The Boomerang of Wickedness Text: Psalm 7:14-16
Introduction: The Moral Architecture of the Universe
We live in a world that has declared war on cause and effect. Our modern sensibilities want actions without consequences, rebellion without judgment, and sin without a hangover. The sexual revolutionary wants his promiscuity without the attendant diseases, shattered families, and spiritual emptiness. The woke revolutionary wants to tear down every institution built by his fathers without living in the rubble. They want to sow the wind and then file a complaint with management when the whirlwind shows up. They believe they can defy the moral architecture of the universe and get away with it.
But the universe is not a random collection of disconnected atoms. It is a cosmos, an ordered creation, spoken into existence by a righteous God. And because it is His creation, it runs according to His rules. One of the fundamental rules, woven into the very fabric of reality, is that sin is not just wrong, it is stupid. It is self-destructive. It is a poison that always, always kills the one who drinks it. God has so arranged the world that wickedness contains the seeds of its own undoing. It is a self-defeating enterprise.
David, in this psalm, is crying out to God for deliverance from the slander of a man named Cush. He has appealed to God on the basis of his own integrity, not claiming sinless perfection, but asserting his innocence in this particular matter. And having laid his case before the righteous Judge, he now turns to describe the inevitable process by which God’s justice works itself out. This is not wishful thinking. This is not David whistling in the dark. This is a calm, confident declaration of how the world actually works under the government of God. What David describes here is the natural history of sin, its conception, its birth, and its self-inflicted death. He is showing us that God’s judgments are not arbitrary thunderbolts from a clear blue sky. More often than not, God’s judgment is simply letting a man have the full consequences of his own choices. It is giving him a long enough rope.
These verses are a profound comfort to the righteous and a stark warning to the wicked. For the believer, it is a reminder that we can trust God to handle our enemies. We don't need to take matters into our own hands, because God has built a boomerang effect into the moral order of things. For the unbeliever, it is a call to repentance before the trap you are setting for others springs shut on you.
The Text
Behold, he travails with wickedness,
And he conceives mischief and gives birth to falsehood.
He has dug a pit and hollowed it out,
And has fallen into the hole which he made.
His mischief will return upon his own head,
And his violence will descend upon his own skull.
(Psalm 7:14-16 LSB)
The Unholy Trinity of Sin (v. 14)
David begins by describing the internal process of the wicked man. Sin is not an accident; it is a project.
"Behold, he travails with wickedness, And he conceives mischief and gives birth to falsehood." (Psalm 7:14)
David uses the metaphor of pregnancy and birth to illustrate the life cycle of sin. This is a deliberate, organic process. First, he "travails with wickedness." The idea here is of agonizing, intense effort. The wicked man is not a passive victim of his circumstances. He is actively, strenuously laboring to bring evil into the world. It is his job, his craft, his all-consuming passion. He puts in the hours.
From this labor, he "conceives mischief." The word for mischief here speaks of trouble, toil, and sorrow. He is not just doing bad things; he is inventing new ways to cause pain. His mind is a dark workshop where he designs schemes to defraud his neighbor, slander his rival, and undermine the righteous. This is not a momentary lapse but a calculated act of the will. He thinks it up. He plans it out. He nurtures the malicious thought until it becomes a fully-formed strategy.
And what is the end product of all this effort? He "gives birth to falsehood." After all that work, all that scheming, the final result is a lie. This is a profound insight. At the heart of all wickedness is a rejection of the way things are. All sin is a lie about God, a lie about ourselves, and a lie about the world. The slanderer tells a lie about his brother. The adulterer lives a lie before his wife and God. The thief acts on the lie that what belongs to another can be his without consequence. But ultimately, the lie is on him. He has become pregnant with a fantasy, and the child born from it is a deception that will, in the end, deceive him most of all.
The Law of the Pit (v. 15)
Having described the internal generation of sin, David now moves to its external consequences. The wicked man's project turns back on himself with a perfect, geometric irony.
