What Does Evil Look Like?

“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Genesis 6:5

What does evil look like? Maybe, like the leader of a country which executed its own citizens in six different cities as a nationwide event in a single day for merely possessing a Bible? Perhaps, a religion that convinces its followers to suicide bomb office towers and murder thousands? Maybe, it looks like the pimp who forces a woman to have sex with strange men by intimidation or threats against her family or children? Maybe, just maybe, it looks like a man whose heart knows what is right and does not do it. Maybe, evil looks like the man who stares back at me in the mirror.

In God’s eyes, all men are wicked, and the wickedness is rooted in the heart. It is there that God looks and this is what He sees:

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.” Jeremiah 17:9-10

And so, to God, we all are evil because our hearts are bent toward self. If evil were to have a face, it would most definitely be our own, because we are inherently selfish due to Sin. Selfishness is the beginning of all evil, for that was the very first sin, from Adam in the garden. He chose himself and his desires toward Eve and wanting what she then had, having tasted the apple first, over the commands of God. Because of his selfishness, Sin was brought into the world.

Sin is that bend which we all have in our hearts to serve our own needs, our own wants and desires. And inevitably, serving ourselves leads to a dead end, because God said, he would give man according to his ways and the fruit of his doing. If we serve ourselves, God will step back and allow us to do that, because that is the fruit of our ways – more self, and more self serving, and more selfishness. Self, self, self…

So, if we truly want to see evil, we need to start in our own bathroom, standing before the mirror.

“As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:” Romans 3:10

“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;” Romans 3:23

All men are evil. It is only God Who is holy, and for us to be found as righteous, made new and transformed, we need Him, in the Person of the Son, Jesus Christ, and what He did on the Cross at Mount Calvary. Without Jesus, I am nothing but a sinner, evil to the core. But with Jesus, I am still a sinner, but I am saved by grace.

SDG

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/11/15/daily-prompt-evil/