Dennis Tuuri

# CLEANED TRANSCRIPT

27 years ago on January 23rd, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States of America handed down its infamous Roe versus Wade decision. For 27 years then, abortion on demand has been pretty much what we’ve had here in America. And for most of those past 27 years, actually 25 or 24, I believe, a significant portion of Christ’s Church in America have used the occasion of the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision to speak to the awful sinfulness of abortion, the murder of pre-born infants.

In 1984, the Erskine Presbyterian Church in Tyler, Texas, published a liturgy of malediction to be used in worship services on January 22nd, 1984. We here at RCC believed that part of the appropriate response and the part of the body of Christ convened at Reformation Covenant Church was to use that liturgy and we’ve been using it in some form for the past 6 years on the Sunday closest to the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision.

Now, of course, there’s lots of other activities going on. There’s a rally for life supported by Right to Life at the state capital that began at 1:00 in Salem. I believe at 2:00 OCA is having a rally in support of their initiative petition to outlaw abortion in the state except for particular cases. And I want this morning to help you understand why we’re using a form of that liturgy of malediction that I spoke about, that was first published in 1984, why we think it’s important and proper to do so.

Now first a few words about terminology. A malediction is in essence the opposite of a benediction. And if you think about it a little bit, the meaning of the two words can be understood from the words themselves. A benediction is a bene, a good word. A benediction is a good word, something that’s said that invokes good upon a person. We speak of benefits, for instance, and that comes to the same root word as a conferring of a good thing.

So a benediction is what we do here at church every Sunday. At the end of the service, we pronounce the ironic benediction—good words to the congregation that hears and obeys and repents of their sins and walks in newness of life. The opposite of a benediction would be a malediction. Mala, the different beginning part of that word there, a prefix I guess, is the word for bad. A malediction is a bad word. Mala—malignant, malpractice, malfeasance—all kinds of other terms can come to our minds there. But the important part is that prefix mal means bad or evil, as opposed to benevolent. We speak of somebody who is malevolent, who has malevolent purposes in mind, evil purposes. So in the same way that the congregation hears the benediction of the words of God, so also in the case of liturgies of malediction, sentences or pronouncements of bad words or cursings are invoked or placed upon a person in accordance with God’s word.

Now in neither case—the benediction or the malediction—is autonomy to be exercised. In other words, we may only bless or pronounce as blessed those whom God has told us to bless. And we may only curse or pronounce as cursed only those whom God has told us clearly in his scriptures are to be accursed. We’ll talk about this a little later as we get into Psalm 10. But you’ll notice there that the wicked man blesses the covetous whom the Lord abhors or hates.

You see, he was issuing a benediction to the covetous in autonomy, not according to the word of God, according to his own thoughts. God’s word for the covetous is that he’s cursed unless he repents of that covetousness. So God hates. We want to make sure we don’t exercise benedictions or maledictions autonomously apart from the word of God.

Additionally, there is no magical power in what we as a church do in either benediction or malediction. And yet there is a substance and effect to it as the believing and obeying congregation leaves the place of congregation or convocation with God’s benediction and power from it resting upon them. So we pray that God’s special curses have been poured out on the disobedient and rebellious specified in a liturgy of malediction according to the word of God.

Now one other term here that we should explain a little bit. Another word used to describe the liturgy is one of imprecation. Imprecation. This word imprecation means simply to pray to God and to pray for God to curse or to work harm to another person in accordance with his word. The word is used as one of the classifications of the psalms. And so for instance, when you read classifications of the book of the Psalms, you’ll see that some of the psalms are characterized as imprecatory psalms—psalms in which there are imprecations, prayers that God would work a particular curse to a particular person.

I was looking at a manuscript that Tony Tosti has been working on for a number of years now on the imprecatory psalms. And I don’t remember, I don’t know if Tony wrote it or somebody else wrote this part, but anyway, they pointed out rather accurately that there are really no purely imprecatory psalms. There are psalms that contain imprecations within them. No psalm is totally given over to a prayer for cursing against somebody. There’s more to psalms than that. But many psalms have particular verses or sets of verses that contain an imprecation or a prayer that God would deal harshly and decisively with wicked people in the land.

Now we have been reading one of the psalms that contains an imprecation in it for the past couple of weeks as we have dealt with the sin of pride in the beginning of our series on the seven deadly sins. And so I thought that in the providence of God, he’s brought us to what the Christian Action Council has called Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. What’s the terminology they’ve used for this annual commemoration asking for God to deal with abortionists in the land and also affirming life. God has brought us to that particular Sunday in the context of the series of sermons on the seven deadly sins.

