A sermon based upon Psalm 14, CEB
By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,
July 7th, 2019
In June of 1963, the same year I began the 1st Grade, unbeknownst to me, the United States Supreme Court acted upon a case initiated by Madelyn Murray O’Hair, declaring the compulsory prayer and Bible reading in public schools unconstitutional. In that Mrs. O’Hair claimed that her son William, had been bullied and forced to pray against his will.
That decision made Mrs. O’Hair a household name, as she became this country’s foremost atheist. Later, she was named the ‘most hated woman in America’ after she had established the first Atheist organization in America. Her organization, ‘American Atheist’, still defends the civil rights of non-believers, advocating a solid wall of ‘separation between church and state’. But while the work of her organization continues, in 1995, Mrs. O’Hair, along with another son and grandchild, were kidnapped from her office and murdered by David Roland Waters. Waters was a career criminal who worked within her atheist organization. Waters motive was robbery. He was eventually arrested in 1999. Waters died in year 2003, while serving an 80-year prison term in Butner, North Carolina.
Interestingly, in 1980, her first child, William “Bill” Murray, who had been the child in her famous court case, made the news again. He announced that he had become a ‘born-again’ Christian, and a Baptist Minister. When his mother learned of his conversion, she wrote: "One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times. He is beyond human forgiveness."
In the sordid and sad story of Madelyn Murray O’Hair, we know what Mrs. O’Hair thought of God. In today’s Bible text, we can read what God thinks about Madelyn Murray O’Hair: “Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God”.
THEY LIVE LIKE FOOLS (1)
Now, you might think the Bible has a lot to say about atheists. But of the 41,173 verses in the Bible, only one-half of one verse is given to the atheist. Of the 774,746 words in the Bible, only eleven words are given to the atheist. This is the only passage in the entire Bible (repeated in Psalm 53) that speaks directly about it. In the ancient world, there were basically, no atheists. Even the great ancient philosophers, like Plato, Aristotle, Socrates believed some form of god or gods.
Thus, the Psalmist here really isn’t talking about the kind of atheist we know in today’s world. Today’s atheist can be very smart, and they have all kinds of reasons, and some of them very sound like very good reasons, not to believe in God. Richard Dawkins, opens his book, “The God Delusion”, claiming that ‘the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character of all religious fiction.’ He had trouble with the Old Testament, just like Thomas Jefferson did, who said that ‘the God of Moses can be cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.”
As Christians, we must try to understand people who struggle with the Bible. Sometimes the most hard-core atheists are sensitive, caring, compassionate and even religious people. We also need to agree with some of the points they make. For instance, it is certainly true that the God of the Hebrew Bible often looks a lot more like the Hebrews, than the loving God and Father of Jesus Christ. But while we can agree that there are difficulties in parts of Bible, we need to grasp what American writer and religious skeptic Mark Twain once quipped. Even as an agnostic himself, Twain once honestly admitted that it wasn’t the parts of the Bible he didn’t understand that bothered him, but it was the parts in the Bible that he did understand, and didn’t follow. That’s what sobered him.
What many of those ‘new atheists’ today are not admitting or telling, is that no one can justify looking back and judging ancient peoples or trash ancient books because of the understanding we have now. That just isn’t fair. It might sell books, but it isn’t a very fair way to interpret the faith of ancient people. It also isn’t a fair way of trying to understand God either. Obviously, we Christians mustn’t settle for a God who prescribed parents to kill disobedient children, or that settle for a God who has a bias against women or hates sinners, or singles out the sexual confused, or who hates outsiders, is racist. This just doesn’t fit with the growing New Testament understanding of this loving God who accepts all people seek him and the truth. The God who was being revealed to Peter, Paul and the very first Christians is still righteous and just, but he is also revealed to be the God ‘who is love’.
