The lesser of two evils model is a mythology. Evil is simply evil. The mass murder of babies in the womb is the epitome of evil de jure. There is no “scale” or quantification of evil that can ever balance out sheer evil. One problem with committing oneself to a lesser-of-two-evils model is that it becomes a slippery slope; as this presidential election perfectly illustrates. It is a slippery slope because within the winds of the cultural mores we all become conditioned in ways that are increasingly beholden to comparing this level of evil to that level of evil; but when this is done, we can become persuaded that compared to this evil over there this evil right here isn’t so bad. In fact, after a while living in this type of pressure cooker, we easily become entwined and melded into the juices of the cultural wash. The only way out is to look at evil as evil, compared to God’s holiness Self-revealed in Jesus Christ, and make our decisions from this Holy Ground of God’s life. It is His alien righteousness for us that ought to be the frame we see the world, and the “choices” it offers us, through. When we move and breathe in this way, we come to have the capacity to simply say, No! And we live a life of continuous repose upon God’s Word rather than the culture’s word baked into God’s Word.

A pushback to this might be: “well, this is too idealic and pie-in-the-sky.” But the opposite is actually the case. In fact, trusting God’s Word, living as seeing the unseen as the seen, is the only way a Christian can truly move and breathe and have their being in this shifty and shadowy world of dissolution. This is not to say that we don’t have difficult decisions to make living as Christians in a fallen world; indeed, it is to say the inverse. It is much more difficult to live a life that the basic human senses cannot penetrate; to live by the faith of Christ. The fallacy of the lesser-of-two-evils model is that it presumes that a person has the capacity to weight this evil against that evil, this amount of evil against that amount of evil, and discern which side of the scale is the right side. But what if one evil is so being-shaking, what if one evil, in a basket of many evils, so utterly strikes at the being of God, the being of Life itself, that it becomes impossible to weed through to the point that we believe we can come to the conclusion of what weighted side is more acceptable than the other? What if there is an evil that like yeast becomes so intracule to the total loaf of bread that its pervasiveness becomes inescapable; to the point that it finally becomes absolutely necessary to simply trust God? To move beyond the supposed possibility to divine between the evils, and simply recognize the LORD has not given us a viable choice to choose.