And please turn with me for our New Testament reading to the book of Romans chapter one. And our reading will be verses 16 through 23. Romans chapter one, verses 16 through 23. Listen to this. This is the very word of God. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. for His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.
So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him. But they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened, claiming to be wise, They became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
And then for our Old Testament reading and the text for this evening’s message, please turn to the book of Psalms and to Psalm number 14. You might have been expecting Psalm 43 tonight, but I didn’t have time to prepare a fresh sermon, so I decided to stick an old one in the microwave. Actually, I hope it won’t be just a reheated rinse and repeat message. I hope it’ll speak to your hearts. I did put a fair amount of work on it, even though it’s a redo. This is God’s Word, Psalm 14. to the choir master of David.
The fool says in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt. They do abominable deeds. There is none who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They’ve all turned aside. Together, they have become corrupt. There is none who does good, not even one. Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread and do not call upon the Lord?
There they are, in great terror, for God is with the generation of the righteous. You would shame the plans of the poor. but the Lord is his refuge. 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. And that’s the reading of God’s word. Let’s pray for his blessing upon it. Father, we thank you for the truths revealed to us In this psalm, and as we consider it together, Lord, we pray that Christ Jesus, our Savior, would be lifted up. We pray that you would encourage and instruct our hearts through the ministry of your spirit this very evening in this very place. And we ask this by faith and we pray it confidently in Jesus’ name, amen.
We teach little children to identify all kinds of things, especially when they’re really young. We have books for them and things that we read to them that teach them basic things. They’re learning to identify shapes. They’re learning to identify lots of other things, including the sounds that animals make. And there are books that help us teach kids those things. And even little toys, you know, like the thing with a little dial and you spin it around, you point it to an animal, pull the cord, and it makes the sound of some animal. And we coach them and help them learn these things.
So when they’re very, very small, they’re learning, what sound does a dog make? What does a dog say? And kids learn that dogs say woof, woof. And they learn that cats say meow. They learn that cows say moo. Well, as we get older, and those of us older children here in the room, we continue to learn things like that.
Because just as surely as a dog barks and a cat meows and a cow moos, God is teaching us the sound that another creature makes. We can ask a child, what does a dog say? What does a cow say? God in Psalm 14 asks us, what does a fool say? And the answer is, a fool says there is no God. If you hear a moo, you’re probably hearing a cow. If you hear a bark, you’re probably hearing a dog. And if you hear someone say there is no God, you are hearing a fool.
Now in the modern era, There’s this attitude of superiority relative to past generations, past centuries, past civilizations. And C.S. Lewis referred to this attitude as chronological snobbery. The notion that modern ideas, modern values are inherently superior to those of the past simply because they’re newer. or perhaps because they’re ours. And people affected with such an outlook, people affected by this chronological snobbery, often think of atheism as kind of the logical result of modern learning.
In other words, past eras and older civilizations believed in God because they lacked the knowledge that we have now. Of course, they believed in God because they didn’t know any better. And they couldn’t explain things that we now have explanations for. They didn’t understand things that we understand now. And so we’ve kind of outgrown our need for God.
And so the assumption of people who are afflicted by this chronological snobbery is that that theism was pretty consistent in the past and atheism is the thing of the present. It’s the thing of the future. But atheism is not new. Atheism is not modern. atheism didn’t spring up in the 20th century. It didn’t spring up during the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t a product that just came into being from from the period of the Enlightenment, so called Enlightenment. No, atheism didn’t start in any of those eras.
It’s an old evil. As this very song shows. It’s a Psalm of David. Roughly speaking, David lived at about, in round figures, 1000 BC. And under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he could write about people who say, there is no God. It’s an old evil. It’s an ancient evil. Atheism is an evil that’s been dwelling in the hearts of fools from every generation.
But what we’re going to see in this psalm is that God saves his elect out of the foolishness of atheism. That’s the good news I want us to hear from this psalm. God saves his elect out of the foolishness of atheism. Just two points tonight. First, atheism is a byproduct of mankind’s total depravity. And secondly, the grace of Jesus Christ brings God’s elect out of atheism. So that’s what we’ll be looking at here. So first of all, atheism is a byproduct of mankind’s total depravity. The psalm begins with these words, the fool says in his heart, there is no God. That’s what fools say. And it shows us that atheism is categorically foolish. To say there is no God is to be a fool.
