The Truth About Evil and Good
INTRODUCTION
We live in a world where what is good and what is evil are determined by what suits us.
We see it all around us. Our generation does evil and we call it good and we avoid good as if it was evil.
For example it’s almost impossible to find someone who will admit that they are evil. To us we are almost always good! And what may be evil to you may be good for me.
No wonder we’re all in therapy! We’re so mixed up.
In this passage, James straightens out some faulty thinking – he outlines the truth about good and evil (OHP).
A. THE TRUTH ABOUT EVIL (1:13-16)
1. A correction
These days some people are so mixed up that they blame God for our flaws. They say, “I have imperfections and weaknesses and God is to blame for them. After all, he made us – and so he must have made us the way we are, with a tendency to do wrong things. And didn’t God put us in a world filled with temptations that I just can’t resist? It’s God’s fault that I’m a sinner,” they say.
That kind of thinking is so worldly – it has nothing to do with the Bible. We do wrong and we need someone to blame. Yes the blame does lie with someone, but it’s not God! To blame God for supposedly creating us weak, and to blame him for placing us in temptations way is evidence of how far we have drifted from the truth. It shows that we can’t even discern what’s good and what’s evil anymore.
The Bible says that the truth is the exact opposite of this kind of thinking. James explains the truth about evil.
“No one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone” (James 1:13).
God is our loving heavenly father! All he wants is to give us love and freedom - not to maliciously trip us up. Jesus made this clear when he said,
MT 7:9 "Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? MT 7:10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?MT 7:11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
What Jesus is saying is that if we sinful human beings know how to give good things – how much more does our holy and sinless God in heaven? God doesn’t enjoy seeing us trip up over sin - he loves us. He doesn’t want to see us torn down, he wants to give us good things that build us up.
James tells us that it’s wrong for us to think that God tempts us because our God is untemptable (v 13). What he means is that God can’t be persuaded to do evil – and to tempt someone so as to trip them up and corrupt them is an evil thing to do. But God is completely holy so it’s just not in his nature to behave that way.
The whole idea that a god can tempt humans to do evil is not a Christian concept. It comes from the ancient gods of Greece and Rome – like Mars, the god of violence, and Athena the goddess of war. Ancient people believed that these gods interfered with human life in evil ways. But it’s not like that with the Christian God. The Christian God is absolutely holy and righteous – there is no malicious intent in his heart whatsoever.
So God can’t be persuaded to tempt us and we should be careful not to accuse him of doing so.
b. The source of temptation
So where does temptation come from?
James points out in v14 that, each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.
Temptation comes from within us. Within all of us are evil desires that are ready to express themselves in action. That’s the thing with sin. Sin takes us right to the heart of where we want to be – we have a desire and we want it met. But it’s not the meeting of that desire that is sinful, but how that desire, that need is met.
Some people have tried to avoid sin by denying the basic human desires. But that makes us something less than human, because it’s not desire itself that is sinful, but how we seek to have those desires met. Hunger is not sinful, but gluttony is. Desiring to pass a test is not sinful, but cheating is. Sleeping in is not sinful, but laziness is.
The basic desires of life are the fuel in the carby that make the engine go. If we turn off the fuel supply we have no power. If we let the fuel go it’s own way we have a mess, maybe a fire and destruction. But the secret to success is to regulate the fuel supply through constant control.
The secret to satisfying our natural human desires in a God honouring way and without sin, is to regulate them; to keep them constantly under God’s control. To keep them Christ centered. Our desires must be his servant not our master.
To do this we need to ask for Christ’s strength – and if we are his we already have it within us through his Holy Spirit. But we also need to be wise about how it is that we fall into sin.
c. The process of sin
A mistake that many Christians make is to think of sin as one single act, or a series of single acts.
But James shows us that sin is a process.
First there is desire, and we’ve already spoken about that. Desire is an attack on our emotions – “I’ll be sad if I don’t get what I want right now.” So we need to be self aware of our desires and the emotions that they appeal to.
After desire comes deception. James writes in v14, “each one is tempted when by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed.” The enticement is the deception – Desire is an attack on our emotions, but deception is an attack on our intellect. Deception is the blanket that covers the true consequences of our actions. It’s the bait that appeals to our natural desires but in our minds it hides the end results. No fish ever saw the hook inside the worm, if it did it wouldn’t have taken the bait.
It’s the bait that’s the exciting thing. It’s the promise of immediate satisfaction – but what we don’t see are the delayed results.
