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The End of Evil?

02/10/2008 - Pandora's Box, Selected Scripture

There's an ancient Greek myth that's told about a woman named Pandora, the first woman in the world. Her name means "all-gifted" because when she was created the gods and goddesses got together and gave her all kinds of gifts to bring to earth with her like beauty and charm. Zeus, the king of the gods, gave her a special box called Pandora's Box which she was told never to open.

Soon after, Pandora was married and all went well for a while until she became more and more curious about the contents of the box. She wanted to know what was inside. So she begged her husband to let her open it, but he always said no. Until one day she stole the key while he was asleep and opened the box.

And when she did out flew a swarm of winged monsters bringing every kind of evil imaginable into the world. There was disease and death, crime and famine, envy and anger, revenge and violence, and every other curse that brought the happiest times of this world to an end and left mortals in misery.

Pandora wailed as she tried to shut the lid, but it was too late. Every form of evil had escaped and flown all over the world. There was only one thing left in the box and that was hope, hope that Zeus had put there to keep mortals going in the midst of a world full of evil.

Hope. All of us need hope. Someone has said, "We can live about 40 days without food, about 3 days without water, about 8 minutes without air, but only about one second without hope."

We all need hope in the midst of a world full of evil. We need hope that the hurts and pains and struggles we're facing right now will some day be over. We need hope that the global crises that rock our world will one day be over as well. The people in the Midwest need hope right now.

I don't know if you caught this on the news, but this week the deadliest set of tornadoes since 1985 tore through Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky killing at least 55 people and injuring hundreds more. When you looked at the pictures you could see a swath of flattened trees, shredded mobile homes, flipped over trucks and tracker-trailers, and bare concrete pads where buildings, houses and garages once stood. The governor of Tennessee took a helicopter tour of the devastation and after he touched down he said, "It looks like the Lord took a Brillo pad and scrubbed the ground clean."

What a nightmare! Those are the kinds of experiences that can shake your faith in an almighty, all loving God can't they? God why would you allow such a horrible thing to happen?

I can remember my first "God why?" experience. For me it wasn't a tornado it was a car accident. I was 16 years old driving home from swim practice on a rainy, July night. Passing through an intersection in my little 1969 Volkswagen Beetle I was broad sided by a station wagon going about 50 miles an hour and knocked unconscious. I ended up in a hospital for a month, then in a full body cast for nine weeks after that, and then months of rehab to repair a broken left femur. It was the summer before my senior year in high school and I was swimming twice a day, working hard to earn a college scholarship. And I can remember many nights lying on my back in that hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling and saying, "God, why? Why me? Why now? Why this? I just don't get it."

We live in a world that is full of evil and so much happens that's completely outside of our control. And that's what's frightening to us. But the good news is that the world won't always be this way. There is coming a day when there will be no more tornadoes, or car accidents, or disease, or death. In the new heaven and the new earth there no longer will be any sea of trouble and chaos and judgment and pain. Evil will one day be vanquished. But that day is not this day. And until that day comes how are we to handle all this?

This morning we continue our series called The End of Evil? We began last week with the Bible's own version of Pandora's Box. We said that our good God created a world that was all good, very good in fact. And one of the things that made the world very good was the good gift of freedom, the freedom that God gave the first man and the first woman to love him with all their heart or to despise him if that's what they chose to do. But he wouldn't force them either way.

To validate that freedom he put a tree in the garden called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and told them not to eat from it. They could eat from any other tree in the garden, stuff themselves if they wanted, but to show their allegiance to God that tree was to stay off the menu.

And they may have been able to pull it off if it wasn't for an intruder in the garden called the serpent, aka the evil one. He wasn't a bad creature that God had made. God doesn't create bad stuff. Instead, he was a very good creature that God had made who went very bad. At some point, the serpent too had misused his freedom and turned against God as well. We're not exactly sure how and when that happened, but something went on between God and the serpent before he appears in the garden.

