How are churches ruined! How is it that great companies of the people of God lose their peace and joy, their happiness, their fulfilment, their fruitfulness? Well, because everybody has forgotten how to think, forgotten how to have discernment, forgotten how to discern wrong things that enter in. So you see, if I am not interested in being a deep person, seeing things, judging aright, then really I am being very unkind. I am contributing not only to my own downfall but the downfall of others. And the writer is so concerned about this that he says it is practically as bad as saying, ‘Come let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause.’ Consider a local church: if the members are not interested in wisdom or depth, this is what they will be doing. They will be selling themselves out to failure, to loss, to heartache, to tragedy, within a matter of half a decade. So the alternative to wisdom is just unthinking, even violent, selfish insensitivity for what can happen to people.
Amazingly, the world tempts us into sin, but tries to get us not to feel too bad about it. ‘There will be no pain to us or to them, it tells us. The good things are here, not in Christ. This is how we will get gain.’ Yes, there is a tempter, and he knows he has to deal with conscience, so he says soft things to us, to calm our fears of doing wrong. But O, the sorrow and the discomfort and the terrible sense of loss when we have yielded to temptation! Our only hope is to go back to God.