“The experience of Creation’s insignificance before God” was a definition I have given previously for evil; see here. However, creation is not ‘insignificant’ as such as long as it exists. There must be a siginificance attached to the very fact that God has left it in existence. So le us explore a more precise understanding of evil.

It is indeed an experience of creation’s futility without God, for creation self destroys and destroys all around it when it is corrupted by evil. Why is this?

Man was created to take part in the life of the Trinity. The life of the Trinity is characterized by a reciprocal giving and receiving. The Father gives to the Son, who gives to the Spirit, who in turn serves in complete submission the Father and Son, and like wise the Son serves the Father. God is the only one who can satisfy himself. He gives that he might receive his own life back in mutual self-sacrifice. But notice that just as it is God’s nature to give so is it his nature to consume! For he consumes what he gives within himself; he satisfies himself.

So when God created man he made him to take part in this as well. This is what it means that man was created in God’s image; he bore his life of sacrificial love. Now man had something to give to God because God had given him himself! The Word, God’s Son, spoke him into existence, breathed into him the breath of life, and sustained him physically and spiritually. An man in turn worshiped God by giving him his all; his work and time and love in caring for his creation as a sacrifice unto his maker.

But in sin, we reject what God gives for the finite, the physical, the human, and so we lose this God life in us. Since it is God’s nature and therefore our nature to consume, we begin to consume ourselves and eachother; thus, death. And since it is God’s nature to consume as well, he also consumes us; he is an “all consuming fire.”

This then is evil: only part of God’s relationship. For the relationship is two-fold; it gives sacrificially and it consumes what is given. Since all things exist from God only he can satisfy and only he can be given to be consumed without being exhausted. So when evil entered the world it was the advent not of some new ‘thing’ but was rather the loss of part of the perfect nature of God, the part that receives God, and gives him back to him. And this, by the way, is love.

So when love is lost there still remains the need to consume, but since God’s life is not being given we consume ourselves. So Christ had to die to give himself to man once again, as man, and be totally consumed by God, that God might be satisfied by himself, but by a man also, that man may be brought back into his Trinitarian life.

This is why it is so serious to be ‘luke warm’ as it is stated in Revelation. Only part of God’s desired relationship with man is what sin is! Either we are all his, giving him all that he is in us, or we are consumed by him. There is no middle ground.