This the the 5th and final sermon in a series on evil. Some will ask, “Worth, why did you decide to talk about evil in the first place?” Because, as Carl Jung observed, “Most people are hopelessly unconscious of evil.” If we remain unconscious of evil and our part in it, we will not be able to name the evil, unmask the evil, or stand against the evil. That would be tragic. As Edmund Burke has said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good (people) do nothing.”

Most people are hopelessly unconscious of evil, but the human authors of the Bible, inspired by the Holy Spirit, are not most people. They warn against evil in many forms.

Primarily, the human authors of the Bible warn agains the evil of human sin. Sin is the transgression of the Law of God. God laid down the Law through his servant Moses to protect us from ourselves and from one another. Therefore sin is anything that we do, or fail to do by which we hurt ourselves or another. That said, do not get the idea that sin is just the action or inaction of individuals. In Romans 3:9 St. Paul says that all the people in the world (both Jews and Gentiles) are under the power of sin. Sin’s power consist in part in its ability to deceive us. Sin appears to us in the form of something that is infinitely desirable, and then after it lays hold on us, it reveals itself as something that is infinitely nefarious. The Japanese have a saying about their powerful drink, Saki:

First, a man takes a drink.

Then the drink takes a drink.

Then the drink takes a man.

Likewise, a man chooses sin, and then sin makes choices for him that he would never have made for himself.

Now all of us are guilt of sin. The scripture says, “None is righteousness, no not one. No one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together we have gone wrong.” What then is our fate?

In his book, “God’s Search for Man,” Abraham Heschel relates how the ancient rabbis sought to determine the fate of sinners like you and me. First they went to wisdom and asked,“What should be the punishment of a sinner?” Wisdom said: “Misfortune pursues sinners.” That is from Proverbs 13:21. Then the rabbis put the same question to the prophets saying, “What should be the punishment of a sinner?” And the prophets said: “The soul that sins shall die.” That is from Ezekiel 18:4. Then the rabbis put the same question to the Holy One of Israel, blessed be He, saying, “What should be the punishment of a sinner?” And the Holy One said, “Let the sinner repent, and he will be atoned for.” In other words, God says, “Let the sinner repent, and I will restore our fellowship. He will again belong to my people. She will again be my daughter.” In Mark 1:5 Jesus began his public ministry saying, “Repent and believe the gospel for the kingdom of God is at hand.” It was William Jennings Bryan who said:

“When a man repents toward his neighbor, he repents
up a slippery slope. When a man repents toward himself,
he repents into the mouth of a raging lion. When a man
repents toward God, he repents toward the source of
all love and goodness.”

In Jesus Christ, God made atonement for the sins of the world! (Romans 3:25 NIV)

The Bible speaks of the human evil we call sin, but it also speaks of non-human forms of evil.

It speaks of Idols and demons. The idol is an expression of evil in the outside world. A demon is an expression of evil which a human being has taken into him or her self. Wherein lies their power? The prophet Jeremiah compared idols to a scarecrow in a cucumber field. It cannot talk, it cannot walk, and it has to be carried everywhere it goes. It can do us no harm, and it certainly can do us no good. Likewise, in 1st Corinthians 8:4 St. Paul says that an idol has no real existence. That said, the Paul would be the first to warn that if we give anyone or anything power over our lives, we have become slaves of that person or thing. One of the most horrible examples of giving an idol power over a human life is found in Psalm 106. There we read that the children of Israel mingled with the nations, and learned their practices, and served their idols, and were snared by them, so that they even sacrificed their sons and daughters to the demons. Today we we laugh at the idols of the ancient world, then we invent and serve our own. Anything that breaks up our families and destroys our children is an idol for us. Anything that separates us from God and from one another is an idol to us.

The Bible also speaks of the principalities and powers. We read in Colossians 1 how God created the powers in Christ. Thus they possess potential for great good. That said, we saw how the powers exist in the matrix of sin that is this world. Thus they possess potential for great evil. In Ephesians 6 the apostle defines the principalities and powers as “the world rulers of this present darkness, the spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places.” The Bible speaks of the heavenly powers as “out there” inhabiting the space between earth and God’s heaven. They exist as the archetypes of worldly powers. The Bible also speaks of the concrete manifestations of the powers. It speaks of Herod, and Caesar, and Rome, and Babylon. William Stringfellow, a lawyer who made an extensive study of the principalities and powers said that the powers include: “all governments, all nations, all corporations, all institutions, all ideologies, all symbols, all idols and the like.”

The powers rise up out of our human society, yet they have characteristics human beings lack, and lack at least one characteristic that human beings have. In his book, “What Ever Became of Sin,” Karl Menninger, founder of the world famous Menninger clinic, compares one of the powers, the corporation, to human beings. He says that is many ways a corporation is just like us. Like us a corporation is born. It thinks, and plans, and works, and does all the things that human beings do. Then, eventually, it dies. A corporation, like all powers, may, or may not, survive the individuals that created it. Menninger says that corporations lack at least one characteristic that human beings have. Human beings have a conscience, but corporations do not.

Writing more than a century before Menninger, Henry David Throeau said, “A corporation has no conscience, yet the members of a corporations board do have a conscience.” That sounds good in principal; but in practice, it sometimes fails. In his book, “Moral Man and Immoral Society,” Reinhold Niebuhr says that it is possible to take any number of highly moral individuals, and put them together in a group, and the group may still prove itself immoral. He says the problem consist in this: An individual can sacrifice him or herself for the common good. Ordinarily, a group cannot, for the first rule of the group is to survive. Therefore most groups lack the capacity to sacrifice themselves for the common good. Let me give you an example. It matters not how much money the governments of this world fine Volkswagen for the diesel scandal, Volkswagen will do its best to survive as a corporation.

The corporation has yet another law that works against morality and the common good. The corporation exist to make a profit, and the corporation sometimes sacrifices its morality for the sake of profit. Therefore, in the 1970’s Volkswagen covered up the news that, when a VW Beetle was hit from the rear, the front-seat anchors frequently broke, throwing the driver and passenger against the rear shelf, causing serious injuries that often resulted in paralysis or death. Likewise, in the same decade, Ford covered up the news that, when a Ford Pinto was hit from the rear, the poorly located gas tank frequently exploded, condemning the passengers of the car to a fiery death. I am not picking on VW and Ford, I have owned both with great satisfaction. Elayne and I drove a VW Beetle from San Diego, CA to Morehead, NC in three days. We loved that little car. And some of you will remember that the late Ray Troutman often accused me of thinking that a1966 Ford F100 truck that I once owned was the center of the universe. I am not picking on VW and Ford, I am pointing out that all corporations have a similar weakness. The corporation like all the powers was created in Christ, and posses the potential for great good, as human beings work together for the common good. Yet, because they exist in the matrix of temptation and sin that is this world, those who serve them, or own shares in them, must exercise a constant vigilance to see that they act morally.

The Bible also speaks of the ultimate evil which it names Satan, also known as, the devil, aka, the accuser, aka the enemy, aka the prince of the powers of the air, aka the prince of demons, aka the deceiver of the whole earth. The Bible describes Satan in language that is progressively frightening. The author of Revelation refers to Satan as that ancient serpent. St. Peter says that our adversary the devil prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. St. Paul says that Satan masquerades as an angel of light. When Peter tried to stop Jesus from going to Jerusalem to suffer and die, Jesus looked at his disciple and friend, and said, “Get behind me Satan, for you are not on the side of God, but of men.”

