Here is the full transcript of R.C. Sproul’s sermon titled “What Is Evil & Where Did It Come From?”
In this sermon, R.C. Sproul discusses the nature of evil, arguing that it is not a thing with independent existence, but rather a negation or absence of good. He explores the concept of evil as privation, a lack or deficiency. Sproul acknowledges that the origin of evil is a difficult question, and he critiques various explanations that have been proposed.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Well, it’s not fair. I don’t dream up the themes for our conferences each year. The staff does that, and then they come to me and give assignments as to what I’m supposed to address. And you notice on the board a moment ago that I had been given two questions to address, each of which would be worthy of a lengthy series to consider. And I’m supposed to answer these questions in one message. Well, that’s impossible.
I won’t do it because I can’t do it. But we’ll give you a little introduction to these questions. And the first of the questions is, “What is evil?” The second question is, “Where did it come from?”
But the first part of the question is, “What is evil?” And my immediate response to that in presidential fashion is to say, “It depends upon what the meaning of is is.” Now that’s really not a joke. I’m serious about that because there are different ways in which we use the verb is as a verb to be. And when we’re dealing with the question of what is evil, we face immediately the issue of whether evil really is at all.
That might seem strange to you, but my first assertion this morning is that evil isn’t, that is it is not. Why? Because evil is nothing. Am I going too fast? Evil is nothing.
Now lest you think that I’ve fallen into Christian Science, a religion that’s neither Christian nor Science, where the reality of evil is denied altogether and considered to be an illusion, I want to clarify what I mean when I say, “Evil is not,” or that, “Evil is nothing.”
Before I do that, let me tell you a story of an occasion where I was asked to debate a spokesperson for Christian Science on this question of the nature of evil, and the position of my opponent that day was that evil is an illusion.
And so in the course of that discussion, I asked him a question. Did he think that I was an illusion? Was I a fig newton of his imagination? And he declared that he did not think that I was an illusion. He considered that I was real. And I said, “We’re really having this discussion here, and I am saying that evil is not an illusion, and you saying that it is an illusion. And my simple question is this. Do you think it’s good that I am saying that evil is not an illusion?”
He said, “No.” And I said, “Well, if it’s not good that I’m saying that, it must be bad, and so here’s one example of an evil that is not an illusion.” And it sort of went downhill after that.
But what do I mean when I say that evil is nothing? What I mean by that is I’m taking the word nothing and resting upon its etymological derivation where the term nothing comes from the combination of a negative prefix and a subject.
And the word nothing really means “no thing.” And the reason I want to stress that point is that in the culture we get the idea that evil is some kind of independent substance, something that is in your drinking water or in the clouds somewhere, some force or power that is independent, that exists in and of himself and influences the affairs of your life and of this world. And so the first thing we have to say about what evil is, is what it is not.
It is not a thing that has existence. Evil has no being. It has no ontological status. Rather evil is an action of something that is a thing. I am something. You are something. And when I do something that is not good, then I am doing something that is evil, but evil then is an activity of some being. It has no being itself.
Now that may seem like a pedantic point and of no immediate concern to the second question of where evil comes from, but later on, God willing, I’ll try to indicate why our definition of evil is so important to the deeper question of where it comes from.
Now back to the idea of its nothingness, historically the two great theologian philosophers in the history of the church who have addressed the question of what is evil were, of course, Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine before him.
And both Augustine and Aquinas used two Latin words, of course, because you can’t do theology without using Latin words. And they used two Latin words to describe the nature of evil, and those two words were negatio and privatio. And you can guess the translation of those two Latin words. Privatio comes into the English language with the word privation, and negatio comes into the English language with the word negation.
And so historically and classically, the nature of evil has been defined in terms of negation and privation. In philosophy and in theology, one of the most important ways in which we try to give definitions to thing… to things that are mysterious is by using the method called the way of negation, and that method talks in terms of what something is not. For example, when we talk about the character and the being of God, we say that God is infinite.
What does that mean? Well, that means He is not finite. That’s an application of this way of negation. And so what Augustine and Aquinas were getting at is that to discuss the nature of evil, which the Bible calls the mystery of iniquity, we have to first understand it by way of negation, by what it is not.
