The Beautiful Side of Evil
Have you ever thought about the fact that the “good” on the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” was just as deadly as the “evil”? Indeed, without its good the tree would have lost its allure and ceased from posing a threat to anyone. Not even the subtle serpent could have enticed someone to sin against God by picking foul fruit from a repulsive tree for their dining pleasure. To be deadly the tree had to be desirable and to be desirable it had to at least appear to be good (Genesis 3:6).
There is always a beautiful side of evil. Were it not so, evil could not flourish. Without its attractive side, evil would have no carrot to dangle in front of our noses nor any cover to hide its hideous face. It is the promise of sin’s short season of pleasure that draws us to it during our winters of discontent and it is the good deeds that evil dons to conceal its dark nature that blinds us to its malignance.
We mustn’t forget that Satan—the evil one—was “perfect in beauty” before his fall (Ezekiel 28:12). Furthermore, he has been masquerading ever since as “an angel of light.” (2 Corinthians 11:14). He never appears with horns, pointed tail, and a pitchfork. You’ll never see him as the HIV virus, at least not until its too late, but only as the ultimate erotic experience. He’ll appear as the utopia of National Socialism, never as the gas chambers of Auschwitz. He’ll present himself as a charitable working religion, never as “another gospel” deceiving the masses into Christless graves and Christless eternities at the forfeiture of their immortal souls (Galatians 1:6-7).
I dare say that the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” bore mostly “good” and very little “evil”; otherwise, it would have been seen for the hangman’s tree that it was. Did you know that the rat poison Decon is made with a whole lot of good grain and only a little pinch of poison? It’s the good grain that lures the rat in, but the pinch of poison that does him in. Likewise, it’s all the truth around the lie that lures us in, but the lie at the core that does us in. It’s the false prophet’s humanitarianism and strewed Scripture references that convince us that he is a preacher of the gospel, but it’s his subtle hint of other possible paths to God that undermines the gospel and corrupts our faith.
The mythical belief that we can define good for ourselves and then do it on our own has always been sin’s big draw. Sinners convince themselves that right is wrong—preaching the gospel is intolerant—and wrong is right—all religions are good. Then, they proceed to act upon their perceptions with absolute certainty that they are justified in their actions. It is this attempted usurpation of God’s place as the lone arbiter of good and evil and the sole source of all good that serves as the very essence of all sin; it is also the reason God threw Lucifer out of Heaven and Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.
Such foolhardiness on the sinner’s part is disproved by our Savior’s insistence that “there is none good but...God” (Mark 10:18). Since God alone is good and there is no good apart from God, what hope is there of us doing anything good independent of God? Perhaps, sin is best defined as independence from God. As the Apostle Paul put it, “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Romans 14:23). Whatever is done by us in self-reliance is no good, no matter how highly we think of it or how hard we worked to accomplish it. Only what is done by God through us as we rely upon Him will stand the test of time and eternity. All the other fruits of our labor should have never been picked by us in the first place!
Don Walton
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