What are these excellent things? Well, the Hebrew literally means commanding things but excellent is a perfectly good translation. The idea is of a commander or a prince, somebody who is superior.
So today, unfortunately, we won't get these things in the world around us. We are all aware of the concern about the decline in moral standards and the dreadful things that are happening on every hand. For the last 30 to 50 years our society has been spurning moral values and the standards of the Scripture and running them down, despising them. Society has been saying, 'Oh, there are no God-given moral standards and we are not an accountable people. The only moral standard is our duty to society'. That is all that is left today according to this present age. As long as we don't steal from each other and beat each other and hurt each other, that is about the only ethic that is left. Otherwise, you can talk about your sexuality as though there is no moral condemnation from God upon homosexuality and lesbianism, which there most certainly is. You can write your own rules today. So now they are beginning to see this iniquity proved to be what it is, now that we are launched into an age of the most vile deeds. Never have we seen so much child abuse. It has mushroomed to the extent that it is many, many times more prevalent than at any other time in history. Now they are seeing the failure of their ideas. How do they explain it? They don't know how to explain it. They are at a complete loss because one thing they will not do, they will not say, 'We have got it completely wrong; we have been fools. The moral standards of God's word are binding upon the human race, and if the human race casts them aside everything will go wrong, and we will be plunged into depths which we never dreamed of.’ They won't face that. They won't acknowledge human depravity. They won't acknowledge the moral standards of the Scriptures. So anything you hear these days explaining the situation that the nation has got into will be folly, far from the mark. Only from this word, only from divine wisdom, do we get a high standard, things that are excellent, authoritative, consistent, and which will work.