The Origin of Evil

God is who He is because He is fixed, and fixed as love; plainly every person who is to find himself and be a person equally becomes fixed. We often hear it said that the origin of evil is an unfathomable mystery, but, unless I am mistaken, I have not found it so. It seems plain enough. First, we understand evil to be the term we use as the opposite of good. But, good is the term we use of God who is love, for all that love does is good. Thus Jesus, when called Good Master by the rich young ruler, said, "Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but God!" So then, if good is the term used of the Living God who is the other-love, evil must be the term used of anyone who, as a person, is the opposite of God, and evil because he is selflove. Evil, therefore, is a person who, as a free person, has made the opposite choice to God and is fixed in it–a misused self rather than a right-used self.

This is why in Isaiah, God says, "I am the Lord…I create evil." The moment God creates persons like Himself, and, in no other way can He have sons to develop His universe, they can only be developing persons by their freedom of choice; and fundamental choice is, shall I be an expression of God in His self–giving love, or shall I, in my freedom, separate myself as a person (though, of course, eternally having my being in God) and function as a self–loving self? To be such, the opposite to the Self–giving One, would be what we call evil. Evil, therefore, is a necessary alternative in freedom. To be free involves the possibility of being evil. That is why it says that God creates evil. If He creates persons, He must create them free or they are not persons. If they are free, they can choose to become the opposite to Him in His fixed choice, and that is evil. Therefore, in giving freedom, God gives evil as a possible alternative. 

And that, I think, is the eternal wonder of God’s love in redemption, and the final revelation of the ultimate of love. In creating free persons, He created the possibility of the evil choice, yet He is not responsible if that choice was made. He could, therefore, have said, "Well, they made the choice for which I am not responsible. Leave them to it, and let Us make another race of persons," which is what He told Moses at the incident of the golden calf to stir in Moses the love-response he must have to handle Israel at this crisis. Exodus 32:9-14, and 32:32. But love belongs to need. Love is the debtor and need always love’s creditor, for need, as Paul said, has an inescapable claim on love, which exists to meet it. So God as love has to go that second mile. Responsible for freedom, but not responsible for that wrong choice made in freedom, He says, "I will take the whole upon Myself, both the freedom for which I am responsible, and its wrong use, for which I am not responsible; and I will take that ultimate curse of that wrong choice upon, Myself, and remove it in the blood of My Son"–the Lamb ordained to death before the foundation of the world. 

So we know where evil began. It was the first free person, not of this human race, but of the angelic order, who could only be established in his unique appointment as "the anointed cherub that covereth" (Ezekiel 28:14) by becoming fixed by choice as Lucifer, which means bearer of God’s light. But, instead, he spoke his free word of faith which fixed him in self-interest, self-seeking, self-exaltation (Isaiah 14:13-14). Evil, therefore, had its public origin in a person who became fixed in self-centredness, the opposite to God. This was "sin" which John explained as "transgression of the law," law being the way a thing works; and the way the universe works is by Him who is love. So sin is a person who is self-loving love, just as righteousness is the Person who is self-giving love. Both are persons, for the universe is the Person, and we, as persons, His sons in the Son, Head and Body. It is in our separation from Him that we have come to speak of aspects of Him as things, as abstractions, such as goodness, love, power, peace, joy, etc., or alternatively of evil, sin, hate, envy, etc., whereas they are the Person who is these things. God is the Person. Evil is a created person who chose to be the opposite to God, and is called the god of this world because he brought into manifestation the opposite form of personhood. Sin is the root and sins are the product. 

But what we are to note as we continue to trace humanity’s history is that this evil one, called Lucifer, and Satan, is still and forever a rebel son, recorded in Job as among the sons of God presenting themselves to Him. He is still God’s servant, though in rebellion, and still does God’s will, and has his being in God, as all the universe had. This is important because owing to the illusory sense of separation from God which the Fall has given us, we find it difficult to recognize that Satan is not some separated person who goes about and does as he wills, and we have to, in a way, call on God to go and find and handle him. No, he is God’s negative agent and we shall see how wonderfully he is God’s convenient agent, and we learn to see through Satan to the One in full control of him, if we are to get all the distortions of life into focus. But again we shall look into this in more practical detail later on. 

