John Calvin called the Psalter “the anatomy of all parts of the soul.” Commenting on Calvin’s thoughts, Robert Godfrey said, “In other words, (what Calvin is saying is that) the Psalter shows how Christians are to offer praise and prayer to God amid all the various circumstances of life.” Calvin taught that every fear, every anxious thought, every yearning for the Christian can be a prompting toward obedience in prayer by using the psalms to help us to pray.

This afternoon I  returned from a wonderful weekend in Colorado. I can say with full conviction of heart, “The Lord was with us!” For I experienced God’s people praying in the Spirit.
Invited by Pastor Joseph Friedly of the Tri-Lakes Reformed Church, on Saturday I met with a half dozen men, along with their wives, who are considering pastoral ministry. Hearing their stories, desires, questions, and even anxieties, we spent an incredible time in fellowship, honest discussion, and prayer for several hours on Saturday evening.
Then on the Lord’s Day, in God’s providence I came having planned to preach on the role of the Spirit in the life of the church. In the morning service, I addressed Ezekiel 47 and the imagery of the river flowing from the temple, growing deeper and bringing life the further it spreads.  Then we looked at Ephesians 6:18 in the evening service and concentrated on the phrase “praying at all times in the Spirit.”
However, though I came to encourage this church in prayer, I found the night before and then that day that the Lord had arrived before me!
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While sin still is “barbs in your eyes and thorns in your side,” and so may we seek to avoid it, above all, let’s be thankful to the Barb-Taker, the Thorn-Wearer. Because he’s the one who, in love, not only illustrated, but who embodied, the indescribable harm of our sin. As Paul says, “For he who knew no sin became sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). 

But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell. – Numbers 33:55
The Oxford dictionary defines a barb as “a sharp projection near the end of an arrow, fishhook, or similar item.” While a thorn—well, you know what a thorn is.
Imagine a barb in your eye. A thorn in your side. Talk about painful. Debilitating. Something that hurts.
That’s the picture God uses to warn the pre-land Israelites what it’ll be like if they don’t drive out the nations. The nations will be “barbs in your eyes and thorns in your side.” Translation: They’ll really hurt you. As he says, “They shall trouble you.”
Yet the bigger question is, Why? Why will these nations hurt the Israelites?
Why They Will Be Barbs and Thorns
To answer, first, let’s think about what we would assume to be the reason. With the language of “barbs” and “thorns,” our initial answers would probably assume that the nations would physically harm the Israelites. For example, that the nations would attack the Israelites back—that’d make the most sense of barb- and thorn-like language, wouldn’t it?
Or, if we were to take a non-physical answer, perhaps we’d assume that the nations will make the Israelites less prosperous. That sure would be “troubling.”
Or finally, perhaps we’d put a more modern emphasis on it and make it something like the nations would make the Israelite’s feel less secure and important and loved.
All those would be harmful. But the Lord gives us the true reason. And it isn’t any of the above. Instead, it’s simple: The nations will be barbs and thorns because they’ll lead the Israelites to turn away from God and to sin. It’s that simple.
A Much Bigger Barb
Now, let’s be honest. We may hear that and think it sounds just religious. “Really? The intensely painful barb is just idolatry and sin?”
Yet the reason God calls uses such an extreme descriptions as “barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides” is precisely because God wanted them (and wants us) to know how incredibly hurtful idolatry and sin actually are.
They may think that leaving the nations and engaging in their worship wouldn’t be that big of a deal—for “We’re still God’s people!” as they often thought, or “God is gracious after all!” as we often think. But the reality is, the picture of idolatry and sin’s effects is eyes being pierced with barbs and sides being struck with thorns.
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In a recent op-ed for the U.K. Sunday Times, Douglas Murray observed that the reason the wheels have come off the #MeToo movement is that it discredited itself by overstating its case and conflating unmistakable instances of abuse with messy adult entanglements. “The MeToo movement had some cases that were very clear-cut. Others were not,” he wrote. “And the insistence that a historic reckoning was occurring made the line between the two uncomfortably easy to breach.”
The same line-blurring could describe what is happening in the second-largest religious denomination in the U.S. (and the largest Protestant denomination). Known for its theological conservatism that includes reserving the pastorate for men, the nearly 15-million-member Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is currently undergoing what many major media outlets are characterizing as a reckoning over sexual abuse.

Indeed, some go further, with ex-SBC leader Russell Moore calling it an “apocalypse” and evangelical pundit David French calling it a “horror,” proof the denomination does not merely contain some bad apples, but is, in fact, a “diseased” orchard.

