Psalm 14
You may be seated. Please turn
in your copy of God’s word to Psalm 14. Next week, we’ll make
a return to the book of Acts and pick up where the risen Lord
is sending his apostles and converts into the world to make the gospel
known to the ends of the earth. But today I thought it would
be good for us to think on a psalm that will help us with an outlook
for the new year. Not an outlook about eating better
and exercising, but maybe an outlook that will help us bear
up well under the burden of it really is a dark world. It really
is a crooked and depraved generation. And if we listen too much to
the headlines and look too much at culture, I think we could
get down in the dumps and we can get the blues. And so I think
Psalm 14 will help us. I originally wanted to walk us
through Psalm 11, 12, 13, and 14 and see how those 30 or so
verses progress. But the wisdom got the better
of me and I thought, I don’t want to keep y’all here till
two o’clock. So we’ll just look at 14. Before we read Psalm 14
though, let us look to God in prayer. Pray with me. Lord, the
fool says in his heart, there is no God. And we would say the
same thing, were it not for your Holy Spirit, were it not for
your grace to let us hear the voice of the shepherd. And so
that when he called our name, we came in obedience to him. But Lord, we do live in a world
that screams at us for our attention, for our allegiance, and sometimes
our ears get stopped up. There’s too many shiny things
around, too many distractions, and sometimes the voice of the
shepherd is faint. So now, Lord, let us hear, let
us believe, and let us live according to your holy scriptures, we do
pray in the name of Christ our Savior, the living word, amen. This is Psalm 14, a Psalm of
King David, And he begins this way to the choir master. The
fool says in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt. They do abominable deeds. There
is none who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven
on the children of man to see if there are any who understand,
any who seek after God. They have all turned aside. Together,
they have become corrupt. There is none who does good,
not even one. Have they no knowledge, all the
evildoers, who eat up my people as they eat bread and do not
call upon the name of the Lord? There they are in great terror,
for God is with the generation of the righteous. You would shame
the plans of the poor. but the Lord is his refuge. Oh,
that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion. When the Lord
restores the fortunes of his people, let Jacob rejoice and
let Israel be glad. Amen, the word of the living
God. If you read Hebrews chapter 11, you read an account of what
we call the heroes of the faith. And it goes through the Old Testament
and I believe ends in summary form with some New Testament
characters, though not given their names. And it tells about
how they persevered in hard times. One of those characters always
strikes me, and it’s the character Noah. When we think of Noah,
we always think about Noah and his ark and the two animals coming
to about two and how cute it is. But the book of Hebrews says
this, by faith Noah, Being warned by God concerning events as yet
unseen, in reverent fear, constructed an ark for the saving of his
household. You could describe this verse
in this way. Noah hammered and he nailed for
a hundred years on an ark and there was no rain in sight. Noah
sawed lumber and hewed this gigantic boat into being, all the while
preaching to an unrighteous generation, all the while being ridiculed,
all the while culture continuing to rot by the minute and become
darker and darker. I think there’s a copy of it
in the children’s room, the nursery. I know we have a copy of it at
home. It’s a illustrated book of Noah
and his Ark. And it’s by a Dutch artist named
Peter Speer. And there are no words in the
book, zero. Pictures tell it all. And in
his drawings of Noah hammering and nailing and sawing and building
and preaching, all that is behind this man as he builds an arc
of safety for his family, all that is around him would be the
exact same things that we see in today’s headlines. There’s
all manner of drunkenness and immorality and addictions and
godlessness. No one seeks after God. No one has turned from their
evil ways to the living God. And yet the book of Hebrews tells
us that in reverent fear, Noah believes that the promised events
yet unseen, that is a great flood, will take place. And so he must
build an ark of safety for the saving of his household. Yet
for a hundred years, The generation around him says there is no God. And the book of Hebrews goes
on to say, by this he was condemning the world and became an heir
of the righteousness that comes by faith. Now you can imagine
as the rains came down and as the doors of the ark were shut,
the preaching of the gospel completed. God shut the doors. He shut Noah
and his family in. And you can imagine the rains
coming down. And even Genesis says that waters came up out
of the earth. There was water everywhere. And
you can imagine the tenacity, the doggedness of the unrighteous,
even to their last drowning breath, saying, there is no God. Or how about this? Fast forward
in the Bible to two 80 year olds. Two 80 year olds sent to Pharaoh
to say to Pharaoh, let Israel, my people go up out of Egypt
and into the wilderness to worship Yahweh. They carried with them
the rod that when they threw down, it became a serpent because
God had said, they will know, Pharaoh will know that I am. Pharaoh will know that Yahweh
exists and through a plague of blood, the river Now their lifeblood
turning into red blood, the plague of frogs, the gnats, the flies,
the wiping out of the livestock, the boils and the hail, the locust
and the darkness. And finally the death of the
firstborn. You read through these chapters
in Exodus and you see continually Pharaoh has the hard hearted
nerve. to continue to exalt himself.
