Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Today we study the fool.
[00:00:07] As I was telling Pastor McNeely that I intended to continue on into Psalm 53, he told me something that I didn't know. I hadn't looked at it yet.
[00:00:25] He said, oh, yeah, that's just like Psalm 14, almost word for word.
[00:00:32] And I said, really?
[00:00:36] He said, yeah, you might want to go back to your Psalm 14 notes.
[00:00:40] And so I did.
[00:00:43] And so I did.
[00:00:45] I did preach a fair number of years ago now.
[00:00:51] I did preach on Psalm 14.
[00:00:56] In fact, we sang Psalm 14 at the end of the service last week. So you might recognize Psalm 14. But it starts with this statement, the fool has said in his heart. And that's why I say, today we study the fool.
[00:01:12] And the single most foolish thing that we can do is deny that God exists.
[00:01:21] This is the irony of atheists who all proclaim themselves the least foolish, the most wise men on earth.
[00:01:33] Their great pride has made them into the biggest fools of all time.
[00:01:41] If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, as we read in Proverbs 17, then not fearing the Lord is the lack of all wisdom, which is to say foolishness.
[00:01:54] So would you please stand for the reading of God's word from Psalm 53.
[00:02:02] For the choir director. According to Mahalath, a maskal of David, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God.
[00:02:15] They are corrupt and have committed abominable injustice.
[00:02:20] There is no one who does good.
[00:02:24] God has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men to see if there is anyone who understands who seeks after God.
[00:02:32] Every one of them has turned aside.
[00:02:35] Together they have become corrupt. There is no one who does good, not even one.
[00:02:42] Have the workers of wickedness no knowledge, who eat up my people as though they ate bread and have not called upon God.
[00:02:53] There they were in great fear where no fear had been, for God scattered the bones of him who encamped against you. You put them to shame because God had rejected them.
[00:03:05] Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion when God restores his captive people. Let Jacob rejoice.
[00:03:14] Let Israel be glad.
[00:03:19] O God, please help us not to be fools this morning, but to acknowledge you with our hearts, minds and bodies as we hear your word proclaimed. Now grant that we would have holy fear and redeem us from all our foolish, wicked deeds.
[00:03:37] We pray in Christ's name. Amen.
[00:03:40] You may be seated.
[00:03:47] The fool is the man who denies that God exists.
[00:03:53] I hope that none of you in this room denies God's existence, that none of you is an atheist or a budding atheist.
[00:04:10] And yet there is a sense in which all of us live this way. All of us proclaim there is no God through our actions.
[00:04:25] The moment that you choose to sin, it is a practical example, atheism at work.
[00:04:33] You go back to the very first sin. You think about Adam and Eve. They knew God, they knew God existed.
[00:04:40] They would not have thought themselves denying God's existence by disobeying and eating the fruit of the tree, right?
[00:04:53] And yet what exactly had Satan convinced Eve of before she ate?
[00:05:06] Satan had convinced Eve that God wasn't who she knew he was, that God wasn't loving and caring for her, but rather that God was selfish.
[00:05:25] God was fearful.
[00:05:27] God was something other than God is, right.
[00:05:32] And so to rewrite who God is is to deny who he is.
[00:05:39] It is a simple practical reality that whenever we sin, we are denying. We are saying something about God that is not true. Either we are saying that evil is good, that good is evil, or we are saying that God is not to be trusted, or we're saying that God is not to be feared.
[00:06:11] There's many things that come out in our sins that we, when we caring about God by sinning, when we grasp onto things as idols, grasp onto our money, grasp onto our children, grasp onto things that we've placed above God, right?
[00:06:39] These are all ways that we have denied that we can trust God.
[00:06:49] We've stated something about God, we've lowered him. We said he's not our God. We've got something that's more important.
[00:06:59] So if you think through the commands of Scripture and you think through the ways that you are tempted to sin, and you dwell on what you have to believe about God in order to go down that path of sin, you'll find that it always lowers God.
[00:07:22] It always makes him out to be something that he is not. And that is always to lower him.
[00:07:32] This is why sin is always incredibly foolish.
[00:07:39] Sin is always irrational. Sin never makes actual sense. When you consider eternity, when you consider God's holiness, when you consider his wrath against evil, when you consider all things in their proper place, you realize that nobody should ever sin if they were actually logical.
[00:08:04] Now, many of us pride ourselves on being very logical and very reasonable people, right?
[00:08:13] We are not ruled by our emotions. We are ruled by logic. And come to find out we're not actually as logical as we think.
