Amen. We're going to be reading in Psalm 53 today. The title of my message is, What Sayeth the Fool? I'm going to start in verse 1, verses 1 through 4. It says, Psalm of David, 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. God looked down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there were any that did understand, that did seek God. Every one of them has gone back. They are all together become filthy. There is none that doeth good. No, not one. Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge, who eat up my people as they eat bread? They have not called upon God." Father God, Lord, I thank you for this day, God, and thank you for this time to come together worship you, Lord, and to hear your word, God. And I pray, Father, you would be with me as I preach, Lord, that you would be with my lips and keep me from error, Father. I pray that your word would not return to you void, God. And Lord, that you would just open our ears to your word tonight. Help us to hear what you have to say. It's in Jesus' name I pray, amen. All right, so David, in this psalm, he says that there is none that doeth good In a relative sense, there are good men and wicked men and all those in between. But in the absolute sense, we are all wicked and corrupt. The Lord died on a cross for our sins because we were corrupt. And there was nothing good in our own works that could make up for the iniquity that we had done. He took our sin upon himself and paid for it with his own death, a substitution for us, for all who will believe on him. when we believe on Him, our debt of sin gets marked as paid in full, praise God, and He gives us a new man to put on and walk in, a man that is not sinful and corrupt, born of the Spirit, not of the flesh. But David is speaking of those without the Spirit, without the knowledge of Christ and of God, those who commit iniquity without any thought for the God of the Bible, for the One who created the heavens and the earth and all that there is on the earth. and in the heavens. David says that these people are fools, and they have said in their heart that there is no God. He said, God looked down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there were any that did understand, that did seek God. Every one of them has gone back. They are all together become filthy. There is none that doeth good. No, not one. And then he asks, Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge who eat up my people as they eat bread? They have not called upon God. Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge? If you ask them, I'm sure that they would think that they have a lot of knowledge. In some ways, they probably do. But not all knowledge is true knowledge. Not all knowledge is profitable. Proverbs 1 says, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. In Proverbs 2, verse 3 says, We live in a day when knowledge is a commodity. The Internet has made it easy to access the vast accumulation of information that we have come to rely upon to tell us what reality is. We used to get this from the evening news and it was curated for us by the national networks and their local affiliates that decided what was important and what was newsworthy. Everyone kind of had the same baseline of information with which to form their own opinions. But now we have a vast sea of content in which to go fishing for the knowledge that we want. You can find information on just about any topic, licit or illicit, and I think that that is just a sign that we are in the end times. Daniel 12 says, But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. I think that describes the age that we live in pretty well. Many do run to and fro. Travel has never been easier. We all have cars that propel us along the highways at speeds that were once unimaginable. Aircraft can now take us anywhere on earth in a matter of hours. and knowledge such as it is is greatly increased. But for all that knowledge, people seem to be just as confused as ever. 2 Timothy 3 speaks of those who are ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Man has an amazing ability to find support for the beliefs that he holds anywhere he looks. We call this confirmation bias. A bias means a leaning of the mind, inclination, or prepossession propensity towards an object that could be called a prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair. Confirmation bias means having a tendency to favor evidence that confirms what you already believe or want to believe, and tending to ignore the evidence to the contrary. Confirmation bias was known to the ancient Greeks. It was described by the classical historian Thucydides in his text The History of the Peloponnesian War. He wrote, Confirmation bias is present in all of us to some degree. We don't reevaluate our beliefs every time we encounter a new piece of information. We often do tend to allow our beliefs to color our judgment of facts or observations, even when we think that we are being objective. This is generally not a problem when our beliefs are correct, but confirmation bias can cause us to make incorrect judgments when our beliefs are wrong. In Ecclesiastes 8, 11, Solomon says, because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily. Therefore, the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. A foolish sinner, whether he realizes it or not, has already said in his heart that there is no God. When he sees that God has not moved swiftly against those that commit evil works, his foolish heart sees this as confirmation of what he has already chosen to believe, and therefore he is emboldened to commit more sins against God. Secure in his confidence that God will not bring sentence against him, because there is no God. Ecclesiastes 8, 12 says, Though a sinner do evil a hundred times, and his days be prolonged, yet surely I know that it shall be well with him that fear God, which fear before him. But it shall not be well with the wicked, neither shall he prolong his days, which are as a shadow. because he feareth not before God. Solomon knows that there is a God, and he is a righteous God, and a God to be feared. Even if God allows a sinner to go many days without punishing his sins, Solomon knows that his days are still numbered, and God will not allow that man to escape judgment. Psalm 73 says in verse 1, A psalm of Asaph, Truly God is good to Israel, even to such as are of a clean heart. But as for me, my feet were almost gone, my