March Of The Fools - [Psalm 14]

It is my privilege to be here this morning and to open up the Word of God with you. Let's look at Psalm 14,

Psalm 14, Psalm 14.

I'm going to read all of it and then we will work our way through this passage. For the choir director, a

Psalm of David. The fool has said in his heart, there is no

God. They are corrupt. They have committed abominable deeds.

There is no one who does good. The Lord has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.

They have all turned aside. Together they have become corrupt.

There is no one who does good, not even one.

Do all the workers of wickedness not know who eat up my people as they eat bread and do not call upon the

Lord? There they are in great dread.

For God is with the righteous generation. You would put to shame the counsel of the afflicted, but the

Lord is his refuge. Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion.

When the Lord restores his captive people, Jacob will rejoice. Israel will be glad.

Let me ask you a question. How many of you know someone, friend, relative, coworker who says,

I'm an atheist? If you don't know them, you're going to get to know them.

Did you know, and I find this just fascinating, I run into this in the internet and I read a book and I'm going to be talking about this, but did you know that there are now evangelists for atheism?

That's what I said, huh? They want to convert people to atheism. Now some pretty absurd ideas, of course, if you know how my mind works, you know that some pretty absurd ideas come to my mind.

I mean, can you imagine holding some kind of atheistic crusade, some kind of rally, you know, where we all go to, you know, downtown

Worcester and we get in together in a great big stadium. People start walking the aisles to profess their belief in nothing.

It's crazy, but not so crazy.

In all seriousness, did you know that several major books have been released and are in the top 10 list, and their purpose is to evangelize

Christians into being atheists? Now, is that possible?

If you love Christ, can you go, hmm, read a book and go, I never knew that, I'm now an atheist.

Well, if you're saved, then you are always saved. You can't just read a book filled with ideas of atheism and believe it, because the

Holy Spirit isn't going to allow that to happen. But this is a trend because they think it'll work.

May I just say that when we think about, you know, in America, our spiritual antecedents, our ancestors came from England, and they fled religious persecution.

They came over here and they were Puritans. They were serious about the word of God. Did you know that in England today, atheism represents about 70 % of the population?

I don't know what percent of the population is Islamic, but it's probably as high or higher, especially in London, than the evangelical

Christian population, 70 % of England. This week, as I was preparing this,

I went to Amazon .com, that's where all the pastors go, and looked at the religious and spiritual section, the bestsellers in the religious and spiritual books, and two of the top four selling books, now get these titles,

God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

Now, those were number two and number four on the best -selling religious and spiritual books.

Those don't sound very religious or very spiritual. I recently actually read a book entitled

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. His previous book was The End of Faith, which

I'd read reviews about, and I knew it was kind of, you know, religion's day is past, it's time to move on.

Well, I didn't read that book, but I did read Letter to a Christian Nation, and I read it for a few reasons.

One is I thought, he wrote a letter to Christians in America. He must have something he wants to communicate to us.

Maybe it's live and let live, and maybe if I just kind of understand how Sam Harris is thinking, then maybe

I'll be able to communicate better with atheists, or maybe I'll understand some of the flawed thinking they have. So he's trying to put forth a reasonable presentation of his views, and fine,

I'll just interact with that. Besides that, I got it for free from the library. But the thesis of his book, his main point wasn't, hey, let's all live and let live, you believe what you want to believe, but leave me alone,

I don't want to be bothered with it. His point was that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is both dangerous and dumb.

That if everybody in the world would just be an atheist, that things would be great. And he goes on, and he says, you know what, he says, oh, you know,

I interact with Christians, and they say, well, what about Hitler? What about Stalin, killed 20 million?

What about Mao, who may have killed anywhere from 50 to 100 million people, and those people were atheists?

And he says, well, absolutely, you know, they claimed that they were atheists, but they didn't really live like rational atheists.

Then again, he wants to blame Christians for everything from, you know, the Inquisition to whatever, the

Crusades, and everything that's going on in the world right now. And of course, if you say, well, they're not living like Christians, he wouldn't buy that at all.

But people who do horrible things, and don't believe in God, in fact, suppress religion.

