What should we do in a deceptive culture?
Text: Psalm 12
Hosts:
J. Kent Edwards
Vicki Hitzges
Nathan Norman
Narrator: Brian French
The CrossTalk Podcast is a production of CrossTalk Global, equipping biblical communicators, so every culture hears God’s voice. To find out more, or to support the work of this ministry please visit www.crosstalkglobal.org
Southern California Educational Cohort
(With an option to earn a Masters of Arts in Biblical Communication for $10,000).
Produced by Nathan James Norman/Untold Podcast Production
© 2025 CrossTalk Global
Kristin: How often are you deceived? How often are you lied to? Once a month, once a week, every day? Look at advertising. Often the implicit message tells you if you use their product, all areas of your life will be vastly improved. Look at your mail. You get regular credit card offers trying to deceive you into believing that you can buy now, pay later, and there won't be any serious consequences. Look at some Christian speakers on TV or social media. Some of them try to manipulate money out of you. Look at the news. One news outlet spins the truth one way, so you check out the same news in another source and they spin the story the other way, which is true. Look at the stories we tell on TV or in the movies. Sin is often portrayed, but there are no consequences for the drugs, binge drinking, profane language, violence, or extramarital sex that is portrayed. What can we do? What should believers do in a deceptive culture? Today, while Dr. Kent is away, join Vicki Hitchkiss, Brian French, and Nathan Norman as they discover how King David learned to navigate a deceptive culture in Psalm 12. Welcome to Crosstalk, a Christian podcast whose goal is for us to encourage each other to not only increase our knowledge of the Bible, but to take the next step beyond information into transformation. Our goal is to bring the Bible to life, into all our lives. I'm Kristin Norman. Today, Brian French, Vicki Hitskiss, and Nathan Norman take a look at the Psalms. If you have a Bible handy, turn to Psalm 12 as we join their discussion.
Nathan: Bryan, welcome back. Good to have you here with us.
Brian: Good to be back one more time. That likely means that last week went so well. We get that's how it works, right?
Nathan: So much. It was great. Okay. So, Vicki and Brian, how do you feel when you're being lied to or you find out you've been lied to after the fact?
Vicki: I absolutely hate being lied to. I just hate it. I've had several. Surprisingly, I could think of at least three, maybe four people who've lied to me. And you know, I can forgive a lot of stuff. People do things they don't mean to do it, or maybe they do mean, but I can get past all that. But if you lie to me, you better be careful planning a surprise party for me, because if I find out you've lied to me, I don't want to be your friend anymore.
Brian: Yeah, yeah. I think for me, intent matters sometimes. I'll use. I don't lie to my wife about what I'm getting her for Christmas or her birthday, but I enjoy the misdirection of it because I want it to be a surprise. And so sometimes I will ask her, hey, have you ever been to this location? Wouldn't that be a fun vacation type spot? And then I'll get her a subscription to something that she really, really wants. It has nothing to do with that piece. So I'll use misdirection. But if someone intentionally lies to me, I feel taken advantage of. I feel like I have given them something that was valuable and they have stripped that away from me.
Nathan: Yeah, it has strong emotional results when you realize you've been lied to. Even something as simple as My son came home with a paper. He had to write a persuasive essay based on a couple of articles that the school gave him. And both the articles were about how terrible chocolate milk was. And so he wrote how bad it was and everything. But the problem was I was reading through the articles and we went through the article step by step. It had misinformation. They said that chocolate milk had more sugar than a can of Coke, which is absolutely, completely and utterly not true. Easily falsified through a quick Google search. Right? And on and on and on. And it was talking about cancer links and heart attacks and all this stuff and just all this information. And I was pointing out too that there was no footnotes that referred to any of these so called studies that were done.
Vicki: Facts.
Nathan: And so, you know, my son's in fifth grade, but I was really frustrated and my wife's like, why are you so frustrated? Because he's, they're setting him up to accept false information. And this is the school. They should be giving him good information. He's been lied to. Right. Kind of like we see with advertisers, like we talked about in the intro, it's really difficult to be lied to. And I don't know, as you guys just said, I have a strong emotional response when I discovered I've been lied to or lied about or when I sense I'm being lied to in the moment. And so we turn to Psalm 12, which is attributed to King David. And David, again, we don't know exactly when this happened in his life. There's some possibilities, but David has some similar strong reactions to being lied to. Let's go ahead and read.
Vicki: He says, help Lord, for no faithful one remains. Well, that's a little strong, but no faithful one remains. The loyal have disappeared from the human race. They lie to one another. They speak with flattering lips and dissent, deceptive hearts. May the Lord cut off all flattering lips. And the Tongue that speaks boastfully. They say through our tongues we have power. Our lips are our own. Who can be our master.
Nathan: Wow, there's some incredibly strong imagery.
Vicki: He's ticked off.