steps had well nigh slipped. For I was envious of the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For there are no bands in their death, but their strength is firm. They are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men. Therefore pride compasseth them about as a chain, violence covereth them as a garment. Their eyes stand out with fatness, they have more than heart could wish. They are corrupt and speak wickedly concerning oppression. They speak loftily. They set their mouth against the heavens, and their tongue walketh through the earth. Therefore his people return hither, and waters of a full cup are wrung out to them. And they say, How doth God know? and is their knowledge in the Most High? Behold, these are the ungodly who prosper in the world. They increase in riches. Verily, I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency. For all the day long have I been plagued and chastened every morning." Asaph is lamenting that the wicked seem to be doing just fine in the world. Not living in fear of God, they do whatever they like, and God seems to allow it. He says he cleansed his heart in vain. What is the point of living for God when the ungodly prosper just as well as the godly, or even more so? They speak against God and God doesn't correct them. And they say, how does God know? How does God see and hear the evil of these wicked men and not do something about it? Does God really know what is going on in the realm of men? Verse 15 says, If I say I will speak thus, behold, I should offend against the generation of thy children. When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God. Then understood I their end. It was after going to the sanctuary and hearing the word of God that he realized their prosperity was an illusion. He understood their end. They are not getting away with anything. They are filling up their cup with iniquity. to be poured out upon them in the judgment. And they have no idea that it's coming. They have no knowledge in themselves pertaining to the things of God. Psalm 94 verse 3 says, How long shall they utter and speak hard things, and all the workers of iniquity boast themselves? They break in pieces thy people, O Lord, and afflict thine heritage. They slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless. Yet they say, The Lord shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it. The Lord shall not see, neither shall he regard their wickedness, because the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Verse 8 says, Understand, ye brutish among the people, and ye fools, when will ye be wise? He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? He that chastiseth the heathen, shall not he correct? He that teacheth man knowledge, shall not he know? The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are vanity. Hear what God is arguing here in the Psalm. Shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? The ear and the eye are such sophisticated organs, allowing us to perceive the world around us with such clarity and perception. To think that the one who made the ear would be deaf himself, or that the one who made the eye would be blind, is absurd. It's foolishness. But the atheist believes this is wisdom. your mind, which is able to comprehend language and interpret the sounds that your ear receives, the images on the retina of your incredible eye, and put all those things together in order for you to learn the knowledge of the world around you. All this incredible synergy that is the human being, they think was not created in the image of God, but was created by a blind, deaf God with no understanding. They believe that millions and millions or billions of years is all that it took for some random processes to accidentally create the first organic compounds in a puddle of primordial soup, and they sloshed around for a few more million years, until they combined somehow into the first living organism, the first cell, and it began to multiply, and millions of years later you had plants and animals and all the living things you see today on the earth, including human beings, who somehow developed the intellect to be able to look upon all these complex organisms that are able to do amazing feats of biochemistry without even thinking about it, and say, this confirms my belief that we came about by random chance. Many people have understood the argument for the existence of God. A man named William Paley wrote a book titled, Natural Theology in 1802, and he gives an analogy that has come to be known as the watchmaker analogy. He writes in it, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. I should hardly think of the answer I had given before, that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there. There must have existed at some time and at some place or other an artificer or artificers who formed the watch for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use. Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design which existed in the watch exists in the works of nature, with the difference on the side of nature of being greater or more in that in a degree which exceeds all computation. Paley argued that the watch was such a simple design compared to the intricate mechanisms that the natural world is filled with, Yet we would not presume to believe that a watch could have just assembled itself through the random actions of the wind and the tides beating on rocks for millions of years. It shows the hallmarks of being designed for a purpose, and it functions well for that purpose. It had to have been created by an intelligent craftsman who understood the purpose that it was creating it for. Nature has multitudes of examples of structures, like the ear or the eye, which are clearly designed for a purpose, and are very well suited to that purpose, just as the watch is made to keep time, and it does what it was designed to do. The ear is designed to collect vibrations in the air and turn them into electrical signals that get sent to your brain and interpreted as sounds that you can recognize and understand. the ticking sound of a watch mechanism as it winds down. And when the ticking stops, you know it's necessary to wind the watch again. Or the eye, which collects light, entering into it through a lens that focuses an image on the retina behind your pupil, like a tiny camera. And those light rays get turned into signals that your brain can interpret as visual