Proverbs 14:19 ESV
The evil bow down before the good, the wicked at the gates of the righteous.
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+14%3A19&version=ESV]
Aside from its translation using one of my favorite rhetorical devices, zeugma, this verse also promises to the righteous what we so often find difficult to hope for, much less expect: victory, true and abiding. The world, after all, seems perpetually winning. The tale of the church, if we’re honest, is a story of standing forever on the edge of disaster, stepping a scant few feet away only for a few decades and in a few places, at least to the eyes of worldly men. Whether it is the apostasy of the Arians spreading through the early church and actually dominating whole swathes of it, including the ‘missionary’ efforts to pagan Europe or the unrelenting advance of globalist, technocratic, and anti-God ideologies in the world today, the people of God are perpetual underdogs. Thankfully, though, God is the Author of this story, of the story which encompasses and justifies history, and His people, forever embattled, are nevertheless inevitably triumphant by His might.
Few times have been darker than the early years of the first century A.D. In that time, the Jews alone held memory of the truth, and even they were swept by concealed apostasy, by work’s righteousness of the Pharisees and philosophical delusions of the Sadducees. They hated Christ, when He came, for a reason. They hated Him because they hated God. After all, if they had loved God, they would also have loved Christ, the second person of the Trinity (John 8:42). Instead, they chose to love themselves, the world, and their own autonomy more, exchanging the truth of God for a lie (Rom. 1:18-23). This would have consequences in the fullness of time, but in the years leading up to Christ’s ministry, their sin reigned triumphant.
The ministry of Christ, of course, was a turning of the tide. He preached to thousands, both cumulatively and at once, and traveled across the land, spreading the good news- and the warning- of the coming of the Kingdom (Matt. 4:17). A revival, you might call it; with even more accuracy, a reformation. Christ brought not only men to the truth but the truth to men, showing them both by His own authority (Matt. 9:2-5) and from the Scripture already given to them (Luke 24:27) the character of God and the purpose for which He had come. Yet this turning of the tide, if we read on in the Gospels, ended in the arrest, slander, torture, death, and burial of the Son of God. Can a darker moment in history be imagined? For what other death, what other tragedy, did the very heavens turn to night, the dead rise, and the curtain of the temple, the separation between God’s presence and the men who served him, rip in two?
That last fact, of course, hints at the true nature of this catastrophe. In the eternal scheme, God is victorious. How else could He be? Could God, just and righteous, by His omnipotent power and universal knowledge award to Himself anything less than total victory, He who is not only sinless but the perfection of virtue? God wins. How, though, do we square this with the death of God, of His Son? How was this congruent with God winning?
The answer, of course, is the Resurrection, is the true significance of Christ’s death which His rising revealed to man. In His death, Christ conquered His people’s sin by taking our judgement; in His life, He gave us life, the life of His own virtue. As Paul says, “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:4). The death of Christ was, to appearance, a catastrophe beyond man’s measure to fully understand; the death of Christ, in combination with His resurrection (without which the story would be unfinished), was a eucatastrophe, a sudden (though prophesied- see Isaiah 53) rise from utter defeat to the heights of victory1.
The victory of God, of course, is not all sunshine and roses. Victories have two sides: the victorious and the defeated. In this case, even apart from a preterist view of Revelations, what happened to the Jews in A.D. 70 should at once warn and encourage us. The Jews of Jerusalem said to Pilate regarding the death of their sinless King, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matt. 27:25), and on them indeed the guilt of Christ’s blood came, even as Abel’s blood came upon Cain in Genesis 4, save that the crime the Jews asked for the guilt of was of a magnitude infinitely greater, the crime of murdering the Son of God.
In Psalm 69, David calls down judgement upon those who assail him, that their table might become a snare, their minds a terror, their camp a desolation, that to them be added ‘punishment upon punishment’ till they were ‘blotted out of the book of the’ (22-29). This passage, like many others, speaks of the judgment God wreaks upon those who persecute His servants unjustly; imagine, then, the judgement due to those who raised their hands against God Himself. The fall of Jerusalem in A.D.70 was a brutal fulfillment of this curse, a wrenching apart of the temple (literally) stone from stone (Matt. 24:2). It was not merely from man’s wrath that the Christians fled Jerusalem before the Roman’s coming, as Josephus records and Jesus commanded (Matt. 24:15)2.
Nowadays, things look bad. Whether you’re worried about vaccines, nuclear war, non-nuclear war, gun-grabs, censorship, generalized tyranny, world government, the world looks scary. Even more foreboding, the church seems on the brink of self-destruction, unable to rebuke the world because of its own accession to the world’s ideals, split into woke institutions, dead churches, and- you dare to hope- a few scattered remnants desperately fighting to stay above water. The outlook is bleak. Yet here history has a few words to say.
The times in which Christ were born were dark, darker even than now. In those days, the whole earth was in bondage to darkness, lashed beneath Satan’s yoke by its own assent and desire, hating God. Roman culture, however architecturally marvelous, was morally rotten, built on idolatry and encouraging fornication, prostitution, homosexuality, and more. The Jews, who were in that time supposed to be the city on a hill which the church now is called to be (Matt. 5:14), had nigh abandoned their charge, content to shine only on themselves, leaving the Gentiles to darkness and turning themselves into their own saviors (Matt. 23:27). Compared to today, the world was dark, with less light and less prospect for light to rise. Then came Christ, a bright light in the darkness. Then came His death, resurrection, and ascension, in which we find our hope. Yet even after this, the church was tiny, the world overwhelmingly mighty. What were a few hundred disciples, perhaps, against the might of at least two millennia of apostasy, against cultures which had been enthralled by sin since their inception, since the inception of their ancestors in Babel?
From this rose the early church; from this, in time, rose the Protestant reformation and the greatest wellspring of evangelism since that early church. If God re-made a world as broken as the world of the twelve apostles, who are we to proclaim our world, in which the Bible is so widespread and Christians found in every nation and clime, un-salvageable? Of course, this assurance, that evil will bow down before good and the wicked at the gates of the righteous (Proverbs 14:19, today’s verse), does not preclude persecution and struggle. This world hates God’s people, and to bring it under Him (Ps. 110:1) will be no easy task. In God, though, it is a task with only one ending: the victory of Christ and in Him, of His saints.
Written by Colson Potter
1 – The term ‘eucatastrophe’ is borrowed from J.R.R. Tolkien’s excellent essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’, available in PDF here.
2 – I’m indulging in a bit of justified preterism here, but the argument remains strong even apart from that belief.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
