Psalm 27:3

just beneath the surface

Draw me not away together with the wicked; and with the workers of iniquity destroy me not: Who speak peace with their neighbour, but evils are in their hearts. (Psalm 27:3 DR)

The Psalmist now begins to consider the manifold ways in which he is afflicted by the wicked, which forms the bedrock of his supplication. His fundamental understanding is that the wicked are destined for destruction, and thus wishes to not share in their lot. The implication is that through their schemes and machinations he is somehow either tempted to join in with them or is so hard pressed that he may be brought to evil himself, either through despair or through hatred for these self-same enemies.

Their wickedness towards him is of a subtle variety, for they do not openly oppress or persecute him. Rather they feign good will by speaking peace, but this is merely a cloak for their underlying malice. They pretend to be friends and neighbors, but they pervert the good will of the righteous so as to further their own wickedness.

This is—to the Psalmist’s mind—a much more dangerous situation, for rather than open warfare it is more akin to a minefield. It becomes more challenging to navigate because the nature of the wickedness is not so overt, which requires far more prudence and wisdom. Part of the Psalmist’s fear by implication is that he will thus be drawn in with those who seek wickedness, perhaps by being deceived, and thus be drawn into their inevitable destruction.

The evil one tends to be subtle in his machinations. Overt, in-your-face temptation is in some ways easier to resist in that it comes from out of nowhere and offers a stark and obvious choice between good and evil. Sometimes we face this temptation, but more often than not it is far more subtle. It often comes as something that is more of a compromise or a lesser good that is still good. Sometimes the choice is even—in its infancy—rather innocuous seeming. St. James describes how this sort of temptation progresses:

But every man is tempted by his own concupiscence, being drawn away and allured. Then when concupiscence hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin. But sin, when it is completed, begetteth death. (James 1:14-15 DR)

The parallel between our being drawn away and allured by concupiscence and being drawn away with the wicked is of course not accidental, and while the Psalmist frames it in different terms, he is speaking of the same reality.

The choices that we face every day either draw us away with the wicked or draw us closer to God. Evil can put on a friendly face, but ill-will lurks beneath. The temptation to compromise and to accept what is wrong is perhaps nowhere stronger than in our present time when the zeitgeist frames its machinations in the language of morality, such that it is easy to be drawn away with the values of the world which are packaged in the language of righteousness. We are incentivized—especially on social media—to virtue signal by means of our advocacy of the values of the zeitgeist, which is virtue without the actual substance of virtue, but rather a perversion of it.

But beneath the emoji-smile surface lurks ill-will which seeks to weaponize the goodwill of the righteous against them, as the Psalmist takes notice of.

Here he speaks prophetically of our Lord who was often tested in bad faith to try and trap him. One of the more famous examples is of the woman caught in adultery, in which His enemies attempt to set our Lord against the Law of Moses or to get Him on the wrong side of Roman law. That this was clearly contrived (even though the sin was likely real) is evident from the fact that only one party of the adultery is present when, as the saying goes, it takes two to tango.

But in this situation our Lord does not fall for their trap, knowing their wicked intent, but instead exposes the charade for what it is. His famous response that “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (John 8:7 DR) is striking on two accounts.

Firstly, He does not set aside the Law of Moses in His response but rather demonstrates that it is incapable of producing righteousness, for as breaking one part of the Law is equivalent to breaking it all, so anyone who has sinned is in the same position as the accused woman.

But there is a deeper level, for of everyone in the story, He is the only one present who is without sin. And as the Word Himself and thus the source of the Law, He fulfills it by forgiving her sin, since that is what the Law is ultimately pointing towards. The punishment for sin is death, but He will take that chastisement upon Himself (cf. Isaiah 53:4-6), not by being punished for sins He did not commit but rather by breaking the power of sin and death and defeating them forever. In this way our Lord becomes the fulfillment of this passage on the Psalms:

Christ alone could say truly what this verse contains, because he was the only one, in every respect, “separated from sinners.” And, being the only person in whom sin could find no place, he, with the greatest justice, asks that he may not be judged; that he may not perish with sinners, but that he should rather slay death itself; and, by rising from the dead, bear away a most triumphant victory from the prince of death, and from death itself. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 27, 3.)

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This animation was kind of fun. I was looking for images and found this hand holding up a heart, which prompted the direction for this piece.

I cut out the image in Photoshop brought it into After Effects. I added some slight animation and some emojis and precomped it. I duplicated that precomp and changed out the emojis and added Stretch to the heart to make it look like it was melting or dissolving or whatever it’s doing.

I then inverted the color channel and used some mattes to transition between the two states. Nothing terribly complicated, but I like it.

Enjoy.

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View a higher quality version of this gif here: