Greetings Friends everywhere!
The answer may not be as absurd as you might think! I’m talking about the evil in our world which seems to continue unabated. There is a simple yet profound explanation for it. As we look around us, things seem to be in disarray and beyond our power to control. It seems like we are headed in a downward spiral to oblivion and we can’t do much about it. Terrorism dominates our psyche every other day. Our capitalist world doesn’t seem to contribute to a better world we thought it might give us – how can it, if it has greed as its agenda? According to scientists, our planet earth we call the ‘blue marble,’ is dying a slow death through man’s excesses and lack of environmental responsibility. The world is filled with problems—disease, pollution, poverty, ignorance, religious confusion, rape, war, terrorism, crime, violence, racial tensions, hunger, immorality, slavery, oppression, political upheaval and much more. Even nature seems to be against us in the natural disasters we see around the globe. The future for mankind can best be described as uncertain and on shaky ground.
Montage of War on Terror (Wiki Commons)
Yet, there’s never been a time like ours in terms of man’s advancement in education, in science and the arts, in technological wonders, in transportation, in engineering, and just about every sphere of endeavor. Yet, evil has kept pace with man’s progress. It seems with every step forward he countermands it with two steps backwards. What’s behind this paradox? The well-known presidential historian and columnist Peggy Noonan summarized mankind’s history: “In the long ribbon of history, life has been one long stained and tangled mess, full of famine, horror, war and disease. We must have thought we had it better because man had improved. But man doesn’t really ‘improve,’ does he? Man is man. Human nature is human nature; the impulse to destroy coexists with the desire to build and create and make better” (“America’s Age of Uncertainty,” Knight Ridder, Nov. 9, 2001). Why is the “impulse to destroy coexists with the desire to build and create?”
Natural Disasters (Wiki Commons)
I can give you my personal solutions to the problems, so do others from every which where, but they will be to no avail. So, let me give you the Trinitarian solution. You have read me always defray to the “Triune” solution to everything and every issue in my blogs. Jesus lived this way and said, “I don’t speak on my own authority. The Father who sent Me has commanded Me what to say and how to say it” (John 12:29, NLT). The solution to the problems of humanity are not found in humans, except to those who tap into a divine source outside of themselves, as Jesus prescribed. Albert Einstein supports this vies saying wisely, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Jesus said that not only was He given what to do, but how to do it, by His Father. So I hope to be able to convey the same solution on the subject of evil, with the help of His Spirit.
First and foremost, man’s beginning originates from a Being who is Trinitarian in His makeup and character. (Gen.1:26-27) Man is the anthropomorphism of a God who is Love and Triune. (1 John 4:8) The Father is not God without the Son and the Spirit. Nor is the Son God without the Father and the Spirit. Neither is the Spirit God without the Father and Son. Because of this basic truth of God’s Triune nature, we were made to live and function like He does in His Tri-Personal Being. That’s to say, in the Trinity, each Person “occupies” the others’ personalities. This occupation brings about a relational oneness or “Triune Life” as I often refer to in my blogs. As each of the three Persons of the Trinity becomes “home” for the other two, so do we when we live the “Triune Life” in Christ. (Rom.8:29) As each inhabits the others, each is host and guest to the other in this Triune lifestyle and existence. It is so reciprocal that each one feels more at home with the others’ personalities than His own. Trinitarian persons, which we have become through and in Christ, do not exist in isolation; they live in and through one another, which makes their personalities relational. Each has intimate access to the others’ deepest thoughts and feelings perpetually. This makes them equals, free personalities, and united in Love. Hence we read Jesus’ declaration of this “Triune Life”: “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in Me? The words I say to you I do not speak on My own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in Me, who is doing His work” (John 14:10). It’s a life that’s never lived solitarily, but collaboratively, each inhabiting the other as host and guests in Loving relationship. Without the “Triune Life” man will live life to his own detriment. The power which makes this kind of living possible is God’s divine Love. “God is Love,” and Love is God. (1 John 4:8)
The Trinity, After Whose Likeness Man Was Fashioned (Wiki Commons)
Man was not born with this Love, but he has the potential to be given and receive this Love through a spiritual rebirth by God’s Spirit. Jesus said, “You must be born again of the Spirit” (John 3:5-8). The Spirit is the personification of God’s Love deposited in man. (Rom.5:5) Love is the glue which makes the “Triune Life” possible. “Triune Life” means a believer who lives the 3-dimensional life inhabitation within the Triune God, as opposed to the ‘solitary’ 1-dimensional life man lives in himself. Love engenders and means trust. Stephen Covey said, “Trust (Love) is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” When Adam disobeyed God, his human spirit died. “You will surely die,” God told Adam if he ate the forbidden fruit. (Gen.2:17) Adam’s spirit died because he sinned, for “the wages of sin is death” (Rom.6:23). Sin is the opposite of and contrary to Love. The devil took reign of man’s heart for he is the originator of sin, rebellion, and death. (Ezek.28:15) Man’s fallen and dead spiritual state of being now becomes the basis of his thinking process and the trigger for human suffering we see in the world today.