Many Bible scholars believe that the prophet Ezekiel is describing the evil one before he turned evil when he writes these words in Ezekiel 28:12-17,

This is what the Sovereign Lord says, You were the model of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. ¹³You were in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone adorned you … ¹⁴You were anointed as a guardian cherub, for so I ordained you. You were on the holy mount of God. You walked among the fiery stones. ¹⁵You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created till wickedness was found in you. ¹⁶Through your widespread trade you were filled with violence, and you sinned. So I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God, and I expelled you, guardian cherub, from among the fiery stones. ¹⁷Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor. So I threw you to earth. I made a spectacle of you before kings.

This is prophetic, apocalyptic passage that's dripping with imagery. Yet many believe that Ezekiel is talking about the evil one, the serpent who was in Eden, the garden of God. And if that's true then we see that the evil one started out as the model of perfection, not as a bad guy at all. But his heart became proud and in his pride he freely chose to rebel against God and in the imagery of this passage was driven off the mountain of God.

And so what happened to the evil one then happens to the first man and the first woman. Pride gets the best of them. They want to be like God too! So they freely choose to rebel and are driven out of the garden of God, but not before all the expressions of evil are unleashed out of the box and, like nuclear radiation, everything gets tainted by the curse.

In Genesis 3:17-19 we read, Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. ¹⁸It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. ¹⁹By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.

Evil is everywhere and it's not just a problem for those who believe the Bible and want to follow Jesus. Evil is a problem for everyone. And every religion in the world has had to grapple in some way or another with the origin, the nature, and the end of evil.

A few years ago we did a series at Valley View called What's The Difference? And in that series we examined how the major world religions address the problem of evil.

We looked at Hinduism. Hinduism is one of the most ancient world religions. It's a polytheistic religion, which means Hindus believe in many gods. The three main gods are Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. Hindus believe that there is a moral law that operates this universe, a standard of right and wrong. "What goes around comes around." And when we violate that moral law, we pay for it in some way. That's called karma. Karma means that our actions have consequences. It's the law of cause and effect. If you live a good moral life you have good karma and you'll be rewarded. If you live a bad moral life you have bad karma and you'll be punished.

And all that occurs through a concept called samsara. Samsara is this concept of reincarnation that sees life as an endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth. If you have good karma you'll be reincarnated to a higher life form and if you have bad karma you're in trouble on the food chain. And on and on it goes like a spinning wheel until you finally achieve moksha and your soul is liberated from this temporal world and you become absorbed into Brahma like a drop of water falling into an eternal ocean. That's when you're released from evil and your tormented soul enters a state of complete rest. That's the Hindu answer to evil. To finally escape evil in this world you have to go through an almost endless cycle of reincarnation.

In that series we looked at Buddhism. Buddhism grew out of Hinduism about five hundred years before Christ. It was started by Siddhartha a man who had a passion to understand the cause and cure for human suffering. For the first thirty years of his life Siddhartha lived a charmed life in a breathtaking palace shielded from any and all forms of suffering. His father was a king and his mother was a queen and when he was born they gave him a name that meant "every wish fulfilled."

He had it all. But one day he ventured outside the palace walls and he saw an old man, a sick man, and a dead man. And it rocked his world. He had never seen that before and so he thought to himself, "Does everyone get sick and grow old? Do we all die? If so, then what?" And that started him on a spiritual journey that six years later led him to that famous fig tree in north central India under which he sat for forty days and forty nights until he became enlightened. That's what the name Buddha means, "the enlightened one."

The essence of Buddhism is all about how we handle evil and suffering in this world. It's wrapped up in the four noble truths. The first is that life is suffering. Life is full of sickness and pain and death. The second noble truth is that the cause of suffering is desire. It's our lust and greed and selfishness that get us into trouble. The third truth is that the cure for suffering is to remove all desire. And that is done when we observe what's called the Middle Way, the eight-fold path that helps us blow out the flame of desire inside us and achieve nirvana, perfect peace and freedom from suffering.

