[*]“From the very nature of God and the things of God and from the very nature of evil and the things of evil, God and the things of God must win. Manifest Victory (Perfect Triumph) has not only been achieved in the experience of Jesus but is being achieved in the experience of everyone in union with Him. Ultimate Manifest Victory (Perfect Achievement) is predestined; God is working everything together for its achievement in us and in the creation.”[**]
Light has power to penetrate and destroy darkness; darkness has no power to penetrate and destroy the light.
Good has power to destroy evil and even power to use seeming evil and turn it to good. Evil, like darkness, may obscure the good, but cannot destroy it.
Truth is omnipotent against falsehood; falsehood is impotent against truth.
As Patmore put it:
- “When all its work is done, the lie will rot;
- Truth is mighty and will prevail
- When none cares whether it prevails or not.”
Love has power over hate, but hate cannot destroy love and cannot keep love from being love.
“Love never faileth.” There may be a failure to love but no failure in love itself. Where there is not enough love to conquer, keep on increasing love. Enough love will conquer all that is not love.
Jesus the Christ has power over the anti-Christ, but the anti-Christ has no power over Jesus Christ.
Evil succeeds for a time by masquerading as the good and by employing the cooperative principles of the good. Utter evil unmasked as utter evil would not only be destroyed by the Good, but would even destroy itself.
When the rattler gets mad enough, he goes to biting himself. In the last stages, evil always turns upon itself.
The Memoirs of Goebbels reveals that Hitler was afraid of his associates and they were afraid of each other as well as afraid of Hitler. It seems impossible for anyone to have real faith when on a mission of evil. To make yourself untrustworthy causes you to mistrust others.
Evil cannot have faith in itself. One who goes out on a mission of evil armed with the weapons of destruction is of necessity afraid of being destroyed. One evil man cannot have genuine faith in another.
As Emerson puts it, Napoleon had the best chance in all history of succeeding without moral principles; he failed utterly. He left France weaker than he found her and ended his life as a prisoner. Pasteur is far more loved in France than is Napoleon. Only those who bring good and whose lives are motivated by love are really loved by their fellows.
The good is fearless. One on a mission of good will motivated by the highest love for all will be perfectly fearless. Perfect love hath nothing to be afraid of.
If the same man who is fearless on a mission of love and good will should yield to temptation and go on a mission of evil to anyone, he would of necessity be afraid. Evil is a coward. In trying to make itself secure it makes itself insecure.
It appears on the same principle that light destroys darkness, that good destroys evil and that love casts out fear and, in large enough doses, conquers the most ruthless hate. Jesus Christ as perfect health and healing, as perfect life and immortality; not only conquers sickness but even death itself.
In all of His encounters with disease He conquered: and according to the New Testament report, no one ever died in His presence, nor remained dead in His presence. He awoke the dead more easily than we can wake up sleepy children. Those who had only been dead for a short time He awoke in an ordinary voice; Lazarus who had been dead for days He awoke with a loud voice. The Scriptural prophecy is that when He awakes all the dead He will do it with the voice of an archangel and with that triumph of God. The longer one has been dead, the louder the voice.
Saint Paul was convinced that not everyone was going to fall asleep or die (1 Cor. 15:51-56). He saw that the goal of Christian achievement is to overcome the last enemy death, as well as the first enemy sin. He was keenly aware while in the “first Adam” all die, that in Jesus Christ all shall be made alive.
If you are going to remain a child of the first birth only, you only have to look at your grandfather to get a fair picture of what you are going to become.
If you become a disciple of Jesus Christ and give yourself to becoming like Him, you only have to look at Him to begin to see what you are to be. By looking at Him you are already being changed into His likeness.
On the way to perfect triumph over even the appearance of sin, disease and death there should be great inner victory in the midst of what seems worst defeat. As Soren Kierkegaard says substantially, “When it appeared that Jesus and all that He stood for was finished, Jesus Himself saw the enemy He came to conquer was finished.” In the midst of what seemed to be the worst defeat there was the greatest triumph.
