
These are verses from Psalm 7, a strong song of feeling by King David. These verses surely describe so many unrepentant people in the depths of evil:
12 If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword;
he has bent and readied his bow;
13 he has prepared for him his deadly weapons,
making his arrows fiery shafts.
14 Behold, the wicked man conceives evil
and is pregnant with mischief
and gives birth to lies.
15 He makes a pit, digging it out,
and falls into the hole that he has made.
16 His mischief returns upon his own head,
and on his own skull his violence descends.
My wife and I have been watching “Sharpe” about a doughty band of English sharp shooters in HRH’s Army, under the command of Lord Wellington, fighting the tyrant Napoleon. The fighting portrayed looks like these verses and they are the tragedy of man who has cut himself off from his Lord. In this regard so many names come to mind from man’s history: Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Jim Jones, Jeffrey Epstein…and those who followed them: “…and on his own skull his violence descends” is graphic and historically true. Yet, note who metes out the just punishment upon “the wicked man”: God (vs. 12) and the wicked man himself (vs. 15)! We do not administer the judgment of punishment, the Lord does! We don’t or should not because, “Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord. I will repay.” (Genesis 32: 35) Now we do need to do something: speak and fight with the Sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God for the truth: “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them”, Eph. 5: 11. And so speaking for the truth will get us into trouble: Ps. 7: 1,
O Lord my God, in you do I take refuge;
save me from all my pursuers and deliver me,
2 lest like a lion they tear my soul apart,
rending it in pieces, with none to deliver.
The Lord will deliver us through, not around, the wicked men, sometimes they will hurt us and He will punish.
In all of this there is great temptation. C. S. Lewis in his fiction, The Screwtape Letters, in Letter 10, Screwtape, a senior tempter from hell, advices in his nephew Wormwood, that one of the ways to get “your patient” to fall from God is the use of the future, as this time at it’s least real and where all temptation lies. Screwtape advises:
“…we want a man hag-ridden by the Future — haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see.
Always thinking about how we can avert evil and punish the wicked, and we end up wicked men. Visions of an imminent heaven or hell on earth is the stuff, left or right, 24/7 in all our media and then our ‘faith’ is dependent on our schemes, not the righteousness of God. Our faith is from God.
I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness,
and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High.(vs. 17)
The Word of the Lord also encourages, Psalm 37: 7-8:
Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him;
fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way,
over the man who carries out evil devices!8 Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath!
Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.
And the only way to resist in the slough of temptation to fret or wield punishment is “His righteousness”, that is Jesus Christ, who died for sinners: all of us.
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