When writing about Psalm 14, I focused on the last verse - the one that cries out for the Lord to come and save us. Psalm 53 is almost an exact duplicate of Psalm 14, which makes it a little difficult to come up with fresh thoughts. But I am going to give it a go, by focusing on why we should care about the fool who says there is no God.
The main reason we should care is that the passage says that we, in fact, are the fool. Verses 2 and 3 say that "God looks down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there are any who understand, who seek God. Every one of them has turned aside; they have together become corrupt; there is none who does good, no, not one" (NASB). Outside of Christ, we are nothing but a bunch of fools. I know that a lot of press is given to us being called and chosen to be God's people, to be grafted in with Israel as His chosen ones - and rightly so. But it would serve us (and by us, I am speaking loudest to myself) well to keep in mind that the Bible calls us all fools and says that none of us do good. The only thing of any worth in us is Jesus - not our jobs, not our friends, not our spouses, not our kids. Jesus.
Another reason we should care about the fools is that there are many still out there, and verse 4 says that these fools wouldn't even "think of praying to God" (NLT).
The main reason we should care is that the passage says that we, in fact, are the fool. Verses 2 and 3 say that "God looks down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there are any who understand, who seek God. Every one of them has turned aside; they have together become corrupt; there is none who does good, no, not one" (NASB). Outside of Christ, we are nothing but a bunch of fools. I know that a lot of press is given to us being called and chosen to be God's people, to be grafted in with Israel as His chosen ones - and rightly so. But it would serve us (and by us, I am speaking loudest to myself) well to keep in mind that the Bible calls us all fools and says that none of us do good. The only thing of any worth in us is Jesus - not our jobs, not our friends, not our spouses, not our kids. Jesus.
Another reason we should care about the fools is that there are many still out there, and verse 4 says that these fools wouldn't even "think of praying to God" (NLT).
They don't even think about it.
This amazes me, and yet, my recent exposure to the world of teenagers has been a most excellent example of this. There are people in this world, and you can see it in the way their children behave, who have no real concept of God. There are murderers, and rapists, and people who abuse their kids and people who take guns to school to shoot people and people who don't feed their children because they have to buy drugs with their grocery money. This actually happens. And we, who have been given much grace, have to be exposing others to the gift of grace, because they won't even think of it otherwise. Can you imagine the despair if we thought this world was really all there was? There would be no point in living.
So we need to care about the fools. We are fools who just happen to be enormously blessed to be in Christ. And we are living in a world of fools who know nothing other than their (dangeously) foolish ways. Before we can cry out "Come Lord! Come!" we must know that we've done all we can to encourage other fools to do the same.
~Kim
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