In order to discuss “good,” let’s first look at the problem of “evil.” As man developed his concept of God through experiences and observation, God became to man the personification of good which man then placed in a home called heaven. The same experience and observation caused man to perceive that sometimes things happened which appeared to be the opposite of good. This he called “evil.” Since God was the personification of good, man believed that evil must be the result of something else, something that was “not God.” So evil became personified as the devil or Satan who was given a home which man named “hell.”

In Jeremiah (24:1-3) there is a story about Jeremiah’s vision of two baskets of figs set before the temple. The King Jmes version is quite colorful:

The LORD shewed me, and, behold, two baskets of figs were set before the temple of the LORD, after that Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon had carried away captive Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah, and the princes of Judah, with the carpenters and smiths, from Jerusalem, and had brought them to Babylon. One basket had very good figs, even like the figs that are first ripe: and the other basket had very naughty figs, which could not be eaten, they were so bad. Then said the LORD unto me. What seest thou, Jeremiah? And I said. Figs; the good figs, very good; and the evil, very evil, that cannot be eaten, they are so evil.

In Jesus’ language, Aramaic, the word translated into English as “evil” is bisha which means “evil; unripe; immature.” Those naughty, evil figs were green!

Charles Fillmore said, “Evil is a parasite. It has no permanent life of itself; its whole existence depends on the life it borrows from its parent, and when its connection with the parent is severed nothing remains. (The Revealing Word, evil) What we call evil does not originate in God-mind but is a product of human consciousness and error thought. I have heard evil called “the absence of good.” But this is impossible! If the nature of God is absolute good and God is omnipresent, good is also omnipresent. Just as there is no place where God is not, so there is nowhere in the universe where good is absent. Since God is the one and only power, there is nothing else to create anything in opposition to God’s good. Rather than consider evil the absence of good, I prefer to think of it as the frustration of good in the same way that a shadow is the frustration of light. Charles Fillmore said, “‘Evil’ represents error thought combinations; that part of consciousness which has lost sight of true principles and through sensation become enamored of the thing formed.” (Mysteries of Genesis, 39.) Evil results from the immature use of a perfecdy good power. It all begins with a sense of separation from God— not realizing the one presence and power and our oneness with it.

This sense of separation and the belief in two powers result in three reasons for the appearance of evil. The first is our failure to know that we are spiritual beings with innate divinity, the Christ, which gives us dominion and authority. Without this realization, we try in our ignorance to improve our lives by manipulating people and things in the world. The second reason for the appearance of evil is a lack of understanding of the formative power of thought to produce either desirable or undesirable conditions. Immature thinking, or the immature use of ideas, causes the appearance of evil in our lives. Lastly, without spiritual understanding, we do not see the rcladon of cause and effect and we continue to attempt to change outer conditions without ever seeing and working to change the mental cause in back of the conditions.

H. Emilie Cady reminds us in Lessons in Truth, Denials:

What everyone desires is to have only the good manifested in his life and surroundings—to have his life full of love; to have perfect health; to know all things; to have great power and much joy; and this is just exactly what God wants us to have. All love is God in manifestation, as we have learned in a previous lesson. All wisdom is God. All life and health are God. All joy (because all good) and all power are God. All good of whatever kind is God come forth into visibility through people or some other visible form. When we crave more of any good thing, we are in reality craving more of God to come forth into our lives so that we can realize it by the senses. Having more of God does not take out of our lives the good things—it only puts more of them in. In the mind that is God there is always the desire to give more, for the divine plan is forever to get more good into visibility.