I can not say that I have not forsaken God’s precepts. I cannot say, as the psalmist says here, that I have not forgotten your statutes. I know the weight of shame and guilt, but I do not fully know the burden of temptation. I, for one, do not know that full weight. I have heard it said before that the only person who really knows the full weight of temptation is the one who has never given into it. We will do all of these things and more because we are impure to the core. We will choose easy sexuality instead of walking through the desert of loneliness. We will murder, either in reality or through the depths of hatred, to make ourselves feel better. We will steal to help pay a bill or buy that thing we have lusted after. Each of us will, at some point when under the strains and stresses of life, forget the law of God and choose what we think at the time to be an easy way out. He is the only one who is able to say that in the midst of life’s many troubles he never forgot God’s statutes. I am reminded of that one person once again when reading this portion of Psalm 119.
In fact, every person on the face of the globe, past, present, and future have such capacity, every person save one. This is true of me and this is true of you. That is to say within my heart sit the seeds of all evil. Every bit of darkness we see in this world, the death and decay, the lawlessness and the evil, the lies and murder all originate within the heart of man. While this world is full of both great beauty and dark ugliness it is not the source of either.
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