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In a world this bad can faith take it? There's no doubt that this is a wild and wicked world though there is much good in it. Paul painted the Gentile world in the most somber colors (Romans 1:18-32) and made it sound like there was no uprightness in it at all. Yet in chapter 2 he speaks of Gentiles whose good lives made it clear that the truth was written on their hearts. So it's all right to say the world's "filled with wickedness" as long as we know it isn't "filled" with wickedness. God is at work in it.

Still, it's an awful place and as a single human family we can descend to abysmal depths. We shouldn't pretend this doesn't matter. We shouldn't even try to act like it doesn't matter. It's all right to weep or rage or both over the awful darkness in us but there's a limit to which we can go with gospel approval. It isn't for the church to fall into despair because of the entrenched evil and the various powers that under gird it.

Colossians 2:15 says that the church's Lord and Master met all those powers at the hanging tree we know as Calvary. There, where evil, cruelty, fear, ingratitude and blind indifference raged the Christ triumphed and made a spectacle of them all. So here he comes striding through the centuries, picking up the things that worry us so and the losses that devastate us and the besetting sins that dismay us and he assures us that he knows all about them. He picks them up, each one of them, takes them seriously and without glibness assures us, "Yes, they look invincible and indestructible don't they? But take heart, I've dealt with them all. Big and small, obvious and sly, stubborn and spasmodic--there's none of them I haven't dealt with. Trust me, nothing can stop us."

If we didn't have truths like Colossians 2:15 we'd live a nightmare. Having truths like Colossians 2:15 our faith doesn't know how to quit. Can faith take it? Why of course it can. "This is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith." (1 John 5:4)