He refuses to humble himself and he continually proclaims
there is no God. And so sometimes we think, sometimes
we think we’re the only generation, we’re the only culture that’s
gotten this bad. No, it was so in the days of
Noah. It was so in the days of Pharaoh and it took that 10th
plague the taking of the lives of the firstborn, the Passover
as we know it, to soften Pharaoh’s heart. Well, only for a minute,
because he gave chase to Israel. But we know of God’s triumph
because Miriam and Moses sang of it. I will sing unto the Lord
for he has triumphed gloriously, the horse and the rider he has
thrown into the sea and maybe Well, maybe just like the people
in Noah’s day, as the rains came down and the floods came up,
the sea came over them in an overwhelming fashion, and their
last gasping, drowning breath, they said through the bubbles,
there is no God. Friends, that’s what God is telling
us here in Psalm 14. The fool in his heart says, there
is no God. That’s exactly what is wrong
with our culture. That’s why we see the evening
news headlines. That’s why cultural commentators
have plenty to say, plenty to talk about because we live in
a world where there are plenty of fools who say in their heart,
there is no God. A quick understanding from the
Bible, what is a fool? The fool is a person who has
no spiritual understanding. You contrast them, particularly
in the Proverbs, with the wise man. The wise man does this. The wise man fears God. The wise
man listens and learns and grows. But the fool continually robs
and kills and destroys and makes his way down to death. The fool
has no morals. The fool has no spiritual insight. Well, a step further to understand
this predicament we find ourselves in, this culture that is all
around us, there is not only the fool, the unspiritual person,
but there is the fool’s heart. Psalm 14 says the fool says in
his heart, there is no God. You could interpret that by saying
the fool says to himself, you know, we say stuff to ourselves
all the time, right? There’s a degree of which we
can say things to ourself and we’re not crazy. This fool says to himself over
and over, there is no God, but there’s a deeper issue. His heart
is dead in sin. His heart is dead in his transgressions. And Jesus says so well that out
of the overflow of the heart does the mouth speak. And so when the fool says there
is no God, he believes it down in the core of his being. His
inability to see God and the majesty of creation. His inability,
as Psalm 19 says, Heavens above declare the glory of God. The
sky above the firmament declares his handiwork. Day after day
pours forth speech. There is no voice that does not
yell out, scream out, proclaim that there is a God. And the
fool says in his heart, there is no God. We have to understand,
we have to understand this in today’s culture. Everyone will
tell you atheism is an intellectual problem. No, actually, atheism
is a spiritual problem. It’s a moral problem. In fact,
atheism is bad intellectualism, because you first have to find
a God, then deny him. That doesn’t work. You can’t
be an atheist if you deny that there’s a God. Well, the fool
says in his heart there is no God, and that’s because the fool’s
heart is bound up in folly, it is bound up in sin, it is chained
under sin’s dark night, it is under Satan’s dominion, and that’s
who we all were before God and Christ saved us. And so the fool,
the unspiritual person, the fool’s heart, a rotten heart at the
core who says there is no God, what about the fool’s conclusion? You could think You could say
the fool’s conclusion is that there is no God. That’s only
the beginning of his conclusion. His real conclusion is that he
is God. She is God. In fact, after all,
that’s what Satan has sought to do in this world. You remember
Satan, an angel of light, a messenger of God in heaven. Somewhere in
eternity past decided he’d rather be king of hell than the servant
of heaven. And he wanted to take the rest
of us with him. And that’s why Genesis three and other places
in the scripture where we see Satan deceiving and discouraging
and seeking to devour Christians. God’s people is such a treacherous
story in scripture. Satan declared himself to be
God. And when Satan comes to us and
says to us, did God really say, when Satan attacks the word of
the living God and even our faith, we’re really setting ourselves
up on our own throne. I choose to do as I please, when
I please, without saying please, right? That’s the way most people
around us live. So what’s wrong with this world, the fool, the
unspiritual person? The person with a heart dead
in sin, a heart that does not look for God, says not only there
is no God, but says, I am God. He does not seek after God, nor
does he call on the name of Yahweh. Now this next little heading,
I think helps us look at our culture currently. What is the
fool’s lifestyle? We look at the fool. He’s an
unspiritual person. We look at the fool’s heart,
it’s rotten, it’s dead in sin. We look at the fool’s conclusion,
there is no God and I am he. But what about the fool’s lifestyle? God looks down from heaven and
he sees that there is none righteous, no, not one. And all the people are doing
abominable deeds. This reminds us again of the
story of Noah. After God made Adam and Eve and
they sinned in the garden, Cain killed Abel, and then there was
the rise of evil across the face of the earth. Remember, Adam
and Eve were to spread the glory of God across the earth, but
sin and wickedness spread instead. And when Noah’s generation comes
along, several generations later, only Noah found favor in God’s
eyes. Only Noah’s family were remaining
that walked with God, knew God, feared God. And God says of the
rest of that generation, I regret that I have made them. For mankind
on the face of the earth only does evil all the time. Can’t
you hear that in the evening news? Can’t you see that on the
news feeds that you read? Mankind on the face of the earth
only does evil all the time, it seems that way. It seems that
way and more so as the years go by. The fool’s lifestyle.