The way to deal with deception – an attack on our intellect, is through the word of God. When Satan tempted Jesus, he always dealt with it by quoting scripture. Jesus said, “It is written…” and reminded himself of the truth of the word of God. From the human point of view, turning stones into bread to satisfy his hunger would have been a sensible thing for Jesus to do; but not from God’s point of view.
And look at Eve. Satan said to her, “Did God really say that you couldn’t eat from the tree?” In the end the devil had her in such confusion, she didn’t know what God’s precise word’s had been.
So we need to know the bible so we can detect the bait and deal with it accurately.
The third step in the process of falling into sin is disobedience. James writes in v15, “Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin (or disobedience)...”
Desire is an attack on our emotions, deception is an attack on our intellect, but disobedience is an attack on our will – it’s an attack on the choices we make.
You see, living as a Christian is about deciding deliberately to live for Christ whether we feel like it or not. We read our bible whether feel like it or not. We pray whether we feel like it or not. We share our faith whether we feel like it or not. We love the unlovely whether we feel like it or not. These are choices we make. Mature Christians make choices based on what is right, not on how they feel.
The warning here is for us to be self aware about these things in us – desire, deception, and disobedience, and as we see them in us we need to recognize that we are in the danger zone and under attack.
If we don’t we come to the final step in the process of sin – which is death. Again in v15 we read, and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death.”
It’s not “a [single] sin” that James is talking about here, but the collection of sins that make up a sinful life. “A sinful life, when it is full grown, gives birth to death.” What he’s saying is that, unless all of our sins are dealt with we can only expect death. We can expect physical and on-going death. That’s the place a person finds themselves in, if they haven’t yet trusted Christ - death at the end of this life and complete separation from God in the next.
But you know – I think it’s possible for a Christian to experience something of this too. If we are not careful with sin – if we don’t grow up out of our sinful habits I think there’s room for us to say we may experience a death of a kind.
For example, unless we deal with sin in the way we relate to others, I think we can expect to experience the death of relationships – a friendship or even a marriage. If we don’t deal with sin in our attitude to finance, we could experience the death of a business or at least the death of prosperity.
The point of all this is that whenever we’re faced with temptation, we need to get our eyes off the bait and look ahead to see the consequences of sin. This is the truth about evil.
B. THE TRUTH ABOUT GOOD (1:17-18)
So what is the truth about good?
1. Every good
This is what James has to say.
JAS 1:17 Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. JAS 1:18 He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.
What we see here is that a Christian concept of God is exactly the opposite of the malicious god that some people think would try to tempt, trick and destroy us.
God doesn’t instigate our destruction. He doesn’t want us to be ruined. He’s the great Giver of everything good. “Every good gift … comes down from the Father.”
Think of all the good things we enjoy – every one of them come from God. And think of all the better things that we could enjoy if God had his way in our lives more and more.
James points out that God takes care of even the simplest things. He is the Creator of the sun the moon and the stars – the heavenly lights – and by them the seasons. They each bring good things to life – but even these fail us sometimes. But not God. He never changes – he is always giving good and perfect things to us.
That old British Pop singer Cliff Richard once said, "I believe God made everything, it’s what humanity does with it that makes something evil." He said it in relation to rock music and then applied it to all of life.
This beautiful world was not made by God to trip us up and lead us into sin. It was made and given to us to enjoy and appreciate and to use for good. We can’t blame God for our sin saying that he put us here and made me with shortcomings – it just isn’t true.
2. The highest good
All things that come from God are good, but there’s one that stands out from all the rest. James tells us in v18 that our loving heavenly Father, chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of first fruits of all he created.”
The highest good is the new birth that God provides. In the process of becoming a Christian God reconstructs us as new people – he gives us a new life. What a contrast to the death that sin results in. Death is the outcome of evil desires – life the outcome of God deliberately choosing us.
And the way he brings new life to us is “through the word of truth,” says James – that is, the message that Jesus spoke and which is recorded for us in the Bible.
CONCLUSION
It’s an unusual concept, but Jesus himself is that word of truth – Jesus is God’s message to us. Have you received new life through hearing and accepting Jesus, the word of truth?
Maybe we need to correct some inaccurate thinking. Are we guilty of smearing God’s reputation – accusing him of leading us into sin? He’s not a fault-finder who wants to make life difficult for us. Make no mistake about it, He is the giver, and the only giver, of everything good – even the greatest good which is new life in his eternal family.