We Only Know Right Through Wrong 

Now we come down to ourselves. We have seen God’s purpose–to "bring many sons unto glory," glory being to total fulfilment, a vast family of sons brought to their highest conceivable destiny as co-sons and co-heirs of the universe with His own Son. He had this in hand before the creation, "according as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world," and this meant one thing–that the sons must be mature, capable sons, not a crowd of irresponsible little children, but knowing who they are as persons, knowing how to function as sons, and thus knowing their destiny and able to fulfil it. That means training and development from little children to sons, and thus to sons who can represent their Father and take over His business for Him. And this is the history of the human family. 

There is one facet of mature experience which is often missed, yet it lies at the roots of capability on any level and none can be sure of himself and his proficiency in any profession without it. A thing is only a thing because it has its opposite. It has a right and a wrong, and the one has overcome the other. Sweet has overcome or swallowed up bitter, smooth rough, soft hard. Life swallows up death, said Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:4; and it gets its strength from having an opposite which it has swallowed up. You cannot say a certain yes in a decision, until you have first canvassed the alternatives and said an equally certain no to each of them. The strength of the yes is in swallowing up the noes! Not in having no noes, not in ignoring their existence, but in facing them and replacing them by the final yes. Then only is the yes a strong and certain one. 

Proficiency is not in ignoring the wrong way of doing a thing, still less in denying that there is a wrong way; but proficiency is in having known the wrong way and tried it out and learning once for all that it doesn’t work that way. Then the yes has its strength in swallowing up its no. A carpenter, to be proficient, must first have learned that you don’t use your chisel this way, or make your measurements that way, but then these are the right ways. No housewife can be confident in her kitchen until she first knows you don’t cook that meat at this heat, or mix those ingredients in those proportions, then she is spontaneously at ease in her good cooking. And so through every conceivable activity of life. You must know the wrong way and have proved it wrong, before you are secure and confident in the right. The one must "swallow" the other up. 

And here we have God’s perfect wisdom in the birth of the human race, and in having a convenient opposite, the wrong one, the evil one, through whom He would bring his vast family of sons to maturity. This was His first way of making the devil His convenient agent. To have sons, they must find themselves in their freedom. They must discover that to be a person is to be conscious that there are alternatives and make their free choice; and ultimately their right choice through having first made the wrong one, and tasted the consequences. And the wonder of our perfect God is that He knew this was the way His predestined family of efficient sons must take, from wrong first and then to right; and He knew the suffering that entailed for them, with its possibility of a lost eternity. So he took it upon Himself to go that same way to its total final end, and in the person of His own Son, Himself in His Son form, to participate in the sufferings in their fullest measure. So Peter said we are redeemed "with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world": and the writer to the Hebrews takes it even further by saying that this involvement to the full in the sufferings of humanity was the only way the perfect Father, to be perfect, could go so that "it became Him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, to make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings." Tremendous! 

So we find our first parents in the garden, and placed between two trees, one to give life and the other death. Why did not the Father just put them there conveniently with only one tree? It wasn’t very kind of Him to put the two! We might just have eaten of the tree of life–and then been what? A crowd of helpless babies who knew nothing and could do nothing! No, the first parents of these destined sons must first discover themselves, learn their potentialities, misuse themselves–and then they are ready to be reliable ones. 

And at that tree of death the deceptive voice of that "old serpent, the devil" came to them, and what it did for them was to awaken them to discover what it is to be a self. Enormous awakening with its vast potentialities. Thank you, devil. Through those tempting suggestions to have what she would like, Eve found she was a person! She had appetites in wanting to eat that fruit, with all that goes with them in making us vibrant humans. She had the awakening adventure of new discovery through sight when she saw the fruit was "pleasant to the eyes," all the limitless avenues of exploration in the visual arts and sciences. And the awakened mind, the topmost of all, by which she would know the truth of things and at the end of the long trail would "know even as we are known." 