No one does good, abominable deeds. I remember a couple of years
ago in New York, they passed a law that says abortions could
be performed later in the pregnancy. An applause erupted in the state
house. That’s the type of world that we live in. We saw over
the last couple of years when we don’t like something in our
culture, we can loot and we can destroy and we can ignore authority
if there’s something that we want, but we’re not getting.
We look now, especially, I think it’s coming out of Canada, the
assault on the elderly. I think recently in Canada, a
lady called the government who handles all their healthcare.
Remember the Canadians warned us it’s not good. I need a wheelchair
ramp. She called for a wheelchair ramp
to get in and out of her house, access. And they said, if you
want to know how we can assist you in your early death, just
call this number. We’ll let you know. Abominable
deeds. And we look at the education
system. Well, it’s really not that. We’re
trying to indoctrinate the littlest people possible how to choose
their destiny in life with whether they’re a little boy or a little
girl or something of their own construct. And on and on and
on we can go. And we see what Paul calls the
fruit of the flesh, the fruit of a depraved mind, the fruit
of a heart dead in sin. Everyone has turned aside. They
are corrupt. No one seeks after God. Well, we might as well just sing
the blues, huh? We might as well just say it’s a rotten world. What can we do? Throw up our
hands. I remind you of Isaiah’s calling. Isaiah was called by
God 800 years or so, 700 years or so before the coming of Jesus
Christ. And God told this to Isaiah,
you will proclaim the good news of salvation to a people who
will not hear and they will not understand, they will not see
and they will not perceive, and their hearts will be dull, their
ears will be stopped up and their eyes will be closed. But perhaps,
God tells Isaiah, there will come a day when people will see,
they will hear, they will understand, and they will turn from their
wicked ways and be healed. Friends, we have to remember
the gospel. We have to remember the purposes
of God, the strength of God. We can wring our hands all we
want. We can hear the news, read the news, watch the news, and
we can get the blues and be depressed. And we can say, woe is me, woe
is us, all is lost. And we can even feel like King
David who says, the people and the culture around me eat up,
eat up Christians as if they are bread. We can face persecution,
we can face hardship. And yet David reminds us in this
passage, God is with the generation of the righteous. You may be
like Noah, the only one with a hammer and nails. You may be
the only one on your cul-de-sac or your family or in your neighborhood
who leaves for church on Sunday. And the promise is true, no matter
how few or how many, the Lord is our refuge. And David says
a longing prayer, oh, that salvation would come out of Zion. And we’ve just celebrated Christmas.
We’ve just observed Advent and we remember well, the good news
of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so as we look at the fool
and the fool’s heart, the fool’s conclusion, the fool’s lifestyle,
we have to see the fool’s opportunity. And we have to remember that
salvation for Israel, even the Gentiles will come out of Zion. And we can only go to the cross
to scatter the evening news blues or to help dispel the feelings
of darkness of this crooked and depraved generation. And we remember
that there was a generation that treated Christ Jesus shamefully. They were ungodly. They humiliated
him. They spit on him. They ridiculed
him. They beat him. They mocked him.
And yes, they even crucified the Lord of glory. But there
was hope for one man stood at the cross and he said, surely
this man was the son of God. This was a man who in a moment
or two before said in his heart, there is no God. But as he saw
the mighty act of redemption, he said, surely this man was
the son of God. And so my challenge to you this
moment is this, which is on your lips? There is no God or surely
Jesus is the son of God, it matters. It matters for eternity, but
it matters your perspective today as you look on the news, pray
with me. Our great God, we thank you that
over and over again, you remind us through your word, through
your deeds and through your servants like David of old, that you don’t
leave your people, you don’t forsake them. Though the days
may be dark and it looks like we are at the end of our rope. You always have a plan. You’re
always up to something. You’re always working. It’s not
our timetable or even to our liking always. but you come through
and you turn the fortunes of Zion, and you’ve done so through
Jesus. Lord, we should never lose sight
of the cross, never lose sight of how much light you can bring
into this world, never lose sight that one day you will make all
things new. Until then, keep us looking to Jesus Christ and
hoping in him. We need your help and blessing,
so we pray for it now in his name, amen.