This week I preached on the topic of lesser and greater evils. \u00a0I touched on the question of how we know whether we\u2019re choosing the lesser of two evils out of necessity, or if there are really more options. \u00a0As I mention in the sermon, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s an easy answer. \u00a0And I\u2019m curious what people think: are the circumstances where it\u2019s a good idea to make a conscious decision and say, \u201cI\u2019m going to regularly choose to do this evil thing, because I know that I would do worse things if I didn\u2019t\u201d \u2013 or is it always better to continually fight against the tendency to sin at all, and only choose the lesser of two evils in a moment where we\u2019re failing? \u00a0In other words, should we ever plan<\/em> to commit the lesser of two evils? \u00a0I\u2019m not sure. \u00a0Anyway, here\u2019s the sermon:<\/p>\n Readings:\u00a0Genesis 22:1-14<\/a>; Matthew 19:3-12<\/a>; Arcana Coelestia<\/em> 1241<\/a><\/p>\n THE LESSER EVIL<\/p>\n A Sermon by Rev. Coleman S. Glenn<\/p>\n \u201cMoses, because of your hard\u200bheartedness, permitted you to send away your wives; but from the beginning it was not so.\u201d <\/em>(Matthew 19:8)<\/p>\n Does the Lord\u2019s law ever change?\u00a0 It can seem that the obvious answer would be no.\u00a0 The Lord Himself said, \u201cIt is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than one little\u200b \u200bhorn of the Law to fall\u201d (Luke 16:17).\u00a0 And yet, in some senses it seems like the law did<\/em> change.\u00a0 When the Lord came into the world, he abolished sacrifices.\u00a0 He did away with the ceremonially laws of the Jewish faith.\u00a0 And in the passage we read from the Gospels this morning, He did away with the Jewish laws that permitted a husband to divorce his wife for reasons other than her adultery.\u00a0 He did change the law, it seems.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But the law that the Lord abolished at that time was not the true law.\u00a0 It represented the true law, and it contained the true law within it.\u00a0 That\u2019s why Jesus could say that nothing would fall away from the law, that he did not come to do away with the law, but to fulfill it \u2013 even though He seemingly DID do away with the law.\u00a0 He was not adding something new \u2013 He was revealing what had been inherent in the law all along.\u00a0 That\u2019s why He said, \u201cFrom the beginning\u201d it was not so that divorce was permitted \u2013 because from the beginning, the original<\/em> law, was that \u201ca man should leave His father and mother, and be joined to his wife, and the two should become one flesh\u201d (Genesis 2:24).<\/p>\n So what was the purpose of the old law?\u00a0 The primary purpose of all the laws of the Jewish faith were to represent spiritual things \u2013 as Paul wrote in his letter to the Colossians, all the sacrifices and feasts were a \u201cshadow\u201d of Christ who was going to come (Colossians 2:17).\u00a0 But if they would be fulfilled and changed into spiritual laws at the time of the Lord\u2019s coming, why were the children of Israel not simply given those spiritual laws in the first place?\u00a0 The Lord gave answered that question in his teaching about divorce: \u201cbecause of the hardness of their hearts.\u201d\u00a0 The Writings tell us that if God had revealed these deeper laws about marriage to the people at that time, they would have completely rejected Him.\u00a0 And so He offered them the lesser of two evils \u2013 instead of having them completely reject the truth, which would condemn them to a deeper hell, He permitted them to marry multiple wives, to put away their wives for less important things.<\/p>\n The same thing is true with sacrifices.\u00a0 The Lord has no desire for sacrifice, as he says in Hosea: \u201cFor I desire mercy and not sacrifice, And the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings,\u201d (Hosea 6:6).\u00a0 Among the people of the Most Ancient Church, the earliest worshippers of God, represented by Adam and Eve, the idea of slaughtering an animal as an act of worship would have seemed profane.\u00a0 But the Lord permitted animal sacrifice to prevent a much greater evil: the evil of human sacrifice, which was common in the people around them at the time, and which they fell into whenever they turned away from the Lord.\u00a0 We see this permission of animal sacrifice play out on a smaller scale in the story of Abraham.\u00a0 Now, in the internal sense of this story, the willingness to sacrifice Isaac represents a good<\/em> thing \u2013 a willingness in the Lord to give up all that was merely human within Himself, and to make His rational mind holy.\u00a0 But in the literal sense, it would have been a terrible thing for Abraham to sacrifice his son.\u00a0 And so in place of his son, he was permitted to sacrifice instead a ram.<\/p>\n Again, the Lord permits a lesser evil to avoid a greater one.\u00a0 And the truth is, all around us, all the time, the Lord is permitting lesser evils for the sake of avoiding greater evils.\u00a0 We can sometimes have a tendency to paint all evils with the same brush, to look at an evil and think only about how bad it is, without realizing that there may have been worse alternatives.\u00a0 There is a value in seeing the different degrees within evil, that there are lighter and more serious evils.\u00a0 Today we\u2019re going to talk about three uses in distinguishing between these degrees of evil.\u00a0 First of all, it helps us understand why the Lord permits evil at all.