“Don’t you even know the
basics,
how things have been since
the earliest days,
when Adam and Eve were first
placed on earth?
The good times of the wicked are short-lived;
godless joy is only
momentary.
The evil might become world famous,
strutting at the head of the
celebrity parade,
But still end up in a pile of dung.
Acquaintances look at them
with disgust and say, ‘What’s that?’
They fly off like a dream that can’t be remembered,
like a shadowy illusion that
vanishes in the light.
Though once notorious public figures, now they’re nobodies,
unnoticed, whether they come
or go.
Their children will go begging on skid row,
and they’ll have to give
back their ill-gotten gain.
Right in the prime of life,
and youthful and vigorous,
they’ll die.
“They savor evil as a delicacy,
roll it around on their
tongues,
Prolong the flavor, a dalliance in decadence—
real gourmets of evil!
But then they get stomach cramps,
a bad case of food
poisoning.
They gag on all that rich food;
God makes them vomit it up.
They gorge on evil, make a diet of that poison—
a deadly diet—and it kills
them.
No quiet picnics for them beside gentle streams
with fresh-baked bread and
cheese, and tall, cool drinks.
They spit out their food half-chewed,
unable to relax and enjoy
anything they’ve worked for.
And why? Because they exploited the poor,
took what never belonged to
them.
“Such God-denying people are
never content with what they have
or who they are;
their greed drives them
relentlessly.
They plunder everything
but they can’t hold on to
any of it.
Just when they think they have it all, disaster strikes;
they’re served up a plate
full of misery.
When they’ve filled their bellies with that,
God gives them a taste of
his anger,
and they get to chew on that
for a while.
As they run for their lives from one disaster,
they run smack into another.
They’re knocked around from pillar to post,
beaten to within an inch of
their lives.
They’re trapped in a house of horrors,
and see their loot disappear
down a black hole.
Their lives are a total loss—
not a penny to their name,
not so much as a bean.
God will strip them of their sin-soaked clothes
and hang their dirty laundry
out for all to see.
Life is a complete wipeout for them,
nothing surviving God’s
wrath.
There! That’s God’s blueprint for the wicked—
what they have to look
forward to.”
