“Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God” (3 John 11).
Attorneys for a defendant accused of kidnapping, raping, and killing a seven-year-old girl argue that he’s not responsible for what he’s done. They contend that there is an anomaly in his brain which prevented him from knowing right from wrong. His attorneys argue “not guilty by plea of insanity.” Hating to recognize that those criminal deeds are choices that evil men and women have made, we minimize or ignore the evil that has driven them to actions that are so dark as to be almost incomprehensible.
Says attorney Andrew Vachss, “The crimes are so unspeakable, many believe that those who commit them must be mentally ill. But that very natural reaction is what prevents us from seeing the truth.” (Andrew Vachss, “The Difference Between ‘Sick’ and “Evil,” Parade Magazine, July 14, 2002, p. 5). And what is the truth, according to Vachss? It is that evil is always a matter of choice that determines your behavior.
For 4,000 years the Bible has contended not only that evil is the cause and motive for wrongdoing, it is also the source of wrongdoing itself. Men and women do evil deeds because they are evil. It is both a choice and a compulsion.
About the time that psychology gained prominence in the twentieth century, some criminologists (especially those who had never personally been the victim of a crime or violence) asserted that the criminal cannot help what he does. He’s born that way. Bad DNA, you know.
Dr. Stanton Samenow, a clinical research psychologist, and the late Dr. Samuel Yochelson, no longer believe that the criminal should get off the hook because of a bad home environment, poverty, or not enough food and milk as a baby. They disbelieve that evil can be explained as mental illness.
Over a period of years, this team worked with 255 men who had committed almost every imaginable crime—all of which had pleaded “not guilty by reason of insanity” or else had been sent to a mental hospital to see if they were capable of standing trial.
For five years they used standard psychiatric methods in evaluating these men. Then they began to realize that the greater knowledge of psychological jargon these men learned, the more gifted they were in convincing judges and juries that they were “crazy” and, therefore, not responsible for their behavior.
Of the 255 they worked with, not a single one, in their opinion, was mentally ill. They did, however, see personality traits which contributed to their deeds which included dishonesty, anger, ownership, uniqueness, and the feeling that the world owes him a living. The results of their work covered 300,000 pages of documentation and filled three volumes (“Doctors’ Investigation Turns Up No Excuses,” Orange County Register, April 28, 1977, p. F-1).
The Bible mentions evil 437 times in 399 references. It is as much of a fact as is the existence of God Himself. The first introduction to evil is in the Garden of Eden where God placed the first couple. They had a choice to make. The options were life or death; they chose to disregard God’s instructions, and with that choice evil entered the world.
This Bible pictures history as a battle between good and evil, between God and Satan, and humankind is torn between with choices which reflect good and evil, righteousness or sin, life or death.
Someday evil will be destroyed, but until that day, you had better bolt your door, lock your windows, and teach your children there is evil in our world, a terrible hideous reality which is there but is not as powerful as righteousness and truth. So, choose wisely. But remember, evil is a choice.
Resource reading: Revelation 20:11-15.
