The Three Levels of Evil in the World Today

Discerning the evils of the world helps us to contend with them properly.

The thieves did not need a demon. They needed a death notice and a lock they could beat.

On August 19, 2026, Henry Parra and Adam Hlavaty died in a helicopter crash in Kenya. Within a day of their names becoming public, Geybert Garcia and Melany Perdomo were at the Coral Gables house. Police say the pair ransacked the home, took jewelry, electronics, papers, a sculpture valued at more than $500,000, a Land Rover, and a Porsche. Investigators later found tools consistent with identity theft. This was not a haunting. It was a calculation. The bodies were still overseas and the living had already started inventory.

Call that what Scripture calls it. Not a principality. A heart.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? Jeremiah 17:9

Americans have two cheap habits when we look at wickedness. One is to baptize every crime as trauma, chemistry, circumstance, skin color, gender, or a system that failed. The other is to slap the word “demonic” on every headline they hate. Both habits are lazy. Both leave you unable to tell the difference between a vulture and a spirit that hates the Son of God.

John did not leave the church that helpless. He told believers to try the spirits. He also never pretended the flesh needed help to loot a dead man’s house.

On today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show, I will discuss the three different categories of evil so we can all be more discerning about what we’re reading in the headlines. There are subcategories of evil that we won’t get into. There are even some evils that defy categorization. I’ll try to keep it simple.

The Flesh Is Sufficient

James does not send you hunting for a demon every time a man sins. He sends you looking in the mirror.

But every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin. Then sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. James 1:14-15

That is a complete statement. Greed does not have to be imported from hell in a special shipment. It is already in the warehouse.

Garcia and Perdomo are useful because they are ordinary. No ritual. No manifesto. No claim of a voice. Just the oldest grab in the book. Someone died. The house is empty. Take it.

If you need a fallen angel to explain that, you have not read Genesis lately. Cain did not require possession to kill Abel. Ahab did not require it to covet a vineyard. Judas kept the bag long before Satan entered him. The devil is a liar and a murderer from the beginning, but he is also an opportunist. He does not waste staff on work the flesh will do for free.

That matters because Christians who see a demon behind every ugly story stop seeing sinners. And sinners can repent. A man who robbed a dead couple is not a metaphor. He is a thief. He needs the law, and he needs the gospel. Dressing him up as a casualty of spiritual warfare is a way to avoid both.

So start here. Most of the evil you will meet this week is human. Cold. Small. Hungry. It will smile at a funeral and ask where they kept the jewelry. Do not baptize it. Do not mystify it. Name it and refuse it.

John Gave a Test, Not a Mood

Then there is the thing John named that is not merely the flesh doing what the flesh does.

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. 1 John 4:1-3

That’s not a vibe. It’s a confession. The spirit of antichrist is not first a mood of meanness. It is a lie about Jesus. It denies that the eternal Son came in actual flesh, bled actual blood, and rose in an actual body. John said that spirit was already in the world in the first century. Paul said the mystery of iniquity doth already work. You do not have to wait for a single man of sin to notice the atmosphere that will one day crown him.

“Anti” can mean against. It can also mean “in place of.” The spirit of antichrist does both. It opposes the real Christ and offers a replacement. A prophet. A teacher. A symbol. A mascot for whatever the age already wanted. Matthew Henry’s old warning still cuts. Do not believe every pretender to the Spirit. Try them. The world will love the teachers who talk its language. That is not evidence of anointing. That is evidence of kinship.

John’s test is brutally simple, which is why the modern church keeps trying to complicate it. Does this teaching confess Jesus Christ come in the flesh, the Father and the Son, the cross as atonement rather than theater? Or does it dissolve Him? A spirit that dissolves Jesus is not “another perspective.” It is the spirit you were told to recognize.

The Creed That Fails the Test

Islam is not the only expression of that spirit. It is one of the cleanest.

Muslims will tell you they honor Jesus. This is a pure con. The Qur’an calls Him Messiah and grants the virgin birth and miracles. Then it slams the door John said you must not slam.

In Islam, Jesus is a prophet, not the Son. Not God in flesh. The crucifixion as Christians confess it is denied or emptied. The Trinity is treated as an outrage against the oneness of Allah. Surah 5:72 says they have disbelieved who say Allah is the Messiah. Surah 9:30 treats the Christian confession that the Messiah is the “Son of Allah” as a delusion worthy of curse.