images, so you can see where the hands on that watch are pointing, and know what time it is, and how long it will be until the sun goes down or your train arrives. The design of these sayings causes us to infer that there was a designer, one whose understanding was far greater than our own. But the fool will not understand this, not because it is illogical or even hard to comprehend, but because he has already said in his heart that there is no God, and he is going to keep that belief intact by coming up with as many arguments as it takes to deny that the designer ever existed. Richard Dawkins, one of the preeminent God-hating atheists of the 20th century, wrote a book refuting the idea that the complexity of life demanded a designer. It instead proclaimed that the complexity of life could easily be explained by the random processes of evolution, throwing mutations against the wall for millions of years until something sticks. He called this book the Blind Watchmaker. because he presumed that nature had no planning whatsoever, and that the rules which he thought governed evolution were sufficient to explain all the diverse forms of life that ever existed, however complex they might be. So like a watchmaker with no eyes, no ears, no knowledge of his own, just banging out a perfectly well-made watch by accident, even though he doesn't care what time it is. And this book was well-received by fools who said in their heart that there is no God. But the problems that Dawkins thinks he has solved are minuscule when compared to the problems of the origin of life. If evolution could explain the complexity of life, it could only possibly work after life itself had begun. You have to have living organisms reproducing themselves before you can conceivably have some process of random changes in those organisms to create more complex organisms. Even the simplest living organisms, microscopic single-celled bacteria, for instance, are incredibly complex. They are composed of materials that are chemically derived from other materials processed by the living cell themselves. In order for these cells to have arisen on their own, at some point these chemical compounds would have to have been assembled on their own. In order for these cells, sorry, would have to have been assembled on their own without a living system to produce them. The knowledge that we have about the living cell today is far beyond what we knew when evolutionists came up with their theories of how life might have come to exist. They thought that perhaps this could be explained by lightning striking the primordial soup, and did experiments placing various chemicals into solutions and hitting it with electric discharges, and found that it made some compounds that they thought could have possibly somehow one day magically came to life. This was first done in the 1950s in the Miller-Urey experiments, and they are still doing these types of experiments today. They think that if they can show that it is possible to produce amino acids in a prebiotic scenario, that it shouldn't be a stretch to believe that these amino acids must have been produced somehow and combined themselves into proteins and formed living cells. All it takes is a long, long time and a source of energy like the sun, and it was bound to happen. The so-called origin of life field of research is full of people making claims like this, that they are close to solving the mystery of how life came to be on this earth. They have even claimed that within a few years they themselves would be producing life in the laboratory, but their predictions have not panned out. They haven't ever been able to show how this would actually work. The more that we learn about the actual working of living cells, the more unlikely it becomes that this fantastic story of life crawling out of a puddle of ooze could possibly have ever happened. Dr. James Torr is a synthetic chemist at Rice University who has raised this issue publicly in recent years. Synthetic chemistry means developing the processes to actually produce chemical compounds. He understands the difficulty involved in creating these compounds in a clean laboratory and disputes the idea that these chemical processes could have just happened by accident in any meaningful way in the wild. He wrote an open letter to his scientific colleagues discussing these issues that he believes the origin of life researchers were not addressing. In his letter he opens, Synthetic chemists know what it takes to build just one molecular compound. The compound must be designed, the stereochemistry controlled, yield optimization, purification, and characterization are needed. An elaborate supply is required to control synthesis from start to finish. None of this is easy. Few researchers from other disciplines understand how molecules are synthesized." He gives a lot of complex descriptions of what he's talking about. And then he ends his letter. It says, with these complexities in mind, how can we build the microsystem of a simple cell? Would we be able to build even the lipid bilayers? These diminutive cellular microsystems, which are in turn composed of thousands of nanosystems, are beyond our comprehension. Yet we are led to believe that 3.8 billion years ago, the requisite compounds could be found in some cave or undersea vent, and somehow or other, they assembled themselves into the first cell. Could time really have worked such magic? Many of the molecular structures needed for life are not thermodynamically favored for their synthesis. Formed by the foremost reaction, the saccharides undergo further condensation under the very reaction conditions in which they form. The result is polymeric material, not to mention its stereorandomness at every stereogenic center, therefore doubly useless. Time is the enemy. The reaction must be stopped soon after the desired product is formed. If we run out of synthetic intermediates in the laboratory, we have to go back to the beginning. Nature does not keep a laboratory notebook. How does she bring up more material from the rear? If one understands the second law of thermodynamics, according to some physicists, then, quote, The interactions of light with small molecules is well understood. The experiment has been performed. The outcome is known. Regardless of the wavelength of the light, no plant ever forms. We synthetic chemists should state the obvious. The appearance of life on earth is a mystery. We