Psalm 14/Commentary

Psalm 14 “Ship of Fools”

This Psalm is also exactly duplicated in Psalm 53. “Here the spirit of godlessness reveals itself in two ways: in flouting God’s law (1-3) and oppressing His people (4-6)” (Kidner p. 78). “’The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’, is perhaps one of the bestknown verses in the Bible. Vast numbers of people today would say exactly the opposite, ‘The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is a God’. Atheism in the modern world has become both a religion and an ideology. The Marxist state is established upon an avowed denial of any supernatural being or beings…Once the scientific method held sway, the power of reason to control all reality was applied, little by little, to the whole of human life. To know the truth, we no longer needed divine revelation…..We only needed ourselves. The modern era has shifted from humility before God to humility before humankind. Thus we came to be in awe of ourselves. Through reason we would conquer superstition and discover the laws behind the apparent chaos of human life. For Marx, economics unlocked history. For Darwin, evolution unlocked nature. For Freud, our biological drives and unconscious unlocked the human psyche” (Williams pp. 111-112)

God Dismissed 14:1 “The last word on atheism is said in Romans 1:22: ‘Claiming to be wise, they became fools’” (Kidner p. 78). Since the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and true knowledge (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10), the fool, in denying God, denies wisdom itself. The Hebrew word for fool in this psalm is nabal, a word which implies an aggressive perversity (remember “Nabal” in 1 Samuel 25:25?).

The verb “has said” can also mean, “has always said”, i.e., fools have always said there is no God. Not only is this Psalm repeated in Psalm 53, but a portion of it is also quoted in Romans 3:10-12. The fact that God repeating Himself means that we need to pay attention, for this is a temptation that each generation will face.

14:1 In the ancient world, even the pagans believed in spiritual and supernatural beings. “The denial of God is not an absolute denial of His existence. The pagans around Israel believed in many gods, and the impious in Israel did not rationalistically deny the historic and cultural links between the

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Lord and Israel. In his impudence the fool disregards God’s expectations. God is not important in his life. He shuts off the affairs of this world from divine intervention and denies any personal accountability to God for his actions” (Gaebelein p. 143). How much more then does this Psalm rebuke and condemn people who argue one step further, i.e., God doesn’t even exist!

God isn’t impressed by skeptics (James 1:6-8). “The assertion, ‘There is no God’, is in fact treated in Scripture not as a sincere if misguided conviction, but as a irresponsible gesture of defiance” (Kidner p. 79). This Psalm really undermines the idea that atheists are sincere in their convictions. So we then ask ourselves, “Why is such a person called a fool?” First, according to Romans 1:20, such a man knows there is a God but chooses to reject the evidence. People are not atheists from birth! He is dishonest, for Romans 1:20 makes it clear that what is revealed in the Creation is sufficient to prove to any honest man or woman that God truly does exist and to lead that person to conclude that every member of the human race owes this God praise and thanksgiving. “According to these verses, the revelation of God in nature is not hidden so that only a highly skilled scientist may find it. It is open and manifest to everyone. Finally, Romans 1:18 goes to the heart of the motivation which starts a man or woman on the road to unbelief. If we are trying to live without God it is because we do not like Him. “Everything about Him is an offense to them. He is sovereign; they are not, though they wish they could be. He is holy; they are not. His holiness is a condemnation of their sin. He is omniscient; they are not. They find His knowledge of them to be unsettling. He is love; they are filled with hatred. He is gracious; they are ungracious. He is wise; they are foolish” 1 14:1 Here we see the fruit of practical and theoretical atheism. “Atheism bears it’s proper fruit in rotten conduct” (Leupold p. 139). “The surrender of the knowledge of God or even the formal belief in God, opens the door to all kinds of human corruption. To deny God means, ultimately, to deny any transcendent basis for morality…The irony of the twentieth century is that the period of the greatest technical advance has been also the period of the greatest mass destruction” (Williams p. 114).

The verse isn’t teaching that man is born depraved (1 Corinthians 14:20).

Rather, here we are given the clear consequences of what happens when people reject God. There is this myth in our society that if we get rid of religion, then we will all become really nice people. But Scripture (and history) prove that when people reject God and His absolutes, they become selfish, mean, and end up abusing themselves and others (Romans 1:28-32). All of us will become “fools” if we depart from God and His revealed will, and we will end up corrupting ourselves. Compare with Genesis 6:12 and Ephesians 4:22.

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Psalms, Volume 1, Psalms 1-41, James Montgomery Boice, p. 115 2

14:1 This is a universal problem. “This thought, and the sequence of denying God, and then denying our humanity lies behind Paul’s indictment of the race in Romans 1:18-3:20. Once we no longer know who God is, we no longer know who we are. We destroy ourselves and each other” (Williams p. 114). So much for the idea that the removal of morality and ‘God’ will bring a golden age. We don’t have to “Imagine” what life would be like without faith in God or moral restraints. During the Second World War we saw that the fruits of evolution (the superior race and might makes right) led to genocide. During the Sixties, the philosophy that ‘God is Dead’ only increased man’s inhumanity to man, as people treacherously divorced, abused their spouses and children, and infected others will venereal disease, and abandoned pregnant girlfriends in record numbers.

