In Psalm 12, David engages God with a dilemma not unfamiliar to the Christian of 2022. With breaking heart, he cries out, "Save, O Lord, for the godly one is gone; for the faithful have vanished from among the children of man. Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak" (Ps. 12:1-2). The prophet Habakkuk is equally frustrated with his society in Hab. 1:2-4, and Paul echoes the indictment on humanity in Rom. 3:9-18, painfully too long to reproduce here. In John 3:19, Jesus Himself declares the judgment: "The light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil." Stretching all the way into our past (Gen. 6:5,6) and all the way into our future (Rev. 5:2-4) as mankind, then, is a legacy of imagining, committing, and approving what is evil (Rom. 1:32).

Despair at the apparent pointlessness -- and even impotency -- of righteousness is a side effect more real and common than we would like to admit among the saints (Ps. 73:13). Our frustration that bad people seem to win, and always get away with their wickedness, can soon harden into an unspoken sulkiness towards God that tempts us to fall into sin ourselves. This is where Paul's command to the Roman church arrests our hearts: "Do not be overcome by evil", he says, "but overcome evil with good" (Rom. 12:21). What could he mean? Not merely survive with a base amount of goodness in the impossible darkness of evil in the world all around us, but thrive, and beyond that, triumph with a goodness that is so good that it is militant? Is it possible?

Here, we must bend our experience to the theology of the Bible, that there is a supernatural kind of goodness that drowns evil. There is a kind of light that shines in the darkness, Jesus announces, which the darkness is simply not able to overcome (Jn.1:5). The inconceivable commands to face an evil world with the seemingly simpleminded goodness preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:38-47), and fearlessly repeated by Paul (Rom. 12:14,17-20) and Peter (1 Pet. 3:9) are no longer the resigned weakness of the subjugated, but rather the defiant reaction of a spiritual generation, challenging the deafening sound of vice with the even-louder sound of virtue.

The Christian argument is that although darkness seems to prevail, there is an inexorable strength in good. It always will win in the end for a number of reasons, but most especially because God -- who remains forever and wins forever -- is good. In the way that is the preserve of a sovereign deity, God manages to course-correct the universe at every turn to make sure that in the end, good wins. He paid the ultimate price to guarantee this: Jesus entered the darkness as the undimming Light of the world and went around doing good (Acts 10:38), defeating all the power of evil with all the power of absolute goodness.

Thus, as the world mocks and inverts what is good, and even sometimes hails evil, we are to persevere in being like our Father in heaven who is thoroughly good. We are to be inexperienced infants in doing evil (1 Cor. 14:20), but to wisely imitate what is good (3 Jn. 1:11), recognizing that our good deeds accomplish more than we can imagine. Every good deed is an act of war, pushing back against the darkness and resisting this present evil generation. This is why God designed in advance (Eph. 2:10) and empowers (1 Thess. 1:11) the good works we are to do. However, this kind of goodness is costly.

The Cost of a Powerful Goodness

First, it requires that we learn and imitate God's kind of good: that is the only goodness which makes the difference we seek. It is God, you must remember, who assesses and determines what is good or not good (Gen. 1). Human arrogance makes us think that we are adequate judges of what is good -- we call some people "good people" and certain things "good things". But what is acceptable to us is often an abomination to God, and vice versa (Luke 16:15). Some of the things which seem horrifically evil to us are things that God intentionally means for good (Gen. 50:20; Ps. 119:71). No wonder God doesn't trust human evaluations of what is good or bad (Lev. 27:33). His goodness transcends our temporary perceptions of what makes us happy; it is a positive force that ensures our salvation. Therefore, we must grow in being good like God.

Secondly, we must realize that goodness is Spirit-ual. God's good Spirit (Neh. 9:20) bears in us the fruit of goodness (Gal. 5:22). It is then that we can discern what is good to the Spirit to inform our actions and inactions (Acts 15:28). Moreover, there is a certain aspect of militant goodness which can only be achieved by the empowerment of the warrior Holy Spirit. The prophet Micah explains his fearlessness in Micah 3:8 -- "But as for me, I am filled with power, with the Spirit of the Lord, and with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin."

This leads to the third implication, which is that we must be courageous enough to be good. It is far too easy to remain silent instead of taking on colleagues or friends who make crude fun of the things we believe in. It is easy to let go of opportunities to take on evil conversations, evil perspectives and opinions, and evil people, despite the uneasy awkwardness that warns you that God expected you to speak up. It is easy to follow the multitude to do evil, though it is express disobedience (Exod. 23:2), placing greater value on being woke than being Christian. However, militant goodness that keeps the darkness at bay must be combative, eager to engage the fight especially when it comes to our doorsteps.

The fourth and related implication is that good people must fight evil. It is possible to be a quiet kind of good -- good for yourself and your God, but affecting nobody else and definitely not the society around you. The good King Jehoshaphat was good friends with the evil King Ahab for decades, and it startles me that the friendship never managed to affect Ahab's character. Lot escaped unscathed from Sodom and Gomorrah, but barely saved his family; nobody else took his goodness seriously enough to follow him out of the city. It is hard to kill my darling, but Joseph's rise to the position of Prime Minister in Egypt had little effect on the religious life of Pharaoh and all the other officers, although he performed excellently in his work. Compare this to Daniel, whose righteousness was so obvious that each of the kings under whom he served eventually had to acknowledge God as worthy of worship; in a number of cases, the whole empire was commanded to revere God because of this one man. The uncompromising reaction of Phinehas to the adultery of that man at Baal Peor (Num. 25) immediately secured him a covenant of priesthood for his generations because it confronted evil obviously. We must strive, then, to reject and resist evil, actively.

Finally, if the power of good is to be amplified, it must be fed not only by great lights which are few and far between, but also even by lesser lights that spring up in greater frequency. Let us rally around good people and edify and encourage one another. Stand firmly with vocal Christians rather than hanging in their periphery, timidly treading the line. Get role models who are good, and imitate what is good. Praise and reward what is good.

Let me end by looking at the difference in the responses of Ezra and Nehemiah to the inter-marriages of the returnees. While Ezra afflicted himself and sat weeping before God (Ezra 9), his repentance and intercession was so Spirit-empowered that it instigated a revival in the community. Nehemiah was less gentle: he attacked the sinners physically (Neh. 13:23-25), but also achieved purification of the community.

Militant goodness is therefore not necessarily aggressive physical behaviour, but a determination to be righteous which is undeterred by how everyone else seems to be doing the wrong thing, and which eventually affects your community because you hold so unwaveringly to it by the Spirit.