He says, well, they're not rational atheists. And I thought, man,

I'm reading this book, and it is insult, after insult, after insult to Christians. You're stupid.

You're dangerous. You're ignorant. And I thought, if I was writing a book to atheists,

I'd want them to read it. I'd want them to be challenged in their thinking, and I wouldn't want to just insult them, because that's not going to get me anywhere.

This is a quote from Harris, who apparently has no problem insulting the people that he's allegedly trying to reach.

Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering.

But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient, all -knowing, and omnipotent?

There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this.

This is the age -old problem of theodicy, also known as the problem of evil, of course, and we should consider it solved.

If God exists, Harris writes, either he can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or he does not care to.

God, therefore, is either impotent, not powerful, or evil.

Pious or holy readers will now execute the following pirouette. This is all still Harris. God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality.

But of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful use to establish

God's goodness in the first place. Now, what's wrong with that?

I don't use standards of human goodness to judge God, because my standards would always be wrong.

My standard is God's standard. My standard is the word of God. But Harris asks this question, if God is all -knowing and all -powerful, why do humans still suffer?

Harris implies that either God cannot stop suffering, or he does not want to stop it. So he's either weak, cannot stop it, or he's evil because he somehow enjoys it.

Now, in interacting with other atheists, other intellectuals,

I'm sure that sounds really quite intelligent. Yeah, we've got them now. What are they going to say to that? And it has become quite fashionable to mock the existence of God.

And it seems, based on these books and how they're selling it, you could make a living doing this.

But can I tell you a little secret this morning about our text? This psalm, Psalm 14, isn't just about atheists.

It's about unbelievers in general. No, it's about, you're all sitting and that's good, you, and it's about me.

This is kind of, as it were, the narrative of our lives. This psalm is universal in its scope.

What it describes is true of every single person, or at least it was at one time.

This morning, I want to draw your attention to three aspects of the psalm so that you would be transformed in your thinking about who and what a fool is with the consequence that you would rejoice in God's goodness to you if you're saved.

In other words, we're going to dissect this passage this morning in such a way that you will see yourself, not

Sam Harris, in a mirror and understand the great work God has done in your heart so that you will want to be the instrument that he uses to perform the surgery of salvation on the hearts of many.

And if you don't know God this morning, this psalm should alarm you greatly.

First we're going to see the disease of disbelief. The disease of disbelief, looking at verse 1.

The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. Some of you are sitting here saying, wait a minute,

I thought you said this psalm wasn't about atheism. Well, again, the internet is a great thing, so I looked up atheism to see what the historical roots are.

You do strange things when you're putting together a message like this. I looked it up, and you know what?

Atheism as a philosophy, as a coherent thought, really didn't come into existence until the 16th century, many, many centuries after this psalm was written.

And no one really claimed to be an atheist until the 18th century. Now you're certainly right if you're sitting there thinking, well, atheists say there is no

God, therefore they must be foolish. And I would certainly agree with you. Today's atheists certainly are foolish.

Now you say, you may even be saying, well, wait a minute, you're calling this disease? I thought we don't like that. Well, yes.

I'll say it's a disease in this sense, that it's universal and that it's deadly.

Not in the sense that you catch it, but you've already got it from the moment you're born. Foolishness, that is this concept that there is no

God, is the natural condition of every single human being on the planet.

From the time of Adam and Eve's fall, all of their progeny, all of their children are infected by this disease, this foolishness.

So if a fool was not back then thought of as being an atheist, the way we think of them now, who was he?

Who would this apply to today? Well, first of all, let me just say that a fool, we think of a fool as being stupid, dumb, an idiot, and that's not the idea at all here.

In fact, within the confines of Psalm 14, a fool might be quite smart. He might be able to write a bestselling book.

He might be a professor at a university. He might win a Nobel Peace Prize. He can be absolutely brilliant.

There's no limit to his IQ. In fact, as I like to say about many people, he or she, this fool can be too smart for his or her own good.

When you read these books, I read Sam Harris's book, he's not dumb. He's quite intelligent.

