Tobit 12:7 "Do good and evil will not overtake you."

This seems almost like a false platitude, something that people say but that isn't always true. After all, bad things happen to good people all the time, as just came up in yesterday's post. But it really is true that if we do good evil cannot overtake us, it's just that the truth of it rests on a proper understanding of evil, and in distinguishing the evil outside of us from the evil within us.

To God, the greatest evil is for us to lose our souls, to not be with Him in eternity. Everything He does and allows is aimed at saving us (individually and collectively) from that fate. So when He allows bad things to happen, we can be assured that there is a greater purpose, that in some way even these bad things, things we tend to think of as evil, like death and suffering, are meant to lead someone, somewhere, by some path not visible to us, to salvation. God knows that the devil is trying to lead us into sin, and He knows that since the Fall we have invited evil into the world and into our lives. Jesus came to save us from the effects of this evil, and He broke the devil's hold over all of us, but we still have the ability to choose evil, that is, to sin. When we do, we can always be forgiven if we repent, but each time we sin we are opening ourselves up to the possibility that evil will overtake us, that this will be the time we do not repent and lose our souls.

Thus, Archangel Raphael's advice here is completely accurate. If we do good, and do not sin, evil will have no foothold in our lives, it cannot possibly overtake us. That does not mean we will not suffer through many bad things, we always will because evil has a great foothold in this world. For those doing good, however, the sufferings from this outside evil are crosses which gain us Heaven through Jesus Christ, they are a blessing.

The evil that can overtake us is only the evil that we let in, not the evil  solely outside of us. That outer evil can hurt our bodies, and even take our earthly lives from us, but it cannot take our souls away from God.