So today we are hearing one of the psalms that's often thought of as dour. It begins with a statement about the fool, but it's often forgotten that the psalm ends in joy. So we're going to explore that particular psalm, Psalm 14. So please turn there in your Bibles to Psalm 14. I've got my Hebrew book of Psalms. This particular copy I bought for Clark Copeland's Psalms Exegesis class back in the fall of 1976. It is rather much my favorite book in all the world. Just the book of Psalms in Hebrew text. I love that book. Oh, there goes something. Let's pay attention then to the word of God. Psalm 14. The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt. They do abominable deeds. There is none who does good. The Lord from heaven looked down upon the children of men to see. Is there anyone who understands? Anyone who seeks God? The whole lot of them have gone astray. All of them are corrupt. There is no one doing good, not even one. All these evildoers, do they not know Those who devour my people as though they devour bread, and on the Lord do not call, truly they dread a great dread. For God is with the assembly of the righteous. You evildoers would frustrate the plans of the afflicted, but the Lord is his refuge. Who will grant from Zion Israel's deliverance? When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice. Israel will exult. So far, the reading of God's own word. Thanks be to God for his word. I notice in the bulletin my name is right below the word that says the fool. I'm rebuked. When I was a boy, third of four children, we were not allowed to call anyone fool or any other name like blockhead or dumbo or idiot or stupid or anything like that. Our mother was raised by a devout Quaker grandmother and her father was a devout Methodist Sunday school superintendent and they did not say such things. nor do they permit them to be said. And my grandmother was a prim and proper lady who was addressed never as granny, oh my no, nor even as grandma. She was Grandmother Gilmore, or in a less formal moment, Grandmother Gee, or maybe if you dared, Grandmother. And addresses to her were formal but affectionate. And in that household, in my mother's household, respect was the rule for how to treat not only siblings, but everyone else. That didn't stop us from venturing beyond that devout limit. And words like stupid, idiot, were on our lips, especially about each other, the four of us. And one of my favorite such words was learned by reading Dr. Seuss's wonderful children's book, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. How many know the book? Go ahead, okay. What's the grand vizier say about everyone in that book? Dunderheads! What a wonderful word. I never dared say it. I've almost never said it in all my life until today. But how wonderful to have the boldness to address someone that way. No, no, you don't do it. Don't do it. Remember, of course, in the Gospels, in the Sermon on the Mount, the one who calls his brother, you know, rakah. That's the Aramaic for empty head. OK, don't do it, says Jesus, because that person's the image of God. And to insult the image of God is to insult God. And anyone who calls his brother a rakkah is liable to the judgment. So says the Sermon on the Mount. But we were allowed to call certain actions foolish. We were allowed to do that. And our parents did that too, and often about us. And we deserved it. So we have the problem of the fool. Elvis Presley sang it, what, 70 years ago? Wise men say only fools rush in. Who knows the rest of the lyric? But I can't help falling in love with you. All right, well, some things actually may appear foolish, but are wise. Like, OK, falling in love with the right woman. In the Talmud, here's this saying, you can educate a fool, but you cannot make him think. I rather like that one. George Bernard Shaw, a British playwright, Irish playwright, fools brain digest philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry, hence university education. Again the Jewish Talmud, never tell a fool that he is a fool, all you'll have left is an angry fool. H.L. Mankin, who held court in Baltimore for many years and in the newspapers of the nation, a man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married. Francis Bacon, 500 years ago, 400 years ago, time of Shakespeare, people have discovered they can fool the devil, but they can't fool the neighbors. Alright, well enough sayings about fools. In the Bible we have the most dire statement of the fool here. The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. God is allowed to say that about us. Yeah, God is allowed. We were not allowed to say such things. God is allowed. I mean, after all, he makes the rules. And in one of the parables of Jesus about that rich man who wants to tear down his too small barn and build a bigger barn, what's the gospel saying there? You fool, tonight your life will be required of you. All right, Jesus says that, and Jesus can. When deity declares it, believe it. So who in Psalm 14 is this fool? In the Psalm and in the wisdom books of the Bible and the Bible in general, as in 1 Corinthians 1 that we've read, and who'd read so clearly and well, the fool is neither ignorant nor uncultivated. And there are lots of fools who have PhDs. The term pertains to the one without moral sense. They may have a vast intellect regarding maybe science or culture or literature or some particular discipline. They may be extremely skilled in such a thing. But they lack moral sense. They lack the compass that ought to be built into each of us and is, in