The Ways of the Wicked | Psalm 10:7–11
7 His mouth is filled with cursing and deceit and oppression;
under his tongue are mischief and iniquity.
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.”
Last time, we looked at the mind of the wicked (vv.
2–6). Because he serves himself, denies
God, and creates his own reality, he will walk and talk in wickedness. His corruption spreads from the abundance of his
sinful heart (Mt 12:34), meaning that all unregenerate sinners are capable of
such iniquity. Those so given over to
prayer trouble the righteous, and such a dark description makes the earnest
prayer of the psalmist understandable.
The wicked utters curses. He uses his God-created tongue to lash
others. Paul alludes to this in Romans
3:14, where he writes that the mouth speaks “curses and bitterness.”
The wicked dwells in
corners. He loves darkness (Jn
3:19). As a result, he isn’t living everyday
life in villages, but stays on the fringes in wait.
The wicked hooks his
catch. Proverbs 1:11–13 describes
the wicked as plotting evil and enticing others to do the same. They say, “[L]et us lie in wait for blood; let
us ambush the innocent without reason; like Sheol let us swallow them alive, and
whole, like those who go down to the pit; we shall find all precious goods, we
shall fill our houses with plunder.”
The wicked kills God’s
creatures. The wicked isn’t all talk
and imagination. He’s compared to a
predator, a fisherman, and a hunter. He specifically
takes on the image of a lion because he reflects his father, the devil (1 Pt
5:8).
The wicked ignores
God’s character. Again, the wicked
is full of false theology. Ecclesiastes
8:11 says, “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily,
the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil.” The wicked repeatedly tells himself that God
doesn’t exist (v. 4), and when that fails, he tries to convince himself that
the Lord grows forgetful.
This is the active suppression of the truth about God in
unrighteousness (Rm 1:18). The absence
of God’s immediate judgment is his confirmation bias. The wicked should be warned: God will see and
act, as all will one day see (vv. 14–15).
