In the sermon 'Charging Bears and Raging Lions', Peter Allison argues that capital punishment aligns with God's just, holy, and merciful nature, emphasizing that withholding such punishment from murderers is unloving and unjust. He discusses the Bible's prescription for dealing with murderers, including due process and the necessity of multiple witnesses, while highlighting examples of biblical flexibility in applying the death penalty to other crimes. Allison examines the burden of unconfessed sin, drawing from Psalms to illustrate the spiritual and emotional turmoil it causes, and underscores the importance of confession and understanding justification by faith. Additionally, Allison critiques modern societal issues, including economic oppression and the effects of wicked rulers, comparing them to dangerous beasts like charging bears and raging lions. He calls for reliance on divine justice through faith in Jesus Christ, who promises protection and ultimate justice.

God's law is just because God is just. God's law is good because God is good. God's law is holy because God is holy. And so it's not being merciful. It's not showing pity to withhold capital punishment from murderers.

It's actually unloving and unjust. We can't claim to be more loving than God himself. And actually to put somebody in a jail for for 50 years and not allow them to do any productive labor, not allow them any of the benefits that God gives to those who live is really cool. Really cool. Capital punishment is far more merciful to the criminal.

Capital punishment is also far more merciful to the victims. Because when we let these people go out of prison and they do these same crimes again and again and again and again, that's just more misery. One more family who is missing a loved one. One more crime. One more victim that shouldn't have been, if we had been merciful according to God's definition of mercy.

So for the murderer then, God's law prescribed very clearly that mercy cannot be shown to them, leniency cannot be shown to them even if they claim mercy at the altar. They cling to the altar like Solomon's brother did at Onijah. They're to be torn from the altar. God says in Exodus 21, take them from the altar. If they flee to a city of refuge, they're to be taken from there.

If they seek to redeem or ransom their life, that's to be refused. Nobody can be redeemed who has been sentenced to death. And So over and over again throughout his word, God blocks any attempt to impose a lesser penalty on murder. But he doesn't do that for other crimes, and we'll look at that in a minute, but I wanted to say just because there is no to be no mercy for the murderer, doesn't mean that they can't be saved. Doesn't mean that somebody who has committed murder is outside, beyond God's salvation.

No, David committed murder, but he was saved. He was a Christian. It also means that we have to have due process. As we read, it has to be due process. You have to have a plurality of witnesses.

It can't be done without that. And so yes, there are some times that murderers can go free because we lack the due process necessary to bring a conviction. And in that case, this verse speaks about somebody who is burdened by murder may drive themself into the pit and were not to help them. Now this is only true for murder. This is not a principle that extends to any other crime.

With other capital cases the death penalty is the maximum penalty but not the minimum. The law allows, the law allows. This isn't us coming and saying well mercy requires. This is us looking to the law there is flexibility within the law of God for the for variation in punishment for other capital crimes other than murder. We see the principle of the judge having discretion to fit the punishment to the crime in Deuteronomy 25, where It allowed for the judicial sentence of whipping, of a lashing.

The judge was allowed to adjust the number of lashes according to the crime, but no more than 40. That was the maximum. That became in practice a maximum of 39, lest there be a mistake in counting and they inadvertently go over 40. The death penalty was mandated for adultery, for example. Let's take a look at that.

In Leviticus 20, 10, the man who commits adultery with another man's wife, he who commits adultery with his neighbor's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death." So there is that God is giving the death penalty for adultery. He says they shall surely be put to death. But scripture also makes clear in other cases where the victim did not want the death penalty, did not push for the death penalty, then it was not required. There was some leniency that could be granted. But that would be up to the victim and the judge.

Matthew 1 with the case of Joseph and Mary, it says that Joseph being a just man. It didn't say Joseph being a lenient guy or just not too careful about the law. Joseph, but Joseph, a just man, wanted to put Mary away privately because he thought, because she was pregnant and he thought that He wasn't the one responsible. It must have been. She must have committed adultery.

And so being a just man, he wasn't, in this case, pushing for the death penalty. He didn't want to bring her before the Sanhedrin and have her executed. But it says he wanted to do it privately. So here is a victim, or he thought he was a victim at the time, wanting mercy for this woman that he loved. Now some might say that well the death penalty wasn't authorized because Mary was only betrothed to Joseph.