fact, built in us, though we can gradually demagnetize it and make it go awry. Choose against it again and again and again and again and again and again. And the moral compass goes awry. in the Bible is usually someone wealthy, powerful, and successful, at least by the standards of the world. And I'll note that perhaps the greatest percentile of atheists is in organizations such as the National Academy of Science, where it's the highest achieving scientist of the country, and you must be elected by its membership to get in, but one of the unwritten criteria is if you're a Christian, they won't vote for you. Well, occasionally they will. But something like 2% of that organization believes in God. Well, according to the scriptures, God does not believe in atheists. And atheists secretly believe in God. So let us frame our life according to wisdom. In the code of worship from Psalm 111, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That's the last verse of the psalm. A good understanding of all those who do his commandments. That's how the psalm ends. So the beginning of wisdom at the end of the psalm, what is it? Okay, to revere God, and out of that reverence for God, therefore to obey and love God and practice the truth. And in the order of our psalms, we are discovering more and more how the order, the numbering of the psalms is often relevant. We can't always discern if there's anything there, but sometimes, often enough, relevant. And what's the very next psalm? In your Bibles, take a look. What's the very next Psalm? Psalm 15, what's it about? Lord, who can ascend to the mountain of God? Who can stand in your holy place? The one with clean hands, a pure heart, who does no evil. So there's a wonderful contrast between 14, the fool, the corruption of the human race, their deeds are vile, there's none who does good, but wait, Psalm 15. And of course, the only one who perfectly fulfills that psalm is our Lord Jesus Christ. But as we learn from Corinthians, he is to us righteousness and redemption and sanctification. He is the source of all that is right and good and true. So let's look more closely at our psalm now. And what we find in the first verse is the perspective of the fool. What does the fool say in his heart? That is, the say in one's heart is to think. It's the self-talk inside your own head. What does the fool say to himself? What does he say in his heart that is the deepest perceptions of his life? There is no God. Now our Hebrew there is very terse. Ein Elohim. Two words, that's all you get. And ein sounds like something in physics we call the particle of non-existence. but it's the denial of whatever comes next to the sentence. And the syntax is not filled out. We could have perhaps more in the sentence to clarify such things. We could even perhaps translate those two words, not whatever pertains to God. Not. All right, whatever God wants, not. We could almost translate that way. In the psalm we'll have four of those ayns, those things that are not. There is none who does good, ayn osetov, ayn. A few lines later again, ayn osetov, ayn achav. No one does good, no one does good, not even one. And in the four-fold poetry of those ayns, we seem to evoke that famous statement from Deuteronomy. Here in Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. The word one is echad. And accompanying that line in Deuteronomy is several times the assertion, ayn acher, there is no other. Those two sentences are very famous in synagogue liturgy. They're among the most common of all sentences in the prayers of Orthodox Judaism. They summarize the heart of what Moses teaches wonderfully well. Here in Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, echad. Ein acher, there is no other. And in our psalm, the ironic reversal, ein oseto, there's not one who does good. Ein, ein, ein, ein, four times. Ein hav, not even one. It seems to be the ironic reversal. The Lord himself is one and the Lord is righteous, but what about the human race? Not even one. And so our psalm says they're corrupt, their deeds are vile, there's no one who does good. Yeah, not even one. Now that's all we had in the psalm. We should pack up our bags, close our books, turn out the lights, go home and not come back. Thanks be to God, that's not all there is in the Bible. not all there is in this psalm. And so the Lord has perspective on this and gives us further perspective on this and the Lord looks down from heaven according to our psalm and what does he see? He looks down upon the whole race of the children of men. And as he looks down he has his own determination about us. But as we read the entire Bible We see, and in the lens of this psalm, we see that there in fact are some who are righteous. So look at the last verse. Who will establish from Zion the salvation of Israel? When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice, Israel will be glad. Oh. And we find that these wicked are trying to bring to frustration the counsels, the plans of the afflicted, but the Lord is his refuge. That is, the afflicted one has a refuge in God. And what about these wicked? Verse five says it, surely they dread a great dread. Yeah, they wake up in the dead of night and they know. Yeah, they know. They perceive their outcome. They dread a great dread. And why do they dread such a dread? Because God is with the assembly of the righteous. Oh, so the very psalm that speaks of the universal evil of the race also speaks of the righteousness of the household of God. And this, of course, implies the whole gospel. That is, the