Psalms 53

1. THE fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity; There is none that doeth good. 2 God looked down from heaven upon the children of men, To see if there were any that did understand [deal wisely], That did seek after God. 3 Every one of them is gone back; they are together become filthy; There is none that doeth good, no, not one. 4 Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge?

Who eat up my people as they eat bread, And call not upon God. 5 There were they in great fear, where no fear was: For God hath scattered the bones of him that encampeth against thee; Thou hast put them to shame, because God hath rejected them. 6 Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion! When God bringeth back the captivity of his people, Then shall Jacob rejoice, and Israel shall be glad.

THIS Psalm is only another version of the fourteenth Psalm, from which it differs in two particulars. First, in its use of the name of God, which here is Elohim, instead of Jehovah—a peculiarity which is characteristic of all the Psalms in the second book. Next, in the remarkable deviation (v. 5) from the language of the parallel passage in Psalm 14: 5, 6. There seems to have been an intentional alteration, with a view of adapting the Psalm to different circumstances. Perhaps, as Bunsen suggests, a later poet may have wished to apply Psalm 14 to the events of his own time, when Israel was threatened by foreign enemies, and thus have sought to encourage the people to hope for deliverance by reminding them of God’s help vouchsafed in former times of trouble. In this case vs. 4, 5 [5, 6] must be taken as referring to the past, not to the future. That of the two texts Psalm 14 is the original appears to me almost certain. P.

1. The fool hath said in his heart, no God. This I dare affirm in knowledge of nature, that a little natural philosophy and the first entrance into it doth dispose the opinion to atheism; but, on the other side, much natural philosophy and wading deep into it will bring about men’s minds to religion; wherefore atheism every way seems to be combined with folly and ignorance, seeing nothing can be more justly allotted to be the saying of fools than this, “There is no God.” Bacon.

Truly it is only the fool who hath said in his heart, “No God,” for to prove it one would need to be himself a god and to travel abroad over the surrounding universe till he had exhausted it. He must search backward through all the hidden recesses of eternity; traverse in every direction the plains of infinitude; he must sweep the outskirts of that space which is itself interminable, and then bring back to this little world of ours the report of a universal blank, wherein he had not met with one movement of a presiding God. For man not to know of a

God he has only to sink beneath the level of our common nature, but to deny Him he must be a god himself; he must arrogate the ubiquity and omniscience of God Himself. Hallock.

An atheist there may be, but an anti-atheist there cannot possibly be. That is to say, a man may declare that he does not find any evidence that satisfies him of the existence of a God; but no man may dare to say absolutely, There is not a God. The former is merely the expression of that individual’s necessarily most limited, imperfect, and restricted experience; but the latter proposition would imply that the individual had soared among the stars and ransacked the contents of the worlds that are there; that he had descended to the caves of the ocean and explored the unknown treasures that are there; that he had travelled through the mines and strata of the earth and discovered the hidden recesses and depths and mysteries there; that, in short, he had been in time past possessed of omnipresence and omniscience, and in the exercise of two attributes of Deity had not discovered a God. The fact is, such an individual must be himself God in order to be in a position to announce the proposition, There is not a God. Cunning.

We are placed amidst the amazing scene of His works, extending on all sides from the point where we stand to far beyond anything we can distinctly conceive of infinity; in a diversity which not eternal duration will suffice for any creature to take account of all; having within one day, one hour, one instant, operations, changes, appearances to which the greatest angel’s calculating faculty would be nothing; combining design, order, beauty, sublimity, utility. Can we glance over the earth and into the wilderness of worlds in infinite space, without being impressed with the solemn thought that all this is but the sign and proof of something infinitely more glorious than itself? And that there should be men who can survey the creation with a scientific enlargement of intelligence, and then say, “There is no God,” is one of the most hideous phenomena in the world. J. F.

Sin is always folly, and as it is the height of sin to attack the very existence of the Most High, so is it also the greatest imaginable folly. To say there is no God is to belie the plainest evidence, which is obstinacy; to oppose the common consent of mankind, which is stupidity; to stifle consciousness, which is madness. If the sinner could by his atheism destroy the God whom he hates there were some sense, although much wickedness, in his infidelity; but as denying the existence of fire does not prevent its burning a man who is in it, so doubting the existence of God will not stop the Judge of all the earth from destroying the rebel who breaks His laws; nay, this atheism is a crime which much provokes heaven and will bring down terrible vengeance on the fool who indulges it. S.

An atheist is a moral monster. Man has fallen, but not so low as to be satisfied with the atheist’s cold, dark, and dreary creed. Recoiling from that, he has erred on the side of a multiplicity of gods. The soul craves for a god as the body craves for food. It clings to the thought as a creeper to the pole it climbs; and rather than his spirit should want such a support, man will catch at the wildest and most childish notion of beings above himself—just as ivy, when it has not a rock, will embrace a rotten tree, or as a drowning wretch for lack of something better clutches at a straw. Guthrie.

