Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Fool Has Said in His Heart
Psalms 14:1-7
1 For the Chief Musician. By David. The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt. They have done abominable deeds. There is no one who does good. · WEB
The denial of God is located in the heart rather than the mind, and the survey that follows finds nobody exempt.
The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God" Psalms 14:1.
Two things are precise here and both are usually lost. The word for fool is not a term for low intelligence; it describes moral collapse — a person who has become incapable of judging rightly. And the denial is in his heart, not in an argument. What the psalm describes is not a philosophical position but a practical conclusion reached by someone who has found it convenient.
The evidence offered is not intellectual either. They are corrupt. They have done abominable deeds. There is no one who does good. The psalm moves straight from the denial to conduct, because it regards the conduct as what the denial was for.
Yahweh looked down from heaven on the children of men, to see if there were any who understood, who sought after God Psalms 14:2.
The image is of a survey conducted from above, and it deliberately echoes the two great inspections of Genesis — before the flood, and over the tower Genesis 6:5 Genesis 11:5. The search is for two things, understanding and seeking, and it is worth noting that seeking is enough to qualify. The bar is not attainment.
They have all gone aside. They have together become corrupt. There is no one who does good, no, not one Psalms 14:3.
The verdict is total and the psalm states it four times in three verses. Paul builds the central argument of Romans on these lines, quoting them to establish that Jew and Greek are alike under sin Romans 3:10–12, and the use is not a stretch: the survey in verse two covered the children of men without qualification, and the result came back empty.
That raises the obvious difficulty, since the same psalm speaks four verses later of the generation of the righteous Psalms 14:5. The collection does not treat this as a contradiction, and the resolution is the one the whole of Scripture uses: righteousness in this book is never a claim to have passed the survey. It is a relationship with the one conducting it, and the fifty-first psalm — by the same author — is what the righteous sound like when they are asked about their own record.
You frustrate the plan of the poor, because Yahweh is his refuge Psalms 14:6.
The psalm turns, as it usually does, to who is being hurt. The fool's practical atheism is not a private matter; it produces people who eat up my people as they eat bread Psalms 14:4, casually, as a meal.
Oh that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion! Psalms 14:7. A survey that found nobody good ends by looking for rescue from outside, which is the only place it could come from.
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