14th May 2025

GOOD AND EVIL.

The news on our television screens too often emphasises what a broken world we live in – international conflict of frightening dimensions, vicious racial clashes in our cities, a breakdown of relationships within marriages, whilst so much material advertised on television is insultingly trivial, violent, or depicting exploitative sexual relationships. Or again in the remorseless search for wealth, the old idea of Mammon motivation takes precedence over ideas of service. But in the midst of crisis the innate goodness of neighbours also becomes happily apparent. And so the battle between good and evil is intensely set these days.

Life in first-century Israel was not so very different. Thus, in the Lord’s Prayer, there is the admission that we live in a fallen world: we are not only sinners but the sinned against, living in an imperfect world, in which we need protection from temptation, and deliverance from evil. It is very much in a broken world that we are invited to pray.

Or take Paul’s analysis of the daily problems confronting the Christian disciple in Ephesians 6 as he speaks of ‘the stratagems of the devil’, ‘cosmic powers’, ‘the authorities and potentates of this dark age’ and ‘the super-human spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms’, all making for ‘the coming of the day of evil’ – a description as frightening as what we see on our television screens, and a pretty good theological description of the very world we live in. But we have ‘the full armour of God’ with which to withstand these devilish endeavours, standing firmly on the ground of Christian commitment.

But returning to the Lord’s Prayer, the strategy is not only to pray, but also to act, that we may be kingdom builders rather than the agents of hatred and destruction, or just those who let things happen, for in the end our confidence must be that in Christ is the kingdom, the power and the glory, initially in this world, but then most fully in the world that is yet to come.

John Briggs