What the Psalmist means by a foolish person in this text is not such much a concern about a theoretical atheist, as it an observation about a ‘practical’ atheist. Notice how this ‘fool’ is not saying with his lips ‘there is no God’ but he is saying it in his ‘heart’. This fool probably worshipped God and sang praises to God along with everyone else. But even though they said they believed, what was hidden deep in the ‘heart’ was something else altogether. Besides, in practical, day-to-day matters, God, or faith in God, simply did not matter. To this ‘fool’ God did not matter in how they made plans, how they made decisions, how they spent money or how they lived. They may have said they believed in God, but in the way they lived, God did not exist. As the notorious Madalyn Murray O'Hair once admitted: "I am an atheist not because I have searched behind every star, and looked under every rock, to prove there is no God. I am an atheist because I live my life as if there were no God."
In this text, one of first things the Psalmist does is to picture God ‘looking down from heaven’ to ‘see’ what people are doing. The Hebrew word used to describe this is shawkaf; a very common Hebrew word, picturing God as leaning over a railing or peering out of a window. Of course, this is just a human way of speaking about God which scholars call anthropomorphisms. In order to talk about God, we have to think in our own terms. We all do this, but what we need to be most cautious about is that the God who spoke to Moses from a burning bush is not ‘up there’ looking down, but God is right here, all around us and even within us. God is aware of us, even though we may not be very aware of him. The King James Version of the Bible even expresses this idea when it says in verse 5, that ‘God is in the generation of the righteous. God is not simply ‘with’ us, he is ‘in’ those who are in him.
But what does God ‘see’ when he ‘looks down’ at us, that is when he is not ‘in’ us? The Psalmist says that God looks to ‘see’ whether are not people are living ‘wisely’; asking whether or not ‘anyone seeks him’ (v.2). Unfortunately, what God sees, at least in this text, is not very good. The Psalmist says that God not only sees people doing bad things, but he says God sees that ‘all of them do bad things’ and that ‘everyone is corrupt’. God sees that ‘no one does good’; not ‘even one person’. How did a perspective like ever become ‘music in Israel’s ears?
To understand this very pessimistic viewpoint, we need to read on to the end of this Psalm where you see that these ‘evildoers’ the Psalmist means are those who are ‘devouring God’s people, just like they eat, without praying (v.4) and just as they confound (NRSV), humiliate (CEB), crush (NAB), shame (KJV) or frustrate (NLT) ‘the plans of the poor (v.6). This Psalm concludes with a cry for ‘salvation’ or ‘deliverance’ praying for God to ‘bring back’ (v. 7, KJV) his people, who are being held captive in a pagan environment. To most scholars, this Psalm goes back to the time of the darkest days of Israel’s history, the long dark rule of evil King Manasseh.
When you understand why this Psalm was written---as song of hope, calling upon God’s people to keep trusting in God even in a time of great evil and unbelief---you can understand why everything sounds so negative. This also helps us know why God’s people are called to ‘rejoice’ and ‘be glad’ in the Lord, in spite of their situation. This Psalm is not really calling people to dwell upon the bad, but it is calling God’s people to trust the Lord anyway, and not to allow their lives to become consumed by worry or to become lost in unbelief.
Still, however, in this Psalm of lament, there is still the matter of this person who is being called a ‘fool’. The Psalm clearly shows how godless, irreverent, and unbelieving people can quickly become lesser and smaller people. Here, the Psalmist observed how by their ‘practical atheism’ people become ‘corrupt’. They ‘do evil things.’ They ‘turn bad’ so that they ‘devour God’s people’ and ‘frustrate the plans of the poor’. In other words, when people live like there is no God, they can quickly lose the moral basis for life. When a person loses the ultimate perception of ‘goodness’ above them, they end up losing the goodness within them too.
When Will Durant, the famous philosopher wrote his massive historical work, “The Story of Civilization”, after 40 years of studying history, he summarized his work by explaining that he had developed a ‘humble respect’ for religion—all religion. He went on to speak of the many good things positive things religion has done for the world. Then he concluded, “There is no significant example in history, of a society maintaining morality without the help of religious faith.”
Thomas Jefferson, as I said earlier, did not like God of Moses, and we can’t say that he was really a serious follower of Jesus either. Jefferson did not go to church much, he didn’t believe in miracles, he didn’t believe in a personal God, but as a deist, he did have some sort of vague concept of a creator, and he still revered the moral of the Bible. Jefferson even wrote his own version of the New Testament, though he felt he had to cut out all of the miracles to make it work for him. What Jefferson did believe about faith, particularly about the Christian faith, is that he did not think a democracy last, unless a majority of its people had a moral foundation based on respect and reverence of the teachings of Jesus Christ.