Now, as I draw this series to a close, let me point out three things I would have you to remember.

First, I would have you remember our rational for believing in the devil. C.S. Lewis said that to believe in the devil is to believe that evil is greater than the sum total of its parts. I believe that. Emil Brunner said that to believe in the devil is to believe that the possibilities of evil are not exhausted by purely human evil. I believe that. Yet, I do not believe that the devil is a person like God is a person. God is the Creator, the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. He is before all things, and in him, all things whole together. The devil is a parasite, he cannot exist apart from the creation. In the Bible his beginning and ending are closely tied with the beginning and ending of the human race on this planet. Indeed, apart from his involvement with the human race, the devil has no power in the world. It is only through us that Satan haunts the of the matrix of human sin, and turns this world into a toxic dump. I think it is interesting that in the book of Revelation, it is after the fall that Babylon, aka Rome, that the land on which the city one stood is called a dwelling place of demons, the haunt of every foul spirit. (Revelations 18:2)

Second, I would have you to remember that God is the source of goodness and the order that flows from it, while Satan exist in a matrix of evil and the chaos which flows from it.

In the Bible the One God reveals God’s Self with three persona, or faces: The face of the Father, the face of the Son, and the face of the Holy Spirit. Theologians say that, in speaking of God, we must be careful not to divide the essence of the one God, nor confuse the faces. That said, the Triune God works in perfect harmon with God’s Self to bring all the people and all powers under the sway of the kingdom of God. People will be redeemed by God, and so will the powers. Thus in Revelation 21, when the New Jerusalem has come down from above, and God has established God’s Self therein as the Light that shines so bright that no sun is necessary, then the kings of the nations are free to come into the city to bask in the eternal light and blessing that is God. Meanwhile “nothing unclean shall enter (the city).” (Rev. 21:27)

God is One, and, in a sense, evil is one too. It is impossible to speak of demons without speaking of the prince of demons, or to speak of the powers without speaking of the prince of the powers of the air. Evil presents a united front, yet evil exist in confusion, and all the evil powers are in constant competition with one another. There may be some honor among thieves, but eventually thieves, and the powers, bite and devour one another, for it is in their nature. Thus, in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, God frequently uses one earthly power to admonish and punish another. The theme of the Bible is “the LORD God Omnipotent Reigns, and the LORD God will establish righteousness and justice in the world.”

Finally, above all, I would have you to remember that God has already won the war against evil.

Therefore, in Colossians 2:15, we read that God disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in Jesus Christ and in his cross.

The cross itself is a power. In 1st Corinthians 1 chapter 1, St. Paul says that the cross of Christ is a stumbling block to the Jews, and folly to the Gentiles, but to those of us who are being saved, both Jews and Gentiles, it is the power and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than me, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

On the cross, Jesus won the war against evil by exposing it. Evil did its worst, and God did His best. The last power available to evil is the power of death (Hebrews 2:14, etc.), but not even death could stop God’s purpose. The cross is not the bad end of a good man, it is the road traveled once for all by our now victorious savior. In the death and resurrection of Jesus God won the decisive battle against evil, and the outcome of the war is certain. In the meantime, we continue to contend, not against flesh and blood, for God loves all flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness, against the prince of the powers of the air that is even now at work in the children of disobedience.

It was Oscar Cullman, the great 20th century New Testament scholar, who said, “The devil is bound, but with a long rope.” Because the battle rages on, the powers of evil can still do us harm. Any one of us may be among those who die in the war against terror. Any one of us could be killed, or crippled by a faulty airbag, or by a rapidly evolving virus brought into this country by a drug smuggler. Anyone of us could suffer and die long before his or her time. This does not mean that we are beaten. We cannot be beaten because we belong to him who suffered, and died, then rose again. As the Apostle writes:

35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36 As it is written, “For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Finis

It was Karl Jung who said that most of us are hopelessly unconscious of evil. We have seen the the human authors of the Bible are not most people. They warn us against evil in many forms.

The warn against the evil of human sin. Sin is the transgression of God’s law. God laid down the law through his servant Moses to protect us from ourselves and from one another. Therefore sin is anything we do, or fail to do, by which we hurt ourselves are another. Today, few of us would say, “The devil made me do it.” But deep down in our hearts we sometimes believe it to be so. We excuse ourselves for offenses against our neighbors that would have made our parents blush with shame. Whatever we say about the various forms of evil in this series, nothing excuses us from the choices we make. It was a 19th Century Anglican clergyman, Bishop Beckwaith who said:

Plant a thought and reap a word;
plant a word and reap an action;
plant an action and reap a habit;
plant a habit and reap a character;
plant a character and reap a destiny.

We make our choices, and our choices make us.

The human authors of the Bible also warn against Satan, aka “the devil,” aka “the prince of the powers of the air,” aka “the prince of demons.” The great Oxford professor of English Literature, C.S. Lewis, said that to believe in the devil is to believe that evil is greater than the sum total of its parts. I believe that. I do not believe that the devil is a person, like God is a person. God is the creator, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. The devil is a parasite. He exist for a little while, in the anxious middle. In the Bible, Satan’s beginning andending is tied to the human race.

The human authors of the Bible also speak of the principalities and powers, which Ephesians 6 defines as, “the world leaders of this present darkness, the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the airy spaces.” In Colossians 1 we read that God created the powers in Christ. Therefore they possess potential for great good. However, since the powers exist in the matrix of sin that is this world, they also possess potential for great evil. Thus, God created the power we call “government” so that human beings could live together and work for the common good. At its best the United States is a benevolent power, for it is a government “of the people, and by the people, and for the people.” We are not always at our best, but even our worst is better than the governments headed by people like Idi Amin, Kim Jong Il , Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin and the like.

Finally the human authors of the Bible speak of the idols and demons. Idolatry is the major sin spoken against by Israel’s four major and twelve minor Prophets. Psalm 106 idols and demons together. Therein we read:

35 …(the people of Israel) mingled with the nations and learned to do as they did. 36 They served their idols, which became a snare to them. 37 They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; 38 they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood.

The New Testament also speaks of idols and demons. In 1st Corinthians 8:4, St. Paul says that the members of the church in Corinth know that “an idol has no real existence,” and “there is no God but one.” However, Paul always takes idolatry seriously. In Romans 1 he blames idolatry for the wrath of God that is already being revealed against all ungodliness and wickedness of humankind. An idol may be as dumb as a post. It may be like a scarecrow in a cucumber field in that it cannot talk, and it cannot walk, it has to be carried wherever it goes. An idol cannot hurt us, and it cannot help us. (Jeremiah 10) However, if we worship and serve a dumb idol that idol has power over us. Anything we worship and serve has power over us. And, conversely, anything we give power over us, we worship and serve, whether we admit it or not.