John already told you what to call a spirit that will not confess the Son come in the flesh. He did not tell you to pretend the disagreement is small because your coworker is polite. Courtesy is not Christology. You can love a Muslim neighbor, feed him, tell him the truth, and still refuse the lie that Isa-the-prophet is the same confession as Jesus the Word made flesh.

They are not the same. One saves. One will try to lead many to blasphemy and hellfire.

The spirit of antichrist is larger than one religion. It shows up anywhere the incarnation is treated as optional. Anywhere the body God made is treated as a costume. Anywhere Christ is reduced to a brand, a therapist, or an AI face that says amen if you tap share. The common thread is the same. Unmake the Son. Unmake the flesh He wore. Then you can unmake everything else.

Do not turn that into a hunting license. John said many antichrists, not “the person in line at the store.” The test is the teaching. The fruit. The replacement gospel. If you cannot keep that distinction, you will either baptize error because the speaker seems nice, or you will call every opponent possessed and become a nuisance with a Bible.

Possession Did Not Clock Out After Acts

The third category is the one respectable people are not allowed to mention.

Jesus drove unclean spirits out of men who lived among tombs and cut themselves with stones. A slave girl in Philippi made her owners rich with a spirit of divination until Paul commanded it to come out. The sons of Sceva found out the hard way that the name of Jesus is not a party trick. Nothing in the New Testament says the dark intelligence that seized those people filed retirement papers when the canon closed. The church that pretends otherwise has not become scientific or “modernized” through our false enlightenment. It has become materialist with hymns.

That does not mean every addict is Legion. It does not mean every schizophrenic needs an exorcist instead of a doctor. The Lord who cast out demons also spoke of sickness as sickness. Scripture can stack categories. Saul had jealousy and an evil spirit from the Lord troubling him. Judas had a moneybag and then Satan entered him. A boy in the Gospels had seizures and a spirit that threw him. The Bible is not embarrassed by body and spirit existing in the same wreck.

Modern people are. They will give you 400 pages on neurotransmitters and not one honest paragraph on the possibility that some evils are personal, intelligent, and hungry. Then they act shocked when the culture fills with tarot in teenage bedrooms, astrology as personality, and churches that treat deliverance as a punch line. The Vatican’s own exorcists have been warning about a surge in occult traffic. You do not have to accept every Roman claim to notice that the West reopened doors it used to keep shut and then blamed the draft on mental health.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Ephesians 6:12

Paul did not say you wrestle only against those things. He said you do wrestle against them. If your Christianity has no category for that fight, you will lose it and call the loss compassion.

The Basement and the Pink Sidewalk

Which brings you to a basement in Duxbury and a sidewalk in Plymouth.

On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out for medicine and dinner. Then, she later said, a male voice told her this was her last chance. She had to kill the children so she could kill herself.

Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months old.

She took them to the basement and strangled them with exercise bands. Then she cut herself and went out a second-story window. Patrick Clancy came home to blood, an open window, and three small bodies. That is the case. Do not let anyone talk you into a softer version.

The defense blames postpartum psychosis and a brutal cocktail of psychiatric drugs. Those things are real. Women have been destroyed by them. A Christian who pretends the body cannot break that badly is a fool. Prosecutors say planning, Google searches, and a voice that is too convenient. A forensic psychologist told the jury the alleged voice lasted about the 18 minutes required to finish the killings and then stopped, a pattern he called very, very unusual. She told her husband she had no choice.

This morning, the Plymouth jury told Judge William Sullivan it could not reach a unanimous verdict after roughly 17 hours. He sent them back. Nine women and three men. The law will do what the law can do. It cannot see into the unseen.

Neither can a writer. No one reading this sat in that basement with authority to name a spirit. Anyone who issues a certificate of possession from a comment section is playing prophet. That is one ditch.

The other ditch is the one this age prefers. She is only a patient. The children are a tragedy that happened around her. The real victim is the woman, and the real villain is a healthcare system that did not listen hard enough. Some of that criticism of the system may even be true. It is still not the whole truth. A mother wrapping bands around the necks of three children is not a policy failure with a first name. It is an assault on the image of God so complete that honest people feel the air change. They should. Scripture never required you to pretend that feeling is nothing.

