“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves....
The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
Genesis 3:4-7, 21-22
Fictional villains are evil, weird, insane, and self-absorbed. They have a tendency to have a theme of acts of villainy. They show no reason or pity for justice. Scratch that, all villains are all these things, including the people we deem as workers of horrible evil acts.
The thing is though, recognized villains, fictional or real, are pretty flashy in their insanity and/or deeds. This makes them easily spottable for heroes. Or are they flashy and obvious? Could it be....that villains live among us?
The possibility of villains infiltrating society everywhere comes from the difficulty of defining evil. The dictionary (or rather, the internet and society today) defines evil as "Profoundly immoral and malevolent. Profound immorality, wickedness, and depravity, esp. when regarded as a supernatural force." The problem with that definition is the word "profound". We rank tiers of wrongdoing, and as time goes on and the world get worse, things seem less profound. Deeds we do are not considered evil; we water them down to justify ourselves. But in God's book, sin is sin is sin is evil.
There is a real danger, no it is a reality, that there is sin in our lives that we ignore. We are better than the other villains, and rank ourselves above them. The danger is that villains not only live among us, but that we are the villain.
Hey, I admit, I am guilty and do this all the time. I lie to myself and say God's cool with me, that the things I do will make him happy enough that I don't have to pursue Him any longer at a certain point. You see, there's that checklist thing, or that certain point to reach that becomes a false security in ever becoming a doer of evil.
In The Dark Knight film, Batman says, "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." This is partially true in how it applies to us as followers of Jesus. If we are not striving towards light, away from evil, then we become the villain. You either die a hero, or be static enough to see yourself become the villain. If we aren't being submissive to God, following Him and pursuing Him, we are not good, but full of sin. "How am I sinning by doing nothing?" you might ask, but this goes back to the ranking issue: we might not be sinning, but bad things become less bad in our eyes until we eventually do them.
This forces us to acknowledge our villainous nature. We are evil, weird, self-absorbed. We pursue and idolize grades, career, our time. We are two-faced and hypocritical. Ego engineers. We have hangups that make us do the same bad thing over and over and over again.
Love changes this. Love in our loves being heroes to the world will change this. I feel God has called us to be heroes, not villains, and pursue love by facing up to the evil around us.
Will you be honest with yourself and others about the villain inside you? Will you continue to answer the call of the hero and have the courage to encounter the evil that happens?