Now what about demons? The New Testament if filled with talk of demons. In the gospels demons are said to be the cause of both physical and mental illnesses. They are said to be the cause of an inability to hear (Mark 9:25), and an inability to speak (Matthew 9:33), and of what appear to be epileptic fits (Matthew 17:14-20). Demons are also said to be the cause of anti-social behavior (Mark 5:1-20), madness (John 10:20), and multiple personalities (Mark 5:9)

Jesus cast out demons, and Jesus told his disciples to cast them out (Luke 9:1). Jesus ordered out some demons with a word of command. (Matthew 8:16) Jesus healed some people who were possessed of demons. (Matthew 15:28) Jesus told his disciples that some demons could only be cast out by prayer, and he did not put a limit on how long his disciples would have to pray. (Mark 9:29)

It is the same today. Not long ago I spoke with a woman who told me she had married a highly functioning alcoholic. She said he had gone from highly functioning to barely functioning. In former times he would have been said to be under the influence of “demon rum,” or, in his case, “demon Scotch.” This is a very New Testament description. The woman wanted an immediate healing for her husbands alcoholism; she wanted a miracle. I told her that, in my experience, this kind could only be cast out by prayer and patience; I told her that he need Alcoholics Anonymous, and she need Al-Anon. She agreed. As far as I know she is still praying and waiting for him to hit bottom, and help himself. The hardest thing that those living with a person with an addiction has to learn is that no one can help an addict until that addict is ready to help him or herself. The hardest thing that those living with a person with an addiction has to do is to stop enabling the addict’s addiction. Living with a person living with an addiction takes tough love.

Now, the powers that opposed Jesus, said that Jesus cast out demons by the power of Beelzebub, aka Satan. Jesus responded, “If I cast them out by the power of (Satan), by what power do your (followers) cast them out?” Then Jesus said, “But if by the Spirit of God I cast them out, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Matthew 12:27-28) The fact that demons are cast out, and idols are rejected, is one massive sign that the kingdom of God has come among us. Not long ago a person asked me if l thought the church was the kingdom of God. I said, “No, but I do think that the church is the place where the kingdom of God is most likely to happen.”

Since the time of the Enlightenment, people have stopped seeing demons in every mental and physical illness. Today we look for biological and physical causes. Yet, the wisest among us realize that the mind is deep, and dark, and mysterious, and capable of things that are both wonderful and awful. For instance, in one of his books—I think it was “The Man Eater’s of Kumaron,” Jim Corbett- tells the story of an Indian man who often served him as a guide. He was a brave man, often entering the jungle unarmed in company with Corbett as he pursued a man eating tiger or leopard. One night, as the two men camped in a deep jungle, they heard the night call of a rare bird that is said to be the harbinger of death. The man told Corbett he had to go home to die. Corbett understood superstition, and had no real fear for the man’s life; but he did allow him to go home, saying he would drop by to pick him up after a few days. Several days later, when Corbett stopped by the man’s house, his family told Corbett that the man was dead. .You may say, “That man died of superstition.” That is precisely my point. Anything we give power over us has power over us, and that includes superstition. No wonder the apostle Paul warned the Galatians against superstitiously observing days, and months, and seasons, and years. (Galatians 4:10) The word superstitiously is not in the text, but its meaning is implied.

Now some will ask, “What about a psychological approach to evil?” A psychological approach is certainly compatible with scripture, and many New Testament scholars appreciate the psychology of Carl Jung. Remember, it was Carl Jung who said that most of us are hopeless unconscious of evil. In defining the evil that is in each of us, Jung spoke of several different things. First, he spoke of the shadow which lurks in our unconscious mind. Jung described the shadow as being something like a long back bag into which our conscious mind stuffs all those unpleasant and traumatic events in our life we are fearful of admitting to the memory bank of our conscious mind. Jung said, sooner or later, we all have to unpack the bag. This is what Martin Luther did when he “searched out himself before God.” There is no better way to unpack the bag of the shadow than to search out ourselves in light of God. Jung also spoke of a thing that he called a complex. He said that a complex is a cluster of ideas, some of which are conscious, and some of which are unconscious. Left unchecked a complex can dominate the conscious mind, and make us do things we would not ordinarily do. That is what happened to a woman that I married to her finance some years ago. I performed the service on Saturday. On Monday or Tuesday she called me to say, “I did not marry that man!” “That was not me!” “I was not myself!” At the time I thought, and I still think, that her “let’s get married” complex had kicked in, taking control of her conscious mind. When her conscious mind finally took charge again, she could not believe what she had done.

Or what about this. Suppose a man thinks people are against him. The idea starts small, often with a single individual. Yet it grows and grows. He begins to see every person he meets as plotting against him, even the government. Eventually he buys a gun, and arms himself. He is just one step from a violent eruption which he will justify in his own mind. Perhaps you will remember a shooting that occurred on Old Salisbury Road in the summer of 1988. A man shot 9 people, killing four of them. During his trial he testified that he thought the people he shot were demons that needed to be killed. He was tied and found “not guilty by reason of insanity.” I think it is interesting that “demons” were a part of his thinking, though in reverse!

Along these same lines, I wonder how terrorist bombers get to be terrorist bombers. Certainy they look back across the centuries and consider every affront to their race and religion as an affront to them personally. They may also be personally rejected. In this condition, they are manipulated into become a suicide bomber by those who would never strap a bomb to themselves. In his book, “The Word is Flat, Hot and Crowded,” Tom Friedman says that it is only those who are without hope in the world who are drawn to self destructive violence against others.

Now, having considered, albeit briefly, what the Bible says about demons, how can we sum up? No doubt some of you think that demons are independent entities that go bump in the night. There is some evidence in t e New Testament for seeing demons as independent entities. Others think that demons arise out of the human personality, and are powerless apart from a human host. There is some evidence for this in the New Testament, too. Remember, that, as we have seen, the Bible teaches that idols are demons, and that idols have no real existence beyond what we give them. Therefore some conclude that demons have no real existence, beyond what we give them.

We need not agree as to the nature of demons, nor about the language we use in describing them. None the less, we should agree that demons, however they be defined, invade the lives of those who are open to their influences And their influences may be greater than we are sometimes led to believe. In the Bible evil is always confused and confusing. When the Bible speaks of Satan, and the powers, and idols, and demons, it speaks as if each somehow overlaps the other. Therefore, when the apostle says that Satan masquerades as an angel of light, we can assume the same thing about demons.

I was recently shocked to hear a young girl say that she wished to name her new cat after a demon she saw everyday in a cartoon that she watched on television. I checked out the cartoon. The cartoon portrays the little demon quite innocently. Perhaps its influence is Greek thought. The Greeks though that there were good demons the muses that inspire us to great thought, art, and action; and evil demons, those that plague us. The cartoon is probably o.k. for someone who is able to discern good from evil; but I am not sure all children can. Martin Luther warned his followers against anything that fascinated to no good purpose. That said, I am confident that this particular little girls is intelligent and has the ability to discern between good and evil, and that cartoon “demon: may do her less harm than an unhealthy fascination with her body image, or with her popularity.

I know some of this seems quite benign, but it is not always so. In his book, “The People of the Lie,” Dr. Scott Peck, the Army psychiatrists who investigated the Ma Lai Massacre, tells the story of a young boy he once counseled with. The boy’s parents brought him for counseling because he was depressed. In the course of their sessions together, Peck discovered that the boy’s older brother had taken his own life. Later, Peck discovered, that the parents had given their younger son a gift for his birthday that terrified and confused him. They gave him a .22 caliber rifle that had once belonged to his older brother. In this case, I refuse to connect the dots. I will simply point out, as Peck did, that human beings are sometimes capable of evil that goes beyond our ability to imagine it. In Romans 1, St. Paul said that some of us, are “inventors of evil,” and we must never take that lightly.

Now let me leave you with a better thought. The best way to protect ourselves, and our children against the power of evil, is to become, and remain fast friends with him who cast out demons by the power of God’s Spirit, Jesus Christ. Martin Luther was speaking of Satan and his minions, and of Christ’s victory over them when he wrote:

For still our ancient foe
doth seek to work us woe;
his craft and power are great,
and armed with cruel hate,
on earth is not his equal.

