“The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good.” Psalm 14:1 (NIV)
David doesn’t mince words here. David doesn’t mince words here. Right from the beginning, he calls it foolishness, and not intellectual foolishness, but the kind that comes from a heart that has decided God isn’t real or isn’t relevant. And once that decision gets made, the rest follows pretty naturally. Corruption, evil, and a life that consumes others like a person just eating bread. It’s a bleak picture, but if you look around at the world, it’s not hard to recognize.
What’s easy to miss though, is that David isn’t just talking about the obviously wicked. He broadens it out. There is no one who does good, not even one. That’s a humbling line. It means the difference between someone who follows God and someone who doesn’t isn’t that one of them is a better person, it’s grace. Plain and simple. That keeps you from getting too smug as you read this Psalm.
At the same time, David makes it clear that God isn’t sitting on the sidelines wringing his hands over what he sees. He looks down, he sees it all, and he is not surprised or defeated. His people will be protected. Deliverance will come. The fool may feel like he’s winning for a stretch, but the end of the story will be different. It isn’t up for debate.
That’s the part I need to hold onto. It is genuinely discouraging to watch a world that lives like God doesn’t exist, and to sometimes feel the weight of that personally when it bumps up against my own life and work. It’s easy to get worn down by it. But discouragement is really just forgetting how the story ends, and the story ends with God winning.
So this week I want to live from that place. Of course, I’m not naive about what’s going on around me, but not crushed by it either. The end is already written. That changes how I walk through the middle of it.