It’s crucial to understand Jesus when He said, “Life is spiritual. Your physical existence doesn’t contribute to that life” (John 6:63, God’s Word T.). This is fundamental in Christian thought, and Paul spells out Jesus’ meaning when he said, “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the power of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph.6:12). That’s to say, what we see in man’s physical world is the result of the goings-on in the spiritual realm animating human actions. (see Job 2:1-4) This means man is not free as he likes to think he is. How can he, when he has been dead spiritually from Adam? Spiritually, he is incarcerated in the devil’s prison due to Adam’s deathly choice. But Paul tells us the freedom we are given to enjoy as believers, “through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Rom.8:2). The Holy Spirit brings back to life man’s dead spirit through Christ, and man is made one with God through the Spirit’s presence in man. (John 3:5-8) This speaks of the Spirit’s “condition” in which our mind is made to think and behave. The “condition” is either sin, incarceration, and death, or God’s Spirit, Love, freedom, and life.
The human mind is the seat and center of man’s spiritual life. Of all creatures God made, only man was created with the mind to enable him to have a spiritual existence. Through the human mind, man was made to communicate with God in whose likeness he was fashioned. The human body is entirely homosapien except for the brain which houses the human mind and elevates him to God’s level (likeness). (Gen.1:26-27; Rom.8:29) The Psalmist said, “I said, ‘You are “gods’; you are all sons of the Most High” (Psa.82:6). At creation God gave Adam the authority to name the animals and other creatures. This proves that man was special and different from other life forms. (Gen.2:19-20) Man did not evolve from animals, he was fashioned in his Creator’s image. The brain is given its mind power when God breathed into man the ‘human spirit’ no other creature in creation possessed: “Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Gen.2:7). That is the difference between an animal and human being – the human mind! It gave him the consciousness of himself and his actions. It gave him the human mind so he can evaluate his actions. The source of all man’s actions, be they good or evil, originates from a spiritual source – the human mind. Paul says, “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). To believe or disbelieve is the activity of the human mind. This passage speaks of a truth we often are unaware, since the mind is spiritual by nature, thereby, various external spiritual forces can enter man and influence his actions – depending upon which spirit we allow to influence our actions. That is why we “test the spirits” and decide who we believe, and who we discard and disbelieve.
Man is a free moral agent, therefore, he has to choose which spirit to submit himself. This is the root cause of evil in our world – we have given our minds over to the wrong spirit to influence our thought process and thereby bring forth evil actions. There you have it – it is as simple as it is profound. The cause of all evil in this world is man’s mind and the thoughts he allows to germinate and ultimately bring forth into action which affects those around him. We shall see how to deal with it. Paul warned, “You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it’s your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you’ve let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you’ve started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!” (Rom.6:16-18, MSG).
As humans, we fail to guard the door of our minds from intruders (wrong spirits) who mean us harm, as we would guard the door of our homes to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Yet, we must come around to value what we permit to influence our minds more than anything else in life. As we saw earlier, “we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places” (Eph.6:12, NLT). This is first base, friends, this is for keeps, a life-or-death fight to the finish. If we fail here we become slaves to those we have given our minds to control our thought process, and we would have aborted our opportunity to contribute to a better world. (Rom.6:16)
The Human Mind – We Ask, Which Spirit Is in Control of Our Motives? (Wiki Commons)
What is Love and how does it move in the lives of people and their actions? How do we know Love when we see it? In order to understand we have to go back to the original dominion mandate given to man at creation in Genesis. Let’s hear the mandate once more. After God created teems of living creatures in the oceans, and every winged creature, the beasts of the earth and everything that creeps, each after their kind, He said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule (have dominion) over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule (have dominion) over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen.1:26-31). The words I have italicized in the passage above spells out the “dominion mandate” over this earth the Creator God gave mankind through Adam and Eve, our first parents.