Did we in our own strength confide,
our striving would be losing,
were not the right man on our side,
the man of God’s own choosing.

Dost ask who that may be?
Christ Jesus, it is he;
Lord Sabaoth, his name,
from age to age the same,
and he must win the battle.

Finis

It was the great psychologist Karl Jung who said that “most people are hopelessly unconscious of evil.” The authors of the Bible are not “most people.” Over and over again the Bible warns us against evil in many forms.

The Bible warns against the evil of human sin, which, in the final analysis, is anything we do or fail to do by which we hurt ourselves or another.

The Bible also warns against the evil of the principalities and powers. According to Colossians 1 the principalities and powers are created in Christ and have potential for great good. However, they exist in the matrix of sin which is this world, and they have an equal potential for great evil. Thus the author of Ephesians warns against, “the principalities and powers, the world rulers of this present darkness, the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” Let me give you just one example from the New Testament itself as to how the powers can be good or bad. God created the idea of governments so that people can live together and work for the common good; but because these governments exist in a fallen world, they can also be the source of great evil. Thus the Jews looked for the coming of a Messiah who would establish an everlasting kingdom that was so splendiferous that Jerusalem would become a city set on a hill that cast its warm light and prosperity upon the nations. By contrast, St. John the Divine, the author of Revelation, called the Rome of Nero and Trajan , “the great harlot who is seated upon many waters,” and “the mother of all harlots and earth’s abominations.”

The Bible warns against the principalities and powers, and the Bible warns against the evil of Satan, also known as the devil, who is called, “the prince of the powers of the air, the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience.” Emil Brunner says to believe in the devil is to believe that the possibilities of evil are not exhausted by purely human evil. By that definition I certainly believe in the devil. However, I do not think of Satan as a person in the way that God is a Person. God exists whether the world exists or not. Satan exists only as a parasite in God’s world. I believe that Satan rises up as a result of human evil, yet transcends, and outlasts that evil Thus you can kill Hitler, and Stalin, but you cannot kill Hitlerism or Stalinism.

The Bible warns against two other forms of evil which are sometimes linked, idols and demons. Thus in Psalm 106 we read how the people of Israel, “mingled with the nations, and learned their practices, and served their idols, which became a snare to them, so that they even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons.”

In the Old Testament idols are described as the work of man’s hands. Isaiah 44 says that human beings are foolish to worship idols. The prophet describes how a craftsman cuts down a tree, drags it back to his home, and uses part of it to cook his food and warm himself, and the other part he fashions into an idol, to which he prays. Jeremiah says that idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field. They cannot talk, and they cannot walk, and they have to be carried everywhere they go. Jeremiah says that idols cannot do us harm, and they certainly cannot do us good. In the New Testament, in 1st Corinthians 8:4, St. Paul writes how Christians know that “an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one.” Yet, St. Paul never, ever makes light of idols.

Indeed, in Romans 1:18-28, Paul makes idolatry the basic sin of humankind. He writes:

Rom. 1:18   For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; 21 for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.

This text or Romans :18-28 makes several key points that concern us.

1. It teaches that the wrath of God is not just something that is just stored up for the future. “It is (present tense/right now) revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth.”
2. It teaches that, from the beginning of creation, humankind suppressed the truth about God, namely God’s invisible nature, his eternal power and deity, which is, or ought to be, clearly perceived in the things that God has made.
3. It teaches that the way that human beings suppress the truth is by not honoring God and by not giving thanks to God, but by worshiping idols.
4. It teaches that it is because humankind has forsaken God and turned to idols, that God has revealed God’s wrath against us, and that this wrath consists of God giving us up to our own folly. Three times in Romans 1 St. Paul says that “God gave them up.” It is us that Paul is talking about. Then the apostle names a whole catalog of things that God gave us up to. One of those things is homosexual attraction. At the very least this means that homosexual attraction is not just a personal choice on the part of individuals, but a result all humankind’s turning from God to idols. Unfortunately, it is human nature that we make some individuals pay more dearly than others for something that affects us all. Romans 1 raises as many issues about homosexuality as it settles. It is about “natural revelation,” and Paul appears to have been a child of his day in using the examples he uses. Some say this is binding for us, others do not think so, for Paul hardly saw things at a genetic level; but this sermon is not about homosexuality. I am sorry I had to mention it, and fear that, for some it will become more of a focus than the apostle means that it should, blinding us to the rest of the passage. The truth is that the apostle names a variety of things that God has inflicted upon human beings as punishment for our Idolatry. These other things include: a base mind, improper conduct, all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malignity. We have become gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil. We are disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Please note that the wrath of God is not revealed primarily because of these things. Rather, at least in part, the wrath of God consists of these things. God lets our choices punish us for our choices. And the basic sin of humankind is idolatry. Thus C.H. Dodd calls God’s wrath, “an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe.”

Now if idols have no real existence, and if they are as dumb as block of wood, and as harmless as scarecrows in a cucumber field why is the worship of idols so terrible, and why is God so much against it? Let me give four reasons.

1. We turn from God to idols. If I may use a biblical image, we turn from the fountain of living waters which is God, to broken cisterns which we have hewn out for ourselves that can contain no water. We human beings can never rise above our Gods. The Bible teaches that if we choose to worship idols, we will spend out days in the desert. If we choose to worship God, we will spend our days in a green and pleasant land. If we choose to worship idols, we will spend our days in the depths. If we chose to worship God we will mount up with wings like eagles, we will run and not be weary, we will walk and not faith. I know I am piling up metaphors, but that is o.k. The God and father of our LORD Jesus Christ is more wonderful than any pile of metaphors.
2. Idolatry breaks down the family. In the Bible the worship of Idols almost invariably involves cult prostitution. Some prostitutes were women servicing men, or women servicing women. Some prostitutes were men servicing women, or men servicing men. The worship of idols caused both husbands and wives to commit adultery. In worshiping with a cult prostitute, they committed adultery not just against their spouse, but against God himself. Over and over again prophets in the Hebrew Bible describe Israel’s romance with idols as Israel’s adultery against God. Thus Jeremiah says that the people of Israel have committed adultery “under every stone and tree.” And God orders Hosea to “take a wife of harlotry, and have children of harlotry, for the land commits great harlotry by forsaking the LORD.”
3. Idolatry requires people to waste their resources. In the inter-testamental story of Bel and the Dragon, the people of Babylon presented gifts of food and drink to the idol Bel. Every day they spend on it twelve bushels of fine flour, forty sheep, and fifty gallons of wine. Likewise, in every home where idols were worshiped, people sacrificed food to their idols that they could have given to their hungry neighbors, and to their own hungry children.
4. As we have already mentioned, idolatry requires people to sacrifice their future, for it requires them to sacrifice their own children. In the Hebrew Bible God is clearly against child sacrifice. In the time before the giving of the Law, the story of Abraham and Isaac makes this clear. God tests Abraham by requiring him to offer Isaac in sacrifice, but at the last moment God provides a ram for the sacrifice. This story was often told by the Hebrew people to illustrate that God is not a God that requires the sacrifice of their children. Then came Moses and the Law. In Leviticus 20, God speaks through his servant Moses and says that if any man of Israel, or any man who sojourns with the people of Israel, sacrifices his son to an idol,”he will be put to death.” The people did not listen. In Isaiah 57 the prophet speaks agains those who “ inflame (themselves) among the oaks and who slaughter (their) children in the ravines.” And in Jeremiah 7:31, God speaks through the prophet saying, “They have built the high places in the valley of Hinnom to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, and it did not come into My mind.”