He's just angry. He's a very angry man. I saw Christopher Hitchens who wrote,

God is not great. I saw him on TV. He was foaming at the mouth.

He was yelling and screaming. He was angry. It's just bizarre to me.

But the Bible, Psalm 14 would describe a fool, the Hebrew word nabal, is someone who is morally perverse.

They are wicked. They are morally opposed to the things of God. And it shows in what they do.

May I suggest to you that this includes many who call themselves

Christians. I was reading recently, I mean, you have to take everything that you read, everything that you hear, depending on who the person is who's saying it, but everything with a, you know, not a grain of salt, but about a 10 pound bag.

They say that upwards of 2 billion people on the earth are Christians. I have issues with that.

I've seen studies that say 60 to 80 % of Americans claim to be Christians. Then again, there are all sorts of people who call themselves

Christians, who when you start going through it, as we discovered in Sunday school this morning, don't believe what the

Bible says. Change what the Bible says. The Hebrew word for fool is synonymous with wicked.

This is a wicked person. A fool is someone who aggressively and intentionally flouts his independence from God and his commandments.

It's somebody who writes an angry book like letter to a Christian nation, but it's also someone.

Who may outwardly say that they're a Christian, but then their lives don't mark anything like Christianity doesn't look anything like it, and here's where the rubber meets the road, the

Hebrew gives us a few strong indications of what this means.

Our text, again, says the fool has said in his heart, the concept is that this is the very essence of his being.

This is what controls his thinking and behavior. We know that when we see the word heart, we're talking about the mission control center.

And so when he says something in his heart, it's like his core value statement.

And I say that like this because I have some real issues with core value statements.

But anyway, this is his motto, his credo. This is how he thinks.

This is his, if you were, if you will, this is these are his glasses. This is how he sees the world.

This is how he operates, and he does so in a worldview that says there is no

God, no one to rule over me. Now, he's not necessarily announcing it to the world.

He's not walking around with a T -shirt saying he could be, but he's not necessarily doing that. A T -shirt that says there is no

God, but it is what motivates his actions. Note that in verse one, he says there is no

God and literally the Hebrew and some of you may see that you have, there is, is an italics.

And the reason it's an italics is because it's not in the Hebrew. And they put that in there, not because it's wrong, but because English, if it just said no

God, the fool says no God. That wouldn't read as nicely as the fool says in his heart, there is no

God. So what's the idea of no God? The idea, the implication is no God for me.

I can do whatever I want. There is no God who is going to judge me.

I'm not responsible to anybody. I can do whatever I want. I am king.

That's the idea. That is a startling statement, especially when you think at the time of the book of Psalms that this was not written as a gospel tract,

Psalm 14. The Old Testament never gave compelling arguments for the existence of God.

In fact, God himself in Exodus said, just told

Moses, I am. That's who I am. Why?

Because he's self -existent, has no beginning and no ending. We don't need to prove the existence of God because he is.

And from him all things are. Genesis 1 .1, where we would expect if there was some kind of big, rich explanation for where God came from, if there was such a place, it just says in the beginning,

God created the heavens and the earth. No explanation. Why? Because I am, I am self -existent.

I always have been. I always will be. Nowhere in the Old Testament is the concept of God not existing present.

That's what makes this so shocking. So when the fool says there is no God. That's completely foreign to the

Hebrew concept. That's completely foreign to the Bible. There is nothing in the Bible where someone would come to that idea, this idea of no

God. Now let's see if you've heard this before from this pulpit.

What you believe about God affects how you live. Your theology changes what?

What's that? Your methodology. What you believe about God will impact the way you live.

So if you believe there is no God, no judge, no one to ultimately determine whether what you've done is right or wrong, will that change the way you live?

Absolutely. How about if you believe in a God who is too nice to punish you for what you do?

Who has only one attribute, love. That will impact your life as well.

If you believe in a God who is not involved in the details of life, if he just set up this world and stepped back and just kind of wanted to observe and see what was going on, will that change how you live?

