Rotherham and Psalm 5

Some preaching notes might need adjusting this Sunday.

The headlines these last 2 weeks have been shocking our country, and I’m hoping this week we preach some desperately needed grace-imbued truth out to the world about what is happening.

This week I read a tweet from @RaviZacharias:

“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time most intellectually resisted fact.” (Muggeridge)

This morning I was reading Psalm 5 in which David addresses the ‘bloodthirsty and deceitful man’ pleading with God to make him fall — he says that the ‘Lord abhors them’, whilst placing his own confidence not in his own perfection but rather than abundance of Gods love.

This last year has been a time when bloodthirsty and deceitful men have been in our headlines almost continuously.

Depravity. Rotherham. Yewtree. IS. Harris. Saville. Others.

The worldview of modernism — humanity’s capacity to create, improve, and reshape our world was meant to have been supplanted, but I don’t know what has replaced this particular strand of cataclysmic denial. It’s still seems far too prevalent to me.

The depravity of bloodthirsty deceitful men is not in isolated pockets (if there was any doubt about this then the scale of the Rotherham report or the reach of the Yewtree investigation make things clear). We view it as such at our peril and denial. Rotherham doesn’t happen as a result of a few bad decisions. It happens because of the evil of men’s hearts.

Organisational structure and accountability must be addressed, but it isn’t the answer. Dealing with the evil of men’s hearts is the only answer. How as a society do we propose to do that? How as God’s people are we articulating that to the world at the moment?

This is a time when the world might be ready to hear some truth about why this is all going so badly wrong, and what happened to Jesus on the cross. The terrible evil in men’s hearts, the terrible price we pay for ignoring it, and the terrible price God paid to deal with it.

I’m praying for many Sunday mornings in which the world gets to the hear the undiluted horror and hope that the Gospel demands we speak.