What Went Wrong?
How did evil and suffering come into the world?
Here is the usual answer that Christians will tell you:
Adam and Eve disobeyed God.
Therefore God punished them with suffering and death.
God can't stand to be in the presence of sin,
which is to say, disobedience.
Our first parents, Adam and Eve, sinned.
Therefore they had to be kicked out of the Garden of Eden,
sent away from God.
But many places in the Bible show that God can stand to be around sin.
For example:
1. In the book of Revelation, Satan is called
"the accuser of our brothers and sisters before our God day and night"
(Rev. 12.10; cf. Job 1.6ff, 2.1ff; 1 Kgs 22.19-23).
2. In Psalm 82 we see a picture of God sitting on a throne.
God is having a face-to-face argument with the angels in the heavenly court.
God accuses the powerful angels of abusing people and acting unjustly.
To take another kind of example:
Jesus says, "The person who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9).
This means, if you want to know what God is like,
then look at Jesus and he will show you.
Could Jesus stand being around sinful people?
I think the clear answer to this is yes.
Not only could Jesus stand being around sinners—
He in fact reached out and touched them all the time.
He searched for them and brought them back to God through himself.
So there is something wrong with the usual answers to the question,
"How did suffering and death come into the world?".
It is no use to pass around the same old sayings.
Instead we should question and weigh them.
Since I am a Bible teacher, I will do this mostly by using the Bible.
Let's look deeper into this question together.
I would like to begin with these two questions:
1. What is “sin”?
2. How does sin hurt the relationship between people and God?
My opinion is that the original (first and deepest) sin is envy.
Envy came when created beings chose to hate God, their creator,
even though God has shown them nothing but pure love.
The created being that chooses envy towards God
also envies all its fellow created beings.
This is because somehow, turning against your creator
makes you turn against everything that is made by your creator.
Envy is hatred for no reason.
It is holding a bad view, an ill will,
towards another person who has done nothing against you.
Envy is seen every day in our land.
We see envy every time we see someone get bitter
simply because some good thing has come to another person.
It may be a good job, a raise, a new car, clothes, a relationship.
Instead of being happy for the person,
I act as though they have done something wrong to me,
and I feel sorry for myself.
For human beings, the original envy happens in the Garden of Eden.
(See Genesis 2–3.)
The serpent says to Eve,
The fruit of this tree is something good that God has, but you don't have!
"So what?", she could have replied.
So God has something good that I don't have.
I know that God loves me.
So if it were good for me, God would have given it to me.
No doubt it is good for God, but not for me.
That must be why God doesn't want me to eat that fruit.
Why should I be offended?
God has something that is good for God but not for me.
Eve only listened to the serpent because she fell into envy.
Envy is irrational (crazy, against reason), senseless.
Suppose I have plenty of good things.
I see that another person gets some good thing that I don't happen to have.
Why should I feel badly treated?
Why should I begin to hate the person?
The answer is, I don't have any reason to.
I could just as easily be happy for the person.
And if I need that thing, I can pray for it (see Jas. 4:1-3).
When you really look hard at it,
envy turns out to be an offense over nothing.
At its root envy is an offense that another has good.
It is not (as we usually think of it) an offense that I do not have good.
But since envy is an offense that another has good,
that is to say that it is simply ill will towards the other.
Envy is unhappiness to see another person do well.
Love ("agape", in the Greek of the New Testament)
is a free desire for the well-being of the other.
Thus envy is the opposite of agape love.
Jesus calls envy the “evil eye”.
The wellness or sickness of your eye represents your attitude towards another person.
The person might either be God or a created being.
To look on another with an "evil eye" is to view them as your enemy.
Jesus said:
The eye is the lamp of the body.
If your eye is good, then your whole body will be full of light.
But if your eye is evil, then your whole body will be full of darkness.
Therefore, if the light that is in you is darkness, then that is quite a darkness!
(Mt. 6.23).
Jesus also told the parable (story) of the workers in the vineyard (field of grape vines):
Some workers were hired about an hour from the end of the day.
They still got a full day's pay.
So when those came who were hired at the beginning of the day,
they expected to get more.
But each one of them got the normal day's pay too.
When they got it, they started to talk bitterly against the owner, saying:
These men have just worked one hour,
and you have made them equal to us!
We did most of the work and endured the hottest part of the day!
But he said to them, Friend, I am not being unfair to you.
Didn't you agree to work for the normal pay for a day?
Take your pay and go.
