The Origin of Evil
by Norman Grubb

The Law of Opposites

Having established the fact that the only way by which God could create sons or “fellows” with whom He can live in fellowship is by creating spirits with whom He can unite, we must search into another question. In this predestined union, what is our exact relationship? What do we contribute? What does He? How much of me? How much of Him? We touch a terrible subject here, for we probe into the existence of evil and hell. To do it, and to get some understanding of it, we must go right back into origins.

First, let us ask this question. What is self? Of what does it consist? How does it function? For our answer we must go to the first Self of all selves, the I AM, and of Him we are told that God is love. So love is the essence of self. Self is compounded of love. But what does love do? It is desire. It wants. It draws to itself: It must satisfy itself. It is continual hunger. This characteristic of self is found in the lowest to the highest of God’s creatures. It is the consuming hunger of fire (and God is a fire); it is the endless upreach of vegetation to the sun; it is the instinctive urges of the animals. Of God Himself it is written, “Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.” I remember as a callow youth how those words startled me, and in my ignorance of the elemental meaning of self, I boldly said, “Then God Himself is selfish!” And I felt myself further confirmed in this when I read that Jesus “for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross.” Not for God’s glory, not for our blessing, but for Himself, I said! Yes, self’s hungry love must be satisfied. It is self ’s unchangeable nature which caused the Saviour to say, “Love thy neighbour as thou lovest thyself,” to give a legitimate paraphrase: and Paul to write, “No man ever hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it.”

But now we meet with a basic law of existence, which must take a little examination; a law which is obvious through Scripture and experience, and had its earliest mention in the solemn warning against eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, a plain hint that disobedience would bring the consciousness of two warring opposites in life, good and evil, instead of one harmonious experience of good alone. That law is the basic fact of nature that life can only be manifested through the rightful interaction of opposites; for basically everything has, and must have, its opposite.

Look at it this way. Everything in life is by its very nature duoform and we can only perceive or feel or know anything by the interactions of the two forms. There can be no yes, for instance, without an exactly equivalent no. If there is sweet, there must be bitter. If love, there must be hate; if male, female; if light, darkness. And so ad infinitum. Those direct opposites make life. If there were no such contrasts, nothing could be known or felt or done. How could we know light, except in contrast to darkness? How could we say yes, except in distinction from no? How could there be movement, except in opposition to inertia? There could not be, for each pair of opposites are part of one whole: one cannot be without the other, when one is inactive so is the other. To say yes to one thing is to say no to its opposite. To move is to refuse to be still. If a thing tastes sweet, there has been a conquest over its innate bitterness.

The Positive and the Negative

The trouble is not that all things are pairs of opposites. Indeed not, for the pairs so make one whole that one cannot function without the other. One is the strength-giver of the other. But the whole trouble arises when what should be subservient dominates, so that the true nature of things is reversed. For in all pairs of opposites one is equivalent to the positive, and one to the negative, and the positive is meant to be in the ascendancy, and the negative to be the hidden servant. Take a pair like motion and inertia. All life is motion, but the very material which motion utilizes for its activities consists of inert objects. Motion consists of still things made to move. But supposing inertia could conquer and quench motion, supposing the atoms ceased to whirl or the earth to rotate! Sweet is the positive, bitter the negative, and sweetness is pleasant just because it can make bitter things palatable: the one is the raw material for the other. But supposing bitterness was permanently in the ascendant! Love must also have its reverse form of antilove or hate of all that is the opposite of love, but supposing hate is in the ascendant! World history is the tragic commentary on that. Faith has its reverse form, its opposite is doubt. While it places confidence in one direction, it must as vigorously doubt and disbelieve in anything that diverts it from the object of its trust. But what times of desperation a soul goes through when doubt, the negative, is more in the forefront than faith, the positive. Indeed no man can live in doubt; he must in the end make his doubts his faith, if his personality is not to disintegrate.

So we see that opposites, contraries, are really the reverse sides of the same quality, an essential part of its one whole: but that in all the infinite numbers of pairs of opposites the positive exists to be in the forefront, in the ascendancy; its negative is its necessary and friendly background, its food and fuel, its servant and safeguard, its mate which gives form and manifestation to its offspring. Look again at light, for instance. Are not dark opaque substances made beautiful by the shining of the light upon, in, and through them? Does not the marriage of light with darkness in this way bring into glorious manifestation the otherwise hidden marvels, and even the very existence of light? The light conquers the darkness, deprives it of its dominion, says “no” to it, but it is a friendly “no,” for the existence of its opposite, the dark objects which in their mass appear to obstruct the free, pure, shining light, in actual fact gives light its foil and playmate, the raw material for its activities, the mother of its children, its “opposite sex,” by interrelation with which, in light and shade, in transparency and solidity, all its wonders are manifested.

