Deliver Us from Evil—and the Evil One
In the middle of the Rwandan civil war of the early 1990s, over the course of a mere one hundred days, almost a million members of the Tutsi community were murdered with machetes and rifles.
It took the rest of the world time to come to grips with what had happened and eventually face its own complicity insofar as it had done nothing to stop the horror. When Canadian general Roméo Dallaire arrived as commander of the UN Assistance Mission to try to achieve a ceasefire, he witnessed firsthand the bloody hundred days:
“In Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him.”
Confronted with neighbors invading the homes of neighbors, raping and hacking them to pieces, we can’t rely on abstract tropes about sin being present in every human heart. We need to speak about the demonic, about Satan. That is what Dallaire understood as he gaped at the piles of Tutsi corpses and witnessed the indifference of his fellow Westerners.
THE REALITY OF EVIL
Jesus taught His followers to pray for deliverance from the evil—that is, the one who is evil, the ancient adversary of God, who, in the words of John Chrysostom, “wages against us an implacable war.” It’s for this reason that some translations render this petition “Save us from the Evil One,” with capital letters.
“Evil has a definite physiognomy,” as the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff puts it. The Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, who was involved in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, commented on the seventh petition from his Nazi prison cell: “There is not only evil in this world, there is also the evil one; not only a principle of negation but also a tough and formidable anti-Christ.”
What we need to be rescued from isn’t just the devices and desires of our own wayward hearts, as real and dangerous as those are, but also the malevolence of a personal being bent on our suffering.
In speaking this way, Jesus is in line with the entirety of the Bible. It may not in every place be as clear that the devil himself is in view, but the Bible everywhere speaks of evil not simply as pervasive but as personal.
“What we need to be rescued from isn’t just the devices and desires of our own wayward hearts, as real and dangerous as those are, but also the malevolence of a personal being bent on our suffering.”
As early as the third chapter of Genesis, the origin of Adam and Eve’s rebellion is depicted as a reasoning, speaking serpent (3:1). Job’s torments are traced back to the instigation of a mysterious “accuser” (literally “the satan,” in 1:6). The prophet Daniel is visited by an angel who reports a battle with “the prince of the kingdom of Persia” (10:13); Paul warns his converts that they must be prepared to contend “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12). Peter, likewise, tells his readers, “Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour” (1 Pet 5:8).
In the apocalyptic vision that closes the Bible’s storyline, the defeat of ultimate evil is described like this: “And the devil who had deceived [the nations] was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur” (Rev 20:10). And, above all, the New Testament portrays Jesus as having constantly to contend against a mighty and wily foe: “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man” (Mark 3:27).
Scripture, in short, “has a penchant for personifying evil.” And when Jesus encourages His disciples to pray, “Deliver us from evil,” it is most likely that it is this personal evil to which He refers.
ARE WE BLIND TO EVIL?
But can modern Western people, who are skeptical of the efficacy of witchcraft and spiritualism, follow Jesus on this point? One of the fascinating developments in recent science, both in the hard sciences as well as the social sciences, has been the focus on how human beings are at all times at the mercy of powers greater than themselves. Contrary to sunny notions of free will and self-expression, we all are shaped by powers as small as microscopic biochemical forces, some of which are microbial interlopers in our bodies, to those as large as inherited notions of what constitutes acceptable gender performance.
Think, for instance, of how racism makes itself manifest in a society. Older generations of white Americans may have more readily thought, “So long as I am paying my black employee a fair wage and greeting her warmly each day, I’m not a racist.”
But racism operates more covertly and insidiously than that. In a recent experiment, for instance, a sociologist asked participants to stare at a screen on which a series of black and white faces flashed. These images appeared and disappeared so quickly that the viewers were not even consciously aware of having seen them. Immediately after seeing a black or white face, the participants were then shown a picture of a gun or a tool. These images were quickly removed from the screen but not quite as quickly as the facial images, so as to allow the participants to register having seen them.
It turned out that when participants viewed a black face followed by a tool, they were more apt to remember the tool as having been a gun than they were when the image of a tool followed that of a white face. The racialized tendency to associate black faces with a violent weapon, the sociologist concluded, “requires no intentional racial animus, occurring even for those who are actively trying to avoid it.” People are, in a very real way, enslaved to something outside of their control. As one theorist has put it, racism has “a life of its own.”
“Christians who worship whiteness don’t just need education; we need exorcism.”
So modern Western minds actually might be catching up with the inspired wisdom of Scripture rather than the other way around. Evil is not just what we do, but—more hauntingly—it is what we suffer, what we are mired in and encrusted with. And if that is the case, we are unable to extricate ourselves from it by any direct action.
No amount of good intentions—to return to our example from above—can cause a white person to disassociate black skin from the threat of harm. The prince of racism—and of so many other forms of evil—hinders even the most virtuous white people from ending their own racist habits of mind by sheer decision.
Stronger medicine is needed. And that is what Jesus urges us to pray for: we must, in the end, appeal to God to deliver us from the grip of the Evil One. Christians who worship whiteness don’t just need education; we need exorcism.
DELIVER US FROM EVIL
The New Testament rustles with the news that God already has delivered us from the Evil One. Consider these words from the early Christian sermon that we know as the Letter to the Hebrews:
The children of a family share the same flesh and blood; and so [ Jesus] too shared ours, so that through death he might break the power of him who had death at his command, that is, the devil; and might liberate those who, through fear of death, had all their lifetime been in servitude. (2:14–15 NEB)
Making our mortal human nature His own, the Son of God died in order to defeat the Evil One who wielded death as a weapon. As the Orthodox liturgy says, He is “trampling down death by death.”
Or consider this from the First Letter of John: “The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil” (3:8). Or this, from the letter of Paul to the Colossians: Christ “disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in [the cross]” (2:15). Somehow, by dying, Jesus has rendered the devil impotent, denuding him of his ability to win the war he wages against human beings.
There are different ways of thinking about how Jesus achieved this, and the New Testament uses a variety of different pictures or metaphors to help us see the full scope of His triumph over the Evil One. But the point all the images are seeking to drive home is that a decisive victory was secured in and through the events of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection—a victory that sealed evil’s fate once and for all, guaranteeing its final demise.
When we pray “Deliver us from evil,” we are asking to be able to see, enjoy, and live in accord with what is true but still largely unseen in the present. We know that Jesus has already secured our final release from the Evil One, but we still sense evil’s nearness and taste its effects.
The victory of Jesus is real but not currently as visible as it one day will be. And so, in confidence but also in trembling and with tears, we pray for the final, public, irreversible experience of celebrating the defeat of the regime of our Enemy.
Wesley Hill is associate professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry (Ambridge, PA). He is author of Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters, Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian, and Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality.
