THE WICKED
By Elder Mark Green
For the purposes of this article “the wicked” means the unregenerate. I realize that there are regenerate people who sometimes act in wicked ways, but those are not within the scope of the definition as used in this writing.
That there are wicked, non-elect people in this world no reasonable, Bible-reading man could deny. “Just Lot” was vexed by the filthy conversation of the wicked. Lot was just, but the others were wicked. The inerrant Son of God told a group of wicked Jews, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do” (Jn. 8.44). They were not children of God, but were wicked by nature and wicked in conduct, and would never be otherwise than wicked.
That there are sizable numbers of unregenerate people in the world at this time none rightly could deny. If that were not the case, how could entire armies of tens of thousands of men be raised whose delight is to murder and maim and rape unarmed and helpless civilians, evidently without the slightest compunction or tinge of conscience? If there are no wicked men in this world, how could hundreds of thousands of people have been butchered in Burundi and Rwanda not very many years ago? Is it reasonable to think that there were no wicked men involved in the slaughter of over a million people in the bloodletting in Cambodia under Pol Pot’s reign of terror? I realize that good people sometimes go astray and this is absolutely no reflection upon them; but if there are not substantial numbers of unregenerate people in this country, does it make sense that the number of prisoners in our penal institutions has swelled to record proportions, some of them repeat violators of the most heinous and vicious of crimes?
What a tragedy it is that untold thousands of God’s children in this country alone have wandered from the paths of righteousness and into the heartbreak of overt sin! Would that we could somehow persuade them to turn from such! How many broken homes and shipwrecked lives have there been in the current generation because elect, regenerate people have turned into the broad way? It is a calamity of monumental proportions. However, we must not think that because God’s children often do many wrong things that therefore everyone who does wrong things is a child of God. That simply is not sound reasoning.
I thank God that I live in the rural South and that much of my time is spent around some of the finest people upon the face of the earth, and I do not like to spend my time even thinking about the other sort. Still, the fact that I do not like to be around them and do not wish to meditate about them does not change the fact that they are there. Time Salvation is an absolute truth of God’s word, and many of God’s disobedient children forfeit it by their rebellion. God’s children sometimes do wickedly – but all who do wickedly are not God’s children.