The usual Christian answer to the question of how evil and suffering came to be in the world is this: The first human beings disobeyed God, and therefore God punished them and subjected them to suffering and death. God can’t tolerate or be in the presence of sin, and our ancestors, Adam and Eve, sinned. Therefore they had to be sent out of the Garden of Eden, banned the presence of God.

But according to the Bible, God can tolerate and be in the presence of sin, and in fact does tolerate sin and live in its immediate presence. To take one kind of example, in the book of Revelation Satan is called “the one who accuses our brothers and sisters in front of our God ” (12.10; cf. Job 1.6ff, 2.1ff; 1 Kgs 22.19-23). In Psalm 82 we see a picture of God having a face-to-face argument with beings entrusted with judgment in his heavenly court, accusing them of mistreating people and acting unjustly. To take another kind of example, Jesus says, “The person who has seen me has seen the Father.” This means, at the least, if you want to know what the Father is like, then look at Jesus and he will show you. Could Jesus tolerate being around sinful people? I think the answer to this is clearly yes, he could tolerate being around sinners, and in fact sought them out in order to reconcile them to God through himself.

We need to stop passing around the same old statements that are very often not questioned or tested, and look deeper into this matter. The root question I would like to begin with is this: What is the essence of “sin,” and in what way does sin destroy the relationship between God and the created being that sins?

I propose that the original and most damaging sin is envy. Envy is what happens when created beings decide to take offense at their creator, who has shown them nothing but pure love. The created being that chooses envy towards God also envies every created being. Somehow, turning against your creator automatically involves you in turning against everything that is made by your creator. Envy is baseless hatred. Envy is the embracing of an ill will towards another being who has done nothing to harm you. It often manifests itself in the following symptom (which is the common, weaker, definition of envy in our society): I am offended to discover that another has something good that I don’t have myself.

(Now notice that anger at being treated unjustly is not the same thing as envy. For example, suppose you have something I need for my well-being, and I don’t have it. And suppose the reason you have it is because you have stolen it from me, or because your people have stolen it from my people. Under those conditions, my self-love and my love for my people is going to make me offended at you or your people, and my offense need not come out of or result in any ill will towards you at all.)

For human beings, the original envy happens in the Garden of Eden. The serpent tells Eve, the fruit of this tree represents something good that God possesses that you don’t have. “So what?” she might have replied. “So God has something good that I don’t have. If it were good for me, God would have given it to me. After all, I know that God loves me. No doubt it is good for God, but not for me, so that is why God doesn’t want me to take it. Why should I be offended that God has something good that is appropriate for God, but not for me?” 

Eve only went along with the serpent because she fell into envy. Envy is irrational. If I have plenty of good things, why should I be offended that another creature has some good thing that I don’t happen to possess? The answer is, it needn’t. One could just as easily rejoice on another’s behalf to find that they have some good thing. Envy resolves to an offense over nothing. It is at root an offense that another has good, not (as we usually mis-perceive it) an offense that I do not have good. But since it is an offense that another has good, that is to say that it is simply ill will towards the other, unhappiness that they should prosper. Ill will wishes the other not to prosper. It is the opposite of agape love (agape is a Greek word from the New Testament, pronounced ah-gah-pay), which is the free desire for the well-being of the other.

Jesus calls envy the “evil eye.” The condition of your eye represents the attitude with which you look on another, whether it be God or a created being. Thus to look on another with an “evil eye” is to approach another with a fundamental attitude of enmity. Compare these two teachings:

The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light inside . But if your eye is evil, then your whole body will be dark inside. So if the light in you is darkness, that is some real darkness (Mt. 6.23).

The following comes as the end of the parable of the workers in the vineyard:

The workers who were hired about an hour from the end of the day came and got a standard day’s pay. So when those came who were hired at the beginning of the day, they expected to get more. But each one of them got the standard day’s pay too. When they got it, they started to complain against the owner. “These men have just worked one hour, and you have made them equal to those of us who did most of the work and endured the hottest part of the day.” But he said to them, “Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for the standard wage? Take your pay and go. I want to give the person who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do whatever I choose with my own money? Or is your eye evil because I am good? (Mt. 20.15).

