Evil can’t win ultimately because…

…it’s too much of a burden.

When you look around and it all seems hopeless, take heart. It’s not. The world it really good at presenting a picture designed to suck the life out of you.

Each day I pull up news headlines. I go through them rather quickly and what I see is what I expect – mostly bad news. There are stories of corruption, violence, death, anger, political power struggles, greed, disease, natural disaster, abuse, manipulation, outright lies, and more. And each headline is no longer shocking to me. That doesn’t mean these headlines are normal. They aren’t. They are abnormal to their core. They represent not just something different or alternative to what is good – but rather the exact opposite of what is good.

I don’t get down though on seeing these things. I used to. But not any more. I look at these headlines for a couple of reasons. 1. to be reminded of the reality of evil and brokenness in the world. I can’t live in la-la fantasy land. There is much brokenness and there are people, systems, and institutions that create more brokenness – sometimes on purpose. 2. I look forward to the day when such things will no longer exist. It is a hopeful expectation that I have that someday I will pull up the headlines and the ways of the world will have ended. 3. These stories are motivation to me to keep going. To just keep doing what I am called to do in spite of the evil and brokenness.

No matter what, here’s what I know – evil cannot ultimately prevail. It’s impossible. It will fall under its own weight. Evil thinks it can keep going non-stop. It thinks it can keep crossing lines. It does this because it thinks it is God and is infinite. But evil is not infinite. It is finite. And it exhausts itself at some point. It consumes itself at some point because there is nothing else to keep it going. And when it reaches that point, it collapses and dies.

Evil always falls. It’s a matter of when. It’s a matter of how. It’s matter of what destruction it causes in the process and how many people it tries to take with it. And evil will definitely try to destroy as much as it can as it fall. Evil will definitely try to harm and kill as many people as it can as it falls. Because evil believes that death is the end of the story – that history stops with the end of evil’s reign of terror.

In a way it is. Yet, evil doesn’t get the fact that evil isn’t the center of the universe and doesn’t get to tell its story afterwards. And there is an afterwards. There always is.

Resurrection comes – but not resurrecting evil. Rather it is transformed. That which was evil will be used for something good after the fact. Not because it’s God’s will in some kind of twisted logic that tries to excuse evil. Evil is inexcusable. Rather, evil just can’t last. And what good comes from all of this? Sometimes its a matter of looking at evil right in the eye and knowing exactly what it is, how it acts, and how it falls, and then going forward to do something worthwhile, to be someone who rejects evil regardless of the cost so that evil knows that it has failed. Evil fails when even just one person rejects it because evil thinks it is all things. But when one person rejects it – this one person shows that evil is lacking in the one thing it needs: control. When we reject evil, we reject the control it tries to lay claim too. It fails. And it falls.