What is evil?

The spirit of obedience is the great secret of all godliness. The spring of all evil from the beginning has been independence of will. Obedience is the only rightful state of the creature, or God would cease to be supreme — would cease to be God. Where there is independence, there there is always sin. This rule, if remembered, would wonderfully help us in guiding our conduct.

All that moves in the sphere of man's will is sin. Christianity pronounces the assertion of its exercise to be the principle of sin. We are sanctified unto obedience (1 Peter 1:2): the essence of sanctification is the having no will of our own.

The one Greek word translated by the phrase "transgression of the law" really means "lawlessness," and is so translated in other Versions. The verse, then, should run thus, "Whosoever commits sin practises lawlessness; for sin is lawlessness."

What, then, is lawlessness? It is simply the refusal of all rule, the throwing off of all divine restraint. The assertion of man's will in defiance of God's. Sin is just that. Such was the course to which Adam committed himself in eating the forbidden fruit. How bitter the results!

"Sin" is that which at the fall of Adam gained an entrance into the world. Just as the poison of a snake, once injected into a man's body, will run through his whole system doing its deadly work, so sin — the virus of that old serpent the devil — has permeated man's moral being to his ruin. The result of this is "all have sinned." "Sins," of thought, word, or act, whether of omission or commission, are chargeable to each of us.

"Sin," then, is the root principle, "sins" the shameful fruits that spring therefrom.

From the preceding verses we learn what the Spirit of God means by sin, for we read, in v. 4, "sin is lawlessness." The essence of sin is doing one's own will without reference to God or man. The world around is increasingly marked by lawlessness — everyone doing that which is right in his own eyes.

How then are we to escape the evil principle of lawlessness, or self-will? Only by abiding in Christ; for the Apostle says, "Whosoever abides in Him sins not." Only as we are held under the influence of the One who could say, "I come … not to do mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me," shall we escape the self-will that is the very essence of sin.

Thus the way of disobedience was seductively dressed up as the illuminated highway to enlarged knowledge and vastly increased importance. In truth it proved to be a dark and depressing road to utter disaster. Knowledge of good and evil there would be, but without power to do the good or to avoid the evil. Whoever commits sin becomes the slave of sin, as our Lord said so emphatically in John 8:34.

It was just pure defiance of God's command, just that lawlessness which is sin, according to the correct translation of 1 John 3:4.

It has been well said that whilst by his act of disobedience man gained the knowledge of good and evil, with that knowledge he only learned how prone he was to evil and how impossible it was to do good.

Holiness in us (while it is by its nature separation from evil) is just having God, the Holy One, who is love too, the object, centre, and spring of our affections. He makes us partakers of His holiness (for He is essentially separate from all evil, which He knows as God, though as His contrary).

Dependence looks up, and is exalted above itself. Independence must look down (for it cannot in a creature be filled with itself) and is degraded. Dependence is true exaltation in a creature when the object of it is right. The primeval state of man was not holiness, in the proper sense of it, because evil was not known. It was not a divine (but it was a blessed creation) state; it was innocence. But this was lost in the assertion of independence.

Evil exists. The world is lying in wickedness, and the God of unity is the Holy God. Separation therefore, separation from evil, becomes the necessary and sole basis and principle … of unity. For God must be the centre and power of that unity, and evil exists: and from that corruption they must be separate who are to be in God's unity; for He can have no union with evil.

Separation from evil is a fundamental principle of the divine nature.

I am sure that the enemy is very busy, as well as the evil heart within. What you need is thorough deliverance from yourself, that is, the flesh.

When there is no will, such thoughts will be left, turned aside from, and treated as "not I." … Oh that you had grace to leave "the flesh" unrecognised and disowned, and to pass on conscious that it is always there and will be in you to the end.

The sins that we Christians have to deplore and confess are not little isolated bits of evil foreign to us, inserted somehow into our lives by the devil. Their cause lies much deeper. They spring as fruit out of that which is within us. Sin is within us.