"To the choirmaster. Of David.
1 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;
there is none who does good.
2 The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man,
to see if there are any who understand,
who seek after God.
3 They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
there is none who does good,
not even one.
4 Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers
who eat up my people as they eat bread
and do not call upon the Lord?
5 There they are in great terror,
for God is with the generation of the righteous.
6 You would shame the plans of the poor,
but the Lord is his refuge.
7 Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion!
When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people,
let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad."
Psalm 14
We should note the significance of the phrase 'in his heart' in 1 - the atheism is not actually voiced, but to all intents and purposes it is lived. To live as if there were no God is practical atheism. The word 'fool' here refers not so much to intellectual blindness as to moral obstinacy. As we say, there are none so blind as those who will not see. Over against this atheism the Bible sets a living God, Who sees and watches, and looks down. Indeed, the Bible confronts us with such a God. There is said to be a reference in this to the wickedness of Babel, and Sodom and Gomorrah, and the days of practical atheism, when God 'came down to see...' (Genesis 11:5, 7; 18:21). The great question of the Bible is not whether there is a God - and it is never concerned to prove this, but rather it assumes it - nor even 'Where can I find God?', for to the Bible He is only too present; the question is, 'How can I get right with the God from Whom there is no escape?' The real answer to the practical atheism of our day lies, as the Psalm indicates in 7, in the intervention of God. When God is in the generation of the righteous, the result is always a sense of awe and fear. In times of spiritual awakening, there has been such an over- whelming sense of a divine presence that any question of whether there be a God be- comes quite superfluous and irrelevant. As Jesus said of the Holy Spirit, 'When He is come, He will convict the world of sin, and unrighteousness, and of judgment'. This is what solves the problem of communication - a living God in the midst of the Church. Well might the Psalmist pray for such a manifestation (7)! The one unassailable answer is - life. This must be our prayer also.