Asking and Answering Questions

July 12, 2026

Question Sunday

      Hope you’re all good and carbed and coffee‑ed up… because for today’s Ask the Pastor sermon we’re going to look at four questions that have to do with evil.

1. Is the Devil real?

2. Are some people an embodiment of pure evil?

3. Why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?

4. Do good intentions excuse bad results?

So… before we begin… let me say right up front… what I’m going to do today is give you my answers as a working theologian. These are by no means the definitive Christian or even Presbyterian answers to these questions. You ask other people and they may — probably will — give you different answers because their theology might have a different emphasis or nuance than mine. And obviously… these are questions people have been asking since people could ask a question… so the answers I give are not complete… and there’s always more to say and explore. Every answer ought to lead to other questions, right?

Disclaimers out of the way… here we go with the first question.

Is the Devil real?

And my first thought to that question is… does the Devil need to be real?

What is it that we think we know about the Devil? The World Religions professor in me speaks up and first wants to talk about the importance of mythological language in understanding good and evil. There is a Christian mythology surrounding the Devil… a mythology I bet each of you know and could tell me about. Satan… Lucifer… the Devil… is a fallen angel who led a rebellion against God and was cast out of heaven into hell. Heard that one? In that mythology, the question of good and evil becomes part of a greater cosmic struggle between God and the Devil. Humanity is little more than powerless pawns in the struggle between these great forces… manipulated this way and that.

But… most people are surprised to learn that the story of Satan’s rebellion is not in scripture. Most of the mythology we know about the Devil is not supported by our scripture, but is an interpretation — an understanding of the Devil from other sources — that has been read into and laid over scripture. People think it’s there. For example, the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Nowhere in Genesis does it say that the serpent is Satan. The writers of the text would never think that the serpent is Satan because there was no Satan‑type figure in Jewish mythology at the time this story was written. Later Christian interpretation turned the serpent into something more… and that idea stuck… so much so that people will now insist that the serpent is Satan and you can’t convince them otherwise… although again there is no textual evidence to support such a claim.

Whenever these devil questions come up, again that World Religions professor in me wants to talk about Zoroastrianism… the religion of Persia that predates Christianity… that may have had a big influence on the development of Satan in later Judaism and subsequently Christianity. Zoroastrianism, another monotheistic religion, names Ahura Mazda as the one god. From Ahura Mazda emanate these two spirits of good and evil: Spenta Mainyu, the Beneficent Spirit… and Angra Mainyu, the Evil Spirit. These two have co‑existed since the beginning of time. Angra Mainyu is surrounded by all manner of demons who do his bidding, tempting and tormenting human beings. His second‑in‑command goes about the earth, polluting it and spreading disease and death.  There are many similarities of the beliefs around Angra Mainyu and the Devil.

The mythology of Angra Mainyu — and the Devil we know — gives us a language to talk about the pervasiveness of evil in our lives. How the evil around us feels so much out of our control… like it is coming down on us from some great cosmic source that we feel powerless to defeat.

But in Zoroastrianism, people are not entirely helpless. Men and women are born in a pure, sinless state and choose to serve either good or evil. Their lives and their ultimate destiny depend on the exercise of their free will. People can choose to serve the forces of evil… they can cooperate in lies, hate, corruption, and every other sort of evil… but they can also choose to be a part of the good acts that will improve the world. There’s a Zoroastrian prayer that goes, “Henceforth let me stand firm for good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, which must be well thought, must be well spoken, and must be well done.”

That leads us to the question… “Are some people the embodiment of pure evil?” Would it surprise you if I said “yes”? I would reason it is possible… though not probable… to be pure evil… emphasizing the word “pure” here.  Scripture uses the term “anti‑Christ”… which is not another name for the Devil or some other cosmological being.  It’s not the evil little kid of horror movies. In scripture the term is exactly as it says — it is the person who is the opposite of Christ. It is the person who denies the good as Christ defines the good and instead chooses what Christ calls evil. Just as we are called to embody the goodness of Christ… it is then reasonable that there are those who would embody the opposite. People can choose to serve the forces of evil… they can cooperate in lies, hate, corruption, and every other sort of evil. That is free will… and I do believe in Christian free will.  The person who chooses evil has the same power to choose the good.  God is always more than ready to forgive and to love and to welcome the prodigal home.  That’s a difference between Christianity and Zoroastrianism.

Which gets me back to my response to that first question: “Does the Devil need to be real?”