Ultimately, all sin, every sin is committed because mankind, and may

I say, even believers, have an extraordinary capacity for practical atheism, acting even for a short time as if there is no

God. When you sin, it's not thinking, I know God's here,

I know he's not going to be pleased, I know, I know, I know, I'm going to go to the word of God and I'm going to sin anyway.

Don't do that. Even for just a moment of time when you sin, you are basically applying, you're appropriating that idea of no

God for me, I am going to decide what I want to do. I am going to live my own life.

Now is there really a true atheist? We've talked about it before, the book,

Does God Believe in Atheists, one of my favorite titles of all time. The answer is no.

God doesn't believe in atheists. Why? Well, first of all, he doesn't have to. But secondly, he tells us that there are no atheists.

Keeping your fingers in Psalm 14, please turn to Romans 1. There are no atheists, so there are plenty of people who don't want to submit to God, but there are no atheists.

Romans 1, verse 18, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness because they don't know the truth, because they're not sure if there's a

God. No, they know the truth, but they suppress it. They hold it down because they don't want to be accountable.

Because that which is known about God is evident within them.

They know it. He goes on in Romans 2 and talks about the law of God being in their heart. Going on in verse 19, for God made it evident to them.

For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse.

Look, they look around the world. They see the order of things. They see the sun comes up, the sun goes down.

The world continues to revolve. The moon, the oceans come in and out.

We survive. I've said this one before, but I really like it. Dogs have dogs. Cats have cats. Everything goes on the same.

Two plus two always equals four. There is an order in the universe that cannot be explained through chaos, through random happenstance.

They know that there is a God. God has placed that knowledge within them. And so ultimately, at the end, they are left with no excuse.

They will not stand before God and say, I didn't know. Oh, they knew. They suppressed that truth.

Verse 21, for even though they knew God, that doesn't mean they had an intimate knowledge. They just knew that there was a

God. They did not honor him as God or give thanks. But they became futile in their speculations.

And their foolish heart was darkened. Today, we see that all over the place.

They write books about speculations. Verse 22, professing to be wise, they became fools.

They're so smart. So smart.

Verse 23, and exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four -footed animals and crawling creatures.

They're too smart to make idols that look like little animals and bow down and worship them.

So what do they do? They make a temple out of their brain and they worship their intellect.

They think they are so smart. They think they are so clever. They are quite convinced that they have the answers for everything.

And, you know, as I read this, I just thought they have been watching too many science fiction episodes of television shows where they think that rationality and the human mind can solve every problem.

And it cannot solve one particular problem. That's the human heart. The human heart is sick.

It is filled with sin. They deny that. They know there is a

God, but they are so motivated by sin that they willfully suppress that knowledge, turning to idolatry again.

It's not idolatry in the way we normally think of it, but just worshipping the intellect, worshipping humanity, worshipping our ability to solve every issue.

And what's the result of that? They are given over. If we went through Romans 1, we would see that they are given over to increasing forms of depravity, step by step by step, until the things that are evil, they call good, and the things that are good, they call evil.

That's the world where we live. Now, if there are no true atheists, it's sobering to think of how many people act as if there is no

God. They may say they're Christians, but it's what they do that marks what they really believe.

One commentator says this, the fool, those who act as if there is no God, who have as that their motivation, the fool is not a rare subspecies within the human race.

All human beings are fools apart from the wisdom of God. And the works of the fool can never secure justification in the sight of God, devoid as they are of that loving kindness, which is the essence of God.

I like that, no matter how smart they are, no matter how clever they are, everything that they do lacks love, lacks kindness, lacks mercy, and that's evidence that they are not of God.

Our passage this morning gives us three results of acting from the core of their being as if there is no

God who is creator, sustainer, and judge. First looking again at verse one, corruption.

Text tells us they are corrupt. And this word actually has as its roots an

Arabic term that would say that milk is spoiled. You know, when you open the refrigerator and you go, whew, close the refrigerator and you call your wife over.

Well, okay. And the idea is that when

God opens the refrigerator of mankind, he wants to close that door.

They are corrupt, they are spoiled, they are rotten. That term means to depart from what is right.

Leupold says, atheism bears its proper fruit in rotten conduct.

This idea that there is no God shows itself in the fact that bad things flow out of it.

