Evil Sucks.

A Lesson Learned: by Robin Thomas

Why do people always blame God for things like terminal illness, or the death of a child or loved one, war, and crime in the world, poverty?

Why don’t they blame the Evil one, the devil, Satan?

The question they ask is why did God let that happen? Why isn’t HE doing anything?

I have a really good friend who abandoned faith because of not being able to reconcile evil in the world. Why would a loving God let all the bad stuff happen? Maybe there is no God at all. Why would they not just blame Satan? Evil incarnate?

He is the one who does everything he can to fan the flame of evil.

Human trafficking, Let’s go!

Cancer that tragically takes the life of a parent or child, Satan is cheering them on.

I can imagine Satan sitting over his little crystal ball cackling, like the scene in the Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch watches the demise of Dorothy while her

freaky, flying monkeys are swarming around her.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, Satan laughs as another child is abducted. He experiences a total head rush when a natural disaster (probably one of his own making) takes the lives of hundreds of souls. He laughs his head off when someone loses their faith in God because they blame Him for the trials in their life.

Somewhere along the line, we have allowed the Halloween version of Satan in a skin-tight red suit and pitchfork soften our thinking of just how deceitful and real he is. As long as we can attribute humanity to the devil we can mentally dismiss him. If I don’t play with fire I won’t get burned. But the thing is, we are already in the fire. And we need someone to save us from it.

When Adam and Eve chose to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, they opened up the floodgate of evil, also known as sin, to the world.

When someone has a tumor, the surgeons cut it out. When an apple has a bruised spot we cut it off, when you get gum in your hair the only way to get it out is to cut off the stuck hair and let it grow back.

We have it backward. God does not cause evil, he combats it. And Satan knows it. God restores what is broken.

The reason the Son of God (Jesus) appeared was to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8)

So this is the short version.

Lucifer (Satan) challenges God in Heaven, God casts him out with a third of the angels (demons) who followed him. God creates Adam and Eve and tells them that they can eat from any tree in the garden except the Tree of Knowledge (Gen 3:17). Satan convinces Eve that God must be hiding something from them. So she and Adam eat, evil is unleashed and humanity is cursed and separated from God. The only way to undo the curse is to sacrifice a perfect human to repair the damage that was done.

God also provided the sacrifice, His Son (Jesus).

So now sin is still in the world being used by Satan to damage and destroy, but the sacrificial blood of Jesus makes it possible to be saved from eternal death by just acknowledging this sacrifice as our “get out of hell free” card to be restored to God the Father and be given eternal life.

Evil sucks. We can’t glorify it with a handsome TV character named Lucifer. It’s oily, dirty, and wretched. We can’t blame it on a HOLY God who gave us a choice in the first place.

I have heard it said that evil is the counterbalance of good, but I think that it is more that we, having only been part of a sinful world full of evil, have no concept of a place of eternal light where evil has no residence.

I watched Spiderman: No way Home (2021) last night.

MJ says, “I don’t get my hopes up because when it doesn’t happen then I won’t be disappointed.”

What a bleak, absence of hope and light.

How can you have the “thrill of victory” without the “agony of defeat?” I guess in that sense the lows make the highs even higher, but hope is the energizer that keeps us in the game.

Wikipedia says, Hope “is an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes with respect to events and circumstances in one's life or the world at large. As a verb, its definitions include: "expect with confidence" and "to cherish a desire with anticipation.’”

Jesus brings hope. Satan’s reign ends in this world.

I put my faith in Jesus My anchor to the ground My hope and firm foundation He'll never let me down

(Maverick City Music, PROMISES)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC87F9WQWHU

“Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.”

I Corinthians 13:12 NLT