If evil lives inside of you, how do you remove it?

Unless you’ve been in a sensory deprivation chamber for the past couple of weeks, I’m sure you’re aware of the stomach-churning antisemitic attack that occurred on June 1st in Colorado. A week or so ago, the accused terrorist, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, was formally charged with 118 criminal counts (including 28 counts of attempted murder) by Colorado prosecutors for the firebombing attack that he carried out on people who were participating in a march to honor Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on October 7.

What you may not have known, however, is that the homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails that he used in his rampage weren’t his first choice of a weapon to use against the innocents gathered that day. Soliman had instead hoped to use a firearm, but his immigration status prevented him from buying a gun. He admitted this to a detective after his attack, stating he had even gone to the point of taking a concealed-carry class where he learned how to use a gun.

In one way, the security measures we have in place to protect people from those who shouldn’t have access to things that could harm others worked, which is a good thing. However, on the other hand, they failed because there is no foolproof security paradigm available that can always prevent evil from carrying out its intentions.

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Evil almost always finds a way.  

It may use a plane like on September 11. Or a fertilizer bomb like in Oklahoma City. Or a knife such as the one used at the Osaka school massacre (8 children dead, 15 seriously wounded) and similar blades utilized in attacks at various Chinese schools before that.

This is why making the primary focus on withholding whatever evil uses to carry out its plans from everyone else is doomed to fall short. You can stop a Mohamed Sabry Soliman from getting a gun (again, a good thing), but if you want to stop evil intentions full-bore, you have to go deeper than that.    

For example, those who want to remove so called “assault rifles” from society usually don’t know that more people are beaten to death each year than are killed by those types of rifles and all long arms in total (don’t forget also that a government analysis done on the 1994 assault weapon ban showed no meaningful reduction in homicides from its enactment). Heck, London, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the world, had a murder rate from knives and other weapons that exceeded the homicides in New York back in 2018.

Moreover, ignored is the reality that weapons like guns and knives save many more lives each year in self-defense situations than those taken through weapons-related homicides^[1], proving that a “thing” in itself can be used for either good or bad purposes. This being true, the wise thing to do is shift the primary emphasis away from the instrumental cause of evil acts and instead zero in on the efficient cause of such crimes, which is the evil inside all human hearts.

Refuting psychologists like Abraham Maslow, who said, “As far as I know we just don’t have any intrinsic instincts for evil” and Carl Rogers who stated, “I do not find that … evil is inherent in human nature”, Scripture tells us, “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5).

The Bible goes on to say: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9); “The hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live” (Ecc. 9:3); “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51:5); “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness” (Mark 7:21–22), and “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (James 4:1–2).

As the Bible says, we’re all capable of terrible things in and of ourselves. William Golding depicted this well in his novel Lord of the Flies, and its modern-day reimagining, Yellowjackets, which is a Showtime series that substitutes a high school girls’ soccer team for Golding’s young British boys who end up stranded on an island.

The Yellowjacket girls at first believe a presence they deem “the wilderness” is commanding them to do the awful acts they begin committing, but one of them finally asks, “What if it isn’t ‘the wilderness’? What if it’s just us?”  

Theologian Francis Schaeffer labeled that realization “man’s dilemma”, writing, “Man is able both to rise to great heights and to sink to great depths of cruelty and tragedy.” Sounds about right.

Since evil always seems to find a way, the only real cure for acts like those committed by Mohamed Sabry Soliman is to get rid of evil, which is done in one of two ways.

The first, is a spiritual heart transplant, which Jesus sums up as “You must be born again” (John 3:7). When our hearts no longer look to harm our neighbor, but instead seek to love that same neighbor, then we’ll have the real reduction in violence we all seek with one result being no need for any more bans on guns, knives, etc.

The second way to get rid of evil is to quarantine it. Oddly enough, there are way too many people who don’t seem to truly get the need for this down deep.

I find it weird that oftentimes the same crowd who militantly demanded quarantines to keep viruses like COVID from infecting and hurting others are the same who are far too OK with releasing evil people back out onto our streets to become repeat offenders. Unless such people truly repent of their past actions and undergo a character change, the only thing we can look forward to from them is more of the same.

Quarantining evil is the biblical approach to solving that problem. Eternity is one big quarantine, with Scripture telling us that God’s eternal city is one where: “Shut out from the city shall be the depraved, the sorcerers, the impure, the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices a lie” (Rev. 22:15).

Said differently, evil can’t find a way to do its thing if evil isn’t present in the first place. One day it won’t be; there the evil God will destroy in an eternal quarantine, and then the evil He’s already destroyed at the cross, which is the only way He’s able to destroy our evil without destroying us in the process.

That being true, take Scripture’s word for it: you want to be under the blood of Jesus on the day God puts all evil to bed.

[1] For an interesting and balanced view on this and other gun control assertions, see statistician Leah Libresco’s Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-used-to-think-gun-control-was-the-answer-my-research-told-me-otherwise/2017/10/03/d33edca6-a851-11e7-92d1-58c702d2d975_story.html.