Now, evil in this sense can only be defined against the backdrop of what is good. And in Biblical terms, evil is defined by words like this: ungodliness, unrighteousness, injustice, for example, so that the term is used as the negation, the opposite of the positive thing that’s being affirmed. So that injustice or un-justness can only be understood against the previous concept of justice. Unrighteousness can only be recognized as unrighteousness against the background of righteousness as the standard by which unrighteousness can be recognized and can be defined.
Now I think that’s pretty easy to see that the way in which negative language is used to describe evil. In this sense, the great theologians would indicate that evil is parasitic. It’s like a parasite. It can’t be known in and of itself as some independent being but can only be known and understood against the positive standard. And like a parasite, if the host dies, the parasite dies with it, because the parasite depends upon the host for its own strength and existence.
And in like manner in an analogical way, the same thing is true of evil. It’s that you can’t really describe it, you can’t really define it except against the background of the good.
Now the other word that is used by Augustine and Aquinas is the word privation, and what a privation is, is some sort of lack or some… some sort of deficiency. If you don’t get something that you want, that doesn’t mean that you’re experiencing deprivation. But if you don’t get something that you need, then it can be properly said that you have been deprived, that you are lacking something that is necessary and essential to your very being.
If we go to the Westminster Confession of Faith, the 17th century Reformed Confession, and its catechetical formulations in the Westminster Larger Catechism and then in the Shorter Catechism, you have the simple question that is asked, “What is sin?” What is sin? And since you all know the catechism, you know the answer to that before I give it.
What is sin? Sin is, “any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God.” So there confessionally sin or moral evil is defined in terms of a lack, of a privation, of a want of conformity to. Righteousness involves conforming to the law of God, doing what God commands. But sin enters in when we fail to do what God commands, and we fail to conform to His standards of what is righteous.
And so on the one hand, the catechism says that sin is a want of conformity to, which is a kind of privatio, a kind of privation, or transgression of the law of God.
Now we’re moving out of simple privation and simple negation to another element, an element that the Reformers of the 16th century added to the classic definition of evil. They agreed that evil is negation and is privation, but lest anyone should think that because evil has no being, no independent status, is not a thing, unless because of that we come to the conclusion that evil really is an illusion, the Reformers said that yes, sin is negation or evil is negation, evil is privation.
But they added another Latin term. Don’t they always? Huh? They added the term actuosa, that is to say evil is privatio actuosa, meaning that though evil is not something that exists in and of itself, it is real, and its effects and its impact are devastating.
There is an actual privation that is an activated privation, an activated disobedience to the Word of God. And because real beings act out real evil though evil is not independent, nevertheless it is real. Am I making sense? Are you getting that? Are you understanding that point or is it too obscure? Of course not, you all get it, don’t you?
So that’s where we start with this question of what is evil and where does it come from. That’s the easy part of the two questions.
The second part of the question has to do with the origin of evil and how evil could intrude into a universe created by a God who is altogether holy, altogether righteous, and not only is this universe created by such a God, it is also governed and ruled by such a God. And if this God is holy and if He is righteous, how in the world can He tolerate so much evil in it?
The origin of evil has been called the Achilles’ heel of Christianity, and that analysis or that analogy goes back to the Iliad and to the Battle of Troy where Achilles could only be wounded in one place and that was at his… the back of his heel, which was the only part of his body that was not protected by his armor.
And so when we say that something is the Achilles’ heel, we mean that it is the supreme point of vulnerability. And critics of Christianity have said, “Where the Christian truth claim is most vulnerable is at this point of the presence of evil in a world allegedly made and governed by a good and holy God.
Now sometimes as Christians we fail to feel the weight of that problem. The philosopher John Stuart Mill put it this way, “The presence of evil makes the very existence of God problematic,” because in the Christian view of God we say that on the one hand God is omnipotent. He possesses all power.
On the other hand, we say that God is loving and good. And Mill looks at the pain and the sorrow and the suffering and the moral evil in this world and he said, “Wait a minute. These two ideas, the goodness of God and the omnipotence of God, in light of the reality of evil cannot logically cohere or coexist.”
His argument is this. If God is all-powerful and has the power to create a universe without evil or has the power to rid the universe of evil at any given moment, if He has the power to do it and He doesn’t do it, then He’s not good or He’s not loving. Because what kind of being who has omnipotent power could stand by and observe the pain, the suffering, and wickedness in a universe of His own creation and not eliminate it? He can’t be good.