I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you.
Don't I have the right to do whatever I choose with my own money?
Or is your eye evil because I am good?
(Mt. 20.15).
Envy, as I said, is the total opposite of agape love.
In the parable here, the owner shows agape love.
Some workers never got a job all day long, but only at the end.
But the owner still gives them enough pay to feed their families that evening.
The owner's generosity comes from his love for the workers.
Sadly, his love and generosity become an excuse for bitterness.
The all-day workers resent (hold bitter feelings towards) both the owner and the one-hour workers.
It is not because they have done anything wrong—
It is because the all-day workers have an "evil eye".
They suffer from a deep-rooted stingy attitude.
They are unhappy that good has been given to another creature.
They do not know what agape love is.
Envy is the root cause of murder. For example:
What is the very next story in the Bible after the story of Adam and Eve?
It is the story of Cain and Able (Gen. 3).
We are told that Cain resented Abel and murdered him.
This murder did not happen because Abel had done anything against Cain.
It only happened because Abel had received something good: God's approval.
(See Genesis 4).
In summary, envy is mindless and groundless hatred.
It is the deepest, most fundamental sin.
Human envy created the original tearing of relationship between people and God.
We turned against God for no reason.
Envy is why Jesus, God's Son, was crucified (Jn 15:25).
Envy also lies at the root of all sorts of mindless human resentments.
For example: racism, classism, nationalism, sexism, and so on.
That is the first part of my answer to the questions we started out with:
"What is sin?"
"How does sin ruin the relationship between people and God?".
The second part starts off with the fact that envy breaks relationship with God.
From there, I go on to ask:
What harmful ways of living do human beings get into,
when they try to live outside of relationship with God?
I will suggest that there are actually two kinds of sin.
The first and deepest kind is envy, as we just saw.
The other kind of sin is idolatry.
There is a close relationship between these two kinds of sin.
The relationship is shown when God says through Jeremiah,
"My people have done two evils:
They have turned away from me, their artesian spring,
and they have dug cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that cannot hold water."
(Jer. 2:13)
An artesian spring is one that bubbles up right out of the ground.
You don't have to pump the water or draw it up from a well.
The water is free and pure and clean.
A cistern, on the other hand, is a thing built by human beings.
It is a big container for storing rainwater.
It often leaks, and the water goes bad.
I will now explain the second kind of sin: idolatry.
(There are also other kinds, but these two are the most important.)
When envy ruins the relationship between human beings and God,
this creates a whole chain of results.
Here is the way it goes.
Human beings turn to a state of envy,
that is, hatred, towards God.
When they do that, they look on God as their enemy:
". . .you were enemies toward God in your minds" (Colossians 1:21).
In this place of enmity (being an enemy),
they try to avoid accepting the love of God.
They may do this knowingly or unknowingly.
In either case,
they starve themselves of God's gift that meets their deepest need.
Therefore they live in a state of spiritual hunger.
To satisfy their hunger,
they try to meet their needs without God.
But it is not possible to satisfy a need for God's love
with anything other than God's love.
So what happens is, they get trapped into sick patterns of living.
They are trying to feed themselves without God,
but the spiritual food they gather doesn't fill them up.
In fact, it makes them sick.
And that's because it is the wrong kind of food.
But they keep trying and trying.
For all their effort, they fall far short of the plan God has for their wholeness.
They continuously hurt themselves.
They also hurt one another, other living things, and the earth itself.
This is the real meaning of idolatry:
Searching for, or trying to create, spiritual food in every direction except for God.
Idolatry can never satisfy.
If people do not turn to God,
they will never satisfy their thirst with things from the creation and from themselves.
There are three main kinds of idolatry.
To understand them, we have to know the kinds of spiritual food that they try to replace.
An idol is a creature-made imitation of God or of something good that comes from God.
An idol is a counterfeit, a phony replacement.
What we need to do next is to name the deepest needs of human beings—
needs that can only be met by accepting the love of God.
Then we can see the imitations for what they are.
I take my clue from Paul the Apostle.
Paul says there are three good things that last forever:
Faith, Hope and Love (see 1 Corinthians 13).
Paul says these things will always be there,
even when everything else we know about being human has passed away.
These are the values of God that last forever.
Everything else changes—
from time to time,
from place to place,
from culture to culture,
or from person to person.
Human beings will always need faith, hope and love.
And we will always have these, in God, forever.
So what are faith, hope and love?
And how do they supply our needs?
