The Monday Morning Quarterback

Yesterday I finished my mini-series, "Where is God in Evil?" The major point of the sermon is that God has dealt definitively with evil in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. To quote N.T. Wright in his book Evil and the Justice of God, "the Gospel writers have been trying to tell us, that evil at all levels and of all sorts had done its worst and that Jesus throughout his public career and supremely on the cross had dealt with it, taken its full force, exhausted it" (89). The resurrection is the event that trumpets evil's defeat and God's ultimate triumph. God's victory has not been fully implemented yet, and in the "in between times" until God finally makes all things right, we, Jesus' followers, are to address evil with suffering love.

An aspect of evil that I wish I had made more explicit in the series is that evil is present in all of us. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote many years ago,

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Some of the greatest atrocities have been committed by people when they don't understand that evil cuts through their own hearts--they project their won evil onto the "evil ones" and then justify what they do merely by saying, "They're evil."