From this emerges that most important truth that opposites, the positive and negative sides of all qualities and powers in the universe, are not in their original enemies but friends, mates, one the complement of the other; but not as equals; they are meant to be as husband and wife in the Scriptures, the woman originally taken out of man, the man the head of the wife, the wife subject to the husband, yet in a mutual relationship of loving service to each other.

Self-for-self or Self-for-others?

Now take this back to God Himself, the first Self. A self is immediately confronted with its opposite— others. Now what? Is the hungry self going to use others ruthlessly just for its own satisfaction? Or is it going to satisfy its basic hunger by giving itself for others? Is it to be self-seeking or self-giving? Which of the two opposites predominates in this first Self of all selves? For life cannot be a manifested life without the interaction of these two opposites in the self: Selflove or other-love? The answer has been given from eternity and never was otherwise. God is love, expressed first in the love of His Son, begotten in His exact image: subsequently in the love of all His creatures: the eternal will to all goodness, from whom proceeds every good and perfect gift, and with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. God’s self-love finds its eternal satisfaction in otherlove. The opposites are wedded, the negative self-love is the willing servant and mate to the positive otherlove. Polarity is achieved and from it all loving activity. As the Father to the Son, so the Son to the Father, ever delighting to do His will, even to the cross; and from their union proceeding the Spirit of love to complete His loveplans for the universe.

So we see that the will and wisdom of Him who is from the beginning, that first Self, manifests the true interacting balance of all pairs of opposites. In Him they are “in temperature.” Where then are the opposites in Him, that selflove would produce? Hate, darkness, evil? They are in the eternal No, a mere potentiality of the self, never to be in existence.

In His nature, who cannot even be tempted with evil, there is only pure other-love; but in the nature of self, in its implicit freedom, there is also the potentiality of self-love; and the eternal No of God to that potentiality is what gives form and manifestation to His positive lovingness. The negative No is the womb out of which is born the positive Yes. One is within the other, as when Paul says, “Death is swallowed up in victory”: is not destroyed, but swallowed up: death dormant, merely potential, within life. So only the love is seen and known in God: only goodness, truth, and righteousness. That is all there is in God: “In Him is no darkness at all.” The pairs of opposites are polarized: the positive has swallowed up the negative, yet the negative by its potential existence is the necessary, inseparable, manifestor, energizer, form-maker of the positive.

So we see that Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God, dwelling in each other, loving, serving, glorifying each other, one love, one light, one truth, is “that eternal life” to which the Scriptures point us. But deep in the heart of that life, in its very essence is the eternal reconciliation of opposites, the interaction of which can alone make life manifest, the eternal “No” to a potential selfishness, the eternal “Yes” to selflessness; and this reconciliation is accomplished by the yielding up of the self-loving self to find its completion in other-love, the opposites made one in the creation of a kingdom of heaven which is for ever a kingdom of love.

Lucifer’s Choice

How then did evil manifest itself, and when? The Bible gives us the answer in the history and activities of the one who is called the father, the originator, of lies, and the sinner from the beginning, the murderer from the beginning, who would not abide in the truth and now has no truth in him (John 8: 44; 1 John 3: 8). He held a chief place among those principalities and powers in heavenly places, the innumerable company of angels, who also are spirits (Heb. 1:7) and flames of fire, mighty and holy servants of the Most High. His name at creation was Lucifer, Lightbearer, with rank as “the anointed cherub that covereth,” perfect in beauty, with every precious stone as his covering, walking up and down amidst the stones of fire, choir-leader of heaven. As in the description of the Throne of God and the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation, so in this account of Lucifer in Ezekiel 28:11-I7, we can only surmise what glories are depicted in these descriptions for which necessarily only earthly terms can be used.

