Evil is in All of Us

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Isa. 53:6 “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

All of us have gone astray. This is so true. It includes the vilest offender and the greatest looking saint. We have all sinned… it’s not only Adolf Hitler and his minions that have gone astray, but all of us. The story is a fantastic example of this:

“One of Adolph Hitler’s right-hand men was Adolph Eichmann. He was one of the worst of the Holocaust’s masterminds. After the war he escaped to Argentina. In 1959 the Mossad, Israel’s secret service found his whereabouts and sent undercover agents down to Argentina to bring him back. After capturing him they transported him to Israel to stand trial.

There, prosecutors called a string of former concentration camp prisoners as witnesses. One was a small man named Yehiel Dinur, who had miraculously escaped death in Auschwitz. On his day to testify, Dinur entered the courtroom and stared at the man in the bulletproof glass booth – the man who had murdered Dinur’s friends, personally executed a number of Jews, and presided over the slaughter of millions more. As the eyes of the two men met – victim and murderous tyrant – the courtroom fell silent, filled with the tension of the confrontation. But no one was prepared for what happened next. Yehiel Dinur began to shout and sob, collapsing to the floor. Was he overcome by hatred? By the horrifying memories? By the evil incarnate in Eichmann’s face?

No. As he later explained in a riveting 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace, it was because Eichmann was not the demonic personification of evil that Dinur had expected. Rather, he was an ordinary man, just like anyone else. And in that one instant, Dinur came to a stunning realization that sin and evil are the human condition. ‘I was afraid about myself,’ Dinur said. ‘I saw that I am capable to do this … I am exactly like he.’

Dinur’s remarkable statements caused Mike Wallace to turn to the camera and ask the audience the most painful of all questions: ‘How was it possible for a man to act as Eichmann acted? Was he a monster? A madman? Or was he perhaps something even more terrifying? Was he normal?

Yehiel Dinur’s shocking conclusion? “Eichmann is in all of us.” The Good News is, it doesn’t end with only this. We have been given the Spirit of God so that this evil in all of us will lay powerless and can do nothing.