What do we do with evil?

Last night I watched the film "No Country for Old Men".  It was one of those movies I wasn't sure I wanted to see.  I think Tommy Lee Jones is a fine actor. It won a number of Oscars, so my interest was piqued.  But apart from O, Brother Where Art Thou, I've never been a huge fan of the Coen Brothers.  I confess I just don't get them.  But Sam, who's 15 wanted to see it, and I thought it would be good for us to watch it together.  I'm sure that is the only reason I made it through to the end of the movie.  I suspected from the start it wasn't going to end the way I wanted it to.

My family makes fun of me.  I like movies with happy endings.  I like movies where justice wins, the bad guy is defeated.  I like movies where the hero lives, and even lives happily ever after with his heroine.  At the very least there needs to be a clear point to the suffering, a lesson learned, an evil exposed.  Many would argue that life just isn't that way.  That evil wins, that suffering is meaningless, that there just isn't any point. 

Os Guinness says in his book Unspeakable that "A basic fact of life is that any of us may suffer and all of us will die.... far more people in the world suffer today under the heel of grinding evils that are numbingly ordinary and will never make the newspaper headlines or the television news.  Few of us, for instance, give serious thought to the millions of young girls forced into prostitution, to the women abused by their husbands, to the widows driven from their homes and their rightful lands, to the men convicted and imprisoned without justice, or to the millions of families kept for a lifetime in bonded slavery".   He goes on to contend that there are four challenges to rethinking evil and suffering in our times:

1) The scale and scope of evil has increased in the modern world.

2) Modern people have demonstrated a consistently poor response to modern evil.

3) Modern people have shown a chronic inability to name and judge evil and to respond effectively.

4) The worst modern atrocities were perpetrated by secularist regimes, led by secularist intellectuals and in the name of secularist beliefs.

So are we, modern people, less able, less willing to acknowledge evil, address evil, combat evil?  I don't know if historically we are more so inclined.  But I do think now, in this day and age we ignore, avoid, and dismiss the evil around us.   Albert Einstein said "The world is too dangerous to live in - not because of people who do evil, but because of people who sit and let it happen."  So if there seems to be an increase in evil, is it because evil is really on the rise, or is it just that we are less willing to oppose it?  I guess I agree with Os Guinness, it is both.

Even those of us who set out to make a difference, to fight the bad guy, end up like Tommy Lee Jone's character in the movie; making an honest effort yet overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible task before us.  So we choose instead to retire from the world, sit "safely" in our homes.

So I guess "No Country for Old Men" is more pragmatic, than the movie I want to see.  But is it more true?

Thank God, there is a reality that we do not see.  There are forces at work we are unaware of.  There are purposes being accomplished we do not understand.  How does the unspeakable evil of the world fit into that.  I confess I do not know, even though I do struggle to understand.  But I do know that good does win in the end.  There will be a time when Gods redemption of this world will be complete.  And evil that is now defeated, will be banished for good.

I guess this is the story of Easter.  There was suffering, there was death.  But now there is resurrection and life.  This is the story my heart yearns for.  And we already know what the end will be.

"Behold the dwelling place of God is with man.  He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."  Revelation 21:3-4