And it’s important that we understand that in biblical terms, the concepts both of wisdom and of folly are not intellectual concepts, they’re primarily moral concepts. Biblically speaking, wisdom is primarily a moral attribute. And the same with folly. I don’t know what you think of or what you picture in your mind when you just hear the word fool. Maybe you picture the goofy looking guy with the dunce cap on but there are highly intelligent and very handsome or beautiful fools, the world’s full of them. is not a matter of intellect. It’s primarily a matter of morality. Many brilliant people throughout history have been fools. I think of a couple of names that you might recognize.
Warren Buffett, far as I’m aware, he’s an avowed atheist, brilliant financier, brilliant investing mind. And very, very wealthy, because of the use of his brilliance. Yet, biblically speaking, he’s a fool. Francis Crick, famous scientist who helped discover the human genome, crack the DNA code. Brilliant man, but an avowed atheist, and therefore a fool. Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest physicists of our time, but denied that there’s a God. Intelligence off the charts, IQ sky high, but he’s a fool. To be a fool, it’s like ignoring a warning sign.
Proverbs 22.3 says, the prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it. To be a fool in the biblical sense is to ignore road signs, which in the case of morality and in the case of gospel, it’s God’s word.
The Bible speaks of God. And so does everything else around us. That’s why we read the passage we did from Romans 1 in our introduction for our New Testament reading. The evidence of God’s existence is all around us. You can just look with your eyes, see things that have been made. You can take out a telescope and look to distant stars. You can take out a microscope and look to the molecular structure or the cellular structure. of living organisms.
Everything shouts that there’s a God and the fool denies it. But God gets the final word on atheism, we might say. We already read from Romans 1. Let’s go back there again. Keep your finger in Psalm 14. And turn with me to Romans 1 again, please. And look at verse 18. Let’s start there.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. So, as we go through these verses again, see, first of all, what can be known about God is plain. It’s not some difficult puzzle that we have to solve.
The beauty, the structure, the organization of just about everything about creation points to God and makes it plain that there is a God. There is a Creator. His power and His divinity are illustrated in nature, it says. His invisible attributes, verse 20, namely His eternal power and His divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made, so they’re without excuse.
In other words, men know there is a God. They know. I remember seeing a t-shirt years ago that said, God doesn’t believe in atheists. He doesn’t, because ultimately, there aren’t really any. Because they all know that God exists, but they suppress that knowledge. That’s what we’re told in Romans 1. So men know that there’s a God, but they deny it. So they’re lying. And by that lie, they become fools.
One of the fun things you can do at family camp is you can go to the swimming pool. You can swim in the pool, you can play in the pool, and you can take a ball into the water with you. And a great illustration of what Romans 1 is saying is that you take that ball and you push it underneath the surface of the water. you suppress that ball, keep it underneath the surface. And you can do that depending on the size of the ball and the strength of your triceps, but eventually you’re gonna get tired of holding that ball down because it requires effort.
It requires exertion, but that’s the kind of exertion mentally, spiritually that the atheist has to exert to suppress truth. to suppress his own innate knowledge of God. So, atheism is not mere ignorance. It’s a defiant lie. But God takes note of it. God sees. Psalm 14 tells us that God observes everything that human beings do, everything they say, everything they think. Verse two says, God looks down, looks down from heaven on the children of man. And what is he looking for? He’s wondering, he’s looking to see if anyone understands, if there’s anyone who seeks him. And what will he find? Verse three says, he finds that all have turned aside.
Turning aside in scriptural language means to disobey, to turn away from the right path. It’s the way it’s used in Deuteronomy 5.32, where God says to his people, you shall be careful therefore to do as the Lord your God has commanded you. You shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. But as God looks down on the children of man, He sees that they’ve all done exactly that they’ve turned aside. He sees that they become corrupt as a whole. Together they become corrupt, it says. In other words, they become morally evil, morally corrupted. And we use this, this is one of the classic texts for demonstrating the scriptural doctrine of total depravity.
And as we read these verses, we might be tempted sometimes we might be inclined to say, well, isn’t that kind of hyperbole? Isn’t he kind of being over the top in his description of the human condition? But you see, at the end of verse three, he’s the Holy Spirit isn’t exaggerating. Because back in verse one, he said there’s, verse one says, there’s none who does good, none. And then when we get to verse three, it really makes it clear that this isn’t some kind of exaggeration. This isn’t hyperbole.
There’s none who does good, not even one. That’s the condition of the human race apart from the operations of God’s gracious spirit upon us. So in this text, one of the classic texts for the doctrine of total depravity, Paul quotes it in Romans 3 to show that this condition refers to all mankind, both Jew and Gentile. And it contradicts this notion that did come out of the Enlightenment, by the way, that man is basically good Prior to the Enlightenment, it was generally understood, especially in societies that had been influenced to any degree by Christianity, by the Bible, it was understood that humanity has fallen, that we’re sinful.
