“For the upright will inhabit the land, and those of integrity will remain in it; but the wicked will be cut off from the land, and the treacherous ripped out of it.” (Proverbs 2:21-22 CSB – Read the chapter)

The best stories always have a happy ending. That’s not the same thing as saying every story has a happy ending, but the best ones always do. In the end, the good guys win. Perhaps even more importantly, in the end, the bad guys lose. We celebrate that in our stories because it doesn’t always or even often feel like it’s what happens in real life. Here, injustice feels like it wins the day more often than it doesn’t. Evil people thrive in spite of the best efforts of those who are trying to advance the cause of righteousness. Given that, a proverb like this one feels hard to believe. Let’s talk about what we should do with it, and why, in spite of appearances, it really is true.

Over the last few days, I’ve been rewatching Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy with my son who is watching all of them for the first time. I knew without any doubt that they are the best three Batman movies ever made (live action at least), but I had forgotten just how good they are, especially the second, The Dark Knight, with Heath Ledger as The Joker. It should have gotten the Oscar for Best Picture that year, but Hollywood is far too snooty to nominate a superhero movie for that award. It was nominated for eight other awards, but not that one. Slumdog Millionaire was good, but not even remotely that good.

In any event, The Dark Knight ends in an odd place. At Joker’s promoting, Harvey Dent loses his fragile grip on his sanity and becomes the villain Two-Face. He was supposed to be the shining symbol of goodness Gotham needed to be reminded of their better angels so that the city could start to be cleaned up. The Joker wound up in prison, but in corrupting Dent, he won the war.

In order to deny him this victory, Batman and Commissioner Gordon conspire to convince the city that Batman committed all the murders Dent was responsible for so that his image isn’t tarnished. The movie ends with Gordon celebrating Dent’s legacy while the Batman is on the run from the police, hunted down for crimes he didn’t commit. The good guys may have stopped all the bad guys, but it really doesn’t feel like much of a victory. The good guys shouldn’t still be on the run when the credits roll.

Yet how often does it feel like this is precisely how life goes? The good guys don’t necessarily lose (although sometimes they absolutely do), but neither do the bad guys seem to lose like they should (and sometimes they even appear to win). What are we supposed to do with this? How do we not let this less us down a path of cynicism and bitterness?

Well, for starters, we remember that the Proverbs describe how the world works, all things being equal. They don’t tell us how every single situation we face is going to go. They don’t offer guarantees of any kind. They simply direct us toward the wisest path through life. Sometimes that path isn’t going to seem so wise because of how things go in the short term, but get short term isn’t what we are living for. We are living for something entirely linger and more significant than that.

This actually brings us to a second thing we do in light of this dark reality: We don’t despair. We don’t despair because there is more to this life than what we can see. The life we are living for as followers of Jesus is one that doesn’t even really begin until this life is over. That means if we stick with Jesus, we have a life ahead of us that is going to be infinitely better than even our best day in this world.

At the end of The Dark Knight, as complicated of an ending as that was, the bad guys were either dead or stopped from pursuing anymore of their dark aims. They were cut off from the land, so to speak. Meanwhile, although Batman was on the run, Gordon, the one truly good and upright cop in the city, was established as the Commissioner. And although the public didn’t know the whole truth about what went on, Gordon did, and he could lead the people accordingly. He inhabited the land. The people of integrity remained in it.

But that’s just a story. Yet to bring us back to where we started, that’s how all of our best stories go. Even with as broken as the world is, and even with as often as it seems like the wicked prosper while the righteous suffer, the fact that we keep telling stories in which “the upright will inhabit the land, and those of integrity will remain it it; but the wicked will be cut off from the land, and the treacherous ripped out of it” is something we just can’t overlook. Perhaps it is a symptom of a wishful thinking that has persisted down throughout the centuries of human history, but maybe it is a pointer to something more than that.

Maybe it is a pointer to the fact that we know in our deepest knower that justice is what should be normal, not evil. God created us in His image. That means we share in some of who He is. Obviously we don’t share in the things that make Him divine – His omniscience, omnipotence, externality, and so on – but we do share in things like His being a relational God. We share in His creativity. We share in His moral nature. We recognize things that are right and wrong, and we naturally desire the right. Now, it is absolutely true that this desire is deeply corrupted by sin, but it just keeps popping up over and over again. It is because of this that we know that in the end the upright will inhabit the land, but the wicked will be cut off from it.

When you commit to walking the path of righteousness through this life, there will be rewards for that commitment. Some of those will come here and now as you enjoy the fruits of a good reputation in your community. But some of those rewards will yet come on Christ’s return when He rewards all of His faithful servants with the heavenly treasures they have stored up along with the eternal life of God’s kingdom. The way there won’t always be easy, but it’s end will indisputably be good. Let’s commit to walking that path.