Ephesians 5:12 - On wise monkeys and Bactine

"For the [things] secretly coming to be by them, it is shameful even to be speaking..."

-These deeds of darkness are wrought in secret, they are birthed and brought to life in hiding, away from the Light of Truth.  Yes, the life lived on this way of death is one of hiding, hiding (deludedly) from God first and foremost, hiding from self - deceiving myself and desperately trying to convince my audience of one that what I am doing can’t be wrong - and I’m hiding from my fellow man, from my parents, from my boss, from my spouse.  I hide because in fact I AM ashamed.  What I am doing is definitely shameful.  Not everything, of course, but the disgraceful deeds of darkness are hidden away at all costs.

-And so God’s people, we don’t partake of them.  We don’t join in with them.  And we don’t even speak about them, these deeds of darkness.  To be sure, there is indeed a juiciness about them, luridly fascinating.  We can find ourselves talking about them with a sort of titillation in our souls.  But the shame which others bring upon themselves when they engage in these deeds can spread to others, to us.  So much spiritual collateral damage.  We don’t talk about it, nor should we watch it or listen to it.  Exposure to evil, whether through seeing it or hearing about it as well as simply talking about it, leads to desensitization and acclimation.  It feeds that vein of evil in our own hearts which the Lord actually wants to root out of our lives.  It is the ancient Chinese proverb of the three wise monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.  Normal monkeys do ‘ape’, however - they imitate that to which they are exposed.  Monkey see, monkey do.

-But no, we’re not talking about simply turning the proverbial blind eye.  The monkey’s are not merely burying their heads in the sand.  It is not about ignoring dark deeds.  Remember, we were just told to be correcting these deeds.  God's people are to be salt, light.  We are God's Bactine, the anti-septic for the festering mass of moral putrescence which infects our world.  And in order for that to happen, clearly we need to be able to talk about the deeds.  Rather we are talking here about avoiding a kind of verbal engagement which does nothing at all to clean up or correct such deeds, that which is more akin to gossip actually.  When we talk about such things and don’t address them directly, we actually glorify them and those who do them.  We shine the light on them for our own personal info-tainment.  And we engage in a type of moral acquiescence.  We get the taint of the disgrace on our own souls.  But it should NOT be this way.  So definitely don’t join in - either solve the problem, or don’t talk about it.