"He has dug a pit and hollowed it out, And has fallen into the hole which he made." (Psalm 7:15 LSB)
This is a classic biblical illustration of divine justice. The image is of a man setting a trap for an animal or an enemy. It requires hard work. You have to survey the ground, get out the shovel, and start digging. You have to hollow it out, making it deep enough to be effective. You sweat. You get blisters. You expend a great deal of energy, all with the malicious intent of harming someone else. The psalmist wants us to see the sheer industry of the wicked.
But God is watching this whole affair with what we might call a holy sense of humor. The man is so focused on his intended victim, so consumed with his own cleverness, that he doesn't watch his own feet. And in the end, he is the one who tumbles headlong into the very trap he so painstakingly constructed. The pit he dug for another becomes his own grave.
This is not a rare occurrence; it is a law of the universe. Haman builds a gallows seventy-five feet high for Mordecai, and ends up swinging from it himself. The enemies of Daniel conspire to have him thrown into the lions' den, and they and their families are the ones devoured by the lions. The Pharisees plot to trap Jesus with their questions, and are repeatedly silenced by His wisdom, caught in their own intellectual snares. God does not need to intervene with some new, exotic judgment. He simply has to uphold the laws of moral physics that He built into the world. He lets the man's sin run its natural course.
The Inescapable Boomerang (v. 16)
David concludes this section by stating the principle in its starkest terms. The evil a man sends out into the world is not a fire-and-forget missile. It is a boomerang, and its return flight path is already calculated.
"His mischief will return upon his own head, And his violence will descend upon his own skull." (Psalm 7:16 LSB)
Notice the certainty in the language. It "will return." It "will descend." This is not a possibility; it is an inevitability. The mischief he conceived, the trouble he planned for others, comes home to roost. It lands squarely on his own head. The violence he intended for his neighbor crashes down on his own skull. The imagery is graphic and personal. The consequences are not abstract or general; they are fitted perfectly to the sinner.
This is the doctrine of sowing and reaping, stated plainly. "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap" (Galatians 6:7). If you sow violence, you will reap violence. If you sow lies, you will find yourself entangled in a web of deceit. If you sow discord, your own house will be divided. The universe is hard-wired for this kind of justice.
This is why the righteous do not need to be consumed with vengeance. Vengeance is God's, not because He is a cosmic score-settler, but because He is the one who guarantees that the system of justice works. Our job is to remain faithful, to speak the truth, to do good to all men, and to trust that the Architect of the universe knows how to handle those who try to knock down His building. Their own bricks will fall on their own heads.
Conclusion: The Cross as the Ultimate Pit
This principle of retributive justice finds its ultimate and most glorious expression at the cross of Jesus Christ. The enemies of God, energized by Satan himself, conceived the ultimate mischief. They labored with all their might to perpetrate the ultimate act of violence against the Son of God.
They dug a pit. They wove a crown of thorns to mock His kingship. They drove nails through His hands and feet. They hoisted Him up on a cross, a pit of suffering and shame, and thought they had disposed of Him for good. They dug a pit, hollowed it out, and threw the Prince of Life into it.
And in a display of divine irony that shakes the cosmos to its foundations, they fell into it themselves. In crucifying Jesus, they sealed their own doom. By killing the author of life, they unleashed the very power that would crush them. The cross, which they intended as the ultimate instrument of violence and shame, became for them the symbol of their utter defeat.
But the gospel is even better than that. For us who believe, the story has a glorious twist. We too were wicked. We too conceived mischief in our hearts and gave birth to falsehood. We too dug a pit with our sin, a pit that led straight to hell. And we were falling into it.
But Christ, in His infinite grace, did something astonishing. He saw us falling into the pit we had made, and He jumped in first. He took our place. The mischief that should have returned upon our heads, returned upon His. The violence that should have descended upon our skulls, descended upon His. On the cross, Jesus absorbed the full, violent, retributive boomerang of our sin. He fell into the hole which we made, so that we could be lifted out.
Therefore, we can read these verses with sober confidence. The wicked will be caught in their own traps. But for those who have fled to Christ for refuge, the trap has already been sprung. The justice of God has been fully satisfied in Him. And because He fell into our pit, we are now free to walk in the light, our heads and skulls safe under the shadow of His wings.