\u00a0 Second of all, it helps us make decisions in seemingly impossible situations, where we feel that all we can choose is the lesser of two evils.\u00a0 And finally, it helps us to refrain from judging the spiritual state of the people around us whom we see committing evil.<\/p>\n The first use in distinguishing between lesser and greater evils is that it helps us understand why the Lord permits what He does permit.\u00a0 With all the evil we see in the world around us, it may seem that the God does nothing to prevent evil.\u00a0 The truth is, He is constantly preventing evil, and leading toward greater and greater good.\u00a0 The book Divine Providence<\/em> says, \u201cThe withdrawal of a wicked person from evil is effected by the Lord in a thousand ways that are most secret\u201d (DP 295).\u00a0 Although the Lord leaves each person in freedom, He works with that freedom and subtly modifies it.\u00a0 For example, he inspires people who desire nothing more than their own power to act in ways that benefit society \u2013 from that person\u2019s point of view, they are still acting on a lust for power, but the restraints of society keep that from breaking out, and keep the person in some order.\u00a0 And if He is not able to lift a person into heaven, He at least continually prevents them from plunging themselves into a deeper hell, which is where all of us would go if left to ourselves.<\/p>\n In general, the Lord permits any<\/em> evil for the sake of His ultimate purpose \u2013 the salvation of every person.\u00a0 The Lord permits people to act on their evil because if it were bottled up inside them, and they were forced to act in good, no one<\/em> could be saved.\u00a0 The lesser evil is to allow people to act on their evil inclinations.\u00a0 Even terrible evils are sometimes allowed so that their true nature can be seen, which is better than them remaining hidden within people\u2019s hearts.\u00a0 The Lord did not will the horrors of the holocaust \u2013 but without them, maybe the human race would never have realized the poisonous, murderous intent at the heart of all racism.\u00a0 Perhaps He permitted that atrocity so that evil could be seen clearly for what it was.\u00a0 Perhaps it was a lesser evil than for the human race to continually live in continuous hatred of other races.<\/p>\n In all the workings of His providence, the Lord desires that people may live.\u00a0 The Lord cannot force people to do good, because they would then not be human \u2013 they would simply be extensions of the Lord, and not capable of being joined to Him and blessed as separate beings, which is the Lord\u2019s goal in creation.\u00a0 To be truly happy, people must choose<\/em> good.\u00a0 And so it is a lesser evil to allow people to act in freedom.<\/p>\n Besides keeping people in freedom, the Lord in His providence does all that He can to prevent a person from profaning<\/em> what is good and true.\u00a0 A person profanes goodness and truth if he for a time acknowledges, loves, and lives by what is good \u2013 and then afterwards completely rejects it.\u00a0 This is much more harmful than if a person never accepts the truth in the first place, and for this reason, the Lord never allows a person into any more goodness and truth than they are capable of being kept in to the end of their lives.\u00a0 It was to prevent profanation that the Lord did not give the children of Israel the true commandments on marriage \u2013 He knew that their nature was such that they would embrace this at first as Divine, but then afterwards reject the teaching, and reject Him altogether.\u00a0 He gave permission for a lesser evil to prevent a greater one.<\/p>\n The final reason the Lord permits lesser evils is that a person must gradually<\/em> progress from the evil inclinations that he is born into.\u00a0 If they were removed all at once, the person would in fact fall down dead \u2013 because early on in a person\u2019s path of regeneration, most<\/em> of his motivation comes from selfishness and a love of worldly things.\u00a0 If those motivations were taken away, he would simply have no motivation at all, no life.\u00a0 And so the Lord gradually leads a person from greater evils to lesser evils, and then on from lesser evils to true good.\u00a0 This is why the children of Israel were told that their enemies in the land of Canaan would not all be driven out at once, but little by little (see Exodus 23:30<\/a>).<\/p>\n And this leads us into the next reason we mentioned for learning about lesser and greater degrees of evil: to help us make decisions in our own lives.\u00a0 Because there are times in our lives when it seems that we have to choose between the lesser of two evils.\u00a0 And this really will be the case sometimes \u2013 the Lord cannot rid of us our evils immediately.\u00a0 What matters is that we are moving in the right direction.<\/p>\n One of the fundamental choices we often have to make has to do with our motivations.\u00a0 At the beginning of our regeneration, as just mentioned, most of our motives are selfish.\u00a0 And the fact is, at first we cannot help but think of merit and reward for doing good.\u00a0 We cannot help but think that the good we do comes from ourselves.\u00a0 There\u2019s a story in Genesis about the time when Joseph had become a great leader in Egypt, and his brothers came asking for food, not recognizing them.\u00a0 When Joseph sent them back to their father with food, he had his servants place a silver cup in his youngest brother Benjamin\u2019s bag of grain \u2013 and when they returned, he accused Benjamin of stealing it!