Trust In The Lord

TRUST IN THE LORD (PSALM 37)

An article titled “Are You Evil? Profiling That Which Is Truly Wicked” talks about Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Cognitive Science who has developed a sort of checklist for determining whether someone is demonic. This is his definition of evil:

“To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of "causing considerable harm to others," Bringsjord says. Finally, "and most importantly," he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing.

On my way to deciding the 10 psalms to preach, I read a number of renowned websites to determine what psalms do others consider are the top ten psalms. Psalms 37 appears on half of the websites. What is distinct about Psalms 37. It is 40 verses long, the eight longest psalm in the Bible. It is an acrostic psalm, in that it follows the Hebrew alphabet to begin a sentence over two to four verses. As in real life, there is a lot of bad people in Psalms 37 – from evildoers and workers of iniquity (v 1), to the wicked (v 12) and sinners/transgressors (v 38).

So we ask these questions: Who on earth is in charge of the free world? What chance do good people have against bad people, wicked people or evil people? What is our attitude when the world is not right?

The Envious: Foresee Inequality

1 Do not fret because of evil men or be envious of those who do wrong; 2 for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away. 3 Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. 4 Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. 5 Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: 6 He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun. 7 Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when men succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes. 8 Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; do not fret — it leads only to evil. 9 For evil men will be cut off, but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land.

Here are some quotes on bad men and good men:

“What is an evil man? The man is evil who coerces obedience to his private ends, destroys beauty, produces pain, extinguishes life.” Jack Vance

“One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up.” C. S. Lewis

“If fortune makes a wicked man prosperous and a good man poor, there is no need to wonder. For the wicked regard wealth as everything, the good as nothing. And the good fortune of the bad cannot take away their badness, while virtue alone will be enough for the good.” Sallust

“Wicked men obey for fear, but the good for love.” Aristotle

“A wicked man in prayer may lift up his hands, but he cannot lift up his face. Thomas Watson

“If you are suffering from a bad man's injustice, forgive him lest there be two bad men.” Augustine

“If a wicked man seems to have peace at death, it is not from the knowledge of his happiness, but from the ignorance of his danger. Thomas Watson

“You can't keep a good man down or a bad one up.”

The verbs “fret” (vv 1, 7, 8 of 11 times in the Bible) AND “envious” are indirect jussive commands because of the negation “not.” The first and most famous use of the word refers to Cain, who was very wroth/angry (Gen 4:5, 6), twice leading to Abel’s murder. The verb “envious” is a generational sin in Abraham’s family when Jacob’s wife Rachel was envious of her sister Leah (Gen 30:1), and then the two sisters’ sons were envious of Joseph to the point of plotting to murder their brother Joseph. Both fret and envy led to murder. Arthur Chapman wrote, “Envy is like a fly that passes all the body’s sounder parts, and dwells upon the sores.”