Off-Limits for Christians

Most Christians think of the world as having two “camps.” There’s all the “good stuff” that Christians should engage with and then there’s the “bad stuff,” the things that are off-limits for Christians. Opinions differ widely on which things belong in which camp of course. But no matter where you draw the line, you’re making an important theological mistake. Scripture is clear that there is only one creator and that he made everything “very good.” In contrast, we have no biblical reason to believe that the enemy can create anything. There is no competition in creation. We don’t have a good God creating good things and an evil enemy lurking behind him creating bad things in hopes of tricking us into sin. All things were created by the one, good God. End of story.

Sin and evil are secondary to creation. They are responses. Sin and evil are the bad things we DO with God’s good creation. Everything that exists can only be there because our good God willed it to exist. Therefore, by definition, there cannot be any evil “stuff,” because it’s all his! Every evil act is a distortion, a twisting and reshaping of something originally good. Every single thing we’ve ever classified as “off-limits” is something good, created by a good God for his good purposes and literally everything the enemy does is a counterfeit of something holy. Spiritual purity does not require us to deny the goodness of all things, only the evil intentions attached to them. We would be much more honest with ourselves and the world we’re trying to influence if we admitted that there are not two “camps;” one good and one evil. There’s only one camp, and it belongs to God no matter what we might be doing with it at any given moment.

There are certainly sinful intentions and evil uses, but there is no evil “stuff.” Everything belongs to God.

Everything.

Recognizing that is empowering.