From shootings to terrorist attacks to failed coup attempts and more, this has been an exceptionally difficult month to watch the news. Even just yesterday we saw yet another unspeakable tragedy unfold in Baton Rouge with three police officers slain.

In the face of such overwhelming evils, people tend to wonder how a good God could allow such atrocities to take place on his watch.

Is he asleep at the wheel? Does he care? Is he even there?

It would certainly seem as though hopelessness and cynicism are the only two paths we can possibly choose in light of such reckless hate, but maybe there is another—maybe there is hope.

In services at well-known megachurch Willow Creek this past weekend, teaching pastor Steve Carter shared a heap of insight so good that it bears repeating here in answer to the question we've set out with: "Is evil winning?"

Steve taught his message from 2 Timothy 3, a chapter from a letter written by Paul which begins with a sobering charge:

"But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days."

Terrible times indeed. So terrible, in fact, that it would seem as though evil had the upper hand.

But it doesn't.

No, evil has already been defeated, but it has yet to be completely destroyed.

Our enemy just doesn't know how to lose well.

All you have to do is look back in history at how World War II played out to see how this could be true.

On June 6, 1944, 24,000 Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy, France in the largest seaborne invasion ever—an invasion now known as D Day.

Interestingly enough, though the war would not end for almost another year after that invasion—a year full of horrific bloodshed and tragic deaths—historians would say that it was on D-Day that Germany was defeated.

The eleven months and two days between D Day and V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day) were the "last days" of the war, the days between the initial invasion and the final victory of the invading forces over the evil of Nazi Germany.

We live in the "last days" between Christ's initial invasion into our world and his second coming.

When the Allies had Germany on the ropes during WWII, the Nazis only sped up their Jewish extermination program, hell-bent on causing as much death and destruction as they possibly could before their inevitable defeat.

It is much the same in the case of evil today.

Our enemy knows he's on the ropes—that his days are numbered—so he is doing everything in his power to destroy as much as he can before he himself is finally destroyed.

Therein lies a piece of the powerful hope in the message of Christianity—evil's days are numbered.

That's why Revelation 21 contains such an incredible picture of what it will be like when Christ returns to destroy the evil he has already conquered:

"He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."

As the saying goes, "the night is darkest just before the dawn," and it's pretty dark right now.

But there is hope even in the midst of overwhelming darkness.

All that being said, I want to leave you with a sort of analogy from one of my all-time favorite movies, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

In the scene below, the men of Rohan have their backs up against a wall (quite literally) in their mountain fortress and are being besieged by the armies of evil. But just when it seems that all is lost and evil is about to claim the victory, hope arrives with the dawn and the tide begins to turn.

If you can't see the clip on your device, click here.

To view Steve Carter's message in it's entirety, click here.