gospel is for sinners. Only sinners can be Christians. Isn't that good news? That only sinners can be Christians. And of course, only Christians can be pastors, so only sinners can be pastors. All right, here we are. Here we are. Sinners who are Christians who are pastors. All right, and the way into this way of life, the door is, of course, Jesus, who offers us, by the call of repentance and faith, a life of grace that transforms. And so the psalm implies the gospel. Hallelujah. And the next psalm teaches us of the perfections to which we are called and the perfections of Christ who alone has the fullness of that description of the one who walks with integrity and who does what is righteous and who speaks truth in his heart. Notice the phrase in 15. He speaks truth in his heart. What does the fool say in his heart? Ein Elohim, there is no God. What does the believer say in his heart? He speaks truth. He speaks what is faithful. And so our Psalms cohere together in a kind of literary unity that is often lost except by close attentiveness. And so in verse one we have the inner thought of the fool. and then we have thereafter the inner thought of the Lord who looks down upon the whole race and makes his assessment and the assessment is true and then in verses 4 and 5 and 6 do they not know all these who do iniquity? Do they not know? And there is that dread by which they wake up. There they are devouring my people as if they devour bread, but as they think nothing of victimizing the weak. the people with integrity, the people who have repentance and faith, they think nothing of doing their wicked deeds against such people whom they love to victimize. And in our Psalms very often the word, the synonym for the righteous believer is the word that's often translated the afflicted one, the ani. The Ani or the poor, sometimes the translation is that, more often the afflicted. And in the Psalms of the man, of which we have about 40, often written by David, we have the Ani, the Ani, the Ani, the afflicted man, the afflicted man. Psalm 71 is likely a psalm of David in his old age, in which he confesses himself to be the Ani, the afflicted one. And we have the accounts of the afflicted in verse six. Their inner thought. And their inner thought is not there is no God. What is the inner thought? The Lord is my refuge. The Lord is my refuge. And that very person is the one whom the wicked seek to exploit. But will their exploitations ultimately succeed? And the answer, of course, is no. For God is with the assembly. Some translations say the generation of the righteous. Recent studies in Hebrew vocabulary indicate assembly or gathering, even community. God is with the community of the righteous. A fine translation of that line in verse 5. And so we have the opinion of the fool, verse 1. We have the Lord's assessment of that. We have the statement of the future. when they dread that great dread, and when God acts for the community of the righteous. And then in the last bit of the psalm, we have a surge of hope, an expression of ardent desire. Who will establish from Zion the salvation of Israel? Now, the psalmist knows very well the answer to that question. The psalmist knows that it's the Lord and the Lord alone who can establish or send forth from Zion the salvation of Israel, the salvation of his people. And here we are in our New Testament setting in which we ourselves are, yes, included in Israel by faith and repentance. We are honorary Israelites, hallelujah. And when will God do this? The psalm does not say. The psalm does not tell us when. We might wish to know when, and there are those who set dates. They set dates for when, for when Jesus shall return, for when such things shall happen. The psalm does not tell us that. And those of Old Testament Israel who were surviving into the end of the first century BC, they did not know when. They had a kind of general expectation that when the Romans conquered the place as they did in 63 BC, the fourth kingdom announced by Daniel way back in Daniel 2 and Daniel 7, they had a strong sense that when the fourth empire had come, which was Rome, the Messiah was soon. But they did not know when. And when Jesus comes preaching, the opening words of the ministry of Jesus, Mark chapter 1 verse 15, the time has come. The kingdom of God is at hand. What time? Well, the time that was announced by the prophets, such as Daniel. The fourth empire had conquered them. Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Okay, Rome came in 63 BC. They knew the time was coming. Those who were faithful in Israel, they knew the time was coming. And Jesus says the time has come. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news. And people did. And in the church of Jesus, we do. But there is also a second coming and we do not know when. When will the Lord restore the fortunes of his people? We know that it shall happen. We do not know when it shall happen. And in the meantime, we have the problem of the atheists that seem to rule the world. More keenly, we have the problem of what the Puritans called practical atheism. I'll deal with the philosophical atheism briefly and then I'll talk about the practical atheism because this is where it really hits home and is the most dangerous form of atheism. Philosophical atheism, that's the assertion that deity does not exist. There are no gods and there is no God. most philosophical atheists assert materialism. All we are is electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, quarks, these subatomic particles. That's all we