(upbeat music) - All right, Pastor John, here's a doozy of a question for you that we get via email from time to time. So take a drink and a deep breath. Here it is. What is evil? Evil clearly is something. Is it merely the absence of holiness or is it the absence of God?

Is there a way to explain the core essence of what evil is? - Wow. (laughs) Some of these questions, Tony, are just, I mean, they're just so ultimate, like philosophers. (laughs) We're supposed to do this in five minutes. Okay. The only reason I have any presumption to answer questions like this is because I have a Bible in front of me.

(laughs) I mean, if God hadn't said anything, I would be so stupid. Okay, so I think, here's my answer that I'm gonna try to show from the Bible in just a few minutes. The core essence of evil is preferring anything more than God, loving anything not for God's sake.

So evil is an act of preferring. Where there is no will, no volition, there's no evil. Evil is a function of willing. Satan's willing, demon's willing, human's willing. It's not a function of stuff. It's a function of willing. And evil is always defined in the Bible in reference to willing in regard to God.

God is the supreme value in the universe, and therefore evil is defined in reference to this ultimate reality, this ultimate value, ultimate treasure. Failing to value the ultimately valuable appropriately is evil, that's what evil is. Now, here's a text, Jeremiah 2, 13. My people have committed two great evils.

Number one, they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters. Number two, they have hewed out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. So what is evil according to Jeremiah 2, 13? It is preferring broken cisterns to God. That's what evil is, preferring anything to God because anything measured against God is a broken cistern.

God is the fountain of living waters. Or here's another one, Romans 3, 23. All have sinned, all have committed evil, and fall short of the glory of God. So sin is defined in relationship to the glory of God, and fall short of is literally lack, be without. Now, why would you lack the glory of God or be without the glory of God?

And I think the answer is found earlier in chapter one, verse 23, where it says they've exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. So the reason we lack the glory of God in Romans 3, 23 is because we've exchanged it.

That is, we preferred images, especially the one in the mirror. That'd be the 20th century one, rather than say an image of a snake on a pole or something. We love the one in the mirror, and we prefer getting praise for ourselves rather than getting praise for God and being made much of rather than making much of God.

So sin is feeling, doing, and saying anything that reflects the exchange of God for lesser things. Sin is feeling, doing, saying anything that reflects the exchange of God for lesser things. So here's one more textual example. Take the 10 Commandments. Most people think the 10 Commandments are a good summary of what's right or what's good, and yet almost all of them are stated in terms of negation.

Don't do this, don't kill, don't steal, don't commit adultery. So it is renouncing evils. Now here's the interesting thing. The first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me, Exodus 23, and the last commandment, you shall not covet, I think are virtually saying the same things, one negatively and one positively.

Don't covet means don't prefer things you shouldn't prefer. Don't have other gods before me means don't prefer anything before me. So the beginning of the 10 Commandments and the end of the 10 Commandments are, I think, stating the essence of evil which underlies all the other evils that we have to turn away from inside the 10 Commandments, and the essence of that evil is wanting, preserving, preferring, desiring something that would cause God to look less than supremely valuable.

So we start with God, He's good. Yes, He's good. By what standard is He good? By Himself, His own value. So God's moral goodness is always acting in harmony with His infinite value, and therefore our good is acting in harmony with His infinite value, or the essence of evil is feeling or thinking or speaking in any way at all that would make God treat God as though He were not supremely valuable.

- Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your very difficult questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. At desiringgod.org, you'll find thousands of free books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)