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Pregnant With Evil?

                         Whoever is pregnant with evil conceives trouble and gives birth to disillusionment. (Psalm 7:14)

                To state the obvious, when a woman is pregnant, there is a human being developing in her womb. When someone is pregnant with evil, the evil is developing within their soul. It's not the plot for a devil baby movie. It’s not that someone impulsively lies or steals a pack of gum on the spur of the moment. They dream, envision, plan, contemplate, and even sometimes practice. This isn’t to say that they are master criminals with grandiose plans to take over the world. They needn’t have an IQ of 240. To be pregnant with evil means that the trouble they’ve conceived is premeditated. It’s not an “oops-baby.”

                The problem is, once the evil is done, the excitement starts to drain away. If the authorities get involve and excited, that makes them a little more interesting for a while, but over time, the novelty and adrenaline fade. You can only relive your old glory so many times before it gets boring, if not to you, then to your audience. And once it’s boring to your audience, the disillusionment sets in. It’s not as good as you thought it would be. You must either accept the failure, or find a way to do it better.

                This isn’t only true of evil, of course. You can be excited about doing something good and discover it wasn’t as good as you hoped, but the point today is that, in retrospect, evil often doesn’t live up to our expectations of it. Anticipation exceeds realization. What is being described is human nature. That’s why we need the warning.

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