What keeps evil from running rampant in a person's life?

Genesis 6:5 (NIV)
The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.

It is so incredible that so soon after God created man in His own image, man had become totally evil.  In Genesis 1, you read that God created everything, including human beings, and saw that it was good.  Five chapters later, you read “God saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become”.  How could this happen?

Note the absolute words that Scripture uses to describe man’s evil.   God saw that “every” inclination of the thoughts of the heart of man was evil.  He also saw that man’s heart contained “only” evil and evil was present “all the time”. 

You’d think after the great flood when God erased all evil from the earth that mankind would not return to being so evil.  Yet you read the following verses written centuries later that tragically emphasis the same thing, that evil of the heart prevails: 

§ This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun……also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live (Eccles 9:3)

§ The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?  (Jer 17:9)

§ For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies (Matt 15:19)

I vaguely recall watching a movie about Noah building the ark while people laughed and made fun of him.  The image that horrified me was men wearing necklaces with human skulls, many skulls.  Like watching a bunch of killers laughing while they perform the most evil acts possible.  If this was the kind of image that God saw, no wonder he wanted to destroy what He had created. 

Do you recall the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and all the television images and reports of people, without law enforcement, resorting to all kinds of rampant evil---looting, squalor, all kinds of rampant violence.  When society is left without boundaries, law enforcement, any kind of control of people’s natural inclinations, what are the results?  Evil.  Wasn’t the main message of William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies” that there is evil within everyone and it’s a fine line between someone allowing that evil to run rampant or not?

So what’s keeps evil from running rampant in a person’s life? The simple answer---the presence of God in a person’s life where you allow good to triumph over evil. God gave you the choice to choose good or evil and it’s a matter of conscience which choice you make. 

“Conscience is the window of our spirit, evil is the curtain.”--Doug Horton

“Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin.”--Aesop

“The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man

brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his

mouth speaks”.—Jesus (Luke 6:45)