Abstain from all appearance of evil

Abstain from all appearance of evil – 1 Thessalonians 5v22

I have purposefully chosen the KJV rendering of this verse today for a reason. The NKJV renders this is a way that more accurately reflects the meaning for the 21st reader as ‘abstain from every form of evil,’ but that is not what we fundamentalists are accustomed to hearing so I decided to address it in familiar terms.

For most of my life this has been used as the be all and end all, kind of a stop gap measure when there was no Biblical reason for a rule or regulation. We have been told to not go here or there, do this or that, listen to this music or that music, dress this way or that way, and so many other things. When we ask the nearly unaskable question, ‘Why,’ and there is no Bible answer, we have been told – ‘Well, we need to abstain from all appearance of evil.’ I am not going to go into a long list, but those of us who have been there no what I am talking about.

There is a major problem with that though – who decides what has an appearance of evil? Who decides if it is an appearance of evil to listen to a certain Christian song? Who decided if it is an appearance of evil to go to a multiplex cinema? Who decides if it is an appearance of evil wear a certain style of clothes? At the end of the day it comes down to a man deciding that an activity ‘looks like’ it might be evil.

One may say it is an appearance of evil to wear a ball cap backwards. Another may say that it is an appearance of evil for a Christian to be grossly obese because they have no self-control. Who decides?

All of this points out the danger of using this verse the way it have been traditionally used, at least in my circles.

The answer is simple, even in the KJV rendering. Abstain from every appearance of evil. When evil appears, stay away. Don’t dabble with any form of it. Don’t play games with it. How do we know what evil is? God’s word is fully sufficient to tell us what evil is. He really doesn’t need my opinion.