What is the godly, Christian response to devilish people? Change your response to them, because only God can change the person.
While there are many people in my little world who seem to work for Satan, one person in particular afflicts me regularly. I’ll use the otherwise unacceptable grammatical practice of referring to her/him as “they” and “them” to protect the innocent. Yes, there are always innocent people involved, and identifying the guilty serves no good purpose. This is not about other people, but about the one in the mirror. This is about prospering in the fallen world which always includes such people, not about pointing fingers. So the first item is realizing God still loves them and Jesus died on the Cross for them, too.
Perfection is not possible. If it were, your primary responsibility would still be perfecting yourself, first. Only the most damaged personalities seek to make their world perfect by whatever means without first changing themselves. This is precisely the problem we are facing. They are so obsessed with what they want for themselves, it never enters their head to concern themselves in the least over the wants and needs of others. You expect this from kids around 5 or 6 years old; it’s normal at that age. You don’t expect them to stop developing there.
The fundamental error is making of oneself a god. It’s blasphemy as a character trait, demanding to have it their way. The means is often a matter of manipulation, be it subtle or more overt. Lying is supposed to lead you to take a certain course of action; threats are designed to prevent another. They are smart enough to know others don’t want to do what they demand, but internally assume it’s a problem with evil in others.
Here’s where most Christians fail to get it. From the eternal perspective, there is no such thing as objective reality. There is no static standard out there in the cosmos by which all things can be judged. The standard is a living Being, God Himself. We aren’t comfortable with a living and dynamic Truth, because it makes it possible for people to claim anything they like as a reflection of that Truth. The point is, you are not God, and can’t decide that for others. You can’t know Good and Evil as God knows them; that was the mistake in the Garden of Eden. What you can know is what God requires of you.
Dealing with damaged and broken people begins with the person in the mirror. I can’t make this other person do what I want, even with all my training and expertise in Bible, theology and psychology. I can’t say definitively what is evil, only what is painful to me. From that ground, I can then examine the record of Scripture, and human history in light of that record, and say I won’t get involved in things which I see God calling “evil.” So when I say, “Torture is evil,” I’m saying something I know people will tend to agree with, but it’s more important to note I cannot support it. There are some things so utterly consistent in the record of Scripture and history, we can say God condemns it with the certitude of most prophets. But we say it first to ourselves, because we recognize most quickly the evils of others which reflect our own. If we condemn our own desire for torture, domination, control, etc., we are prepared to stand beside God when He rises in judgment on sins we can see from His place.
Yeah, it’s all fuzzy, and we don’t like that. Too bad; it’s reality and truth as God defines it. Dealing with this “them” in my life, I cannot say with absolute certainty they do evil. I won’t pretend my words mean that, nor should anyone else. Such may be the typical assumptions about the English language, but that’s a flaw inherent in our culture. What I am saying is I can’t support it. No more than I should be willing to control them, I won’t allow them to control me.
If you need a practical guideline, let me suggest you use the Transactional Analysis Model. Notice it’s only a model, not the absolute truth of human nature. It does give insight into some of the basic interactions, some of the modes of operation. In that context, they come on to me as child and parent, flickering between the two rapidly. My relative position as authority figure means they usually try to manipulate me into playing parent. There are times it seems I comply because I do take command, but only as an adult protecting things for which I am responsible. As you might expect, they tend to avoid me unless things are going okay for them.
I can’t fix that. I can only strive to keep myself in the channel of God’s grace.