The whole system of Buddhism is about disengaging from evil and the pain of this world, but it offers no ultimate hope. There is no new world coming. One person put it this way, "Buddhist funerals are the most depressing things. There's no hope of ever seeing that person again. They've vanished. They're gone. Even if they are reincarnated, you'll never know who they are. In fact, at a Buddhist funeral the priest waves four fans and the last fan says, "There is no resurrection."

Islam is the youngest of the world's major religions beginning about 600 years after Jesus. They believe in one god, the god Allah. Islam was started by Mohammed who was born in the city of Mecca in what is called Saudi Arabia today. His father died before he was born and his mother died when he was six. He was raised first by his grandfather and later by his uncle.

Until he was about the age of forty he lived a life of luxury and affluence. He was a successful merchant, married with children, but his wealth didn't satisfy him. Instead, he was troubled by injustice and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. He began to question life and the suffering he saw. To deal with his unrest he would retreat into mountain caves and spend weeks at a time in solitude. And it was during one of those times when he claimed to have had a vision from the angel Gabriel.

At first he thought he was going insane and even considered killing himself. But he shared his vision with others who convinced him that it was true. And over the next twenty years Muhammad claimed to receive more revelations in the cave, which eventually were written down and became known as the Koran, literally "the reading," the most sacred writings of Islam.

And according to my understanding of Islam, the ultimate goal is to rule the world. The world is in a state of wickedness because the message of Allah as given through Muhammed hasn't spread yet to all people. And evil won't be eradicated until Islam is brought to the whole world and everyone submits to Allah.

And of course, at that point there is great divide between the vast majority of Muslims who see that as a peaceful process and the radical minority who want to achieve it through jihad or holy war.

Everybody has an opinion on evil. They have to because evil is everywhere. We can't ignore it. It touches our lives everyday. And for the rest of the series we are going to trace God's approach to evil through the Scriptures to see what God has done, is doing, and will do about evil in our world. We know it's going to end someday, but what do we do about it in the meantime?

In his book Evil and the Justice of God, N. T. Wright feels that our current approaches to evil are often inadequate and not based on Scripture. He says we tend to ignore evil when it doesn't hit us in the face. And he's right. We all want to turn our head and pretend that the problems aren't there.

And then when evil does hit us in the face we're surprised by it. How can this happen to me or how can this happen to us? That can be anything from the diagnosis of a disease to a global tragedy like 9/11.

And then when evil does hit us in the face we often react in immature or even dangerous ways. We can take all the blame on ourselves or we put all the blame on others. But it's never that simple.

About September 11th Wright says, "The terrorist actions of al-Qaeda were and are unmitigatedly evil. That appalling day rightly provoked horror and anger. But the astonishing naivety which decreed that America as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be neatly divided up into evil people (particularly Arabs) and good people (particularly Americans and Israelis), and that the latter had a responsibility to punish the former is a large-scale example of what I'm talking about - just as it is immature and naïve to suggest the mirror image of this view, namely that the Western world is guilty in all respects and that all protestors and terrorists are therefore completely justified in what they do."

It's not that simple. We can't divide the world up between the good guys and the bad guys. And we can't blow evil off this earth with a few well placed bombs.

"The line between good and evil does not lie between 'us' and 'them,' between the West and the rest, between the left and the right, between the rich and the poor. That fateful line runs down the middle of every one of us, every human being. This is not to say that all humans, and all societies, are equally good or bad, far from it. We must not make the trivial mistake of supposing that a petty thief and Adolph Hitler are exactly alike, that the same level of evil is attained by someone who cheats on an exam and by Osama Bin Laden. Yet we are all infected and any attempt to see the problem of evil in terms of 'us' and 'them' is fatally flawed."

Pandora's Box has been opened. Adam and Eve made the wrong choice and were driven out of the garden where we find ourselves today. Evil is everywhere. Evil is messy. Evil is inside us. But God has done, is doing, and will do something to bring an end to evil. And next week we're going to begin tracing through the Scriptures to discover his strategy for bringing evil down.

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Valley View Community Church, feel free to contact us at info@valleyviewseek.org or call 610.631.2707.