Ps 14 - To know Yhwh is to praise him.

The fool / has said in his heart / there is no God

They are perverse / they do horrible deeds / there is not one doing good

This verse is the headwater to the rest of the psalm. Everything that follows—the perversity, the horrible deed, the corruption—all flow from this premise.

It is therefore important to see that this statement is one the fool says “in his heart”. This does not mean that he is ‘speaking interiorly’, nor is it an intellectual statement. To ‘say in your heart’ something means it is the all-consuming position of the person. It is the sphere of activity that they live within. It is the seed from which everything else the person does, grows from.

It is, in other words, parallel to the following line—they are perverse, they do horrible deeds/ there is not one doing good.

For the psalmist, these two lines say the same thing. One cannot “say in his heart there is god” and live a life of “horrible deeds”. The external deeds are manifestations of the dialogue of the heart—what a person “says in their heart”. These deeds are am abomination to Yhwh. The psalmist uses particularly strong words for them. If this is what it means to say “there is no god”, then the opposite of the “fool” is not so much “wisdom” as it would be “lovingkindness”. In other words, here the ‘atheism’ is an expression of extreme moral impurity, not so much an intellectual statement of God’s existence, per se. It’s opposite, then, is the covenant life—“lovingkindness”.

Yhwh has looked down / from heaven / upon the sons of man

                To see if there is one / acting prudently / one seeking God

In Genesis, when Yhwh’s angel informs Abraham that he is going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham negotiates the angel down from fifty to ten righteous men—if there were only ten righteous men the angel agreed he would not destroy the cities. In Jeremiah, Yhwh tells Jeremiah to go throughout the city and if he could find one person who acts rightly, he would forgive the city. In Ezekiel, Yhwh looks for one man who would stand before him on behalf of the land; he found none. In all of these, Yhwh is searching for a righteous man who would stand against a coming destruction. They would act as saviors of their cities, because by their righteousness Yhwh would avert his wrath. They would be like a mother chicken, spreading her wings over her young. The point here is not on the judgment so much as it is on the incredible power of righteousness to ‘redeem’ or ‘save’ an entire people. It speaks to the profound depths of Yhwh’s mercy and his desire to enact it against his wrath.

In all of these examples, the realm of destruction/mercy, is one that is rife with wickedness—the realms of power are corrupt and it stretches from the top to the bottom. Likewise, in many instances where Yhwh is described as “looking down from heaven” it is often with a negative connotation—whether the flood, tower of babel, or otherwise. The imagery seems to be one of a measured, evaluating gaze; one that is aware of injustice and is looking to examine and judge the situation.

Here, presumably something similar is at work. The entire world is corrupt and Yhwh is looking for one person that he can rely on to be his intercessor. He wants one man who would stand on behalf of the world so that he can enact his mercy. For this psalm, the one Yhwh is looking for is the one who is acting prudently, who, in other words, seeks God.

The whole lot have turned aside / together they are corrupt

                There is not one doing good / not even one

Don’t they understand / all the workers of iniquity / who are consuming my people

This is the judgment of Yhwh’s penetrating, judging gaze—all of the sons of men are corrupt. He cannot find the ‘one man’ who would intercede as a savior of the sons of men. Their ‘folly’ is that they lack all remnants of covenant love—lovingkindness. They do not “do good”. They “don’t understand”. The final image is the most disturbing of all—the “sons of man” are consuming Yhwh’s people.

It is not merely that they behave corrupt to each other, nor only that they are failing to do good. They are not simply evil because of their passive failures. They are actively oppressing and destroying Yhwh’s people. But it is also not merely destruction. The evil are often portrayed as lions, who are pursuing the psalmist, ready to tear him apart. Here, while there is no image of the lion, there is the image of their ‘feeding upon’ Yhwh’s people, of deriving sustenance, and nourishment from them. So what we see here is a type of Yhwh-father looking down from heaven and what he sees are his children being consumed by the “sons of man”. It is a horrifying and horrible image. It should point to Yhwh’s heart, and its effect upon him.

                They have eaten bread / on Yhwh / they have not called

This line in many ways sums up the psalm and the life of the fool—the Scriptures speak of man not living ‘by bread alone’ but on the word(s) of Yhwh. Here, the fool does the reverse—he eats bread but does not call upon Yhwh.

The fact that the immediately preceding line describes the fools as “consuming my people” an now describes them as “eating bread” to avoidance of Yhwh, reveals the parallel—their consuming of Yhwh’s people is their ‘not calling’ upon Yhwh; their consuming of Yhwh’s people is their ‘eating bread’ (or, their ‘living by bread alone’). They are utterly closed to Yhwh, and their closure does not result in their simply operating within a dome of self-regulation. Their closure to Yhwh makes them evil. It makes them corrupt. It makes them cannibals. They do not merely turn away from Yhwh, but they turn against themselves. They fail to “do good”. In their turning away from the true source of nourishment (“man does not live by bread alone”) they turn upon humans to consume; they turn to “bread alone”. It is a terrible, anti-eucharist, because it is flesh-bread that is not a divine outpouring and sacrifice, but more akin to a vampire, taking the victim’s life into itself and thereby turning the victim into the evil that consumes it.

