A Love Greater than Evil

Since 9/11 the word 'evil' has regained some popular usage in our culture. The painfully essential revelations about the abuse of children and women by men with power in religious, business, political, and entertainment spheres have reinforced our awareness that evil is real and has to be faced. The recovery of ‘evil’ in our public discourse helps us to name certain actions and begin to deal with them in just and proper ways.

The lynching of an African-American man by the Ku Klux Klan, the slaughter of Jews by Nazis, or the sexual abuse of a child is not merely “bad” or even “criminal”. No, these are examples of evil, and calling them such helps us censor those who advocate for, defend, or perform such atrocities, while also arriving at just punishments for these terrible acts. To minimize evil behavior is to diminish justice and give cover to wickedness.

Whatever Happened to Sin?

I've noticed, however, that while 'evil' has gone mainstream, 'sin' remains a word banished to the back of the bus by the culturati. Many people who don’t mind using the word ‘evil’ feel uncomfortable with the word 'sin' and I suspect that this is because it signifies to them a kind of judgmentalism or prudishness that seems unfashionable or bigoted and repressive. I also suspect that there is much more to it than that.

While evil seems somewhat easy to recognize (as we tend to use the word), ‘sin’ remains the vocabulary of a distant land for many, a remote island where people have moved God from the periphery of existence to the center of their lives - an unsettling state of affairs for many. We tend to use evil to refer to violations against our fellow-humans—as the examples above indicate (though in reality, it goes much deeper than even those sociopathic horrors).

‘Sin’ reminds us all of God, while our current use of evil finds a way to exclude him. ‘Sin’ implies violations committed specifically against God, and that leaves our cultural gatekeepers troubled. Any talk-show host could speak of evil without fear of Twitter outrage leading to their cancellation, but speaking of sin would be a wholly different issue.

Holy Love

One way around this is to tone down the notion of sin; another way is to tone down the idea of God’s holiness in favor of God being “Love.” God’s love is holy and his holiness is loving, but for many, these attributes appear to be mutually exclusive. Starting from that misguided notion, many downplay anything that smacks of sin being an offense against God; after all, “God is love,” and love doesn’t get bent out of shape over offenses.

Now if a person’s view of God/god is that he/she/it doesn’t really care about sin, that violations of God’s will are no big deal, that “to err is human and to forgive is divine,” then they will always diminish the magnitude of sin—and at the same time diminish the high price sin extracts from us, the deep penalty sin incurs. But minimizing sin, in turn, diminishes the eternal nature of God’s justice, as well as the breadth of God’s mercy. Great sin can be met only by great justice or a great salvation; sin that isn’t so bad after all calls forth neither amazing grace nor fearful punishment. This ‘thin’ view of sin leads to a very thin view of God’s mercy.

With such a shallow view of sin, one can easily fall prey to giving cover for wickedness, not only excusing one’s own fallen condition and actions but, in the end, dismissing and/or diminishing the magnificence of Jesus and his loving sacrifice for us. The irony of arguing that since God is love, sin isn’t all that troublesome and forgiveness is not all that costly, is that it is exactly the love of God that is made less important by the attempt to exalt it. To exalt love, we must view sin clearly. 

At the Cross

That can only be done in the full light of a dark Friday afternoon two thousand years ago. On that day, an innocent man hung between heaven and earth on a cross, not for his offenses but for the sins of others, those who were slaves to sin, shackled to it and in need of a Redeemer who would come to liberate them. How terrible is sin, my sin? “Behold the man upon the cross, my sin upon his shoulders…” Sin is that horrid.

That man on the cross went further than sin, however; he also dealt with evil. He not only bore the just penalty of the sins committed by those he called his own but also conquered evil forces by his death, a victory confirmed when he rose from the dead. 

At the Cross of Christ, the justice of God and the love of God both meet, the first utterly satisfied and the latter compellingly demonstrated. At the Cross of Christ, we find not only the mercy that forgives our sin but the power that liberates us from it. At the Cross of Christ, we see not only the deliverance of the repentant but the destruction of darkness and find the assurance of its ultimate demolition. 

Evil in all of its manifold forms will not prevail. Nor will sin’s stain or shame. And all of this is true because the Cross will never lose its power. When we see evil and sin, let us also quickly cast our gaze on the Savior, Jesus Christ, who loved us to life not by saying, “It’s not all that bad” but by seeing these issues for what they are, meeting them head-on, and dealing with them in holy justice and power so he could welcome us with holy love and tender mercy.