But I just point out that the law treated betrothed wives the same as a consummated marriage. Deuteronomy 22, verse 22 says, if a man is found lying with a woman married to a husband then both of them shall die. The man that lay with the woman and the woman so you shall put away evil from you. In verse 23, though if a young woman who is a virgin is betrothed to a husband and a man finds her in the city and lies with her then you shall bring both of them out to the gate of that city and you shall stone them to stone death with stones the young woman because she did not cry out in the city and the young man because he humbled his neighbor's wife and so you shall put away evil from among you." And then it gives the case of a betrothed young woman in the country who is forced and then only the man is put to death because the assumption is that she cried out. She cried out.

Whereas in the city, she didn't cry out. If she had, she would have been rescued. So if we don't understand the death penalty in these cases as the maximum penalty with lesser punishments allowed in the law, then the many passages that allow divorce for sexual sins can't really be explained. If the death penalty always applied, then why would there be any need for divorce? But there is.

And there is because it was the maximum, not the minimum. Jesus teaches that adultery is grounds for divorce in Matthew 5, 31, 32. But if adultery required the death penalty, then Jesus wouldn't need to be teaching about divorce. There wouldn't be any need for it. And Ezra 10 is another example.

In each case, the foreign wife, Ezra 10 is where Israel had married all these foreign wives. And Ezra is very disgusted because they have broken God's law in doing that. But in each case, so being a foreign wife meant that these wives were not Christians. They were not worshipping God and they refused to do so. So it wasn't wrong just to marry a wife from a foreign land, God's word prescribes for that, but those wives needed to be converted.

They needed to be willing to live as Jews and worship the Lord. But these wives were not willing to do that. But in each case Ezra examined them family by family and it took a process of three months to examine each case case by case. He didn't make everyone with a foreign wife simply divorce their wife, but only where the death penalty was mandated was divorce mandated. Only where the death penalty is mandated is divorce even permissible.

And so only where there was no repentance did Ezra and Nehemiah mandate these divorces. Wives who would not repent and who refused to turn away from their idolatry, the idolatry they practiced in their native land, worshiping other gods, committed sins worthy of capital punishment. And it's only in those cases that Ezra, Nehemiah mandated Divorce. They could have required the death penalty, but they were merciful in that. It was either divorce or capital punishment.

Paul is applying these Old Testament laws regarding marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 where Paul teaches that a believing spouse is to allow her unbelieving spouse to live with her, not to depart that unbelieving spouse if that believing spouse will live with them. The harlots that came to Solomon in 1 Kings 3 are another example. Everyone knew they were harlots. If the death penalty was mandated, there would have been no need to decide whose baby the living child was. But this was not a miscarriage of justice because the Scripture in this very case says that Solomon showed that the wisdom of God was in him to administer justice.

Now the Bible couldn't say that if Solomon ruling in this case had been a miscarriage of justice. If he should have said, well you're too heartless, you both need to die. If that's what he should have said, then the Bible couldn't have said that this was an example of Psalm's wisdom to administer justice. And So this flexibility with the death penalty is something that is in the law itself. It's not something that we are adding to it.

It's part of the law. God's law is merciful. It's restorative. It's only in places where there is no repentance that we see this death penalty. And so, he, a man burdened with bloodshed, shall flee into a pit, Let no one help him.

That is also describing the effect of unconfessed sin. As the soul is burdened. In this case, the Sin is murder and the person is fleeing into the pit. But sin, all sin, is a burden to the soul. Psalm 32 describes this burden.

When I kept silence my bones grew old through my groaning all the day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me, my vitality was turned into the drought of summer." Sila. That's David's describing unconfessed sin, the burden that it puts upon the soul. David in Psalm 51 speaks of his sin always being before him. And in Psalm 38, for my iniquities have gone over my head like a heavy burden.

They are too heavy for me. I am troubled. I am bowed down greatly. I go mourning all day long. My loins are full of inflammation and there is no soundness in my flesh.

I am feeble and severely broken. I groan because of the turmoil of my heart. That's the burden of a soul weighed down by sin. Sin that is unconfessed. And we saw last week God's balm for that burdened soul.

It's confession and forsaking of that sin. But this burden of unconfessed sin can bring depression. Proverbs 12 25 says that anxiety in the heart of man causes depression. Anxiety, that's describing a burden upon our soul. And that burden can come from many places, but one of the places that burden can come is sin, unconfessed sin.

