Living Between Fear, Mystery, and Faithfulness
Why Evil Feels Personal
One of the reasons conversations about Satan and spiritual evil remain so emotionally powerful is because evil rarely feels abstract. On the contrary, evil feels personal.
Evil is never experienced as just a philosophical puzzle, nor is it felt as a peculiar psychological problem or a harmful flaw baked into laws, economies and institutions where the system is stacked against us.
However, we know exactly what it is to experience exploitation, accusation, opposition, and fear. We’ve tasted dominance, deception, division, shame, violence, betrayal, and suffering in ways that feel directly targeted at our lives.
Consequently, evil almost feels intimate, as though there’s a force actively opposing trust, communion, well-being, and life itself. Honestly, when we look at the horrors human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another, it’s not hard to think something bigger than ordinary, self-directed desire is also at work. We’ll explore that reality further in our next article: More Than Demons – Rethinking Powers in the New Testament.
A Spiritually Textured World
Today, we do what people have always done when the weight of the world becomes too heavy to carry. We look for a big enough theatre screen to hold the sheer size of our pain.
In our previous reflection, I said initially, Hebrew theology was super simple. Yahweh brings blessing, and Yahweh brings judgment. The tribes of Israel and Judah experienced national tragedy as a direct consequence of breaking their covenant relationship with God.
However, during the brutal centuries of oppression under Greek and Roman occupation, Jewish writers faced a massive theological trauma. Their simple, localized theology didn’t work anymore because their trials, traumas, and tragedies seemed caused by something far bigger than themselves. This forced Jewish thinkers to completely rethink how God operated in a world overrun by colossal, seemingly unstoppable empires.
These authors turned to highly symbolic, otherworldly visions to provide a divine, heavenly perspective on their earthly suffering. To explain their pain, they took obscure figures from the older scriptures (like the sons of God in Genesis 6, the serpent in the garden, the chaotic sea creatures and cosmic deities) and threaded them into an elaborate story of cosmic rebellion, a post-creation drama that took place long after Adam and Eve. By framing their struggles as part of a grand post-creation drama, it gave them a way to explain why systemic tragedies happened to faithful people. Meanwhile, those stories offered ultimate hope that God would soon intervene, judge the empires, and restore cosmic order.
And yet, while Scripture acknowledges this tension, the body of works in the Bible remain remarkably restrained. To the biblical writers, the world is never presented as merely material. Rather, reality is spiritually textured, portraying humanity as living within a creation space that includes both visible and invisible dimensions. Accordingly, the Bible speaks of powers, principalities, rulers, accusations, deception, hostile forces, and spiritual opposition but it doesn’t explain exactly how the mechanics of these realities actually work.
Instead, Scripture consistently leans into directing our attention toward covenant faithfulness within the uncertainty of our lived experience. Perhaps this is because Scripture is ultimately more concerned with how evil shapes people than with fully explaining the nuts and bolts of evil itself.
Evil as Distorted Desire
Often, the overall scriptural story returns to a familiar list of human and cosmic crashes:
- Idolatry and pervasive fear,
- Domination and systemic violence,
- Accusation and unchecked greed,
- False worship and distorted desire.
Look back at the beginning. The drama starts with the serpent re-framing trust. Later ha satan acts in an adversarial way and accuses, and empires seduce. Therefore, the key focus of our exploration in this article is discovering why evil feels personal and how fear shapes the way we interpret it. Yes, the biblical mind is significantly structured, but the Bible doesn’t describe evil as a created substance. Instead, it treats evil as a profound distortion. Evil is expressed in redirected trust, misaligned desire, twisted power, corrupted worship, and fractured fellowship. This is when things fall apart.
The Inclination of the Human Mind
I often think about God’s conversation with Noah after the flood. In that moment, God acknowledges that “the inclination of the human mind is bad from its youth” (Genesis 8:21 – John Goldingay’s First Testament Translation). Surprisingly, even after creation is completely reset through judgment and rescue, the deeper human yetzer (inclination) remains unchanged.
This reminds us that the problem of evil isn’t just some external danger lurking in the shadows. On the contrary, Scripture repeatedly returns to the ways human perception, desire, fear, and self-interest become bent within ordinary life.
Naturally, I’m not saying this reality makes evil less real. If anything, Scripture portrays evil as deeply pervasive and profoundly destructive. And yet, the biblical writers consistently resist giving spiritual opposition an elaborate, supernatural explanation. The mechanics of evil are beyond our security clearance and God has chosen not to brief us on the workings of its influence.