And so this afternoon, we’re going to continue really in that series and talk about the relationship of the seven deadly sins to abortion and specifically the sin of pride to abortion and what that tells us.

Now, for that reason then, and because Psalm 10 is the one psalm we’ve been using to talk about pride and the seven deadly sins, and also because it contains an imprecation, I’ve decided to use it once more for our sermon scripture today.

Now while the focus of today’s service is on the liturgy of malediction that we will be performing prior to the closing song, I do want to spend a few minutes first explaining what we’ll be doing, why we are doing it, the biblical basis of it, and in so doing touch briefly at a couple of points that are very important for us to keep in mind from Psalm 10.

So let’s turn to Psalm 10 now. And as you can tell from your outlines, what we’re going to do is first have a little overview of Psalm 10, making sure we understand what that Psalm is all about and then drawing out some application of Psalm 10 to what we’re talking about in terms of a liturgy of malediction for abortionists. So if you can turn in your Bibles to Psalm 10, we’ll spend some time now going over it.

First, just a generalized outline for you. I believe that what we have in Psalm 10 is that the first verse is a summary statement that can be applied to lots of situations. A summary statement. And then verse two contains a summary statement that is more specific. The first summary statement is rather general. Verse number two gives us a specific summary statement of what he’ll address specifically in Psalm 10, and that consists—the first half of verse two—as a summary statement of the problem that the psalmist is addressing. And I will use David as the author here. David authored Psalm 9. Psalm 10 is connected with Psalm 9 and I think that he also is the author of Psalm 10.

So David gives us in verse two a specific summary statement dealing first with the problem in the first half of the verse and then in the second half of the verse the prayer. So he says: “The wicked and his pride persecute the poor.” That’s a summary statement of what will then be expounded throughout the psalm. And then he prays. He says: “Let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined.” And that’s a summary statement of the prayer of the psalmist for that particular man.

And then we have an expansion in verses 3 to 11 of the problem. The summary statement is fleshed out and we see a much broader picture of the man that is being addressed here, the wicked man and who he is and what he does. And then in verses 12 to 15, we see the prayers expanded from the summary statement and we have more detail given there. And then the last three verses of the psalm—16, 17, and 18—contain an assurance of an answer from God in the positive to the prayer of the psalmist.

I might mention here by the way that Spurgeon has titled this psalm, Psalm 10, “The Cry of the Oppressed.” It’s a very descriptive title that would certainly meet with our needs today. And additionally, I might just mention in passing that Augustine saw Psalm 10 as a description of the wicked man that he characterized as antichrist. And so he said Psalm 10 really gives us a picture of the vilest of men.

And Luther in his comments on Psalm 10 said the same thing—it’s a great picture of the wickedness of man in his various manifestations over the years.

Okay, first the summary statement. As we said, verse one is a general statement. “Why standest thou afar off, O Lord? Why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?” Times of trouble—God isn’t seen as acting immediately to alleviate people from those times of trouble. And so the psalmist begins this prayer with a plaintive cry: “Why haven’t you attended to this thing?”

And I suppose after 27 years of abortion on demand, and after probably hundreds of years in this country of not seeing abortion treated criminally the way it should be treated, we can surely identify with the psalmist in this plaintive cry as we begin our service of malediction. “Why, oh Lord, has this continued so long?”

I mentioned there that it hasn’t just been the last 27 years in this country that’s been a problem. If you read the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade, you’ll find out that one of the reasons the justice gave for his finding and further his decision—the majority opinion said that the state of Texas wanted to assert that abortion was murder during the trial or during the case heard at the Supreme Court level—and yet the state of Texas treated abortion far differently than murders in the rest of its civil statute or criminal statutes.

I think if I remember correctly that the mother who put her child up for abortion so to speak received a very minimal if any criminal sentence from the Texas codes, and I think the abortionist himself only got like a fairly short period of time in jail. So, and that statute by the way went back to the middle of the 1800s in Texas. So for a long time—the point of all this is for a long time in this country, abortion has not been seen as murder, which the scriptures clearly teach it is.

Okay, so we ask: “How come, why so long?” And then David in verses two and following, as we said, gives a summary statement that is more specific. He says: “In these particular kinds of trouble, how come you haven’t intervened?” And then he gives a description of the trouble, a summary statement: “The wicked and his pride persecute the poor.”

