Then I Heard the Devil Heckle

“A conscience apart from objective moral authority is an orphan with no way home.”
Douglas Groothuis

Recently, there was a news story out of Florida that illustrated the depravity and wickedness of the human heart like few other stories ever could. Several young teens…children, really…recorded for social media the accidental drowning of a disabled man. As the pot-smoking boys watched the man struggle to stay above water and cling to life, they taunted, cursed, and giggled even as their hand-held camera rolled….

Lost boys…orphans… set adrift on a dark spiritual sea of cultural indifference.

Then I Heard the Devil Heckle

Just today I heard some children
Laughing at a drowning man…
I detected burning sulfur
While the flames of hell were fanned.

I saw children with no fathers,
I heard pornographic lies….
Learn-ed scholars in high places
Running out of alibis.

I heard proud men in the pulpits
Preach “another gospel¹”, friend.
I could feel foundations crumble
At the fast-approaching end.

Then I heard the devil heckle,
Saw the children all as prey…
Truth before me scourged and beaten²,
Pilate turn and walk away³.

Then I gazed into the mirror,
Where I saw the fatal flaw.
Then and there the Cross of Calv’ry …
Lit by God’s true, Holy Law⁴.

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
—The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

¹ Galatians 1: 6-9

² Isaiah 53:5-7

³ John 18:38

⁴ Galatians 3: 23-25