Wicked People

In this session we look at the meaning of wickedness that grieves God greatly. Despite the intelligence of man, mankind faces many problems due to the existence of iniquity, morally depravity. Before we look at the subject please answer the following questions:-

1. What is wickedness?
2. What is pride?
3. Who were the Nephilim?
4. What sort of picture does the word ' disobedience' conjure up in Romans 5:19
5. What does it say about Adam?

The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the Lord said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth - men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air - for I am grieved that I have made them." But Noah found favour in the eyes of the Lord. Genesis 6:5-8

• God created Adam sufficiently perfect and not morally flawed. Within the freedom of a loving relationship they would be able to mature and love spontaneously.
• God's desire for man was that man would grow in such a way that spontaneous goodness and thought out love would be directed towards fellow man, this being the fruit of a deep abiding relationship with man's heavenly Father.

It is apparent in the Bible that God wants people to live with a certain mindset in order to know full mental and spiritual health. They must learn to live life with a claim on and a sense of God's forgiveness, even in the face of continued faults and failures. They must live with the confidence that God has a plan for their happiness and well being in this life and that He provides a source of power to meet every challenge. Furthermore they must retain the confidence that even when they fail to appropriate that power God still maintains control.
Dr P. Cosgrove in Mental Health - A Christian Approach. P 40

• Man's wickedness (raaah - bad in an ethical and moral sense), speaks of those who have deserted God's way, choosing not to respect Him or simply seeking to incorporate their ideas of God into some sort of self-help scheme.
• Evil does not exist by itself - it needs a host in which to dwell. Evil is parasitic and much more than an inconvenience to man. It is transgression of God's law. 70 million human beings were uprooted, enslaved or killed in the twentieth century alone.
• Evil not only speaks of wars and murders, but also of the bully in the playground, and the person who looks down on others.

The Bible is a dispute about the identity and character of the true God. Israel's life is initiated and sustained by Yahweh, the giver of life. But Israel is always tempted and seduced by alternative gods and loyalties (Hos 2:8). The polemical question is always 'to whom will you compare me? Who is like Yahweh?' (Ex 15:11; Is 40:18) The answer of course is that there is no God like Yahweh who is the God who intervenes powerfully on behalf of the poor and the marginal in the face of oppressive power..this God is not known in any speculative or theoretical way but always through acts of social intervention and inversion that create possibilities of human life in contexts where the human spirit has been crushed (see Is 57:15)
Prof W. Brueggemann, A Social Reading of the O.T. p 54-55

• Man is a proud being, pride speaking of a self-evaluation that is often exaggerated and dishonest. Man's pride speaks of a refusal to accept God as well as a refusal to be what we are called to be before God.
• Note the warning in scripture not to call anyone Father (Matt 23:9). This is because 'father' (in Hebrew thought and as found in Isaiah 9:6 for example) speaks of possessing that which a person is Father of - e.g 'Father of knowledge'
• In speaking of Jesus as 'everlasting Father scripture is using an idiom which describes Messiahs relationship to time. Hence in the Targums we have, 'Wonderful Counsellor, Might God He who lives forever, anointed one.
• In the King James the word 'grieved' is translated 'repented.'
• The Hebrew word is 'Nacham', which means 'to sigh, to breath strongly, breath deeply - all speaking of a physical display of one's feelings. The word is like a bitter disappointment of someone who has been wronged by those closest to them.
• The point that is being made is that God starts to act differently - to take another course of action - because His ways have been abused.
• Wipe: 'machah' -as in wiping a dish; the complete removal of one thing from another.
• Judgement is the predominant aspect of God's actions, yet grace is also mentioned.
• Favour - 'chen' - grace - unmerited favour or regard in God's sight.
• In Genesis 6:2 we read 'the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and they married any of them they chose.'
• 'Bene 'elohim (sons of God) speaks of those who share God-like qualities (e.g. man was created morally upright). Here we see men simply taking the women they wanted. There is no mention of marriage arrangements being made with families or relatives. It would appear that 'might is right.'
• The name 'Nephilim' means 'giants, fallen ones; those who fell upon others.'
• In Genesis 6:4 we read that God would not contend with man forever, for he is mortal, and his days will be a hundred and twenty years.
• Although judgement was going to fall on the human race, that judgement would be delayed 120 years suggesting that some would have responded to Noah, a preacher of righteousness (else why the delay?).
• In 1 Peter 3:19-20 we see that 'God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built
• The 'spirits in prison' refers to the place of the departed in the O.T. Sheol (to be dealt with later in Genesis) with the word 'spirit' emphasising that all life belongs to God and will be called to account.

