Equipped to Fight Evil

“It’s a Jewish piggy bank,” the seller said as she bagged my rescued treasure. “Dates from before the war.” I handed her some cash and replied, “It is not a Jewish piggy bank.” Stepping away, I stared at my find, tracing the Hebrew letters with my finger. I contemplated an unknown past. Who had owned it? Which house or synagogue had displayed it? Of course, I will never know. 

Almost every Jewish person from the Krakow Ghetto (est. March 1941) had been worked to death, shot or deported to death camps like Belzec or Auschwitz-Birkenau. Pure evil, in human form, had wiped out the community.

Dante’s Inferno: The Depths of Evil

The BFP leadership visited haunting places of death such as Treblinka (est. 850,000 murdered Jews) and Auschwitz-Birkenau (est. 1.1 million murdered Jews). We gazed into the gas chamber at Majdanek, where 200 naked people would be crammed in at a time, the door sealed and everyone murdered in less than 20 minutes. 

Then we visited the gas chamber at Auschwitz I, which could hold 600 people at a time with the same deadly result. But the Nazis needed to keep up with the mass deportation and extermination of Jews, so they built eight more gas chambers in Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The large chambers could murder 2,000 people at a time for a total of 10,000 a day.

We stood next to a destroyed gas chamber that had been constructed below ground to stifle the sound of screams. Our eyes traced the stone steps that descended into the undressing room and the collapsed roof of the main gas chamber. We were emotionally overwhelmed. 

There were two distinct moments during our trip that I will never forget. The first was standing before a mountain of human ash at Majdanek. The second was touching a charred door, the only remnant of a barn where Polish civilians burned over 340 of their Jewish neighbors alive in the village of Jedwabne. 

 Reflecting on the nature of evil, I recalled the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, the largest slaughter of Jews in a single day since the end of the Holocaust. October 7 unleashed global Jewish hatred at an unprecedented level, hearkening back to Europe in the 1930s. People from around the world and all strata of society have blamed the Jewish people, justified their slaughter, made excuses for their suffering or fabricated and denied the evidence while shifting blame. 

The ideology of evil, which once fueled the Nazis and their advocates, is alive and well today with Hamas and their millions of apologists worldwide. The output of this ideology comes in different clothing, ranging from the hostile activist or the indifferent pastor to the podcast fabricator or leftist virtue-signaler. Regardless of the source, it is the same gradual indoctrination that ultimately takes root in darkness within the human heart.

Reflections on the Nature of Evil

Many great thinkers, philosophers and theologians have contemplated evil, its nature, manifestation and origins. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) believed people should reject inherited traditional, religion, moral systems and convictions, and strive to build their own values on the meaning and purpose to life. He declared famously, “God is dead!” in the wake of modern, secular science and evolution. 

Yet what about evil? Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” He understood that humans—even humans with good intentions—can fall prey to evil. According to Nietzsche, humans have to rely on their own moral values to become good. 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (1948–2020) had a very different outlook. Why must good people suffer evil? Sacks answered by explaining that God consciously hides the answer from humanity. “Let us imagine what would happen if we clearly understood why there is evil in the world. We would not fight it! We would watch evil occurring before our eyes but remain passive; we would say that evil is understandable and logical. God is completely good, and He wants us, humanity, to refuse to take evil for granted! We must not accept evil; we must rebel against evil and do everything in our power to fight it!” 

British philosopher and theologian C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.” Lewis viewed evil as the “parasitic perversion of goodness.” He believed that true goodness comes from the God of the Bible. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis depicts evil originating from “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.” The manifestation of evil, he held, often comes from places we least expect.

Canadian psychologist and author Jordan B. Peterson writes in Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, “If you fail to understand evil, then you have laid yourself bare to it. You are susceptible to its effects, or to its will.”

Bible versus Evil

The Bible teaches that sin and evil originated in the Garden of Eden with the disobedience of Adam and Eve when they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:1–6). Sin and death entered the world and the distortion began. The word evil in Hebrew is ra (appearing 342 times), which translates to evil, distress, adversity and wrong. The word ra’ah, which can mean misery, appears another 287 times. Evil is ultimately anti-God. It is first manifested in the heart before evolving into an action. It is the nature of fallen angels, called demons. It is what nourishes pride and godlessness. Evil is the destroyer of what is holy, good and righteous. 

Since Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden, evil is pervasive in humanity. In the pre-flood world, Scripture declares that evil was “every intent of the thoughts of his heart” (Gen. 6:5). Joseph describes his brothers’ actions as evil, and yet he extends grace (Gen. 50:20). Evil is a common failure that afflicts Israel in different capacities, separating them from God and stirring up divine wrath (Num. 14:35; Deut. 1:35; 2 Kings 8:18). Moses is clear that evil, even a presence of evil, must be removed (Deut. 17:2–7; 17:12) and that God’s reaction will be to “hide My face in that day because of all the evil…” (Deut. 31:18).  

The pattern we see in the Bible is a battle between righteousness and succumbing to evil (Judg. 2:13–17), with God beckoning to His people to “serve the Lord with all your heart” (1 Sam. 12:20). Contrast Solomon’s prayer for help to “discern between good and evil” (1 Kings 3:9) with his plunge into idolatry that aroused God’s anger (1 Kings 11:9–10).

The Bible encourages us to stand against evil. Job feared God, shunned evil and was righteous (Job 1:1). God doesn’t tolerate evil (Ps. 5:4), but defeats and conquers it (Ps. 23:4). We should avoid evil (Ps. 34:13–14), hate evil (Ps. 97:10), and restrain from evil (Ps. 119:101). We should fear God and turn from evil (Prov. 3:7), and trust that God will deal with evil (Ps. 140:1). The person who acts righteously is blessed (Isa. 33:15–16), and yet we live in a world where evil is often celebrated (Isa. 5:20). The Bible describes people whose “feet run to evil” (Isa. 59:7a) for the heart is “more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9 NASB).

Ultimately, the message of the Bible is hope. Evil doesn’t win! Like the Tanakh (Old Testament), the New Testament address the subject of evil directly. The word poneros, meaning evil, wicked, toilsome, bad and worthless, is used 72 times. Kakia appears 11 times and points to depravity and wickedness. Jesus (Yeshua) and Paul taught deliverance from evil (Matt. 6:13; 2 Thess. 3:3). The New Testament also acknowledges that evil originates in the heart (Matt. 9:4; Mark 7:21–23; Heb. 10:22). Satan, whose name means “the adversary,” is called evil and participates in the evil of deception (Matt. 13:19). John described Jesus as Light, which counters evil. “And this is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the Light; for their deeds were evil” (John 3:19 NASB).