Now we do not worship idols like Baal, and Bel, and Molech, and the like. What are the idols of our culture? What are the things that break down our families, and cause us to waste our resources, and sacrifice our children? Let me mention four things.

Some will say sex. In our culture we bypass the idol, and make sex itself the idol. We use sex to sell everything imaginable. More than anything else we worship the cult of youth and beauty, and place more value on a pretty face than on the wisdom of the mature mind. Yet wisdom, too, is worshiped in its way, for knowledge is power. No less a person than John Adams, our 2nd president, said that in America there is an aristocracy of sorts, and those with youth, and beauty, and money, and education, will always be a little more equal than others. Sad, but true.

Some will say money. Money is a good example of how a power, or, even an idol, can be both good and bad. In and of itself, money is not evil. As a medium of exchange money is a good thing, and in our modern world we could not do without it. Can you imagine paying for your new truck with vegetables from your garden? But the author of 1st Timothy is certainly right when he says that the love of money is the root of all evil. And Jesus warns that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. Mammon is not just money, but the whole money system. We may use it; but it just as easily uses us.

Some will say the automobile. I personally love the automobile, and the freedom it gives us to move about. There was a time—in my own lifetime, when the freedom of the open road was real, because we could still find a country lane all to ourselves. Today we get that freedom at the expense of countless hours of commuting and occasional gridlock. There is little doubt that the automobile is creating a drain upon our planet. Let me give just one small example. Several reputable agencies have said that, by cheating on its diesel emissions, VW has decreased air quality in the US alone to the point that it will cause 60 additional deaths by the end of 2016. That is just the tip of a big iceberg. In his book, “The Medium is the Message,” Marshall McLuan said that we cannot see the automobile by itself, but we must also see the system of fueling it, and the roads upon which we drive it, and the parking lots upon which we part it, and many other things besides. An idol was a small cog in a big machine which was the worship of idols. And the automobile is a small cog in the big machine that is the use of automobiles. Of course, and here is the issue, what we have said about automobiles could also be said about the millions of airplane flights, and the giant cargo ships that ply our seven seas. I am not saying I have a solution. I don’t. We will not give up our automobiles tomorrow; but we do need to see the problem as it exists.

Some will say the gun. The gun is a object of power unlike almost any other. Jared Diamond taught us that the history of the world can be written in guns, germs, and steel. The late Chris Kyle wrote the history of the United States by describing ten firearms. Guns come plain and fancy. Some are just tools in the hands of a farmer or rancher, but others are created as works of art to be enjoyed by those who have money enough to afford them. When I visited in Edinburgh in 1999, a clerk showed me a double-barreled shotgun that costs more than I make in a year today. The good things is that a fine gun like that will never be used to stick up a convenience store. The bad thing is that Ernest Hemingway used one almost like it to end his own life. As a boy, I used a gun given me by the late Dr. F.I. Dorsett, one of my father’s best friends, to hunt rabbits and squirrels with the late John Holeman, a school principal, and one of my dad’s best friends. As an adult, I have carried a shotgun as I followed birddogs across North Carolina, Kentucky, and Indiana. One of our own members, Eben Alspaugh, sold a bird dog to Jimmy Carter when he was President of the United States, and it has been my pleasure to hunt with him. Likewise, I have spent many happy hours on a deer stand in the Green Swamp. I did not take many deer, but I never failed to appreciate the wonders of the world around me. I do not think that many boys who grow up hunting and fishing will ever end up in jail. That said, my son never enjoyed either, and he turned out o.k. And my grandchildren live in an increasingly crowded world. So I will doubt I will teach them. I am not surprised that since 1970, the number of hunters has been cut in half. Likewise, as a Marine I was a rifle and pistol expert. I never went to war, but I headed a training command that prepared several thousand Marines to use their weapons—-whether the rifle, or the machine gun, or the mortar, or the rocket launcher. At the same time, I have determined that I will not use a gun for self defense. I say that for two reasons: 1) I would be afraid that in turning a gun on a burglar, I might escalate a robbery to a murder, perhaps my own, or a member of my family, perhaps the intruder’s. I do not own anything I value more than a human life. 2) I not sure I could ever pull the trigger on another human being. And you are probably just like me. In his book, “On Killing,” Lt. Col. David Grossman, an respected Army expert, says that in World War II only 15-20 percent of American soldiers actually fired their weapons, and many of those who did fire their weapons intentionally fired to miss. Most of the deaths of WWII were cause by bombs, and cannon fire, and crew served weapons. Grossman says that we human beings have a natural safety-catch when it comes to killing another human being, and distance, and sharing the responsibility of killing helps to take it off Gossman’s considers his job to be twofold. On the one hand, his job is teaching the Army and the police how to take that safety-catch off, for those times when a soldier or a policeman must employ deadly force. On the other hand, his job is teaching America and the civilized nations how to put the safety catch back on so we don’t go around shooting ourselves and each other. Here is the frightening thing: Grossman says that the way the Army takes the safety catch off is to employ training that can be directly compared to the violence we see in movies and in video games. I know that because we used the first wave of that kind of training in the Marines, and it is still used today, and 90 to 95 percent of todays soldiers and Marines are likely to shoot, though not necessarily to shoot to kill. In Vietnam it took 50,000 rounds of small arms fire to kill a single enemy. Grossman says that the only way that society can put the safety catch back on, is by either banning all guns and all other weapons, as the Japanese once did in the 16th century—and that was an imperfect and temporary fix, or by controlling the access that our children and young adults have to violences in television, movies, and video games.

I have just scratched the surface of idolatry. There are many more things that we could name. Many have suggested “technology.” The truth is that almost anything can be an idol. Something becomes an idol when we place it ahead of our devotion to God, and harm our relationships, especially the relationships we have with our wives, and husbands, and children, and neighbors. When I consider the idols of our day, I know that I don’t have all the answers. I know that your answers may be different from my own. Yet, together, we can seek the lead of the Holy Spirit in finding answers. A first step, is, I think, to confess with Isaiah, “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”

Finis

Ephesians 2:11-22

It was the great psychologists Karl Jung who said that “most people are hopelessly unconscious of evil.” The authors of the Bible are not “most people.” Over and over again the Bible warns us against evil in many forms.

The Bible warns against the evil of human sin. We sin when we break God’s law. God laid down the law to protect us from ourselves, and from one another. Therefore, sin is anything that we do, or fail to do, by which we hurt ourselves or one another. Sin is also missing the mark. God wants great things for us, and from us. We sin when we fail to achieve all that we might.

The Bible warns against the evil of Satan, also known as the devil. Some people laugh at the idea of the devil, but serious theologians never have. Luther said, “his craft and power are great, and armed with cruel hate, on earth is not his equal.” In 1st John 3:8 the apostle writes that the reason that the Son of God appeared was “to destroy the works of the devil.” Emil Brunner said that to believe in the devil is to believe that the possibilities of evil are not exhausted by purely human evil. By this definition, I certainly believe in the devil. Just when I think we have reached the height, and depth, and width, and breadth of human evil, some new evil appears to partially eclipse all former records. The supply of evil in our world seems inexhaustible.

