A Slice of Infinity

When I read this today, I was reminded of my salvation. Right before I was saved, I was telling my friend Karla that I knew there was evil in the world. I had absolutely no doubt it exists. I remember asking myself, "if I know evil is real, why is it so hard for me to know that Jesus is real?" There can't be evil without good. Oh how the devil deceives us. Here is the article from A Slice of Infinity:

05/21/08
Diagnosing Evil
Jill Carattini

A recent article in The New York Times states in its title: "For
the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be 'Evil.'"(1) The article examines the
responses of certain professionals who say their work forces them to
reflect on the concept of evil. Though many unremittingly avoid the
word--asserting that its use quickly moves them from clinical to moral
observation--many others find it an undeniable and altogether necessary
term. Forensic examiners and psychiatrists working with predatory killers
often acknowledge they can find no other term for certain scenes and
individuals they have examined.

It is not uncommon to hear men and women of conflicting moral and
philosophical convictions agreeing about the existence of evil. In scenes
on the news, in lamentable moments of history, in atrocities across the
world, evil is a difficult reality to denounce. But what is problematic
is the simultaneous acknowledgment of evil juxtaposed by the renouncing of
moral law and lawgiver. For how could we recognize evil if good does not
exist? In fact, this is why Lewis called evil a parasite: Evil cannot
exist without good, he said. That we recognize "bad" and "evil" among us
points to the reality that there is a standard of measurement, a moral
framework by which all actions are held up. It is unfounded to posit
labels of "good and evil" while denying an absolute moral law. It is
unreasonable to acknowledge a moral universe without acknowledging a
transcendent, moral God.

But there is also a danger in labeling evil without understanding our
common and irrefutable need for God ourselves. When God is taken out of
the picture, evil is misunderstood. Apart from God, evil becomes
reasonable, mistaken for a euphemistic quality. You can be good simply
for the sake of goodness; but you would not do something wrong simply
because it is wrong, but because it was in some way satisfying or useful.
Wickedness, Lewis reasoned, is the pursuit of some good in a wrong way.
Apart from God, we may recognize the evil around us in terrorism and
serial killing, and yet altogether fail to see the ugliness of our own
pride or the ill motive of our own words.

With much controversy, a major television network aired a documentary
featuring the music of bands formed behind the bars of maximum-security
prisons. Producers went inside the prisons to film music videos featuring
the inmates. After the filming, the producer commented on the experience.
"The first thing that surprised me," he said, "was the air.... Floating in
the air, palpable and just out of reach was the unmistakable stench of
evil."(2) What he did not specify was whether this stench of evil came
from the music, the inmates--or his own heart. The question becomes, if
we are really looking, can any of us fail to find the stench inside our
own lives?

Apart from God, we readily forget that this same evil, quickly labeled in
the hearts of prison inmates, is present in the hearts of all humanity.
As Reinhold Niebuhr aptly states, "The final enigma of history is
therefore not how the righteous will gain victory over the unrighteous,
but how the evil in every good and the unrighteousness of the righteous is
to be overcome."(3)

Indeed, God has done what we cannot do. Jesus Christ is the only man ever
to live a perfect life, standing in our place as the perfect measure of the
glory of God. As a stream becomes stagnant when it is cut off from the
spring, morality apart from the source of goodness becomes something less.
Christ is our righteousness. In him alone, can we overcome.