They were in great fear / but God is in the assembly / of the righteous

You would confound / the counsel of the poor / but Yhwh is in his refuge

These verses appear to contrast the state of the wicked with that of the righteous. The evil were in great fear and they were confounded, but God is in the assembly of the righteous and Yhwh is their refuge. What is clear is that something has occurred causing the wicked to retreat. An act of judgment.

The wicked’s failure to call on Yhwh did not prevent Yhwh’s gaze—what the psalmist shows is that man always-already stands underneath the gaze of heaven. No matter how wicked the “sons of man” become, and no matter how much they seal themselves off from Yhwh, they cannot block or camouflage themselves from Yhwh’s gaze. Yhwh will, at some point, gaze down from heaven and will act, depending on what he finds.

The judgment—it is not straightforward. We have seen how Yhwh’s judgment often entails a “letting be” of the wicked acts, such that they return on the wicked. Here, for example, those that consume will be consumed by their evil actions. Those who are fools will become ‘confounded’. They send out wickedness and in a type of ‘logic of wrath’, it turns on them, boomeranging back on their own heads. So, for the wicked, the judgment that falls on them produces confusion. Their security in themselves—their walling themselves off from God—has turned on them producing fear and confusion. Their cannibalistic devouring of Yhwh’s people now comes back upon them.

For the wicked, Yhwh “gazes down from heaven”. For the righteous, though, God is “in their assembly”. He is “his refuge”. It is key to see this geographical theology—for the wicked Yhwh is distant and a god who gazes down with a penetrating, judicious gaze. For the righteous, on the other hand, Yhwh is intimate. He is close to them—in their assembly—and he is protective toward them. It is a similar dynamic to that experienced in the exodus, when, to the Egyptians, the plagues became the embodiment of Yhwh’s wrath. And yet, in the very midst of his wrath, he formed spheres of protection where the Israelite’s dwelled in safety (the ‘Passover’ being the most dramatic and final example of this).

What needs to be born in mind, in the context of this psalm, is that God “being in the assembly of the righteous” is the reverse of what the fool said in the opening “in his heart”—there is no God. And that he is in the assembly of the righteous counters the second, parallel line—they are perverse, they do horrible deeds, there is not one doing good. In other words, God’s presence is the epitome of the source of all wisdom and covenantal lovingkindness. His “being in their midst” is what makes them righteous, and their being righteous is what makes their assembly a fitting place for him.

Would that Israel’s deliverance / would come out of Zion

                When Yhwh restores / the fortunes of his people

                Jacob shall exult / Israel shall rejoice

The psalmist now looks to the future, when deliverance “will come out of Zion”. At that time, Yhwh’s people, who were consumed by the wicked, will have their fortunes restored to them. They will no longer be hiding within Yhwh’s protective embrace, but they will out in the open, free from harm; and they will “exult” and “rejoice”.

The restoration of fortunes is not simply an ‘old testament’ belief in wealth as a sign of favor, or the psalmist’s (supposedly inappropriate) materialistic focus. The Scriptures end with a city coming down from heaven that is beyond staggering in its wealth and display. The point, of course, there is that in the redemption, the wealth of the earth now perfectly coincides with holiness. There is no longer the disconnect that existed before—when the nations exploited the poor in order to obtain their wealth; when wealth was a sign of terrible power. The ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’, instead, are completely aligned in Yhwh’s restoration, in his redemption.

As above, that deliverance comes out of Zion is part of the exultation and rejoicing. It comes from the place where Yhwh dwells with his people. It comes from the Temple, the gathering of his assembly (what we could call the church, the liturgical people of God). The place of liturgy is also the place of victory, the place of restoration. It is the place from which Yhwh’s power will unleash on the world.

Jacob and Israel—the focus up to this point has been on the corruption of the entire ‘sons of man’. That has been the unity of this psalm. It is, of course, not a true unity because it is full of the wicked who, by their nature, cannot be unified (evil is disunity). There has been another unity—“my [Yhwh’s] people”. They are obviously not included within the group of the “sons of man”. Here, at the end of the psalm, in its concluding line, another community-in-unity is mentioned—Jacob and Israel. We have here the entire northern and southern tribes of Israel, restored by Yhwh, from Zion, and united in praise of him. This united group are the true Adams of the earth; the true ‘sons’. Whereas the “sons of man” are unified in their foolishness and wickedness, Jacob-and-Israel are united by Yhwh-in-Zion and his restoration of their fortunes. This is a divine, covenantal unity.

We began with the fool who said in his heart there was no god. We end with the exulting and praising of Yhwh by Jacob and Israel. In the first, there is no god; in the second, Yhwh is being praised. In the first instance, the fool has been consigned to his own folly and destruction. In the second, Jacob-Israel has been delivered and his fortunes have been restored. This bookending of the psalm is meant to direct our attention to precisely what the fool denies—God/Yhwh—and to his manifest and clear working for his own people. Note how destruction comes about through a type of ‘letting be’, of letting evil work its way back to its own destruction, whereas deliverance and redemption are always portrayed not as a ‘natural outworking’ but as an unambiguous act of Yhwh. Yhwh ‘turns’ this psalm. And that is why the psalm ends not so much on the proclamation that “God exists” (contrary to the fool’s heart) but on the note of resplendent praise and exultation. We might say, to declare Yhwh’s existence is to proclaim and exult him. That his existence cannot be stated truthfully in any other way. To know Yhwh is to praise him.