October 3, 2026
Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the Hamas terrorists’ attack on the people of Israel with these words: “Babies slaughtered, bodies desecrated, young people burned alive, women raped, and (people killed in front of their children or parents). How are we to understand this?”
Evil is real. Undeniably real. Even so, there secularist-humanist-Marxists who deny or discount the reality of evil, who believe that they can create a heaven on earth without God and without any definite code of right and wrong.
What happened on Oct. 7 revealed how real evil is. What happened on 9/11 revealed how real evil is. What happened in the Killing Fields of Cambodia revealed how real evil is. What happened in the Nazi concentration camps revealed how real evil is.
Let’s ask and answer three questions about evil.
WHAT IS EVIL?
Evil poisons our hearts, souls, mind and bodies. It can fill our hearts with anger, bitterness and hatred. It can fill our souls with doubts and disbelief. It can fill our minds with arrogance and ignorance. And it can fill our bodies with malignant cells and virulent bugs. We might say that evil distorts, twists, perverts what is natural and normal.
French aristocrat Francois-Rene de Chateurbriand wrote about how he saw the horrors of evil in the French Revolution and what became known as the Reign of Terror, the death of his own mother.
As he came face to face with evil that he had never known before he wrote, “I cried and believed.” He returned to the faith in Christ he had once abandoned.
Perhaps the clearest picture of evil can be seen in the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem and Washington, which shows us in black-and-white pictures how the most well educated and sophisticated country on earth tortured and murdered 6 million people simply because of their race – and an additional 4 million because they opposed the evil of Nazism.
Another clear picture is that of communist countries excelled evil in Nazism by torturing and murdering 100 million of their own people. We have to be realistic about evil – and the harm it can do. Neville Chamberlain was a decent human being who underestimated evil, and mistakenly thought he could negotiate with a devil named Adolph Hitler. James Boswel forewarned Chamberlain back in the 18th Century (1763) when he wrote how those who underestimate evil “know little about human nature.”
WHERE IS EVIL?
It would be much more comforting to say evil is confined to the Hamas training camps in Gaza, but that is not the case. We don’t have to visit North Korea and Afghanistan to stare into the face of evil. Ron Rosenbaum wrote an article entitled “Staring into the Heart of Darkness” here in America when a mother drowned her two young children, when sons murdered their parents, and when young boys murdered a 2-year-old.
Yes, we find evil here in America. Chuck Colson’s testimony tells how he gave up a $200,000-a-year job as a high-powered lawyer to work in the White House for $40,000 a year. He said, “There is one thing which I was absolutely certain – that no one could corrupt me … (but) I ended up going to prison. … Every human being has an infinite capacity for self-rationalization and self-delusion. … Even if I had known I was doing wrong, would I have had the will to do what is right? … I have to tell you the answer is no. … I discovered that there was no restraint on the evil in me. In my self-righteousness I was never more dangerous. … I discovered what Solzhenitsyn wrote so brilliantly from a prison — that the line between good and evil passes not between principalities and powers, but it oscillates within the human heart. … That which I want to do, I do not do; that which I do, I do not want to do”
God warned Cain that “sin or evil was crouching at (his door), desiring to devour him. Evil is not only crouching at the door to our hearts, but lurking within the shadows of our heart, soul, and mind!
HOW DO WE OVERCOME EVIL?
We don’t. We can’t. We need God’s help. That is exactly why God came in the person of Jesus Christ to deliver us from evil, to save and change our lives. He got in the face of religious leaders who had been corrupted and seduced by their own self-righteousness which led them to go against everything they knew to be true in an attempt to silence Jesus.
Jesus exposed evil for what it is in all its ugliness. And Jesus faced it head on, was deserted and disgraced, ridiculed and rejected, tortured and murdered, and buried and sealed in a tomb. Then, on Sunday morning He was resurrected from the grave and demonstrated once and for all time how we through Him can overcome evil IF we are willing to accept Him as Savior and Lord, allowing Him to save and change us.
We see how God inspired Jonah “to conquer evil with good” when he ever so reluctantly preached repentance to the world’s first terrorists in Nineveh. The contrast between our faith inspired love for enemies and that of Hamas’ hate-driven fanaticism that disfigures the heart, mind, and soul is there for all the world to see — and how much we need God’s unconditional and self-sacrificial love to save and change humanity.
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Paul R. Baxter is the mission strategist for Georgia's Pine Mountain Baptist Association.
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