THE VIRTUOUS FACE OF EVIL

This sounds like a contradiction. How can virtue be evil? For one thing, I am not referring to true virtue but the appearance of virtue and self-sacrifice. It appeals to our human desire for self-righteousness, by which we convince ourselves that we are more virtuous and deserving than others.

The research of Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, psychologists at the University of Kansas, has demonstrated that culture has provided us with the means of counteracting the terror of death through various ways to enable us to believe that we are good people:

·       These cultural worldviews portrayed the world as a meaningful, purposeful place in which death is not the ultimate end. Until very recently, these worldviews virtually always included the idea of a literal afterlife for some aspect of oneself -- a soul -- but also included modes of transcending death via permanent symbolic marks of the self, such as heroic deeds, great achievements, memorials, and heirs. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/05/how-the-unrelenting-threat-of-death-shapes-our-behavior/256728/

Religion has performed the same service by providing us with the assurance that we are good and deserving once we have fulfilled certain moral requirements. Therefore, when we die, we will occupy a superior place in heaven. This means that we have to attain a superior status. How? Through self-sacrifice! However, this also requires us to deceive ourselves into believing that we are superior and deserving.

Paul had warned about how the appearances of virtue could deceive us away from the Gospel of God’s mercy:

·       Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron… (1 Timothy 4:1-2 NKJV)

Certainly, such demonic deceptions should be easy to spot, right? No! Instead, they are packaged as virtue:

·       …forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. (1 Timothy 4:3)

Well, isn’t it both Biblical and righteous to forego food and marriage for the sake of the Kingdom? It looks that way. Paul had even written that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman” to marry her, (1 Corinthians 7:1). So how can forbidding marriage be demonic?

Besides, isn’t abstaining from certain foods the very thing that God had commanded Israel to do? How, then, the command to not eat certain foods be a doctrine of demons? James, the head of the Jerusalem Church, had even commanded their brethren:

·       …to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from [eating] things strangled, and from blood. (Acts 15:20)

However, Paul had written that what we eat or don’t eat isn’t important:

·       But food does not commend us to God; for neither if we eat are we the better, nor if we do not eat are we the worse. (1 Corinthians 8:8)

Even so, why was Paul so set against the “doctrine of demons,” which taught against marriage and eating certain foods? He was even concerned that such teachings would cause Christians to abandon the faith.

How do we reconcile these accounts? While we are free to eat and drink everything, we mustn’t believe and trust that, if we abstain, that we are earning God’s righteousness and salvation. This is a false hope designed by demons to replace our hope in Jesus alone. (This demonic doctrine had been “forbidding” marriage and certain foods. This language suggests that if the people marry or eat, they could no longer hope to be saved.) In other words, where we place our trust and hope is of key importance.

Likewise, marrying or not was not a Biblical condition for salvation, lest any boast; just grace operating through faith, apart from any good deeds (Ephesians 2:8-9; Romans 3:27-28).

The appearance of virtue can be very deceiving. Therefore, Paul had warned:

·       For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works. (2 Corinthians 11:13-15)