From Their hearts come evil

One of the side effects of the decline of Christianity over the past 500 years is that we see people have lost sight of where evil comes from. In the modern context, thinkers like Rousseau and Marx attribute the evils of the world to private property. But all property, at the end of the day, is an object. An object cannot be good or evil. It is superstitious to apply moral qualities to things that have no moral agency. As our Lord says:

“Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” When he got home away from the crowd, his disciples questioned him about the parable. He said to them, “Are even you likewise without understanding? Do you not realize that everything that goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and passes out into the latrine?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)“But what comes out of a person, that is what defiles. From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.

All these evils come from within, and they defile.” -Mark 7:15-23

 
Evil comes from corrupt hearts and souls. Imagine you are in a battle; an enemy knight is charging at you with a sword. The sword isn’t evil; it is ultimately just a hunk of sharpened metal. The man trying to skewer you is the one who is evil. The sword can be put to legitimate uses, like fencing, sports, or works of art. Yet when we attribute evil to an object, in this case, property, we make the evil unbeatable in our minds. We unduly give the object a mystical quality that it simply doesn’t have.  Attributing evil to the state of nature or to property does this same thing; it attributes a mystical quality to an object that simply doesn’t have a mystical quality.  In war, identifying the enemy is just as important as being able to fight that enemy. The same is true of the spiritual life. If we fail to identify where an attack from the devil is actually coming from, we can walk straight into a spiritual ambush.