Strength stops Evil

Suppose you ran into a person being robbed by a group of armed men. Whether or not you stop it depends on if you believe you can. It has little to do with your morality. You wouldn’t be justified in walking away and doing nothing, yet most people will. Not because they are bad, but because they lack the strength to stop evil from happening.

When Jesus said, “The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light” (Luke 16:8), and “The kingdom of God suffers violence and the violent take it by force” (Matthew 11:12), this is what he was trying to help us see. For some reason, we’ve associated the need for strength and aggression with being evil. We somehow think that being easy-going makes us good. And yes, in an ideal world, you shouldn’t have to be confrontational all the time.

However, the truth is that to be good, you need to be strong. And that means you must be capable of “violence”. To be good, the evil man must know that a worse fate than he is planning for you will befall him if he tries to harm you or anyone else in your presence.

This is not a call to “violence”, but a reminder that there is nothing wrong with being capable of it. Let’s be clear: “Violence” here doesn’t always mean hitting someone. It means being stronger mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and sometimes physically—so that when evil approaches, it is met with a kind of resistance that damages its will to live.

Evil prevailed because good men did nothing. Good men did nothing because those good men were weak. It takes strength to will the world you want into existence. Nothing answers to morality until the moral man shows strength.