How would you describe evil?

I have heard a variety of ideas about evil. One states that essentially every culture of the world recognizes evil as the exploitation of others. I think we would all agree that exploiting people is evil.

But is there more to evil than purposeful exploitation?

First, let’s confirm what evil is not. It is not a physical substance that can be transferred from one person to the next, like a germ. When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, he could not have smeared some “evil” on Jesus and, thereby, cause Jesus to become evil. Likewise, evil angels or evil people cannot smear some substance on people or things and make those people or things evil, because evil is not a physical substance.

So, what is evil? The Bible says:

The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD; they forgot the LORD their God and served the Baals and the Asherahs (Judges 3:7 NIV84, emphasis mine).

Judah did evil in the eyes of the LORD. By the sins they committed they stirred up his jealous anger more than their fathers had done. They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land; the people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations the LORD had driven out before the Israelites (1 Kings 14:22–24 NIV84, emphasis mine).

What made this evil? Was it the behavioral perversity that made it evil, or was the behavioral perversity the fruit of the evil?

If the behavioral perversity is the fruit of the evil, then what was the evil? Evil is replacing love and trust in God with a preference for false gods, but why is this evil? Why does God say we are to have no other gods before Him?

He speaks against having other gods because of the law of worship, which is a design law upon which our hearts and minds operate. We are changed by what we choose to adore, esteem, admire, worship, prefer, embrace, believe, internalize, and practice. As Scripture says, it is by beholding we are changed (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Human beings are the highest created beings on Earth; there is nothing on Earth that we can worship that will advance us, develop us, and heal us. Anything on Earth that we worship degrades us, as Paul describes in Romans 1:18–32: When those people exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped images made with their own hands, their minds became darkened, depraved, and futile.

Or, as Jeremiah wrote:

They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves (2:5 NIV84).

It is only by worshiping our Creator God of love, the Infinite One, that we advance, develop, mature, and ultimately fulfill God’s purpose for us and become image bearers of Him.

It is Satan’s goal to destroy the image of God in human beings and place his image where God’s should be. And this is what evil is—it is the destruction of what is good and healthy; it is breaking the design laws, principles, and purposes of God, and such evil always harms and destroys.

It is evil to destroy human beings created in the image of God. False worship destroys love, goodness, compassion, nobility of character, kindness, mercy, patience, tenderness, grace, and truth in the heart, mind, and character of people and instills fear, selfishness, greed, lust, cruelty, abuse, murder, envy, strife, hatred, licentiousness, and every other demonic attribute.

It is evil to have other gods before God because it destroys the image of God in us, degrading us, ultimately resulting in our engaging in evil (destructive and harmful) deeds and ultimately causing our eternal death.

And this is how evil spreads—people who have rejected God and preferred the methods of fear and selfishness engage in evil deeds that harm the innocent. The evil done to the innocent causes the innocent to experience temptation. The innocent experience increased fear and a desire to protect self rather than love their enemies. They are tempted to hate, resent, believe lies, retaliate, and choose to use other evil methods to hurt their assailant. And if they choose to embrace the methods of the evildoer in dealing with the evildoer, then the evil methods and motives spread.

This is why Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:44, 45 NIV84).

It is when we choose to love, to forgive, to embrace the truth of God as revealed in Jesus that we stop the spread of evil. Love stops the spread of fear and selfishness. Truth stops the spread of lies. Forgiveness stops the spread of resentment, hatred, jealousy, envy, and vengeance.

But while forgiveness stops the innocent from internalizing evil, it does not make the evil perpetrator trustworthy! Thus, the wise man forgives but does not forget and sets healthy boundaries with those who are untrustworthy.

When we prefer the methods of fear, selfishness, coercion, and control over the methods of Jesus—truth, love, freedom—then our choices to reject the truth and love of God and to embrace the methods of evil become wired into our brains, our characters become changed, we come to prefer the evil and call it good and call the good evil. And the Bible says that those who do this experience woe, misery, and suffering (Isaiah 5:20). Why?

Because God’s laws are the design laws He, the Creator, built reality to operate upon, like the laws of health. To call what is healthy and good destructive and harmful, and what is harmful and destructive good and health, directly causes and results in harm, misery, and suffering. It is like telling people that it is good and healthy to rub manure in wounds and harmful and destructive to clean wounds with water and use antibiotics. Anyone who does this will unavoidably be miserable and suffer.

As Jeremiah wrote:

“Your wickedness will punish you; your backsliding will rebuke you. Consider then and realize how evil and bitter it is for you when you forsake the LORD your God and have no awe of me,” declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty (Jeremiah 2:19 NIV84, emphasis mine).

When we turn away from what is right, healthy, good, and reasonable, from our Creator God of love to anything else, the only result is suffering, and that punishment is not inflicted by external power like human governments do but is inherent; it comes from breaking the laws of life!

And by practicing such destructive and harmful methods, the wicked cause what is healthy to become sick, and that is evil. And the evil they persist in doing becomes wired into themselves and becomes their trap:

“The evil deeds of a wicked man ensnare him; the cords of his sin hold him fast” (Proverbs 5:22 NIV84, emphasis mine).