I realize that today, our nation is becoming increasingly secular, as fewer and fewer people take the message of the Bible seriously. As we do this, our nation is also becoming increasingly morally confused too. As the Great Russian author Dostoyevsky once put into the mouth of one the characters, “When there is no God, everything is permissible.” And that’s is certainly verifiable, isn’t it? When there is no God beyond us, and when there is no final judgment or no growing revelation of what is right, wrong, good or evil, people tend gravitate toward licentiousness. Since there is not real authority for life, people start thinking they live, think, or can act any way they please.
As the Bible writer once observed, when he noticed what happened when the concept of God was lost, was that ‘Everyone did what is right in their own eyes.” We can see this happening too, can’t we, even in a land where 90% of the people still claim to believe in God? For instance, in a nation that still sings on the 4th of July, “God Bless American”, it can still practically live as if there is no God, when its own courts, cease to apply the law, but are moved to change the law, by changing the meaning of words, like it did recently when it changed the meaning of a word like ‘marriage’ to suit what some people want marriage to be. Furthermore, when there is little true practice of faith in God, parents will allow their children to become whatever they want to become, and do whatever they want to do. When there is no practical faith in God, there is no longer any higher calling in life or final accountably for our lives, so that have nothing much left but to ‘live, eat, drink, and make merry, for tomorrow they will die’ In other words, when there is no God in our hearts, you become the center of your own universe, and there no ultimate authority over your life, except for what you want or can get by with. And if you have enough money, or enough ‘smarts’, you can probably get by with whatever you wish. But the shocking awakening still to come, is that when you practically live as if there is no God, you only end up with the choices you will make and the desires you will have. And you eventually end up with nothing left, but yourself. You ARE on your own.
Several years ago, newscaster Ted Koppel spoke at a commencement ceremony at Duke University and reminded the students that ‘God did not give us the 10 suggestions, but God gave us the 10 Commandments.’ Koppel was quoting a great German writer, Heinrich Heine, who once explained how the great buildings and great societies of West, could only have been built by people who looked up; who reached for the stars because they believed that God commanded and called them to serve him and to serve humanity. What happens in a society where people no longer believe in a God who calls and commands, is that we start living only to serve ourselves, and then, it isn’t long until the great buildings and infrastructures of our society start to crumple too, just like our great institutions are in decline today. When you don’t care about seeking God, you end up not caring about much of anything else, except yourself.
THEY THINK LIKE FOOLS (4)
People who live like there is no God, are not acting wisely (v.2), the Psalmist goes on to explain, because ‘they have no knowledge’.
The word that the Psalm uses for ‘Fool is ‘nabal’, a word that carries this idea of being ‘senseless’—not thinking with good sense. Interestingly, there was also a man in the Bible who was also name Nabal. He was the husband of Abigail (1 Sam. 25:3). She was said to be smart and beautiful too. But her husband, Nabal, she said, was just what his name implied. ‘As his name was, so is he’, his wife said (1 Sam. 25:25). How did he get the name ‘fool’? The story goes, that before David became King, he came and asked Nabal, the sheep shearer, and asked him for his help. But Nabal, not paying attention to anything that was going on in his world, except his work, refused to help young David. Who is David, he asked? Who is this son of Jessie? Nabal was not so stupid, he couldn’t understand who David was, but Nabal was so foolish he didn’t pay attention to who David was.
Later, his beautiful and smart wife Abigail, who did understand who David was, went behind her husband’s back and helped the future king. When she later told her husband, who David really was, Nabal was so overcome with his own foolishness, that he died in fear having to live with his own stupidity. Nabal was exactly what his name said he was; he was a fool, not because he didn’t know any better, but because he did know better, but he didn’t care to think about the repercussions of his own stupidity.
Most interestingly, not long after he died, David made Nabal’s beautiful widow Abigail, his own wife.