are nowhere near solving this problem. The proposals offered thus far to explain life's origin make no scientific sense. Beyond our planet, all the others that have been probed are lifeless, a result in accord with our chemical expectations. The laws of physics and chemistry's periodic table are universal, suggesting that life based upon amino acids, nucleotides, saccharides, and lipids is an anomaly. Life should not exist anywhere in our universe. Life should not even exist on the surface of the earth." I can't find any flaws with Dr. Tour's reasoning. But there are plenty of people who laugh at his arguments, calling it pseudoscience because he is a Christian and believes that God created life. They know life exists, but God could not have created it because they have said in their heart that there is no God. So they don't need to answer any objections to their fairy tales about how life could have sprung up from non-living matter. In their view, it had to happen. That is their confirmation bias, to reject any information that would go against their beliefs. Proverbs 18 says, The intelligent design movement has brought some attention to the issues surrounding the origin of life and complexity of life debates. Many people may be persuaded by the natural argument for the necessity of a designer and become theists of some sort, but the natural arguments can only bring a person so close to the truth of God. God can only be truly known through revelation. We don't have the means to discover God beyond that He exists. We can infer some things, like the watchmaker analogy does. God must have made us for a purpose. He designed everything for a reason to fulfill specific requirements, so it stands to reason that there was a purpose in that design, just as the watch has a purpose. God gave us an intellect so that we can understand things. It would make sense that God wants us to have understanding. God has given us the ability to discern a great deal about the world we live in, but our ability to discern the things of God is limited by virtue of the fact that we can't see God or test God in a laboratory. If God wants us to have understanding about Him, we're going to have to rely upon Him to give us the revelation of those things that He wants us to know. And I believe that God has given us that revelation in His Holy Bible. We have the words of God written down and preserved for us today, and we can know the things of God through the pages of the Scriptures. God is able to reason with us and commune with our reason. He is able to tell us where we came from, how He created man and all the animals, the earth below us and the heavens above. And He can tell us why we were created, what is our purpose, what were we designed to do. And then we should do those things that God created us to do. James 1, 22 says, But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass. For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. When you read it, it will show you the things that are wrong with you, the things in your life that are wrong, the things that God wants to change in you to make you what He designed you to be instead of the fallen creature that you have become through sin. Our natural tendency is to deny that we are what the Bible says we are, to deceive ourselves and reject the truth because we are biased in respect to ourselves. We believe ourselves to be better than we are. but God looked down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there were any that did understand and that did seek God. Every one of them has gone back. They are all together become filthy. There is none that doeth good, no, not one." We have to be able to overcome our confirmation bias to recognize the truth about ourselves. Just as the truth of creation declares that there is a marvelous creator, The truth of our sinful nature declares that we are unworthy sinners and in need of a Savior. God doesn't just want us to know who He is. He wants us to know Him, to have fellowship with Him. He wants to give us good things, better gifts than we could possibly imagine. But we have to come to Him in faith, accepting His Word as truth. What He says about Himself, what He says about us, and what He says must be done to remedy our sinful state. Hebrews 11 says, But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. Isaiah 118 says, Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. We have to believe that Jesus died for us, because death was what our sin demanded as payment. We were destined for the lake of fire, and then God sent His Son Jesus to be a substitute for us. He died for us so that we might live. He paid the cost so that we wouldn't have to, and so that we could be brought into fellowship with God and serve Him with gladness. Isaiah 119 says, The truth is not dependent upon whether you believe it or not, or whether you like it or not. The truth is the truth, no matter what. God's creation declares the truth. God's Word is the truth. But wicked people that reject the truth will be judged for it in the end, whether they seem to prosper in this world for a time or not. Saying that they didn't believe in God will not excuse them. Romans 1.20 says, For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. Because that when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lust of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves, who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. Father God, Lord, I thank you, God, again, for this time to come together, Lord, to fellowship around your word, God, around the truth, Lord. Lord, we thank you that you've given us the revelation, Lord, of the Bible, the Holy Scriptures, Lord, and these last days we can know you, Father, through them. God, I just pray, Lord, you would help us, Lord, to draw closer to you, closer to your word, Father, that we would seek to be near you at all times, God. And Lord, we pray that you would help us to be ready, Father, for what's coming, Lord, upon this nation, upon the world, God. There's gonna be some terrible times ahead, Father. Lord, we pray, Lord, that we would be accountable worthy to escape all those things that shall come to pass, God. And Lord, we just pray that you would be with us, God, and guide us in everything that we do. Lord, I thank you again for these folks. I pray that you would bless everyone and be with our fellowship for the rest of this evening, God. It's in Jesus' name I pray, amen.