[00:08:21] Because every time we give ourselves to sin, we are actually giving ourselves to utter foolishness.
[00:08:34] And this is why this psalm starts with the fool has said in his heart there is no God.
[00:08:42] Now, when you think about actions, declaring to the world that God isn't, or that he isn't holy, or that he isn't to be trusted, or all the ways that what you realize is, I don't want to declare that. And you might even be tempted to say, I don't mean to declare that. I don't actually think that. I don't actually believe that. And yet isn't it interesting, the fool has said in his heart, the fool has said in his heart there is no God.
[00:09:25] Think about why you do the things you do. Think about why you say the things you say. And Scripture is clear. And I think you'll find if you look at yourself, that you are clear, that out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.
[00:09:40] When we act, it's coming out of our hearts.
[00:09:48] And so we deny when we sin, we deny who God is.
[00:10:00] We deny it first in our hearts.
[00:10:04] Then we deny it in our words and our actions in such a way that other people can see.
[00:10:10] Hebrews 11:6 says that God is. And that he is a rewarder of those who seek him, Right?
[00:10:18] And so whenever we give ourselves to sin, we're denying that he rewards those who seek him, that he rewards those who obey, right?
[00:10:28] Or we deny that he is.
[00:10:33] We deny that God will punish the wicked. We deny that God's will should be done on earth, which we pray that God's will be done on earth, and then we don't do it.
[00:10:43] And what are we saying? What are we saying in our hearts?
[00:10:47] My will should be done on earth.
[00:10:54] The moment we choose to sin, we've raised our own desires up to be the highest good and denied that God's commands matter.
[00:11:07] Now, I said before, I hope that nobody in this room is an atheist.
[00:11:14] But what I want you to see is I want you to see the way your foolishness runs into atheism. Because if you run after your sin, you will end up an atheist. In fact, there's an old saying that the atheist is always the half Christian gone mad.
[00:11:42] Rarely, rarely do you have anybody declare the truths of Scripture and what God requires of us.
[00:12:03] And so as I start out this morning thinking about this psalm, teaching it that first verse, the fool has said in his heart there is no God. What I want to warn you against, especially you children, is that if you grow into your foolishness instead of growing into repentance, you will end up denying God, and you must not walk down that foolish path.
[00:12:43] The fool is described in greater detail this one who has denied God.
[00:12:51] In the verse it continues, they are corrupt and have committed abominable injustice.
[00:13:00] There is no one who does good.
[00:13:07] God has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men to see if there is anyone who understands who seeks after God.
[00:13:15] This is kind of like the ultimate episode of Undercover Boss, right?
[00:13:24] God is everywhere.
[00:13:27] Have you ever thought about that?
[00:13:29] Every time you're doing something, every time you're doing something good, every time you're doing something bad, God is there. He sees it. I hope that you've learned this from the catechism. I hope you've actually thought about it.
[00:13:41] But this verse puts a little bit different picture before us.
[00:13:49] If you think especially of the fool, you can imagine the employee who's constantly slacking off, breaking the rules, stealing, cheating, lying to his co workers.
[00:14:13] That's right.
[00:14:15] Standing right behind him in plain clothes, right?
[00:14:20] The foolishness is not just breaking the rules.
[00:14:28] The foolishness is failing to recognize the presence, authority, and the watchful eye of one standing right there who is in the psalm, not just the owner of a company that could fire you, but the very creator.
[00:14:52] Or live as though the boss isn't in the room.
[00:14:59] When I listened to Johnny Cash, when the man comes around, it's such a great reminder that one day the judgment will come.
[00:15:13] But what you don't really get from that song is the current presence of the watching judge.
[00:15:23] It's a future thing when the man comes, like later, when the judgment comes, right? And this is true. It's biblical, it's scriptural. Scripture tells us to look forward to that day and to remember that that day of judgment is.
[00:15:37] It's a future thing. But scripture is also very clear that God is looking down from heaven upon the sons of men. God is actively watching right now.
[00:15:54] And so we live as if the man hasn't come around, as if the man won't come around, as if the boss isn't in the room.
[00:16:09] This is ultimately corrupting what God has made good, what God has made us to do from the beginning. Titus 1:16 says, they profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny him being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed. So there are those who deny that God exists, and there those who profess to know God, who are ultimately given to the same behavior.
[00:16:46] Detestable, disobedient, worthless for any good deed.
[00:16:54] God looks to see if there's anyone who understands, anyone who seeks after good. He says every one of them is turned aside. Together they have become corrupt.
