Quotes about Evil

The myth of progress fails because it doesn't in fact work; because it would never solve evil retrospectively; and because it underestimates the nature and power of evil itself and thus fails to see the vital importance of the cross, God's no to evil, which then opens the door to his yes to creation.

Evil then consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honor elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them.

Saul the zealot had expected a Messiah to defeat the pagan hordes. Paul the Apostle believed that the Messiah had defeated the dark powers that stood behind all evil.

Forgiveness doesn't mean that we don't take evil seriously after all; it means that we do.

And—perhaps the most pressing question of all—if these "powers" have been defeated, why does evil still appear to carry on as before, to reign unchecked? Did anything actually happen on the cross that made a real difference in the world, and if so what account can we give of it?

In Christian theology it is God who deals with evil, and he does this on the cross.

The voice of Satan is often hard to recognise precisely because it appears so frequently as the voice of common sense, of prudence, of reason.

Our father in heaven, May your name be honoured 10May your kingdom come May your will be done As in heaven, so on earth. 11 Give us today the bread we need now; 12And forgive us the things we owe, As we too have forgiven what was owed to us. 13Don't bring us into the great Trial, But rescue us from evil. 14

God grant us grace to be so filled with that love that we may work in our own day with mature, Christian, sober intelligence to address the problem of evil, to implement the victory achieved on the cross, and to be agents, heralds, and living embodiments of that new creation in which the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

We cannot and must not soften the blow; we cannot and must not pretend that evil isn't that bad after all.

Jesus had been raised from the dead; therefore, he really was Israel's Messiah; therefore his death really was the new Passover; his death really had dealt with the sins that had caused "exile" in the first place; and this had been accomplished by Jesus's sharing and bearing the full weight of evil, and doing so alone. In his suffering and death, "Sin" was condemned. The darkest of dark powers was defeated, and its captives were set free.

As we shall see, it is only when we take fully into account the gospel writers' belief that Jesus was involved in the ultimate battle against the ultimate forces of evil that we can begin to see how their combination of kingdom and cross—and, looking wider, of incarnation, kingdom, cross, and resurrection—makes sense.