“Good Will Always Prevail”
Summer Series: “Virtues that Can Keep Us Stable”
Phyllis Dorothy James, or P.D. James as she was known professionally, was an English author of the last century who’s “claim to fame” was crime novels. She was a committed Christian, an Anglican, whose theology often surfaced in her detective novels. For example, in one interview she acknowledged how it always bothered her that murder mysteries can often function as a metaphorical narcotic that numbs us to real evils, not fictional ones, evils without and evils within, as they invite us to lose ourselves in the world of “whodunit.” In fact, she says that her own career as a writer was launched as a five-year-old when her parents read “Humpty Dumpty” to her and she immediately asked them, “Was he pushed?” “Was he pushed?”
The notion of the evil forces in this world, if we are not careful, can become a consuming one, so much so that if we are not careful this infatuation with evil can discourage us and deflate us and ultimately defeat us, which is why the Bible devotes so much attention to what folk of faith must do in order to win the victory over it.
Consider, for example, this teaching from the book of Romans. The book of Romans, as many of you know, is divided into two sections – a theological section and a practical section, or, as students of the New Testament refer to it, an indicative (“Since you have put right with God through your faith in Jesus Christ) and an imperative (“This is how you must live”).
This twelfth chapter is the place in Paul’s letter where the attention shifts from grace to demand, or from the indicative to the imperative. Here, in this section of the letter, Paul invites his readers to be aware of the reality of evil in their world but not to be vanquished by it. That’s because as powerful as evil is, it is never as powerful as good; and whenever people confront any form of evil with good in the course of their daily lives, the good will always prevail. Thus, Paul writes to the church, “Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
What intrigues me about Paul’s teaching is how it implies that believers in Rome must have been on the verge of losing out to the evil in their midst. Otherwise, Paul would have never felt the need to give them such a stern warning. In fact, the verses that are around this twenty-first verse seem to indicate that much of the evil they were in danger of losing out to was evil that had somehow managed to worm its way into the church itself. Believers had begun to look at one another with distrust and suspicion, and that mindset then had begun to permeate the church’s witness to the world so that it was on the verge of being compromised. People were being led to ask the question, “Look at how those Christians behave. They’re no different from us. So, why should I become one?”
This is how the Devil works. He is so very subtle. Instead of blatantly and openly challenging our confession of Jesus as Savior and Lord, he works to undermine it by garbing his evil intentions in just enough good to deceive us and lead us astray. Look at how Satan tempted Jesus. He quoted the Bible! A lesser person would have thought to himself, “Well, you know, you’re right; that’s what God says,” and then gone along the path Satan was inviting him to take, a broad path, which, as Jesus said, always leads to destruction. But Jesus was not a lesser person; Jesus was the Son of God. And so, seeing Satan’s sinister strategy, Jesus rejected it and opted instead for God’s path, which through his death on the cross, would lead many to life.
The point is, evil is always the camouflaging of the good. Evil disguises itself in ways that we do not easily notice until it is too late. If we could see Satan coming at us, we could get out of the way or move in another direction. But because he is Lucifer, whose name means “Bearer of Light,” we find it so easy to bask in the light he brings until the evil it hides overtakes us and we are plunged into abject darkness.
I know I sound like I’m trying to take the wind out of your sails this morning. Trust me, this is not the kind of preaching that I enjoy. But I am convinced, given the systemic nature of evil in our world today, which simply means that it is so hardwired into our ideologies and our institutions, our relationships and our affiliations, that it is so easy to be duped or misled by it that we never really recognize it as a problem. Think of any word that ends in “ism” and you’ll see what I mean.
How then do we move beyond those things? Quite simply, in the power that faith in Jesus provides, we do good. In our ideologies we focus on the good. In our institutions we structure for the good. In our relationships we work for the good. In our affiliations we side with the good. It may be that evil is most definitely a force in this world that threatens to overcome us at every point along life’s way, but our faith in Jesus Christ enables us not just to hold evil off, but to triumph over it, to triumph over it by the means of the good that God’s grace in Jesus Christ enables us to show.