To Love is to value the life another being.
To love someone is—
to esteem them,
to value them,
and to be committed to their well-being.
Human beings are created with a deep need to have a sense of their own value.
They are created as God's own children.
Therefore they cannot meet that need without receiving and knowing God's love.
The love of God is given out through the Holy Spirit,
through the whole creation,
and through other human beings.
To have Faith is to trust what is outside your control.
God is totally outside our control.
Yet God is faithful and trustworthy.
This is exactly because God loves us and esteems (values) us.
Therefore God is the first and most important receiver of our faith.
Human beings are created with a deep need for a sense of security.
(Security is the inner knowledge that I can rest in trust).
Because we are created as God's own children,
we can never reach a feeling of security without God.
To be secure we need to know and depend on God's trustworthiness.
To Hope is to have the ability to give out energy and take risks,
even when there is no immediate repayment.
Think of it like this.
Whales fill their lungs with air and dive down to do their hunting or traveling.
God has designed human beings to be like this:
They also are able to exert themselves.
They can do this because they know they will get back later what they give out or risk now.
God is the great hope of all things.
God is the one who teaches all things in creation to hope.
Hope is energy and drive for living in the present time,
rooted in the expectation of future good.
Human beings are created with a great ability to hope and need for hope.
When human beings refuse the love of God, their hope dies.
We have seen that without God, all beings starve of faith, hope and love.
We can now talk more about the second kind of sin: idolatry.
To do this, we just need to show how people try to replace faith, hope and love.
In my understanding of sin as idolatry, I follow the New Testament writer John.
John ends his whole first letter by saying,
"Little children, keep yourself from idols" (1 Jn 5.21).
In the same letter John in presents the love of God over against three forms of idolatry:
Don't love the world or anything in the world.
If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For everything in the world,
the lust of the flesh,
the lust of the eyes,
and the pride of life,
comes not from the Father but from the world.
The world and its desires disappear.
But the person who does the will of God lives forever.
(1 Jn 2.15-17)
To me, this is one of the key verses of the whole Bible.
John has here named the three great idols.
With these idols "the world" attempts to replace faith, hope and love.
By "the world", John means human society out of relationship with God.
So it is important to understand that John is not saying that we should
stop loving
or stop valuing
or stop being thankful for
God's beautiful creation.
John means that we are not to love the things that the human "world" runs after.
The world's value-system rejects God, and is very sick.
No wonder!
It tries to feed itself on things that are not food.
God says in Isaiah,
Come, all you who are thirsty,
Come to the waters!
All you who have no money,
Come, buy food and eat!
Why spend your money on what is not real food,
And work all day for what leaves you hungry?
Listen, listen to me, and you will eat what is good for you,
And you will have enjoyment and the finest food.
Listen and come to me,
Hear me, and you will come back to life.
I will make an agreement with you that will last forever:
My faithful love, which I promised to David.
(Isa. 55:1-3):
God is saying that people away from God are hungry and thirsty.
The things they "eat" and "drink" do not satisfy them—
For only one thing will satisfy them: the faithful love of God.
Let's look now at three false foods we human beings try to feed our hunger with,
the three false idols that we worship to fill our emptiness without God:
The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.
The "lust of the flesh" tries to replace Hope.
Apart from God, human beings lose their energy to exert themselves.
Without God, people have no strength to invest selflessly in the future.
The lust of the flesh thus despairs of future good.
Instead, and seeks instant enjoyment or pleasure:
Let's eat, drink and enjoy ourselves,
for tomorrow we are going to die.
(Isa. 22:13; 1 Cor. 15:32)
This is the voice of despair.
But it's not supposed to be that way.
God builds pleasure and enjoyment into the universe.
When we relate to our fellow beings in a healthy way, good feelings come.
Our bodies are happy when we live in harmony with God and our fellow creatures.
The lust of the flesh short-circuits the gifts of God.
It seeks pleasure directly,
losing interest in the making of good relationships.
In human relationships, lust says, "I'd like a piece of that,"
Rather than, "I'd like to get to know you."
Lust of the flesh tries to get pleasure for its own sake.
It does not seek the good thing that brings pleasure along with it as a free gift.
Most of what we call "addiction" can be understood this way.
The addicted person is a slave to the lust of the flesh.
The "lust of the eyes" tries to replace Faith.
The person of faith always trusts God.
Trusting God, they also trust God's creation to meet their needs .