If this story indicates the meaning of being foolish, it does not mean being ignorant about something, but it means not to care to know or do any better. The foolish person sees, but they don’t see. The foolish person knows, and might even think they know everything, but they really know nothing. The great philosopher, Immanuel Kant once wrote: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe….the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” What Kant understood is that the person who doesn’t look for God, won’t find God. When you don’t want to find any ultimate meaning for life on earth, or for this vast universe and you want to think that everything is one big accident, rather than to trust in a loving, creator, and caring God you end up thinking like Nabal. You end up forgetting that this way of thinking makes you an accident too.
The great biology professor at Princeton University, Dr. Edwin Conkin, once wrote that “the probability of complex life originating from an accident is comparable to the a dictionary coming together as a result of an explosion in a printing factory.” While I understand that obvious order, design and complexity of life may not absolutely prove the existence of God, it surely points us in a better direction only a fool would deny.
I say this, because if you do go in the opposite direction; if you try to deny that there is something special, unique and sacred about human life, then you end up making life and people nothing more than accidental animals, or worst, you make humans of no value at all. The human person quickly becomes usable, expendable, and disposable. Isn’t this what happened in under the Nazi’s or under communism? We need to be careful that it doesn’t happen under capitalism too.
Reinhold Niebuhr, a German scholar who fled Germany and worked in America against Nazism, said that Germany was a brilliantly advance culture, with more ‘education per square head’ than any other place in the world. It even had the most educated Christian culture in the world too. But Nazism rejected God anyway. Its leaders were determined to build a ‘super-race’ at the expense of everyone else, including God. They had their own view of God, which they adopted and adapted for their own wishes. They even ended up thinking that they were ‘gods’ themselves. In order to ‘purify’ the human race, they thought they had to execute six million Jews, most of them dying in gas chambers.
It’s the same kind of thing that happened in the Soviet Union too. Communism was an atheistic culture that declared belief in God to be only fit for museums, not in classrooms or daily, political life. All across that culture, Atheistic communism said clearly, loudly and proudly, “There is no God”. We all know what kind of evil communism produced. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that Joseph Stalin, at the height of his power, was executing 40,000 people a month. When a person thinks there is no God and lives as if there is no God, the smartest people in the world can become the smartest monsters in the world too.
What really concerns me these days, in our increasingly secular, religiously neutral, American culture, is not that we have a secular government or neutral public life, but it is when we allow this neutral, secular way to be the sole provider of the education of our children. If we fail to supplement this secular education with a moral and religious education too, we don’t end up just getting neutral children with a neutral society, but we eventually end up as a society that is in spiritual, moral, and ethical freefall, like we may be already observing today. I hope there this not where we are going, and there is debate about this, which I think is good. But the point I want to make is that when we create a culture that doesn’t think faith in God or religious belief is important, we don’t end up with a culture that simply doesn’t believe in God, but we end up as a culture that loses all culture, loses all faith, and loses its moral focus, because it has lost its positive center, which is a true, religious faith.
THEY DIE LIKE FOOLS (5)
Now, I’m sure there are people who can’t or won’t agree with what I’m saying. I certainly don’t think you can prove the existence of God either with an argument, nor can you prove the existence of God with logic. God is certainly not always logical, just like love is not always logical. And while I understand why some people become agnostic about God or absolutes, what I can’t understand is how some certain atheists become so arrogant about something that can only be known by faith.
Especially, when people face the reality of death, how can anyone remain a compassionate atheist? The only ‘answer’ an atheist has is that ‘when you are dead you are dead’. The Psalmist was probably being prophetic in verse 5, when he says that the atheist eventually ends up living in ‘panic’, ‘terror’ or ‘fear’. But the real fear of the practical atheist is not his own impending death. We all have to face that. What the practical atheist has to fear most, is that not that they will die, but that after death, there will be no place to escape the truth of God.
After the French mathematical thinker Blaise Pascal became a Christian, he wrote a story about what was most reasonable about belief in God. This is not ‘why’ he became a Christian, but as a thinker, he tried to show that it is a good reason to consider that God was worth our consideration.
In his story called ‘The Wager’ Pascal envisions a person who lives a good life, as if there is a God, but then dies. After he dies, the man knows nothing, because he is dead. What those who survive know, is that the man lived a very good life, and they remember him fondly. He lives on in their memory because he lived so positively what he believed and how he cared for others.
