When What is Vile is Honored Among Men

Psalm 12 and the Vile Society

Well, I'm going to do something rather unusual this evening. Turn to Psalm 12. Sorry, Pastor Fry, you just didn't get it right last time. I'm just going to have to do some damage control here. It was Psalm 12 last time, was it?

No, I don't know. Did you do Psalm 12? Yeah, I heard you do Psalm 12. I heard Psalm 12. I know I heard Psalm 12. All right. I know that a few of you monitor some of the things that we do in the ministry at Alpha Omega.

Earlier this week, I posted a video, and I quoted the last verse of this psalm in that video, and I thought this evening, for those of you who did not see that video, I might reiterate a few of the points there and look a little more closely at this particular verse.

Psalm 12 .8 in the New American Standard says, The wicked strut about on every side when vileness is exalted among the sons of men. There are a number of different translations of this particular verse.

Literally, the Hebrew says, The evil all around are walking when what is either worthless or vile, both are possible translations of this particular Hebrew term, is honored amongst the sons of men. And I have probably mentioned this verse three or four times over the past number of years, because no matter what we do, unless you live in a lead mine, unless you do not read a newspaper, or in my case, you don't have news feeds, I mean, that's sort of how you do newspapers these days for some of us.

Sorry to some of you other folks, but I can still get my regular news feeds wherever I am. If I was dependent upon a newspaper, I'd be in trouble, given all the traveling that I do. But be that as it may, unless you just cut yourself off from the world, you cannot help but be faced with a tremendous avalanche of news stories and happenings that cannot help but cause you to be deeply troubled at what is going on in our society.

And Monday morning, I listen each day to a webcast that I would highly recommend to you. Dr. Albert Moeller is the president of the Southern Seminary. I have frequently referred to Dr. Moeller as the smartest living Southern Baptist.

Cultural Decay, Marriage, and Sexual Ethics

And he is an amazing man. The amount of material that he reads in a week is just shocking. He must not sleep. That's the only way he could possibly do it, I would assume. He has about a 14 -15 minute program that I listen to each weekday morning called The Briefing.

And he basically reviews relevant news stories from a Christian worldview. It's very well worth the time to listen to it. But it can also be troubling because he made note of the fact that the Maryland House of Representatives had just last week voted in favor of what I call the profanation of marriage.

I cannot bring myself to utilize the oxymoron of gay marriage because it's a capitulation in essence to a complete redefinition of what marriage is. To me it's the same thing as saying the square circle.

It just doesn't work. But Maryland had done this, the seventh state to be going that direction. And just today I was listening and he was talking about an LA Times article talking about the inevitability of the national establishment of homosexual marriage in the United States.

So we had that and then he was also talking about that morning about an article that had appeared over the weekend in the New York Times that indicated that for the first time in the history of the United States for women between the ages of 20 and 30 that at this point in time now the majority of children being born to women in that age range are being born to unwed mothers.

So a majority of the next generation coming up, the norm for them will not be mommy and daddy. And this is not just amongst a particular ethnic group or anything else. This is just in general in our society.

The majority are being born to unwed mothers. And so I was pondering these things as I drove into my office on Monday morning. And it's not a long drive. I guess it's about the same distance as the Fry's after drive to get down here.

So it's not a long distance down 12th Street. I was going down 35th Avenue so you can't listen to too much at that particular point in time. But I was listening to News Talk Radio and the big story Monday morning was Sheriff Paul Babayu or whatever his name is in Pinal County and what was going on with him and his homosexual lover and all the rest of the stuff.

And of course as they were discussing it, the one thing you couldn't say about it was that it has anything to do with homosexuality. If he wants to do that, that's just fine, but there's other stuff. And I'm reaching for hair to pull out, but I can't find any.

And then they break into a newscast and one of the stories in the newscast is about the growing number of clinics, still small but growing, that are specifically designed to provide sex change hormone therapy to children.

And I'm not talking about teenagers here. I'm talking 5, 6, and 7 year olds who become convinced, obviously without any prompting from mommy and daddy, that they were born with the wrong body. And by the time I got to my office, I had to do something and that's why I recorded a video.

And one of the verses I looked at was this verse in Psalm 12. Because it just seems that as we look at the acceleration of the degradation of Western culture as a whole, that we are faced rather regularly with the question how does the person in whose heart there is a love for God's truth and God's law and therefore a recognition that every single thing that I had been faced with that morning from Paul Babayou to the parents who would introduce gender confusion into the minds of a 5 year old to the politicians voting for the profanation of marriage to the fact that you cannot even in most circles in our country today identify homosexuality as a moral evil without yourself being identified as a person who might be engaged in something that is morally evil.