If, on the other hand, God is good and God is loving and wants to get rid of evil that brings so much of a blemish to His creation, like the BP oil spill that everybody recognizes is a disaster, and God would see it as a disaster. And He would love to see it cleaned up, but He doesn’t have the power to do it.
So do you see, one way or the other, God’s either not good or He’s not all-powerful. Now I think there’s an adequate answer to that question, and it’s one, God willing, I’ll try to provide for you in the minutes that are left in this consideration.
But before I go any further, to answer the question of where evil came from, I have to give my short answer to the question, my down and dirty answer to the question, “Where did evil come from?” And my answer is this: I don’t know. So maybe it’s time for me to just sit down and shut up.
But what I want to do in the time remaining is to tell you why I don’t know. Forty years ago, I was giving a lecture on this subject back in Pittsburgh, and in the audience was my mentor, Dr. John Gerstner, and he heard me say on that occasion these things. I said, “I don’t know how to explain the origin of evil. And what else I can tell you is that I’m sure that in this world, I will never be able to answer that question. I don’t know of any philosopher or theologian who has answered it adequately, at least to satisfy my mind. And I’m sure I’m not going to go beyond the insights of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, Edwards, and the rest who have wrestled with this.”
When I was finished, my mentor took me aside, and he was somewhat pained and visibly irritated with me. And I said, “What’s the matter?” And he said, “What’s the matter is your arrogance.” I said, “My arrogance? What did I do?” He said, “You told these people that you didn’t know where evil came from and that you couldn’t explain the problem, and that’s fine. But you’re only 30 years old, and you assume that you have already reached the saturation point of all the knowledge that you will ever acquire in your lifetime. How do you know, R.C. Sproul, that you won’t be able to solve this problem tomorrow?”
I said, “Because Aquinas couldn’t do it and Augustine couldn’t do it and Edwards couldn’t do it and you can’t do it, and these guys are so much more intelligent than I am. I’m trying to tell you, I don’t think there’s much likelihood that I’m going to solve a conundrum that they were unable to resolve.”
Well again, he rebuked me for my arrogance in assuming that I had already reached the pinnacle of my own knowledge, and that maybe someday I would be able to answer the question. Well, to defend the remarks that I made 40 years ago, I still don’t know the answer to this question and not for a lack of trying.
What this question demands philosophically and theologically is an adequate theodicy. For how many of you is the word theodicy a new word or a word that you would have difficulty defining? Thank you. Okay, we’re going to learn a new word today.
The word theodicy, T-H-E-O-D-I-C-Y, is a word that comes from a combination of two very important Biblical words. There is the word theos, which is the New Testament word for God. And then there is the word dikaios, which is the New Testament word for justice or righteousness, a form of which is the word dikaiosune, which is the New Testament word for justification.
What a theodicy is, is an intellectual reasoned defense of God for the problem of evil in the universe. So, in other words, it’s an attempt to answer the critique of John Stuart Mill and others and to justify God for this problem of evil. I don’t know how many theodicies I’ve studied in my lifetime, quite a few of them. I have yet to find one completely satisfying to my own brain. In a few minutes, I will provide the theodicy which I think comes the closest to solving the problem that I’ve ever seen, but still lacks final resolution.
Now I don’t want to exaggerate, but my estimate is, and I don’t think this is hyperbole, – Vesta could confirm it. You could ask her. – at least it seems to me that about once a month, maybe it’s not quite that frequently, but it seems to me that about once a month, I get a letter from somebody out there who has solved the problem of the origin of evil.
And they want to run it by me, and I have to answer these letters as politely and nicely as I know how when I want to say, “This is amateur night, folks, and I don’t think you feel the weight of the problem,” because the answers that I find in these letters that are addressed to me – and I do appreciate that people struggle with this question and are trying to come up with answers – but it seems to me that the answers I hear again and again are not just simple, but they’re simplistic. They don’t really see the depth of the problem.
And of course, the most common answer I receive is that the origin of evil has to be located in human free will. And of course, we all understand that the one who brings evil into the world, moral evil, is man, Adam and Eve, or before that the devil. And both of those personages were exercising the faculty of choosing, in which they had been endowed by their Creator, and that they have made choices the result of which are evil.