The other man, however lives how he wants. He lived a very self-centered life. He did not fear God, and said he didn’t fear anything. When that man died, most people were glad he was gone. The only good thing about his life, was that he was soon forgotten. But , for Pascal, there was still a problem; for you see, even lived as if there was no God, when he opened his eyes on the other side, he suddenly understood that there he was wrong, and now he knows he was wrong. The believing man did and never knew any different. The unbelieving man dies, and now the God he denied is now his judge. And this practical atheist is not judged based on what he didn’t know, but on what he should have known, if he would have taken the time to realize the risk.
Pascal’s wager is that it would be much better to be the person who lived as if there was a God, and there wasn’t, than to be the person who lived as if there was no God, but there is.
Now, of course, Pascal’s Wager is not good motivation for living a life of faith, hope, and love. It I, however, a pointer to the reasonability of faith; that at the center of everything is this God who inspires faith, who gives hope, and who shows love, but will also judge those who play the part of a fool, so they can live as they please. While the absolute truth about God can’t be found through scientific proof, because God remains beyond all proof, God can’t be disproven either. It takes just as much, and maybe even more ‘faith’ to say there is no God, as it takes to believe and trust in God. Because you and I, in this very big universe, will always be dependent, limited, and defenseless in the end, as we were the day we were born, we must trust someone.
The great sociologist, Peter Berger, once suggested that when a baby cries, and the mother comforts her child, saying, “Don’t worry, everything will be alright,” either that mother knows instinctively that indeed, ultimately, everything will be alright, or that mother is telling her child the greatest lie of all. And in the same way, while God is always beyond us, and never fully comprehended, this is exactly why God remains our ‘sure and only hope’. The person who denies God their whole life is finally like a person driving a car, but not looking where they are going. This just as we might call the distractive driver a fool, is the same reason the Psalmist calls the person who ‘says there is no God in their heart, that same kind of fool.
An atheist was complaining to a fellow worker, saying: "You know Christians have all the good holidays. They have their Easter, they have their Christmas, and the Catholic Christians even have more than that: They have Ascension Sunday, and a lot of other Saints and Feast Days too. But, then, the atheists added, since we atheists don't have any holidays, I think only fair that there ought to be a holiday for the atheists too."
The other man listening to his idea agreed, then he suggested just the day: "Why don't you try April 1st?"
One a more serious note, W. O. Saunders, an atheist himself, once wrote these words in the American Magazine. They are heart breaking, but illustrate the worst kind of foolishness. Saunders wrote: I would like to introduce you to one of the lonesome and unhappiest individuals on earth. I am talking about the person who does not believe in God. I can introduce you to such a person because I myself am one, and introducing myself you shall have an introduction to the agnostic or skeptic in your own neighborhood, for he and she is everywhere in the land.
You will be surprised to learn that the agnostic envies your faith in God, your subtle belief in a heaven after life, and your blessed assurance that you will meet with your loved ones in an afterlife where there will be neither sadness nor pain. They would give anything to be able to embrace that faith and be comforted by it. For them there is only the grave and its persistence pursuit…,” The agnostic or atheist may even face life with a smile or with a heroic attitude. They may put on a brave front, but they are not happy. They stand in awe and reverence before the vastness and majesty of the universe, but without really knowing why we are something and not nothing. For them, now listen to his conclusion: this earth is nothing more but a tricky raft, a drift in the unfathomable waters of infinity, with no observable or approachable horizon in sight. Our heart aches for every precious life upon that raft, like my own—drifting, drifting, drifting, but where we are going, is nowhere.
How foolish it is to think like this, the Psalmist says. It is more foolish to live your life out of this kind of belief. Worst of all, the Psalmist says, like Pascal said, that when if you are right, there is nothing, but if you are wrong, the worst part is that the life and the salvation that belongs to the righteous, could have been the salvation and the life that could have been yours. The fool is the one who did not see that coming. The fool is the one who did not see that life is going somewhere, toward someone, and that someone is the Lord, who could have brought them into the way of the righteous too, but they missed him. And it all started, not in their head, but in their heart. And that is where everything can change, unless we are prove to be ‘fools’ about it. Amen.
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