Nathan: Yeah, he's ticked off. And maybe a little hyperbolic or exaggerating the situation. No one faithful remains. Everyone, all of humanity is lying to each other. But he's got some strong feelings. So let's go to our emotional charts here. And listeners, you can find a link in the show notes and kind of define what are some of the emotions that are going on in this movement of the psalm.
Vicki: Well, he's obviously angry.
Nathan: Yeah, yeah, I have no problem identifying that one.
Vicki: Yeah, yeah.
Brian: I often make a joke that when someone's really on the warpath in this kind of a way, I often say, listen, you've got to stop bottling your feelings. You've stopped being so vague and abstract. You've got to peel back that onion. You've really got to tell us how you're really feeling. Like, don't hold back, because it is like something really raw has happened here. And there is besides angry, I thought, there's just a deep level of frustration, just out and out. This is. This is awful. Everything stinks. People can't tell the truth to each other. They're actually physically incapable of doing it. And may God come and cut off their faces because all that comes out of them is a lie. That's.
Vicki: And there's.
Brian: But how do you really feel? Right.
Vicki: Yeah. And there's resentment. Resentment, obviously.
Nathan: Oh, yeah, yeah. He's got resentment towards them. He's loathing, I think would be.
Vicki: Loathing would be good.
Nathan: A good term. Contempt. Yeah. This is a strong start to a psalm. We would have no problem giving this to a contemporary recording artist and say, make a song mimicking these emotional feelings. Right. Just almost any genre right out of the gate. You could have a country song with this. You could have a rap song with this. You could have a heavy metal song with this. Maybe not a worship song, although maybe we should. I don't know. Not a lot of worship songs at this level of emotionality. But this is a song that was sung in the tabernacle, later at the temple amongst the people of God. So bring this more closer to home. Brian and Vicki, have you ever felt this strong about being lied to?
Brian: Once when I was much, much younger. It was another century, as a matter of fact. I was in high school. I was in my freshman year, ninth grade. And a girl pretended that she really, really liked me. She was an older Woman. So I was just in awe that this older girl at the school noticed me. And she put her arm around me, put her arm through mine, wanted to be close all the time for two days. It turned out that she was just using me to get revenge on the boyfriend that she had, that she had just broken up with and wanted to get back at him in some way and just sort of say, hey, you don't. You know, I have other options. You're not just the only one who's interested in me. And so she used me to get back at him. And then they got back together after two days, and I was ignored and just told to get lost. And I remember thinking at the time, how could you? And I went home and I told my mother, women, am I right? They can't be trusted.
Nathan: Well, how'd your mom respond?
Brian: She laughed. She laughed. And like, I'm going to here, they're there. And kind of moved on. But it was to go from that emotional high of, wow, this person really is interested in me to get lost. I overreacted, clearly. But I remember that feeling of, how could anyone just use another person in order to get what they want from someone else? Yeah, I mean, that's it, right? Like, some. Some of the deepest hurts, I think, are when you trust someone and they tell you one thing, and their whole intention is to deceive you. They want to deceive you. I mean, sometimes I say things that are wrong, they're not true, but I didn't know that they weren't true. And so I may not have the whole story yet, or someone telling me something may not have the whole story yet. And I really want to give. You know, let's follow the threads on this. Let's see if we can't piece together all of it. But that's not what my story's about and not what David is really frustrated about and angry about. There's an intent to deceive that he's seeing in so many of the people that he's running the country with and people that he's walking with and his friends. And he's so angry that people feel they can do this and get away with it. This. It's the deception that is. Is driving him mad to the point where he's asking God to. To just stop them from talking at all. Just take away their ability to speak, because all they can do is lie. That's a deep hurt.
Vicki: Yeah, well, rip off their lips. I mean, don't just silence them.
Brian: But not exactly a Hallmark card no, it's not.
Nathan: Sorry. You've been lied to.
Vicki: Yeah.
Nathan: Vicki, have you ever been felt strongly about being lied to?
Vicki: Oh, I have. So much so I still don't want to talk about it. And then every time after that, even if it wasn't a huge lie, I mean, that's my trigger. You don't lie to me, and I will. I know this doesn't surprise you, but I will call you out on it.
Nathan: So shocked. Do you know what David said to happen to liars? I'm not threatening you here. I'm just reading you scripture.
Vicki: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nathan: No, it's incredible. I can remember a number of years ago, working for a Christian organization, and on Monday, the boss saying, or maybe it was Sunday afternoon, I don't know. One day the boss said to me, you're doing a great job and so phenomenal and everything you're doing. And less than 12 hours later, in a staff meeting saying, the reason the church is floundering is because of Nathan's ministry.
Vicki: Wow.