Spurgeon said that in this summary statement in the first half of verse two, we have a description of the wicked person. A description both of his root and of his fruit. The root being his pride and the fruit of that evil root of pride being persecution of the poor. This summary statement says a great deal. The root of the wicked man, the base as it were, the base sin that leads him to persecute the poor is pride. According to this verse.

After last week’s sermon, Doug H. mentioned to me that we see repeatedly throughout the scriptures discussion of the proud man—that he persecutes or oppresses the poor in scripture. That’s certainly true. This statement is one of those sorts of statements where the wicked, the proud man persecutes the poor.

Now, many times when we read these sorts of statements, the term used for poor does not necessarily mean those who are economically or monetarily poor. It rather means in a depressed or powerless state as opposed to being high-blown or exalted like the proud man. The poor man is crushed down as it were. If the proud man can be likened by way of picture to a tower, then the poor man can be likened to a hole in the ground. He is defenseless. Everybody can walk on him as it were.

The essential meaning here then is to be devoid of ability to help oneself, to be defenseless so to speak from the attacks of others. You see, the poor man—excuse me, the proud man rather—does exactly the reverse of what he should be doing for the poor man. What should, what is the biblical response to the poor, the defenseless, those who need help? Well, the biblical response is that we show them loving kindness the way that God has shown us loving kindness.

We’ve mentioned it a lot of times. Micah talks about the three requirements of man. And one of those requirements is that he love—loving kindness. He loved to demonstrate grace to the poor. And we’ve talked about this before. But the reason for that, of course, is that among other things, it’s an indicator that we understand our poverty. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” That doesn’t mean that there are some who are poor and some aren’t. It means blessed are those who acknowledge their spiritual poverty before God.

And when we acknowledge that, we want to then—and we realize that what we have from God is a gift of grace to us and it’s an act of his loving kindness to us—we want to turn around and exhibit that loving kindness to other people. See, what some cultures or some writers have talked about is the royal virtue. The fact that we have been given grace by God and we’re to extend that grace to others. But the proud man—he doesn’t do that. And why doesn’t he do it? Because he doesn’t acknowledge his poverty in spirit.

He says, “I’m what I have made myself to be.” And as we said last week, the self-made man ends up worshiping his creator.

Okay? So the proud man believes that he has gotten his wealth by his own power. Nothing to do with grace from God. He has gotten his salvation as it were the old-fashioned way. He earned it. Now, of course, hard work is a good thing and work is related to blessings. But boy, the scriptures are replete with warnings to us. And you should hear the warnings this morning from these texts: that when we do work hard and God blesses our work, don’t get prideful in that blessing. Don’t think ultimately it’s the work of your hands that gotten it for you. Don’t get sucked into the twisted perversion of that ad about getting money the old-fashioned way. We earned it. Don’t think that you can earn things in and of yourself.

Who gives you power to earn things? Who gives you the very air you breathe, the food on the table to strengthen your body? Who gives you the grace extended to you in salvation in Jesus Christ to bring you into right relationship to God and into blessing? These things aren’t of ourselves. These are the gift of God. And we start to think of ourselves as being more exalted than somebody else because we’re better than them somehow—intrinsically we have uttered we have walked into the sin of pride and into that temptation.

Now the correlation of all this to abortion hopefully is rather obvious. How much lower in terms of defenseless can you get than being a baby and particularly one trapped in the womb? Trapped in the womb. Incredible picture, isn’t it? The womb is supposed to be one of the safest places on earth. There are various passages throughout Scripture that talk about the safety and security of the womb. It’s the best place to grow children and to nourish them and to defend them from outside problems.

And the womb that God has designed to be the safest place on earth instead becomes the tomb, the executioner’s chair as it were, for the defenseless child in that womb whose mother moves toward the abortionist clinic. And as we will be seeing as we go through this sermon, pride is indeed what brings a person to participate in, to plan, promote or perform an abortion.

Okay, so we have a summary statement of the problem. Then we have a summary statement of the prayer in verse 2B. “Let them be taken in the devices that they have imagined.” And this is fairly common in the scriptures. You read about the lex talionis, the law of retaliation. The law of the land according to God’s word, the way he works throughout history is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And when men seek to go about to hurt people in a particular way, God’s judgment frequently will then bring that same kind of thing back on themselves.