Jesus and the Weight of Evil
A key point in my reflection series is this. While I believe the Bible resists explaining the mechanics of evil, it certainly doesn’t minimize it’s weight and influence. As discussed last time, the Hebrew word ha satan first appears as the accuser in God’s cosmic court. Job experienced the crushing weight of testing, yet the story refuses to let his friends reduce his intense suffering to a simple equation: you suffer because you sinned. Their moral calculus collapses under the mystery of God’s larger purposes when God finally steps down from the bench to layout His argument.
Later, Jesus enters the same story in Luke 4: 1-13.
In the wilderness He too is tested. The Greek calls the tempter, ho diabolos – the slanderer, the divider, the one who tears apart. The testing isn’t only about supernatural power but about trust, identity and allegiance. “If you are God’s son…” The question is whether Jesus will grab for control or continue entrusting Himself to His Father.
Furthermore, recall the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:7-13. Jesus teaches His disciples how to pray, but He doesn’t invite them to master the hidden workings of evil. Instead, he teaches them to ask, “Deliver us from tou ponerou.” Grammatically, depending upon how it’s used, some understand that to mean “evil” as in an abstract wickedness, sin or harm. Others, lean toward understanding it as “the evil one” as an entity in the office of “the Satan” shown in the Book of Job. Either way, the point is, Jesus isn’t concerned about satisfying our curiosities about a cosmic entity behind the screen. Instead, He’s more interested in forming people to keep trusting God in the middle of trial and testing.
BTW: the root for tou ponerou means “weighted, painful, sorrowful, distressing, to the brink of breaking.” That’s what the effects of evil feel like and that’s what Jesus draws our attention to.
I think this is meaningful.
In whatever way chaos and friction inserts itself into God’s good creation, Jesus acknowledges that they’re deeply personal. Trial feels personal. Accusations feel personal. Division feels personal. Adversarial postures feel personal. Slander feels personal. Being ripped apart or torn down feels personal. Yet Jesus consistently directs our attention away from speculation about what’s happening on the big screen and toward faithful dependence upon the Father.
However, that doesn’t remove our responsibility. “Diabolos” has a nuance in the New Testament.
It uses the language of slander, accusation, division, and hostility to describe human behaviour. So, not only do we suffer from whatever unseen realities may exist, we also suffer from the real consequences of people who act as slanderers, dividers, accusers and adversaries. And, if we’re honest, we become participants in that same pattern of behaviour ourselves.
I think this might be why Jesus spends far more time restoring people than explaining invisible hierarchies and mechanisms. However evil actually works, God’s kingdom answers it by healing broken relationships, restoring fellowship and teaching people to live truthfully, mercifully and faithfully together.
Living With Uncertainty
Honestly, living with this uncertainty about the mechanics of evil is frustrating, especially since holding tension doesn’t come naturally to us. Because our biology demands immediate answers, we often lean toward one of two extremes. Either we dismiss spiritual realities altogether, or we over-interpret almost every experience through the lens of cosmic warfare.
To illustrate this, here’s a personal example. I don’t often have nightmares, but I have had experiences that felt deeply unsettling while half-awake during interrupted sleep. Let me tell you, in those moments, I didn’t feel partially awake! I sensed a tangible presence in the room.
I felt fear and paralysis. My jaw locked, I was unable to speak, and all I could do was yell out the name of Jesus in my mind. Later the next morning, my wife Lorna would tell me that I woke her with my groaning. Sometimes, I’d jokingly respond, “C’mon, you’re making that up!” Other times, I simply have to admit it.
Physiologically, we can describe such moments through the mechanics of sleep paralysis or disrupted sleep states. Fair enough, but that scientific explanation doesn’t change the emotional intensity of the experience itself.
We’re unique, complex creatures—a mix of physiology, psychology, memory, fear, expectation, imagination, and spiritual perception all constantly overlapping. Whichever way you slice it, our understanding might be like looking through dark, tinted windows, but the experiences remain entirely real nonetheless.
Consequently, embracing that limitation may be one of the healthiest postures we can learn to live into. I just don’t think every mystery requires an immediate explanation of what’s going on in the spiritual realm.
Scripture’s Restraint Toward Mystery
Unfortunately, some Christians are too quick to write off every unexplained experience as an over-active imagination or basic biology. Simultaneously, others immediately assign demonic causality to nearly everything that’s dark, oppressive, frightening, or psychologically disturbing. Although that makes for fascinating books and movies.