Bad action flows out of it. Rotten trees bear rotten fruit. I think Jesus said something like that in Matthew 7.

The word can also mean, when it says corrupt, putrid. And that is an apt description of how offensive they have become to their maker.

Now, how tempting is the idea of there being no God to a fallen human being?

The idea of absolute freedom. It's all about me. And this is our whole culture.

The world in which we live, it is as putrid as it can be. It is close the refrigerator bad.

You could put all the baking soda boxes in there you want. It is going to stink.

Our text also tells us that their actions are abominable. They have committed abominable deeds.

These are detestable acts done out of a complete disregard for God's kingship and his revealed law.

In other words, the fool will have no king to rule over him and no law to govern his behavior.

Kingship, a concept that we just don't grasp in our day and time.

You talk to atheists and they say, well, we can't see the king, we can't see God. Therefore, what?

He does not exist. Therefore, we don't have to do whatever he says. These are just man -made rules.

We're going to live the way we want and we're not going to be held down by a bunch of things that people wrote thousands of years ago.

How about this one? The atheist, the agnostic says, you know, if I could just see him, then

I'd believe. I'd love to write back. No, you wouldn't.

No, you wouldn't. How do I know that? Because Jesus Christ lived on the earth.

Jesus Christ did miracles. And the end result was everybody who saw the miracles followed him and believed and were saved.

No, they walked away. In the end, even the disciples, there were just a few, a handful left.

Another one they love to throw out there is you can't prove God exists. What do you say to that?

Well, I'll tell you what I say. I can't prove it. The Bible never does either.

I declare it, I don't prove it. You know, there are many proofs for God. Let me just give you this warning.

This is kind of getting ahead of myself, but let's put it this way. If you get down into the mud with the pigs, and pardon me for using that phrase, but if you get down into the mud of logic and non -biblical reasoning with atheists and you say,

I'm going to argue on their terms and I'm going to win, you're going to lose. It's entirely possible their

IQ is higher than yours. It's entirely possible that they are so prepared.

I can guarantee you this, that they are prepared for every single argument, whether it's intelligent design or whatever.

If you're dealing with an atheist who's really read up, he is ready to go. And can

I tell you that even if you win that argument with someone who says, I don't believe in God, but if you can prove it to me, then

I'll believe. Even if you win the argument, if you say, look at the design of the world, and therefore you have to believe that God exists, even if you win that argument, may

I say to you, they probably won't believe. It's not winning arguments that convert souls, it's preaching the gospel.

And that's what we're called to do. Now, to my shame,

I love to interact with atheists. I loved it to hear them give me their reasons and I love to push back at them.

But I push back with the Bible and they go, how come you always quote the Bible? Because it's the only thing I have that works.

It's the only thing I know that God blesses. And apart from God, apart from his word, we have no good answer.

Let me give you an example. Years ago, in my former job,

I was at a secular leadership training seminar. And we sat around,

I mean, this went on all week and it was kind of one of those experiences.

But we sat around, we watched movies, we talked about leadership, we did a lot of different things.

And this was a diverse group, civilians, police officers, all kinds of strange ideas were out there.

But the question came up, was there anything that we could absolutely say that was universally wrong?

In other words, in the entire world, was there one thing that we could point to and say, that is always wrong?

You might think, well, sure, you could do that. But as each and every single issue came up, what about murder?

What about child slavery? What about, there was always some kind of excuse. What about cannibalism?

Oh, there's an, you know, here it's acceptable over here. And therefore, who are we to impose our values, our understanding of living on someone else?

So apart from God, what you ultimately wind up with is a series of, well, that's your opinion, that's your value system.

It's not mine. And when we're dealing with people who say there is no God, and we're trying to rationalize with them on their same level,

I'm telling you, they're more skilled at it than we are. And that's not our job. Never are we told to kind of engage with the unbeliever at his level and wrestle him to the ground with our wisdom.

We don't have wisdom. Paul said what? I come to you not in persuasive words of wisdom.

What did he want to do? He wanted to preach the gospel. That's all he had. That is what wins.

Note also in verse one that the fools fail to do good.