In distresses he must be of all creatures the most helpless and forlorn; he feels the whole pressure of a present calamity without being relieved by the memory of anything that is past, or the prospect of anything that is to come. Annihilation is the greatest blessing that he proposes to himself, and a halter or a pistol the only refuge he can fly to. But if you would behold one of these gloomy miscreants in his poorest figure, you must consider him under the terrors or at the approach of death. Addison. — I have heard of some that deny that there was a God; yet never knew the man but when he was sick he would seek unto God for help; therefore they do but lie that say there is no God; they sin against the light of their own consciences; they who most studiously go about to deny God yet cannot do it but some check of conscience will fly in their faces. Augustine.

Naked atheism is a repulsive creed. It is a mere and monstrous negation. It touches no sympathy; it attracts, it stimulates no play of intellect; under the deadly chill of its unlighted vacancy imagination cannot breathe. There is nothing about it refined, or subtle, or profound. It is the vulgarest form of infidelity, and has been professed by the coarsest minds. It demands no effort to comprehend it, and no skill to expound it. It is an arid and barren, a cold and dreary hypothesis, which no genius, not even that of Lucretius, could make either attractive or credible. J. H. Riggs.

Atheism is consistent with itself when, as in the French Revolution, it writes over the gateway to the grave, “Death is an eternal sleep.” It is consistent with itself when it annuls every restraint that is exercised over wicked men by the apprehension of a Supreme Judge and a final retribution. It is consistent with itself when it closes every temple of worship, and rends to atoms all those hallowed sympathies and hopes with which the soul of man is inspired to do and suffer on earth. It is consistent with itself when it leaves the unaided reason of man to grapple in blank despair with the fearful problems of his existence and destiny; when it sends him to the grave with all the racking uncertainty and doubt that invest the possibilities of a hereafter; when it robs the injured sufferer of the last hope of redress in the justice of heaven, and at the same time unbars the gates of every lawless passion and impulse, emancipating it from all sense of accountability or dread of retribution. If there is any one conception into which all these elements of the terrible, the sublime, and the despairing are compressed and combined it is that this scheme of existence, this moral and physical universe is without a controlling mind; without a God. Then life is only a brilliant dream, lighting its own way to the grave, kindled just long enough to flash upon the gloom that is to cover it. Man is an orphan, or a helpless child of uncertainty, want, guilt, and anguish. The world is a desert and a graveyard. Eternity is a terrible, unexplored chaos, the more terrible because unknown. The fond affections that would follow their loved object to the grave, and will not desert it even then—these are but the implements of our torment, the chains that we must wear to gall us. No hope lights up the parting hour of earth; no possible prospect of a blest reunion can extract its sting. We must stand shuddering over the fathomless gulf of annihilation and feed our fancy on the shadows that imagination summons out of its darkness. E. H. G.

Confession of a living atheist. When we look abroad over life, when we see how cruel fate often is; how nature, in the shape of floods, conflagrations, and disease strikes into our wisest plans and wrests from us the most cherished objects of our affection; when we see in society around us vice often exalted to honor and virtue trodden under foot, then we need to rise in spirit above the present pain to a future good, above the present wrong to a future right, above the present incompleteness to a future perfection. Then we need to feel that at the deep central heart of the world there abides an eternal purpose for whose accomplishment we, by our sufferings, are helping to pay the price. We need to feel that no effort is ever wasted, that no honest reaching out for the good is ever lost, that the great all is pressing forward toward a high, a glorious goal. But how shall we obtain this conviction that there is a good tendency in things? In the old religion it is based on revelation; but how shall those who cannot accept revelation build it up in themselves? We cannot logically demonstrate it. It is in vain we go to science for help. All science seizes only a fragment of the whole. It can never hope to prove the certainty of the triumph of the good. There is only one way to obtain this conviction: Act the good, and then you will believe in it. F. Adler, in N. A. Review.

What sort of a world would be that in which materialism should bear sway? A world without God, even in dim traditionary sentiment; a world disenchanted of all the grandeur and loveliness with which a religious imagination has invested it; a world robbed of conscious liberty, crushed, benumbed by an iron fate, ubiquitous, perpetual, inescapable; a world without moral order, without moral law, without conscience, unvisited by remorse, unblessed by moral self-esteem; a world bounded and shut in by the leaden horizon and sunless sky of death; without any glimpse of fairer, more resplendent spheres; without any distant sky-bright prospect of millennium beyond millennium, rising like “Alps o’er Alps” in the perspective of immortality; a world without any Jacob’s ladder, thronged with supernal forms of visitants from heaven to earth, and of transfigured saints ascending from earth to heaven; a world without the name, or memory, or wondrous example, or consoling presence, or Divine sweetness of Jesus our God! Of all this the materialism of the age seeks to rob mankind. Z. Eddy.

