Week 6 Psalm 36
David begins with a short list – Characteristics of an Evil Person:
He flatters himself
He’s deceitful
He lacks wisdom
He avoids doing good
He plots evil
He acts-out evil
He endorses wrong action.
The whole list is pretty unhappy-sounding. But it was the first item that really caught my attention: in his own eyes (an evil person) flatters himself too much to detect or hate his own sin.
It looks like the guy is congratulating himself so much that his self-congratulation ends up masking any ability he might have to identify his own evil-ness.
I draw a quick graph with an X & Y axis.
Self-congratulation is at the bottom-left where the X & Y axes meet.
Evil-recognition is up near the top of the Y-axis. David says there’s an inverse relationship between self-congratulation and evil-recognition. Along the X-axis I start angling the self-congratulation line…up-up-up. Then I start drawing the evil-recognition line…down-down-down. They cross. Eventually my self-congratulation line peaks – meanwhile my evil-recognition capacity has bottomed-out.
It’s a tricky thing since boosting myself is pretty normal. But David is saying that if I let my Self-Promotional instinct evolve there’ll be a side-effect: I’ll lose my ability to recognize evil. And even though he doesn’t spell it out in so many words David seems to be saying two other things. 1) that NOT jacking myself up is what gives me the best view of my own evil-ness. And 2) that being aware of my evil is a beneficial thing.
Note: quote from Psalm 36:2 (NIV)