There is no one who does good. And this is simply an absence of godliness. Well, doesn't it follow that someone who operates from a baseline thought of there is no

God would not act in a godly way? The rejection of God ultimately leads to a life marked by sinfulness.

What you believe about God changes or impacts or designates the way you will live.

And that is the disease of disbelief. Secondly, we're going to look at the divine diagnosis.

The divine diagnosis. Looking at verse two, the

Lord has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.

Notice in verse two that Lord is in all caps. That's because as Pastor Mike has been stressing here lately,

I don't know if you've caught this or not, but that is the covenant name of God. That is Yahweh. Earlier it said there is no

God. There is no Elohim. This is the Lord. It's personalized. So in anthropomorphic language, that means language that we can understand that we get.

But we are told that the Lord, the creator, the sustainer and judge of the universe looks down upon the sons of men, that's all of humanity, to see if there are any who understand or are seekers of him.

The Hebrew verb to understand means to act circumspectly, prudently. In other words, he wants to see if there's anyone who's not foolish, anyone who's wise, anyone who's wise enough to worship

God, to say in his heart, there is a God, and I'm accountable to that God. The Hebrew verb to seek means to seek the true

God, note this, not in some kind of fashion that I want to go to church and maybe I'll seek

God and maybe I'll turn my life over to him, but is to seek the true God in prayer and worship, to be a faithful follower.

In other words, the God who exists is looking for those who of their own volition are wise and who worship him.

Will he find them? When he looks down onto the earth, will he find people that want him, that want to follow him?

This is reminiscent of God in Genesis 11 .5 with regard to the

Tower of Babel. He says, or in Genesis 11 .5, it reads, the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.

Now, did he have to come down to get a better view, you know, get below the cloud cover so he could see what was really going on?

Well, just as in Genesis 11, he didn't physically move and here he doesn't, you know, suddenly change his attention from something else and now look down.

The idea is to give us a picture of God taking special notice. And it also marks that something is about to happen.

The psalmist wants us to know that God is taking special notice of mankind.

God examines the hearts of all men. And what does he find? They have all turned aside.

Together, they have become corrupt. There is no one who does good, not even one.

Now, in the New Testament, when Paul in Romans 3 is building the case, of his case of the universal guilt of mankind,

Jew, Gentile, Sumerian, Westerian, everybody. He quotes this passage,

Psalm 14 in Romans 3. God finds that his creatures, us, those he gave dominion over the earth, have rejected him.

They have turned aside from God, departed from his appointed way, abandoned him.

They have become corrupt, morally confused and tainted. They have a path, they know the way, but they've left it and become morally bankrupt.

Now, notice the absolutes. They have all turned aside. Together, they have become corrupt.

There is no one who does good, not even one. In summary, we could just simply say this.

Every man, woman, and child is lost. Every person who ever lived or ever will live is condemned by his or her sinful nature.

We are wicked from birth. We are strange from God from the womb. Our every inclination is to wander from his commandments.

Prone to wander. That's the human race. Now, we have to realize that this is offensive to the fool.

When we confront them with this, when we confront the person who says, there is no God for me,

I will have no king to rule over me. And we say, you know what? We're all sinners.

That's offensive. But that is a great and necessary witnessing tool.

We must tell them this. Atheists, as I said before, they love to bring up the problem of evil as a proof of God's non -existence.

And I'm sorry, but they have it backwards. The existence of evil, its extent is not an example of his or a proof of his non -existence.

It's a proof of the depravity of mankind, the sinfulness of mankind. They want to make believe

God has to be like us. Now, if God was like you or me, and mankind universally disobeyed him, what would he do?

What would you do? If you had absolute authority, you were the monarch, and one of your subjects rebelled against you, would you offer to send your son to die in his place, even though he deserved death for treason?

Mankind would never make up a religion like Christianity. Mankind would never look at itself in the mirror and say, we are sinful, we cannot obey

God's holy law. God is separate from us. God is above us.

God yet condescends to us to save us. Continuing the divine diagnosis, we see what the outcome for these evildoers will be.