And so I said, “Well, see, what’s the problem?” We answer this problem with the free will of man. Sin came into being because Adam or Eve or both of them freely decided to disobey God, just as Lucifer when he was a good angel was transformed into an evil fallen angel when he exercised his free will by choosing to disobey God.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not denying that those choices were made, and I’m not denying that they were evil choices. What I’m saying is that they don’t solve the problem because we know this, that before a choice can be made, prior to the choices being made, there has to be some kind of moral inclination. And if you examine it as carefully as Jonathan Edwards did in his classic work on The Freedom of the Will, Edwards comes to the conclusion that the only way you can account for an evil choice is by having an evil inclination or disposition to that choice.
It’s manifest that Adam and Eve’s choice was evil, and yet… and they chose it according to their will, and that’s also true of Satan. But the question is, where did their prior disposition come from? What was it that inclined Adam and Eve to disobey God? Now part of Roman Catholic theology is to struggle with this question and talk about the doctrine of concupiscence. You may have heard of concupiscence.
And Rome defines concupiscence in this manner: that concupiscence is of sin and inclines to sin but is not sin. Well, in one respect, I think that’s right, that it is not an actual sin of disobedience in terms of the outward action, but that which is of sin and inclines to sin is sinful. And so a being who has a desire to do something evil, before he chooses to do that evil, is already fallen before he makes the choice. Do you see that?
That’s the point that so many people miss when they say, “Oh, well it was all because of the free choice of Adam and Eve.” But the question is, why did these creatures who were made in the image of God and who were made good choose to disobey Him? Well, if you say for no reason, that there was no prior inclination, no prior desire or disposition, then you’ve described a choice that is not a moral action at all. You’ve denied the moral agency of the creature when you say he does it arbitrarily.
Some people look at the text of Genesis, chapter 3, and they will argue, “Well, they were coerced into sinning by the power of Satan.” This is the old argument. The devil made me do it. This was the argument that Eve gave. It was her theodicy. Adam hitchhiked on that argument when he said to God, “The woman that You gave to me,” as if God now had forced evil into Adam through the irresistible power of the wife that God provided for him.
“Yes, Lord, You made her as my helpmate, and she helped me right over the cliff here into the fall.” You see, so the idea there is that we explain it away by demonic coercion. But if evil entered the Garden through demonic coercion, if it was real coercion, then it would be excusable. And it would not carry the moral judgment that it does carry according to Scripture. It would excuse Adam and Eve because they would have been powerless to resist the temptation of Satan. That not only does not solve the problem philosophically, but it also violates the text of Scripture.
The other is that Satan is described as the most clever of all of the beasts of the field, and that he comes and seduces Eve by tricking her with his guileful arguments and basically fools her. And so Eve falls into sin out of ignorance. And again we would say if that were the case, if she really had been ignorant with what we call invincible ignorance, an ignorance that is impossible to overcome, if that were the case, then she would be guiltless, and God would be wicked in punishing her for that act.
Not only that, but the appeal to the ignorance of Eve and/or Adam also violates the text because the text tells us that God spoke clearly to Adam and Eve and told them what they may not do and what the consequences would be if they did it, at which point Satan challenged the very premise of God when he says, “Did God say you may not eat of any of the trees in the Garden?
Now, he knew very well that that’s not what God had said. But Eve said, “No.” Eve now becomes the world’s first apologist. She defends the integrity of God. “God didn’t say that, Mr. Devil, Mr. Serpent. He said of all the trees of the Garden we may freely eat, but then He put this one area out of bounds, said that if we ate of that we would surely die.” Now Satan says, “You will not die.”
Now, God created Adam and Eve unfallen. Their physical powers were greater than ours because our bodies have been ravaged by the consequences of sin. But not only that, their foolish minds were not darkened, had not been ruined by original sin, and their ability to think clearly far exceeds any Einstein or Aquinas or any other post-fallen person.
If ever a human being would have instantly recognized a violation of the law of non-contradiction, it would have been Eve when the serpent said, “You shall not die,” because she knew that her Creator, to whom she owed her very existence, had said if you do A, B will necessarily follow.