Envy, as I said, is the polar opposite of agape love. In the parable here, the owner shows agape love to those workers who never got a job all day long, by giving them enough pay to feed themselves that evening. This generosity becomes the occasion for bitterness both towards the owner and towards the one-hour workers, but not because either of those parties has done wrong. The problem is that the other workers have an “evil eye,” a fundamental attitude of stinginess with good. They are unhappy that free grace has been given to another creature. They don’t know what agape love is.

Envy is often at the root of murder. Cain became embittered against Abel and murdered him not because Abel had done anything against him, but simply because Abel had received something good: God’s approval (see Genesis 4). 

In summary, envy is irrational and baseless hatred, and it is the deepest, most fundamental sin. It created the original tearing of relationship between human beings and God, and thereafter it became the root of all sorts of irrational embitterments between human beings and other human beings, such as racism, classism, nationalism, sexism, and so on.

That’s Stage 1 in my answer to the question, “What is sin?” 

Stage 2 starts with the assumption that envy breaks relationship with God, and goes on from there to ask, what kinds of destructive living strategies do human beings get into when they try to live outside of relationship with God? 

Let me begin Stage 2 by summarizing what has already been said. I outlined my understanding that envy is the primal sin. I called “ordinary envy” a manifestation, or symptom, of a deeper attitude of baseless enmity which breaks relationship first with God, and then with all creatures. I called envy the opposite of agape love.

The way I break it down, are two dimensions of sin. The first and deepest is envy, as discussed, and the other is idolatry. The relationship between these two dimensions is brought out when God says through the prophet Jeremiah, 

“My people have committed two sins: They have rejected me, their artesian spring, and they have dug cisterns for themselves, cisterns that can’t hold water.” (Jer. 2:13)

I will now briefly outline the second dimension of sin: idolatry. (There are some other dimensions, but in my opinion these two are by far the most important to understand.) Idolatry comes into human lives because envy, once it has come in, completely disrupts the flow of relationship between human beings and God. And that inevitably creates a whole series of knock-on effects. In a state of envy, that is, enmity, towards God, human beings instinctively try to deny themselves the gifts of God’s spiritual provision for their needs, and so they get trapped into sick patterns of trying to meet their needs elsewhere. In doing this, they fall desperately short of the plan God has for their wholeness. They continuously hurt themselves, one another, and other living things. This searching for, or trying to create, spiritual nutrition in every direction except for God is the essence of idolatry. Idolatry does not meet the needs of those who embrace it. But because they don’t turn to God, they keep trying in vain to satisfy their thirst with things from the creation and from themselves.

In order to understand the various forms of idolatry, one has to understand the kinds of spiritual nutrition that they strive in vain to replace. An idol is a counterfeit, a creature-generated imitation of God or of something good that comes from God. So if we can name the essential needs of human beings, which can only be met in right relationship with God, then we can tear the cover off of the imitations which are unconsciously the source of most people’s addiction.

I take my clue from Paul, who says there are three good things that last forever: faith, hope and love (see 1 Cor. 13). These things will remain, he says, even when everything else we know about being human has passed away. These are the permanent divine values, not the incidental or relative values that change from time to time, from place to place, from culture to culture, or from person to person. Human beings will always need these, and they will always have these, forever in God. So what are they, and how do they supply our needs?

To Love is to value the life and well-being of another, and to relate to them on the basis of that value. To love someone is to esteem them, to value them, to be committed to their well-being. Human beings are created with a fundamental need to have a sense of their own esteem, and because they are created as God’s own children, they cannot meet that need without receiving and knowing God’s love, which is communicated through the Holy Spirit, through the whole creation, and through other human beings. 

To have Faith is to trust what is outside one’s control. God is the first and foundational recipient of faith, because God is totally outside our control, yet God is faithful and trustworthy. We can put our faith in God precisely because God loves us and esteems us. Human beings are created with a fundamental need for a sense of security (the inner knowledge that I can rest in trust). Because we are created as God’s own children, we can never achieve a sense of security without knowing and depending on God’s trustworthiness.

To Hope is to embrace the motivation to expend energy and take risks when there is no immediate repayment. Just as whales often fill their lungs with air and descend to do their hunting or traveling, so human beings are designed to be able to expend themselves in the expectation that they will be replenished–that is, that they will receive back more of what they have expended. God is the great hope of all things, and God is the One who teaches all things in creation to hope. Hope is motivation for living in the present that is rooted in future good. Human beings are created with a fundamental capacity and need for hope, and when they reject God, their hope withers.