Verse four, Do all the workers of wickedness not know, who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call upon the name of the

Lord? They are in great dread, for God is with the righteous generation.

The figurative language here asks a rhetorical question. Do those who mock, abuse, and persecute my people doubt what their end will be?

Though the way they treat God's people is inconsequential, I mean, really, does it matter how much abuse these people pour on Christians, they pour on God's people, compared to how they mock

God himself? It's inconsequential compared to the fact that they do not call upon the

Lord, but it is yet another indication of their wickedness. The Lord said,

Jesus, while he was on this earth, said that the world would know us what? By the love that we have for one another.

What will these workers of wickedness be known for? Text tells us, consuming the people of God.

That's not a good thing. And that's not a thing that God is going to leave unpunished. Now there's a truism, maybe you've heard it.

The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. In this case, the opposite of being a fool, the opposite of folly is love.

The wicked are foolish and therefore do not love. They cannot emulate the God that they reject.

They do not love God, nor their fellow man. Their focus is on themselves.

The wicked hate the people of God, and they are more and more aggressive about that these days.

And they would consume them as they do bread. They do not call upon the name of the

Lord. They do not love him, but hate him, his law and his people. The answer to this rhetorical question, do all the workers of wickedness not know?

Is it there is an impending sense of doom? Even unbelievers, you'll hear them talk about things like karma, about what goes around comes around.

They know that this oppression, this attacking cannot go on forever. Eventually, they will be judged.

God will return. He will set the world aright. And our text tells us of a great dread.

How do we know it's great? The Hebrew uses the same root twice in a row.

So in essence, if we're reading it in the Hebrew, we'd say it's a fearful fear or a terrifying terror.

That day will be a day of great foreboding. When God set things, sets things right, they now are proud, they are confident, they are intelligent, and they are confident in their intelligence.

They want to tell us that we are dumb. That we're dangerous. You're stupid.

How could you believe in a God you've never seen? Did Paul know this?

Did the Holy Spirit working through Paul know this? First Corinthians 118, for the word of the cross, the gospel, is foolishness to those who are perishing.

But to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. I've read some of these atheists say that they think that Christians must have been brainwashed from childhood.

Otherwise, they'd never believe it. I don't get that. I wasn't brainwashed.

How would one account for the conversion and the life -threatening conversions of Muslims, of communists, of people literally taking their lives into their own hands to believe in Christ, to make a profession of Christ, knowing that that could in and of itself be dangerous.

How can an atheist explain a complete change of life? Now, you want to talk about a great dead dread.

How about that moment right after death, when the unbeliever realizes that this

God that he's been saying he doesn't believe in is about to judge him. He didn't just stop existing.

He's still thinking. His body's dead, but he's still thinking. I think that's great dread.

In verse six, there's a rebuke from the psalmist. You would put to shame the counsel of the afflicted, but the

Lord is his refuge. He is continuing the Lord's pronouncement of judgment on the wicked.

The fools mock. They put to shame the counsel or the words of the afflicted. They write books.

They put on airs. They tell you how superior they are. They ridicule those who do not believe in God.

But the Lord is our refuge, our shelter, our protection.

They are my people, the generation of the righteous, the afflicted.

To be afflicted means to be poor or pious, weak. Finally, we look at the divine disposition of verse seven.

Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion. When the Lord restores his captive people,

Jacob will rejoice. Israel will be glad. Israel and Jacob, when you see those together, the covenant names, the

Lord, the covenant name of God, this is a promise. This is a promise.

David longed for a day when the salvation of his people would be real, when it would have come to a pass.

Now, where is Zion? It's a hill in Jerusalem. And I believe it is where the

Lord will rule and reign during the millennium. But I'm not getting into end times this morning. I simply believe that the

Bible teaches God will restore Israel to the land. And to himself. He promised

Abraham that the Davidic throne will be occupied by the Lord himself, who will rule and reign from Zion.

This morning, we've seen the disease of disbelief, the divine diagnosis, the divine disposition, how he will make everything right in the end.

Now, practically, how do we apply this? Well, again, as I said earlier in Romans, one would tell us that there's no such thing as an atheist.

