Greyscale


			Whispers of 'the Devil's work!',
			'Devil-spawned!'
			Surround me...
			All I see is a man -
			Only a man's work -
			True, 
			It is a work devoid of God -
			But it is not of Satan,
			Only of a single man...
			Though maybe that is evil enough?

			Paranoia abounds -
			A need to label,
			A desire to define.
			By blaming ungodly actions on the Devil
			One may feel safer -
			For God has already defeated the Darkness
			In that single, beautiful
			Sacrificial action.
			But to see abundant ungodliness
			Gives rise in me
			A fear
			Of man's recurring tendency
			To turn from God
			And trust in the seen,
			In the self -
			Which is not eternal
			But is ever-changing -
			Not forever reliable.

			To blame all on the Devil
			Is a single-minded way to believe -
			Explaining many things -
			But is it rational or right?
			It tries to confine human behaviour -
			Which is not so easily definable -
			Man has been made too complex
			To be able to rightly predict or label.

			Man is man;
			But there is danger in Godless actions - 
			The chance that they may lead towards
			The Devil's realms and entrapments.-
			But not every seemingly detrimental action
			Is of the Devil,
			And not every seemingly good act
			Is of God.


© R. A. W. S. Clarke

Here is my appendage to this poem:

This poem may be misleading in a way. I do believe that not everything good has to be directly from God, and the same with bad and the Devil, but the crux of it is that sin is anything that we do when not paying attention to God - thus something that is done without God may be good, but it's also, by definition, sinful.
It's kind of a hard thing to accept, that anything we do in ignorance of God is a sin - but it's all good because Jesus came down and lived with us and died a dodgily painful death for each of us and all we have to do to have this sin taken away is accept Him into our lives as our saviour - that He can and does forgive our sins. So 'tis all good really.
Also, there is an argument which says that because all that the Devil wants is the glory that should be paid to God, anything that takes away from God is good for the Devil. Thus, anything which is done in ignorance of God is not giving glory to Him, and thus the Devil's happy with that, even if it's not glorifying him either. Therefore, it can be said of actions in ignorance of God that they are from the Devil, and in a way, it is indeed true - the trick is not jumping to conclusions when hearing such an accusation and believing that the person thinks that every action by that person has been ordered by Satan, instead it is a much subtler way of just blinding their thoughts from God and letting them live (as discussed further up) sinfully.

Here are the thoughts of two older, more theological friends who discussed long and hard and biblically the whole 'good and bad thing'...

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