The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): What does God think about those who say there is no God? Today Dr. James Boice will take us through a study of Psalm 53 and talk about how we should live our lives. Many today and in David's time acted as though there was no God. But God is still God, whether he's acknowledged by man or not. How then should God's truth change the way we live?

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Proverbs chapter 14 verse 12 says, "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death." Although you and I can't save ourselves from sin, God has mercifully given us a Savior who can. Turn in your Bible now to Psalm 53 and let's hear from Dr. Boice.

Dr. James Boice: We come for the first time in our lengthy study of the Psalms to a psalm that is for the most part a repetition of a psalm we had earlier. That sort of thing occurs occasionally in the Psalms. We'll come to it again, but this is the very first time that we've come to it in our studies and the psalm that's repeated is Psalm 14. It's repeated as Psalm 53, except for a few minor changes in the last three lines of verse 5.

Now, that suggests some interesting questions. One of them is somewhat philosophical, the other is very personal as you'll see in a moment. The philosophical question is this: Why is the Psalm repeated? And then the very practical one, at least for me, is: What are you going to say about the Psalm the second time?

Now, since God has seen fit to repeat the psalm with only minor changes, I think it would be entirely appropriate if I would repeat the sermon. When we studied Psalm 14, I referred to the fact that Psalm 53 was coming and it's a repetition of Psalm 14. Not only do we have Psalm 14 and Psalm 53, but the heart of these two Psalms is repeated in the New Testament by the Apostle Paul in Romans in the third chapter as verses 10 through 12. I said then that anything God says once commands our attention.

If God speaks, we ought to listen. What if He says it twice? Well, that ought to command our very deep attention. How then if He says it three times? If He says it three times, we ought to concentrate, contemplate, assimilate, and I would suggest we even ought to memorize the words so they become actually a part of us. In the book of common prayer, there's the collect that has the words about scripture: we are to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. That would be appropriate of this Psalm, and it would certainly be appropriate to repeat what I said earlier.

However, I've got to say I think that would probably be missing the point because if God repeats something, even if you study it very carefully the first time and accurately, it is probably because He thinks you haven't yet learned everything there is to learn. So, what we need to do is come back and look at this Psalm to see what else it has to teach us. Spurgeon thought that we profit from these two Psalms more as we grow older. Spurgeon, you know, was very witty and he had a wonderful turn of words. Here are a few things he said about Psalm 53 in his study.

Talking first of all about the repetition, Spurgeon says, "All repetitions are not vain repetitions. We are slow to learn and therefore we need line upon line," referring to that great verse in Isaiah that says how the teaching comes. It's precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little, there a little. That's the way we learn, a little bit at a time. So, that's the reason for the repetition.

Then he makes an assumption, which I think is a valid one, namely that Psalm 53 was also written by David, but written late in life and Psalm 14 was written earlier. He made this conclusion: "David after a long life found men no better than they were in his youth." He adds, "Holy writ never repeats itself needlessly, therefore there is a good cause for the second copy of the Psalm."

And then he gets really clever and he links up the numbering of the Psalm with our age, thinking about us being 14 years old, that corresponding with Psalm 14, and then being 53 years old, and that corresponding with the second. He says this, "If our age has advanced from 14 to 53, we shall find the doctrine of the Psalm more evident than in our youth." It's only a way of saying the better you get to know people, the more you believe in the doctrine of original sin.

Now, there are a few differences between the two Psalms and I want to take just a moment to show you what those are. Most of them are slight. In verse 1, the word "deeds" in Psalm 14 is changed to "ways" in Psalm 53. In the third verse, the phrase "all have turned aside" is changed to "everyone has turned away." Actually, it means to turn back in another direction. In verse 4, the word "evildoers" is replaced with the words "the evildoers." Now, the only apparent effect of those slight changes is to intensify or heighten the sentiments of the Psalm slightly.

You could apparently use one or the other and it means certainly the same thing. Now, there is a change that's a bit more significant and that is the replacing of the name Jehovah with Elohim throughout Psalm 53. Each Psalm refers to God seven times, but the earlier Psalm mingles the two names for God. In Psalm 14, Elohim appears three times and Jehovah four times, but by the time you get to this Psalm, it's Elohim in every instance.