I believe in our free will more than I do the idea that “the Devil made me do it.” I also believe in our free will more than the idea that salvation is Jesus coming along and giving us some special salvation designation or way out of our responsibilities in this world because we said the right words or did this ritual or that. I think both are two sides of the same coin.

Why is there so much evil and suffering in the world? My answer is because we — meaning humanity in all our different forms and actions — create evil and additional suffering in the world. Suffering, by itself, is just a part of life. We will all suffer in some form or another at some time in our lives.  It’s unavoidable and part of this human experience.  What we don’t want to do… what we don’t have to do… is create the suffering… or make it worse. That’s a work of evil.

In our faith, Jesus calls us to follow him in his way. Discipleship is real. He teaches us what is good and we then choose whether to follow that good or not. We are shown the good of grace. We start our discipleship with forgiveness that is meant to shape us and guide us for the faith journey ahead… not give us a free pass. Again, our faith is not to take us out of the world and free us from our responsibilities to one another. Our faith — like our Christ — becomes incarnate in this world. It is to enter us fully into this world where through our shared discipleship we are to spread the goodness of Christ’s teachings… spread the way of Christ.

We are given a vision of the world as intended by God… where instead of the works of evil that have undone the good of the world, we are to do the works of good to recreate the world… to reconcile and be a part of the redemption of the world. I believe very much that we are judged by our fruits… so that as Christians one of the worst things we can do is call evil good… or try to bless what God has called evil with the name of Christ… or to so compartmentalize and weaken our public faith that we believe it is something for me and me alone and has no place in the larger world… as though faith isn’t meant to engage these larger problems of evil and the suffering it creates… as though faith is only about getting myself into heaven.

As disciples, we have to understand that what is good is what Jesus calls good. What is evil is what Jesus calls evil. That is the standard we are given and are to follow. We must stand against what Christ calls evil… in ourselves, in our neighbors and community, in our work, in our society, in our government, in the systems that surround us and have captured so much of our lives.

So… for example… if Christian good is tied to the welfare of our neighbor as so many of the gospel stories are… then we don’t get to ask nor do we get to choose which neighbor. We are to work for the common good of all. We don’t get to blindly support systems that work for the good of some at the expense of others because we know Christ would be there with those others… standing in solidarity with the suffering.

And this is where it gets frustratingly hard. This is where we get tempted to fall back on our mythology and the great cosmic battle between the goodness of God and the evil of the Devil. This is where we would love to just be powerless pawns without any accountability for what little good fruit we can bring into the world.

I go to the grocery store and I encounter the evil of the corporations that bring the food to market at prices I can afford… I participate in that evil as they work for the good of shareholders and the bottom line, not always the common good of all.  I buy the affordable but unhealthy product that does more harm than that momentary enjoyment of my taste buds.  I participate in the shady business practices of food addiction.  I share in the evil of their pollution and the exploitation of workers. My government does all manner of evil in my name in this land where government exists at the consent of the governed.  My neighbor who has invited me over to his house to share a meal… our children play together… over the weekend, he dons the uniform of a white supremacist group and marches on Washington shouting slogans that say it is by divine right his group thrive at the expense of others.  I am daily awash in what God calls evil.  We all are.  And it makes us feel small and powerless.  What can one person do?

The complexity of modern life makes us complicit in the evil of the world. The goodness of this faith of ours now has to somehow become incarnate in our consumer selves, in our political selves, in our social selves.  It never feels like enough.  Still… we are justified by the grace of God… and we enter into the walk of sanctification leaning into the steadfast love of God.  The challenge of our daily walk of faith is recognizing our accountability for what we choose as disciples in Christ… big and small… and sometimes we might experience those results where we get something right… and sometimes we might experience those results where we get it wrong.

Do our good intentions then excuse bad results? No. To me the keyword there is “excuse.” Good intentions do not excuse bad results. Good intentions mean we must learn from our bad results and go again and again and again… learning and striving until we get to the good results our good intentions imagined.  Which we may never see.  The disciples in the stories in Luke’s gospel get it wrong again and again.  And they learn and they keep going so that the stories that follow in the Book of Acts are them imperfectly becoming that early church in their time… as we keep becoming the imperfect church now in our time.

We never get to stop working for the good of Christ. That’s resurrection life. Imagine Jesus as God’s good intention. Crucifixion is the response of the world to God’s good intention. Crucifixion is a bad result. God doesn’t stop working for the good… and Christ is resurrected.

And that — right there — is the pattern we are given. Not perfection. Not purity. Not escape. But persistence.  Resurrection is God saying, “Go back into the world. Try again. Do not let the bad result be the final word.”  Keep choosing to do the good Christ would do.  Amen.