I suppose one of the great pictures of this of course is in the book of Esther where we have wicked Haman who builds a gallows to persecute and kill Jews—to kill those who refuse to bow down and worship him. And you know that’s what it says in the text. Haman got mad at Mordecai because he wouldn’t worship him. Haman was puffed up with pride and as a result he persecuted the poor and wanted to wipe out God’s people from the land. But the very gallows that Haman had erected to kill those whom God was protecting became Haman’s own place of execution as God brought him low.

Let the one who plots murder be executed. Eye for eye. Lex talionis. The law of the land. Tooth for tooth.

I suppose if we wanted to get a little bit tricky on this we could put this verse in modern parlance. We can say a modern paraphrase of this may be that let the abortionists become victims of euthanasia. And indeed that probably will be the case before this is all over in this country.

Verses 3 to 11 give us an expansion of the problem after the summary statement that we just made reference to.

Verse three: “For the wicked boasteth of his heart’s desire and blesseth the covetous whom the Lord abhorreth.” It is in the proud man’s, the wicked man’s own heart’s desire that he rejoices. And it is these desires that drive the wicked man toward his actions. He’s doing his own thing. He’s mastering the possibilities that occur to him. And all too often, the child sitting in the womb is simply not a part of the heart’s desire of the wicked.

Note here that God is said to abhor something. And this is very important as we begin to move in this psalm to the prayer of imprecation that will follow several verses downward from here. The fact is that the wicked blesses the covetous, but God abhors or hates the covetous.

Now we’re going to talk about covetousness here at some length in the month of February and its relationship to envy. But suffice it to say this morning that covetousness—that is desiring what one sees around himself in terms of material possessions, property, goods, etc.—is another root of many abortions in our land. “Who can afford kids these days?” You hear that often enough. And particularly when you have a lifestyle you wish to maintain and don’t want the children impinging on that lifestyle. It’s much better to, if you’re going to be really covetous about things, to just simply eliminate the child that may be growing in your womb.

Now, I want to—I probably would fit in later with the outline a little better—but I don’t think I have it written down there. I want to make sure I get this point across in verse three. Apparently, the psalmist wasn’t aware that indeed God does bless the covetous. He just sinned. The sin of the covetous. Well, that isn’t true. But that’s all too often what evangelical churches say.

I couldn’t believe it. I’m not sure if I have shared this from the pulpit before or not, but when Manuel Noriega was being given asylum in the Catholic church in Panama, they had the right-hand man of the head of the papal embassy there on night. And they asked him, “Why would the Catholic Church give such a wicked person as this—a murderer and torturer and drug dealer, etc.—why would they give him asylum?” And the fellow said, “Well, you’ve got to understand,” he said, “God hates the sin, but he loves the sinner.” And he said it in kind of broken English.

And I just about fell to the floor. Because that’s a perversion of the truth of the scriptures that spawned in evangelicalism. And I’m familiar with it certainly in the American context. And here, you know, from another nation, from another religion, from the Roman Catholic Church. There was this ridiculous statement being said that is devoid of biblical content being broadcast back into the America that I think spawned ridiculous notions such as this.

The Lord does not love the sin, love the sinner and hate the sin. The scriptures say here: the Lord abhors the covetous. Sin is not something that can be hated ultimately. It’s an action that somebody does. And God hates the sinner. Now, the sinner—God may well cause the sinner to repent. We’re all sinners and we don’t want to be puffed up in our pride of our own righteousness. But remember, God hates something here.

Remember that because that’s real important when we talk about the prayer of imprecation. Some churches say, “No, let’s not do that because God loves everybody today and that his wrath isn’t against people.” But this verse clearly says the reverse. And it says more than that. It says that the church that blesses people that the scriptures say should not be blessed—such as the covetous here—are part of that wicked contingency that promotes and keeps going evil and sin in the land.

You see what I’m saying? If you go around blessing people that God has told you not to bless in their sin, you’re not part of the solution. Not only part of the solution, you’re part of the problem now. You’re promulgating this wickedness that’s spoken of in this verse.

Okay? We can talk a lot about covetousness, its relationship to abortion, the abortion clinics. Of course, it’s how they get their livelihood. It’s an income-making endeavor and covetousness is a lot of the drive behind that particular industry. Covetousness can apply not just to material possessions of course. The woman who wants status by having a job in the workplace and can be coveting another person’s position in the workplace wants that kind of thing for herself. Children don’t fit in with that and so she ends up killing her own child in the womb.

Okay, verse four: “The wicked through the pride of his countenance will not seek after God. God is not in all his thoughts.”

We have here the exaltation of self, as we said the last couple of weeks, the debasement of God. This is the key to the problem and the cure. And we’re going to return to it in a couple of minutes.

