I want to offer a few of my thoughts on the incomprehensible powers of evil. I think of evil unfolding its ways in the world as always a problem to us who are trying to follow Christ. Among all the ways that people sin, I think most people would agree that the most evil is the intentional killing of an innocent human being, or what the Bible defines as murder. Among all the ways that we murder, the most incomprehensible is the mass murder of innocent human beings. If you think of the most evil people in all of history, the one thing they will all have in common is mass murderer. That is what makes them so evil. And among all the ways that mass murderers commit this atrocity, the intentional killing of children is another level of incomprehensible evil.

I think of the Pharaoh in Egypt who went out to intentionally kill all the baby boys among the Jewish people that were enslaved there. I think of Herod who, in defense of his own crown, decided to go out and find the one who was promised King of the kings by slaughtering all the baby boys who were two years old and younger in and around Bethlehem. I think of the child’s sacrifice as it was practiced in different parts of the world. The Bible even records it in the Old Testament where the Jews became so hardened in their rebellious hearts against God that they committed child sacrifice.

These are incomprehensible evils that are at work. Certainly the power behind those evil atrocities is the evil one himself. In the book of Revelation, he is described as the great red dragon with 10 horns on his head and all this other symbolic language that is trying to help us grasp the enormous political power that controls these different nations through their governments and their dictators. It really shows us how they are pawns of this greater cosmic power of evil that is described as a great red dragon and then later on identified as Satan himself. The devil is out to destroy as many people as he can in order to disrupt the unfolding work of God’s redemptive history.

Given all of that, what can we say? My thought is this: most of us have a lot more Power at work than we realize. We have our own Inexhaustible Power. The problem is that we do not feel powerful. We feel just typical, ordinary and limited in many ways. So I want to read to you this one scripture that I think becomes stunning once we start to think about the powers of evil.

This evil is called the spirit of the antiChrist. This demonic, seismic, cosmic power that is at work in these big evils throughout the world is the devil himself. He says, in 1 John 4:3(b)-4, “This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he that is in the world.” I think this would not be a believable promise except that it starts off with the words “little children.” John knows that we feel more childlike. We feel powerless against these enormous, extravagant, cosmic powers of evil. We are just ordinary people. Yet the same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in us today, which means for most of us, we have more power at work in us than we give ourselves credit for.

Now, I do not know you or your particular life experiences or your background or what you are doing today, so I am just going to turn the application into a kind of a testimony. Where do I see this resurrection power at work in me to turn me from a little child or to recognize that I feel childlike in many ways, and yet still experience this extraordinary power? I would say, first of all, when my faith becomes courage, I feel more powerful. I feel the spirit of God at work in me and all of us are being confronted with great and enormous evils twisting up truth.

The whole gender dysphoria ideology, the lie about homosexuality and marriage, the false hope of the prosperity gospel and all these other falsehoods that are at work in our culture, feel gigantic to fight against. It takes courage to speak up. When someone is considering abortion or defending abortion, it takes a lot of courage at that moment to take your stand for life. That is the moment in which you are seeing how your faith in God is hardening itself into moral courage and giving you the ability to speak or to act in defense of the innocent.

Whenever I am in that situation, I feel more powerful than I do in normal, everyday circumstances. Secondly, I feel that courage when I see that God has put me in a position to actually give of my time, my talents or my treasure to help somebody else. That moment in which we all become a good Samaritan promotes courage and solidarity in our faith. We recognize the power that dwells in us.

In my context of the pro-life movement, it is meeting a couple who is in a pregnancy related crisis and saying, “Let me help you.” You are not sure how you are going to do that, but you know it’s going to cost you time and effort. It may cost you money, but this willingness to sacrifice and do so gladly without complaint is to live out the resurrection power of the Lord Jesus Chrsit that is in us. To be used by God to save another human being and to save their soul for eternity are moments in which we get to experience the resurrection power of the Holy Spirit. That power is greater than all the temptation and the pressure that Satan is putting on that person or the couple you are talking to. It really is a powerful thing.

Thirdly, I would say that the power to suffer is the power of the resurrection. When you are willing to put yourself at risk, to take chances to lose something, to have your reputation sullied or to be slandered all point to the power of God in you. I have been arrested a couple of times around the world doing pro-life work. It can be intimidating. Let me tell you, even just last year when I was in Nicaragua, I spent two and a half hours with officials there, and they were trying every way they could to see if they could catch me in a lie and to kick me out of the country. If you are there on a mission and you are doing God’s will, as I discerned it to be at that time, then there is a peace and a willingness to suffer if need be.

If you are willing to suffer, if need be, I suggest to you that that is the power of the resurrection at work in your life. Most of the time we are just feeling like little children. But there are moments and times in our life where we get to experience a power that is even greater than that extraordinary power of evil that we see every day in the world today. That is my testimony, and I pray that you have your own testimony along the same lines, God bless.