3. None that doeth good.** It needed no revelation to tell us that sin is, that mankind is sinful. Without, within us is the fact, the experience, the evidence, the presence of sin. It is sin which makes life troublous and gives death its sting. The revelation of the fall tells of an entrance, of an inburst of evil into a world all good, into a being created upright; tells, therefore, of a nature capable of purity, of an enemy that may be expelled, and of a holiness possible because natural. From man’s fall we infer a fall earlier yet and more mysterious. Once sin was not; and when it entered man’s world it entered under an influence independent, not inherent. The first sin is also the specimen sin. It is in this sense, too, the original sin, that all other sins are copies of it. Unbelief first, then disobedience; then corruption, then self-excusing; then the curse and the expulsion—turn the page and you shall find a murder! J. V.

Left to itself the race not only revels in unholy imaginings and desires and purposes; it even exalts and adorns and glorifies its impure creations. It seeks to give them the charm of supreme and perfect literary form, polluting even the poetry of every nation. It bodies them forth in every form of art, until it would seem as if the only pure studios and art galleries of the world were those which nature holds high up above our corrupting touch, in the chaste skies of morn and even. In heathendom the very altars of religion have been dedicated to deities of unnameable loathsomeness. W. F. Warren.

What is it that sin does to a man? It averts his will from all that is good, and right, and true; it bribes his conscience; it impoverishes his heart of every pure affection; it squanders and lays waste all the treasures of his immortal soul; it gives him a bias and interest, as he fancies, in rejecting the message that comes to close quarters with him and his transgression. It makes him in love with his own passions and desires, and consequently not in love with the pure Word of the Divine truth; just as those old Israelites with their perverted taste longed for the leeks and onions and garlic, the strong-smelling and tasting dainties that they had got down in the land of their captivity, and said, “Our soul loathes this light bread,” that came from God and had nothing in it to pamper sense and feed the flesh. Every transgression deprives us, in some degree, of power to receive the Divine Word of God’s truth, and making it our own. And these demons of worldliness, of selfishness, of carelessness, of pride, of sensuality, that go careering through the soul are like the goblin horseman in the old legend; wherever that hoof-fall strikes, the ground is blasted, and no grass will grow upon it any more forever! The heart is trodden down by the rebel rout of beastly sins that go storming through that once fair garden, eating up what they can, and trampling down what they cannot eat. These turn it from the field in which seed may be sown, into the hard, beaten path where the seed only lies on the top, and never goes down at all. A. M.

5. There have they feared a fear, because God hath scattered the bones of thy besieger; thou hast put (them) to shame, because God hath rejected them. (See Psalm 14: 5, 6.) The design to strengthen the expression is particularly clear in this case, where two verses are compressed into one, and the other changes all enhance the emphasis. Thus instead of a general assurance of Divine protection, God is in the righteous generation, we have here a description of their enemies’ destruction in the most poetical and striking terms, God hath scattered the bones of thy besieger—literally, thy encamper, him that encampeth against thee. So, too, instead of the complaint that the wicked treat the faith of pious sufferers with contempt—the counsel of the sufferer ye will shame because Jehovah is his refuge—we have here the tables turned upon the scoffers by the scorn both of God and man; thou hast put to shame (the individuals included in the collective phrase thy besieger), because God has rejected them, an act implying both abhorrence and contempt. In this, which is by far the most considerable variation of the two editions, the existence of design is so apparent that the supposition of an inadvertent or fortuitous corruption seems preposterous. So far are the two Psalms from being contradictory, or even inconsistent, that they might be sung together, by alternate or responsive choirs, with the happiest effect. A.

These impious men had been absolutely confident of their power to maintain themselves against all opposition. Not recognizing the power of God to sweep away every combination of evil, they had come forward in perfect fearlessness, and the ruin that befell them was a terrible surprise. This verse corresponds with Psalm 14: 5 only in the first line, after which another verse is there added that has no counterpart here. But here, even more distinctly than there, some overwhelming calamity is referred to which cannot be identified historically.

6. The question may be asked, here or at Psalm 14, whether the poet is speaking of the race at large, in general terms, and without historic connection, or has in mind some special Divine interposition in behalf of the victims of oppression. His language in vs. 2 and 3 seems to describe humanity, as such and everywhere, as evil and not good. But such absolute ungodliness and utter abandonment to gross moral corruption as his words indicate can never have been universal. There was always a holy seed, a people of God who worshipped and served Him. Even this dark picture of crime is lighted up by more than one glimpse of an Israel quite distinct from the infamous world in the foreground. The seventh verse, with its pointed allusion to time and place in the adverb “there,” shows clearly that the writer had before him a manifestation of peculiarly atrocious wickedness on the one hand, and of Divine justice in appropriate severity on the other. We have here an instance of judgment on a limited scale in the past, as symbolizing the com-

plete and final overthrow of evil in the future. But in being idealized it is generalized, and brought into the present, as belonging to all time, an object lesson for the world. This is the poet’s true position in dramatic representation. The historic basis is found, if possible, among the occurrences of his own lifetime.