Verse five: “His ways are always grievous.”

Verse four talks about the pride. Verse five shows the effects of that pride. Grievous ways. There’s a relationship between one’s position to God, his perversion of that position, and then his ways.

“Judgments are far above out of his sight. As for all his enemies, he puffeth at them.”

There’s really something interesting there because there’s a relationship between one’s enemies and the judgment of God. He says that God’s judgments are above, out of his sight. A theme we’re going to be turning to several times here in the next couple of verses. And the correlary to that—the second half of the verse—is “as for all his enemies, he puffs at them.”

You see, frequently God will use our enemy, the sinful, wicked enemy sometimes to punish us. But see, there’s a correlation between them puffing at his enemies—saying they can’t hurt me—and not realizing God’s judgments are in the land.

Verse six: “He has said in his heart, I shall not be moved. I shall never be in adversity.”

This is an extension of his practical atheism. There is no God to requete things that he does wrong. So there’s no fear of the consequence of his evil actions. He is the master of his own fate. Or so he thinks. He will be proven wrong. But that’s what he thinks in his mind.

Verse seven: “His mouth is full of cursing, deceit, and fraud. Under his tongue is mischief and vanity.”

And we have here of course a picture of the false speech of the covetous one, the wicked, prideful one. And deceit, of course, is at the core of the abortion industry. Now, it is true that a mother who takes her child in the womb to an abortion clinic and gets an abortion committed upon her child is a murderer. She has murdered her own child. But it is also true that those mothers have been given various lines of deception and deceit and intrigue.

You go into an abortion clinic and there is no talk from these counselors about children, babies, nothing of that. You hear talk of fetuses, embryos, quality of life, etc. There is deception that is spewed out of abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood offices and all kinds of other government-funded vehicles that go out across the land and really produce a great deal of deception and deceit into which these mothers and their children fall victim.

Now, that doesn’t obviate the woman’s responsibility, but it does help us to understand that the root of many of these problems also is this deception that comes from the prideful people. And it’s important we realize that Planned Parenthood was at their work of spewing forth deception and trying to con women into killing their own babies.

In Missouri, it turned out that after the Supreme Court decision a number of months ago upholding the Missouri law restricting abortions and getting rid of them at public hospitals altogether, abortions dropped 20%. But then Planned Parenthood said, “Well, that isn’t any good. We better get that figure back up.” And so they took to buying space on the radio and TV and billboards and saying, “No, no, you can have an abortion in Missouri. We’ll help you get it.” And then they sucked women into that thing. And now, according to Planned Parenthood, the abortion rate is about what it was before the Supreme Court decision.

Is there any doubt in your mind that Planned Parenthood is an evil organization? Then you just haven’t taken the time to look into what they’re doing, what their origins are, etc. We can’t spend much time on that this afternoon, but it’s a very wicked organization.

Okay. Verse eight: “He sits in the lurking places of the villages. In the secret places he murders the innocent. His eyes are privy set against the poor.”

Here we have—we talked about the last few weeks that pride has social consequences. We see social destruction and chaos coming forth from the proud man in his oppression of the poor.

“He lieth and wait secretly as a lion in his den. He lieth and wait to catch the poor. He doth catch the poor when he draweth them into his net. He croucheth, humbleth himself that the poor may fall by his strong ones.”

Verses 6 to 8 here show a progression from the thoughts to speech to actions. He perceives things in verse six. He starts talking about things in a particular way in verse seven. And then that leads to actions in verses 8 and following. Verse six, his heart is the source of the sin. Verse seven, that sin leaves his mouth in verse 8-10, that sin results in wicked actions toward the poor.

I want to comment here on the term “the innocent.” “He doth murder the innocent.” That’s what we’re talking about today—is the murder of the innocent. Now, the scriptures don’t mean that the people that the wicked man was killing at the time of the writing of this psalm were innocent judicially before God or not guilty of sin or at least imputation of sin since the fall of Adam imputes sin to all mankind.

The term innocent here is a limited term. It means in terms of having done anything wrong that would warrant God’s death penalty, civil criminally, against him on the part of the state.

Right to life is really a misnomer in the absolute sense. All that fallen man has is a right to death—that God will kill him for his sin and wages of sin are death. But in a limited sense we do have a right to life. Of course it means that the other men, apart from God’s word, do not have the right to take away the life that God has given to us. That prerogative belongs to God and it belongs to those agencies that he establishes in his word to carry out his judgment and his justice in the world around us.