Eve, as representing us all, could only find and know herself by being solicited to be herself for her own self-ends. But more than that. She took that dangerous step which cut her off from being what we were created to be, sons in spirit-union with the Creator Son and the Father, and thus sons of self-giving love. Instead, in chosen separation from God, she, her husband and we all, became self-loving children of the god of self-centredness. 

We became misused selves. We had to discover and experience what it is to be a wrong self before we are conditioned to be a right self. We have to learn misuse before we can settle into right use. One Person became a real human and did not go that way, and that was God’s Son "manifest in the flesh." But He, to be a person, had to be confronted with the devil and come under the temptation of the "evil" way of self-interest. By that means He found His human self as a self, with all its normal capacities and reactions. 

Therefore we must say that Adam and Eve could have made the necessary discoveries concerning themselves by temptation without responding to it. They could have replaced the attraction of the wrong fruit by taking of the right one, as Jesus did by answering the devil with the word of God; but as they did fall, we need waste no time in theorizing! 

So we partook of the tree which brought the human self into manifestation in the form it was never meant to be–the self-loving self, the evil self. Indwelt by the serpent–spirit of error, it appears as a rival and attempted conqueror of the human self in its true eternal form–indwelt by Christ as the self-giving self. It has reversed the true order in which the self-loving form is swallowed up and ultimately unknown to the self-giving form it becomes in Christ, and progressively in us as we find ourselves in Him. 

This tree of death has divided between good and evil and put evil in the ascendency; but in so doing it has given us to drink of the full draught of its bitterness to fit us to reach out to the water of life. The tree of life, of which we are now able to partake, since that cherubim’s sword of judgement which kept us from it, was plunged in His side instead of ours, puts evil back into good. It restores us from the curse of the divided two-power outlook to the single eye, by the glorious discovery of how God uses the evils of this world to His and our good ends. But that we explain more fully later. 

We have become children of the devil, who, we say again, is quite simply the created being who brought into manifestation the potential there must be in freedom, of being the opposite to God; and if God is self-giving love and love is good, then Lucifer, Satan, is that opposite self-loving love, the evil which, if it had not been exposed, lies hidden eternally, "swallowed up" in the good. And we have eaten by choice of that divided tree, and participated in this exposed opposite. But by doing so, we have gone along a necessary road by which a person must know and reject misuse before being established in the right use. And here is the meaning of the Fall, and its value. 

What is God’s Wrath? 

But it is important to realize that there is a fundamental difference between the fall of Lucifer and the fall of Adam and Eve, our fall. Lucifer had made his ultimate choice from his center, his spirit, where he totally rejected God and replaced Him with himself. He chose to be his own god. But Eve was tricked by the serpent (1 Timothy 2:14). She did not intend to reject her Creator, but just to bypass Him with an act of self-indulgence, hoping He would not notice! Her sin was of the flesh, not spirit; and Adam merely followed Eve for the same reason. So, thank God, the human family are prodigal sons, and have never lost the inner consciousness of having missed the way, and knowing by the inner law of their being what they ought to be. Slaves of the devil, branches of the false vine, children of the devil, caught up in the devil’s destiny, but not yet sons of the devil who by free choice become devils like their father. 

For this same reason the Father revisits them in their disobedience; I always like that beautiful statement: "They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day"; and because they were God-conscious, they "hid themselves." But it is our guilt that projects wrath on God, as if that was His chief characteristic, and which still so distorts our concepts of God as if He is a monster. Still our unenlightened eyes, including, I am ashamed to say, many liberal theologians, regard the Old Testament as the record of an avenging God, instead of the same unchanging God of grace shining through from the Garden of Eden, to the call of Abraham, and through Moses and the revelation of the Tabernacle of continuing grace, to the full sunlight of His grace in our Lord Jesus Christ. 