And so when people are burdened, the Bible says that leads to depression. And so when depressed people talk about suicide, or they contemplate suicide, It's very typical that they are dealing and being driven by unconfessed sin. Or it's either unconfessed sin or a failure to properly understand justification by faith and the greatness of the Gospel. One or the other. Martin Lloyd-Jones in his book, Spiritual Depression, uses this heal parable of the, or not parable, but of the, where Jesus in Mark 8 healed the blind man.

And he healed them part way, and he said, now what do you see? And the blind man said, I see people, they're just like trees, they're fuzzy, very fuzzy. He didn't see very clearly. And then Jesus completely healed him and then he saw more clearly. So in the middle there, we wouldn't say the man is still blind, he actually saw things he didn't see before, but he didn't see very perfectly.

And that's a description of maybe where some Christians find themselves. They're discomforted. They don't see clearly because of the lack of clarity about justification by faith. They maybe see it as people as trees walking. And so they might be thinking that they have to somehow change in order to come to Christ.

And Somehow they have to purify themselves, somehow they have to get rid of their sin in order to come to Christ. But of course, that's to miss the Gospel. We can't change ourselves. We come to Christ, He changes us. But there is in all of us, we all wrestle with an element of unbelief.

Like the Father who asked for His demon-possessed Son to be healed. And Jesus said, If you believe, all things are possible to him who believes. And this Father cried out to Jesus, I believe. Help my unbelief. People who have grown up in Christian homes can be sometimes slow to see the sinfulness of their sin.

And so they may not be truly convicted of their sin. Or it might be easy for them to compare themselves to other people and they look a lot better than those around them. Those that didn't grow up so privileged and And in so doing they may judge themselves as being good. But see they're using the wrong instrument. Wrong.

They need to compare themselves to the absolute standard of God's Word. And when we compare ourselves to this standard we see none of us, none of us are good enough. We all have to trust in Christ's righteousness received by faith. People can be paralyzed by sins they've committed simply because of an element of unbelief that God could truly forgive their sins. That God could truly forgive the sins that they've done in their past and that may be a burden on them.

By faith we believe that Jesus forgives sins. And as we confess them, He is faithful and He is just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, even the sin of murder. Now verse 14 then is a second couplet with verse 18. Happy is the man who is always reverent, but he who hardens his heart will fall into calamity. Happy is the man who is always blessed.

It's a blessedness. Now the word for reverent is, we talked about Hebrew stems last week, and the word for reverent is in a stem that makes this verb intensive. It intensifies the sense of it. So for example, the word in the base stem, say take a word like break, in this intensive stem it would mean to smash the smithereens. You take another example, take the word for to release something, to let somebody go, right?

In this intensive stem would mean to drive them away. See how it intensifies the action, that's the sense of it. And so this word is intense reverence. Well, intense reverence like this is, it's, the Bible uses the word fear to describe that. The fear of the Lord.

And this is the fear of reverence, not of bondage. It's the fear of caution, not of distrust or terror. And so This verse, some have translated, and I think it conveys the sense of it, is, the man who is continually or consistently dreads sinning will be blessed. The man who consistently and continually dreads sinning will be blessed. And I think that fits the the second part of the verse, but he who hardens his heart falls into calamity.

To harden your heart is just the opposite of a heart that's concerned about not sinning. It's careless. It doesn't have the fear of the Lord. It loses all carefulness not to do unrighteousness. A hardened heart sins with impunity.

No thought of an offended God." That's a hard heart. Now you'll notice that I added the word sin in there. I said, the man who continually dreads sinning or who dreads sin will be blessed. The word for sin is not in this verse, but it is explicitly mentioned in the first part of the previous verse. He who covers his sin, take a look at that, he who covers his sin will not prosper.

There it is, right there, sins. In the second couple though, it doesn't mention it explicitly. We have to add it, and we have to add it to make grammatical sense of it. But whoever confesses and forsakes, and the word them isn't there. That's why in most of your Bibles it's probably in italics, because that word sin or a pronoun for sin isn't in the Hebrew.

So but whoever confesses, but we have to add it. Whoever confesses and forsakes will have mercy. No, it's whoever confesses and forsakes their sins or that those transgressions will have mercy. And I think the same is true, that same principle as we continue into verse 14. Hebrew can write without subjects, it can write without verbs, and you have to supply it from the context.

And so I think it is appropriate to supply it in the context. Happy is the man who is always dreading sinning. That's the sense of this. It's the fear of the Lord. It's the fear of the Lord, a carefulness not to do unrighteousness.

