Reading:
Psalm 12
The
Bible is no magic answer book. In other words, It doesn't just make
everything better. It doesn't even promise to do that. In
fact, the Bible makes plain that the walk of faith is just that, a
walk of faith.
Psalm 119: 123 describes what the walk of faith often looks like.
My
eyes fail, looking for your salvation, looking for your righteous
promise.
Yesterday1
as our church participated in 40
Days for Life at an abortion clinic in St. Petersburg praying,
there were moments I felt as if we were up against a veritable
Goliath in our stand against abortion—as if you could hear the
enemy jeering at our inability to accomplish anything against this
horrific scourge in our land. Psalm
12 describes a time like this, a time when our eyes may fail—that
we feel completely spent in our ability to hope any longer for the
Lord's redemption.
This
psalm has a clear structure that can be described as A-B-C-B-A. The
first verse (A1)
corresponds to the last verse (vs. 8) (A2);
verses 2-3 (B1)
correspond to verses 6-7 (B2);
and verse 5 stands in the middle (C) as what God is going to do about
it! Seeing
this structure can help us understand what God is communicating to us
in this psalm.
First
the psalmist describes the way things seem at times like this.
Help,
LORD, for the godly are no more; the faithful have vanished from
among men. (Psalm 12:1)
What
evidence is there for this? Corresponding
to this vanishing of the faithful we find:
The
wicked freely strut about when what is vile is honored among men.
(Psalm
12:8)
While
the righteous appear to have vanished, the wicked are highly visible.
The
psalm is not telling us that the righteous have literally been
eliminated. We know the psalmist was still around. This is poetry.
It is speaking from the perspective of the earth and sees how bad it
looks. But
the walk of faith is all about trusting God despite the appearances.
This psalm describes what we face in our own country today: The
wicked are freely strutting about because what is vile is honored
among men.
Our
culture honors sex; not sex in marriage as designed by God, but sex
freely, often and on demand...and now underwritten by the government.
So the Sandra Flukes of our culture unashamedly stand up and demand
that the public subsidizes her escapades and the consequences
thereof. Those who engage in unnatural relations demonstrate on
parade floats caricatures of their immorality. (For more on that
topic see A
Gospel Response to St. Petersburg's Gay Pride Festival.)
Secondly,
the psalmist speaks of the brick wall we seemingly keep running into:
2Everyone
lies to his neighbor; their flattering lips speak with deception.
3May
the LORD cut off all flattering lips and every boastful tongue that
says, "We will triumph with our tongues; we own our lips—who
is our master?"
(Psalm 12:2-3)
One
strategy to attack the truth is to just keep saying the same thing
over and over again hoping people will gradually begin to believe it.
That is what we face in the abortion debate. What once would have
seemed as absurd as corralling up Jews and sending them to
concentration camps, now abortion is talked about as if it is a
reasonable side to a discussion. Just last week, Vice President Joe
Biden said,
My
religion defines who I am. And I've been a practicing Catholic my
whole life. And it has particularly informed my social doctrine.
Catholic social doctrine talks about
taking care of those who — who can't take care of themselves,
people who need help. With regard to —
with regard to abortion, I accept my church's position on abortion …
Life begins at conception.
That's the church's judgment. I accept
it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout
Christians and Muslims and Jews and — I just refuse to impose that
on others, unlike my friend here, the
congressman.
Now
let's think about that just a second... let's apply that logic to
something very similar. His religion
also says that murder is wrong, and that terrorist attacks are wrong.
However, will he impose his church's position “on
devout Christians, Jews or Muslims”
that want to kill their neighbors? If a
baby is a life (and he claims he believes that), then what is the
difference? There is none. So
I am perplexed as to how his
idea of Catholic social doctrine
has taught him anything about how to take care of those who can't
take care of themselves. Surely his
Catholic (and human) doctrine teaches him that these babies in the
womb are unable to take care of themselves. The fact that they can't
take care of themselves gives abortion advocates justification for
eliminating them. (They call that not being “viable life”.) Who
next will it be okay to kill? The elderly who can't take care of
themselves? The disabled? Are these the kind of people we want in
control of our health care?
However,
corresponding to verses 2-3 and the lies that the wicked tell are
verses 6-7 and the truth of God.
6And
the words of the LORD are flawless, like silver refined in a furnace
of clay, purified seven times. 7O LORD, you will keep us
safe and protect us from such people forever. (Psalms
12:6-7)
The
lies that seem like a fire hose in our faces spewing from our culture
today will not stand in the end. There
is a flawless word that will triumph, not the lying lips as they
suppose. Why? Because of what it is the center of this psalm.
5"Because
of the oppression of the weak and the groaning of the needy, I will
now arise," says the LORD. "I will protect them from those
who malign them."
There
are none more oppressed in our society today than the unborn child.
Today one in every two African American children is aborted. The
number of children who have been eliminated through abortion is
likely in excess of 60 million. It is injustice in every sense of the
word. The Lord hears the groaning of the child in the womb as he/she
burns and as arms and limbs are cut off (pardon the graphic but
accurate description). The Lord hears
and will arise to protect them.
Though
our eyes fail looking for this deliverance, looking for this
righteous promise to be fulfilled, we can rest assured that the word
of the Lord will ultimately prevail. So
we must continue to pray, we must continue to speak up for those who
cannot speak for themselves (Proverbs
31:8), we must continue to rescue those
being led away to death (Proverbs
24:11-12).
Love the Gospel, Live the Gospel,
Advance the Gospel,
Jerry
1Written
Monday, October 15, 2012.
