Is there such a thing as a necessary evil?

It is easy to extol and natural to justify whatever religious system we have been born and bred in; but this is the order of the flesh, not of the Spirit. Neither is it wise nor safe to take for granted or to evade so serious a question, the glory of the Lord being concerned in the matter. What I desire for myself and for God's people, if it please Him to give it the least weight in the hearts and consciences of any, is, that we may feel more deeply the common sin of the Church, of that which here below bears the name of Christ, that we may confess it to God and to one another, and that we may cease from known evil through His grace, whatever may be the sacrifice. May we be kept from the common but unholy maxim of choosing the lesser of two evils, a procedure on which God never put His seal, and which faith never can accept.

Some may set up the plea that, their object being the glory of God in the salvation of souls, the manner or the means becomes an indifferent thing. Is not this too like the petulant excuse of the sinner in Romans 3? "If the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto His glory, why am I also judged a sinner?" Is this ground for mortal man to take? It is indeed the old fallacy of Satan, "Let us do evil that good may come."

David thus thinks that conspiracy can justify conspiracy, and, in the war that has begun, deceit may rightly counterwork deceit. Evil with a good end will thus become good; or at least we may do it that good may come: a conclusion which the apostle declares to subject to just judgment those who hold it. Yet it is still maintained under all the light of Christianity, and practically followed by how many in how many forms! This principle is one that David has himself acted on, as we remember, in the old days of Philistine refuge; and these things, if not judged, may easily revive after a long time of dormancy.

And He urges that if the right eye or hand cause men to stumble, it were better to cut them off and go on maimed through life, than to preserve these and go with a whole body into hell. Better sacrifice what might seem most necessary than give oneself up to the sure penalty of sin. Clearly no asceticism or self mutilation is intended by such an injunction; but men excuse on the plea of necessity what they find to be a constant provocative of sin. God's law admits no pretext of the kind.

Any and all disobedience is serious in God’s sight. However, in practice, are we sometimes ready to excuse certain acts of wilfulness? In the first situation referred to above, it might be said that Saul was in unusual and testing circumstances (an impending battle, with the people fearful and fleeing). The natural mind might also describe the state of affairs as never-to-be-repeated, and excuse Saul’s carrying out the sacrifice as a one-off. Sad to say, one sometimes hears believers in comparable settings repeat, in effect, the world’s expression: ‘the heart was in the right place’. Similar lines of reasonings may come to mind in connection with the second incident as well.

"We must not imagine things to be unworthy of God, because they do not commend themselves to us. God does not dispense with the moral law, because the moral law has its source in the mind of God Himself. To dispense with it would mean to contradict Himself. But God, who is absolute Lord of all things which He made, may, at His sovereign will, dispose of the lives or things which He created. Thus, as sovereign judge, He commanded the lives of the Canaanites to be taken by Israel, as, in His ordinary providence, He has ordained that the magistrate should not bear the sword in vain, but has made him His minister, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. So, again, He, whose are all things, willed to repay to the Israelites their hard and unjust servitude by commanding them to spoil the Egyptians. He, who created marriage, commanded to Hosea whom he should marry. The prophet was not defiled by taking as his lawful wife, at God's bidding, one defiled, however hard a thing this was."

If sin was needful to temptation, then would sin be justified in every temptation we were in, for we could not, they say, be tempted without it. Now temptation coming from an enemy without, and sin being needful to this, it is justified if we are so tempted. This is exactly what it is not. "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man" — a human temptation — and God is faithful, who "will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it."

But then there was another want. How are we to have our communion restored if broken by defilement? In fact, we know that the children of God are in the circumstances of great temptation and trial, and that they have not only a tempter without, but a nature within which would constantly drag them into sin. I do not mean that there is any necessity for a child of God to fail: there is no need for it, nor does God in any way tempt to evil. On the contrary, he who has found Christ, and yet fails in the way of sin, is always inexcusable. To allow the thought that God's providence has to do with this, is scarce short of blasphemy. Even, if unhappily wrong, let us beware of adding to it the aggravation of throwing it upon God, and of excusing ourselves at His cost.

We can never give the least justification to sin and say, "the flesh is in us, and we could not help it;" for "there hath no temptation taken us but such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not suffer us to be tempted above that we are able, but will with the temptation also make a way of escape that we may be able to bear it." The theory of the Christian is this - the flesh should never be discovered but in the presence of God, where it is always in the presence of grace and of holiness too.

We never have any excuse for any sin of act or thought, because Christ's grace is sufficient for us, and God is faithful not to suffer us to be tempted above that which we are able to bear.