Calling Evil Good and Good Evil

Series: Standing Firm in Shifting Sands: The Gospel in a Transformed Culture: When Words Lose Meaning – Day 2

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” (Isaiah 5:20, NIV)

Good morning, friends! Language is not simply a neutral tool we pick up and set down. It is the means by which we share reality with one another, the way a father explains the world to a child, the way a doctor names what is wrong so healing can begin, the way the Gospel is proclaimed so that faith can be born. When language is corrupted, it is not just words that suffer. It is the capacity to see, to know, and to respond to reality. And one of the most ancient and devastating corruptions of language is also the most common one in our cultural moment: calling evil good and good evil.

The Warning and Its Root

The prophet Isaiah ministered in the eighth century before Christ, speaking to a people who had grown comfortable rearranging the furniture of God’s moral order to suit their own preferences. What he wrote then reads like a description of our own hour. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” (Isaiah 5:20, NIV) The word “woe” in prophetic speech is not a mild caution. It is a word of grief and coming judgment, the kind a loving father speaks when he watches a child walk toward danger. God is not indifferent to the redefinition of good and evil. He grieves it, and His grief is also a warning.

The mechanism behind this inversion is older than Isaiah. The apostle Paul traces it to its root in Romans 1:18-25: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles… They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator — who is forever praised. Amen.” (NIV)

Paul identifies the engine: suppression. People do not arrive at calling evil good through honest error. They suppress what God has made plain, and the suppression produces darkened thinking. It is not primarily an intellectual failure. It is a moral one. And when thinking becomes futile and hearts become darkened, language becomes a tool for that darkness. Words are quietly reassigned. What God calls sin gets renamed as identity, progress, liberation, or love. What God calls righteousness gets relabeled as intolerance, bigotry, or harm.

We should not be surprised. Jesus told us plainly where this confusion originates. Speaking to those who were actively resisting truth, He said of the devil: “He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44, NIV) The inversion of good and evil is not a modern invention. It is the enemy’s oldest strategy, deployed first in a garden: “Did God really say?” The question was designed to blur the line between God’s word and human preference, to make the forbidden seem desirable and the commanded seem oppressive.

The prophet Malachi witnessed the same confusion in his own generation. When God’s people had grown so accustomed to inverting His categories that they no longer recognized the problem, God speaks through Malachi with patient grief: “You have wearied the Lord with your words. ‘How have we wearied him?’ you ask. By saying, ‘All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them’ or ‘Where is the God of justice?’” (Malachi 2:17, NIV) Notice what has happened: they attributed God’s approval to evil. They spoke on His behalf and said He is pleased with what He has condemned. This is language weaponized against the Lord Himself. God is not distant or unmoved by the corruption of moral language. He is a Father who hears His children describe His house as what it is not, and He grieves.

Standing in the Light

So what is the response of those who belong to Christ? Proverbs 17:15 tells us what God sees clearly: “Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent — the Lord detests them both.” (NIV) God has not amended His definitions. What He called just remains just. What He called wicked remains wicked. The cultural consensus of any given decade does not revise the moral order He built into creation. And for those who love Him, that stability is not a burden. It is an anchor.

The Psalms give us the right orientation of heart: “Let those who love the Lord hate evil, for he guards the lives of his faithful ones and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.” (Psalm 97:10, NIV) Love for the Lord produces a rightly ordered response to evil: we do not celebrate it, rename it, or accommodate it. We hate it as He hates it, not with contempt for those in its grip, but with the honest moral clarity of people who know what darkness costs.

We know what darkness costs because Jesus Christ bore that cost entirely. He took upon Himself every inversion, every lie, every piece of the darkness we had chosen over light. He descended into it and destroyed it from the inside. Because He rose from the grave, the truth He is has the final word over every lie that would displace it. We do not lose heart when the culture calls what is good harmful or what is harmful good. We know who holds the definitions. We know who spoke the world into being. We know who said “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and we know that no amount of linguistic confusion can revise what He declared.

Prayer:

Heavenly Father, I confess that the constant pressure to rename what You have named wears on me. There are moments when the confident voices all around me make me wonder if I have missed something, if the older categories no longer apply. Forgive me for those moments of wavering. Forgive me for the times I have softened what You have called clear, or gone quiet when the truth needed to be spoken. Thank You that Your Word does not shift with the times.

Today, give me the settled confidence of someone who knows that truth does not depend on how many people agree with it. Help me to speak clearly and gently when the moment calls for it, without contempt for those who are confused and without compromise toward what they are confused about. Guard my heart from the slow drift of constant cultural immersion, and fix my eyes on Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. In Jesus’s name, I pray. Amen.

As we go through this day, we will hear the inversions everywhere: in casual conversations, in headlines, in entertainment, in the language of institutions we once trusted. We are not the first of God’s people to live in such a moment, and those who came before us held the line by holding to the Word. The same is available to us. The truth has a name, and that name is not threatened by any amount of confusion built up around it.

We praise You, Lord God, for the unshakeable clarity of Your Word! What You call good is good, and what You call evil is evil, and no generation can revise what You have declared. We praise You, Lord Jesus, for being the truth itself, the light that no darkness can overcome. All glory belongs to You!

To God be the glory.

Pray, praise, and give thanks, for God is good and His mercy endures forever.

If you received this message and are not on the daily distribution for them via text, or know someone you would like to share these messages with, just have them text ADD to 1-833-779-8793.