are. Carl Sagan, famously in the TV series funded by your tax dollars 40 years ago, said the cosmos is all there is, all there has ever been, and all there ever will be. That was the opening line of that TV show on PBS every Sunday night. Let's not call it the Lord's Day for that one. Okay, well, all right. No, it is the Lord's Day and he encroached upon the Lord by asserting nothing but physicality. Now when Carl Sagan was dying of cancer, His Christian friends came to his bedside and they had borne testimony to him over the years and they bore testimony to him again and again in those months and prayed for him. We do not know the secrets of God and the secrets of hearts. But philosophical atheism is rare in that world of ancient Israel. And so the commentators tend to go away from that idea as they expound the psalm and speak more about practical atheism. The philosophical atheism really got its rise in the 1700s among the French philosophers, people like Denis Diderot, who edited the first encyclopedia Now, there's a pretentious title. You may not know what it means. I mean, you know what kind of book it is. But an encyclopedia, well, paideia is the Greek word for education. Encyclo is the prefix for something that encircles and encompasses everything. And the word encyclopedia was chosen by Denis Diderot to describe a set of books that he would take 25 years to produce with many authors and to encompass the whole body of human knowledge. That's a rather tall order. He wrote about 7,000 of those articles himself, went absolutely impoverished doing it. And in the article on God, he said, I'm gonna paraphrase here, he said, we now know, yeah, we now know that there is no need for the idea of God. seeing that everything arose by spontaneous generation. How about that for an assertion? Now, spontaneous generation, that may be a complicated phrase, but it means things just happened. Things just happened. In a certain way, that's just code for, I don't know what happened, but it did. I don't know what happened, but it did. Spontaneous generation. You know, the hubris of that article. The fool has said in his heart there is no God. more keenly dangerous than Denis Diderot and those who followed him by the thousands or even millions since then, is what the Puritans called practical atheism. And that really is what's in view in our song. How do we know this? Well, in Psalm 9 and 10, we have a pair of psalms that are cited or alluded to already in Psalm 14. And turn back to Psalm 10 for the moment. I think it's verse 4. I have it here somewhere. Yes, there it is. In Psalm 9, verse 17, Psalm 10, verse 4, what do we find? We already find statements like the one of Psalm 14, verse 1. And in 917 we read this, the wicked shall return to show all the nations that, what's the phrase, that forget God. All the nations that forget God. Now what does it mean to forget God? You know that he's there, but you no longer acknowledge him. Among the Zulu, Before Christian missionaries arose, arrived in that place in the 19th century, South Africa, the Zulu had an idea that there was a creator god, they called him Nkulu-kulu. But the creator god had walked away from the human race and from the mortal world one day because he got mad, and he got mad for excellent reasons. And so he didn't have much to do with Nkulu-kulu. You had to do with the local tree spirits, and the spirit of the river, and the spirit of the mountain, and the spirit of the desert. And these are the ones you had to deal with in your daily life in a kind of mafia protection racket. You kept them happy by sacrifices and rituals, and this and that, and by doing whatever the local witch doctor said. And you kept the spirits happy. And if you kept them happy, then they let you alone. Or maybe they actually gave you a blessing or two. And then the Christian missionaries arrived, and they used the name Nkulukun to translate God the Father in printings of the gospel, in printings of the New Testament. And a vast number of Zulu became Christians and realized that in Jesus Christ they were reconciled to the Creator whom they had virtually forgotten. All the nations that forget God. Psalm 9, verse 17. Look again at Psalm 10, verse 4. These two psalms together are a single acrostic poem, an alphabetical poem in Hebrew. They are two parts of one composition, nine and 10 together. And in 10, we see especially a focus upon those who say in their heart, verse 4, there is no God. As we read Psalm 10 closely, we discover that these wicked are not really the pagans of the other nations. They're Israelites who have forgotten God and who live accordingly. But who is the Lord? The Lord is our refuge. The Lord is the one who looks down from heaven at the whole human race and sees what we really are and declares it to us. And so in our repentance, what must we acknowledge? We must acknowledge that we were fools. And without grace, we continue to be fools. And even as Christians, yes, we sometimes continue to be fools. A hundred years ago a play by Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones, lays it out. There the main character, a porter for a passenger train, finds himself in the Caribbean on an island and the opportunity to become the king, the emperor. It's a kind of Macbeth story. By mayhem and murder he rises to the top, but it's moral dissolution for him and for everyone. And in the first scene, we find him telling one of the other characters, I'll put my Jesus on the shelf. I put my Jesus on the shelf. In the play, he's Baptist. I put my Jesus on the shelf. I