The Bible warns against, idols and demons and what the 6th chapter of Ephesians calls, “the principalities and powers, the world rulers of this present darkness, the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” On the one hand, the Bible speaks of these powers as the invisible powers of the air, meaning that they are “out there,” between heaven and earth, just beyond our ability to see them. We know evil like we know the moon. We see one side of the moon and often just a sliver of that, but there a dark-side we cannot see at all. So it is with evil, and that evil which we do not see is more heinous, more terrible than that we can see. On the one hand the Bible speaks of these mysterious powers of the air. On the other hand, the Bible identifies these invisible powers with the visible powers of this world, “the world rulers of this present darkness.” It speaks of Herod, and Pontius Pilate, and Caesar, and Rome, and of the Priests and the temple system that opposed Jesus. William Stringfellow describes the powers as:

All institutions all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols.

In Colossians 1, we read that the principalities and powers are created in Christ. That means that the powers have the potential for great good. There is a fine example in Romans 13. Therein we read the rulers who bear the sword in this world, are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Let’s apply that to the present day.

Here in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, our city government appoints the members of our police force “to protect and serve” all of us. Some of our members here at New Philadelphia are members of the police force, and some of us pray for them daily, and all of us ought to. The wanton killing of police officers in Dallas reminds us just how dangerous their job really is. It takes a special person to be a police officer, and we do not have an endless supply of people who are up to that task. Let me illustrate just how special a law enforcement officer has to be. I discovered it more than two decades ago when one of our members, Lonnie Ashby invited me to ride patrol with him in his car.

Early on the night in question we responded to a call of “shots fired.” When we arrived on the scene a number of young men were standing on a street corner. One of them had his hand in his jacket. Lonnie turned to me and said, “Stay here.” I said, “You betcha!” Lonnie then got out of the car and walked up to the group of men. His hand was on his gun. He said, “Young man, please remove your hand from your jacket.” For several long seconds the man refused to do so. Thankfully, as the tension heightened, his girl friend ran to him and pulled his arm outside his jacket saying, “Show that man you don’t have a gun!” He did, and everyone was relieved. Not responding in fear to that man, took courage on Lonnie’s part. It takes courage to be a police officer; but courage is one of many qualifications.

A few hours later, I discovered what else it takes. We were called to a convenience store by the owner who reported a young man raising a ruckus. When we go there a young man was coming out of the front door. He wore no shirt, and his pants were half way to his knees. He was showing eight inches of very colorful boxer shorts. I wanted to say, “Young man, please pull up your shorts!” Luckily, I kept quiet and watched, and listened, as Lonnie spoke to him. He spoke as he might have spoken to the mayor himself. Lonnie soon determined that this young man was not the troublemaker, and I am sure that the young man left knowing that at least one police officer was his friend.

When I think of police officers I think of people like Lonnie Ashby, and Mike Saunders, and Mike Flemming, and Ron Reeves, and Kelsey Grainger Of course, the truth is that not all police officers are like Lonnie and the other officers we know.

I cannot imagine living in a country with police like the Nazi SS or the Soviet Union’s SS, but we live in a fallen world, and all the powers must exercise a constant vigilance to avoid falling becoming mired in the depths of sin. Power corrupts, and great power corrupts greatly. Police have great power. One good officer, like Lonnie Ashby can prejudice us toward the police, yet because they all stand in the long blue line, and wear the uniform, one bad officer can prejudice someone else against them.

I suppose this is a good time to point out that race, too, is a power. Now race in a good thing, and God loves all races equally. Perhaps you remember the old Bible School song which goes:

“Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red, and yellow, black, and white,
They are precious in his sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world”

Racial difference were a part of God’s plan. Scientists say that the various colors, and hues, and shades of our hair, and skin, and eyes, suit us for living in the various climates of the world in which we live. Yet, race can also be bad. Almost invariably, when the races started moving about the globe—and some were forcibly moved about the globe, race caused problems. Race makes it easy for people to separate themselves from other people. Many people have one or more good experiences with a people of a different race, and they assume that all people of that race or like the people they know. Or, and this is the tragedy, people have one or more bad experiences with a people of a different race, and they assume that all the people of that race are like those people. Of course, if race is not the defining difference, something else may be.

I am told that, in some countries of the far north, people look down upon others not because of the color of their skin, for they are all pale, but because of the color of their eyes.

And you may recall how Dr Seuss once told the tory of how the star bellied Sneetches discriminated against the plain bellied Sneetches. The discrimination continued until an entrepreneur named Sylvester McMonkey McBean appeared and offered those without stars the chance to get them for three dollars, just by passing through his Star-On Machine. The treatment was instantly popular, and lots of plain bellied Sneetches got stars. This meant that the original star bellied Sneetches lost their special status. So McBean told them about his Star-Off Machine. And the Sneetches who originally had stars happily payed ten dollars to have them removed. It always cost more to have a star removed, than to have a star added. But cost was no deterrent to the Sneetches, and soon the recently starred Sneetches start paying to have their stars removed as well. If you know the story, you know that this back and forth just escalated the conflict, until Sneetches of both kinds ended up running from one machine to the next until all of Sneetch society broke down in confusion. It was at that point that Sylvester McMonkey McBean departed a rich man. As he exited the city of the Sneetches McBean said, “You can’t teach a Sneetch.” Yet, eventually the Sneetches did learn. They learned how little difference a star makes, and when they did, they all became friends.

That is a story book ending if every I heard one. I wish we could predict a similar ending for the people of Dallas, and Louisiana, and Baltimore, and Minnesota, and Missouri, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Unless we learn what the Sneetches learned, all of us, those of us with stars, and without, red and yellow, black and white, and brown, will continue to live in fear of each other. And we will waste our money, and money we ought to be setting aside for our children trying to protect ourselves from one another. And the only one who will profit is the one that the Bible calls: that ancient Serpent, the Father of lies, the God of this present age, the prince of the powers of the air. What ever we call it, it has successfully convinced a great many of us, perhaps a majority of us, that it is possible to judge a person’s character by something as insignificant as the color of that person’s skin. How much better if would be for us all if only we learned to dream the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was Dr. King who said:

“I have a dream that someday…the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit down in peace, on the red clay hills of Georgia…and I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The Bible teaches that we can live that dream only if we overcome the evil, and we can over come the evil only by facing up to it. This is what Numbers 21 is trying to teach us. In Numbers 21, when the people of Israel sinned against the LORD by murmuring against the LORD, and against Moses. The LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and the serpents bit the people, and many of those who were bitten died. And when the people tired of dodging the serpents, the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD, that he take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the LORD said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” And Moses made a serpent of bronze, and set it on a pole; and if a real serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.

The man who looked upon the bronze serpent did not live because God took the serpents away. God did not. The serpents were still there. The man who looked upon the bronze serpent lived because he obeyed God and looked on the bronze serpent, and when he looked at the bronze serpent, he remembered the fiery serpent which had bitten him, and he remembered the sin he had committed so that God sent the fiery serpents, and he remembered his part of the sin, and no doubt he regretted it, and he repented of it, and he was healed.

We will never heal the racial divide in the United States of America until we face the evil of it, and remember our own part of it. Excuse me, if you will, as I remember a few episodes out of my own life, good and ill.

I remember the innocence of living with my grandmother on Cotton Street. I remember playing with a boy, my age, who had dark skin, and hair that was more than curly. At the tag end of a long summer, I asked, “How did you get so dark?”“The sun, I guess,” he said. And we thought no more of it. There is a lesson there. We can’t ignore race—that is impossible; but neither can we judge one another because of it. I think we are born without prejudice, unfortunately, we learn prejudice from our environment. After I preached this sermon, on of our members, sent me the words of a song sung by two children in the musical, “South Pacific.”