Can you commit yourself to that kind of witness this morning? Can you pledge to God that you will not allow the evil that is all around us to corrupt you or conquer you? You see, in order to overcome us fully, evil needs two victories, not just one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated, but that’s not where the real triumph of evil happens. It’s the second victory of evil that seals the deal, which is when an evil deed is not just perpetrated, but when it is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second one did not in some way infuse it with new life.
There’s a story in the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis, that involves Joseph, the son of the patriarch Jacob, who had been sold into slavery by his own brothers and would have remained in that state if God had not been with him. But God was and Joseph knew it, to the point that in the providence of God Joseph was to rise to a position of second in the land of Egypt, only behind Pharaoh himself.
You know the story of how a famine had come upon Canaan and Jacob sent his sons to Egypt to buy food, not knowing that Joseph, the son he thought he had lost long ago, was in charge of the distribution. When the brothers arrived, they did not recognize Joseph and wouldn’t have recognized him if Joseph had not revealed himself to them. When he did, the brothers were filled with fear. The evil they had done to their brother was surely now about to come back to them in spades. And certainly, Joseph would have been within his rights to seek his revenge against them. But he didn’t. He did something else. Joseph was so caught up in how God had been with him every step of the way that Joseph told his brothers, “Don’t be afraid. You thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good” (Genesis 50:19-20).
You have a choice to make this morning, a choice between two things. You can choose to be overcome by the evil that everyone has to encounter at some point in life, or you can choose by means of God’s grace in Jesus Christ to be the overcomer of evil. It’s one of the two. You cannot let evil slide because you can bet your bottom dollar that evil will never let you slide. You must fight it in grace and in the battle you must either conquer or be conquered. So, which will it be?
Charles Roy Angell was one of the great preachers in Southern Baptist life during the middle part of the last century. Pastor of the Central Baptist Church in Miami, Florida, Angell was recognized as a stellar illustrator of the Gospel. I’ve read many of his sermon books and he was indeed a master communicator. That’s why when the Southern Baptist Convention met in Dallas, Texas, in 1951, Angell was tapped to preach the Convention Sermon.
As the story goes, when the word got out that Angell was to be the Convention Sermon preacher, almost immediately he became a target for the abuse of a demagogue pastor in Ft. Worth, named J. Frank Norris. Several years earlier, Norris shot a man in his pastor’s study, whom he claimed had threatened his life, and when the case went to trial, Norris was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. It’s a tale worthy of a P.D. James novel. Needless to say, Norris was quite the character.
So, when the time came for the Dallas Convention to begin, Norris came over from Ft. Worth, set up a platform in the park across the street from the Convention Center and began to harangue Roy Angell as an emissary of the devil.
When Angell arrived in Dallas from Miami, one of the first things he did was to go down to the Convention Center early to see the room he would be speaking in that night. When he got there, he heard J. Frank Norris holding forth in the park and wandered over to hear what he was saying. You can imagine Roy Angell’s astonishment upon hearing that he was the subject of Norris’s diatribe and was being attacked as a communist and a sinner. But he stood and he listened.
It was summertime in Dallas and so It began to rain, softly at first and then it really started coming down. Norris had no raincoat and was getting soaked like a wet hen. But he didn’t stop. He kept going.
Roy Angell couldn’t stand to see the poor man, now in his seventies, getting pelted by the rain. So, Angell eased up on the platform beside him, removed his own raincoat, and put it around the speaker.
Thirty minutes later, J. Frank Norris concluded his attack and gave the stranger back his coat. Norris never knew that the man who had loaned it to him was the very man he had been so vehemently criticizing as an agent of the devil.
So, who among those two men do you think won the day?
Then go and do likewise, and be not overcome by evil, but in all that you’re about, for Christ’s sake and for your own, overcome evil with good, because good will always prevail. In the end, good will always prevail.