We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. Romans 3:9-10

Sin - 'harmartia'. This word was not originally an ethical word and simply spoke of missing the target when shooting an arrow. Sin speaks of failing to be what we are called to be.

For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. Romans 5:19

Disobedience - 'parakoe'. Parakouein originally means 'to mishear, or fail to hear.' The word then came to mean to deliberately not hear and finally came to mean hearing what one wants to hear. It speaks of closing the ears to God in order to listen to oneself.

I surrendered my moral conscience to the fact that I was a soldier,' said Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of a Nazi death squad, and therefore a cog in a relatively low position of a great machine. As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me,' George Orwell wrote during the Second World War.
Prof Os Guinness in, Unspeakable 92

To be sure, the Nazis ranks included brutal sadists, perverts, and vicious Jew-haters, at the highest levels and all the way down. But the cooperation of most Germans was enlisted by such petty notions as 'follow orders', 'The desire to get ahead,' getting along' and 'respect for the Great Leader'
Unspeakable pages 92-92

Think of those who supplied the gas ovens, those who took the gold teeth, those who built the railways, villages nearby death camps who turned a blind eye and we begin to see what Oz Guiness is speaking about. It has been said that Nazism produced more evil with less malice than civilisation had previously experienced.
The Independent Newspaper, Sat 16th Sept 2006

• Front page: 'Waiting for the slaughter. 300,000 have died already in Sudan. 50,000 people are in refuge camps in the region of Darfur. There are now 2.5 million homeless. The killing has been done by the Khartoum government and its Arab proxies, the Janjaweed militia, whose name means 'devils on horseback.' The fear is that the remaining 2 million people of the Fur, Massaleit or Zaghawa tribes in the camps may soon perish too.'
• Page 3: The story of Jamila Bochra Mohammed. 'When the Janjaweed attacked our village, they came shooting and burning from all directions. I trued to run way, but they told me to stop or they would kill me. I was raped by five armed men. I saw other women raped and many people killed, including my mother and my mother-in-law. They were thrown into a fire while they were still alive, right in front of me.' On the same page a murder witness speaks of several girls aged between 15 and 21. 'They were raped by 60-70 Janjaweed in April 2004. We were tied to trees as they raped the girls. 'Afterwards, they also tied them and put cotton in their mouths. The cotton was soaked in fuel. Then they lit the cotton and burned them to death.
• Page 5. The words of Susan Pollack survivor of the holocaust in Europe: 'I was 13 years old when German troops came to my village of Felsogod in Hungary and took my father. I never saw him again. Then they came for me and my family and sent us to Auschwitz. My mother was gassed to death as soon as we arrived. I survived Auschwitz, slave labour, selection at the hands of Dr Josef Mengele and a death march to Belsen before I was 15. I can still see the mountains of corpses at Auschwitz. After the Holocaust, the world said 'Never again.' Today they are still saying it, but when genocides like Darfur go on unchecked, I'm beginning to wonder if they mean it.'
• Page 10 carries the article, 'The Muslim world protests at Pope's 'derogatory' Mohammed comments.
• Page 15 carries a full-page advert for a programme called Afterlife. The article contains a lonely hearts ad some of which go as follows: 'Father of six, 66, killed by eldest daughter's boyfriend. I don't know what to do. I love her so much I don't want to hurt her. If you're reading, please be in touch.' 'Non-scene male looking for female to help locate the people who brutally kicked me to death last summer.' 'Woman 36, smothered in sleep by violent husband, now also dead. I'm trapped with him and he won't let me go. Someone please help.' There are a total of 56 such 'ads' on the page.
• Page 25 carries the article, 'Harrow teacher's daughter found stabbed to death.'
• Page 28 carries a half-page article about a 24 year-old former University student accused of plotting to carryout terror attack in Britain. He has already admitted talking about blowing up the Houses of Parliament.
• On page 28 we read of Neo-Nazis who are set to win parliamentary seats for a second time in Germany's economically depressed east.
• Page 31 carries a full-page story under the heading, 'Baghdad to dig 50-mile trench to stem gruesome wave of torture and murder.' The page speaks of one week of violence. On Monday 11 bodies were found showing signs of torture; on Tuesday 29 Iraqis were killed. On Wednesday 60 bodies are found scattered around Baghdad. Most are bound and have been shot in the head and many show signs of torture. All crimes appear to have been committed by opposing Sunni and Shia death squads. The rest of the week carries similar stories.
• Page 33 mentions a tribe (The Korowai people) that still practices cannibalism in the jungle of Indonesia's Papua province. Apparently they are going to kill and eat Wa-Wa a 6 - year old boy believed to be possessed by evil spirits blamed for the sudden death of his parents.
• In the back pages we have footballers who are paid thousands of pounds a week to kick a ball around. Elsewhere in the world people are starving to death.
• Evil is something, which occurs in the experience of every man, that should not have occurred.
• Evil is wrongdoing in regard to God's original and ongoing intentions, and detrimental in terms of affects on man. Our sin is our failure to live out our calling as God's image bearers - we fail to live in community with God, with others and with self and our environment, whilst retaining our unique individuality.

