According to the account in Genesis 3, all creation as been at war since evil turned everything upside-down until Jesus came to restore it. His victory over evil comes about in an unexpected way; He came as a helpless infant, healed, forgave and, in the end, executed as a criminal. Hardly a way to fight a war, one might say.
But he didn’t just fight, he won. And his apparently upside-down way was the only way to challenge evil, because evil is a “no-thing”. Evil is an absence of the good. Evil is related to the good in the same way that a shadow is related to a light; evil is the absence of good as shadow is absence of light. Because of this, the “fight” against evil is peculiar. Ask yourself, how do you “fight” a shadow? You’ve already figured it out; not with boxing gloves, but with light.
But we know that there is more to evil than just an empty hole which can be filled with a random happy thought. Evil is not a physical thing but we know it carries physical consequences that cause real hurt to real people: abuse, depression and anxiety, inflation, wars, poverty and polarization, to name a few. Science, while useful to mitigate these manifestations, does not get to their root cause. How does a non-physical absence cause such havoc in the world?
Such havoc arises from human free will which has the unique capacity to reject God. Christian tradition speaks of the greatest and mightiest angel as being cast down from heaven for refusing obedience to God, for wanting to be equal with God. This fallen angel, Satan, appears in the creation story in Genesis 3, tempting our earliest ancestors to violate their Creator’s ban on eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil by promising them that they “will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5).
Think about it; they are already God-like in the way God intended for them when he created them “in his own image” (Gen 1:26). What is Satan saying when he promises them, “you will be like God”? He is promising them that they will each became little gods, each creating and then living in their own individual, tidy little worlds, soon to be at odds with all of the other tidy little worlds and life would be really, really ugly. Satan didn’t mention that last part. Oops.
Well, in each of these tidy little worlds in which each ruled as a little god, their Creator became an invader so that they promptly “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen 3:8). They gave up their intimate communion with God and were cast out of the Garden of Eden.
Arrogant pride is a deep root cause of evil in our world; rejecting God’s global and holistic perspective to be replaced with narrow little worlds where the ego is king. Our creativity is wonderful and can do astonishing things, but, intentionally or not, our hubris ends up twisting God’s good creation into unpleasantness and even destruction. A proper desire to live long and well becomes an obsessive and destructive fearfulness about our health. The goodness of love can be destroyed by manipulation and deceit. A legitimate desire for comfort is corrupted into cravings for ever more luxuries that ultimately harm us and our planet.
Jesus won this struggle; he took this human arrogant pride and turned it utterly upside-down with his humility. This seems so very backwards to us and we don’t like it one bit. Stay tuned for Round Two in the No-Thing Fight: humility as the cure for evil