You're engendering hatred. You're being narrow minded. You're not being inclusive. You're being intolerant. All this stuff we hear constantly all around us. And when we look at this verse, I want us to think about what it says.

The wicked strut about on every side when vileness is exalted among the sons of men. Now let's make sure we know exactly what the verse is saying. It is the standard term for the evil. The evil men. And the term halakh means to walk.

In Greek it's peripateo. Have you ever heard of a peripatetic philosopher? It's a philosopher that would teach his philosophy as he walked about. I suppose when you were teaching philosophy if you walked about your room, Mr. Callahan, you would have been a peripatetic philosopher.

I tend to be a peripatetic teacher. When I teach my seminary classes, if this was a seminary class about 10 -15 minutes in, I'd probably be teaching from back there someplace. I just like to walk around.

I'd also teach some of my students in seminary from surfing the web while I'm talking too because I'll be walking by to see what you're doing. So I'm peripatetic. That's the Greek word. But halakh means to walk about.

And that's the term that's being used here. And it's in the sense of the reason that the NIV and NASB and ESV and others come up with a strut about or thing like that. It's that they're going all over the place.

On every side. And yet these are the evil. These are evil men. And so the verse is describing a situation in a society where men who are evil don't care that people know they're evil. They are advertising they're evil.

And in a godly society where there is more of an influence from God's truth, evil people tend to, well, they hide in the darkness or they don't want people to have knowledge of the activities that are theirs.

There was a day when that was the case in most Western societies. But what has happened that would allow the wicked to strut about? To walk openly on every, it's not just in certain areas that they're walking, but they surround us.

They're all around us. And that's sort of how I've been feeling. They're everywhere. They're at the highest levels of government. They're at the lowest levels of government. They're on the street corners.

They're everywhere. And they feel no shame. Because, well, that's only something in our society. The only people who are supposed to feel shame today are us. I don't know if you've noticed, but this has become something that the homosexuals are doing now, is that when they gather in groups and if they're protesting somebody or if someone dares to say something, they yell, shame, shame, shame, at other people.

I think that the reason they do that is because they feel it so much themselves. They're constantly suppressing the knowledge of God. They know that what they're doing is evil. They're projecting it onto others.

But it's become what they're doing back in 2008 when Proposition 8 was being debated in California. This was back when people actually thought that the people could vote on things that would be relevant.

This woman showed up at some rally, and she was opposed to homosexuality, and they roughed her up, and they're yelling at her, shame, shame. This is not something overly new. It's just been over the past number of years.

But they've been doing this, and it just seems like all around us, these gay pride marches and things like that, you're not allowed to stand on the street corner and yell, shame, at them. You'll be carted away.

But let somebody say something against that, and oh, shame on you. What has happened to allow this to happen in the verse? Why are the wicked strutting about on every side? Well, something has happened.

Something has happened. When vileness is exalted or honored among the sons of men, that's the condition that needs to be fulfilled that would allow not godly men to walk openly, but wicked men to strut about and to be honored in their wickedness is when vileness is exalted among the sons of men.

Now, you might have an alternate translation note in your Bible. Some Bibles will have that. And the term that is used here, Zuloth, can be translated as worthlessness. That which has no value or worth, that is a possibility.

But a number of the sources, a number of the translations as well, in light of the context, go with that which is vile. That which is vile. That's not a term we use a lot because, again, it requires some level of moral foundation to identify something as vile.

And, again, those types of terms are becoming inappropriate in our society. But something has happened. The psalmist is talking about a situation and we are not the first people to experience a society where this has happened.

This has happened many times over the history of mankind. You can read Genesis 18 and 19 if you want to have a good example of something like this. And Sodom and Gomorrah. So it's happened before. But here, the psalmist is talking about a situation where vileness is no longer something that is that automatically brings the proper opprobrium, the disgust of people in a society.

Instead, it is, well, one translation is exalted, but I think maybe an even, maybe a better way of fitting it together is honored. When that which is vile is honored among the sons of men. Now, we know that, for example, in our neighboring state of California, passed into law that in the public school system, been mandated that in the curriculum, in the social studies curriculums of California schools, there needs to be appropriate attention paid to all of the positive contributions of homosexuals to California state history.

And the reality is, we face a situation where homosexuals do not any longer simply want tolerance. In fact, to be tolerant of them is to oppose them from their perspective now. They don't want tolerance.

And they don't want merely acceptance. They want and demand that their lifestyle and behavior be viewed as a positive moral value. And they will identify anyone who disagrees with that as having themselves negative moral values.

