[375 words]
“Behold, he travails with wickedness, and he conceives mischief and brings forth falsehood. He has dug a pit and hollowed it out, and has fallen into the hole which he made. His mischief will return upon his own head, and his violence will descend upon his own pate”(Ps. 7:14-16).
View carefully these three metaphoric pictures of evil and watch its horrid story unfold.
First, evil is a terrible birth of a sinister idea. “Behold, he travails with wickedness, and he conceives mischief and brings forth falsehood” (Ps. 7:14). As we picture a birth, it is usually within the confines of a beautiful beginning, but here we see a birth that is a tragic ending. There is the conception, the development, and the awful coming to life of evil. Sin is born of evil parents; its life will do the work of evil. The writer names the child “falsehood.” He is hurt and devastated by the child (see James 1:14,15).
Second, evil is sometimes expressed as a vicious trap, as a pit that is dug for others. “He has dug a pit and hollowed it out…” (Ps. 7:15). The pit is something like what a hunter or trapper would use to snare a wild animal. The designer of the trap, however, has dug the pit for a person, not an animal. The pit is created to hurt, destroy, and deceive.
Third, it is a boomerang, an evil deed that returns to plague the person who committed it. “His mischief will return upon his own head, and his violence will descend upon his own pate” (Ps. 7:16). Sin has a way of swiftly returning and landing at the feet of the person who sends it out. God is the hound of heaven who pursues us with His love until He wins us back. Sin is the hound of evil that relentlessly tracks us down, enslaves us, haunts us, and scars us.
Key Thought: The story of evil has three chapters: Falsehood rises up out of a wicked birth; it becomes, very quickly, a vicious trap for some unsuspecting soul to fall into; and it sends out a stream of pain that comes back again and again to whoever embraces it.
Eddie Cloer
via Ashdown Church of Christ
Ashdown, AR