“Give us the food we need for today”, the Lord’s Prayer (Mt. 6:11; Lk. 11:3).
The faithless person tries to reach a sense of security by gathering resources.
They try to feel secure by controlling things outside themselves.
(See Mt. 6.19-21, 24-34.)
This, like the lust of the flesh, is an idol, false spiritual food.
Control and hoarding leave a person hungry all the time.
People who are addicted to the lust of the eyes are always "shopping".
Sometimes it is literal shopping, sometimes only fantasy.
But in either case they are never satisfied.
They are always "on the lookout" (remember, lust of the eyes).
They are craving for something new that will make them feel secure:
new possessions,
new things,
new people,
and new territories (land, literal and figurative)
that they can bring under their control.
Sadly, "getting" something or someone does not make for real security.
So such people leave a trail of trash behind them—
broken and dumped things, territories and people.
The Bible story of Amnon and Tamar in 2 Sam. 13 is a perfect example of the "lust of the eyes".
Amnon is a prince, the son of David, the second king of Israel.
Since David has many wives, Amnon has many half-sisters.
One of them is Tamar, who is very good looking.
The story begins when Amnon begins to "love" Tamar.
He starts thinking all the time about how good looking she is.
All he can think about is "having" her, which means, having sex with her.
Although it is wrong to have sex with your half-sister,
Amnon can't get it out of his mind.
He feels very sorry for himself.
He goes to bed, and won't get up.
He pretends to be sick.
In the end, he gets another of his sisters to agree to a plan.
She will ask Tamar to care for him and bring him back to health.
Tamar agrees to come in and help her "sick" brother.
Amnon makes sure he and Tamar are alone,
and then he tries to seduce Tamar.
When that doesn’t work, he rapes her,
forcing her to have sex with him.
Suddenly, that is the end of his "love" for her.
Now that he "has" her, he no longer wants her.
The "love" turns out to be just a desire to "have",
and the desire to "have", when he gets it,
turns out to be totally unsatisfying.
The story is heartbreaking.
Tamar is harmed and hated and shamed,
and lives alone for the rest of her life.
Amnon ends up disgraced,
and later he is murdered by Tamar's brother Absalom.
Through it all, no one ends up giving or receiving love.
That is the kind of thing the lust of the eyes always leads to.
"One night stands", broken relationships, disgrace, suffering.
The "pride of life" attempts to replace Love.
God's love gives us a deep-rooted feeling of our own loveableness, esteem and value.
But without God, we are always desperate to fill an inner hole in our self-esteem.
The person who serves the idol of the pride of life tries another way to reach esteem.
They compare their value to another created being, and look at themselves as better.
Pride competes.
Pride seeks a sense of value and status by stepping on the heads of others.
It puts other beings down, rather than valuing them for their own sake.
Jesus tells the following story about a "Pharisee",
who is a highly religious, well respected person.
The Pharisee thinks he is doing great,
but he is actually worshipping the idol of pride.
He stands in the temple and prays,
God, I thank you that I am not like other people—
thieves, evildoers, sexually immoral people,
or even this tax collector!
[Tax collectors were collaborators with the occupying power.]
At the same time as the Pharisee is praying,
the tax collector prays too.
He says, "God, have mercy on me, the sinner!"
Jesus says, this man, rather than the first,
went home that day right with God.
(Lk. 18:9-14).
The Pharisee takes his feeling of value from an illusion:
that he is worth more, that he is “more worthy”, than others.
Jesus challenges us to admit who and what we are,
and not to try to make ourselves something great
by putting others down.
New Testament writer Paul speaks in many places of "boasting".
Boasting is prideful talking.
A boast looks like this:
"I am (or have) this, therefore I am better than you (or him, or her, or them)".
Pride, like the other two kinds of idolatry, does not satisfy.
When I serve pride, I go around in a circle.
I am always trying to get better than I was or to become better than others.
But I find that the hole in my self worth is never filled.
I don't feel any better about myself.
Just the opposite: I feel empty.
Pride, in despising (looking down on) others, cannot escape despising itself.
There is no cure for the emptiness of pride but to accept God's love.
The Bible character Job says,
"Naked I came from the womb, and naked I will return there."
We have to come before God with nothing but ourselves, just as we are.
With no big claims, no big ambitions to pump us up.
In that place, called "humility", we can accept God's total, free esteem.
New Testament writer James says:
God stands against the proud,
but gives grace to the humble.
. . .
Come near to God,
and God will come near you.
(see Jas. 4:6-10).
