Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
The Enemy of our souls spends much of the time remaining to him trying to convince us that, somehow, God cannot win the battle between good and evil in the world. The darker the times get the more liable we are to believe him.
But our Lord, by His very nature, cannot lose.
Evil is an inherently finite distortion of the good. Its existence is only made possible by God’s decision to create self-aware beings with free will (from a biblical perspective we, along with the angels, would appear to be the only creatures so endowed.) God, in His perfect wisdom as God, created the conditions that made evil possible, but the power of that evil was confined to beings with no independent existence apart from their Maker. Evil, therefore, is only an intrinsically imperfect derivative of the good; a derivative embodied in creatures with finite power. Since God’s power is infinite, and His eternal nature is perfect goodness, He will have the final say over evil’s continued existence. We know from the eternal victory His Son achieved on the cross over both fallen human and fallen angelic evil that the ultimate temporal fulfillment of what was achieved at Calvary will be the final destruction of evil and all who choose to embody it.
What causes human beings, even Christians, to sometimes doubt this reality is the fact that another part of God’s plan is to work out His purposes through actions taking place over time. In other words He has chosen to work His final ends for this universe through history. For those of us who have suffered from the effects of internal and external evil it may seem cruel and incomprehensible that He did not banish evil from our reality a long time ago. From our position of being seemingly trapped in time this makes perfect sense, but the viewpoint of God is from eternity and that viewpoint is as far above our fallen, sinful perspective as the heavens are above the earth.
The Bible tells us that the final fruit of man’s disobedience (as well as that of the angels) will be a divinely-limited period on this planet when evil will greatly increase and seem to hold sway over the destiny of the entire human race. As we watch the news everyday it would certainly appear that this period is upon us. But the Bible also says that at the end of that period Christ, the Son of God, will return and rout all evil from the earth. As God in human, but now glorified, form King Jesus will put an end to history as we now know it. In its place will be the Kingdom of God, a Kingdom triumphant over all darkness. Evil, and its personification in Satan, will both be utterly and eternally destroyed by the one being Who has that capability.
Evil may seem to be having its day, but evil is actually in its last days. With this in mind may we all look to the soon coming King and turn from our own present evil to the divine remedy: repentance towards, and faith in, Him and Him alone