But the wrath of God is only manifest in those who have the wrong relationship to Him. It is not Him as He is, who is all love. But it is what He must appear to be to those who run counter to the law of His being. The wrath operates in them, not in Him. If I have a right relationship to an electric switch and turn it on as I should do, I get a pleasant light. If I defy any warnings and stick my finger in the apparatus, I get a nasty shock. The shock is what I feel within myself through my unlawful contact. So it was not God who hid from the disobedient couple, it was they who hid from Him. They projected on Him a rejection which was really in themselves. And this is the wrath of God. All He said was, "Where are you, Adam? Come out from your hiding, I haven’t changed." And when they came, He talked with them, not in judgement and wrath, but in mercy. All He told them was that they would experience the inevitable effects of the discords self–loving self always brings on itself. Sorrow was what they would have, sorrow, in the man’s life, sorrow in the woman’s life. Sorrow is an inner reaction, for we are inner people. It is our inner response to suffering. Because we have fallen into our false material concepts of life in its outer forms, and have brought about total disruption in our outer living by our grab-and-hold and dog-eat-dog activities, life is a continual suffering: wars, diseases, poverty, anxiety, wrongdoings, and we regard it as if those sufferings are our problems, and why does God "allow" them? But we are on the wrong foot. Sorrow is our problem, for sorrow is our inner reaction to suffering, and we are inner people. Change our sorrow into inner joy, and outer sufferings are turned to praise. 

So it was the Father’s special mercy, not wrathful judgement, when He told them three times over that they would have sorrow. Why? Because sorrow would mean dissatisfaction with their earthly conditions, and desire for a better way. Thank God for sorrow. Thank God the world is restless, fermenting, dissatisfied, rebellious at its present conditions. That is its hope. That’s the best thing the Father could predict for His fallen children: and thank God, behind the sorrow and at its roots lies guilt for not being what we know we should be. But that was not all. 

From that first moment of the Fall and its consequences, there was the pronouncement of deliverance; and the deliverance is in the seed of the woman which would bruise the head of the serpent. God said to the serpent, "I will put enmity between thy seed and her seed." What is the serpent’s seed? The take-over of the human family created in the image of God by a false father who would express his nature of self-centeredness in them. Thus they would be the seed of the serpent. But they are still the seed of the woman, created in God’s image, and into the woman’s seed would come The One capable of destroying the works of the devil, and turning the devil’s captives into His captives. And what is more, though He would come to do this in due time in human history, in God’s timeless sight He was already, in the remarkable phrase in Revelation 13:8, "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." Therefore, He was already the true Adam, the last Adam, progenitor of the new race, and could be found in spirit, as the mercy seat for sinners, from that first day of the Fall. He was so found by Abel and by the countless thousands who, like the seven thousand in the days of Ahab’s apostacy God was pleased to tell Elijah, had not bowed the knee to Baal. Abraham rejoiced to see His day: Moses counted the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: Israel in the wilderness drank of that spiritual rock that followed them and that rock was Christ. So mercy flowed out from the Garden and has never ceased flowing. 

So this first stage, downward, not upward, was the necessary preparation for that vast family of sons of God. By this they could learn once for all, and reject once for all, not to be fooled again, the wrong way before the right, the misuse of the glory of being created self before its right use. And it is as if God said to Satan, "You have deliberately turned your back on Me and founded this false kingdom of the negative, the power of darkness. So now I will use you to my great ends. Through you I will bring to maturity my vast family of sons to rules this universe. When they have well learned the lie from you, they will be safe followers of the truth, and not be fooled by you again. They may visit you at times, while within your reach on earth, but they will never live with you again. Thank you, devil." 

