Spirituality Column #745

February 23, 2021

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

The Evil ‘I,’ Part 2    

By Bob Walters

“We have met the enemy, and he is us!” – Pogo, 1970 poster / comic strip by Walt Kelly

We want to be in charge.  We really, really do.

Whether people, all humanity, philosophers, politicians, control-freaks of every stripe, even the timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat, it is implanted in our willful, human, universal being that we should have the ultimate, permanent, authoritative say regarding the world in which we live and of how things ought to be.

But … we don’t, though we encounter things all around us that are permanent.

Such as?  How about all the God stuff, the “Mother Nature” stuff?  The sun rising and setting, the stars at night, the moon going from full to dark to full, the cycles of wind systems across the earth, the perpetual evaporative cycle that pulls water up from the oceans, waters our lands, and then returns to the sea.  Our relative presence on earth is seemingly unnecessary; our earthly labors, desires, and initiatives … meaningless.

If that sounds familiar, it’s a direct lift from the Bible’s Ecclesiastes 1.  The teacher / searcher who almost everyone agrees is Solomon (we can’t even control agreement on that), is telling us that in this otherwise and, on its face, totally depressing Old Testament book, the only thing that does have meaning is that which God controls.

And God is amazingly, incredibly, and often annoyingly to us, consistent.

Why is it that we were shaped in the image of God, yet we don’t get to control that which God designed to serve our existence?  Ray Stedman wrote, “The Bible tells us that people were created to be the crown of creation.  They are the ones who are in dominion over all things.  People ought to last endlessly and nature ought to be changing, but it is the other way around.  Humans feel the protest of this in their spirit.”

And when we protest the consistency of God, that’s the door through which Satan enters our being and muddles our view – muddles the cosmic truth – of God’s ultimate, objective goodness, His love, and His absolute righteousness.

Evil lurks in this world in more than just human-generated interactions that result in jealousies, injustices, wars, and the like.  We perceive evil visited upon humanity from the natural world as well: weather disasters, diseases, earthquakes, volcanos, plagues, infestations … not to mention the death and temporal frailty of our human bodies.

Where is our strength?  Where is our freedom?  Where is our hope?  Where is our ability not to ruin ourselves and our world?  Where is our purpose that as we live in this world over which we have so little control we find the promised glory of God? 

The teacher / searcher is telling us that everything in life is meaningless: except God. We must learn through our steady faith in God – discoverable through our minds, spirits, and souls – that we have one shot at a permanent place in God’s Kingdom.

And what is that discovery that has meaning?  That does not pollute our living being and God’s creation with Satan’s wiles and misplaced angst against our Lord?

It is our discovery of Jesus Christ, of faith in Him, and the truth of God’s love.

That’s what turns the world of our Evil “I” – me – into eternal confidence in and relationship with the Good One.  Let’s strive to be in charge of sharing that discovery.

Walters (rlwcom.aol.com), speaking of pollution, notes that the Pogo quote was on an anti-pollution poster Kelly drew for the very first Earth Day, April 22, 1970.