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.
Our ancestors,
Adam and Eve, sinned.
Therefore they had to be sent out of the Garden of Eden,
away from the presence of God.
But the Bible shows that God can stand to be in the
presence of sin.
For example:
1. In the book
of R
"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 on his throne.
God is having a
face-to-face argument with the angels in his heavenly court.
God accuses the
powerful angels of mistreating 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 the Father is like,
then look at Jesus and he will show you.
Could Jesus
stand being around sinful people?
I think the
answer to this is clearly yes.
Jesus not only
could stand being around sinners
He in fact
reached out to them all the time.
He searched for
them and brought them back to God through himself.
So there is something wrong with the usual answer to
the question,
"How did
suffering and death come into the world?".
We need to stop
passing around the same old explanations.
Instead we should question and weigh them using the
Scriptures.
So let's stop and look deeper into this question together.
I would like to
begin with these questions:
What is
"sin"?
How does sin
destroy the relationship between people and God?
My opinion is
that the original sin is envy.
Envy is when created beings
choose to get offended at their creator,
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
Envy is baseless
hatred.
It is holding a
bad attitude, an ill will,
towards another person who has done nothing against you.
Envy is seen
We see envy
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 did something wrong,
and I feel sorry for myself.
For human
beings, the original envy happens in the Garden of Eden.
The serpent says
to Eve,
The fruit of
this tree is something good that God has, but you don't
have!
"So what?", she might have replied.
So God has something good that I don't have.
If it were good
for me, God would have given it to me.
I know that God
loves 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 him but not for me.
Eve only went
along with the serpent because she fell into envy.
Envy is
irrational, senseless.
Suppose I have
plenty of good things.
I see that
another person gets some good thing that I don't
happen to possess.
Why should I
feel wronged?
The answer is, I
don't have to.
I could just as
easily be happy for the person.
And if I need that thing, I can pray for it (Jas.
4:1-3!).
At rock bottom,
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 prosper.
Love is the free
desire for the well-being of the other.
It is a good
will towards them.
Thus envy is the opposite of love.
Jesus calls envy
the "evil eye".
The health 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 hate them,
to want them not to do well.
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:
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 complain 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
those who were hired last the same as I gave you.
Don't I have the
right to do what
Or is your eye evil
because I am good?
(Mt. 20.15).
Envy,
as I said, is the complete opposite of love:
Love
is an good will towards someone that they did nothing
to deserve;
Envy is an ill
will towards someone that they did nothing to deserve.
In
the parable you just read, the owner shows love, a good will.
Some workers n
But the owner still gives them enough pay to feed their
families that
Sadly, the
owner's generosity becomes an excuse for bitterness.
The all-day
workers resent 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 attitude of stinginess with good.
They are unhappy
that grace has been given to another creature.
They do not know
what love is.
Envy is often at
the root of murder. For example:
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, groundless hatred.
It is the
deepest, most fundamental sin.
Human envy
created the original tearing of relationship between people and God.
Envy is why
Jesus, God's Son, was crucified (Jn
Envy is also at
the root of all sorts of mindless human resentments.
For example: racism, classism,
nationalism, sexism, and so on.
That's the first
part of my answer to the question, "What is sin?".
The second part starts off with the fact that envy breaks relationship with
God.
From there, it
goes on to ask:
What destructive
ways of living do human beings get into,
when they try to live outside of relationship with God?
For
there are actually two kinds of sin.
The first 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 committed two sins:
They have
rejected 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 stagnant.
I will now
explain the second kind of sin: addiction.
In the Bible,
addiction is known as idolatry,
Which
means, worship or dependence on other things in the place of God.
Envy cuts off
the flow of relationship between human beings and God,
and this creates a whole chain of results.
Here is the way
it goes.
Human beings
turn to a state of envy, that is, enmity, against God.
In this state they try to avoid accepting the gifts of God.
They may do this
knowingly or unknowingly.
In either case they starve themselves of God's gifts for their
spiritual needs.
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.
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 feel worse.
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 well-being.
They
continuously hurt themselves.
They also hurt
one another, other living things, and the earth itself.
This is the real
meaning of idolatry/addiction:
Searching for,
or trying to create, spiritual food in
Addiction can n
If people do not
turn to God,
they will n
There are
various kinds of addiction.
To understand
them, we have to know the kinds of spiritual food that they try to replace.
An addiction is a counterfeit, phony money.
An addiction is
a substitute for God or of something good that comes
from God.
What we need to
do next is to name the essential needs of human beings
needs that can only be met in right relationship with God.
Then we can see
the imitations for what they are.
Then we will
clearly see the cause of people's unconscious addiction.
I take my clue
from Paul the Apostle.
Paul says there
are three good things that last for
Faith,
Hope and Love (see 1 Corinthians 13).
