The Doe of the Dawn: A Christian World View. . .

DELIVER US FROM EVIL

One of the famous British writers is quoted as saying that if he could ask the Sphinx one question it would be Is the universe friendly? The prayer that Jesus of Nazareth taught his disciples to pray implies that the universe is indeed friendly or on man’s side, but that it has unfriendly forces at work within it. Surely if we can address the Ruler of the universe as Father we can believe that there is a great deal going for us. And yet Jesus would have us pray Deliver us from evil, as if to warn that we may well be put upon by forces too much for us.

Evil in the Scriptures includes plagues and curses as well as sin and lawlessness. Evil is something bad, that which hurts man and denies him well-being. It may be disease or famine; it may be pestilence or moral corruption. Evil is not as much the opposite of good as the corruption of good, or good gone awry. It is missing the mark, whether it be nature or man, willful or unwillful. There are natural evils. whether earthquakes, floods, droughts, crop failures, pain, fires, diseases. There are moral evils, whether political corruption, war, injustice, prejudice, crime, child abuse, drug abuse, racism. Then there are circumstantial evils, which may be neither natural or moral primarily, such as unhappiness, depression, divorce, unemployment, incompatibility.

Evil, of whatever nature or source, is evil because it hurts and destroys. It adulterates purity, mars integrity, corrupts sincerity, destroys goodness. And yet evil is not an abstract entity. It is as real as goodness and as active as virtue. It is as real as cancer, aggression and hate. Things are evil and people are evil and ideas are evil. Systems, philosophies and institutions are evil. Evil does not float around unattached. It is usually well organized for its onslaught on vulnerable man.

Deliver us from evil infers all this to be the case. We are at war in our universe. Evil may very well overpower us. But it need not. There is one who rules in the affairs of men who has the power to deliver. The word Jesus used in his prayer implies a sure, final, victorious deliverance, once for all. We can position ourselves, by the grace of heaven, so that we will be protected. Evil or the evil one may attack us, but it or he cannot win.

We need not bother ourselves as to whether our Lord refers to evil or the evil one, for the point is the same. It is the evil one who is behind all evil. As we escape evil we escape him; as we escape him we escape evil. The point is that we need help and that there is a Helper. We are to pray for deliverance, for protection, for victory. This implies trust on our part, as well as wholeness of commitment. This is the essence of the Lord’s prayer: reverence, which is a constant awareness of God. Without this there can be no deliverance from evil.

During the last century there was the optimistic view that the greater part of evil can be eliminated by improving man’s institutions. Evil is not as much in man as it is in his environment, such as poor housing and poverty, it was believed. The events of recent decades, which includes not only world-wide wars but holocausts of nations as well, has brought home to us that our problem is not in our stars but in ourselves, as Shakespeare put it. In terms of all the evil that befalls man he has been his own worst enemy. While it is true that some evils are part and parcel of our kind of universe and beyond our control, most of man’s pain and distress has been self-inflicted. Sin is the culprit, plain, old-fashioned sin, which has been so long neglected in our thinking that Dr. Menninger appropriately asked the question that became the title of his book, Whatever Became of Sin?

Sin not only corrupts man’s spirit but affects his thinking as well, especially in persuading him that sin is not so bad after all. A “good” guy like John Wayne (I saw a bumper sticker that read God Bless John Wayne!) or a “saint” like Mohatma Ghandi may be guilty of a few little sins that do not really matter, but it could hardly be said of them what Scripture lays upon all mankind: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. It even says none is righteous, no, not one (Rom. 3:10). These are truths that man, because he is a sinner, is reluctant to accept, seriously accept. He really believes that he is righteous on his own and does not need God, not really, and so he lives as if there were no God. This is the most fatal sin of all, which is not only a failure to reverence him but a refusal to recognize him.

The prophet Isaiah wrote a line about the sinfulness of the human race that is as relevant as today’s newspaper: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way.” He adds: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Is. 65:6).

Man’s problem is that he does not believe this, and this is why the apostle Paul refers to “the offense of the cross” (Gal. 5:11). The cross is a stumbling block because its message is that man is lost except for the grace of God. If people now fornicate with open abandon, demand the acceptance of “alternate lifestyles” even to homosexual marriage, and involve children in their pornographic enterprise, it is because God does not count and sin is meaningless. The cross insults them, even if they dangle one about their necks!

We do not need an extensive theology of sin, for we all know, if we want to know, that sin is what we think, say, and do. It does not float around in the abstract. It is transgression of law, not only the injunctions of Scripture but all moral law, of which we are all aware, and we all know that we fall short, very short, of what we know to be right. This is what makes us sinners.

Those who live decent, law-abiding lives (supposedly!) see themselves as good as most anyone else and so see no need for God’s grace. One can deceive himself along these lines so long as he does not have a very high standard for himself. Once he measures himself alongside Jesus’ greatest commandments of love for God and man, or the Ten Commandments, which call for right motive as well as right action, he sees that he can’t cut it. Whatever be one’s religion, whether Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem or Jewish-Christian, there are laws and ideals beyond his reach. His conscience condemns him whether he looks to the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Bible. When he is introspective enough, man realizes he is a sinner. But he is reluctant to be that introspective!

The Scriptures make it clear that man has two distinct impulses that are at war, one for evil and one for good. Early in the biblical drama the God of the Hebrews sized up human nature as: “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Gen. 8:21), while the prophets insisted that “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). In Gal. 5 Paul concedes such a conflict within man, implying that the “flesh,” not simply the body but carnal passions, dominates the “spirit.” So even the Christian must have help: “Walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16).

This is part of the “mystery of iniquity” that the Scriptures speak of: man’s propensity to sin. The enigma is apparent even with the righteous, as with Paul himself: I do not understand my own actions, he says in Rom. 7:15, granting that “I am carnal, sold under sin” and “I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” It is only as a believer that he finds a way out of the enigma: “Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

While man is a strange mixture of good and evil impulses, the evil dominates, especially given the circumstances in which we must live in this world, hardships and temptations being what they are. Ah, for the supplication, Deliver us from evil!, which must in part be a prayer for deliverance from ourselves.

We can hardly have an adequate view of ourselves and our universe without a recognition of sin and its consequences, for both man and his environment are grossly affected by sin. Until we see death and destruction as the penalties for sin, we will be blind to so many other things, particularly the holiness and magnanimity of God. We can never see the grace of God until we see what sin has done to us.

Charles Spurgeon was one of the great preachers of the grace of God, and he tells how he finally came to find grace. While he had no “extra-ordinary sins,” it was when he applied the Ten Commandments to his own life that he came to realize his “outrageous sin against God.” It came’ about when he met Moses carrying the law. This is why it is important for sinful man to meet Moses as well as Christ, for he is not ready for grace until he is stung by law.

This is why it is foolish for us to talk about not being under law. We are not under law so as to be justified by it, but we are always under law as a reminder of our sinfulness. Paul said it well, for after granting that the law is holy, just and good, he explains that it was only when the commandment came home to him that “Sin revived and I died.” It was only then that he was ready for grace.