Phil Baisley is pastor of Greenfield Friends Church.
I don’t like to think about evil. Do you? I’d rather think about individual sinners and their sins. You know, like the person who left their shopping cart in the middle of my parking space at Walmart. How selfish. Or the servers at the McDonald’s drive-thru who never get my order right. There must be a commandment against that somewhere.
Evil, that’s something else. It’s something we sweep under the rug in the name of progressiveness. If we can just write one more law to contain one more group of sinners, then everything will be fine.
But laws can’t hold back evil. Evil is more than “sin” deep.
We read in Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
But ancient prophets aren’t the only ones who know about the evil in the hearts of humankind. Popular novelist Cormac McCarthy wrote in Stella Maris, ” … there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world, and there always had been. That at the core of reality there lies a deep and eternal demonium. All religions understand this. And it wasn’t going away.”
What can we do about evil? You can try preaching against it, but evil doesn’t listen well. You can legislate against it, but evil’s never known to be law-abiding.
The apostle Paul describes the only thing we can do about evil in Romans 12:21: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
It’s more than just an idle admonition. The apostle gives a detailed prescription for how to do this in the text just prior to this verse. It includes living peaceably with people, demonstrating care for our enemies, not taking revenge, loving sincerely and practicing hospitality.
Can it really be so easy? Hmm. Tried loving your neighbor lately? It ain’t that easy.
But when we do, we overcome that part of the world’s evil, that area of “deep demonium” closest to us. If enough of us do it, evil hasn’t got a chance.
Phil Baisley is pastor of Greenfield Friends Church. This weekly column is written by local clergy members.
