Mat 23:27 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.
1Co 2:9-10 But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”– (10) these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
When we describe or try to define evil, we end up using words that are negatives of the good:
- UNrighteous
- UNholy
- LawLESSness
I think it was R.C. Sproul that I once heard speak about this. He said that evil is actually a parasite on what is good and that in a sense evil cannot exist in and of itself apart from the good.
I have been seeing this played out this past year. I have noticed that when wickedness parades as righteousness, when the counterfeit disguises itself as a follower of Christ, it’s true nature is betrayed by what I will call a lack of originality. Evil, you see, cannot produce good fruit. It’s core is rotten, so its fruit can only be rotten. Therefore if it is going to parade as what is true and good, it must attach itself to something that is true and good and mimic it. Understand?
Listen to a friend of mine explain it:
…an unregenerate person is unable to discern (figure out) anything when it comes to spiritual things and God. There is nothing within a unregenerate person’s nature that would enable him to discern God or the things of God. And anything that a professing christian exhibits as being a christian is just a facade. Their prayers are empty phrases, their good works are tainted with sinful motives, their teachings are only truth in so much as they are quoting scripture and not interpreting it, their appearance is as white washed tombs.
One way to identify a counterfeit disguised as a Christian is to carefully look at/listen to what they are saying or writing. Where does it originate? Are their words the product of the Holy Spirit having shown them real nuggets of truth in God’s Word? Or are they actually a mimicry of things others have said? Evil is parasitic. It is like a tick sitting on a branch waiting for a deer to walk by so it can attach and suck out the life blood.
A final note. When an evil person in disguise latches onto a source of truth outside itself, it will then always pervert that truth. Often very subtly, but you can be sure it will always twist truth because the evil man’s motive is evil. He is a liar. As Jesus put it, “the truth is not in him.”
1Jn 4:1 Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.
In other words, here is the mark of the genuine person who is indwelt by the Spirit, whose heart has been regenerated:
Mat 13:52 And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
