Woe

18 What sorrow for those who drag their sins behind them
with ropes made of lies,
who drag wickedness behind them like a cart!
19 They even mock God and say,
“Hurry up and do something!
We want to see what you can do.
Let the Holy One of Israel carry out his plan,
for we want to know what it is.”

20 What sorrow for those who say
that evil is good and good is evil,
that dark is light and light is dark,
that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter.
21 What sorrow for those who are wise in their own eyes
and think themselves so clever.
22 What sorrow for those who are heroes at drinking wine
and boast about all the alcohol they can hold.
23 They take bribes to let the wicked go free,
and they punish the innocent.

24 Therefore, just as fire licks up stubble
and dry grass shrivels in the flame,
so their roots will rot
and their flowers wither.
For they have rejected the law of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies;
they have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.

During World War II, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an artillery officer in the Soviet army, dared to write a few critical remarks about Stalin in a letter to a friend. Military censors caught the note and sent him to Siberia for years of hard labor in the dreaded Gulag Archipelago, a string of concentration camps scattered like islands across nine time zones. On the way to the frozen north by train, Solzhenitsyn was deliberately assigned to a box car with the most brutal of criminals. The communists thought such criminals were better than people like Solzhenitsyn because they preyed on the rich and supposedly distributed money more evenly throughout society. This was one way in which communism turned things upside down, calling evil good and good evil. Long before communism, Paul pointed out people’s tendency to turn things upside down: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25).

People in our day coo at their poodles and kill their babies. They worship celebrities and ignore God. Men and women exchange natural relations for unnatural, and call it good. Terror is taught as a pious duty. Like King Midas, people love gold and neglect their loved ones. This is the topsy-turvy world in which we call people to turn back to God.

Help us, O God, to stay on track when society all around us is flying upside down. Help us to focus on Christ alone. Give us the wisdom to discern between good and evil. Amen.