In the book of Acts there are several occasions when a mob of people simply react and no one can reason with them. And it doesn’t take much for a mob like that to form today either, whether on social media, protest marches, or in wild accusations against anyone with a different view on things.
Irrationality also includes in its dark and sticky web institutional authorities and experts, who totally ignore facts, preferring to threaten and crack down, even with powers they don’t legally have, on anyone opposing their narrative. And they become even more irrational the more people oppose them or face up to them with logic.
So how did humans made in the image of God get to this point? Was it because we needed to be faced with the irrationality of evil? I think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion knowing that all evil would be placed on him, and the immense suffering of mind that created in him. It made him sweat blood and beg his Father for anything but having to go through the agony he would have to endure to free us humans from the insanity and power of evil that would never stop until it had eaten us all up.
Jesus, in other words, knew and felt the power of irrational evil like none of us ever have or ever will, and it horrified him what it would do to humanity unless he took the only route the Father knew would destroy evil and its power over us.
And what a power it is, because even with the devil “thrown into a lake of burning sulfur” in Revelation 20:10, it sounds like evil still holds people in its grip, because in Revelation 21:8 there are still unrepentant murderers, liars, sexual perverts and those hooked on the occult.
And yet God allowed this evil into the world from the very beginning. He allowed the devil to inhabit one of his good creatures, and through a completely twisted logic deceive a beautiful woman and destroy her while her husband looks helplessly on, totally paralyzed and unable to defend her.
And that kind of evil power is all over the world today, as people again are paralyzed into conforming with irrational policies and even outright lies that put the lives of the most innocent at unnecessary risk of lifetime damage.
But we wouldn’t have known such evil was possible and real unless we were exposed to it and tasted it, and we suffered some of the same mental agony Jesus suffered in full.
Is that why God talks of burning forever in hell in Revelation 20:10? Is it to get the point across how we must never fall victim to evil, never let it get a hold of us in any way, and grasp the importance of Jesus’ sacrifice as the only way evil could be defeated? Because any one of us can be sucked into the black hole of evil, perhaps by the fury we feel at our fellow humans for their ridiculous mandates and lockdowns, or their criminal abuse of children so similar to the abuse of indigenous children being forced into residential schools.
It seems, then, that for us to pass from death to life we have to run the gauntlet of evil having its way with us, as individuals and as an entire race, as we’ve experienced in this pandemic, when madness is as much a global virus too.
So how much evil must we be exposed to before recognizing its dreadful power and turning to our Saviour to rescue us as a race and as individuals? Every day I wonder how much worse things can get and I can’t help begging Jesus to ease things up a bit, because what could happen to us is becoming all too obvious to see.
Buck To Basics 