Without God, all beings starve for faith, hope and love. To describe the second dimension of sin is to describe how human beings try to feed themselves with replacements of these built-in gifts of God.

In my understanding of sin as idolatry, I follow John, who sums up his whole first letter by saying, “Little children, keep yourselves away from idols” (1 Jn 5.21). In one of the key verses of the whole Bible, John in the same letter presents the love of God over against three forms of idolatry:

“Don’t love the world or the things in the world. If somebody loves the world, they don’t have the father’s love in them. Everything in the world–

the lust of the flesh,

the lust of the eyes,

and the pride of life,

is not from the Father but from the world. And the world is disappearing, and so are its obsessions. But the person that does God’s will lasts forever.” (1 Jn 2.15-17)

John has here named the three idolatries by which the “world,” that is, human society in a state of enmity against God, attempts to replace faith, hope and love. (When John says not to love the world, he is not saying that we are not to love and value and be grateful for God’s creation, but that we are not to love the God-rejecting value-system of the human “world.”)

The “lust of the flesh” is the idol that attempts to replace Hope. Apart from God, a human being is unable to find motivation to invest selflessly in the future. The lust of the flesh despairs of future good, and seeks instant gratification or pleasure:

“Let’s eat, drink and indulge ourselves, because tomorrow we’re going to die.”

Pleasure and gratification are built into the universe by God, so that they shower us with good when we live in harmony with God and our fellow created beings. When we relate rightly to our fellow beings, good feelings come. But the lust of the flesh short-circuits the gifts of God and seeks pleasure directly, while avoiding the building of right relationship. Empty of love, lust unconsciously objectifies:

“I’d like a piece of that.” 

Lust of the flesh is the seeking of pleasure for its own sake, rather than seeking the good thing which brings pleasure along with it as a free gift. Most of what we call “addiction” can be understood as slavery to the lust of the flesh.

The “lust of the eyes” attempts to replace Faith. The person of faith continuously trusts God and what they can’t control in God’s creation to meet their needs (“Give us this day our day’s food,” the Lord’s Prayer). The person without faith in God tries to achieve a sense of security by hoarding resources and controlling things outside themselves (see Mt. 6:19-21, 24-34). This, like the lust of the flesh, is false nutrition, and leaves the person hungry all the time. People who are addicted to the lust of the eyes are constantly “shopping,” whether in fantasy or in reality. They are constantly “on the lookout” (remember, lust of the eyes) for new possessions, new things, new people, and new “territories” that they can bring under their control. “Getting” something or someone doesn’t achieve any sense of peace and security, so such people leave a trail of broken and abandoned things, territories and people behind them. (See the story of Amnon and Tamar in 2 Sam. 13 for a classic example of the “lust of the eyes” and its effects.)

The “pride of life” attempts to replace Love. When we accept it, God’s love gives us a deep-rooted sense of our own loveableness, esteem and value. But when we refuse to let God love us, we are constantly desperate to fill an inner void in self-esteem. The person who serves the idol of the pride of life tries to achieve esteem by comparing his or her value to another created being, at the expense of that being. Pride competes. Pride seeks a sense of value and status by stepping on the heads of others. The Pharisee in Jesus’ story is indulging in the idolatry of pride when he prays, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people. . .” That is, he takes his sense of personal value from the illusion that he is worth more, that he is “more worthy,” than others. Paul speaks in various places of “boasting,” which is typified by the claim, “I am or have such-and-such, therefore I am better than you [or him, or her, or them].” Pride, like the other two forms of idolatry, does not satisfy. I get in a cycle of trying harder and harder to get validity points, or to become better than others, but I never find that the void is filled. Pride, in despising others, cannot escape despising itself. There is no cure for pride except to come before God with nothing but oneself, and accept God’s total, free esteem.

Here is a little table that encapsulates what I have just been saying:

Right Attitude:	Faith	Hope	Love
Good Effect:	sense of security	ability to expend oneself	sense of acceptance
Replacement Idol:	lust of eyes	lust of flesh	pride of life
Bad Effect:	chronic insecurity, obsession with controlling people and getting more “things”	despair, addiction, lack of energy	chronic self-rejection, empty relationships