Since then those who have faced the worst with the love and faith of Jesus have been real victors in what seemed utter failure and defeat. They have been such victors, that they have even made converts of those who persecuted them unto death.
Stephen praying for those stoning him to death with his face in the radiance of an angel evidently was the beginning of the end of Saul the persecutor, preparing the way for Paul the apostle.
The burning of the New Testament by Sundar Sighn brought him to the desperation that opened the way for the glorified Jesus to come to his rescue in a manner very similar to the way Jesus came to the rescue of Saul of Tarsus. Happily, later, the love and glory of Sundar Sighn under the worst persecution became effective in converting the power of his persecutors. As one of these put it, the worse you treat Him the happier He becomes. “I’d give anything to have what he had.”
Sammy Morris converted the giant who sought to kill him but could not. To convert and make a friend of your enemy is not only high achievement for you but exceedingly great good to Him.
On the way to manifest victory and visible triumph Jesus Christ gives such great inner victory that this victory at any time may become manifest victory or perfect triumph.
Isaiah saw that the time was coming when Zion would bring forth even before she travails. I take it there is to be such an inner victory that it will produce quick and glorious outer victory.
One of the editors of the Sunday School Times shared with us this story of a Chinese missionary who was caught by bandits demanding ransom money.
The missionary refused to give it, telling the bandits she did not want to encourage their kind of business and because the money should go to the missionaries rather than to them.
The bandits set a date for beheading the missionary. When they came to behead her, and were on the way to the block she was so extremely happy the bandits said to her, “We don’t understand you.” She replied that she was thinking of the glory she would be experiencing as she ascended and looked back and saw her head rolling down the hill. The bandits replied, “If this is the way you feel about it we’re not going to accommodate you.” Here the inner victory was so great it brought an immediate outer victory, even more in the interest of the bandits than of the missionary.
As I understand, this is to be the goal of meeting evil with good. It is to be met in such love, wisdom, grace and joy that those who start out to do the worst evil will be spared from doing it by becoming happy converts. With enough of this as a contagion spreading over the earth, nations would be born in a day, and the New Order would come with great joy and rejoicing.
The conquest of the very appearance of death is to be achieved through perfect fruit-bearing union and marriage with the glorified Jesus. This will make His victory over death our victory also. The victory of Jesus is ours not through conquest apart from Him but by perfect marriage with Him. By this marriage His immortality becomes ours by receptivity and response to Him and by conquering the things that keep us from the perfect marriage.
Saint Paul says that Jesus alone has immortality. He evidently means that He is the only one who has immortality of body as well as of soul, the only kind of immortality that will satisfy us. This immortality comes by putting on His resurrected and glorified body as well as by entering into a perfect marriage with His mind, spirit and will.
Jesus is the perfect and only bridge between divinity and humanity, between soul and body, between immortality and mortality. He is achieved immortality; His immortality becomes ours through marriage with Him, not through the conquest of death apart from union with Him. His body crucified, resurrected, and glorified, to use a rare phrase of Ignatius, “is the medicine of immortality.”
Jesus longs to be and must be all in all in the all of us and to have us wholly His. This is the perfect marriage which enables Him to give us His immortality of body as well as of spirit.
Blessed are they who are invited to the perfect marriage. Blessed beyond thought are those who enter into this marriage. Those who come to this marriage do not have to bring with them their immortal garments, their redeemed bodies. They do not have to achieve immortality of body. They put on His.
The perfect triumph is not something that we attain; it is something we put on, “for we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened, not that we will be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up in life”[***] (2 Cor. 5:4).
When the sons of God have been brought to the likeness of the Son, then those in union with the Son are to bring the creation to the love and friendliness and liberty of the Sons of God.
The goal of history is the utter triumph of Love over hate, of Good over evil, of Light over darkness, of Joy over sorrow, of Health and Healing over disease and discord, of Life over death—of Jesus Christ over everything unlike Himself. Everything will be increasingly in His name until His conquest and His triumph are complete.
Footnotes / Endnotes:
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