And that was the starting point. But with the Enlightenment, people decided no man is this blank slate. He’s a tabula rasa. And whatever you put on the slate is what he becomes. And man’s basically good. Nobody used to think that in Western civilization prior to the Enlightenment. Secular man has a distorted concept of what is good.
Now, even Jesus acknowledges that people do many different acts of kindness. They actually are capable of doing acts of charity to one another. Jesus said, you then being evil know how to give good gifts to your children. So he’s not saying that we can’t do anything of any benefit to anyone.
But there’s no one who truly does good. And the scriptures testify to that because the most basic of all good works is what? To love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. And nobody does that.
And God looks at the heart. You know from personal experience, You know from Scripture’s testimony that people could be doing good things, but their motives aren’t necessarily pure. God looks at the heart. He sees our motives. He sees our selfishness.
And when we sin, we’re making a statement. Anytime a man, a woman, or child sins, they’re making this statement, I know better than God. Furthermore, they’re saying, I love evil more than good. That is depravity. So all of mankind, men, women, children, all of us by nature, to use language from Ephesians, we’re all children of wrath. We’re following the course of this world. We’re sons of disobedience. That’s our natural state.
That’s what God sees, according to Psalm 14, when he looks down from heaven on the children of man. But that brings us to our second point, second of two. Atheism is a byproduct of mankind’s total depravity, but we also see that the grace of Christ Jesus brings God’s elect out of atheism. Thanks be to God that he doesn’t leave his chosen ones in that state of rebellion and sin and atheism.
Within this psalm, which admittedly is rather bleak, in this seemingly hopeless situation, there’s none good, not even one. There’s something amazing. Really, something quite astounding. If God can say, in verse three, there’s none who does good, not even one.
But then all of a sudden, we see in verse four, that God has a people. Have they no knowledge all the evildoers who eat up my people, as they eat bread, and do not call upon the Lord? God has a people. How did that happen? He mentions it again in verse 7, when the Lord restores the fortunes of his people. So from among these depraved people, amongst this world filled with those who don’t seek God, God ends up with a people. There is, as it says in verse 5, a generation of the righteous.
How does that work? Where do they come from? It says that God is with them, indicating fellowship, indicating that he protects them, indicating that he pronounces blessing over them. And even as it says in verse six, that he is their refuge. But if no one does good, where does God find a righteous people?
Well, the answer is this. There is a righteous one, and his name is Jesus, the Lord Jesus Christ, the true Israelite. So if you think back through this list of indictments against humanity that we see in Psalm 14, First of all, it says God is looking to see if anyone understands. Well, on Jesus, according to Isaiah 11, 2, on Jesus rested the spirit of wisdom and of understanding.
He understands, Jesus does. God was looking to see if there are any who didn’t turn aside, but it says they’ve all turned aside, but not Jesus. Jesus never turned aside. Jesus kept perfectly all the commandments of the Lord. The psalm says, together they have become corrupt. But Jesus was not corrupt.
In fact, Hebrews 7.26 says he was holy, he was innocent, he was undefiled, absolutely unstained by sin. God was looking to see if there’s anyone who does good. The text says there’s none who does good, not even one, but Jesus, according to Acts 1038, went about doing good. So what we discover in Psalm 14 is that Jesus is the one God was looking for.
He fulfills it all. He is the one who’s well-pleasing to God. And he’s the one then who brings salvation to his people. He’s the one who, in love and in pity, redeems a people for himself. He calls an entire people to himself from among sinful mankind.
This group, this set of people in Scripture has several different names. We often refer to that set of people as the elect, those that have been chosen by God. We see evidence of the fact that God has an elect people throughout God’s Word. Jesus himself, when he’s preaching, when he’s teaching about the last days, As the gospel goes forth, and as God brings in his harvest, he says, the angels will gather his elect. They’ll be like grain brought in from the fields and put in the barn.
Romans 8, verse 33, asks this question, who will bring any charge against God’s elect? They’re members of that same race, that same race who doesn’t understand, who doesn’t seek after God, who turns aside and has become corrupt. And yet he saved these out of that fallen race. And their salvation is so secure that he can ask the rhetorical question, who will bring a charge, any charge against God’s elect? The answer being no one will be able to. because they’ll all be dressed in the righteousness of Christ.