But it is manifest that Lucifer and all these heavenly beings we call angels, being spirits, were created of God free and intelligent selves, like Himself. The tragic history of Lucifer alone tells us that. They therefore were faced with that choice between opposites which is in the essential nature of a free, intelligent self. The choice for Lucifer and his angelic host was the choice every being created in the image of God must make. In his own created self there is a mere hunger, an eternal desire for satisfaction, which is the first form of self. By his own free choice he can turn this in on himself, and seek the meaning of life in self-centredness. He has his created powers of mind, will, affection: spirit, soul and body.

There is only one alternative: to receive into the centre of his being, into his heart, the seat of will and affections, the only Spirit of light and love that the universe can ever contain, the living God. He only, by an inward birth, joining Himself as Spirit to spirit, can lift the hungry self from the plane of selfseeking to the new life of self-giving. He becomes the love and light within, and as the created self yields itself up to Him; it is irradiated and transfigured, changed into the same image from glory to glory, its hunger satisfied and its powers occupied in the love and service of God. Let it be clearly stated that there is no alternative for the creature. By himself, according to the nature of self, he can only be a mere hunger. If remaining in himself and living for himself, he can only produce the horrors of hell, as we shall see. Just as in God, the eternal Son was begotten in the heart of the Father, so that God is not one, but three, the Spirit of life and love proceeding from the union of Father and Son in love; so in every created being, there must be a begetting of the eternal Son in the centre, if the hell of self-centred self is to be transformed into the heaven of God-centred self.

Lucifer, the first in history, made the great refusal. His heart lifted up, we are told, by his beauty, he deliberately chose to be his own god. He reversed the law of the opposites; instead of yielding up his negative selfseeking self to be the servant and bride of the positive Spirit of love, he would enthrone his own self and dominate all, yes, God Himself, for his own ends; the negative must swallow up the positive, not the positive the negative. “I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit upon the mount of the congregation; I will be like the Most High” (Is. I4: I2- I5). A realm, hitherto unknown in the universe, was brought into being, previously but potential in the eternal No of God to self-centred self, now actual and visible in Satan and his hosts. He was the first egoist of existence.

The Forms of Self

For self, when turned in on itself, is a kingdom of darkness, a wheel of anguish. James speaks of the “wheel of nature” (3:6 marg.). The hungry self, if left to itself, is bound to an eternal wheel of ferment. By its first form of hungry self-seeking it draws all it seeks to itself. But, by the law of opposites, there immediately arises from the contracting impulse its counteractionexpansion, movement. Think for a moment. If you draw something towards yourself, that is a contracting movement which, if taken to its limit, produces immobility, stillness, hardness. But the very action of drawing something to myself produces movement, expansion, the opposite of contraction, as flowing water is the opposite to hard rock. It is the equal and endless tug of war between these two opposing tendencies of the hungry self, when not given over to the service of God, which produce the whirling wheel of anguish. We want things for ourselves, we are acquisitive, greedy, lustful; we get them, house, furniture, money, car, loved ones. Are we satisfied? No. Out we go from ourselves, searching for other worlds to conquer, more pleasures, other interests, other achievements, other possessions or people. It is the meaningless whirl of the dark natural life, unlit by the light of the Spirit. It is the vanity of vanities of the preacher, after he had tried all that money or invention, privilege and human wisdom could give him—all under the sun is vanity.

These are the three basic forms of self. They are the mighty forces that drive the world. They are the hidden fires, the selfhood of God and man. Attraction, expansion, rotation. The minuteness of the atom and the immensity of the solar system bear witness to the same law, with the rotation of the electrons round the nucleus, and the planets round the sun. But unyielded to God, they are as James describes them: “Whence come wars and fightings . . .. Is it not the passions that war in your members?” We lust and desire, but do not obtain the true satisfaction that way. We rush into activity or society; go after wealth, position or knowledge, but none give us what we truly seek. All are broken cisterns that hold no water. We seem bound to the dizzy wheels of fate. This is the kingdom of darkness, the closed circuit of selfhood, the warring and disintegrated ego first brought into manifestation by Lucifer. In the self-centred self all the hidden, unmanifested opposites to the beauty, goodness and truth of God came into being, potential forms of self-activity which were never meant to be known, but which are now the common experiences of everyday life-lying, hatred, murder, cruelty, envy, covetousness, lust, anger, and so on, through all the list of evil. For that reason the Bible calls Satan the father of lies, the sinner from the beginning, who abode not in the truth, because no truth is in him.