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear, you’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught
To be afraid of people
Whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

I remember two drinking fountains at the bottom of the Four and 1/2 Street stairs in Sears & Roebuck, one was marked White, and the other was marked Colored. One day when I was six of seven year old, this would have been about 1956, I took a drink from the fountain marked, “Colored.” My grandmother came up behind me, and said, “Don’t do that, honey, it shows a lack of respect.” My grandmother meant well; and, to be candid, I am not sure I did. Yet, today, I am sure that the idea of separate but equal is an idea that no one can truly respect. There is no such thing as separation among true equals.

I grew up in a household that was as free of prejudice as my parents could make it. My dad has served with black troops during the 2nd World War, and he loved them, and they him. My mom and dad were both Christians. Yet, my neighborhood was far from free from prejudice. Once, when I was about twelve years old, mimicking the boys in my neighborhood, I spoke of black people, as a group, using a word that now has no appeal to me now, at all. My father, who, unknown to me, was standing right behind me, was so instantly and completely ashamed of me that he slapped me up along the side of my head. It was just a cuff. He did not hit me hard, but he got my attention, for it was the only time I ever remember my father striking me with anything other than his belt, and he always confined my whippings to below the knee.

The summer before I started college I went to work for Shutt Hartman Construction Company laying sanitary sewage. I was the only white boy in a crew of black men. I remember those men coming to accept me and teach me the ropes. I remember that one young man, not much older than me, who would never go to college, old me how glad he was that I was going. I remember being humbled by that. And I remember the day that our foreman forgot the Dixie cups, and we only had one small Coke bottle between us, and we stood in a circle around the cooler, and we filled that bottle over and over again, and we passed it to one another, and we drank from that bottle like it was the Common Cup, and it was, for me at least, sacramental. I wish I had taken of that sacrament more regularly. I needed it. Later that same summer, I was sitting on a loading dock, listening to another college boy with a summer job telling a joke at the expense of the black man who was our supervisor. Before I could catch myself, I laughed. When I did that man looked not at the boy who told the joke, but at me. Later, we patched things up, but our relationship was never the same again. Bonhoeffer was right, sometimes, not to act is to act; and not to speak, is to speak.

Just one more story. In 2001 I went to Jamaica on a friendship mission with our youth. One Saturday night, along with one of the boys on the trip, I went with a Jamaican pastor to downtown Mandeville. There were hundreds of people on the street, maybe thousands, and we were the only white faces visible. I saw no one I knew, and no one would greet us, or even allow their eyes to linger long upon us. It was if we were invisible. I remember thinking of the Ralph Ellison book, “The Invisible Man;” and I remember wishing that somebody would just see me, and that, in seeing me, they might look beyond the color of my skin, and know that I was a Christian, and that I was not all that much different from them, and that I had good will toward them.

Let me say it once more: If we are going to beat the evil, we face up to the evil, but we must also see beyond the evil, and look to the God who wants us to conquer it. Jesus said: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that all who believe in him might have eternal life.” In John’s Gospel, eternal life is not just the endless length of days we achieve in eternity; but a quality of life we enter into right now. God wants us to live in a better world. In Ephesians 2, the apostle says that it is the same Jesus who offers us Eternal Life who has broken down the “dividing wall of hostility” that once separated people of different races, Jews and gentiles, creating in his body one new person in the place of two. Jesus is able to bring all the races together in his body, the church, and we must be a model for the world; but, first, we must face the evil in ourselves.

Finis

Numbers 21:4-9
John 3:14-15

This morning I am introducing a new Series. I call it, “Naming the Problem.” That is the title I will put on the sign in front of the church. I have given the series a second title, that I will make available only to insiders. The second title is, “Facing Up to Evil.”

It was Carl Jung who said that people today are “hopelessly unconscious of evil.” This means that very few of us are aware of the forces at work in our lives to which we surrender so many of our choices. When Flip Wilson’s character Geraldine said, “The devil made me do it!” she was closer to the truth than many citizens of the 21st Century are willing to allow. Of course, the idea that “the Devil made me do it, whatever it is, or that the devil made you do it, whatever it is, or that the devil made Geraldine do it, whatever it is, does not exonerate us from the responsibility of having done what we have done. If we remain hopelessly unconscious of evil, evil will continue hurt us, and the people we love.

The story of the fiery serpents from Numbers 21:4-9 is a prime example of Facing Up to Evil. When the people of Israel sinned against the LORD by murmuring against the LORD, and against Moses, the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and the serpents bit the people, and many of those who were bitten died. And when the people tired of dodging the serpents, the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD, that he take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the LORD said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” And Moses made a serpent of bronze, and set it on a pole; and if a real serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.

Two things jump out from this text. First, the people asked Moses to ask God to take away the serpents. God did not. Perhaps it takes a world with trouble in it to make us into the kind of people God would have us to be. Perhaps God did not want to lull the people into a false sense security. Serpents are not the only danger in the wilderness. Second, it is interesting that the LORD told Moses to make the bronze serpent, even though the LORD had forbidden the people from making any graven image in the 2nd of Ten Commandments. All the idols of all the peoples who surrounded Israel were graven images. As Paul says in Romans 1:23 “(they) exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.” The fiery serpent was not an idol to be worshiped. The people did not pray to it, they looked upon it, and they lived. They lived because they obeyed God and looked upon the fiery serpent of bronze that Moses set upon a pole, and they remembered the fiery serpents that had come upon them, and bitten them, and they remembered the evil they had done which had brought on the plague of the fiery serpents, and when they had faced the evil, they lived. So, the people of Israel were not worshiping the fiery serpent as their neighbors worshiped their idols—the people of Israel were facing the evil.

The story of the bronze serpent does not end with the story of the Exodus. In John 3:14-15, Jesus recalls this story for Nicodemus who came to him by night saying, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” In John’s Gospel, the phrase “lifted-up” is a reference to Jesus being lifted-up on the cross. Thus Jesus is telling Nicodemus, and all who read this text, that we must look to him, but he is saying more than that. He is telling us that to achieve eternal life, which is a quality of life, as much as a unlimited quantity of life, we must look to him and his cross. And when we look upon Jesus and his cross, we must remember the evil that put Jesus upon the cross in the first place, and see how much the evil cost him, and remember our part in it, so that as we turn to Jesus we also turn away from the evil.

In the Bible evil takes a variety of forms.

The most basic form of evil is human sin. We sin when we transgress the LAW of God. God gave the LAW to protect us from one another, and from ourselves. Sin is anything we do, or fail to do, by which we hurt ourselves or another. Sin is also “missing the Mark,” for God wants the best for us, and if we do not achieve that best, we “miss the mark.”

In the Old Testament evil often takes the form of Idolatry. Moses laid down Ten Commandments for the People of Israel. The first two commandments both serve to prohibit idolatry.

1. Thou shalt have no other God’s before me.
2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images.

The prophet Isaiah tells us how foolish it is to worship Idols. In chapter 44 of the book that bears his name, he says that a man watches over a tree as it grows, then when it is mature, he cuts it down, and takes it back to his home. He uses half of it to warm himself, and bake his bread, and roast his meat, and the other half he shapes into an idol, and he bows down to it, and worships it, and prays to it. How ridiculous is that?

