In Psalm 10, the writer describes evil and the way it works in a culture. We all know that human beings are born with sinful human nature, and this passage describes a fully matured sinful nature that works destructively in the culture. Read it slowly and attentively.

⁸     He sits in ambush in the villages;
in hiding places he murders the innocent.
       His eyes stealthily watch for the helpless;
⁹         he lurks in ambush like a lion in his thicket;
       he lurks that he may seize the poor;
he seizes the poor when he draws him into his net.
¹⁰    The helpless are crushed, sink down,
and fall by his might.
¹¹    He says in his heart, “God has forgotten,
he has hidden his face, he will never see it.”
Psalm 10:8-11

This text sounds so primitive and vulgar that it is hard to believe this is biblical text. It is ugly. It is vicious. It is simply impossible to believe that any human being could be so vile. Yet if you consider this description to be without precedent in reality, just discover how Planned Parenthood is selling the body parts of aborted babies. I’m not going to use the euphemisms. I’m going to use the word: baby. Planned Parenthood treats the body parts of aborted babies as the elements of a crass marketing plan.

In ancient times an ancient god named Moloch came to be the name we all associate with child sacrifice. People sacrificed children to Moloch in order that things might be better for themselves. The point of the sacrifice was to feed the god so he would provide well for the villagers. It sounds a lot like the logic that a woman has a “right to choose” if the death of the baby is advantageous to her. Women who have exercised their “right to choose” are encouraged to salve their consciences suffering (surely they suffer) pangs for condemning a baby to death by asking them to consent to the “harvest” of “tissue” for “life-saving” scientific research. So, just like babies sacrificed to Moloch, those babies sacrificed to personal convenience save the village by becoming research projects.

For all the public rhetoric on the subject of abortion in today’s culture, the rhetoric always carefully avoids talking about babies. Even the language used by the so-called doctor on the video linked above avoids words that might evoke thoughts of an actual baby. She calls the head a calverium. Not a baby’s head. A calverium. She speaks of harvesting an intact calverium as if she were harvesting a tomato, yet the process is no less a beheading than the gruesome executions of Egyptian Christians by ISIS in Libya. When a human being’s head is removed, it is a beheading, decapitation, not the act of harvesting fruits for human blessing and benefit.

The Psalmist reminds us that the vile behavior of Planned Parenthood is not a product of human evolution into beings far more intelligent and inclusively moral than those ancient, primitive scribes that wrote the Bible. As you read the words of the psalm, you see that humans have not apparently changed at all. Yet we are told that humans no longer need God, because we know science. We no longer need our morality to be imposed by ancient, dusty books, because we have evolved into creatures with superior intellect who can evaluate issues and reach logical conclusions that are more fulfilling and desirable than the restrictive hatefulness of ancient primitive people who listened to voices in their heads. According to Planned Parenthood, humans have come a long way from the ancient Levant.

In fact, humans have apparently evolved so thoroughly that Planned Parenthood is not even the only place where babies are treated like trash. Read an excerpt from Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery  by Richard Selzer. In this excerpt, babies ripped untimely from their mother’s protective wombs are treated like trash bagged up and thrown into rows of trash cans behind a hospital, ready for disposal in a local landfill.

When Christians contemplate such things, they feel defeated. They wonder what to do to turn things around. If you feel this way, then you will understand the distress expressed by Leon Wolf whose post “Our Broken Country” gives words to the grief we all feel about these problems.

There certainly are things we can do in this world to resist and reject wickedness. We can speak. We can act. We can vote. But, unless we act out of a deep and intimate relationship with Christ that motivates and shapes our acts, we risk becoming more like our adversaries than like Christ.

The Psalmist knew about that problem. He wrote:

¹  How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
²     How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
³     Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
⁴     lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,”
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.
⁵     But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
⁶     I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
Psalm 13

Pray this prayer. Put your own name in the prayer, and pray it all the way through. Put “the USA” in the prayer and pray it all the way through. “How long, O Lord? Will you forget the USA forever?” Pray intensely. Pray repeatedly. Keep praying. This is the way we prepare ourselves to be part of God’s solution to what is becoming of our culture.