Instead, Satan comes and says if you do A, non-B will follow, so that the serpent initially is subtle, but then he gets rid of the subtlety and makes a direct assault on the integrity and truthfulness of God. And Eve buys it, and so she can’t say, “I didn’t know the gun was loaded.” She can’t appeal to ignorance for her sin. And so the deception of Satan of our human forefathers did not excuse them because they were morally capable and culpable for recognizing the contradiction to the Word of God and not to obey the lie rather than the truth. So that explanation falls by its own weight.
What are we left with? You know, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth called the problem of evil the unmöglich möglichkeit, the impossible possibility, which is a contradictory statement. It’s a nonsense statement. Well in that case, Barth was just not merely practicing his favorite tool of dialectical thinking or the use of paradox to make a point. He understood that evil had to be possible, or it couldn’t have happened. But we cannot find any way in which it was possible.
It seems at least on the outside that was impossible, and yet it happened. And that’s why he calls it an impossible possibility. That’s his way as a theologian to throw up his hands and say, “I give up. I don’t know.” Dr. Gerstner would have said to Dr. Barth, “You haven’t died yet, Karl. Don’t give up so easily, or you’re surrendering to the same arrogance that this kid in Pittsburgh has suffered from.”
Well, one of the most fascinating theodicies ever produced on this question was produced by a German philosopher by the name of Leibniz. And Leibniz’s famous theodicy goes something like this. He distinguishes first of all among three different kinds of evil. There is metaphysical evil, there is physical evil, and there is moral evil. Now you all know what physical evil is. It’s Katrina. It’s the earthquake. It’s disease that ravages you. We say that’s a bad thing.
The doctor gave us bad news today about our health. That’s physical evil. But physical evil is not moral evil, though Biblically there is a connection. What he means by metaphysical evil is metaphysical imperfection. The only perfect being that exists is God. He’s perfect in all of His attributes. God is self-existent, eternal, immutable, omniscient, all the rest.
And even God cannot create another god. You say, “Well, God can do anything.” No. God can’t be God and not be God at the same time and same relationship. God can’t build a rock so big that He can’t move it. Nor can God create another god. Why not? Because the second god would by definition be a creature. He would not be self-existent. He would not be eternal. But he would be eternally dependent upon the first God. And so anything that God creates must by the nature of things be less than He is.
That’s not big news. I mean, the Bible makes this absolute distinction between Creator and creature. But he’s saying that God could have created the world in many, many different ways, but no matter how He created the world, the world would by definition have to be imperfect metaphysically because it would fall short of the being of God Himself. You follow that?
And so Leibniz says that metaphysical evil gives rise to physical evil and together brings to pass moral evil. It’s a cleverly constructed argument, but in the final analysis makes God by necessity the author of evil and also gives the ultimate excuse for our sin. What do you expect from me, God, to err is human? I’m finite. I’m not You. And since I am finite and conditioned and derived, I morally fall out of necessity.
The argument that we sin because we’re finite is one that not only Leibniz has given. Paul Tillich fell back on it. Process philosophy uses it. You see it again and again in many different shapes and sizes and forms. And it’s one of the most frequent answers that I get from these people that write me letters and tell me that the reason why sin came into the world is because we’re finite. And if finite, we not only are prone to sin, but it is inevitable that we do sin. And I try to point out to them if sin is a necessary consequence of being finite, it’s excusable.
How can God still find fault? It was Voltaire who wrote the little book Candide, in which he wrote a satire in response to Leibniz’s theodicy. If you’ve read Candide, you know of this character who’s seen as kind of a bumbling guy by the name of Dr. Pangloss. And Dr. Pangloss is espousing the theory that this is the best of all possible worlds. You can’t be mad at God. God did the best He could do.
This was written right after the Lisbon earthquake that caused so much pain and suffering in Portugal that in light of the fresh memory of this earthquake, what Voltaire was trying to do was to reduce the theodicy of Leibniz to ridicule.
So I’m just saying this to say that that I am not persuaded of that argument either. So what do I say about it? A couple of things, and what I’m about to say now might shock you and could easily be misunderstood by you.
Before I say it, I want to also say that the Bible makes it clear that it is a sin to call good evil, and it is a sin to call evil good. And that’s a sin that we commit everyday. When we try to justify our own disobedience and our own moral sinfulness, we try to turn it around and make our evil actually look good.
Or when we despise the law of God and hate the law of God which is good, we say there’s something wrong with that law, I’m not going to obey it because it’s not good for me, I’m calling good evil. So we’re not allowed to call good evil or evil good. That’s axiomatic.