So there is a sense in which we are talking this morning about the murder of the innocent as Psalm 10 does.

Verse 11: “He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten. He hideth his face. He’ll never see it again.”

God’s supposed absence of judgment is critical to the thinking of those who oppress the defenseless. This is a repeated theme throughout this psalm. Accordingly, then the psalmist goes on to ask for God to be active in judgment. Since it’s God’s absence of visible judgment that can be seen by the wicked that causes him to increase his wickedness, the prayer then begins with asking God to intervene and to be active in judgment of the wicked.

“Arise, O Lord God, lift up thine hand and forget not the humble. Wherefore doth the wicked condemn God? He hath said in his heart, ‘Thou wilt not require it.’”

Again, a repetition of that theme. Verse six—we read that in his heart, the wicked says, “I’ll not be moved. I should never be in adversity. No judgment upon me.” Verse 11, he says in his heart, “God’s forgotten. He hides his face. He’ll never see it.” In verse 13, he says in his heart, “Thou wilt not require it. If there is a God, he’s not going to be active. If there is no God, practically speaking in terms of everyday life in my life, that’s what pride tells him.”

But the wicked, the prideful are wrong in this. Verse 14 goes on to say: “Thou hast seen it.”

See, he’s saying, “He doesn’t think you’re going to see it. He doesn’t think you’re going to judge, but I know you have seen it.”

“Thou beholdest mischief and spite to requite it with thy hand. The poor commits himself unto thee. Thou art the helper of the fatherless.”

That term is used again toward the end of the chapter. The term fatherless—we’ve said before from this pulpit that the fatherless are those whose parents turn them over in the womb to the abortionist. The idea of a father is a protector, a defender and a nourisher. And the parent who turns the child over to the abortionist scalpel or saline solution, whatever method is used, is no father. That child has become truly orphaned and fatherless in God’s sight. And that child has the special sight of God in mind. God sees the fatherless, and he indeed is the helper of the fatherless.

And then verse 15, the imprecation is uttered: “Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man. Seek out his wickedness till thou find none.”

The psalmist David says, “Break the arm of the wicked. Remove his power.” The right arm, the arm of the wicked, is the arm of his power. Take away his ability to do what he does. Take away his strength, his might, his riches, his intelligence, his political power, his cutting of his alliances. Whatever he has that allows him to continue his rationalizations will be part of that as well. Take away the arm of the wicked. Break his arm.

“Seek out his wickedness till thou find none.”

Not simply for a moment. In other words, David invokes God to be involved in judging the wicked oppressors of the innocent and of the fatherless. He invokes God to judge them that they might perish off the face of the earth. “Seek out his wickedness till thou find none. Get rid of every spot of it.”

Now, there’s two ways that can happen. One way is for the wicked to give up his wicked ways. And when the wicked does that, the wickedness stops. In other words, God can bring people through his external judgments to repentance. But failing that—failing the wicked man feeling God’s rod upon his back and then repenting of his evil deeds—David prays that punishment would go on until that wicked man is taken off the face of the earth, judged, killed, executed justly, unlike his execution of the fatherless and the oppressed.

Then we have the assurance of the answer.

Verses 16-18: “The Lord is King forever and ever. God’s King. The heathen are perished out of his land.”

He knows with the certainty that God will indeed through time cause the heathen to perish out of his land, which is the whole earth.

“Lord, thou hast heard the desire of the humble. Thou wilt prepare their heart. Thou wilt cause thine ear to hear to judge the fatherless and the oppressed that the man of the earth may no more oppress.”

Again, the term fatherless is used. And it’s interesting—the term “the man of the earth.” We have the prideful man thinking he’s not of the earth. His thoughts are way high and exalted like a tower, as we said, but God brings him low and makes him realize he is simply a man of the earth. And he ends the oppression through either repentance of the wicked man or through the elimination of the wicked man in time and in history.

Okay, we have in Psalm 10 a progression of the description of the wicked. He exalts himself in verse three, boasting of his heart’s desire. He debases God in verse four, through the pride of his countenance—he’ll not seek after God, and God is not in all his ways—exaltation of self, debasement of God. And therefore, in verse five and following, his ways are grievous.

Verses 6 through 8 show a progression from the man’s thoughts to his speech to his actions. His heart, mouth, and then his actions are all twisted by his sin of rejection of the God who created him.

Summary statement again in verse 11. These wicked deeds and speech flow out of the heart that says there is no God. He is irrelevant to my daily walk.

