How Theologia Acediosa
(Lazy Theology) Sanctifies Evil....

A reflection on 2 Thessalonians 2, the Lord’s Prayer, and how “God can use anyone” becomes dangerous when Christians sanctify evil.

God Can Use Anybody?

God can use anybody. But by making them devise evil? Go astray?

We need to pay more attention to this line in the Lord’s Prayer. It teaches more than we admit:

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

People choose their actions.
They act out of the condition of their hearts.

Where those actions are evil, and the victims are evil, read my lips, God stands by.

We find corroboration in 2 Thessalonians 2:9–12.

Those who already perish, already, who reject the truth that would have saved them, to them is sent a grand delusion so that they may believe a lie.

The Grand Delusion

I used to ask, why would the Lord send a grand delusion to those who already perish?

Let me try to explain.

Remember solving a quadratic equation. You worked through the rigor, arrived at the answer, and then underlined it. Not because the teacher needed help seeing it, but because you were saying, I know I am right. Give me full marks.

It appears the Lord allows a person to underline his erring ways in the same fashion. To present them back with swagger. To insist, This is truth.

That is not cruelty. That is justice meeting freedom.

It aligns with God’s nature: all love, all justice, yet all mercy.

Now imagine a man who already perishes. To whom that grand delusion comes, perhaps in the form of a political figure, a movement, an ideology. Imagine he pauses and says, “This is wrong.”

Has he not stepped back from the brink?
Has he not refused the lie?
Has he not been delivered from evil?

The delusion does not destroy him.
His rejection of the grand delusion delivers him from evil.

The Harder Truth

But here is the harder truth.

While we all know that a certain divisive figure devises evil and has clearly gone astray, we choose to sit ensconced, at rest, tucked safely in a cleft on the sides of the limestone mountain called Torpor Animi (Lazy Theology).

Spiritual sloth.
Comfort disguised as prudence.

We have no problem with the fact that though he needs salvation, we would rather it be delayed.

That though a part of his soul is diminished daily with every act of gratuitous wickedness, we are not bothered.

It serves our ends.
“He’s making our faith great again.”

It is thus acceptable to us that he stand in sin.
In the sight of God, for our sake.

A role he appears to relish. As any false messiah seeking to replace Jesus of Nazareth would.

The Deeper Danger

And here is the deeper danger.

While we pray, “Lead us not into temptation” for ourselves, we pray, “Lead him, O Lord, into further temptation” for the man of lawlessness.

We sanctify his going astray.

We whisper, God can use anyone.

True.

And you?

Can He not use you to redeem the times?
To plant tiny acorns of truth daily?
To defy and, like Daniel, boldly declare, Non Serviam?
I shall not serve. I shall not follow this falsehood.

God cannot use you for that?

Yes, God can use anyone. Anything. He is sovereign. YHWH. I Am That I Am.

But sovereignty does not excuse complicity.

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

Sometimes the evil is not only in the one who acts.

Sometimes it is in the one who watches, calculates, benefits, and calls it providence.

The Four Horsemen

The four horsemen of the apocalypse, it is Jesus who allows them.

Scripture is clear: it is the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, who releases the four horsemen by breaking the first four of the seven seals on the scroll.

Each time a seal is broken, one of the four living creatures around God’s throne summons a horseman to bring judgment to the earth.

The first horseman, the one on the white horse, is a deceiver.

Wearing a stephanos, a crown he has done nothing to deserve.
Carrying a bow but no arrows. His lies, those are the arrows.

Now let us talk about the second horseman.
The one on the red horse.

In the Book of Revelation, the second horseman is given power to take peace from the earth.

Not to create righteousness.
Not to heal.
Not to reconcile.

To divide.

To make men turn against one another.

That is the spirit of the second horseman.

And here is the danger.

When we chant “God can use anybody” without discernment, we risk confusing sovereignty with endorsement.