Paul says these
things will always be there,
These are the
undying values of God.
All other things
are secondary or relative values that change.
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, for
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 is to
relate to another on the basis of the fact that you
value them.
To love someone
is
to
esteem them,
to value them,
to be committed to
their well-being.
Human
beings are created with a deep need to have a sense of
their own esteem.
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 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 n
To be secure we
need to know and depend on God's trustworthiness.
To Hope is to
have the motivation to expend energy and take risks,
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 in a similar way:
They also are
able to expend themselves.
They can do this
because they know they will recover what they have expended.
God is the great
hope of all things.
God is the one
who teaches all things in creation to hope.
Hope is
motivation for living in the present that is rooted in future good.
Human beings are created with a deep need for hope.
Therefore,
when human beings reject God, their hope dies.
We have seen
that without God, all beings starve of faith, hope and love.
I am now going
to describe the second kind of sin, addiction.
John the apostle
sums up his whole first letter by saying,
"Little
children, keep yourself from idols" (1 Jn 5.21).
Idolatry and
addiction are pretty much the same thing.
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.
Because
the lust of the flesh,
the lust of the
eyes,
and the pride of
life,
does not come from
the Father but from the world.
The world and
its various lusts will perish.
But the person who
does the will of God lives for
(1 Jn 2.15-17)
This
is one of the key verses of the whole Bible.
John has here
named the three great idols/addictions.
With these addictions "the world" attempts to replace faith,
hope and love.
By "the
world", John means human society standing against God.
Thus John is not saying that we should not
love
and value
and be grateful for God's creation.
He
means that we are not to love the value-system of the human "world".
This
value-system rejects God, and is very sick.
No
wonder!
It tries to feed
itself on things that are not food (Isa. 55:1-3):
The
lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.
The "lust
of the flesh" is the addiction that tries to replace Hope.
Apart from God,
a human being is unable to find motivation.
Without God,
people have no strength to invest selflessly in the future.
So it is that the lust of the flesh despairs of future
good.
Instead, it
seeks instant enjoyment or pleasure:
"Let's
eat, drink and enjoy ourselves, for tomorrow we 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
rightly to our fellow beings, 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 (or sometimes just intensity) directly,
And it avoids the building of good relationships.
It says,
"I'd like a piece of that."
Lust of the
flesh is the seeking of sensation for its own sake.
It does not seek
the good thing that brings sensation 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 continuously trusts God.
Trusting God,
they also trust God's creation to meet their needs .
"Give us
the food we need for today", the Lords
Prayer (Mt.
The faithless
person tries to reach a sense of security by hoarding resources.
They try to feel
secure by controlling things outside themselves.
(
This, like the
lust of the flesh, is false nutrition.
Control and
hoarding leave a person hungry all the time.
People who are
addicted to the lust of the eyes are constantly "shopping".
Sometimes it is
literal shopping, sometimes only fantasy.
But in either case they are n
They are
constantly "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" that they can bring under their control.
Sadly,
"getting" something or someone does not result in real security.
So such people leave a trail of litter behind them
broken and abandoned 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".)
The "pride
of life" attempts to replace Love.
God's
love gives us a deep-rooted sense of our own loveableness,
esteem and value.
But without God, we are constantly desperate to fill an
inner hole in our self-esteem.
The person who
serves the idol of (is addicted to) the pride of life tries another way to
reach esteem.
They compare
their value to another created being, at the expense of that being.
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 a
story of a Pharisee who is a pride addict.
He prays,
"God, I
thank you that I am not like other people!" (Lk. 18:9-14).
The Pharisee
takes his sense of personal value from an illusion:
that he is worth more, that he is "more
worthy", than others.
Paul speaks in
various places of "boasting" (bragging).
Boasting is
pride acting out.
The typical
boast looks like this:
"I am or
have such-and-such, therefore I am better than you [or him, or her, or
them]".
Pride, like the
other two forms of addiction, does not satisfy.
When I am
addicted to 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 only find that the hole in my self worth is not
filled.
I don't feel any better about myself in the long run.
Just the
opposite: I feel empty.
Pride, in
despising others, cannot escape despising itself.
There is no cure
for the emptiness of pride but to accept God's love.
You have to come
before God with nothing but yourself, just as you are.
With
no big claims, no big ambitions to pump you up.
In that place,
called "humility", you can accept God's total, free esteem (Jas.
4:6-10).
Here is a little
table that summarizes the things I have just been saying:
|
Right
Attitude: |
Faith |
Hope |
Love |
|
Good
Effect: |
feeling
of security |
ability
to expend yourself and take risks |
knowing
you are accepted |
|
Replacement
Idol/Addiction: |
lust
of eyes |
lust
of flesh |
pride
of life |
|
Bad
Effect: |
constant
insecurity |
despair,
bad health |
constant
self-rejection |
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