And here’s what I’m going to say. Evil is not good, but it is good that there is evil. Evil is not good, but it is good that there is evil. Otherwise it wouldn’t be in a universe ruled by a perfect God. God has His purpose for the entrance of evil into this world. And in a certain sense as Augustine said centuries ago, God even ordained that evil come into the world. If He did not ordain it, it wouldn’t be here because evil has no power to overcome the sovereign, providential government of this universe.
Now the favorite verse that is annually voted by evangelical Christians as people’s favorite verse in the Bible is Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord and who are called according to His purpose.”
Now unless God has sovereign power over evil, He will not be able to keep that promise, that promise that we cling to, that promise we rely on, that promise that encourages us that no matter how many bad things we suffer in this world. It’s not that God is saying that those bad things are good things, but He’s saying that they are working for good. I’m using it ultimately for good.
Unless God has the power over good and evil, He can’t make that promise. Do you see that? And so for purposes I don’t know and I don’t understand, God, as Augustine qualified, in a certain sense ordained that evil come into this world, not naïvely so that you may experience the difference between good and evil, — My daddy used to say, “You don’t have to live in a garbage can to know that it stinks.” – but for a redemptive purpose.
The classic example of that is the story of Joseph when he was confronted by his brothers after they had so treacherously betrayed their brother, sold him into slavery and all the rest. And when they discover that they’re now talking to the Prime Minister of Egypt, and it’s their long lost brother, they’re terrified that he’s going to bring the wrath of Egypt down on their head.
And Joseph says, “I’m not God, and I know what you did. You know what you did. And I know what you meant by it. I know what your intentionality was as moral creatures. You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”
That’s one of the hardest concepts, but if you want to understand it, look at Good Friday. Ultimately, who delivered Jesus up to the Gentiles to be killed? Ultimately, who was it who was pleased that He be punished? It pleased the Lord to bruise Him. The blackest act in all of human history is celebrated now by what we call Good Friday, because though the motives and the intents of all of the actors that were engaged in the trial and the execution of our Lord Jesus Christ, for which they are responsible, God didn’t force them to do it.
But His sovereign power trumped their mortal, evil desires because it was through the foreordination of God that Jesus was crucified. This wasn’t an accident in history. And so that God has this ability to order a universe in which He uses evil for perfectly pure and holy purposes which we will see in the full and final analysis only in glory.
One last point before my time expires, and for this I’m indebted to Augustine, and I wanted to tie together what I said earlier about evil’s having no ontological status for existence is that although we have a problem explaining the presence of evil, the unbelievers’ problem is greatly exacerbated over ours.
Again, the only way you can identify something as being evil is against the backdrop of the good. And only if good exists, does evil become a problem. Let me say it again. Only if good exists, does evil become a problem. And so in a convoluted way, indirectly, the presence of evil points to the reality of the good. It becomes an argument not against God but for the existence of God.
And the pagan has two problems. He not only has to account for the entrance of evil into the world, but he also has to account for the existence of good without an author of goodness. He has to say in the final analysis as many pagans do today, “There is no such thing as evil. There is no such thing as good, only personal preferences.” That’s what the relativist says until you steal his wallet, then he suddenly abandons his relativism and says, “That’s not right,” and he calls the cop looking for justice.
So I’ve said all this to say, “I don’t know.” But I want you to understand why I don’t know, and why this question is such a thorny one, and why it is the mystery of iniquity. But I leave you with this thought. Though I don’t know or fully understand the origin of evil, I do know the future of it. I do know that it has been overcome, and that God will rid this universe of all moral evil, physical evil, and metaphysical evil, as we grow up into the fullness of Christ and inhabit a new heaven and a new earth, in where there is no more crying, no more death, “death shall be no more,” no more pain, and no more sin, which I will, God willing, speak about tomorrow.
Let’s pray.
Thank You, Lord, for the triumph of Your grace over our wickedness. Forgive us when we ascribe to You an evil action that excuses us for we know that even what You ordain does not excuse our acts of intention against You and against Your beloved. And though we wrestle with this question of evil, we don’t wrestle with the question of good, and we don’t wrestle with the promise that You have given and demonstrated adequately in history of Your final triumph over our evil. We thank You for this in the name of Christ. Amen.