Psalms 14:1

Oh the heart! What a source of mischief and misery it is! Scripture says it well: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." And so we read that "The fool has said in his heart, 'No God!'" (Ps. 14:1). Such a saying may never have reached the lips. It may never have been put into words out loud. But in the unspoken language of the heart, the words come out: "No God!"

Man gained the knowledge of good and evil in the fall. It has shaped him so that judgment is the only action of God's power he understands. Of course he resists that judgment, and blasphemes God. The reason is his conscience: it tells him he must be the object of His righteous vengeance. So, to calm his conscience, he tries to persuade himself that he is not wicked. He hides himself from God, like Adam. And in his folly he grabs at the smallest excuse for denying His existence. "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" (Psalms 14; 53.)

The universe holds millions of proofs of wonderful design. Bias is as blind to them as a bat is in the light of the noonday sun. Bias is not a matter of the head, but of the heart. "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Ps. 14:1).

The "fool" of the first sentence becomes a multitude in the very next. They "are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good." This is what man away from God comes to by nature. God is the true life of man. The body decays once it is apart from the soul that gives it life, and the soul decays in the same way once it is apart from God. There can be no exception here. No law is surer than this: "there is none who does good."

The characteristic man of this terrible time will be "the fool" — the man who has no fear of God. In his heart he says, "No God"; and his corrupt and abominable life shows the thought of his heart.

The first quotation is from Psalm 14. There the words are joined to the statement that "the Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God." What follows gives the result of God's searching gaze. So the truth here is not a description of how we appear before one another. It is how we appear before God, as fallen children of Adam — as in the flesh. In the quotations from this Psalm God strips us of everything we might boast in as natural men — the very things we naturally use to justify ourselves before Him.

In the face of statements as sweeping as these, anyone who pleads righteousness with God has no feeling for the real state of things. It suits us all better to admit that we are truly guilty. Then we can throw ourselves without reserve on God's unlimited grace.