At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“The evil bow before the good; And the wicked at the gates of the righteous” (Proverbs 14:19).
As we consider this portion of the Word of God, we need to remember that it is a proverb, and not an axiom out of Euclid. There is never a possible instance of a triangle having less or more than three sides. When your geometry teachers asks you if a triangle can ever have four sides, the answer cannot be sometimes.
And so when we look at what this proverb says, which is that the evil bow down to the good, and the wicked bow before the gates of the righteous, counter-examples crowd into our minds. In our unbelief, we always tend to focus on Haman building the gallows for Mordecai, and never the spectacle of Haman hanging from those same gallows.
This is the kind of proverb that we should evaluate by the video, and never by the snapshot. The contest between good and evil is a story, and it happens over time, and—as it happens—it may be that God has written a pot boiler. Perhaps you have had the experience of reading a thriller, and right when it gets really intense, you are tempted to flip to the back pages to see if the main character is still alive. Because at the moment it didn’t look like he could be.
God certainly loves cliffhangers. If the evil bowed before the good constantly, in some non-stop fashion, there would be no room for faith. The good guys win, Scripture tells us, but there are many chapters when this does not seem to be the case. David has to run from Saul for years. Abraham wandered in tents, not inheriting anything. The early Christians scattered after the martyrdom of Stephen.
We must remember to let God tell us what kind of story we are in. We are in the kind where the good guys win.