Please note, there was not a word mentioned here of humans having dominion or rule over other humans. The passage speaks of man’s dominion over all creation, except another human. This was quite deliberate, why, because there is only One Ruler over man who is made in the Creator’s likeness – God, who alone Personally directs man by His Spirit. No human is superior to another human because they bear the same image of God which makes them all equals. Then God places unique gifts in each man, woman, and child, and through those gifts directs His human children in His Love. Yet, as humans, while we have absolutely no power to confer gifts upon another human (perish the thought), we have the audacity to selfishly and thoughtlessly rule and dominate them, despite being clueless as to who they are in their God-given gifts? Paul makes God’s divine authority in man clear, “In a marriage relationship, there is authority from Christ to husband, and from husband to wife. The authority of Christ is the authority of God.” (1 Cor.11:3, MSG; also Heb. 8:10-11; Isa. 30:20-21). The family is the foundation of human society replicating God’s Triune character, hence Paul uses it as the basis for revealing divine sovereignty over mankind.
Divine authority begins with God the Father and flows down. So, ultimately the head of every man, woman, and child, is God, and He has never relinquished this role to any human. The prophet Ezekiel, quoting God, said, “For everyone (all people) belongs to Me, the parent as well as the child–both alike belong to Me” (Ezek.18:4). Modern church leaders are grossly culpable by unwittingly (or wittingly) stepping into God’s shoes and usurped authority over people that’s not rightly theirs. Yes, they can play god by dominating the flock through forms of legalism, but they can’t be God. (read Ezekiel 34) Church leaders must remain faithful intermediaries, heralds, conveying God’s truth and Love by helping bring believers into the “Triune Life.” If we fail to do that we have disqualified ourselves from being overseers of God’s people. God makes His sovereignty profoundly clear in the way we live daily, “We can make our own plans, but the Lord gives the right answer” (Pro.16:1). We all seek success in every plan we embark on in life, but a wrong answer will spell failure and disaster for us and our loved ones. Only God has all the answers. No church leader is capable of giving all the “the right answers” to the members of his congregation. But if we acknowledge and allow God to weigh our motives, intents, and purposes, then He rules over us and leads us to success, victory, and happiness. Only God has gifted every human who has ever lived and thereby knows the intents and purpose of each person, and how to lead a person to his/her destiny. So, why do humans seek to rule over and dominate other humans and infringe upon God’s direct personal area of responsibility? Do we dare act upon what we are unqualified and woefully incapacitated to do? Dominating others blinds us to the truth of who we are because we’re not living in God’s likeness or the “Triune Life.” We lose our humanity when we seek to dominate others, for we are made to live the “Triune Life” as equals. When we see others as equals and not dominate them in the sight of God, we are tapping into the source where all gifts originate, and we put ourselves on the path to self-discovery about our ourselves, and those of others, which we would not otherwise achieve. Even God does not dominate humans – He Loves them and gave His Son as ransom for them. The truth is people dominate other people because they have taken on another spirit, not God’s Spirit.
It is crucial as much as it is pragmatic that God gave Adam the original “other” human, Eve, to live the role of a “suitable helper” with him. So, Eve was not created like Adam from the dust of the ground, but out from Adam’s body, depicting the basic Trinitarian nature of the personal co-habitation of oneness and in one another. (Gen.2:20-24) When Adam said of Eve, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man,” the Spirit inspired him to utter the basic Trinitarian image of co-habitation of persons as one being, like the Tri-Personal Being of God. Children are birthed under the same Triune pattern. Mankind come from one man through multiplication – Adam. Though the primary context for this “helper” decree to Adam and Eve was matrimonial, Eve epitomizes every human. Since Eve was the only “other” human besides Adam, by extension she also represented our “neighbor,” whoever he or she may be. For the “helper” decree can be applied in every context, not necessarily matrimonial. Hence, the mandate is to “help” not rule our fellow humans.