And then verse 18 goes with this. It's a couple, goes together. Whoever walks blamelessly will be saved, but he who is perverse in his ways will suddenly fall." That's a couple. Now verse 18 is expressing this same thought. Verse 14 is speaking of the will.

It's speaking of the inward man, of the heart, what we want to do. We're fearful in a good sense about sinning, about not sinning and and not having a hardened heart. Verse 18 speaks of the actions that flow from these hearts. You see that? 14 speaks to the heart, 18 speaks to the actions that flow from the hearts.

Whoever walks blamelessly will be saved, will be delivered. That's what flows out of a heart that is fearful of sinning, a blameless walk. But he who is perverse in his ways, that's what flows out of a hardened heart. Perverse, we saw in verse 6 when we looked at that earlier, that means crooked. Now verse 15 and 16 then are the heart of this passage and it's speaking about wicked rulers.

Wicked rulers it describes as dangerous beasts. A wicked ruler is like a roaring lion and a charging bear. Dangerous beasts that are capable of killing. I saw a video on YouTube here of a charging bear. It was about, it was an actual video shot by a Canadian family.

This guy had gone out to scare some bears away off their property. And he had, I guess, fired in the air to try and scare them. And the bear ended up charging him. So his mama bear starts charging this guy and he had one shot left in his gun and he fired it point blank at the bear. And the bear rolled around and spun over and got up and kept charging.

Thankfully the guy was close to his house and he was able to jump in the door and that one shot gave him enough time to get away. But that's a charging bear. A shotgun point blank in the face couldn't stop it, just paused it. That's what a wicked ruler does. And a raging lion.

Those raging lions when they threw those Persians that had tried to trap Daniel into the lions, remember, they broke all their bones? Remember that, Clark, before they hit the bottom? We read that yesterday. That's a wicked ruler. And the poor are not able to resist them.

The poor aren't able to resist them because they lack the means. And that's really one reason why our land is in the mess it's in because by biblical standards most of us are poor in some in many ways we don't we are many Americans are one paycheck away from bankruptcy from not from defaulting on their obligations. A corrupt economist correctly noted that there is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does so in a manner in which not one man in a million can diagnose. And so how is that relevant to being poor and not being able to stop oppression?

Well, when you're living paycheck to paycheck, you're not able to take three months off and go to Washington, D.C. And get things straight. When you look at the war for independence, and there were a lot of problems with the Constitution and what some of these men did, but when you look at that situation, you see people that had the wealth, they had the means, that these men could take off work and go for extended periods of time and devote themselves to addressing the problems with the civil magistrate. They were facing a tyrannical and oppressive king. And they were able to take the time and get together and to deal with it in a way that many of us are just not able to do today.

It comes time to testify in Congress we're all busy working. We don't have that ability to put our jobs aside for a minute and still live. You see a society in debt is a poor society. A wicked ruler is, in verse 16, one who lacks understanding and is a great oppressor. Lacks understanding and is a great oppressor.

They make poor decisions. It's one way you can oppress people. Make poor decisions. Our country lost 20 million jobs and I think there's what, how many, 370 some million in the whole country. And obviously that includes children and women and all and people that aren't able to work and so on.

So when you look at 20 million jobs that's that's a huge number of jobs. It resulted in the highest level of unemployment seen since the Great Depression in 1930. And I think that effect on, you know, we're living that effect now. When things aren't available, you go to buy something, it's not available because all these jobs have been lost. I don't know if The full effect of that has yet hit us.

But that was a very poor decision that resulted in all these businesses being shut down. And it oppressed a lot of people. And people rightly saw that it was going to oppress the poor or the worst. The rich would be able to more easily handle it. They also rule unjustly.

Unjust rule is another form of great oppression. And what is unjust rule? Unjust rule is rulers who either judge unjustly, but it's also rulers who themselves are breaking the law. That's great oppression. And if we look at our land, we see this.

I'm not talking about people who break the commandments. Every nation, every culture always has people who break the commandments. They always have to deal with people who commit crimes. People, murderers who kill, thieves who steal, and people who lie and perjure themselves, adulterers, blasphemers. Now what I'm speaking about here is that that these commandments are being broken by our, by the rulers, by the leaders.

And these transgressions are more than that, they are instantiated in our laws. That's very different than just saying the people are breaking the law. The injustice, the oppression is instantiated in our, it's encoded in our own laws. And take the area, we take the sixth commandment, that one's obvious and easy to see how we do that. But take the seventh commandment.