Now, you say, does that mean anything? I'm not sure that it does. It does follow a pattern. We were talking earlier as we began the second book of the Psalms and I pointed out that in the second book of the Psalms, Elohim is the name for God that dominates just like Jehovah is the name for God that dominates in book one. Both are names for God, both have their overtones, but I don't know that there's anything particularly significant about that change.

There is one substantial change, however, and it's what I referred to earlier. That is verse 5 of Psalm 53, which replaces verses 5 and 6 of Psalm 14. Now, in case you're not flipping back and forth, let me read what the earlier Psalm says. It seems to be addressing fools in Israel, or fools everywhere, and they existed in Israel too. Here's what it says in the earlier Psalm: "There they are, overwhelmed with dread, for God is present in the company of the righteous. You evildoers frustrate the plans of the poor, but the Lord is their refuge."

And then in the Psalm we're studying now, this seems to redirect the verse now, not to talk about fools in Israel, but fools among those who are attacking Israel, that is presumably Gentiles. It refers to them saying this: "There they were, overwhelmed with dread, where there was nothing to dread. God scattered the bones of those who attacked you. You put them to shame for God despised them." Now, we can only guess what that incident refers to, but there are several that would be quite apt as an explanation.

I suppose the one that comes to mind most immediately is the scattering of the armies of Sennacherib in the days of Hezekiah and Isaiah. You recall that they surrounded Jerusalem and the leader of the troops was boasting about the power of their gods, saying no god is going to protect you against the armies of the king of Assyria. Hezekiah laid that up before the Lord and that night the angel of the Lord went out and killed 185,000 of the surrounding troops.

When they woke up in the morning, there they were, they were all dead. Sennacherib wisely decided that was not a very good place to attack, and so we're told that he withdrew and he went back to his own capital where one of his sons murdered him. All of that is in 2 Kings 18 and 19. Now, that would describe what you have here in this verse. If that's the case, it's very likely—I'm not sure of this, it's just a guess, nobody really knows—but it's very likely that what you have here is an early Psalm of David that a later poet altered in view of the historical situation slightly by making the change in verse 5 to accommodate in a very specific way the new historical situation.

It would still bear the name of David because it was David's Psalm, but it's been adapted slightly for the new situation. Now, as I say, I don't know, I'm not certain, but it seems to me that would probably explain why we have the Psalms we do. That situation with the king surrounding Jerusalem and the army is not our situation, of course. So, if the Psalm is going to speak to us, it has to speak in a different way. So, I ask the question: How are we to study it? What lesson are we to get from the Psalm? What new lesson?

Well, when we were studying the earlier one, Psalm 14, I went to the New Testament and studied what Paul was saying in Romans as an interpretation of the Psalm. You know how Paul operates. He gives a reasoned argument for his doctrine and when he gets to the end, he gives the text. Now, other biblical writers or speakers do it the other way around. Peter, for example, gave the text first, then he gave the explanation and that's the way most people preach, but Paul gave the explanation then he gave the text.

Now, the text he gives in part is what we have here in Psalm 14 or from Psalm 53. So, what precedes that is really Paul's explanation of what it means. What Paul is describing there is the nature of the fool and he's saying all human beings are fools in their sin because what they do is this: God has revealed Himself in nature, but they don't like the God who's there in nature and so they do everything they can to suppress the knowledge of Him.

They deny that He exists sometimes. They deny that He has any influence in the world. They deny that He cares. They deny that you can know about Him. They do that, Paul says, suppressing the truth because they really don't like the God who is there to be known. They're afraid that if they really did acknowledge Him, they'd have to change their lifestyle, they'd have to thank Him for the things that He did, they'd have to serve Him and they don't want to do that. That is sin, of course. That's what Paul is talking about. That's the very nature of sin.

So, reason with me this way. If Paul is explaining the Psalm and he's describing it as sin, isn't it true to say—and give a definition now for the fool, this is the way the Psalm begins—"the fool who says in his heart there is no God"? The fool is not just one who says in his heart there is no God; the fool is anyone who sins. What that means is to act as if God is not there. You see, if God, the holy God, is there, you don't sin before that God. So, if you sin, you're acting as if there is no God.

