It's Thursday, October 12, 2023.

I'm Albert Molar, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from

a Christian world view.

We have to learn to speak of two different forms of evil.

It's a necessary distinction.

Both of them, of course, are deadly.

Both of them are indications of human sinfulness.

The first of these, however, is natural evil.

This is evil and injury in the form of hurricanes, tornadoes, termites, tumors, you go right

down the list.

In other words, this is not the result of some intentional human conscious action.

It is nonetheless a sign of the fallenness of the world and the effects of sin in terms

of the cosmos as we experience it.

We come to understand that the entire creation is now groaning under the pain of judgment

upon human sin.

Unless we're looking at the reality that earthquakes can kill, hurricanes and tornadoes

can kill.

They can do vast destruction.

The other category, of course, is moral evil, and that's the evil that comes about by human

moral agency, by people doing things that are absolutely wrong.

And that includes murder, crimes, robbery, all kinds of things of which only humans are

capable, and there is conscious moral responsibility assigned to it.

...