In the 1920s, a zoologist who specialized in a particular kind of wasp, just one kind of wasp, was studying on the faculty of the University of Indiana in Bloomington. And he soon got tired of studying the mating habits of wasps, and he turned his attention to studying the mating habits of humans. You know that zoologist by the name of Alfred Kinsey. And he was no small time researcher. Much of his funding came from very prestigious foundations in the United States.

And in 1948, he published an academic work. And when it was published, it had as much fanfare as JK Rawlings Harry Potter series, you know how people would stand in line to get those books. Well when this book came out This book was titled Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. It was all sorts of hype and promotion produced by the foundations that were funding him. These books were heavily promoted as scientific studies on sexual practices of mainstream America by this conventional, unassuming American family man, scholar, professor.

But all that was false. It was all not true. He presented his quote-unquote research as a cross-section of typical American males. And what he wanted to show was that typical American people and men and women are very promiscuous. Now he didn't want to use that word he just wanted to describe all these promiscuous practices and say that was normal and if that's normal then how can we outlaw it?

Doesn't make sense. So he had 5, 300 people in his sub-study. Half of them were convicts. 20% of them were homosexuals. 50% or 50 were transvestites.

100 were mentally ill. And 650 were admitted pedophiles. That's not a typical cross-section of America, even today. Even today. It certainly wasn't in his day.

Kinsey's published research included actual criminal activity of sexual predators. In 1998, Dr. Fritz von Balasek's criminal trial records were uncovered in Berlin. Remember, the Berlin Wall came down and it opened up a lot of records behind the Iron Curtain. And according to news reports at that time, Balusek was a Nazi pedophile who was allowed to experiment on Polish children in occupied Poland.

It turns out from the trial records at his database containing 20 years of criminal pedophile activity against children were part of Kinsey's data. Stuck in his diaries, there are letters from Kinsey encouraging him in his research. Even pro-Kinsey biographers have admitted on public television that his work utilized pedophiles. You see, it's one thing to report on criminal activity. It's another thing when your research consists of criminal activity.

And it's evident right in the book itself. Just look at table 34 in that book records the work of criminal activity even today. But despite being the work of convicted sex offenders, despite being populated with data from the dregs of society despite nearly 50% of his population being prisoners in jail, the human male was billed as a scientific study of normal people. It became a New York Times best seller. But the reason I'm mentioning it this morning is it did something far worse.

It became the scientific basis for the model penal code in our country. Today the laws of every state have been radically altered to conform to these theories and ideas that were advanced in his fraudulent work. And on the basis of Kinsey's crimes and junk science, Laws relating to the seventh commandment have been eliminated or the penalties dramatically reduced under the notion that it can't be wrong if 95% of the population is doing it. Well it can be wrong even if a hundred percent of the population is doing it. And the consequences have been devastating, especially for women and children who have lost the protection that these laws provided them, protection from pedophiles, protection from predators.

Dr. Judith Reisman, who has been the pioneer in uncovering all this, found that Kinsey's work was cited 799 times in major court decisions in a recent 14-year period. These courts are citing this as justification. His science was the basis for Roe v. Wade.

What about the 8th commandment? That's an example of oppression, of wicked rulers where the 7th commandment, crimes under the 7th commandment are instantiated in our law. What about the eighth commandment, the one about not stealing? We could spend lots of time talking about how the Federal Reserve steals from us. But we've done that before.

What about the Ninth Commandment? The one against lying? Has it been overturned as well by our laws? Well you can go, At least you used to, I've done it. You can go to the National Archives and search under Cuba Project Northwoods and you can find a document called Operation Northwoods written by the Department of Defense in 1962 signed personally signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This document was was written at the highest levels of our government and presented to the very highest level. The purpose of this document was to think of ways to get the US into war with Cuba. How do we get the, we can't just go attack Cuba because everybody, nobody want to do that. They'll say, well you can't go attack another country, that's murder and it would be. So how do we trick the US into allowing us to attack Cuba?

They were going to brainstorm on ways to get into war with Cuba. And it consists of all sorts of ideas of how we might deceive the American people into supporting a war with Cuba. And here are a few ideas, just to give you a taste of the ideas that were presented in this document. Make, create an, it is possible, so these are people suggesting to the president how they could do this. They said it's possible to create an incident in which it, in which, which will make it appear that communist Cuban Migs have destroyed one of our U.S.