Now, if that's a proper way of thinking, and I'm sure it is, then we can look at the Psalm for what it teaches us about sin. There is some precedent for that. You know the great commentator Matthew Henry did all those multiple volumes, six volumes, of studies on the entire Bible. He studies this Psalm carefully and he finds eight points in the Psalm, seven of which have to do with sin and the eighth, by contrast, with the faith of the saints. In each case, each of these eight points all together that he developed, each of them begins with the letter F.

A wonderful study in alliteration. You know, these old writers were just magnificent at that. I've never been able to do that. Well, let me share some of them with you and then reflect on them from our own perspective. The first thing Matthew Henry talks about on the basis of this Psalm is the fact of sin. The fact of sin, that is the reality of sin. Why does he say that? Well, he argues from the fact that God looks down from heaven and sees it, what verse 2 says. Now, you and I don't always see sin.

The reason you and I don't always see sin is that we don't want to see sin. We close our eyes to it. We do it sometimes with other people. They're our friends, we don't want to think badly of them, and so we close our eyes to what they're doing. Frequently we do that, almost always we do it with ourselves. If somebody in honesty confronts us with our sin, a natural instinct of our hearts is to make excuses for it. We say things like this, "Well, I didn't mean to do it," or, "You don't understand what really happened."

Or we say, "It wasn't really like that," or, "It wasn't my fault," or, "You should see what the other person did to me first. If you know what they did to me, you'd understand why I did that to them." That's the way we argue. In other words, we pretend either that the act was not sin or that it was justified. Now, we have a biblical example of that, in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve had sinned and God came to confront them. They tried to wiggle out from under the judgment.

And so Adam said, "It wasn't my fault, it was the woman's fault. She gave me to eat and I ate." And she said, "It wasn't my fault, it was the devil's fault. The devil got here in the garden and he tempted me and that's why I sinned." You see, that's what we do. But the problem with that kind of denial of the fact of sin is that you and I are not the court of last appeal. As a matter of fact, we're not even judges. In this particular court, you and I are the plaintiffs, we're the ones that are accused.

And the one who stands to judge is one who knows the facts of the case and He prepares the indictment and He handles the prosecution and He renders the ultimate verdict, and that one is God. And it's God who says, "Everyone has turned away, they have together become corrupt. There is no one who does good, not even one." Now, that's the fact of sin and it's God's judgment on the race.

The second thing Matthew Henry talks about is the fault of sin. That's important too, you see, because another way we deal with sin is to minimize it because we don't want to feel too guilty about it. So, we talk about our sins as weaknesses sometimes, or we talk about them as imperfections. We don't mind being imperfect because we assume we're on our way to perfection and we'll overcome it sometime. But we don't actually tell it as it is. Now, God doesn't lie. God sees things as they are. Here's the way God describes sin: He says that sinners are corrupt and their ways are vile (verse 1). He describes them as having turned away from the correct path (verse 3). He says that they are evildoers who devour other people (verse 4).

Now, those terms describe sin in terms of relationships and there are three relationships: relationship to God, relationship to ourselves, relationship to other people. As far as God is concerned, we have turned away from Him. That's what the word says. As a matter of fact, it's even stronger than that. It's not just turning aside, that's what the earlier Psalm said. This Psalm actually has the idea of turning around and going the other direction entirely. We are anti-God in our nature.

As far as we're concerned, we've become corrupt and vile, sinks, corrupts. And so we are in the process of moral decay in our sin. And as far as other people are concerned, well, we are harming them by our actions. Sin is no small thing. It's a very great fault and it's very harmful and that's the second point.

The third point is this: the fountain of sin. What Henry means by that is the source of sin and he asks the question—I quote him here—"How comes it that men are so bad?" And then he answers, "Surely it's because there is no fear of God before their eyes." It's because they say in their hearts, "no God." Now, when we were studying Psalm 14, I pointed out that there's a great deal of difference between a theoretical atheism and a practical atheism. Theoretical atheism is the kind of atheism that denies the existence of a supreme being. It says literally there is no God. We just live in a mechanistic universe, all that is is what we see.

