The Problem of Evil

Vengeance is mine, and recompense, for the time when their foot shall slip; for the day of their calamity is at hand, and their doom comes swiftly.’ — Deuteronomy 32:35

Nearly thirty years ago I met a teenage boy, we'll call him B., outside a high school gym.  My initial reaction to him was visceral and not so much irrational as extra-rational.  I remember seeing black beetles crawling out of a hole where someone's family pet had been buried.  I felt the same unease I experienced upon meeting B.  For a time, he became involved in the lives of people I knew.  I didn't like his smirk and would have wiped it off his face, except, as he blatantly told another adult, "I'm under-age.  You can't touch me."  He brought pain to several people I cared about over a period of a couple of years then, mercifully, dropped off our screens — for about ten years.

B. could be a charming person, a natural-born salesman — some said.  To me, he was dishonest, always wearing a mask, a manipulator.  Other people were pawns to be moved at his whim on a board that only he could see.  He was clearly very clever and thought himself brilliant, though he never did well in school.  He seemed to prefer to fail from not trying rather than have try and find that he was merely above average.  Bankrolled by hard-working, thrifty parents, he went off to college in another state where he spent most of his time seducing girls and using the drugs he peddled. 

Eventually he made his way back to his old stomping grounds, picked up a job selling cars, and happened to run into a girl he had known in high school — one of his rare failed conquests.  I had been involved with the girl's family at the time and my warnings may have helped keep her out of his clutches.  I wasn't around when he came back. 

B. harbored a particular animosity toward me.  He was too good at his game to express it openly and certainly too cowardly to brace me or anyone else since his protected juvenile status had evaporated.  I am not egotistical enough to think that he targeted the girl just to get back at me.  She was attractive enough on her own.   Nevertheless, he did seem to relish the fact that he could rub his conquest in the faces of those, including me, who had thwarted his designs.  I suppose I should credit him with showing some responsibility when he married the girl after getting her pregnant, but I thought she would have been better off without his noble gesture.  In my less charitable moments, I thought marriage just gave him more control over the girl and of their child when she was born.  It also gave him a chance to milk more money from his parents who were thrilled to at last have a grandchild.  The marriages of their two older sons had not produced any offspring.  The baby was welcomed. 

B.'s ways did not change.  He could not keep a job.  He continued to manipulate people, to do drugs, to run with his friends.  It was common for B., out in public, to point out a good-looking woman for an unfavorable comparison to his wife.  He flaunted his infidelities and physically abused his wife when she objected then shamed her into covering the bruises.  When someone noticed a nasty set of bruises on her legs, the woman passed it off as a side-effect of the medicine she took for high blood pressure.  It was like watching a made-for-TV movie.  I could not believe that, in the '90s, women would still do such things.

After about four years, the young woman got up her courage, partly out of concern for her daughter, and left him.  Her mistake was not going far enough.  B. went to church and had a dramatic conversion.  He met me on the road a day or so later and shared the story of his "Damascus Road" experience.  I slammed him down between seats of his car, and, with my hand on his throat so as to slow his lies, I snarled, "If I had killed you when you were fifteen, I'd be out of prison by now." 

I was a little surprised that he did not have me arrested, but there were no witnesses, and B. knew that his most effective revenge would be to win his way back into his wife's good graces and continue to destroy her life, which is pretty much what he did.   The truth was that my reaction was more an expression of my utter impotence than anything else.  I raged because, in the end, it was not my business.   I could not, short of actually twisting his head off, effectively intervene.  It had to come down to the girl seeing through him. 

It took B. a year or so, but he wormed his way back into her life and her house.  Nothing changed except that he had made himself unwelcomed at most of the dealerships in the area and so was reduced to selling office equipment and supplies as a cover for his drug deals.  The bills were paid by his wife.  Any money he got, he blew on himself. 

At some point, he began to abuse his daughter.  Whether she knew or suspected or simply feared what was going on, his wife kicked him out of the house again and went through with the divorce this time.  But, with his parents' support and money, B. got regular visitation.  The abuse continued. 

As might be expected, what the young woman had suffered had a negative impact on her life.  She began to fall apart, all the more rapidly because she could not protect her child.  People labeled her as crazy.  Desperate for money, she stole from her employer.  Mercifully, she only lost her job and her house.  Her daughter, now a twelve-year-old and still wetting the bed, had to move in with her father and his new girlfriend. 

The little girl made the best of it.  She made friends with another girl at school and invited her to the house for a sleep-over.  Again, this sounds like something from a bad television script, but it is true.  B. drugged his girlfriend and slipped some kind of sleeping medication to the two girls.  Apparently his dosage was too light, and when he attempted to molest his daughter's friend, she woke up and pushed him away.  The girl and her mother brought charges against B., but a jury let him off.  That was three years ago. 

B.'s ex-wife got her life back on track, got her daughter back with her, and found a new job.  She still hated and feared B., but he was more or less out of her life.  Then, one night last week, the police arrived at her house.  They had been told that B. had made threats against her and her daughter as well as a number of other people.  A manhunt had been initiated for B., now a man in his forties.  He was accused of breaking into a house and raping a teenage girl at gunpoint while her parents were away.  Late the next day, B. was taken into custody.  He gave up without resistance, though he was armed, a coward to the end. 

Right now, he sits in a jail cell somewhere.  He will not be released on bond.  He will likely spend most if not all the rest of his life in prison.  His parents know the truth.   The jury that turned him loose three years ago knows the truth.  This is not the first rape he has committed.  I pray that it will be the last.  When the news came, my first thought was not that justice had finally been done.  Oddly the very first thought went back to the image of his smirking face outside the gym door.  A line of victims seemed to stand in the shadows behind him, like ghosts from the future.  A list of his atrocities appears on the wall as if written by the finger of God.  All I had to do was shove him back against the wall and slit his throat.  Yes, I would have suffered.  But see how many would have been spared.

This is the problem of evil at its most personal.  This is how I feel when I hear the names of the dead and wounded from Aurora, Colorado.  Why couldn't I have acted on my instinct?  I was right about B. in that very first meeting before I even knew his accursed name.  I have been right for thirty years.  Even that day on the road, if I had choked the life out of him then, I could have prevented this last rape and at least one other along with the abuse of his daughter, not to mention a dozen or more other crimes against God and man.   

The answer lies near here, I think.  These kinds of attacks on decency and righteousness, acts of perversion and defilement are offenses first against God.  The wrath of man, or of a man, as James says, does not produce the righteousness God requires (James 1:19-20).  In other words, it was never my business.  If I had indeed killed B. when he was fifteen, his daughter would never have been born.  Some person might be in the world instead of her.  She, despite the evil of her father, despite her own suffering, is a good person, kind, caring, and selfless.  I might have a faint idea of the suffering my action could have prevented, but what of the evil my rashness might have unleashed?  Could I see the ghost of that?  We do not know and cannot know what shores the ripples of our actions might wash. 

Here in the shadowlands the best choice will ever be to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God. 

Frodo:  What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!"

Gandalf:  "Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity."

Frodo:  "He deserves death."

Gandalf:  "Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. ..."