They know the truth. They just need to be confronted with it.

We don't debate them on the finer points of proof. We can get into creation science all we want.

But again, that will not save anybody. You can look all through the Bible and never find one instance of somebody saying, oh,

I didn't know there were dinosaurs on the ark. Now that I know that, I believe. What causes people to bow the knee to Christ is the

Holy Spirit working in their hearts, convicting them of sin. And that only happens by the preaching of God's word, by the presentation of the gospel, by the conviction of knowing that they are sinners who stand before a holy

God and can no longer say there is no God. But they love that God.

They fear for their safety. They know that there's a hell, and they repent. They flee to the cross.

That is what it takes. That's what we do. We don't get into some kind of, well, I've got a book to your book, let's book exchange.

We can do that till the cows come home. It's not going to save anyone. They don't need better arguments.

They need the gospel. Now, we should also not be shocked by sin in this world.

Why? Because this psalm tells us, look, we would all be doing this.

We all did do this. And apart from the grace of God, we still would be doing this. This is the natural disposition of every person.

And again, I just don't think this can be stressed enough. When we enter into discussions with unsaved people, and we're talking about spiritual matters, this is, in fact, spiritual warfare.

We are to take every thought captive to the word of God. And the way that we do that is they give us a bogus idea.

We give them the scripture. That is how we fight this war, not by our own reasoning, but by presenting the truth of God.

They can reject that. They can reject the Bible. But I guarantee you, my best arguments on my best day will not save one soul.

Now, there may be some here this morning who dutifully, faithfully, come here to BBC every morning.

Then they shuffle out, feeling pretty good. They seem to be wise.

That is, they seem to know God. But in their hearts, they declare, there is no

God over me. I am free to do as I please. If you are living

Sunday -only Christianity, may I plead with you to check that this is not the beat of your heart.

That this idea that there is no God is not how you, in effect, live. Would you earnestly take inventory of your life and make sure that honoring

Christ in all you do is your heartbeat? We should all be thinking, there is a

God. I love that God. I want to obey that God. Maybe you say, well,

I'm doing the best I can. It doesn't work that way.

Your best efforts, your best works, will get you to hell.

There is but one standard, absolute perfection. We cannot attain to it. We are among those who have turned aside, become corrupt.

We don't do good. That is, we don't do what God commands. We need an alien righteousness, a righteousness outside of ourselves, imputed to us.

If we're going to stand before God and be declared righteous, and that is what is said in here, the assembly of the righteous, the righteous generation, the idea in Hebrew, it's the

Hebrew word tzaddik. If we are to be perfectly righteous before God, we cannot do it on our own.

We need Christ's righteousness credited to our account, and we need our sins, and they are innumerable, paid for and put to his account,

Jesus' account at Calvary. Let me challenge you. Are you ready to be called dumb for the glory of our

Lord and for the benefit of a foolish world? Are you ready to go out there and suffer the slings and arrows of the fool who says in his heart, there is no

God? We were all once fools, but God has given us hearts that love him.

Let's pray. Our great

God, we are reminded once again of our sinfulness, of our need for a savior, and of the simple truth that were it not for your grace, we would be but fools, saying in our hearts, there is no

God, acting as if we were the king, making up our own laws, doing what was right in our own sight.

But God, you have, through your spirit, convicted us of our sinfulness.

You have drawn us to yourself. You have allowed us to see the risen savior for who he is, that we might flee to the cross.

Lord, for any that are here this morning who don't know you, I pray that you would reveal yourself in a way that they would be undone, that there would be not a shred of pride left as they see the sinfulness of their heart, the intense of their hearts, how they are continually wicked before you, how they desire their own pleasure and not your good pleasure.

Father, would you also make us willing to be those who would engage this lost and fallen world, not with sophisticated arguments designed to defeat their sophisticated arguments, but with the simple message of the gospel, that is that we are great sinners and Jesus is a great savior.

Would you so transfix us in this that it would be our delight to proclaim,

Jesus Christ is Lord. Father, bless each and every one here that we might so act on these words as to be wise in your sight by your power, your enablement, and your spirit's keeping.