They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. Romans 1:29

• 'Eris' = Strife/discord': to disagree, quarrel, be at variance with; always saying bad things about one another; never having a good word to say. The word speaks of a divided world, and broken or corrupt relationships.
• To the Greeks Eris, (goddess of Strife), was one of the malignant forces in life, producing violence and often death. To the Greek mind, strife was written into the fabric of the universe.
• Four out of six occurrences of the word 'eris' in the N.T. are connected with the life in the church.
• Three are found in Paul's letters to Corinth,(1 Cor 1:11; 3:3; 2 Cor 12:20). It is eris which divides the Corinthian church into sects and parties, and eris that has split the church and brought enmity where there should be love.

As God's creature, therefore, I can never sign a declaration of independence from my Maker. Instead, I ought humbly to acknowledge that everything which I have is God's gift.every second of life which I enjoy, every lungful of air which I breathe, every morsel of food which I eat, every thought I am able to form, every ounce of energy I use, every opportunity which comes my way, and even the capacity to lay hold on that opportunity - all of these are God's gifts. Consequently, I am like my Creator, and yet I am unlike Him. A measureless distance stretches between God as my Creator and myself as His creature.
Dr V. Grounds, Emotional Problems and the Gospel p 73

• In Philippians Paul writes that those who preach in unholy competition with himself, and whose preaching is at least as much directed towards discrediting Paul as it is to exalting Christ are preaching through eris: Philip. 1:15 'It is true that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, but others out of goodwill.
• Eris cannot gain entrance to the Church if Christ is supreme in the church.

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin - because anyone who has died has been freed from sin. Romans 6:6-7

• Throughout scripture God shows His mastery over evil in many ways. For example, we have a baby brought up in the household of a Pharaoh who wanted him dead. We have two old men leading Israel out of the most powerful nation on earth, and then taking Egypt out of Israel (think about it)
• We have small armies moving in awesome ways (Gideon), and a pagan king brought to his knees in repentance (King of Ninevah). We see men walking in a fire and not getting burnt, and the most powerful city on earth being captured at precisely the time God spoke of it
• In the weakness of the flesh God triumphed over all illegitimate power and authority.

Evil is conquered as evil because God turns it back upon itself. He makes the supreme crime, the murder of the only righteous person, the very operation that abolishes sin. The manoeuvre is utterly unprecedented. No more complete victory could be imagined.'
Dr H. Blotcher in Evil and The Cross, p 133

Now review the questions and your answers. What does this session tell you about the patience of God for His children?

Please review the questions and your answers. The final question above is one for personal reflection.

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