suppose he could have been reformed Presbyterians had Eugene O'Neill known anything about us. I put my Jesus on the shelf. And of course, we've all done that for a little while. We've all done such things. And so practical atheism, as the Puritans speak of it, and even the Church Fathers, Theodore, Opsiris speaks of it back in the fifth century. Practical atheism is when the believer decides to live and act as if God is not there. As if there is no judgment, as if there is no final assessment of life, as if the will of God doesn't matter right now. And maybe we even say things in our heart, I'll sin now and I'll fix it later. And that thought is not foreign to you. And that is, in large measure, what Psalm 14 is about. It's not so much the theoretical atheist, the philosophical atheist. It is much more the one who decides, while knowing God, or at least knowing about God, decides to consider God irrelevant, to put my Jesus on the shelf. Now, when I was in college, my mother heard a lecture by R.C. Sproul, whom many of you know and many more of you have heard on lectures or tape or something. I used to go to the Ligonier Valley Study Center on Wednesday mornings in the summers and sit in his living room with 30 or 40 other people and have Bible study with R.C. And my mother bought for me a birthday present one year, Sproul's new book, 1973, The Psychology of Atheism. And I'd heard some of the lectures that went into that book. That title didn't sell so well, so they changed the title. If there is a God, why are there atheists? The book sold far better. But in that book, he tells a story of golfing one day with a number of people, and some he didn't know, and a particularly wealthy businessman. And early on in the game, the businessman tells Spall, I don't believe in God. So they converse 18 holes of golf. Somewhere around hole 11 or 12, the businessman says, your God killed my daughter. That man ardently believed in God and hated him. God does not believe in atheists. and atheists secretly believe in God. Romans 1 makes it clear, Romans 1.18, since the creation of the world, God has been known, his invisible attributes, his divine character, testify to, witness to, by what has been made, so that they are without excuse. Those who claim they are atheists are typically angry at God or justifying their immoral life. And one of the great paths to atheism is this, be a professed believer and begin to look awry. And when your moral life erodes, then your theological life, you choose to erode it. that appeases your conscience for a while until in the dead of night you think what verse 5 says. They dread a great dread for God is with the assembly of the righteous and And so in our psalm, what do we find again? The opinion of the fool whose self-talk is there is no God. That is, God doesn't matter. I can live without God. There is no judgment. He does not see. And then we have the Lord's assessment, verse 2, to see if any understand. Ein, ein, ein. There is none who does good. There is none who does good, not even one. And then we have the future, when God acts for the generation of the righteous because God is our refuge. God, our refuge in the present tense, God's action in the future. And then last of all in the psalm, that fourth step, oh that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion, is translated in the ESV as an ardent wish. In Hebrew, form for form, who will set forth from Zion the deliverance of Israel? The who is actually a kind of exclamation of ardent hope, and so the ESV is right here. Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion. For what is Zion? Zion is that crest of Jerusalem's mountain. that had not been built for generations when the Jebusites had lived there. That hard limestone crest was the threshing floor, where the winds had swept aside the topsoil. And that's where you crushed your grain and got your grain ready to be ground to flour to make the bread. And the threshing floor of our Ulu, the Jebusite, is where David pitches the tabernacle, the very crest of that mountain, a hard limestone top. And the city of Jerusalem built then on the slope to the south. And then Solomon builds the temple there. And the Lord has said to dwell upon Zion from those episodes of tabernacle and temple, 1000 BC, 900 BC, for those events. Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion. So in our psalm, the righteous exist. and Israel exists, and Zion exists, and God is present with Israel at Zion, and God has pledged himself to act in the future, and the psalmist knows it and sets forth our hope then. And the last lines of the psalm are the hope of the righteous for whom the Lord is refuge. In the meantime, let us consider several points of application. I'll quote from William Plummer, whose 1867 commentary on the Psalms is the fattest volume in my library. It's about yay thick. Wonderful commentary on the Psalms. In his doctrinal remarks, he says, the leading truths of natural religion are so clear that it's folly to deny them. What's he mean by natural religion? that is religion as knowable just from the facts of creation, and the facts of human nature, and the facts of conscience, and the fact of being human in the image of God. These things are so clear, they're clear even to those who've never heard the gospel. It's folly to deny them. Calvin in his commentary on the Psalms says it this way, there is no folly more brutish than forgetfulness of God. Now that line could be addressed to the philosophical atheist, and Calvin knew of a few of them, but more ardently