And we have a lot of theoretical atheists today. In the ancient world that wasn't true, very hard to find an atheist in that sense in the ancient world. And when you find in these Psalms the saying "there is no God," that is not what we mean when we say there is no God. This is a practical atheism and it's the stance taken, it's the lifestyle of a person who wants to act as if there is no God. As a matter of fact, that's very strong in the Hebrew text. I mentioned that when we studied the earlier Psalm because in the Hebrew, the words "there is" actually aren't there. All the Hebrew says is the fool says in his heart, "no God."

What that really means is "no God for me." You can act as if you're concerned about God, but I'm not going to do that. Maybe a God, but He doesn't intervene. And as long as He doesn't intervene, I'm going to do whatever I can to advance myself. Now, that is the source of our problems, you see, because whether we deny the true existence of God or not, there is a God and He does exist. But the problem is we act as if He doesn't exist.

Let me remind you what we said when I was studying an earlier Psalm. It's one of my favorite Psalms, Psalm 8. It's the one that places man in this interesting mediating position in the universe. It says, "you've made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and you've crowned him with glory and honor." Now, in the New Testament that's used in reference to Jesus Christ as the perfect man, but in Psalm 8 it's really referring to humankind in general. And here's the interesting position: you have God, you have the angels, you have human beings, men and women, and then below them, as you read on in the Psalm, you have the animal creation, the beasts.

But you've made him a little lower than the heavenly beings, you've crowned him with glory and honor, you've given him dominion over the beasts. That's what it says. Now, Aquinas pointed out that that's a very interesting position. The angels who are above us have spirits but no bodies, and the animals who are beneath us have bodies but no spirits, but we are body-spirit beings. And Francis Schaeffer, who made a great deal of that in one of his studies, says it's our unique opportunity in that mediating position to look up because we have spirits to the angelic beings who are above us and God who is above that.

And as we look up, we become increasingly like the one to whom we look because whatever you look to as a model is what you will tend to become. But you see, when you become a practical atheist and you say "no God for me," what you're saying is "I'm not going to look up, I'm not going to put a spiritual dimension into my life." What I'm going to do is—well, what do you do if you don't look up? There's only one direction you can look then: it's down. And so you look down to the animals and you become like the animals.

You begin to act like them. This is why we have so much beastlike conduct in our day. And the sad thing, you see, is that when human beings who are made to be even above the angels act like animals, they do things that even the animals wouldn't do. When Paul begins to talk about that in Romans 1, he pictures this downhill path of moral decline and when he gets to the bottom, he says in effect there is no bottom because when you say to yourself, "Well, that's something I won't do," you know, "That's wrong, I won't do that," unless you have a relationship to God, that's the very thing you're going to do.

As a matter of fact, even the naming of the sin invites you to do it. And that's what happens with community standards and cultural mores. We say to ourselves, "Well, we're better than those other people," wherever that may be in the world, people of a different race or a different background or a different religion, different nationality, "we would never do that." But of course, as soon as you say that, that is exactly what you do. That's why there has never been moral reformation in any nation that is not religious in nature and does not flow from the gospel of redemption through the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, you see, that's what we've got here. That is the fountain of sin and when you say "there is no God" and "there's no fear of God before your eyes," that's the direction that you go. Now all of this is folly, of course, and that's the next of Henry's points: the folly of sin. It's folly because if God exists, whether we acknowledge Him or not, then it is certain that one day we're going to have to stand before Him and give an accounting. And so every sin we commit, every wrong thought we cherish, every wrong deed we perpetrate is something for which we will have to give an answer one day.

Now, let me put that in a very personal way. If you're a person who has been living as if there's no God—I'm not going to say if you're an atheist the way we talk about it today—but if you're a person who has been living as if there is no God and is planning your own life, doing your own thing, not finding out what God has said in the Bible, how you should live, if you're a person like that, then I want to ask this question: What are you going to say on that day when you do stand before God? What kind of an excuse are you going to make?