While purple prose has been flowing freely in regards to the SBC, little of it has bothered to detail what the apocalypse looks like in hard statistical terms. That’s likely because, according to the recently released report generating all the coverage, a total of 409 accused abusers were found over the course of 21 years in approximately 47,000 SBC churches.
Bombshell
Lyman Stone, demographer at the Institute for Family Studies, told me the actual data contained in the abuse report, the result of an eight-month investigation by Guidepost Solutions, does not come close to meriting the hyperbolic terms that are peppering coverage in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN.
“Statistically speaking,” he said, “there were not that many cases. This is not actually that common of a problem in this church body.”
Stone went on to estimate that there are about 100,000 to 150,000 staffers in SBC churches, but many thousands more volunteer in their ministries. Of all the allegations that Guidepost investigators reviewed, they found only two  that appear to involve current SBC workers.
“If you wanted to argue that based on this report, executives of the SBC mismanaged the cases that were brought to them, then fine,” Stone said. “But if you want to say this shows that [the SBC] is corrupt, hypocritical, and rife with sexual abuse — the report doesn’t demonstrate that.”
Stone added that he was shocked that Guidepost investigators only found two current cases, given how many exist in the general population. “I mean, if I had been betting beforehand, I would have bet for a couple of hundred,” he said. “Because if you’re talking about 100,000 to 150,000 people who are disproportionately men, just your baseline rate of sex offenders tells you, you should have gotten a couple thousand sex offenders in there just by random chance.”
He concluded that while the report may show the need for reforms in responding to allegations, it does not show an endemic problem of sexual abuse, adding, “It is important to distinguish these.”
Corroboration
Advocates like attorney and Larry Nassar victim Rachael Denhollander have argued that misconduct within the SBC isn’t just a question of numbers. They also take issue with the executive committee’s resistance to creating a public database of the “credibly accused,” assembled by third-party investigators like Guidepost. But a deep dive into how Guidepost handled the most prominent allegation of abuse in its SBC report should set off alarm bells for anyone interested in maintaining a biblical standard of justice.
From the broad outlines of Jennifer Lyell’s story, it’s easy to understand why the members of the executive committee might have felt some hesitation to unquestioningly label her as a victim of abuse.
In 2004, Lyell was a 26-year-old master of divinity student when she met cultural anthropology professor David Sills, who is 23 years her senior, on the Louisville campus of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Shortly after, she became close with the entire Sills family, including David’s wife, Mary, as well as his college-age son and teenage daughter. She alleges that it was on a mission trip with Sills and his daughter that Sills first “sexually acted” against her.
That incident, she says, began a pattern of abuse that lasted 12 years until she was 38, continuing even as she moved to Chicago in 2006 and, later, Nashville, to further her career in publishing. During the time that Lyell was a publishing executive, she often worked with Sills, contracting with him for books, and, arguably, holding more power over his career than he did over hers.
In essence, Lyell was claiming that Sills was able to continue committing acts of sexual abuse against her even after she’d left the state because she would return to visit the family.
In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement and two years after her contact with Sills had ended, Lyell told her boss, Eric Geiger, at the Christian publisher Lifeway of the allegedly abusive relationship. Geiger, in turn, arranged a meeting with Southern Seminary’s president, Dr. Albert Mohler. In short order, Sills’ employment was terminated. A year then passed before Lyell provided her account to the Baptist Press for an article she hoped would present her as Sills’ victim.
As the house media organ of the SBC, the Baptist Press (BP) falls under the authority of the executive committee. When committee members read Lyell’s account, which did not contain any concrete description of violent behavior, in a March 2019 BP draft, they had doubts about framing it as she wanted, in part because they feared Sills might sue. They asked BP editors to replace the word “abuse” with “morally inappropriate relationship,” though the story retained a quote wherein Lyell accuses Sills of “grooming and taking advantage” of her. The editors informed Lyell of the change shortly before going to print.
Once the story was published, commenters on BP’s Facebook page criticized the fact that Sills had lost his job while Lyell had not, prompting her to demand BP restore the term “abuse” to the article or link to a statement from her rebutting their word choice.
Months of sporadic back-and-forth communications followed, in which committee members weighed options for coming to terms with Lyell. Then, at an October 2019 SBC conference on sexual abuse, Denhollander recounted Lyell’s story from the stage, identifying Sills by name and calling Lyell a “survivor of horrific predatory abuse” who was “cast away” by BP editors and the executive committee. Almost immediately after, Denhollander threatened the executive committee with a defamation suit on Lyell’s behalf.
Executive committee sources who agreed to speak with me anonymously say that the SBC’s insurance agency did not want to settle with Lyell, believing she did not have a strong case. But already facing bad press over Denhollander’s conference comments, committee members feared further fallout from dragging the issue out. In May 2020, the same sources say the committee paid Lyell just over $1 million, thinking that would be the end of the matter. It wasn’t.
When Guidepost issued its report on May 22, Lyell was by far the foremost accuser in it.
Again and again in the 35-plus pages that feature her case, Guidepost investigators claim Lyell’s version of events is “corroborated.” What that would mean in a police investigation is that witnesses offered other evidence against Sills. What it appears to have meant to Guidepost is that Lyell told her story to Geiger and Mohler, and both men said they believed it, according to the Baptist Press. In fact, Geiger, the first person to whom Lyell revealed the alleged abuse, told me Guidepost never even asked him to provide statements or evidence.
The report does briefly mention testimony from unnamed employees at Sills’ missions agency and his former pastor — referring to Dr. Bill Cook — but both Guidepost and the task force refused numerous requests to provide me with the agency staffers’ specific comments. And Dr. Cook told me that in his case, once again, all “corroborate” means is that he found Lyell’s story credible, not that he had any additional evidence to offer.
Guidepost defends its choice to refer to Sills as an “abuser” rather than an “alleged abuser” by noting that they didn’t find any evidence that “indicated that the interactions between Ms. Lyell and Professor Sills was anything but sexual abuse.”
Perhaps that’s because they weren’t looking very hard.
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