Step 4 -- Knowing Good And Evil

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.  (Psalm 139:23-24)

God’s plan for us is to know goodness, experience goodness, and enjoy the fruit of good and perfect gifts.  His heart for us is to know love and trust in a safe and secure relationship with Him.    God’s intention was that tender loving care and understanding companionship would be the ultimate experience of life as a human being.  His plan for us is to know satisfaction in our deepest longings and enjoyment that brings highest pleasure.  In order that loving choice be the foundation of this good life, God set a tree in the middle of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  He never intended us to know evil, let alone experience it done to us or done by us. 

Satan, on the other hand, is powered only by evil and he seeks only to steal, kill and destroy.  His plan is to destroy loving relationships by having humans choose for evil, something that was never God’s plan.  God knew we were not powerful enough to stand against the destructive pull of evil.  He knew the devastating results of evil at work in relationships and so God’s longing was to protect us from that.  Unfortunately the woman and the man made the wrong choice and humans entered into a new dimension of knowing and interacting with the power of evil – a power greater than themselves.  Operating independently from God’s ultimate power for good, they fell again and again to the powerful forces of evil. 

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.  (1 John 4:18)

Since then, from our earliest moments we have lived in an environment where good and evil are mixed.  Where God intended us to only be familiar with security and love, we’ve known experiences of betrayal and abandonment.  We’ve transferred the disappointment and fear from our broken human relationships into our relationship with God.   The love that was rightfully ours in God’s creation was lost when the knowledge of evil came and brought fear of God rather than secure love within His embrace.  We went elsewhere looking for love and ended up in all the wrong places.  We experienced hurt and disappointment, guilt and shame – so much knowledge of evil done to us and done by us. 

How can we begin to hope to understand and get to the root of it all in a searching and fearless moral inventory?  We have to begin where the break began.  We have to return to the God who made us in love, who designed us to work inside a deep experience of knowing we are loved.  We have to ask Him to search us in love.  We need Him to show us where love is rooted in us and where we are living in fear and brokenness.  We need to invite God to help us search our beliefs, our thinking, our ways of working things out and ask Him to help us return us to a lifestyle that is rooted in love rather than in fear, guilt, or angry resentment.