Are you going to say, "Well, I didn't know that you existed"? How do you think that's going to sound to God? That's going to be stupid, that's the only word for it. And I think it'll even sound stupid to you. Because you see, God has gone to great pains to reveal Himself to you. He's revealed Himself in nature. What Paul says, you don't need an advanced degree to know that there's a God who's made everything about you. Look at your own hand, how it functions, your fingerprints, and so on. Evidence that there's a God. God's revealed Himself in the Bible and God has revealed Himself preeminently in Jesus Christ.

Have you studied nature with an open mind? Have you read the Bible? Have you tried to get to know Jesus Christ? If you haven't done those things, how are you going to stand before God someday and say I didn't know that you existed? Maybe you're going to say, you can't say that, maybe you're going to say "I didn't think that you were important." How insulting to God that must seem. There are lots of other things that you think are important. You spend your time watching television. Oh, it's a very important thing.

You think the football scores, the baseball scores were important. You think your bank account's important, you're always very concerned about that, you don't want to overdraw it. All those things are important. But you're going to stand before God and say, "I didn't think that it was important that I sought you out and came to know you and served you, you who made me"? You going to tell God that? Maybe you're going to say, "Well, I didn't have time for you."

That probably comes closer to the point, but you see, again, that's folly. You didn't have time for God? For God? Yes, you have time for everything else. You have time for everything you want to do. You have time for fun, you have time for your pleasure. But no time for God? You see, on that day when you have to give an accounting, those questions will seem foolish. You will know that you were a fool whether you acknowledge it here or not.

The fifth point is this: the filthiness of sin. One of the deceptive features of sin is that it masquerades as something beautiful and desirable when actually it's hideous and destructive. The Psalm uses the words corrupt and vile. You know, we have a great tendency to want to make sin look pretty. You recall not long ago when Magic Johnson, that handsome, very attractive and charismatic basketball player, announced that he had AIDS, how almost immediately the sportscasters and the pundits jumped on that and they just were almost jubilant because here was somebody who was attractive and nice and had AIDS and somehow in their mind that took away the hideousness of this fatal disease.

I remember reading the day after that was announced in one of the papers that this is actually now, they said, the smiling face of AIDS because Magic Johnson is seen so often smiling. Another paper suggested that now we know that AIDS is not a danger. It's a danger not just for some groups of people, but anyone can get it. Well, that's not true, of course. AIDS is not acquired by people who follow the moral law of God in sexual matters, except in a few strange cases with contaminated blood. But you say the thing that is strange there is trying to glamorize something which is not at all glamorous.

But that's what we try to do. You know what the Bible says? The Bible says there is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death (Proverbs 14:12). The Apostle Paul said the wages of sin is death, but he added fortunately, "the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 6:23). The sixth point is this: sin destroys the one who pursues it. So, we can talk about the fruit of sin and the fruit of sin is that destruction.

Now, that's what verse 4 is showing. It shows us how sin impacts other people. It uses an image, it describes these evildoers as those who devour my people as men eat bread. Now, in the Middle East, just as in the West, bread is the most common of all foodstuffs. We have a great deal of variety here. There's less variety in the Middle East and in that day there was very little variety. So, bread was eaten all the time, regularly, it was scarcely a thought. And the Psalmist picks up on that image to say, "Well, that's the way evildoers act when they're furthering their own interest: they devour the weak and devour the poor in order that they might become strong and rich themselves."

Now, we talk about that, don't we, in our own speech? We talk about this being a dog-eat-dog world. That's the same idea. And what is worse, we know people like that. We know people who don't care what happens to anybody else. And underneath the glamour, the glitz, that's really what sin is like. Sin is not caring what happens to anybody else, not even ourselves. The righteous, of course, do care what happens to others and therefore they'll do the right thing even at great personal cost and they will set their own interests aside in order to help other people and advance their interests.

The seventh point is the fear that attends sin. Now, this brings us to verse 5 and it's the verse that I referred to earlier as the new addition and the variant in this repeated Psalm. It seems to refer, as I said, to an historical incident, although we don't know which one. I mentioned the destruction of the army of Sennacherib, the Assyrians, outside the walls of Jerusalem, and that fits the situation nicely, but it's not the only situation in the Old Testament in which God struck terror into the hearts of Israel's foes when there really was no human cause for it.

