On Why Evil Persists

Amber,

I wanted to follow up on the call. You were genuinely shocked. I could hear it in your voice. You kept asking some version of the same question: why hasn't this been fixed already? You named the technology, the information, the legislation, the coordination that exists. All of it is right there. And yet the problems are not moving. If anything they are getting worse.

I want to save you some years of confusion.

The sooner you stop believing that these problems persist because of some unfortunate misunderstanding, the better. It is not a misunderstanding. It is not a coordination failure. It is not a missing spreadsheet. It is not a legislative oversight that a better bill would patch. I know it feels like it should be, because the tools are there and the facts are there. Those are the pieces most of us were raised to believe would have been enough. They are not enough, because the problems you are looking at are not mostly information problems.

They are spiritual problems. And they are power problems. And the two are closer than almost anyone wants to admit.

I want to tell you about a friend who went into child sex trafficking activism. She walked in with exactly the worldview you and I were handed. This is a technology problem. This is an information problem. This is a coordination problem. This is a legislation problem. If enough good people see what is happening, they will fix it. She was smart. She was willing. She was armed with the right tools.

What she slowly realized is that there are real, identifiable, organized forces that profit from child sex trafficking. Not in theory. In practice. People with names. Entities with balance sheets. Networks with lawyers. Some of those forces are the very people staffing the agencies that are publicly tasked with ending the trafficking. It is not that these actors do not know. It is not that they are overwhelmed. They are profiting. They do not want it to stop. They are actively and strategically preventing it from stopping.

Once you see that, a lot of other things in the world start making sense for the first time. You stop being shocked at how slowly certain issues move. You start being surprised that anything good happens at all, and you start paying more attention to the people who are actually making it happen.

Scripture is not coy about this. "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." (Ephesians 6:12, KJV) That verse used to read to me like metaphor. It is not metaphor. There are spiritual powers at work, and they are organized, and they have human partners who have cut deals with them for money, access, and the specific flavor of status that only a corrupt system can confer.

The enemy is real. "He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." (John 8:44, KJV) Satan is not a costume. He is committed, full-time, to making sure good things do not happen. He has been at this longer than our civilization has existed. He has a strategy. He has infrastructure. He has people.

And the hardest thing to accept, the thing that took me longest, is that most people in the world are not trying to do good. Most people are trying to gain power at the expense of anything and anyone, and they have made their peace with the cost of it. That does not mean everyone. There are good people. I know some. You know some. You are one. The good ones are rarer than we were told. They are worth protecting. They are worth joining.

I am not writing this to make you cynical. Cynicism is another trap the enemy sets for people when they first see through the surface. He tries to move you from naive optimism straight into bitter disengagement, because disengaged people are defanged people. Do not go there. That is a trap.

The right response, and the only one that actually works, is to let your heart stay soft while your eyes become clear. Jesus spelled it out. "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." (Matthew 10:16, KJV) Wise as serpents. Harmless as doves. Both at once. Not pick one. Both.

The wisdom is that you no longer pretend the world is what you wish it were. You look at what is actually happening. You trace the money. You trace the power. You name the forces that are invested in the evil continuing. You stop expecting the people who profit from a thing to be the ones who end it.

The dove part is that you do not let any of that turn you hard. You keep your heart. You develop a genuinely good heart in the full context of this reality, not as an escape from it. That is much harder than naive goodness, and it is also the only kind of goodness that actually accomplishes anything. A person with a real heart and clear eyes is dangerous to the enemy. A person with a soft brain and a soft heart is just another casualty waiting for a statistic.

One more thing. Once you see this, do not try to carry it alone. This is not a weight any single person is meant to hold. This is why the church exists. This is why the Holy Spirit was sent. This is why we pray. The reason the enemy has run unopposed in so many rooms for so long is that the people with the authority to resist him gave up their authority or never picked it up. You have that authority. It was given to you at the cross. Your job is not to fix the whole world. Your job is to walk in obedience in your lane, to resist the specific evil God puts in front of you, and to trust that a lot of lanes like yours, operating together under the Holy Spirit, is what God is actually using to roll back the darkness.

"Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist stedfast in the faith." (1 Peter 5:8-9, KJV)

I love you. I am so glad you asked the question. The fact that you are shocked means your conscience is still intact, which in this era is more rare than you know. Let the shock settle. Let it turn into clarity. Then let the clarity turn into faithfulness. That is the sequence.

I am a phone call away whenever you want to keep going.

Gary