(Preached at First Baptist, Pauls Valley, OK on Sunday evening, July 20, 2014)
When most of us think of “wickedness”, we tend to think of certain specific “evil deeds.” Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who was in the news recently for having murdered numerous babies who were accidentally born during botched abortions, may come to mind. They reported that just before he killed one baby, he joked to his assistants that the child was “big enough to walk to the bus.” Thankfully, he was indeed convicted of murder. What he did was absolute wickedness, make no mistake about it!
But that kind of picture of wickedness also misses the point somewhat, because in many of our minds it serves to excuse US from any kind of responsibility for wickedness — surely none of US have been involved in that kind of evil, right? But in fact, if the truth be known, each of us does indeed manifest wickedness every day.
I want us to turn to Psalm 10, where it speaks of “the wicked” in :3. Following that verse, we see a description of some of the qualities of the wicked person. Some of them are what we might expect. But others may be more surprising — and some of us would have to admit, after studying this scripture, that we are much more wicked than we realized. Let’s look together for a few minutes at “Four Surprising Signs of Wickedness.”
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