Nathan: And that was like, you know, why would you. Right. And so when I talked to him afterwards. Why would you say this here and that? And he just. He floundered his way through everything, made excuses, but it was all my fault anyway. So, I mean, I. Yeah, I just was angry and upset and confused. It was awful. It was awful. I think we've talked a little bit about this, but why do we feel this strongly about being lied to?
Brian: I think, like I said earlier, I think we deeply feel the break in the relationship. I gave you something, my trust, and you have taken that and used it against me in some way, and you've cared about me, but you've stolen that from me. It's like you just put me into a Ponzi scheme. And you told me that here was going to be the return on this relationship, and then you took it and just used it for yourself and your own gain. I'm sure you guys remember the story of Bernie Madoff.
Nathan: Yes.
Brian: You know, just a really trusted financier who convinced so many people that he was going to generate stable income for them for years. And his Ponzi scheme was so massive that he was sentenced to 150 years of prison because he had taken people's retirement and their investments and used them for himself in this giant Ponzi scheme just through deception, over and over again. And so what people complained about is, now I have no future because of this person deceiving me. I think that, to me, gets at the why we feel so strongly when people Try to deceive us and lie to us in that way. I think that's why people walk away from churches when church leaders and church pastors say one thing and do another. They lie about their behavior, they lie about their character, they lie about their success. And people feel violated that I gave you this. I trusted you to lead me closer to God and help me do that, give me the tools to do that. And now I can't help but wonder, what else are you lying about? And so when Christian leaders do it, it becomes a reflection on, if you lie, then how do I trust the God that you say you love and serve? So devastating, devastating impact that just robs people of their future. And I think they feel violated.
Nathan: Yeah, that's a good term, violated. David feels violated, and he talks about how violated he feels. So now in the psalm, God gets involved. Obviously, David is exaggerating a bit, but there's still a real problem. So the Lord intervenes in verse 5.
Vicki: Says, because of the devastation of the needy and the groaning of the poor, I will now rise up, says the Lord, I will provide safety for the one who longs for it.
Nathan: So the emotion of this is a radical shift. What emotions is David now invoking in this part of the psalm?
Vicki: Well, all of a sudden he's getting his needs met. He's getting comfort. And I have not seen. I don't know if I've seen that or not, to tell you the truth. The person who wounded me the deepest with a lie has really come to hard times. And I wonder if God is punishing that person. And I was thinking yesterday, because I deeply care about that person, I would not choose that. I would not choose that. And there are other people. There's one other person that really hurt me, and I would choose it for that purpose. And I haven't seen God do diddly squat.
Nathan: Go for the lips, Lord, go for the lips.
Kristin: That's right.
Vicki: That's right.
Brian: I remember there was a deep church hurt a number of years ago that my family and I had experienced. We were being accused of. Of just some horrible things as leaders. And very similar to kind of what you were saying, Nathan. And without getting into a lot of details, I remember having some raw prayer times with the Lord saying, God, I'm not going to tell you when someone's time is up, but if you ever need help with the list, I have some suggestions. And I didn't know how to process that type of treatment where I was being told one thing to my face. And then behind the scenes, something else was happening. And that was the way I poured out that frustration. And it. Out of that came this understanding that God really does rise up to defend his people, that God really does rise up. And I've seen stories of where God has defended the poor and the marginalized, not just in coming through and providing them with what they need, but defending their character, defending their honor. That I think he has done for me and my family since that moment. Just in some things that have happened in reconciling with some people in that church since then that have been so, so helpful.
Nathan: Yeah, it is a wonderful thing to see God take immediate action. He doesn't always take immediate action, and not as often as I'd like to. But that is the nice part about these kind of imprecatory prayers. We've talked about it on the show before, but there's kind of a movement within Christianity where people say, well, Christians shouldn't really pray like this because we're told to love our enemies, which is true. However, we also realize, apart from Jesus, we can do nothing and we're human. And I can't love my enemies apart from Christ showing me their love. And I shouldn't hold anything back within prayer. God knows what I'm feeling. So me praying a private prayer against my enemies and expressing my frustration is not me taking vengeance. Right? David is not ripping off the lips of his enemies here. He's giving God suggestions. As we've talked about on this show before, I'm not going to take vengeance, but I have some thoughts, Lord. And to see God take immediate action, which rarely happens, I don't know, it's a little horrifying at times to say, okay, God, you need to take vengeance. I can remember a friend of mine, he. He got married to a woman, she had a few kids, and dad was absolutely nowhere to be seen, did not formally adopt them. The wife got ill after a decade or so and. And died. And so now my friend's taking care of these kids. And the. The biological father comes out of the woodwork and sues for custody of the kids. Not because he wants the kids, but he wants the insurance money from the wife's passing. And so they're fighting this, fighting this, fighting this. And because of, you know, there was no legal adoption or anything like that, the judge is about to hand these kids over to a person that they've. They don't even know, you know, and really is only in it for the money. So right before the judge made the ruling, the bio dad couldn't make it to court because he was having health problems. He came down with cancer and died within a week and a half and was never able to get a hold of the kids.
