A friend and associate from my newspaper days in Chicago sent this email last week as fodder for my website:

“I really believe this administration is destroying our country and will destroy the world if given more time…by the way, you were going to define evil for me--tell me what you think and not what Paul says.”

Of course, he was referring to the Apostle Paul. I know what he really meant was, “Leave out the Bible.”

Problem is any comprehensive understanding I have of evil is based on what the Bible says, starting with Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the second chapter of Genesis.

Paul is the source of one of the most famous lines in history about evil: “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

A good overall definition of evil as the Bible lays it out is in the book, “Satan’s Policy of Evil” (available through the website www.enjoythebible.org). Author Keith Blades writes, “Something that is evil is morally bad or wrong and contrary to that which is good, even involving wickedness. It is wicked in that it proceeds from a nature that is corrupt, vindictive, and bent upon doing that which is offensive and contrary.”

As the “prince of this world,” Satan’s game plan in his rebellion against God is to dupe humans by playing to their sinful, evil nature, thereby accentuating and fortifying enmity between them and God.

Light vs. darkness is often tied directly to good vs. evil in the Bible and darkness is the habitation of evil. It’s where Satan rules and it’s the vehicle of his operations. Conversely, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (I John 1:5). Jesus Christ was sent as the Light to dispel darkness.

Christ points out in the Sermon on the Mount, “But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”

Deliverance from darkness, Paul tells us, comes from the piercing light of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which literally shines into a person’s heart. Satan blinds the mind of those who don’t believe lest that light get in and they become Believers.

To leave Paul out any discussion of evil, though, is easy. The Old Testament is loaded with wisdom concerning the nature and forms of evil.

In fact, Proverbs 8 has wisdom itself, as a personified attribute of God, literally revealing to us its attitude toward evil: “I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions. The fear of the Lord is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.”

Giving the “conclusion of the whole matter,” Ecclesiastes 12:13 advises, “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”

Forms of evil identified in the Old Testament include pride, hypocrisy, guile, malice, envy and deceit.

It is in the secret intents of men’s hearts where evil thrives. It works at a compound rate too—the more you indulge it, the more ground it gains and the more it darkens and hardens the heart to eventually render a person incapable of distinguishing the evil inside them. That’s how you can have truly evil guys like Saddam think themselves perfectly upright and good.

“If Al Capone, ‘Two Gun’ Crowley, Dutch Schultz, and the desperate men and women behind prison walls don’t blame themselves for anything—what about the people with whom you and I come in contact?” asks Dale Carnegie in his book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

Listening live to my pastor in Chicago giving a Bible study the other night through the free online service PalTalk (available through my church’s website, www.graceimpact.org), he explained that just as we have components to our respiratory, vascular and muscular systems, our soul is a system that includes our conscience and heart.

People on a regular diet of evil damage the healthy function of their conscience and it eventually shuts down. As Proverbs 11:17 warns, “The merciful man doeth good to his own soul: but he that is cruel troubleth his own flesh.”

Similarly, Jesus Christ warns us in Mark 7: 20-23, “That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders,

“Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.”

One of my pastors favorite reminders to us is that the middle letter of the word sin is “I.” The middle letter of the word pride is “I,’ too.

Giving one final thought on this subject, I’ll never forget the first day of class in my Journalism 101 course at Ohio State University when the professor asked us, “What do you think is the strongest emotion?”

Students offered answers such as hate, love and anger. The professor told us it was jealousy.

The professor then told us that only 5% of what we communicate to another person is based upon the words chosen. Fifteen percent comes through our tone and the rest is body language.

People can read our hearts and we’re only fooling ourselves to think otherwise.