not love. If God is “I AM,” evil must be “I am not.”
If God is substance, evil must be absence—like no thing.
So asking, “Does God create evil?” must be like asking, “Does God create nothing?”
Well, if a shadow is that which a light cannot make, perhaps evil is that which God does not will. To say that God wills evil is to say God wills that which He does not will, which is to say nothing.
Evil is that which God does not will and does not make.
So, of course, God does not will evil, but He wills for us to encounter evil. He wills for us to encounter that which He does not will. He wills for us to encounter Not
God, for how else could we ever choose God? How else could we ever love God in
freedom in His image as He loves us, freely with a good will?
God is creating in us a good and free will
“God alone is good,” said Jesus. If we are to ever choose the good, perhaps we need a knowledge of the not good. To choose the good, perhaps we need a knowledge of the not good but the presence of the good in order to will the good.
If God wanted to create beings in His image, beings that aren’t Him yet choose Him, He would need to make space that’s not Him and then fill that space with Him.
He would need to make a void filled with nothing. The void wouldn’t be evil, but the nothingness—the darkness—would.
Like a wound in His side,
the side of the light of the world. Like a womb in His belly,
waiting to be filled with light.
Absolute Evil?
In the Bible, there is darkness and then there is “outer darkness.” Perhaps there is utter darkness. You know, people can be a mix of light and dark, good and evil. It’s like we live on the border—borderland—of light and dark, good and evil. That’s where we