Written by Norman Jetmundsen, a contemporary attorney and writer. This is an excerpt from his work “The Subtle Power of Evil and God’s Antidote.”
The age-old conundrum is why would God allow evil? Could it be that God is either not all powerful or not all good? The simplest answer is to say this is a mystery we will never understand, which may well be the closest truthful answer. As George McDonald once wrote, “None but God hates evil and understands it.” Nevertheless, Lewis gives us an insight into why God took the risk of evil in the Garden of Eden: “Because free will – although it makes evil possible – is the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.” God knew that meaningful, unconditional love cannot be coerced. Any parent can verify this: obedience and even hugs can be compelled from young children, but their freely given love is what truly matters. It’s easy to talk about evil in the context of the Holocaust, or genocide, or war or September 11th, but the garden story in Genesis warns us not to ignore the equally dangerous and destructive power of subtle evil. The problem with the gentle road is that, without signposts, we gradually draw away from God without meaning to and with little recognition of the path we are taking. It’s just as effective for the devil to take us on the gradual road as the sudden one, like the story that the best way to boil a frog is to put him in cold water and slowly turn up the heat. In our world today, the heat has slowly turned up such that gradually the moral standards of our culture have changed dramatically. It doesn’t take long in perusing a night of prime-time television to realize we’re not in Mayberry anymore.
Prayer:
Today’s prayer is from The Roman Breviary, a liturgical book of the Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church. Published in 1482, it became known as the Liturgy of the Hours.
O almighty God,
we seek the shelter of your protection.
Defend us from all evils,
that we may serve you in peace and quietness of spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Pathways Press.com 