The loudest evidence is not the diagnosis. It is the congregation that formed around her.

In August, hundreds came to Plymouth in pink. Believe. She Needed Help. Peace For Lindsay. Women held their own living children on the sidewalk outside a trial for three dead ones. They cheered her arrival. They made hearts with their hands. They prayed. Organizer Renee Kimball said any one of them could have been sitting in that chair.

On TikTok the liturgy got a name. Same Lindsay. I am Lindsay. Mothers filmed themselves holding babies and putting their faces where a murderer’s face had been. A GoFundMe for her parents blew past $800,000 and then a million, while Cora, Dawson, and Callan receded into the status of unfortunate context.

Wanting better care for desperate mothers is not demonic. Identifying with the woman who killed three children, holding your own child as a prop in that identification, and treating the dead as a footnote is a different act. It is a reversal. Pity flows uphill to the powerful symbol and downhill away from the weakest bodies in the story. Isaiah warned about people who call evil good and good evil. He did not say they needed to know they were doing it.

Not all women see themselves in Lindsay Clancy. Thank God. The ones who do should terrify you more than a hung jury. A culture can argue about mens rea. A culture that dresses in matching colors to stand with the killer while the children have no parade is telling you what it worships.

Safety of adult feeling over sanctity of small life. Therapy language over judgment. A savior who needs help more than a Savior who judges and forgives.

That swarm is why the Clancy case will not stay inside a medical file. Something in this age recognizes itself in the act and rushes to cover it with pink. You do not have to pretend you can prove a legal possession to notice the recognition. Unclean things recognize their own.

How to Tell the Difference This Week

Discernment is not a gift for people who enjoy being harsh. It is obedience. Believe not every spirit. Hold fast that which is good. Abstain from every form of evil. Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.

Those are not slogans for a conference tote bag. They are how you stay sane.

Try a working order.

First, assume the flesh until the facts force you further. Most sin is lust, pride, envy, greed, fear, and sloth wearing a current outfit. Preach repentance. Support the magistrate. Do not turn a burglary into an exorcism seminar.

Second, apply John’s test to teachings and movements, not to every face in the grocery store. What does this creed do with Jesus Christ come in the flesh? What does it do with the body, the child, the cross, the resurrection? If it denies the Son, it is not a misunderstood cousin of the gospel. It is the spirit you were warned about. Islam fails that test in public, on purpose, in its foundational texts. So do the fashionable gospels that keep Jesus as inspiration and throw away His body, His blood, and His exclusive claim.

Third, leave room for the third category without becoming the man who finds a demon in his toast. Actual oppression and possession remain possible because the New Testament did not expire. Occult invitation still matters. So does despair, so does drug-soaked confusion, so does a voice that no lab can put on a slide. Hold all of it. Take the sick to doctors. Take the bound to Christ. Take the stubborn lie to Scripture. Do not let psychiatry baptize what hell would be happy to hide behind a prescription bottle. Do not let deliverance theater replace the ordinary means of grace.

Fourth, watch the swarm. Evil often shows itself less in the isolated act than in the people who cannot stop defending it. When a culture builds a liturgy around the destroyer and forgets the destroyed, you are no longer watching mere sympathy. You are watching a spirit of error teach the public which lives count.

Fifth, stay near the Word and the church that still confesses the Son. Discernment without Scripture is just suspicion with better adjectives. The Holy Ghost leads into truth, not into your preferred panic. Satan still disguises himself as an angel of light. His servants still look helpful. That is why John started with Jesus and not with your gut.

The thieves in Coral Gables prove the first point. You can be wicked with a clear head. Islam’s official Christology proves the second. You can be devout, disciplined, and still animated by a spirit that will not confess the Son. The Duxbury basement and the pink sidewalk prove that the third point will not stay in the first century no matter how many experts wish it would.

Do not flatten those three into one. If everything is demonic, nothing is. If nothing is demonic, the New Testament is a folk tale. The church that can still tell the difference will look strange. Let it. The world already has plenty of people who cannot tell a vulture from a spirit, and they are lining up in matching shirts to prove it.