it's addressed to the believer. The believer who is sometimes ardently tempted to act as if God is not there. Again from Calvin, we commonly see that those who in the estimation both of themselves and of others highly excel in wisdom and skill, employing their cunning and laying snares for the upright, and exercising their ingenuity in despising and mocking God. Have you known some clever mockers? First line of the Psalms speaks of that, a blessed is the one who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, and the last of that three, nor sit in the seat of scoffers. In the Psalms and the book of Proverbs, the scoffer is the most dangerous of all sorts of persons, because not only do they know that they are lost, but they want you to be lost too. And they do so by their mocking of the things of God. If they can bring you down, well, such misery loves company. And they pick the righteous to persecute. So Calvin speaks that way. They exercise their cunning in laying snares, their ingenuity in despising and mocking God. And so the psalm calls us then to a life of faith and of hope and of law, the life of obedience. Because if the heart is wrong, everything else is wrong too. Isn't it? If the heart is wrong, everything else is wrong. And if we envelop ourselves in darkness, then we make our repentance all the farther away. Now for those who are true believers, that repentance will always be exercised. It is impossible for the true believer to be lost. And as Paul says the promise in one of his letters, faithful is the one who calls you, he will bring it to pass, he will do it. Yeah, he will do it. And the topic there is sanctification. Faithful is the one who calls you, he will do it. That's a wonderful fact. And in that same letter, I know the one I believed. Yeah, I know. And he is able, he is able to bring that which I've committed to him. Until that day, until that day of judgment, he's able to keep us. And if it were simply a matter of theoretical ability, okay, God can do it, but God doesn't, the sentence makes no sense and has no hope because I'm the most unreliable person in all the church. And maybe you are too. And when Paul says that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the worst, I like to have congregations recite that line in unison, of whom I am the worst. There's something quite useful in that. But when we envelop ourselves in darkness, we put our repentance farther away and let us not do that. And so in our psalm, we Christians yearn. We yearn for the perfection that is promised. that has been long promised. We may have heard of that line from Hebrews 12 where the text tells us that you'd not come to the earthly Zion or to merely a human assembly, you come to the heavenly assembly, the assembly of the firstborn. And here's the line, and the spirits of righteous people are made perfect. What were you in this mortal life? God called you righteous. You were righteous by faith in Jesus. Oh, that the salvation of Israel might come forth from Zion when the Lord restores the fortunes of his people. And so the spirits of righteous persons now made perfect. That's our destiny. Christ has come in his first coming, a coming in mercy, offering repentance and deliverance to all the world by his gospel. Hallelujah. We in the Church of Jesus have responded. And if you've not yet responded, today is the right day to do so. Repentance in faith. That is the only way. We don't look into the back of the mind of God to see if we're elect. We respond to the open mind of God, which is the gospel. And the gospel says the time has come. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news. And the good news, of course, can't exist unless we have the bad news that they are corrupt. They do abominable deeds. There is none who does good. Ein echad, not even one. And that's the spiritual reality for all who are outside of Christ. That's the reality. But wait. Verse five. God is with the assembly of the righteous. The Lord is his refuge. And what do these repentant believers say? Oh, that the Lord would grant Israel's deliverance, the deliverance of the people of God. Oh, that the Lord would return and perfect his kingdom. Oh, that the Lord will restore the fortunes of his people. Now, the last two clauses of the psalm are a brilliant little piece of poetics, which are often lost in translation. Of course, in translation we instantly lose the sound of the poetry. The psalms are wonderfully skillful poetry. We lose their sound instantly when we go to a different language. In our Hebrew text, yagev ya'akov. It's ya-ya. Yagel Yaakov. He will rejoice. Who will rejoice? Yaakov, Jacob. Codename for the whole people of God. Yagel Yaakov. We're used to our rhymes coming at the end of the words. Here it comes at the beginning. Yagel Yaakov. Jacob will rejoice. Now that's all we had. We wouldn't be very impressed. But the very next clause does the same trick. Yismach Yisrael. Yis, Yis, Yis-mach, he will rejoice. Who will rejoice? Yisrael. Yis, Israel. And in Hebrew, they rhyme in a way that English doesn't. Jacob will rejoice. The J in J almost does it. Jacob will rejoice. Israel will exult. Almost does it. Not quite. And what is the destiny of the people of God, then, according to the psalm? The psalm's first line is famous. The fool has said in his heart there is no God. I rather wish the last line of the psalm was equally famous. When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice, and Israel exult. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Three persons, one God. Amen.