"The World In-Between"

People ask, how could something like the Virginia Tech shootings happen? What possesses a person that they could coldly walk down a row of fellow students and fire off round after round into dozens of strangers' bodies?

And what about the insane violence in places like Iraq? How does a person become convinced that for the sake of some greater cause, God is pleased when they blow up a bus of school children or randomly slaughter fifty mourners at a funeral in a suicide bombing? Has something, some power, some wicked force been loosed in our world that is behind serial killings and bombings and horrific genocidal acts in places like the Darfur?

Twenty-five years ago a professor of world missions at Fuller Seminary wrote an article in a journal for missions specialists titled "The Flaw of the Excluded Middle." The author was Dr. Paul Hiebert. Typically, a scholarly missions article with a daunting title like "The Flaw of the Excluded Middle" would quickly collect dust along with the thousands of other articles on such fascinating topics as "The View of Time Among the Nefusi People of Libya" or "Economic Exchange Mechanisms Among the Urhobo People Of Southern Nigeria."

But Hiebert's article was different. It didn't gather dust. It has been quoted thousands of times in the last two decades and its basic premise has been taught to tens of thousands of Christians around the world. Why did this article have so much staying power?

Because Hiebert argued that Christians in America have a massive blind spot, along with virtually everyone else in the Western world, when it comes to the existence of the world between us and God. The way most Christians see things, the world is devoid of intelligent life, with the major exception of people and God.

In radical contrast to this view, every pre-modern society believed in an "in-between world" filled with countless demons and angels, who are locked in a massive cosmic battle which regularly affects life on earth.

The reason why pre-modern societies had so many techniques to ward off evil such as incantations, spells, amulets, and exorcisms is because they believed in the reality of various good and (especially) evil spirits. While we in the modern world can rightly dismiss some of the primitive ways of dealing with evil spirits as silly superstitions, we are seriously misguided, if we think that evil or good spirits can be just as easily dismissed.

In fact, it is impossible to be a biblical Christian and not frequently pay attention to the "world in between" us and God. Jesus' teachings, his deliverances, his healings, and other miracles, as well as his work on the cross, are all understood by the writers of scripture as acts of war against Satan and his army of demons. Paul and the rest of the New Testament teach that the entire world is "under power of the evil one" (1 Jn. 5.19) and that Satan is "the god of this world" (2 Cor. 4.4) and "the ruler of the power of the air" (Eph. 2.2).

Whenever you look out on the world and see insane violence, or unimaginable cruelty, or unexplained obstacles to the gospel, do not simply attribute the evil you see to politics or religion or mental illness. Nor should you attribute all evil simply to forces of nature or merely human choices. Start paying attention to the world "in between" us and God and start praying that God would intervene in that world, and deliver us from the evil one!