The Total Remedy 

We already know clearly enough the only way we could be rescued. We have the false god in us. It came as a revelation to me when I saw what I knew well already of the redeemed–that the Holy Spirit lives in us; but then also I read in 1 John 4:4 that if the Holy Spirit is in the redeemed, there is also a spirit in the unredeemed. "Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world." And then when two verses later, John plainly names them: "Hereby know we the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error." So the spirit of error, the Satanic person, is in us before we are Christ’s. That was new light to me, and a new orientation. Most of us think of ourselves as just our unredeemed selves until Christ comes in and takes over. We do not realize that we have working in us that "prince of the power of the air, the spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience" which Paul says is true of all of us (Ephesians 2:2). He has so concealed and disguised himself in us as unbelievers, though it says that it is the god of this world in us who has blinded our minds, that we just think we are our independent selves. But the truth is that all humanity are vessels. We are containers, and it depends which God is in the vessel. In Romans it says we are either "vessels of wrath" or "vessels of mercy": those who either contain the god through whom wrath is our portion, or those who contain the Saviour–God through whom mercy comes to us. This greatly simplifies salvation, for it is merely change of gods, not change of the vessels which contain Him. Or to use that other great illustration, we are either branches of the false vine or of the true. "I am the true vine," said Jesus, therefore there must be a false one. 

Who then can make this exchange? Who delivers humanity from its slavery to its false usurper and replaces him by the True Owner? Obviously a slave can’t redeem a slave. There can be only one, and that the Owner and Creator Himself. He only has the right to represent the human race and do something which can include them all. That is why we safeguard the incarnation in our gospel. There is no point nor power in the death and resurrection of Jesus, unless He was God in the flesh, the author of the human race becoming a member of it to represent it. This is one of those "supernatural" events which are not explicable in terms of human thought but issue from the spirit, not the matter, dimension. So it is no good trying to explain or explain away what issues from the realm of what we call the impossible, but we are to learn what is really the only actual. Human thinking is what has bound us to realms of time and space; for the true realm we must have "the renewing of our minds," the "new man which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him." 

The way in which this change of gods has become a fact has of course held our fascinated and almost microscopic attention and investigation through the centuries. And no wonder. "Upon Another’s life, Another’s death I stake my whole eternity." "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." "I was determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." We will put it in simplest terms to relate to what we have already said. Why Christ’s death? We humans have got so physically minded that death to us always means the physical. But we who are believers know better. We know physical death is only the gateway to life after death. Where? Ah, that is the crux! The Bible makes plain that if we die a child of the devil, we continue on into the devil’s destiny which is described in the terms of its supreme loss as "everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of His power." Therefore death for Jesus did not just mean the physical dying. If as the One who never was made captive by the devil and thus not under death’s, dominion, He accepted death on our behalf, then He would go after physical death where we would go, into what Paul called "the lower parts of the earth," the realm of "the spirits in prison." And that is where He did go. Maybe that is why there was such reality in the cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" Supposing He didn’t rise? He had to go this way by nothing but faith, as the rest of us. 

But He did rise. There was nothing that could hold Him, because, though, our sin-bearer, He was not Himself a sinner under the law of sin and death. Therefore, "quickened by the Spirit," He could be "raised from the dead by the glory of the Father." And what did He leave behind on our behalf? That is what is important to us. He left both the cause and effects of sin. The effects are our destiny in outer darkness, the consequence of the curse of the law, the guilt, the condemnation, the weeping and gnashing of teeth, the worm that dies not and the fire not quenched. All disappeared from sight forever, because He took them on Himself on our behalf, and then left them behind on our behalf when He arose. Therefore Paul said that in His resurrection we are justified; in other words, not merely forgiven, which might still leave a memory behind of the things for which we needed the forgiveness; but justified, meaning that we are as spotless, sinless, as the Savior Himself; and all the past in memories of fact or dread of destiny are out of sight and out of mind forever. That is the overcoming in the blood of the Lamb. Nothing can be held against us. "Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?" "It is God that justifieth." The shedding of the blood was the physical evidence of a life totally poured out to death, and therefore taking all with it that would come to us if we died. 

–-Who Am