Journal

Psalm 14 - Frustration

Posted on December 24th, 2009, in the small hours

Reflections on Psalm 14 for my occasional series on Worshipping with the Psalms...

The fool says in his heart,
"There is no God."
They are corrupt, their deeds are vile;
there is no one who does good.

A frustrated and uncompromising beginning to Psalm 14. Not a verse I can imagine writing a congregational song around. But as we've already concluded over only the first 13 Psalms, our contemporary sense of the boundaries between personal and corporate themes doesn't always match up with those of the Psalter.

So is this Psalm a dig at Richard Dawkins? (Or whoever the next atheist-du-jour may be.)

The NIV text note suggests that the Hebrew word for 'fool' means more like 'morally deficient', which is perhaps slightly less offensive in our day than 'mentally deficient'. And reading carefully I think it's clear that lack of belief in God is a symptom of this 'foolishness' as opposed to a claim to logical identity.

The next verse enquires whether there are "any who seek God" with verse 3 concluding "there is no one who does good, not even one". Whatever is going on in Psalm 14 it isn't really dig at atheists - the Psalmist has a much wider scope for his frustration.

The main theme of the Psalm emerges as 'evildoers' opporessing God's people. The Psalm ends with the cry "Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion!" Rather than being about atheism the main story is an increasingly-familiar account of Israel under persecution from her enemies.

Perhaps we understand a little better what is going on. But how far forward does that take us in engaging with Psalm 14 as worship?

It feels lazy to simply generalise the theme and say we should read this Psalm as being a cry for God's ultimate victory over his enemies and the vindication of his people - fudging the specifics of the text to allude to Christian themes. Or cherry-picking fragments like "the LORD is their refuge". But so often with Old Testament texts we seem to be forced into that position if we are to 'get anything out of them'.

I'm fully aware of how clumsy that attitude is. Why do we think we ought to 'get something out of them'? Which is really just to restate the question I set out to address with this series many months ago: how do we read the Old Testament as Christian scripture? I don't have very consistent insight yet.

We have seen a couple of instances of Psalms so far where the overlap of Old Testament and contemporary themes and language is very close, but there are several other passages that seem a lot further off.

I know that we'll be getting on to much richer themes (from the perspective of Christian worship) fairly soon, but in the meantime I wonder how the early Christians - who were obviously predominantly Jewish - used these Psalms in worship. I'll have to look into that!