[00:17:02] There is no one who does good, not even one.
[00:17:10] And so If I say that anytime we give ourselves to sin, we've become practical atheists, that we have fulfilled these verses in some sense, that's a scary thought, because we don't want to be the wicked. We don't want to be the fool.
[00:17:37] And so it can be a struggle for us to understand these verses, because we know in our hearts the truth, that we have often done these evil things, struggled even to desire to do good.
[00:17:55] But those who have become Christians know not only how very wicked they are, but how much more wicked they were before God was at work in their hearts, before God changed us.
[00:18:17] God is not surprised by the continued temptations that you face and the ways that you continue to fall into sin.
[00:18:33] He's not shocked by the reality of how evil our sin actually is.
[00:18:46] In fact, he is the one who has witnessed it most clearly.
[00:18:52] He is the one who has declared that there is nobody, nobody who hasn't continued into sin.
[00:19:03] And so while all of us have these seeds of foolish atheism in our hearts, naturally God has gracefully intervened.
[00:19:21] So if we're going to make sense of this psalm, we have to.
[00:19:27] We have to understand that there are those who are truly fools, truly have rejected God, and see that as they have rejected God, God has rejected them. Group of people.
[00:19:50] But there's another group of people.
[00:19:56] They're not just those who have rejected God and God has rejected them, but there are those who have turned to God and sought after Him. And then you say, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm so confused, because verse two says, he's looking.
[00:20:13] There's no one who's done good. Verse one, he looks to see if there's anyone who understands, anyone who seeks after God. And it says, every one of them is turned aside. Together they have become corrupt. There is no one who does good, not even one.
[00:20:33] But look at verse 4.
[00:20:36] Have the workers of wickedness known knowledge, who eat up my people as though they ate bread?
[00:20:44] You see, there's another group.
[00:20:47] You see, there's another set of people, God's people.
[00:20:52] They have not been rejected by Him.
[00:21:00] So this psalm may be difficult to understand in some ways, but it's not hard to understand that there really are two groups of people that are being discussed, those who are rejected of God and those who are his people.
[00:21:27] All of us recognize that God has seen into our hearts, and we know what's in our hearts is not good. There's plenty of evil in there.
[00:21:46] And we know that it was not us seeking after God, but it was God seeking after us that made all the difference.
[00:22:03] But for those who refuse to repent, whom David calls the workers of wickedness, in the next verse, their minds become entirely darkened and their actions against God's people become callous.
[00:22:25] This is the way of sin. It callouses us.
[00:22:32] Any of you have good calluses on your hands right now? Anybody?
[00:22:37] Some of you are okay, I got some hands out there from mowing, maybe, and from weightlifting.
[00:22:46] What about musicians? Any calluses from musicians? Okay, how else do we get calluses? Maybe it's not the time of year yet for this, but. Yeah, what else gives us calluses? The opposite of weight? Lift. Well, no, it's still weightlifting. It's just body weight. What else gives us calluses?
[00:23:05] Dancing. What else?
[00:23:08] Rock climbing?
[00:23:09] Walking around barefoot?
[00:23:12] What?
[00:23:13] Monkey bars? There's all kinds of ways we get calluses, right?
[00:23:17] And when you get calluses, you find that in that skin, you have less feeling than you used to.
[00:23:26] It protects your skin from feeling. It protects your skin from pain.
[00:23:33] But you know where you don't want calluses.
[00:23:37] You don't want calluses on your heart.
[00:23:46] You might think you want calluses. You might think, oh, I'm sick of feeling pain. I'm sick of being hurt.
[00:23:54] I'll just deaden my heart to pain. Sometimes you do this through alcohol, sometimes through other drugs.
[00:24:01] Sometimes you do it simply by cutting off all of your own emotional feelings.
[00:24:09] There's a lot of ways of trying to build up calluses, and yet sin does the most effective job of all.
[00:24:21] Sin is like the constant rubbing abrasion against your heart.
[00:24:29] You begin to build up this callous. Says, I no longer feel guilty. I no longer feel shame. I no longer feel the desire to be holy. I no longer feel any fear of God's wrath.
[00:24:48] I have gotten used to this.
[00:24:57] This is what it means to turn aside, to become corrupt.
[00:25:08] Calluses are great on your feet and your hands, they're terrible on your heart.
[00:25:21] Think about what it looks like, as the psalmist describes it, eating God's people as though they ate bread.
[00:25:32] Eating God's people as though they ate bread. Now, when you eat bread, you don't give a lot of thought to the bread, do you?