Man Assessed 14:2-3 But God is anything but absent, uninvolved or unconcerned. God is intently looking at all of us, to see if anyone “understands” or acts wisely. Are there any who are actively seeking after God? Please note, this verse isn’t saying that people are born depraved and unable to seek God, because God says that man has “turned aside”, and that man has “become corrupt”. Both of these expressions infer a previous state of purity. This assessment agrees with Paul’s language in Romans 1:18ff. To turn away from God, to reject Him, we must sin against the truth that we already know. God is justified in saying, “There is no one who does good, not even one”, because all have sinned (Romans 3:23). “This is no exaggeration, since every sin implies the effrontery of supposedly knowing better than God, and the corruption of loving evil more than good” (Kidner p. 79).

These verses should silence the entire world! We don’t deserve better, we deserve judgment and condemnation. Man’s denial of God in no way affects His reality. If we don’t turn to the Lord, we will never learn. “We are practical materialists; that is, we are relentless in our efforts to use others for our advantage, profiting from them. We will not learn that ‘man does not live on bread alone but one every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord’ (Matthew 4:4)….because we believe that we can manage very well without him” (Boice pp.

117-118). Yet, there is hope! Even the most hardened sinners can change (1 Corinthians 6:9-11; Titus 3:3; 1 Peter 4:1ff).

The Great Miscalculation 14:4 “The folly of evil, already emphasized in verses 1 and 2, is now seen as failure to discriminate (4) and failure to foresee (5). There is an animal complacency about the unconcerned exploiters and secularists of verse 4”

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(Kidner p. 79). Here are people who are violating the two basic commandments. They reject God and they abuse their fellow man (including the people of God). They believe that they can devour up the righteous as easily as one eats bread—and suffer no consequences.

From this verse we learn something about what happens to people when they give in to evil. First, they become overconfident. Secondly, they create an appetite that can never be satisfied (Isaiah 9:20-21). Thirdly, yielding to evil means that we will end up hating what is right, especially people who manifest a righteous character. One cannot hold to evil and yet love what is good at the same time (Matthew 6:24). Young people need to seriously contemplate this concept, for you cannot rebel against your parents, without also hating, resenting and ridiculing the values that your parents cherish.

14:5 We know that the wicked will be in “great dread” when they meet God in judgment (Romans 2:6-11; 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-3).

Compare with Psalm 53:5. Yet, this terror may also be something luring in minds of every rebellious person. “Even though they deny God, they live with underlying anxiety” (Williams p. 117). Boice notes, “To put it another way, no one is threatening these unbelieving persons. They seem secure, as the wicked often do. But in their quiet moments, deep in their hearts, they sense that if this is a moral universe, as they suspect it must be, then they are guilty of many sins and will undoubtedly suffer for them. They are unnerved by this and shudder violently” (p. 119). Could this be saying that no man or woman can sear their conscience to the point that they never think about eternal condemnation or their deeds catching up to them? Williams reminds us, “It may be that those who violently deny God the most are in some ways psychologically closer to Him than they would admit….It is interesting to note that Joseph Stalin studied for the priesthood and Hugh Hefner’s father was a Methodist minister” (p. 117). This statement reminded me of Psalm 74:22 “Remember how the foolish man reproaches Thee all day long”. Some people have just enough “faith” to be angry at God. 14:5 But God is always with His people. In our times we hear many voices ridiculing and attacking the “religious right”. This isn’t anything new.

14:6 The “You” in this verse appears to be the ungodly man, those who heap abuse on the plans, views and values of the afflicted. How often is the simple faith of Christians ridiculed by those who consider themselves to be the elite in this world? The world often tries to ”shame” Christians for what they believe.

But the Lord is the refuge (shelter from danger) for His people. This doesn’t mean that God keeps us from being persecuted, rather it means that the world cannot destroy our faith. Instead of being frustrated by how many people have turned from God, we need to realize that the world is often very frustrated by the 4

fact that so many people do believe in God. The church looks so vulnerable, so lacking in material resources, and yet the church grows! And the more you persecute Christianity, it seems that the faster it grows (Acts 8:4).

“I once heard Dr. Joel Nederhood….tell of being in Moscow and attending a bookseller’s convention. The fascinating thing about this convention was that, in the age of glasnost (the openness in the last days of the Soviet Union), the American Bible Society was present and was giving away Bibles. A long line of people patiently waited to receive these Bibles, and, as Nederhood told it, the line stretched several hundred feet out into the display area, where it passed in front of a neglected booth manned by seventy-year-old Madalyn Murrary O’Hair, the most famous of American atheists, who sat there glowering. She must have been thinking, ‘What fools these Russians are to stand in line for Bibles. They should be buying books about atheism from me’. But it was she, not they, who was the fool. For they had tried atheism and had found it wanting. She had lived about as long as communists had ruled Russia, but she had learned nothing” (Boice p. 118).

There’s A Great Day Coming 14:7 We don’t have to long for this salvation, for salvation has already come out of Zion (Jerusalem). Jesus died for our sins and the message of deliverance was preached in Acts chapter 2. Compare with Psalm 2:6; Zechariah 9:9=Matthew 21:5 and Isaiah 2:2-3. This deliverance from Zion is seen as finding its ultimate fulfillment in the forgiveness of our sins (Romans 11:26-27).

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