What is the definition of evil?

In its fruits, however multiform, evil is, in its essential principle, absolutely one. The creature leaving the creature place — setting itself up in independence of God: — this is its character at bottom ever. Thus the light is darkened with us, and the terrible slavery to a depraved will results. We need not, therefore, be at a loss as to what Chushan-rishathaim represents. The first step on the downward path to ruin is always the same.

Here we have the positive activity of evil, the actual energy of self-will. For, be it remembered, sin is doing our own will in whatever line that will may travel, whatever form it may assume. It may present itself in the shape of the grossest moral depravity or it may array itself in the garb of a cultivated and refined taste, but it is self-will all the while, and self-will is sin. It may be only like the acorn, the mere seed, but the acorn contains the wide spreading oak. Thus the heart of the newly born infant is a little seed-plot in which may be found the germ of every sin that ever was committed in the world. True, each seed may not germinate or bring forth fruit, but the seed is there and only needs circumstances or influences to unfold it.

The whole subsequent condition of man is involved in this — he has the knowledge of good and evil, and he knows too the exercise of his own will, but that is, in the nature of it, as manifested from the first, invariably directed towards evil. It is evil which he wishes to do, contrary to the good which God wishes him to do. If he never wished to do anything but good, he would have no will apart from God's will and would thus be sinless.

Every unconverted person is characterized and controlled by an evil nature, which Scripture calls "sin," and which is nothing less than "a will with a way," ever acting contrary to God.

But what is wickedness? we may well inquire. The word for "wicked" in Greek is "poneros" and signifies the active exercise of corrupt and unruly desires, not just a single act, but a positive injurious activity of evil, a living in sin. Generally speaking, a wicked person is one who is morally bad and evil in principle and practice. He is characterized by either violence or corruption as in the days of Noah (see Gen. 6:5, 11-13) and is full of bitterness and enmity and viciously bent on doing harm or evil. Wickedness is more a course of conduct than a single act of wrong. It is evidenced by a persistent course of evil in which the will is actively engaged.

It is an awful display of human character that is exposed by the Divine light of life and truth. Satan, who had nothing in the Son of God, is in full possession of the world. It is he who stirs men's hearts to lift rebellious tongues and hands against all truth; for he is the prince and director of this world, whose authorities combined to crucify the Lord of glory. The course and effects of human evil are varied and tremendous, but its principle is simple. If man be not in willing subjection to God, he must (in imagination and desire) be above Him. The lusts of their father filled the hearts of the enemies of Jesus (John 8:44); but he first taught sin to man by tempting him to rise, by inspiring him with the desire to have and to enjoy, in independence and despite of God. If human conduct has another source or motive than the Divine will, it is virtually atheism. It is that deep revolt of heart for which no cure exists in nature, and which grace alone can quell and turn to perfect and abiding peace, through the once made reconciliation of the cross.

Mankind is dominated by a triple alliance of evil — the world, the flesh, and the devil. The first is that organized system of things produced as the fruit of human thought and activity, without God and in opposition to Him. The second is that corrupt nature, inherent in man as a fallen creature, which finds expression in the world, and is quite at home there. The last is the mighty personage, the very source and originator of evil itself. The world as an elaborate system has been built up by men, but unknown to them the inspiring genius of its developments has been the devil, and he controls the machine thus created. He is the god and prince of this world (see 2 Cor. 4:4; John 12:31).

There are two forms in which sin, or the activity of man's will, manifests itself — violence and corruption. This was seen at the time of the deluge. The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. Satan is a liar and murderer. In man, corrupt lusts are even a more abundant source of evil.

“By one man sin entered into the world.” Innocence existed in one man — Adam. God made Adam free from evil; without the knowledge of sin. This was the starting point of man's existence upon earth — a life in its moral characteristics totally distinct from our present life. But Adam preferring disobedience to obedience, and exercising his will, his nature became evil, and thereupon the character of the fountain of human life became changed. Innocence disappeared from the earth, and sin entered the world. This is the origin of our sinful nature which we received through our parents, and with which we were born. We trace the river from this present day to the past generation — we follow it back further and further till we reach its source — and we find that every age has produced a nature which is sinful.

But evil never came from God — only from the creature once innocent, now fallen, that kept not his first estate, but chose to do his own will and have his own way. An angel did this first. Man was misled by him who, straying and exalting himself, beguiled others both in heaven and on earth. That creature is called Satan — the Devil. All efforts to get rid of this fact have proved utterly vain, so much so that the boasted lights of antiquity fell consequently into one or other of these notions: either that God is everything, which denies sin; or, secondly, that there is no such being as God at all; while both cases led to worshipping ever so many false gods. Witness now the two greatest philosophers of Greece who have exercised perhaps the largest and most enduring influence over civilised men outside the Bible — the one the head of Pantheism, the other of Atheism. There is what man's thought ends in when it is logically carried out. Man in his fallen estate may reason God away; yet he excludes God, not from his conscience, but in his reason; for at the bottom of the man's heart who does so there is the uneasy feeling that what he sees around him did not grow like a potato — least of all, he himself and his fellows. He feels that, though fallen, he is a moral being who will have to give an account of his action; and to whom but to God — the One who made him and all things?