In a culture that is currently engaged in a futile effort to push God to the periphery of public consciousness, it’s important for Christians to recover a sense of biblical reality. Despite what our unbelieving world would tell us, neutrality is a myth. Every human action — from making love to drawing up the building specs of an oatmeal factory — is done in service to something. Either it is done for the glory of God or for the glory of self.

I keep your precepts and testimonies, for all my ways are before you. (Psalm 119:168)

One of the noteworthy characteristics of the wicked in Scripture is that they regard the living God as a distant and negligible reality. If the grand stage of human life is a play, God, for them, is a mere background character. A silhouette. A barely discernible figure tucked away on stage right, who, if He has any part to play in this theatre of existence, probably only exists to highlight the main actors. That God could be anything more — like, say…the transcendent Creator-King to whom all worship, obedience, love, and devotion is owed — never comes into their minds. They are too preoccupied with themselves: plotting trouble on their beds and enjoying the hollow pleasures of self-flattery (Ps. 36:1–4).

The righteous, by contrast, take an entirely different approach to reality. For them, the old hymn “This is My Father’s World” plays on repeat. And as they use those remarkable beauty receptacles otherwise known as “eyes” to look out upon “rocks and trees and skies and seas,” the righteous don’t simply see an endless landscape to be manipulated for their pleasure. Rather, they see the manifold wonders their Father’s hands have wrought and are moved to love and obedience: “I keep your precepts and testimonies, for all my ways are before you” (Ps. 119:168).

This, then, is the crucial distinction between the righteous and the wicked.

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