[00:25:42] I mean, maybe if it's delicious bread, you think, ooh, this is delicious bread. Right? But you're not concerned about the bread. You just.
[00:25:50] I mean, maybe some of you are more civilized than I am with bread. I love bread. But you just eat it.
[00:25:59] You're not concerned about the bread. You don't give any thought to the bread.
[00:26:06] When you eat people as Though they are bread.
[00:26:09] That's kind of a nasty word picture, right?
[00:26:15] But of course it's a metaphor.
[00:26:18] It's not talking about literally eating people.
[00:26:25] It means to consume, right?
[00:26:30] And to consume people.
[00:26:34] Again, it's strange to think about, but I want you kids to think about how you treat people.
[00:26:43] Your brothers and your sisters, your friends, other people in your class, your parents.
[00:26:50] How do you treat your parents?
[00:26:54] Do you treat them as something simply to consume, that they're there simply to serve you? Everything is about you.
[00:27:09] How do you treat your little brother?
[00:27:19] We don't want to be the fool.
[00:27:22] We don't want to be the corrupt who eat God's people like bread.
[00:27:33] This is how the unrepentant wicked view others.
[00:27:38] They don't see their brother, their sister or anybody else as precious, loved by God, an image bearer.
[00:27:50] They see them simply as tools to be consumed, discarded for their own career or pleasure or gain.
[00:28:06] And so the wicked are described here not just as people who reject God, but in denying God, they lose all concern for others, they lose all concern for God's people.
[00:28:29] Anybody who knows there is a.
[00:28:35] Anybody who knows there is a God knows to obey him, right?
[00:28:46] How is it that.
[00:28:51] We live so often as the fool in this?
[00:28:57] How is it that we refuse to call upon his name?
[00:29:04] This is probably the most common way that we deny God's existence.
[00:29:12] We say in our heart there is no God, and therefore we don't bother to pray.
[00:29:20] Prayerlessness.
[00:29:24] When we wake up, go through our day without calling upon God, we're functionally saying, I can handle this on my own.
[00:29:37] I don't need God's help. I have enough wisdom and strength.
[00:29:42] Or, and, or saying, God can't provide all those things. Even though I don't feel like I have enough of them, I'm not going to bother to turn to God because he can't give it to me.
[00:29:54] Or God isn't loving.
[00:29:56] I can't rely on him to do it.
[00:30:02] And so to not call upon God as Christians is to whisper the fool's words, right?
[00:30:16] There is no God.
[00:30:18] Even if we deny these words with our lips, we're saying them through our actions.
[00:30:30] God looks down and he sees two groups of people, though he sees the wicked and then he sees his people who need to be saved.
[00:30:43] And all of the ways that I keep pointing out that you're like the wicked are the reasons why you need to be saved. You need the salvation that comes out of Zion because you are like the wicked. And what is going to happen to the wicked Those who deny God will be destroyed.
[00:31:07] When it asks the question, have the workers of wickedness known knowledge who eat up my people as though they ate bread and have not called upon God? It's saying, hello.
[00:31:17] Hello, wicked. Are you insane?
[00:31:22] You think that this is going to go well for you, to treat your brothers and sisters this way? You think it's going to go well for you to reject God, to deny him, To not call upon God?
[00:31:49] The wicked are not fearful at first, but verse five begins to tell of the end.
[00:31:59] There they were in great fear where no fear had been.
[00:32:09] They're not fearful at first, but they will become fearful of God because they know he is among his people as a refuge.
[00:32:18] And what have they been doing to God's people?
[00:32:21] Eating them like bread?
[00:32:33] Sometimes we get to get a little picture of this when dad steps into the room, right as you've clocked your brother.
[00:32:49] You weren't in any fear of dad until that moment.
[00:32:54] And you suddenly realize, oh, I have been living foolishly.
[00:33:00] I am attacking my father's son, right?
[00:33:07] And now you're in great fear.
[00:33:12] Dad, I was trying to please. I don't know.
[00:33:17] Suddenly excuses, suddenly fear.
[00:33:26] Not fearful at first, but when it comes, it comes fast.
[00:33:34] What will God do to such men? Psalm verse 5 says, not just that they were in great fear where no fear had been. It gives a reason.
[00:33:46] God scattered the bones of him who encamped against you.
[00:33:55] Scattered bones is pretty brutal.
[00:34:02] You got to be dead before your bones can be scattered.
[00:34:07] As I was thinking about the similarities between Psalm 53 and Psalm 14, this verse is where there's the main difference.