“The righteousness of the upright delivers them, but the unfaithful are trapped by evil desires” (Proverbs 11:6 NIV84, emphasis mine).

What we choose to cherish and do reacts upon us, changing our characters, rewiring our brains, and over time we become changed. We develop either healthy or unhealthy habits by what we choose to embrace and practice.

Habits can be behavioral, such as habits of hygiene, worship, or exercise. But we can also develop habits of thinking, of how we interpret the world around us. Such habits, developed from upbringing, education, and previous choices in thinking and believing, are wired into our brains and become automated neural pathways that fire without our active decision-making or immediate contemplation. Such automated systems, if healthy, can make life easier, but if unhealthy, they can cause serious harm. Our preconceived habits of belief, values, and understandings become filters through which we interpret events. And our interpretation, the meaning or relevance we experience from events, might or might not be in the events themselves.

There are the events, and then there are the interpretations of those events. Our interpretations, if not prayerfully, intelligently, and truthfully made, are vulnerable to old habits, some of which may be evil.

For instance—prejudice, racism, sexism, and nationalism are learned biases that become thought-habit filters upon which people interpret events.

Other automated pathways that people interpret events through can be against their own selves—“I am no good. No one likes me. I am ugly, stupid, worthless, fat,” etc. And people who interpret neutral events with some internal automated negative bias experience a negative impact on their life.

One Bible example of how preconceived habits of thinking can cause misinterpretation of events and even cause people to resist the right interpretation when the truth is presented is God’s thundering at Sinai (Exodus 20).

When God thundered at Sinai, the event resulted in two different interpretations with two different conclusions about God because of the different states of the hearts and minds of those involved. The people interpreted the event as God being a threat to them, someone who they could not trust. They believed that if God had direct contact and interaction with them, then He would kill them, and thus, they requested an intercessor to stand between them and God. They asked that God talk to that intercessor and then for that intercessor to talk to them.

But Moses was there and experienced the same event yet had a completely different interpretation. He said there was no need to be afraid of God, that God was not against them and only wanted to inspire and motivate them to stop hurting themselves by worshiping false gods.

In other words, God was seeking to get the people to turn from evil—the evil of worshiping demons—and turn to the good of worshiping Him, the God of love. But the people interpreted the event in a false light; they put a false understanding on God and His actions and taught the He was someone to be terrified of and distance themselves from, someone whom they needed an intercessor to protect them from. And the entire mediatorial priestly ministry was started because of their misinterpretation of events and false beliefs about God, who wanted to talk to them directly, but they misunderstood.

This same evil is taught about God in many churches today—that we cannot go to God directly; that we need an intercessor to stand between us and God; that if we don’t have that intercessor to pay the Father with the blood of an innocent human sacrifice, then God will lash out and kill us. And God is calling for a people today to be like Moses, to stand up and let everyone know that there is no reason to be afraid of God. That God wants to come to us directly, personally, and to dwell in us through His Spirit and cleanse and heal us from all evil.

Yes, evil is replacing the truth of God for a lie, but those who revere God shun evil:

“Then the LORD said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil’” (Job 1:8 NIV84, emphasis mine).

“To fear the LORD is to hate evil; I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech” (Proverbs 8:13 NIV84, emphasis mine).

Those who “fear”—which means awe, revere, admire, respect—our Creator God admire, revere, and respect that which is right, healthy, good, the design laws of God, truth, love, freedom. If a person loves the good, loves health, loves what is right, they will automatically, naturally, hate what is destructive, harmful, unhealthy, evil—and everything out of harmony with God, His character of love, His design law methods that life is built upon, truth, love, freedom, kindness, mercy, grace, patience, meekness, gentleness—anything contrary to what is noble and pure and holy is evil, for it breaks the bonds of love and trust and directly causes pain, suffering, and death.

We overcome evil through the methods of God, truth, love, and freedom, which leads to an abiding trust in God with our lives, our families, and our futures. The righteous at the end of time achieve this victory over evil:

They overcame him [Satan] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death (Revelation 12:11 NIV84).

The blood of the Lamb is symbolic of the perfect righteous life of Jesus—the spirit of pure love—so they have new hearts and right spirits (Galatians 2:20; Hebrews 8:10), and the word of their testimony is the truth about God that Jesus revealed that they have embraced and teach. These are the saved of God, the righteous, the healed, the purified, the sealed, who, like Daniel, the three worthies, Stephen, Paul, and the martyrs through history are transformed to be like Jesus, people who would rather surrender their lives in love than act to save themselves. These are those who have overcome evil!

This is God’s appeal to you and to me—to surrender our entire beings to Him, to worship Him who made the heavens, earth, sea, and fountains of waters, and to reject the dictator view of God and return to worshiping Him as the Creator of reality that He is and whose laws are the design laws of life. For when we do this, we will be fully restored into His likeness, and this is the only way to overcome evil.