Reflections on the Problem of Evil according to Pekka Ervast

According to Pekka Ervast, God loves the world, the world is expression of God himself, therefore God loves himself; There is nothing outside of him. This love is manifested also in Man so that first it's attracted to itself and then to everything. Man can not love first anything else but the world which is primarly his - himself.
Entering the Matter, downward development is necessary for Man in order to learn more and more to love himself. He's falling out of the original image of God, which dwells in him as a seed, and selfishness comes forth. Adam, the Reason, wanted understanding and knowledge, Eve, the Heart, said: "You only gain it through experience." A Sin - hamartia - means to "miss the target": Within each Man dwells the natural desire for perfection. A Man tries but he fails, and this is called sinning.

Selfishness is natural only as long as Man doesn't know better. His first lesson is to love oneself in order to become an individual human being. As soon as we've learnt this, the lesson of selflessness begins: Our love is to extend to other people and eventually, it's expanding until it embraces the whole world - The Ideal image of God the Father, the Christ - may fully come to dwell in us and be completely living in us.

All that is evil and selfish in us, is alien. It's not the true essence of Man, but force that comes from outside. When speaking of forgiveness of sins, The New Testament uses a word which means "to drive out." In New Testament there are a lot of stories of people being like possessed by evil spirits.
By virtue of his Self Man is able to isolate from the rest of the world, to close to himself, to start to serve himself. God separated the part of his Consiousness from himself. Man's intellect is not attached to that of God. Man's God-given reason turns its back to God and evil comes to the world.
God won't violently prevent us from doing evil. We have received the Power on earth and we must freely give it to Christ.

The Matter is limitation, a form; therefore there may be also evil and selfishness concentrated in some form. Living in a particular form causes the natural desire to live, desire to survive, and that's how evil is developed in natural way. In old myths and philosophies Matter was seen evil and spirit as good, but there would be no manifestation based on Matter without Spirit or Consiousness beside the Matter. Evil is caused by existence itself. There is only one Godhead, The Great Unknown, into which all opposites merge, the spirit and the matter as well. And the suffering and pleasure, sorrow and joy, are united as One limitless Love and Compassion. Evil is illusion, transient and temporal. There exists only the possibility of evil, because there would be no manifested Good without. There would be no possibility for Love without possibility for evil.

Pekka Ervast tells us there are two aspects of Sin: 1. We wrong one another. 2. We wrong our own being, life, God. The Sin against the Holy Spirit that shall not be forgiven, means, that Man can not break the laws of life God's Holy Reason has ordered, but it has its natural, karmic consequences. "You are the temple of the Holy Spirit"; The spirit of truth, sincerity, and honesty should live in us and if we won't make space for it, we sin against it. Measure of all Good must be in ourselves. If we sin against it, we sin against the Holy Spirit. I can't ask for forgiveness from another person once I've been dishonest to myself or used my body wrongly. God can't change my bad tendencies - I have to bear the consequences.

Whenever we wrong, we owe to life and we have to pay it by suffering - that's the law of karma, God's Righteousness and Justice. When others wrong us, we plead to the Justice of life if we are hurt, or sorry, or ignorant within. When we whole-heartedly forgive, no one has to owe to life because of us. How could we demand others to pay their debts to life for us, as we don't pay God what we owe to him.
We tresspass against God when we are in debt of Good to him. Once a Man feels how useless is the selfish, personal life and he would like to live a perfect Christ-life, he kind of writes a bill of exchange to God, out of Necessity and from the very core of his being. He must treat others as Christ, professing him before men, and then the Son is professing him before the Father. External God won't change the laws of the world and release us from the consequences of our action: only inner God, God within, can do that.

It is temptation to believe in evil outside of ourselves, in external suffering, which is in fact a blessing in disguise, consequence from the cause ahead. We must carry our cross without complain, even with a pleasure, believing in God alone and not in Satan. The Active evil in us is to will something evil, wish for something selfish. The passive evil is the weakness that makes us dependent on external environment: To feel hurt, forsaken, depressed. We can not free ourselves. We plead to the Greater One in us, The Christ, The God.
The Cornerstone of the Sermon on the Mount is not to resist evil. Instead of wasting our energy on hopeless battle against evil in ourselves or in others, we only need to strengthen the Good within us and be Examples for others. The Good won't fight - it will overcome!