[00:34:15] One of the differences between them is the word that's used for God is Yahweh in one and Elohim in the other. That's an interesting change, and it goes with the groupings of Psalms.
[00:34:28] But in terms of the main change, it's this. God scattered the bones of him who encamped against you. It's right in this verse right here.
[00:34:37] You don't read that in Psalm 14.
[00:34:41] And it made me wonder whether this was David rewriting the psalm after some particular event.
[00:34:54] David is attributed with both of them. Or maybe somebody rewrote the psalm much later.
[00:35:01] This is David's psalm, but I'm adding a verse because of what God has done.
[00:35:11] I don't know.
[00:35:12] Not trying to guess, but you can see biblical examples, right?
[00:35:21] What about 2 Kings 19, when the massive Assyrian army under Sennacherib surrounded Jerusalem? They mocked God. They encamped against his people. They. They were ready to eat them like bread.
[00:35:36] They had absolutely no fear.
[00:35:39] But in the middle of the night, God acted.
[00:35:43] God showed up on the scene and the angel of the Lord struck down thousands, hundreds, thousands.
[00:35:57] And they went to sleep confident, with no fear. They woke up as scattered bones.
[00:36:05] Put to utter shame because God had rejected them.
[00:36:09] The world may oppose us, his people, but God has the final word. And this is the next thing that you need to see.
[00:36:18] I've been pointing out how you're similar to the fool. But if you recognize the oppression of the world against God's people, if you recognize the oppression of the world, the persecution that comes to you and to those you love because you are God's people, then this verse gives you great hope, great confidence, knowing that God is the one who acts on behalf of his people.
[00:37:00] So the foolish may live for a long time saying there is no God.
[00:37:05] They may do much harm to his people.
[00:37:12] Psalm 14 doesn't have this utterly terrifying vivid image of complete defeat for the wicked.
[00:37:23] But when you see it happen over and over in the Old Testament, Where God's enemies, the enemies of God's people, those who are oppressing them, are suddenly terrified. But it's too late, because the judgment has arrived.
[00:37:48] God takes the persecution of his church personally.
[00:37:54] He is among his people.
[00:38:05] Oh, that the salvation of Zion, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion when God restores his captive people. Let Jacob rejoice.
[00:38:15] Let Israel be glad.
[00:38:20] God saves his people.
[00:38:26] God saves his people.
[00:38:29] His salvation has come out of Zion.
[00:38:33] He's restored his captive people, those who were dead, those who were dead. Bones he's raised up, scattered, dead, dry bones he's able to turn into his people.
[00:38:54] And so the great contrast between God's people and the fools that persecute them is not the righteousness of God's people.
[00:39:13] The great contrast is the salvation of God.
[00:39:19] That's the great contrast.
[00:39:26] And so this psalm, this prayer, is perfect for us today.
[00:39:33] It's not just an Old Testament thing where God's people are attacked, eaten like bread.
[00:39:46] People of God are still attacked today, still waiting on him for our salvation, but not waiting for the coming of his salvation out of Zion.
[00:40:02] That has happened in Christ Jesus.
[00:40:09] His people are still wicked, still foolish, still needing him to restore us.
[00:40:17] But if we will pray, if we will pray, he will hear us and he will answer our prayers.
[00:40:26] So who is this salvation that comes out of Zion? We've already said it's Jesus Christ.
[00:40:33] We were the fools.
[00:40:36] We were the fools.
[00:40:41] We were captives to our own sin, living as atheists.
[00:40:50] Jesus came out of Zion, went outside the city gates, was put to shame on the cross so that our foolishness could be forgiven and we could be given the spirit of God and wisdom.
[00:41:12] This is what we're called to celebrate, to rejoice in. Let Israel be glad. Let Jacob rejoice in verse six when it says oh, that the salvation of Israel had come out of Zion. They're looking forward to the coming of Jesus Christ and they're willing to rejoice when God restores his captive people. Let Jacob rejoice. Let Israel be glad. But they're. They're waiting.
[00:41:43] They're waiting.
[00:41:45] We are not waiting.
[00:41:51] God has restored his captive people and so let Jacob rejoice. Let Israel accomplish that.
[00:42:00] We are to rejoice because he has accomplished that.
[00:42:05] He has saved his people.
[00:42:10] Are you glad for what God has done for you?
[00:42:21] If you're thankful, then you can rejoice.
[00:42:25] You can lift up your voices in song.
[00:42:30] You can cry out, God has done great things.
