psalm 14

psalm 14:1

==psalm 14:1-2:

​​The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
2 The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

​Psalm 10:3–4:
The wicked boasts of the desires of his soul,
     and the one greedy for gain curses and renounces the Lord.
In the pride of his face the wicked does not seek him;
     all his thoughts [or all his plans] are, “There is no God.”

“Christ is not valued at all unless he is valued above all.” --Augustine

January 13, 2025: John Piper wrote: Both David and Paul agree: with as much evidence as God has given in the world of his existence, only a fool would deny it. David says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” and Paul, amazingly — maybe even quoting; I don’t know — says in Romans 1:22–23, “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God.” We don’t want to be fools. So we embrace God, and we embrace him in Christ.

July 21, 2022: Scott Hubbard wrote: Blaise Pascal, seventeenth-century Christian polymath, thought so. When Pascal looked round at his modern country, neighbors, and self, he saw a collective pathology, a shared insanity: “Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder,” he said (Christianity for Modern Pagans, 203).
We cultivate hobbies, and follow celebrities, and read the news without knowing why we exist. We stumble through an unthinkably vast cosmos, circled round by unthinkably intricate wonders, too distracted to ask, “Who made this?” We develop firm opinions about politics, and care not whether souls live forever, and where. We look often into our mirrors and seldom into our deep and fallen hearts. A strange disorder indeed.
And so, Pascal walked around with needles in hand, seeking to puncture the daydream of secular or religiously nominal apathy to eternity. 

==psalm 14:3-25:

3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
4 Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread, and call not upon the Lord.
5 There were they in great fear: for God is in the generation of the righteous.
6 Ye have shamed the counsel of the poor, because the Lord is his refuge.
7 Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion! when the Lord bringeth back the captivity of his people, Jacob shall rejoice, and Israel shall be glad.

St. Jerome: “Our Lord teaches who our neighbor is…. Everyone is our neighbor, and we should not harm anyone. If, on the contrary, we understand our fellow human beings to be only our brother and relatives, is it then permissible to do evil to strangers? God forbid such a belief! We are neighbors, all people to all people for we have one Father.”

January 15, 2025: Jim Denison wrote: ​In my fallenness, I am less a good person who sometimes does bad things than a bad person who tries to do good things. David observed, “There is none who does good, not even one” (Psalm 14:3). Paul’s admission is mine: “I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (Romans 7:18–19).
I am grateful that God forgives all I confess to him (1 John 1:9), but my default subliminal picture of him has typically been of a holy Lord who is consistently displeased with my failures and shortcomings. But this is not so.