Now, it’s the same progression that leads to the wickedness that we will petition God for this day, the way the psalmist did in his day. Psalm 10 gives us a picture not only of the effect of the primary of the seven sins—pride—on society and particularly its effects on the helpless in society. But Psalm 10 also gives us the correct biblical response to the particularly loathsome manifestation of the sin of pride: that being the murder of the poor. That is, those who have no strength in and of themselves to resist the evil.

And Psalm 10 then goes on to give us a true analysis of the pride, the wicked in society, the results of that sin, and then the means to correct it. And it also gives us an assurance that God does indeed judge the wicked who don’t think he is judged by God.

So now we move to the second half of the outline: application of all of this to us. We’ve got it under these three things we just pointed out. One, a correct analysis of the sin. Two, the correct means then to the goal of elimination of the sin. And three, a correct understanding of the efficacy of the means that God has chosen us to use from a long-term perspective—the assurance of God’s answer.

First, correct analysis of the sin—relationship of abortion to the seven deadly sins. We’ve talked a little bit already about covetousness—for a lifestyle that children are not consistent with and cannot help them perform. And covetousness—it’s very easy to see the ways in which that leads to decisions to murder children both on the part of the mother and also on the part of the abortionist.

Sloth. We’re going to talk about this later of course in March probably, but sloth was often talked about in the middle ages as despair—a giving up as it were on the responsibilities that we have that God has given to us. Sloth and despair frequently precede abortion. And it is essentially can be characterized as a shirking of the hard work of parenthood and household management that then leads the potential parent—the parent—to move toward the killing of that child that will bring about more work for the parents.

And so sloth—there’s a definite connection between sloth and despair and then sloth and despair and abortion.

Gluttony. We want more of what we can have—that we don’t have to share with the child—and so the child is killed.

Lust. That’s what brings many women into the abortionist clinics. Of course, a desire for illegitimate use of sexual privilege and a lusting after men and power and other things. These things can be seen clearly related to the sin of abortion.

But we wanted to center, and we have centered, upon the relationship of pride to abortion. The act of destroying a child and life is the ultimate act of pride. Taking what God has created and deciding apart from his revealed word to destroy that life—that is ultimately God’s life. Pride, as we’ve said, is a reversal of God’s order, an attempted reversal. It is a denial of the creator-creature distinction. The creator gives life, but now the creature in the abortion act asserts to himself the right to take the life given by the creator outside the dictates of scripture.

The sin ultimately is not against the child in this act of abortion. The sin is against God. As we said, pride is the root—the exaltation of self, the debasement of God.

How often have we heard the prideful remarks of the woman saying, “It is my body, my choice to do what I want to do with my body.” The plain fact of the matter is it is not her body. It is God’s body. And certainly there’s a separate person growing within her. And yet to make our case ultimately on that biological fact is to miss the point. Her rejection is not of life. Her rejection is of God and his claims, not only over her child but over herself as well.

Now women come to this decision in the context of a society that builds up their sense of personal pride. We have a society that’s based upon people doing their own thing and individualism and making decisions for ourselves. And so that all leads to the woman’s decision to extend that logical thinking to her own body and its processes. It’s logical according to the basic supposition that God isn’t and that we have the right to make these decisions over all that we have.

I guess what I’m trying to get at here is there is relationship of abortion to the seven deadly sins obviously and to pride. And because of that there is a relationship of abortion to the person of God.

As we said, Psalm 51:4 says: “Against thee only have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight.”

The abortionist sin is not ultimately against the child. It is against the holy God who created that child. Abortion is a sin not ultimately against society—as I said—or even the child. Ultimately the sin is first and foremost a sin against Almighty God.

It is interesting to me to note how the abortion debate has gone on over the last 15 years or so, or 10 years. And so many times Dan Premeaux has pointed this out in very clear terms, consistently over the years. People keep thinking that the key to abortion is just to convince these women and these abortionists that there is life in the womb. If we can just show them there’s life, surely they’ll stop killing that life. But that isn’t true. They don’t care about the life in the womb. They care about their own personal pride.

I was listening to Otto Scott’s workshop tape from the Christian Reconstruction Conference in 1988, and he talks about John 18:38 where Jesus is talking to Pilate, and Pilate says to Jesus, “What is truth?” And many people see that as kind of a philosophical question that Pilate is kind of putting out there. “What is truth after all? Let’s talk about this philosophically.” Otto’s point, and I think he’s absolutely correct, is that to Pilate, he didn’t care what truth was. It was irrelevant to him in his life.