You think of the Apostle Paul, all of his travels, all of his labors, all of his sufferings. Why did he endure it all? Why did Paul endure so much hardship? Second Timothy 2.10, he tells us why. The Apostle Paul wrote, I endure everything for the sake of the elect. Paul knew they were out there. Paul knew that the means by which God was going to draw them to himself was the proclamation of the gospel. So Paul said, I’m going to go and I’m going to proclaim. I do it all. I endure it all for the sake of the elect that they also may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus. In the Old Testament, we tend to find the elect referred to by the term chosen ones, chosen ones.
Deuteronomy 7.6 says, For you are a holy people to the Lord your God.
The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. in that idea of the elect being the chosen ones of God, then comes to us in the New Testament in words such as what we find in First Thessalonians 1.4, for we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, the elect, God’s chosen.
They’re the ones that find refuge in the Lord, the righteous one. Look with me at verse six in Psalm 14 once again. Speaking to the wicked, he says, you would shame the plans of the poor, but the Lord is his refuge. They are the ones whose fortunes are restored by the Lord. As it speaks of in verse seven. he restores their fortunes.
That’s gospel language to refer not necessarily and not always to restoration of those temporal blessings, the good things of this life, but ultimately to God repairing and restoring the ruins of the fall as his program of redemption progresses until the last day.
Of course, read there about salvation coming out of Zion. For salvation to come out of Zion simply means it comes from the Lord. Salvation is of the Lord. He’s the one that saves. He delivers his people. And this salvation, we’re reading about it from an Old Testament passage, from a Psalm.
And so we see that the salvation that God conveys, that He grants, that He delivers to His people, is exhibited in the Old Testament as well as in the New. Here it is in Psalm 14. We see it in many other of the Psalms. And we read in our standards that the justification of believers is the same in the New Testament and in the Old. And that’s why in Hebrews 11, he speaks of the faith of Abel, and of Noah, of Enoch, of Abraham.
And that’s why in Genesis 15.6, it says, Abraham, or Abram at that time, Abram believed God And God credited that to him as righteousness.
So from the hopeless lot of corrupt, sinful humanity, God chooses to save some. He chose to save you from your sin, from death, from your natural atheism. You’ve heard of Bertrand Russell. He was an atheist, highly intelligent man, philosopher, but an atheist. And on one occasion, he was asked in an interview, I’m paraphrasing here, but the question was posed to him sort of like this. Just suppose that there really is a God, and you died and had to appear before him.
And he asked you, why didn’t you believe in me? What would you say? And Bertrand Russell said, I would say, not enough evidence, God. Not enough evidence. He didn’t believe there’s enough evidence to believe in a God. Well, that hypothetical meeting that the interviewer proposed to him actually took place, took place on the 2nd of February 1970, when Bertrand Russell passed from this present age and into eternity, and he appeared before God. Scripture says it is appointed for man to die once and after this comes judgment. He has now stood before God in judgment. And I wonder if he had the audacity when standing before the judgment seat of God to say, not enough evidence.
If he did, God could say, friend, I bombarded you with evidence every day of your life. But I think that conversation probably never took place. I think Bertrand Russell probably did not say a word. I think his mouth was stopped. He had a lot to say in life, but he’s now been held accountable, and he has gone on to his eternal reward. And that’s a somber thought. And it should cause us to ponder eternity. It should cause us to reflect on judgment, because there’s an appointed day when you will stand before God. Are you ready? Are you ready?
You’ve probably heard the term practical atheism, practical atheism. It’s a term that applies to people who claim to believe in God, but whose actions and reliance on self or their worldly values show no evidence of the faith that they claim to have. Many professing Christians are practical atheists. They say they believe, but they think and they speak and they live as if they do not. They profess Christianity, but they practice atheism.
Practical atheism is what we call it. But you know, that word practical has another meaning. The word practical can also mean useful. It can also mean sensible. And in that sense of the word, atheism is altogether impractical. By definition, it’s a lie. It’s a defiant lie that brings about destruction, brings about eternal doom. It’s a lie that my heart has spoken, and so has yours. But praise be to God that he saves his elect out of the foolishness of atheism.
Salvation, in the words of our psalm, salvation has come out of Zion for God’s people, the sons and daughters of Abraham. Seek refuge in him and rejoice. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for saving us from ourselves. Thank you for your grace, which draws your elect out of the foolishness of atheism and into faith and into the obedience of faith. Be working this in greater measure in all of us, we pray. And as you add to your kingdom, work it in many, many others. Even this day, we ask this in Christ’s name. Amen.