And here too was hell manifested for the first time, a hell that is in God and must be, startling though it sounds, a hell which Jesus said “was prepared for the devil and his angels,” for they first brought it into being.

Fire and Light

The best illustration of nature, indeed a material form of these very spiritual realities, is fire and light. You cannot have light without fire. It is a child of fire and the main purpose of its existence. But what a difference between the consuming father and the gentle son. And all depends on our relationship to them according to the laws of our being. If we obey those laws and live in the benefits of the light, but do not penetrate to the firesource, we bless both fire and light, and they bless us. But if we should break those laws, and find means of penetrating the sun instead of living at a proper distance from it, then its blessing becomes our scorching, consuming curse. The sun is not to blame, which only exists to be a source of life. We are to blame, who defy the laws of its and our nature. Such is the wrath of God, the consuming fire.

To us, hidden in the Son of His love, He is the blessed eternal light, the life and joy of the kingdom of heaven. To the disobedient, who tamper with the awful laws of their mighty selfhood, an outbirth of His, and retain their egoism in their refusal to be the temples of the Holy Spirit, to them the selfhood of God, of which they are a part, becomes a consuming fire of wrath; they are “children of wrath;” wrath is their nature; they touch the fire-source and are eternally burned; they find that their basic selfhood, derived from His, but separated from His Spirit, is a horror of great darkness, a hell which kindles with its dark fire the sphere it controls, even as the wicked tongue with its kindling power, we are told by James, sets on fire the wheel of nature, and “is set on fire of hell”: in other words, the spiritual fire which kindles a fiery tongue, those fires of the rebel self, are themselves the fire of hell.

Yes, fallen angels and men are still “in God,” for all are in God for ever. All (things and people) were made by Him, and without Him was nothing made that was made. All maintain their life through Him, and truest of all, “in Him all live and move and have their being.” Devils and fallen men and a cursed world are “in Him.” They are in the opposites in God which were never meant to be known or experienced. If God is love, He must equally be hate of all that is opposite to pure other-love. What fallen creation loves, God hates. If God is gentleness, lovingkindness and mercy, He is equally anger against all that is cruel, merciless, unrighteous. 

History’s Darkest Moment Here there is a potential kingdom in God of darkness, misery, wrath, which was only potential and undiscoverable, if there had been no fall of angels and men. But when Satan reversed the polarity of Creator and creation, the loving submission and service of the one to the Other, he opened a kingdom of selfhood, potential but eternally unknown in God and the kingdom of heaven. He plunged into the forbidden opposites; he reversed the eternal “yes” to all goodness and “no” to all evil, and said “yes” to the hitherto unmanifested evil, and “no” to the good. He entered what one has called the hidden “dark principle” in God, and was exiled from the “light principle.” Here everything is discord in place of concord, war for peace, hate for love, selfishness for selflessness. Hell has been discovered, but it was and still is in God, for no creation in heaven, earth or hell can have an existence apart from Him: not God as He is eternally in Himself, all light, love, meekness, humility and goodness: but God as He is and must be towards all who desert his eternal “yes” to all goodness and enter in themselves into his eternal “no” to all evil. They are in the hidden, unmanifest side of God, the basic selfhood of that almighty Self which streams out for ever in the love of His Son. They have that same basic selfhood derived from Him; but in them, whether in the world of spirits or on earth, their selfhood has not been given over to the Christ of God, and they taste to their eternal woe what self-centred selfhood could have been in God, and is in themselves.

There is a future lake of fire as sure as there is a new Jerusalem, the Book of Revelation leaves us in no doubt about that: but we are able to see that it is not some punishment outwardly designed by God for the wicked, but rather the consequences of an inevitable law of our being, God’s and ours: the rebellious, by the law of their selfhood, have the fires of hell and the wrath of God burning in them. They have plunged into the “No,” and the hate, and the anger of God: and the fires of hell that burn in them here in subdued form, owing to the counteracting restraints and goodness of God in this present world, will burn in all their consuming fierceness in the world to come, and be that lake of fire which burns for ever and ever.

For many years after his retirement as General Secretary of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, Norman Grubb traveled extensively sharing the truth of our union with Christ. He also carried on a huge personal correspondence with individuals throughout the world. He was the author of many books and pamphlets, a number of which are available through the Zerubbabel Book Ministry. Norman lived with his daughter, Priscilla, in Fort Washington, PA. Norman P. Grubb entered the Kingdom at 98 years of age.