It Depends: Good Perverted Becomes Evil
It Depends.—We may make evil out of good by putting the good to a wrong use. In fact, all evil is good perverted. Iniquity is the perversion of equity, unrighteousness of righteousness. Sin is missing the mark, swerving from the path of holiness and right, coming short of God’s glory. What is called the law of gravitation is a good law, rendering stable the material things of earth. In fact, it is absolutely necessary to our existence. But if a man should fling himself from a precipice or a church spire, the same law would in all probability prove his destruction. God’s law was ordained to life, and if man had only let that law work in its own legitimate way, he would never have known death. But now, in the sinner, “the law worketh wrath” (Rom. 4: 15); why? because man has perverted the law, endeavored to control the law in his way, to use it for a wrong purpose, and what was ordained to life proves to be unto death (Rom. 7: 10). But in the Christian, the law, God’s will working in him (Phil. 3: 13), operates after its original design—“the law of the Spirit of life” (Rom. 8: 12). Thus it was in Christ Jesus; thus it is in every man in whom the carnal heart is yielded up to die. In the sinner, God’s law perverted by the carnal heart is a law of sin and death; in the believer in Christ it is the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. If used to God’s glory, God’s blessings are life; but perverted they are death. It depends on how we use them.