The prophet Jeremiah tells us that idol worship is wrong for two reasons. In chapter 2 of the book that bears his name he says that when people turn away from God and look to idols, people not only forsake the fountain of living water that is God, they turn to broken cisterns, which they have made for themselves, which contain no water at all. Here water stands for life and blessing. It calls to mind the covenant that God made with Israel. God said, “Listen, people, the Promised Land which I am giving to you is not like the Land of Egypt which is watered and irrigated by the Nile River, it is a land that is dependent upon the rain. And if you keep my covenant, and remember my Words to do them, then I will make it rain on your land and bless you; but if you forget my covenant, and fail to remember my commandments, then I am going to withhold the rain from your land, and with it, my blessing.” In chapter 10 of the book that bears his name, Jeremiah says that idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field. They cannot talk. They have to be carried everywhere, because they cannot walk. In and of themselves, they are just a hunk of stuff. And as a hunk of stuff—whether wood or brass or gold, they can do us no harm, and they can certainly do us no good. It disturbs people, that, in the Old Testament God frequently commands Israel to go to war with the nations that surround her. In every instance, this is to keep Israel safe from the idols of the nations. God is a jealous God. God does not want his people to forget him, and just as importantly, God is a loving God, he loves Israel as a man loves his son, and he does not want his son to waste time seeking the help of Idols, for Idols are powerless to save.

There is yet another form of evil in the Old Testament. The book of Job introduces an enemy of the people, called Satan. In Job, and again in the 3rd chapter of Zechariah the prophet, Satan is revealed as the adversary, or the accuser. In the book of Job it is Satan who tells God that Job loves God only because God has been so good to him. Satan tells God that if God will only strike Job’s wealth, and Job’s family, and Job’s health, then Job will certainly turn away from God, and love God no better than anybody else.

Satan is a major figure in the book of Job, but a minor figure in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, Satan appears by name is only three of the thirty-nine books, and by implication in a few others. By way of contrast, Satan, aka “the devil,” is a major figure in the New Testament, appearing in 18 of 27 books, and in all of the major New Testament authors. I think that Satan achieves increased prominence in the New Testament, because the nature of the warfare of the people of God is radically changed. Ancient Israel was opposed by the nations. It was Israel against everybody else. Israel had to fight the nations that opposed her to insure her survival. She hoped that the LORD of Hosts, the LORD of the Armies, was fighting with her, and for her. By contrast, the church of God, the body of Christ, is made up of the nations. The Good News about Jesus the Messiah is not just for Israel, but for all people and all nations. God so loved the world, that he gave his only son. God hates sin, but loves the sinner. Therefore the church’s warfare is not against flesh and blood but against evil in all its forms. As Americans we may be forced to go to war. Some wars must be fought. When we fight we seek to defeat our enemies, even if it means killing them. However, as Christians, we do not defeat our enemies by killing them, but by converting them. As Christians, our warfare is not against flesh and blood, it is against evil in every form, and Satan emerges as the number one representative of that evil.

The New Testament describes Satan in a variety of ways.

In the book of Revelation Satan is referred to as “that ancient serpent,” a clear reference to the story of Adam and Even in which it was a serpent who tempted the first pair to doubt that God had their best interest at heart. Do not take this description of Satan too literally. In the story of Adam and Eve, the serpent is condemned to crawl in the dust, and the New Testament does not depict Satan as to be so confined.

In 1st Peter 5:8 the apostle says that Satan, or the devil, prowls about like a raging lion, seeking whom he may devour. That is a fearsome description.

In 2nd Corinthians 11:14, St. Paul paints a still more horrible picture. He says that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Now we are getting closer to the mark. Most of the time temptation come to us not because we think that some forbidden fruit is unappealing and tasteless, but because we think it beautiful, and desirable beyond words and explanation.

In the gospels, Jesus gives the most horrible description of Satan that is possible. When Peter attempts to prevent Jesus from going to Jerusalem to suffer and die, Jesus rebukes him saying, “Get behind me Satan, because you are not on the side of God, but of men.” No wonder Jesus said that our enemies are often members of our own household. Anyone who prevents us from doing God’s will, acts as Satan to us. That means we act as Satan to one another. Ouch!

At this juncture, some people may say: “Well, Worth has flipped his wig!” Not so. C.S. Lewis says that to believe in the Devil is to believe that evil is greater than the sum total of its parts. I believe that. Likewise, Emil Brunner says that to believe in the Devil is to believe the Devil is to believe that the possibilities of evil are not exhausted by purely human evil. I believe that, too.

There is another form of evil that stands out clearly in the pages of the New Testament. In Ephesians 2, the apostle refers to Satan as“the prince of the powers of the air, the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience.” The devil is not the only power against which we do battle. In Ephesians 6 we read:

6:12 For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

In the New Testament the powers take two forms. Sometimes they are “the powers of the air.” Sometimes they are worldly powers such as Herod, or Pilate, or Caesar, or Rome. In this series, I am going to argue that the powers of the air are but the inner spirit of powers that are very much a part of this world. In his book, “An Ethic for Christians and Other Sojourners Living in a Strange Land, “ William Stringfellow describes these powers as:

All institutions all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols.

Thus ISIS is a power, but so is the Pentagon; and so is the Ford Motor Company, and GM and VW, and all other car companies, and all other companies; and Harvard University, or any other college or university; or the Moravian Church, or any other denomination or local church; and so is the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, or any other collective; and so is the family of my birth, and yours.

And you may object, saying, “But some of the power you named are good.” Yes, that is true. According to the book of Colossians, the powers, or at least their archetypes, were created in Christ, and thus good; but the powers exist in a fallen world, a world dominated by sin and selfishness, and we name them, and unmask them, and confront them, we find them controlling our lives and robing us of the freedom that God gave to us. Thus God created families to sustain and nurture us, but some families do anything but. They are corrupt and corrupting.

Remember, Jesus said that, sometimes, even a good power, like our families and the people we love, hamper us, and prevent us from living out God’s will.

There is a final form of evil in the Bible I wish to mention. I refer, of course, to the demonic. Some of you will remember a movie released in the 1970’s entitled, “The Exorcists.” It was about a little girl possessed by a daemon. Billy Graham said the read the book, but did not want to watch the movie. The movie was rated “R” for graphic violence. Just a few years ago I watched about half of it on DVD; I did not want to finish it. The demonic is scary! However, if I read the New Testament aright the demonic is the least fearful of all the evil powers, because the demonic often works in isolation, in a single human life, and apart from a host, the demonic has little power. That, I think, is why the demon which identified itself as Legion, asked Jesus to allow “it” to leave the man who was dwelling naked among the tombs, and go into the heard of swine. Of course, today, one person possessed by an evil power, such as ISIS, and armed with a semi-automatic rifle with a high capacity magazine can kill 49 people and wound more than 50 others in a matter of minutes. And one person possessed with an evil power, and armed with a dirty bomb could, possibly, destroy a city.

So, that is the outline of our course, as we “Face Up to Evil.” But some will ask, “Why? Why would spend so much time looking at the evil, and making us look at the evil?” For the same reason that God caused Moses to set up a bronze serpent upon a pole, and for the same reason that God caused Jesus to be lifted up on the cross, so that we can face the evil, and in facing the evil, see our part in it, and overcome it. We must face the powers, name the powers, unmask the powers, and confront the powers. Given the world that we live in today, I do not think that we can ever again allow ourselves to be so hopelessly so ignorant of evil, as we have been in the past. I hope you will stay with me during this series. It is of the utmost importance.

Finis