The Void At The Core Of Being

Amy Biehl had been on a Fulbright scholarship working on projects to facilitate democracy and social justice in South Africa. A day before she was due to return home to California, she ran into a crowd of black youths who were chanting “one settler, one bullet”. They were protesting the murder of seven black youths by those thought to be agents of the white minority rulers. The youths murdered Amy. An innocent soul caught up in the cycle of evil that engulfed apartheid South Africa. Another episode in an endless series of a world gone rogue.

But whereas Amy’s life was so brutally cut short, her story did not end there. We will return to it later. For now, it helps to train our minds on the perennial question: why is there so much evil in the world?

The Bible advances a proposition. It says the love of money is the root of all evil.^[1]1 Timothy 6:10 Methinks: not really. The love of money is not the root of all evil. It doesn’t even come close. It’s just a convenient anchor on which we hang an issue with which we struggle. The question is eternal: why is there evil in the world? The fault, my friends, is in ourselves.

There are those who will throw scripture at me. My proposition challenges biblical inerrancy. The Bible is the word of God. If it says the love of money is the root of all evil,^[2]1 Timothy 6:10 it damn well is – end of! Any challenge to biblical wisdom is carnal, heretical, and therefore null and void.

But to those able to bear with me consider the evidence. The first biblical account of evil by a human being against another human being was the murder of Abel by Cain. The love of money had nothing do with it. In fact, money was nowhere in sight. If we as people of faith are willing to look in that mirror, we might find that the first record of evil by a human being was consequent upon acts of worship.^[3]Genesis 4:3-8

I’m all too aware that there would be folks who would latch onto this as proof that religion is at the heart of conflicts in the world. What with Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al Qaida and Isis in the Middle East, Hindu/Muslim clashes in Asia, persecution of Jews by Europe’s Christian rulers in the Middle Ages and the list is endless. But, again, that’s just holding up a fodder for an issue with a much deeper root.

There’s a story in the bible that does not incite the depth of scrutiny that it’s begging for. It’s the account of the foetal conflict between Esau and Jacob. Two specimens, not fully formed, neither influenced nor affected by culture or environment, engaged in gestational fisticuffs over who would be the first to power out of mummy’s tummy.

Their would-be mother went seeking an insight to the rumble in her tummy. What she learned foretold a generational fratricide that would only end when a whole ethnic group disappeared from the face of the earth.^[4]Genesis 25:21-26

The story of Jacob and Esau is not unique in biblical scripture. Neither is the story of their gestational wrestling. After them came the conflict between Judah’s twins, Pharez and Zarah. The former pulled the latter back the birth canal to breakthrough ahead of his twin.^[5]Genesis 38:18-30

The Hebrew Bible is replete with instances of sibling rivalry. Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Joseph and his brothers and that little kerfuffle between Aaron and Miriam on one hand and Moses on the other.^[6]Numbers 12:1-2 Scripture has been hard-pressed to draw our attention to the cradle of trouble with humanity.

While many have dealt well with the theme of sibling rivalry in scripture, not many have attempted to drill through these gestational scuffles. These narratives yearn for an exploration. They turn the perennial question of the cause of evil in the world into a darker and more complex conundrum:

Why would babies in the womb compete for prominence and ascendancy?

There’s a void at the core of being. It’s creation’s unfinished work. There’s always been a premortal, sometimes fatal, instinct to fill that void. Often, the tools we employ to fill that void are borrowed from the depths of hell. The earliest cited case in biblical exploration was the case of Lucifer, an angel of light who threw it all away because all his glory, beauty and power were not enough for as long as there remained One greater than him.^[7]Isaiah 14:12-14

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”^[8]Isaiah 14:12-14

The closest we’ve got to understanding this phenomenon is to get Freudian. We call it Ego: the most central part of the mind, which mediates with one’s surroundings. It doesn’t perfectly tick all our boxes, but it’s the closest we’ve got.

The Psalmist unwittingly captured it. He said God has put all things under our feet. You might think that’s a lot. But before that he said God had made us a little less than the angels.^[9]Psalm 8 Eve had a problem with that. Much to the title of Mary Trump’s book on Donald Trump, it’s a case of too much and never enough.

Egocentric complex was at the root of much of the friction in scripture. Eve wanted to be more than a human. She lusted after cosmic gifts.^[10]Genesis 3:4-6 The tower of babel was the brainchild of those who wanted to reach for heaven,^[11]Genesis 11:4 Sarah tore a family apart in order to position her child as the heir to God knows what!^[12]Genesis 21:10 Rebecca and Jacob committed a sacrilege for much the same reason,^[13]Genesis 27:5-30 Jacob’s sons resented the prospect of Joseph rising above them,^[14]Genesis 37:5-8 Solomon killed his brother Adonijah in a race for the throne!^[15]1Kings 2:13-25

The earliest biblical instance of anti-Semitism was the account of Haman the Agagite whose ego was bruised when a Jew refused to acknowledge his exalted presence. Consequently, he ordered the slaughter of the entire Jewish population of Persia!^[16]Esther 3:5-13.

In our quest to fill that void we reach for all sorts – power, avarice, hedonism, religion, spiritualism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, name it, but nothing slakes this thirst. What do we get for all our pursuits? Vices. As James the Just wrote:

“From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?”^[17]James 4:1

To be sure, these egocentric aspirations are at the heart of scientific breakthroughs. There was a time was when we thought that only necessities drove inventions. Not so now. Necessities might have driven the basics. The pursuit of ‘superlatives’ is egotripping. Biggest, fastest, best are soon enough pushed down to comparatives because someone else has done biggest, fastest or best.

Ultimately superlatives fail to fill the void. We are no longer satisfied with biggest and best. Ours has got to be the ‘ONLY’. There’s a bottomless pit deep down that requires more and more but never enough. Nowhere does it find expression more vociferously than in religion. Nowhere as virulent as when expressed in the name of God! One’s way couldn’t be one of several revelations, it’s not not enough to be reckoned as the best revelation. It’s got to be the ONLY revelation. Over the millennia, unquantifiable levels of evil have been wrought by those for whom the world is not big enough to accommodate beliefs that differ from theirs.

So, what’s the role of God in a world that’s gone rogue, considering that His good name is invoked in acts of evil? The Bible presents the evidence that God is there with us every step of the way, encouraging us to summon our better angels. When He saw that evil was brewing in the bowel of Cain, He visited Cain and admonished him to subdue his ego.^[18]Genesis 4;6-7 Cain would not listen; his ego got the better of him. As often as we resist the call of conscience to rise above our base instinct, we do bad stuff.

But why does God not do for us that which we lack the will power to do ourselves? That’s another myth – that we are captive to our base instincts. Sadly, it finds sympathy in scripture:

“For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me…. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”^[19]Romans 7:18- 21,24

It’s at this point we return to Amy Biehl. Her parents flew into South Africa to plead for clemency at the trial of the men accused of Amy’s murder. They established the Amy Biehl Foundation in celebration of their daughter’s passion for a better world. Two of Amy’s killers work with Linda Biehl, Amy’s mother, at the Foundation in Cape Town. Amy’s family failed to be overcome of evil but overcame evil with good. They filled the void at the core of being with a charity of Christ-like proportions.

They demonstrated that we could subdue our base instincts, that it’s in our power to calm the rage within. They are proof that it’s indeed possible to seek clemency for those who nail you to the cross, to listen to the still, silent voice within, summoning us to be our better selves. By them we are encouraged to be the sort of people God is calling us to be.