Sunday message preview : Deliver us from evil

The final request we are taught to pray in the Lord's prayer is to be delivered from evil. This might be the most basic of all human desires. The desire to be protected from evil. I am immediately struck by the fact that our Lord is the one that instructs us to pray this. The reason? He is against evil as well and desires we be shielded from it's impact.

The most common reason for people to reject God and the fact that He is loving and merciful, is the existence of evil. That it even exists to some means that either He is not all-powerful (because He can not abolish it) or He could remove it, but doesn't care enough to do it. The human mind seems scandalized that God would even allow evil to be an option.

According to the Bible, God's ultimate desire was for evil to not be apart of the human situation. In the creation of man and woman in the image of God, they were given the gift of volition or choice. The fact that there was something called "good" meant necessarily the opposite was at least possible. God never intended for evil to be more than a possibility. In fact, He gave strict orders for even the knowledge of it to be avoided.

Because the Lord is holy, He has forbidden evil from the beginning to the end. Ultimately evil will be punished and eternally abolished. In the meantime, He has called us to pray to be delivered from it. He is powerful and can help us defeat it in our lives and empower us to help others defeat it as well. That is why our message to others is called the "good news".

We hope for some super hero to come along and rescue us (or maybe even Jack Bauer) but in the end, Christ is the only true source of help from the merciless, relentless foe called evil.