Here is a little table that lays out the things I have been saying about the three idols:
Good Attitude: Faith Hope Love
Good Effect: feeling of security ability to expend yourself and take risks knowing you are accepted
Replacement Idol: lust of the eyes lust of the flesh pride of life
Bad Effect: endless insecurity despair, addiction, bad health endless self-rejection
We'll talk more in a later chapter about the two kinds of sin,
envy and idolatry,
and about their relationship with each other.
For the present, let me finish by repeating the ideas of this chapter.
First, the deepest, most deadly sin in the world is envy.
Envy is not wishing you had good things that someone else has,
but wishing that they did not have them.
Thus envy is wishing that someone else will not have good.
It is the opposite of a good will, the desire that the other will prosper.
The first and "original" envy is against God,
according to the Garden of Eden story.
We see that the first woman listens to the snake's words,
which say that God is holding back something good (wisdom) from her and the man,
which is to say, that God is stingy and does not love them.
As soon as she listened to the snake's message,
she began to "want" things.
She saw that the fruit of the tree [of knowledge of good and evil]
was pretty,
looked good to eat,
and was desirable to make a person wise.
(Gen. 3:6)
After she decided to believe that God was her enemy,
she had three reactions to the deadly fruit.
First, she began to like the way it looked, and she wanted it.
I want it for myself, she thought, like Amnon,
who began to lust after his beautiful half-sister Tamar.
That's the lust of the eyes.
Second, she began to think to herself
that it must be good to eat,
even though there was a huge garden full of trees,
and they all had fruit that was good to eat.
She didn't need to eat this one,
which God had warned was not safe to eat.
He said it was deadly.
Yet she began to crave it.
The lust of the flesh craves pleasures that sooner or later harm us,
whether that be sugar, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, unhealthy foods,
unsafe sex, the excitement of fast cars, violence.
That's the lust of the flesh.
Third, she began to think that the fruit would make her wise.
She wasn't sure what knowledge of good and evil was,
because she had never "tasted" it before.
But the snake had tricked her, and she wanted it.
She wanted wisdom, this thing that God had,
and she believed it would lift her up.
She was drunk with the idea that she would be like God.
She would somehow be greater than she was now, very great.
That's the pride of life.
Sadly, the woman and the man were already like God,
for they had been made in the image of God,
made as God's own children (compare Gen. 1:26-27 and 5:1-3).
But the snake had taught them to resent being newborn, young in the world.
He tempted them to blame God for creating them at all!
Isn't it a gift, after all, rather than a curse,
to be given life as one who grows over time?
There is no shame in being young.
It's nearly time to end this chapter now.
Let's think a little more about the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
If God says eating that tree's fruit will cause you to die,
that is to say, its fruit is poison.
Why, then, would God put a poison tree in paradise?
I would like to say this:
Not everything that is poison today will be poison tomorrow.
For newborn babies, everything is poison except milk.
For human beings, we know it is bad for them to see evil before they are ready.
It is harmful to see suffering and death and cruelty before they are ready.
Do not eat that fruit, God says, for that fruit will hurt you.
(It is the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.)
They are not ready for it yet.
God says (Gen. 2:16),
Take the good and sweet fruit of all the other trees,
and later, when you are older, you will taste this bitter fruit,
the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
Later I will tell you the painful truth:
Not every being follows me in love.
Since the time before you were brought into being,
hatred (envy) of God has existed among the created ones.
and where hatred of God is, hatred of life is,
and where hatred of life is, cruelty is, and death is.
Death cannot overcome life, but death is (see Jn 1:4-5).
Hatred cannot overcome love, but hatred is.
The snake was a hateful creature.
Envying (hating) God,
the snake wanted the newly made ones to hate God too.
When the snake tried to get them to eat of the poisonous fruit,
It was not because he knew they were ready for the hard facts of life.
He offered them envy because he wanted them to become envious, like himself.
That is the Bible story I find most helpful
that says how evil came into the world.
Every story that explains the world has at least one thing that it cannot explain.
I have two things:
that God loves us, and
that God's creatures (including us), have chosen to hate God.
"God is love" (1 Jn 4:8),
yet
"They hated me without a cause" (Jn 15:25).
I believe that if the first is true,
then there is no explaining the second.
And also, if the first is true,
then it is not something that can be explained by anything other than itself.
God's love is just true, and it is something to celebrate,
not something to find a reason for.
If you'd like to read more on this and related topics, see