Air Force aircraft over international waters in unprovoked attack. How do you do that? Here's one of their ideas. And this goes on. There are many, many, many, many ideas that they throw out there.

But here's just one of those ideas. They say, well, You could dispatch four or five fighter aircrafts from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, which is near Cuba. Would be to conduct, let's see, their mission would be to conduct various flights. They would fly out at various intervals and the crews would fly around Cuba. And on one of these flights, so you might have five planes, so you have five planes, the last, the pilot in the last plane would be briefed that he would fly at the end at a considerable interval.

And when they get near Cuba, this guy at the end is going to broadcast that he's been shot down by MiGs and he's going down. That's all he's going to do. He's told, Mayday, Mayday, I'm shot, I'm down. And then the pilot would then fly directly west, that's reverse direction, going back west, at a very low altitude and landed a secure base in Elgin Auxiliary. I'm just reading right out of this document.

And the aircraft would be met by the proper people, quickly stored and given a new tail number. The pilot who performed the mission under an alias would resume his proper identity and return to his normal place of business. The pilot and aircraft would have disappeared. At precisely the same time that the aircraft was shot down, a submarine or small surface craft would disperse parts from this airplane that was shot down, a parachute about 15 to 20 miles off the Cuban coast and then depart. So if anybody's flying around they're going to see there's a bunch of aircraft parts that they would recognize because they come from their own airplane.

And then the pilots returning to Homestead Air Force Base, they'd have a true story as far as they knew. They went out with five guys and they came back with four and they saw the parts of the airplane floating on the ocean. All the while it was entirely made up. That's a lie. That's a lie to get us into war and what happens in war?

People die. It's a lie to get us into an unjust war. And I could I could go on and on. Sidney Powell wrote a book recently called License to Lie that details how federal prosecutors are lying and withholding evidence and cheating and false witnesses are just endemic in the federal court structure. And I have an interesting case that came before the 9th U.S.

Circuit Court. The 9th U.S. Circuit is the court right below the Supreme Court. This is not your county court. And there is, in that case, and you can listen to the audio of it.

I have the audio of it. A CPS attorney argued that CPS agents have constitutional immunity to lie and present false evidence in court in order to remove natural children from their parents. Did you get that? They have the right to lie under oath in court in order to remove children from their natural born parents. The judge said to this attorney, are you telling me that a person in your client's shoes, her client is the CPS, he's defending CPS, Are you telling me that a person in your client's shoes, her client is the CPS, he's defending CPS, are you telling me that a person in your client's shoes should not understand that you can't commit perjury in a court proceeding in order to take away your children?

The attorney says, of course not, your honor. The judge says, well, of course not your right. Then the case is over. But surprisingly, that wasn't this attorney's view defending CPS. She distinguishes that her of course not answer was referring to our moral compass not the constitutionality of their action.

She's just saying we have a constitutional right to do what's morally wrong. The judge said I'm just staggered by the claim that people in the shoes of your clients with the CPS wouldn't be on notice, that you can't use perjury and false evidence in court to take away somebody's children. Says that to me is mind boggling. That's what we're talking about. Wicked rulers, like roaring lions and charging bears, are great oppressors, And especially the poor.

Because who suffers the most when CPS comes to take children away? If you're very, very wealthy and you have a gate at your front yard and your house is half a mile back, it's very hard to get you. But if you're poor and you can't afford a good lawyer, it's very easy. I think raging bears and charging lions are very apt descriptions of the kind of oppression that we are living under. But brothers and sisters, remember as we said last week, Jesus Christ is King.

And Jesus Christ rules, as we sang this morning with perfect justice and equity. And he promises to hide as a righteous in his pavilion and to protect us from, hide us in the secret of his pavilion and to protect us from these raging lions and charging bears. And he can, because all of these people, you know, are just like Pharaoh's army. They're not any greater. They're not any greater.

Stand by, stand by, and see the deliverance of the Lord. This is our hope and this is our confidence. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, We thank you that you are the reigning king. We thank you that you rule over all things.

And that the greatest armies in the world are but as a speck of dust. The greatest nations in the world are but as a speck of dust upon your scales. And so Lord we thank you that you are not deceived, that you're not blind or ignorant, but you know all of these devices. And Lord we lift our case to you this morning that you the righteous judge would would see these injustices and that you would bring your mercy in your mercy you might bring a judgment to destroy the works of wickedness in our land, to destroy the wicked oppressors of your people. We ask Father in Jesus' name and for your glory.

Amen.