Let me give some examples. In Joshua 10:10, we're told of the confusion of the armies of Southern Canaan when the Jewish troops fell upon them at Gibeon. In Judges 7, we're told about the battle of Gideon and his small army of 300 men against the Midianites. All they did on that occasion was surround the camp of the Midianites at night. They had candles that were hidden by a piece of pottery and they had trumpets and then on a given signal they broke the pottery, all of a sudden the lights came on, they blew the trumpets and the Midianites fell into such terror and confusion that they turned on one another and actually slaughtered themselves and fled out across the desert.

Or in 1 Samuel 14, after Jonathan and his armor-bearer had killed some 20 of the Philistines, we're told in verse 15 that panic struck the whole army and Saul and his larger army then routed them. Now, any one of those incidents would explain it. Now, let me say this: in those cases that I've just mentioned, panic overtook the enemies of Israel when there was no human cause for the panic. And yet God did it.

Now I ask if that's so, if people were filled with panic before God when there was no human cause for it, what is going to happen in the day when sinners have to stand before God and give an accounting for all the things that they have done? Jesus said what's going to happen on that day. He said in that day they're going to say to the mountains, "fall on us," and to the hills, "cover us," so great will be their dread. You see, but the hills are made by God, mountains are His creation, and they answer to God, not to sinners. And they will not fall upon sinners to hide them and sinners will have to stand before God. You will have to do that one day, unless your sins are covered by the blood of Jesus Christ.

Now, all of that brings us to the last point. This is where the tone of the exposition changes. Tone of the Psalm changes too. It's talking about the sin of the wicked evildoers, those who say there is no God in verses 1 through 5, but when you get to verse 6, now suddenly we're talking about what Matthew Henry calls the faith of the saints or the faith of the righteous.

Now, you notice he changes from sin to the righteous, but he doesn't drop the alliteration. He's talked about the fact, fault, fountain, folly, filthiness, fruit, and fear of sin. Now, he's talking about the faith of the saints. Now, these people live in a world in which fools do indeed act and speak as if there is no God. It's a world in which sin abounds and because it abounds, it has become a cruel world in which the righteous suffer, in which for a time those who are wicked do seem to triumph, but in the midst of this present evil world, the saints look upward and wait for the deliverance that comes from Zion.

Think about that. That's what that last phrase says. "Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion." What's that referring to? Well, it's not referring to the deliverance in verse 5 because that's something in the past. "There they were, overwhelmed with dread where there was nothing to dread. God scattered the bones of those who attacked you and put them to shame for God despised them." That's something in the past, it's the occasion of the Psalm. But when you get to the end, verse 6 says, "Oh, that salvation would come out of Zion." What's it referring to?

Well, maybe some people thought of that only in terms of a physical deliverance as God had delivered Israel from the Assyrians and the Midianites and the Philistines and the others, but the saints in Israel, and there were many down through all the centuries of Jewish history, looked forward to that Savior who was to come: the Savior God prophesied way back in the third chapter of Genesis whose goings-forth are from of old, whose ways and ministry and work and details of life were all foretold. They looked forward for that one. That's the salvation.

And you see that's the only answer to that question of sin. They look forward, we look back, but it's the same solution. If God does not save us from our sin, there's no salvation. You and I can't save ourselves from sin. Our culture certainly can't do it. Our culture is part of the enemy, part of the problem. But God has come to save us in Jesus Christ.

And so what I say to you is this: if you've been living as if there is no God, I urge you to repent of that folly and the sin which is an expression of it and become wise instead. What do the wise do? The wise people know they need a Savior. That's real wisdom, it's wisdom given by God. And furthermore, when that Savior is revealed as He has been, Jesus Christ, they believe on Him and cleave to Him. May God make us all so wise.

Our Father, we thank you for this Psalm. It's been a privilege to study it again. The lessons there are great lessons to which we need to return again and again and we would pray that you would grant us to profit, that we might become wise men and women, spiritually wise, turning from the folly of sin, embracing Jesus Christ, and following hard after Him. We pray in His name. Amen.

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