What About the REALLY Bad People?

Toward the end of a streetcorner conversation with Spencer, who described himself as an interested agnostic, he asked how it could be in Christianity that people can just “believe” and be saved, yet continue to sin? I explained how true faith in Christ is life changing, that it brings a desire to turn away from one’s sins and live for God.

“But what about the REALLY bad people?”, he asked, several times.

I asked if he saw himself in that category, and he did not, like well over 99% of the people I talk to. We all may be able to acknowledge some of our own sinful shortcomings, but none of us thinks we are anywhere near the level of, say, a Hitler or a Stalin, or even capable of such evil.

It made me think of the book I’ve been reading – “The Gulag Archipelago” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, about the vast system of prison and labor camps in Stalin’s Russia, and of which he was an inmate himself. In it, Solzhenitsyn documents the millions of citizens who were arrested, detained, interrogated, tortured, imprisoned, and killed under socialist and communist rule, and the descriptions of man’s cruelty and inhumanity to his fellow man are simply mind-numbing.

The temptation is to see Stalin and his hundreds of thousands of officers and prison guards as evil monsters, like those in Spencer's “really bad people” category, while the rest of us are the pretty good guys.

But Solzhenitsyn doesn’t give us that reassurance. He wrote “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Is that true? Might we be in the “really bad” category, given different circumstances? Do we have that same evil in our own hearts? Where would we be without the intervention of God’s Spirit, both from outside influences and from within through our moral conscience?

After Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden and from an intimate relationship with God, we see the murderous result between Cain and Abel in the very next generation, and complete lawlessness within a few generations: “Then 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.” (Genesis 6:5) Would we have been any different?

Fortunately, in his mercy, evil doesn’t go entirely unchecked in this world. Since Adam and Eve, all people have a God-given moral conscience – a sort of referee in our minds to whom we are accountable to. This doesn’t mean we stop doing evil completely, but it does mean we need to get very creative to come up with elaborate excuses to justify our evil actions.

And according to Solzhenitsyn, one of the most powerful excuses that leads to the self-justification of even the most monstrous of crimes is an ideology such as the theory of communism: “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”

So, given the right excuse, especially under an ideology like socialism, facism, racism, or any number of “isms”, or even in the name of religion or any number of other excuses that make evil seem good, any of us could and might be the REALLY bad people Spencer was asking about.

None of us are exempt, and all of us are exposed by the one who takes away all excuses and helps us see that we are all equally in need of the Savior.