“Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Our culture has a fascination with evil. Through our stories we often wonder exactly what it is, how it works, what it can accomplish, where and how we experience it, and so on and so forth. While the various authors who contribute to the Scriptures do touch on the nature of evil from time to time, there’s a stronger theme across the narrative: as the people of a God who is good, we are to overcome evil. How? Paul tells us right here at the end of his list of characteristics of life in God’s kingdom. Let’s take a look.

Evil is always on the lookout for a chance to get one over on us. In order for that to make positive sense, though, we have to have the right understanding of evil. We often imagine evil in very much cinematic terms. We think of a scene that is dark and Gothic and scary looking. We think of creepy dolls and freaky clowns. We think of chains and pentagrams. We imagine violence and aggressiveness. We imagine demons and monsters. There are enough culturally common images that when you ask AI to create an image of evil, it comes up with something like this.

Creepy.

But when we survey the Scriptures, a very different picture emerges. Evil is often dark, yes, but it can also resemble things of the light. It can hide in broad daylight. Evil does not have any substance in and of itself. Evil is the absence of substance, the absence of something entirely. That is to give it far more credit than it is due. Evil cannot create. It only destroys. It is, in other words, the absence of good.

Goodness is like the light to evil’s darkness. When Paul calls us to not be conquered by evil, he might as well have told us to walk in the light as Jesus is in the light as he does elsewhere in his letters. We are to conquer evil.

Yet what does it look like to conquer evil? Do we battle? I’ve seen enough supernatural-themed shows to know how the culture thinks about it. There is going to be a fight. Probably a big one. It might be close. The outcome will not be clear. It will take everything we have to stop it and then some. We’ll require some help from someone more powerful than we are, but not too much. We still want the credit for the victory at the end of the day. We may have to compromise our values some, even as we hold tightly to them in the end, because sometimes you have to meet evil on its own terms.

As common a story as this is, though, what progress have such efforts ever really made against evil? I’ll give you a hint: very little. If we try to conquer evil using anything like its own methods, the only thing we have done is to add more evil to the world. If the goal is to reduce the amount of evil in the world, and we fight evil using evil methods, we fail. The only way to conquer evil is with good.

We must commit ourselves heart, soul, mind, and strength to doing what is good. Okay, but how do we do that? Well, we start by recognizing what good is. Better yet, we must learn what its source is. God is good. Everything good in this world has its start in Him and His character. To turn that around just a bit, goodness does not have its start in us.

Contrary to every narrative we have created for ourselves, we are not a source of goodness in and of ourselves. We are not inherently good. We cannot look inside ourselves to find what is the good and right thing to do. On our own we will only ever produce selfishness and pride and spitefulness and jealousy and hatred and a million other forms of evil. This is because we are thoroughly corrupted by sin. Paul made this point rather emphatically way back in chapter 3.

Because we are not any kind of a source of goodness, if we seek out what is good by looking within, we won’t find it. We will come up empty. We will produce only what is evil. And the real danger of this is that we will convince ourselves that it is good. We will start to call what is truly good evil, and what is evil good. When we reverse those two things in our minds, we set ourselves up for a very dark path indeed.

If we are going to conquer evil with good, our first task is to commit ourselves to Christ. Without His Spirit in us, which only happens when we confess Him as Lord, the kind of consistent goodness that can conquer evil rather than compromising with it will be impossible for us to produce. If you haven’t acknowledged Jesus as Lord and committed your life to Him, that’s step one. The next things I am going to mention follow naturally from this first step, but they can also lead to it such that there is a bit of a both-and here. If they lead us to it, though, we will continue them after taking it as well.

Because evil conquering goodness does not reside in us when we are on our own, we must root ourselves deeply in the God who is good. We must grow in our knowledge and understanding of His character. This comes by investing time in the Scriptures each and every day. It does not have to be long all the time. Life doesn’t always allow for that. But it needs to be consistent. We need to be reading and studying the Scriptures, God’s primary vehicle for self-revelation, on a regular basis.

We also need to root ourselves deeply in prayer. Prayer is our primary means of building and growing a relationship with God. We share of ourselves with Him, and by His Spirit in us (which comes when we commit our lives to Christ as Lord), He shares of Himself with us as well. To create an even more productive synergy here, we combine our praying with our engagement with the Scriptures. We let God’s word lead us to prayer, and we let His Spirit’s movement in us in prayer lead us to His word to help us gain a deeper and richer understanding of Him.

There’s one more piece to this puzzle. We must be invested in a community of faith. That is, we must be engaged with the church. Pursuing goodness – the kind of goodness that will see us conquering evil – is not something we can do by ourselves. And this time I don’t mean only that we need God as its source. Goodness is inherently directional. It is an application of the character of God to the life of another person.

In other words, we need people if we are going to pursue goodness. We need people whom we can bless. We need people we can love. We need people we can serve. We need people from whom we can learn new ways of experiencing and pursuing God’s goodness. And the best place to find those people to be able to engage with them in ways that lead sustainably to life is in the church. If you want to grow in goodness to see evil conquered, the church is where you need to be.

You can be a part of conquering evil in the church when things are going well on the inside because as a group we can focus our efforts to proclaim and demonstrate God’s character and kingdom in the world around us where evil still reigns. You can be a part of conquering evil in the church when things are really not going well, when evil has made its way into the church, by unleashing the goodness of God in response. If evil makes its way into the church, as it occasionally does, smuggled in in the hearts of the people who are there, it becomes all the more important for us to conquer it with good rather than opposing it with more evil. Either way, if you want to see God’s evil-conquering goodness increase and expand, the church is where you need to be.

The world is awash in evil because the world attempts to operate independently of the God who made it. But apart from that God, goodness will be fleeting. It will only exist where God’s people do. We serve the God who overcame the world and all of its evil. Sin and death are defeated foes. We can stand against evil and see it conquered entirely by committing ourselves to what is good. The time for that final conquering is not yet, but it is coming more surely even than the next sunrise because the God who creates all the sunrises has decreed it. Our job is to walk in His goodness and take part in His victory in Christ who overcame evil with good. Let’s do it.