It is a complete redefinition of morality. It is, in fact, taking that which is morally vile and honoring it. It's turning it into its opposite. Just as what's happening with marriage. It's turning it into its opposite.

In marriage, you have man and woman. They are not the same. You do not fall in love with a mirror image of yourself. Loving a mirror image of yourself does not change you. It is the difference in that man for the woman, that woman for the man.

That forces you to change and to remove selfishness and to live sacrificially. It's not necessary when you fall in love with a mirror image of yourself. And, in fact, I would submit to you that there can be no true Christian love in that context at all.

So it bothers me when I hear even Christian leaders, Oh, I don't doubt that you love each other. No, I would say you lust each other. And you may be willing to engage in certain levels of self-sacrifice.

But don't call that love in the Christian context. Because it's not. And the sad thing is one of the reasons that it was said in the article that I made mention of briefly in the LA Times that it's inevitable that this will become the law of land over time is because of the fact that the youngest generation right now is so radically for the redefinition of marriage.

What is it about the young generation where there is no recognition any longer of that which is vile? Well, certainly it's films and television and culture. It's been an onslaught to try to change minds on that issue.

And same morning I forgot to mention this. I also heard the statistic that in my generation 65 of people identify themselves as Christians. Next generation, 28%. Next generation, 8%. 65 of my generation was never a Christian.

And so it's nominal Christianity, it's hypocritical Christianity that's probably resulted in the 28 and the 8. But the point is this is what's coming. And when these folks vote they will vote for people who will enact legislation that represents their worldview and the Christian worldview is rapidly becoming a very minority perspective.

And what's the result? Well, when vileness is honored there has been a fundamental switching of light and darkness, good and evil. And that's what we're seeing right now. It's described, Apostle Paul put it very, very well when he talked about men exchanging the truth for a lie.

They twist the creator-creation relationship and in their rebellion against God they choose to twist the very aspects of creation that represent God's sovereignty. God makes us male and female so what is one of the most outrageous ways to attack God's lordship over our lives but to fundamentally alter the way He has made us.

And so we take 5 and 6 years old and begin introducing foreign hormones into their bodies that will forever make them sterile. They'll never be able to have children of their own. At 5 and 6. That is evil.

That's child abuse on any level. And yet the world honors the enlightened parents who would engage in such activity. There isn't any argument in Psalm 12 about what is vile. Because you see, the argument in Psalm 12 is we know.

We know. These people have to get together in rallies and they have to constantly pump each other up to continue that energy-draining, life-sapping activity of constantly suppressing the fact that they're made in the image of God.

And they're cutting themselves off from the only source of true life. And so it's very easy. It's very easy when we consider these things and when we see the fulfillment the wicked are strutting about on every side because vileness is being honored amongst the sons of men in our society.

It's very easy to become jaded. It's very easy to become angry. I think there's a proper righteous indignation when we think about the abuse of children. Because you are abusing a child to purposefully, purposefully deprive them of the proper models that God designed them to have in a mother and a father.

You're abusing them. And you're abusing them to introduce gender confusion to them. Yes, it's rebellion and there's a proper righteous anger but at the same time we can't let that become something that causes us not to even be in a position to be able to speak forth the gospel to these people.

Because what they need is the gospel. And it's very easy for us to become centered upon ourselves to just, well I'm just, we're just going to go off and start our own little enclave someplace. That was what the monasteries were about.

Get out of the world! God's people are called to live in a world that is opposed to Him and His ways. And it can be more or less opposed but it's always opposed. Tremendous change in a very brief period of time.

We respond to those things. That is one of the reasons that we need to be here on a regular basis to be exposed to the Word of God. We need that example. It's not an easy cut and dried here's the steps you do it.

As more and more perversity appears around us, we need to be spending all that much more time looking at that which is pure and good lest we ourselves become apathetic about God's law. We become apathetic about the fact that these people that are engaging in these activities they are destroying themselves.

The end of their ways is death for themselves and their children and their society. And yeah, we're part of that society. It's loss of life. No death. No life. Death is all they can have. It's just the way it is.

Because they're cutting themselves off from the only source of true life, and that is God. So, this verse speaks loudly to what we see. It comes into my mind often. But hopefully when we think about it, we also recognize that this same Word calls us to faithfulness in the midst of a perverse generation.

We need to pray for one another. Because we all face this in manifest different ways. We all face this every single day. And yet we want to be clear witnesses. We want to be bold witnesses. May it cause us to be proper witnesses.

But may we pray, Lord, give me the wisdom to know what to say. To know where that line is between compromise and not having speech seasoned with grace. Where is that line? That's a difficult thing to know at times.

It takes maturity. It takes wisdom. And God is the only source.