\u00a0 This can seem like an odd story, but in the internal sense, it is about the fact that at first, we cannot help<\/em> stealing from the Lord, in the sense of taking credit for things that really belong to Him.<\/p>\n But this means we have a choice: we can either do good which has some sense of merit in it, or we can hang down our hands and wait for the Lord to flow in, and do nothing at all.\u00a0 Both of these choices have evil in them \u2013 but the first choice is a lesser evil than the second.\u00a0 Now, this does not mean that we should rest content<\/em> with the fact that we are doing evil \u2013 we should continually strive to truly acknowledge the Lord as the source.\u00a0 But we do not have to feel bad that at first we are still in an evil.\u00a0 What matters is that we are progressing toward goodness.\u00a0 A passage from the book Doctrine of Life<\/em>, says, \u201cLet people even once in a week, or twice in a month, resist the evils they are inclined to, and they will perceive a change\u201d (Life 97). \u00a0It is better to catch ourselves even twice in a month doing some particular evil, and to stop ourselves, then to think we have to be perfect and immediately give up on the task as impossible.\u00a0 What matters is our progress.<\/p>\n But how do we know what the lesser evil is?\u00a0 It is not always easy.\u00a0 The only way to truly know is to search the Word, to continually try to understand.\u00a0 The book Conjugial Love<\/em>, for example, says that a young man at first often does not see the difference between having sex with an unmarried woman and with a married woman \u2013 when the truth is that the evil of adultery is a much graver evil than the evil of fornication (see CL 486<\/a>).\u00a0 Similarly, the same book says, if a young man truly cannot<\/em> restrain himself from having sex, it is a lesser evil for him to restrict himself to one, than to sleep with many women from a lust for variety, or to fall into the even worse evils of adultery or rape (see CL 459<\/a>).\u00a0 It is especially in the laws around sexuality that we find teachings on the importance of distinguishing between lesser and greater degrees of evil.<\/p>\n Sometimes there really are cases where we have to choose between a lesser or greater evil.\u00a0 And the determining factor is the goal, or motivation \u2013 what are we working<\/em> towards, what are we progressing<\/em> towards?\u00a0 If a person truly sees a state of goodness \u2013 for example, true marriage love \u2013 as the goal, then what matters most is that he is taking steps in that direction.\u00a0 But there are also time, of course, when it seems<\/em> that we have a choice between two evils, and the reality is, we could choose neither.\u00a0 For example, in treating of those permissions around sexuality, the Writings say, \u201cWhat has been said, however, is not for those who can restrain the heat of their lust, nor for those who can enter into marriage as soon as they attain to manhood\u201d (CL 459<\/a>).\u00a0 Those permissions are there for people who truly cannot restrain themselves without harmful effects \u2013 and yet it is all too easy to use permissions to lesser evils as an excuse, when we really could reject evil altogether.<\/p>\n There is no easy answer within ourselves to whether we are using the teachings on permission as an excuse, or truly as a lesser evil.\u00a0 In times when we seem to have to make that choice, it is useful to take a step back and pray to the Lord for wisdom to see if there are other choices.\u00a0 We can do simple things like write down all the options we have, trying to see if we\u2019ve missed any.\u00a0 And the Word itself can help us see more options than there seem to be at first.\u00a0 For example, in the case of certain kinds of dysfunctional marriage \u2013 for example, if one partner is an alcoholic \u2013 it may seem like the only options are to live in that dysfunction, or to divorce.\u00a0 But the Writings say that in these cases, where there has not been adultery, the best option is not necessarily to stay together, and definitely not to get a divorce, but to be separated \u2013 to still be technically married, to not start new relationships outside of the marriage, but to live separately from each other, perhaps even with court-ordered limits.\u00a0 That is the better choice in a situation where none of the choices are very good.\u00a0 We need to study the Word to see what truly is<\/em> a lesser evil \u2013 since we often are wrong about which is the greater and lesser evil.\u00a0 And we need to pray to the Lord for help resisting evil, to pray for a sight of the goal, which is goodness \u2013 and to pray for the strength to be honest with ourselves.<\/p>\n And this brings us to our final purpose in looking at these different degrees of evil.\u00a0 Within ourselves, we can be honest about whether or not we are truly fighting evil with all our hearts, whether we are giving into an evil because it will prevent a lesser evil, or giving into it simply because we want to.\u00a0 But we cannot make the same judgment when looking at others.\u00a0 When we see others around us doing evil, we ought<\/em> to judge their actions as evil \u2013 the Lord said, \u201cJudge righteous judgment\u201d (John 7:24<\/a>). \u00a0We ought<\/em> to do what we can to prevent them, for the sake of the people they may be hurting, and for their own sake.\u00a0 But we cannot judge their hearts, because we do not know their motivation.\u00a0 We do not know if they are choosing the lesser of two evils.<\/p>\n