Paul explains this “helper” decree we’re to have toward our fellowmen: “Owe no man anything, except the debt of Love” (Rom. 13:8; Gal. 6:2; Rom.5:5). Again he said to the Corinthians, “We are helpers of your joy” (2 Cor. 1:24, KJV). Yes, we ought to be a source of joy to others – that’s what Love does. Why, because God created us and owes us the same debt of Love, and lived by it when He gave His only Son to die for us. John said, “Dear friends, since God so Loved us, we also ought to Love one another” (1 John 4:11). Yes, this is a debt we owe every human who walks this earth: “the debt of Love,” but never to dominate and rule another human which is God’s prerogative alone. Jesus said it this way, “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). That means your neighbor is your equal – you can’t dominate anyone who is your equal, you can only Love him or her. Human domination is forbidden irrespective of station, color, nationality, culture, or whatever walls of division humans are likely to set up. So, the original Genesis “dominion mandate” given to man precludes our domination over another human.
And this, right here, is the true source of evil in the world today. We have forsaken the “dominion mandate” given us by the Creator to Love, help, and be a source of joy to our neighbors. It is Love that will change our thought process to think differently and more highly of our fellowmen. It begins here, it begins with God’s divine Love, if evil is ever to be reversed in the world.
Divine Love, Not Man’s Love (Wiki Commons)
Those who channel the “dominion mandate” selfishly are spontaneously forced to make greed and avarice their way of life, instead of God’s Love. This is where evil and human suffering takes root. They think the only way is to compete and control, not realizing that the “dominion mandate” given to man precludes our domination over another man. Everything created is given to man to have dominion and rule with the exception of human beings. When we live the “Triune Life” and treat everyone as equals, a whole new world opens up we never knew existed.
“You are unrealistic,” one might say, “people are employed to serve under other people who are above and dominate them. So how do we apply this principle in real life situations?” Yes, a valid point. Every company operates under this ‘master/servant’ relationship where there’s employer and employee. So did Jesus when He walked this earth, yet He lived by the “dominion mandate” set by God, never domineering nor dictating His followers. In fact, He served His followers, never lording it over them. The leader is the greatest servant, he is servant to his followers. Jesus said, “You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must become your slave. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give His life as a ransom for many” (Matt.20:25-28). Yes, His ultimate act of leadership was to dies for His followers. He said, “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Then He taught his followers, “This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you” (John 15:13,12). What a profound statement about authentic leadership of which the world has little or none.
Jesus asked His disciples, “Do you understand what I have just done?” What did He just do? He performed the most menial task a servant can do – getting down on His knees and washing the disciples’ feet. He told them, “You call me ‘Master’ and ‘Lord,’ and you are right, because that’s what I am. And since I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you” (John 13:12-17). You see, you can be a manager of people and still be the greatest servant of all. How? You have to frame every person in the context of God’s Love – as owing everyone the “debt of Love” (Rom.13:8). The Spirit impresses God’s Love into your subconscious mind so your thought-process and actions is motivated by Love. Once Love becomes the central motive in your relationship with people, your paradigm changes and your actions will change to support it. That’s how God behaves toward us, the least we could do is to act likewise with others. 
Jesus, Washing The Disciples’ Feet, Showing Leadership Through Love and Servanthood (Wiki Commons)
Zig Ziglar said, “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.” For many Love is not the central theme which leads their lives, yet, it is the most profound singular measure by which you will determine your altitude in life. The greater part of our success and happiness or lack of it depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances. Marcus Aurelius said, “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to Love.”
Why don’t you turn to Jesus today, and ask Him to deliver your mind from all forms of evil thoughts through the gift of His divine Love. The Scriptures says this to you directly, “May you experience the Love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God” (Eph.3:19). May God bless you!
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to write me in the space provided below, or email me on bulamanriver@gmail.com.
Blessing: Until we meet again in my next post, may the blessings of the God who ceaselessly expresses Himself in His dependable Triune Love, be with you always. May the Spirit enliven your spirit and make all things concerning you possible as you live the “Triune Life” as a Bulamanriver.* Be strong in the Lord’s joy.
Kiang,
* Bulamanriver” is the metaphor describing the union of man with the Love of the Triune God flowing in humans, making possible the “Triune Life” – the source of the miraculous life in man. To read the many facets of life of the Bulamanriver, go to my website www.bulamanriver.com where you can order a copy of my Book.
All scriptures are taken from the NIV Version 2011, unless stated otherwise.