Truth had no relevancy to a world filled with power. And that’s the world that Pilate knew. Pilate was content to see things in terms of his abilities and his powers to collect wealth for himself and for the Roman government. Truth had no relevancy to his life, and ultimately to the abortionist, life has no relevancy to the question. They simply want the right to decide for themselves whether they should terminate life or not.

You see, that’s why the abortion thing is linked to euthanasia and the suicide thing. If you spend 15 years trying to convince them there’s life and think that’s going to do anything, you’ve wasted 15 years worth of time which you should be telling people that God has crowned rights over you and your body. You don’t. You belong to him.

So many times we get off the mark because we don’t remember—because we’re good humanists and think that people are good people and if they just know it’s life and human life at that, well, that’ll be the ultimate standard by which they make their decisions. That’s foolishness. The word of God says those that hate God love death. They wrong their own soul.

The woman who claims to write over her own body has a surgical procedure done in which a part of her own body, if she wants to look at it that way, is hacked to pieces inside of herself. Life, logic—these things aren’t pertinent because the root of abortion is pride. It’s a rejection of the person of God.

Now, we got to know that it’s important to us in terms of helping us get our priorities right in our thinking. I was listening to a radio show several months ago on KOU, and you ought to listen to some of those shows occasionally to get the far-left perspective on some of the things that go on in our society.

These women that were talking about abortion on there were very concerned about the abortion movement and Reagan and Bush because they think they see everything in terms of the state wanting conscripted motherhood. They say the state wants our children and for the state’s benefit it wants to get rid of abortion because it wants our kids. See, and they thought there’s this big plot afoot where the government is trying to get soldiers, boys, and they want the women then to carry those soldiers to term.

Now, that sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Sounds absolutely ridiculous. But you know what? It happened. We’ve been rejoicing over the freedom, the newfound freedom of the Christian church in Romania. But Chausescu had eliminated abortion. Did he do it because he believed that God, God’s word said it was wrong? No. No. He wanted four kids to every family for the purposes of the state, just like the women on KOU are concerned about.

You see, if all we’re interested in is in getting rid of abortion, we’ve missed the whole mark. Our interest, our driving factor has to be the glory of God. Otherwise, we’re just humanists like the rest of them. And there’s no credit to Chausescu. He earns no privilege with God because he eliminated abortion in this country. He did it for prideful purposes, for the exultation of the state.

We’ve got to get this down. We’ve got to understand that abortion, the root of it is a rejection of God and his crown rights over his creation. That means another reason for that is that it gives us the correct means to the goal of elimination of abortion.

The elimination of abortion is a means to an end. It’s a means to glorify God because his word says that he is dishonored when people kill pre-born children. The correct means to our problem—that is the appropriateness of imprecation and of prayers of malediction.

We have a Psalm 10 situation in our land. There are correlations, rather obvious ones, between that and the situation with abortion today. And those correlations say that the means that David gleaned and used in the context of Psalm 10 are appropriate ones for ourselves today.

Now, there’s lots of objections to this, and I could spend probably a lot of time answering objections, but I won’t do that. But I do want to help you get clear in your own mind that this is a legitimate thing for the Church of Jesus Christ to be doing.

Now, it should go without saying that’s the case because the Psalms are the inspired hymn book of the church. It’s our prayer book. It’s our hymn book. David sang about the destruction of the wicked. We should sing about the destruction of the wicked. David prayed for the destruction of the wicked who put themselves up against God and in so doing killed the defenseless, and we should pray for those things as well.

I mean, it’s pretty clear that’s the case. And yet some people today say, “No, no, no. We don’t want to do those sorts of things.” And there’s lots of objections put up.

One objection is that, well, these are just David’s personal thoughts. You know, he was just upset during some of these times. And that’s why he wrote like that.

Let me just tell you—spend a lot of time on this, but let me just tell you what that leads to. That thought leads to the rejection of the word of God as a standard. If you’re going to start going through the Bible and redlining stuff out, saying, “Well, that might have been a problem. Those guys might not have known what they were doing. Maybe he was just mad. Maybe this, maybe that,” you might as well take the whole thing and throw it out.

You see, the word of God is the inspired word of God. And God’s going to tell us in here when things are wrong. He’s going to tell us when people commit sins in the scriptures. He’s not going to have a bunch of truth and then a little sin in here and want us to catch that somehow and get tripped up by it.

No. No.