Vicki: Wow.
Nathan: Like, that's. You look at that as an.
Vicki: Wow.
Nathan: As an outside observer, not involved, and say, okay, I think God wanted these kids to be with this man, with the person that they called father, a new father from. From the earliest memories that they have. Right? Those kinds of things. You go, I. There's a triumphalism there, but there's also a who I am horror. I'm horrified at God's justice, right. That he rises up and like you were just saying, Vicki, you know, there's some times where you wonder, is God bringing justice in this person's life? And I don't want it. And there's other people. I'm like, all right. That person, though, they are a prime candidate. They could use some justice, if not justice, then a little bit of discipline. So we know just because God might intervene in one situation doesn't take away deception from all of society. So he might intervene in one area, but he doesn't always intervene in every area. We will always deal with deception and lies. So even though in this case, God might have answered one of David's prayers, he's still dealing with the deceptive culture that he's living in and that surrounds him. So what should we do in a deceptive culture? Let's see, in verse six, the words.
Brian: Of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in an earthen furnace, purified seven times. You, Lord, will guard us. You will protect us from this generation forever. The wicked prowl all around, and what is worthless is exalted by the human race.
Nathan: So he doesn't fully end on a positive note, but he. He starts off this final movement of the psalm saying, the words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in an earthen furnace purified seven times. So in contrast with the lies of the culture and the wicked lies of the entire human race are the words of the Lord. They can be trusted. They're trustworthy, they're good. We can find shelter from the deception of the culture through the words of God. So the word of God protects us from the wandering, worthless direction of the wicked. All right, last, last time I'm going to ask this. What emotions is David invoking in this part of the psalm?
Vicki: He is finding comfort. When he turns to the scripture, he finds comfort.
Brian: Seems that he really admires what is happening in Scripture. That image of silver being refined over and over and over. And over. You do that to make it the best it can possibly be in that circumstance, so the silver has no more impurities in it. And when you compare that to what God is saying, that in every circumstance, over and over and over again, it will always ultimately be trustworthy. It may take time to flesh itself out, but you can trust that its purity of its intent will always be to safeguard you. You can trust it. You can trust it implicitly. The process of people saying, can I trust God's word has been tested over and over and over again. And when people do apply it well, it always is the best thing in their lives.
Nathan: Well said. So what should believers do in a deceptive culture? Turn to the Lord's words to protect us from deception. The novelist Frank Peretti has rightly pointed out that our world is like living in a pitch black room that's perfectly round with no features. And there is a chair in the middle of the room bolted to the floor. And by it we can know if we're facing north, south, east or west. By it we can know where we are. And if someone is on the east side of the room shouting, I'm on the north side. And you can know with confidence, no, you're on the east side. So even if someone's trying to deceive us by that bolted chair to the floor, you could say, no, no, this is, this is the direction. This is the correct way that we're facing. God has given us his word, his revelation, His Bible. Not just so that we can know the truth, but so we can be transformed by it. This deceptive generation cannot manipulate you if you essentially come back to the chair to regain your bearings. That is, if you come back to the Bible when you experience the word of God, it transforms your mind. It silences the noises. It is the one place you can always let your defenses down and stop asking, is this true? It is an island of truth in a sea of deception. What should you do in a deceptive culture? In a deceptive culture, you should turn to the Lord's words to protect you from deception. Don't neglect reading the living word of God. Don't let work fatigue or laziness or television or video games or social media or computers or phones or friends or family time or even reading other Christian books take you away from reading the Bible. Read the Bible so you can discern truth from non truth. Gorge yourself on scripture.
Kristin: When you're lied to. And we all are by the media, advertising, even perhaps our spouse and friends. How should believers respond when they are deceived. Go to Scripture. Turn to the Bible to protect yourself from deception. The crosstalk Podcast is a production of crosstalk Global equipping Biblical communicators so every culture hears God's voice. To find out more about this educational nonprofit organization, please visit www.crosstalkglobal.org. this month we're training biblical communicators in Panama and Kenya. And next month we're launching a new educational cohort group in Southern California. Help us empower the next generation of biblical communicators. All you have to do is click Donate in the show notes and make a donation of any size. You can also support this show by rating it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you find it. Be sure to listen next Friday as we continue our discussion in the Word of God and discover how to go deeper in our relationship with God. You won't want to miss it.
Nathan: Gorge yourself on Scripture. Bringing in the whole cookie imagery again. And we're back to calorie free and we're counting calories. Count. Count your Bible. Some of you have a higher caloric intake than Bible calorie intake. That's right, we go with a Christian cheese here. I had to pet the cat non stop otherwise she threatened to meow and ruin the whole thing. Right?
Kristin: Dais how often are you deceived Daisy?