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What’s the source of evil in the world today? If you break your mom’s favorite flower vase – the one given her by her grandmother – who’s to blame? Is it the corrupting influence of “Society” upon our children? Is all the evil we see caused by repressed sexual desires, as Freud would say? By the oppression of the ruling class, as Marx would say, or by the systemic oppression of one race against others, as Critical Rate Theorists today say? Is it all in our genes – a remnant of from Darwinian “survival of the fittest” strivings, as some evolutionists would say?
In his book, The Faith, Prison Fellowship founder Charles Colson says all these theories “treat human responsibility as an illusion. The underlying reason for this is their dismissal of God. Because they get God wrong, they also misunderstand human nature.”
In the beginning, God gave Adam and Eve free will to love, trust and obey Him (or not). That is the source of actual human responsibility. Genesis 3 records how Satan deceived Eve by questioning God’s Word (“Did God really say…”) and how he tempted her by appealing to her pride (“Wouldn’t you like to be just like God, knowing good from evil?”). Ezekiel 28 records how Satan himself, one of God’s angels, fell into sin from pride, arrogance and self-love. Indeed, pride goeth before the fall.
But having chosen to know evil, Adam and Eve immediately began seeking to avoid human responsibility for their actions. First, Adam blamed Eve (and God!), and then Eve blamed the Serpent. And we humans have been pointing the finger ever since – at everything and everyone except at our own human responsibility for our thoughts, our words and our deeds. Our pride tells us it’s always someone else’s fault, or society’s fault, or even God’s fault “for making me this way.” (Which God will tell you isn’t true.)
And even when we do honestly accept that something is our fault, what does our pride tell us to do? To “make it up” to somebody, as if we can make the credits balance the debits in some cosmic checkbook of justice. Once you break your mom’s favorite flower vase you can’t unbreak it. You can say you’re sorry and you can buy Mom another vase, but it’s not the same as it was before. It’s not the same as new. Even more, we can’t undo violence… or adultery… we can’t take back hurtful words once they leave our lips… even if we were to make restitution by returning stolen goods, we can’t remove the stain of having violated someone’s property or person.
But God can. And He did. He sent His only beloved Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but to redeem it. Jesus, the Messiah, came into this world to right all of the wrongs in this world by taking the blame for all of us upon Himself, in His innocent suffering and death upon a cross at the hands of violent and, yes, evil, humanity.
The Gospel of Mark records Jesus saying that the purpose of His laying down His life was to serve as a ransom for multitudes of people. By exchanging His innocence for our guilt, He balanced the cosmic checkbook of justice for all humanity.
At enormous cost to Himself, Jesus gave humanity another chance to exercise real human responsibility – to fear, love and trust in God afresh. His first words recorded in the Gospel of Mark invite us to “repent and believe in the gospel.” We do this by confessing to God that we have sinned in thought, word and deed, and by trusting in His gospel promise of forgiveness through Christ. To those who believe, the cross of Jesus is God’s power to make all things new.