Good and Evil

Being a youth pastor, I'm often faced with questions about the reality of faith and religion. Questions about the inconsistencies of Christians, questions about heaven and hell, and the occasional conversation about faith in action. Oh, that we had more conversations about that!

Through these conversations I've found that it can be quite difficult to explain the realities wrapped up in these issues without first establishing a common foundation of belief from which to launch such discussions. One of these foundational beliefs that I find most people take for granted is the mere existence of Good and Evil. We say we believe in their existence, but most of the time what people really believe is that good things happen and bad things happen. So few people want to ponder the reality that Good and Evil exist with or without the corresponding actions that we associate with them.

This issue has recently become even more obvious to me through a conversation with a young man at my home the other night. He asked me, "If sin had not yet been committed in the world, how was sin introduced then? I mean...if they didn't even know what sin was, how did they know how to commit sin? I know they were "tempted", but it doesn't make sense to me." It was after he explained his thoughts further that it hit me...

We say we believe in evil, but we mostly just believe in sin...

What we fail to want to think about is that evil, pure unadulterated evil, EXISTS. It exists with or without actions. It exists in a spiritual world that we cannot see. It existed before the first act of sin, and although we're not quite sure how this world will play out, I'm quite sure that evil will continue to exist after all is said and done. That final existence is a place most people call hell.

True hell, to me, is not necessarily the existence of evil, but the absence of good. Conversely, true heaven is not the existence of good, but the absence of evil. Not that I know what heaven will be like, but to me heaven will not be complete until evil is extinguished and defeated.