In contrast, the scriptural story models a far greater restraint. It fully acknowledges mystery without satisfying our craving to explain it away.
- Job never receives a metaphysical explanation for his suffering. He didn’t even know what was said about him in the heavenly staff meeting before his life started to break apart!
- Ecclesiastes can feel too depressing to read, and you might think I’m weird, the tensions left unresolved can feel strangely comforting.
- The Psalms move honestly through fear, confusion, trust, and lament without offering cheap answers.
- Apocalyptic literature, like the Book of Daniel and Revelation, describes reality symbolically while still leaving much hidden in the shadows.
Maybe a mature faith isn’t about eliminating chaos and uncertainty, but cultivating the capacity to trust God and remain faithful followers of Jesus right in the middle of it.
Inherited Imagination and Fear
I understand how difficult this can be. Some personalities naturally lean toward paranoia, vigilance, pattern-seeking, overthinking, and a spiritually charged style of interpretation.
When an inherited imagination shaped by aggressive spiritual warfare language enters the mix, it can drastically intensify those natural tendencies. Without noticing, ordinary human fears become spiritually loaded. Intrusive thoughts suddenly feel threatening and personally directed. Dark emotions feel deeply suspect, coincidences appear to have cosmic meaning, and anxiety itself begins feeding the sense that something unseen is always lurking nearby—crouching at the doorway. As a result, the attic remains fully furnished and never fully quiets down.
The Model of an Untroubled Jesus
Again, I am not saying spiritual reality is unreal or that all experiences can be neatly explained away with psychology or physiology. People are far more mysterious than modern materialism allows. Yet still, not every fear, oppressive feeling, disturbing dream, or unexplained experience requires an immediate metaphysical meaning attached to it.
Therefore, wisdom looks less like certainty and more like settledness (Yes, I’m thinking of the settled water of Psalm 23). It requires:
- Refusing to become consumed by fear,
- Refusing to furnish the cosmic attic with endless speculation,
- Refusing to grant evil more attention than Scripture itself consistently gives it.
No, I’m not asking you to stir up greater willpower! Instead, how about giving this specific reality some thought: One of the most striking features of Jesus throughout the Gospels is how he acknowledges spiritual opposition without appearing fascinated by it. There’s no anxiety, no obsession, no paranoia, and no elaborate mapping of invisible enemies.
Ultimately, the Gospels show Jesus as boldly unbothered by the kinds of fear-driven spiritual vigilance that many believers quietly carry today. No, I don’t believe His divinity kicked in to keep Him from experiencing such emotion. The New Testament insists His humanity was the real deal – tested, vulnerable, and well acquainted with suffering. The Slanderer – the same Prosecuting Attorney from the Book of Job, tested Jesus in the wilderness. And still, He appears profoundly grounded, entirely free from fascination and obsession with hidden opposition. Jesus remained anchored in trust, mercy, prayer, and a shared life with His Father.
When Fear Becomes Interpretive
Perhaps that grounded posture itself teaches us something. It challenges us because many believers quietly live lives within spiritually overcharged perspectives where fear has become an interpretive habit. And fear has a devastating way of distorting our perception of reality.
First, let me clarify: fear isn’t failure! Please hear this. Our bodies and nervous systems are brilliantly shaped to recognize and react to threats long before our minds consciously try to figure out what’s going on. Fear is instinctive, and that instinct is a good thing.
However, what I am attempting to impress upon you is a different dilemma. We need to evaluate whether fear has slowly become a governing lens through which we interpret reality itself. That’s an entirely different question.
Learning Not to Fear the Unseen
I don’t see Scripture saying we should go all-out to eliminate instinctive fear. The instinct will still fire, your imagination may still wander, your body will still react, and mysteries will undoubtedly remain unresolved.
Instead, Scripture invites us toward a deeper rootedness right in the midst of the mystery. True faith forms through ordinary, grounded practices:
- Consistent trust and prayer,
- Shared worship and life,
- Grounded truth and active love,
- And the ordinary rhythms of life with God.
I won’t pretend these practices will immediately erase your anxiety, your mystery, or your inherited imagination. However, over time, they reshape what holds your attention and allegiance – and that matters! The cosmic attic may not quiet down fully. Yet maybe, a mature faith slowly learns that not every creak in a floorboard needs you to run upstairs and make a monster out of it.