Psalm 119:115 – Leave!

Leave me you evildoers
that I may obey the commands of my God.

Being harassed as you try to do good can be a problem. Both bad influences, those who by word or example lead you toward bad behavior, and bullies who try to pressure you into doing wrong are a reality. That’s what I think the Psalmist is saying here. “I want to follow God’s commands. If you’re not on that program, go away!”

This reminds me of the very first verse in Psalms:

Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of evildoers, nor does he stand in the way of sinners, nor does he sit in the seat of scornful people.

Psalm 1:1 (my translation)

And in that case too, the next line talks about the man’s delight in God’s law. Good advice, I think.

But this made me think of another situation, one in which someone claims the wicked as an excuse, but is actually responsible. This is the person who wants to do something wrong and then finds an evildoer to use as an excuse.

“But everyone is doing it” was an excuse many of us used in our youth. “How can I resist if I’m the only one?”

As adults and even leaders, we often replace this with the excuse that other people, or the other “side” does certain things, so it’s OK for us. Sometimes this is presented as a necessity. In order to match those other guys, which I call the “infernal they,” we have to use the tactics or that they do. We’ll be weak and lose if we behave well.

There’s a view of war that suggests that we really can’t fight a war without becoming more like our enemy. I suspect that is true. If you get into the fight, in which winning is important, you will often find yourself embracing tactics that you might have rejected at the start. The question is, I think, what happens to your soul in the process?

Psalm 1 suggests a few things. Speaking of the blessing that results from not following the counsel of the wicked, the righteous person is compared to a tree planted by streams of water. “Whatever he does will prosper,” ends this blessing.

“Not so the wicked,” the Psalm continues. Their description ends up with the opposite. “The way of the wicked will perish.” Following the temptation to become more like sinners in order to have success is predicted by the Psalmist to result in failure. I see the path coming to an end.

How we do things matters. The process matters. We can ramrod an idea through our church council, pushing people around in order to get our way, but what does that do to the longer term work of the church. Henry Hazlitt, an economist, in his book Economics in One Lesson says that every error in economics results from looking at things over too short a period of time and/or too narrow a range (I paraphrase).

The choice of destructive tactics may make you a winner in the short term, but in the long term, you, or more likely others, will pay.

Keep away from me, evildoers. In fact, keep away from my mind. I don’t want to think about the success of evildoers nor to be tempted by their methods.

What tactic tempts you that cannot be reconciled with godly living?

(Featured image was created in Adobe Express using two separately generated images. The engine for image generation in Adobe Express is Firefly.)