Hey, it’s good to be with you. This is a bleak and dark day and dark weekend and it’s good to be here with a little light and the singing was great this morning. The worship’s great. So, yeah, it’s just wonderful to have God’s people gathered together. And today, of course, it is Father’s Day. We do want to extend that blessing and encouragement all the dads and the grandpas in this room and we’re going to pray for the dads at Knox Church before our service is over, but we won’t focus specifically on Father’s Day theme for our message. For some, Father’s Day is a really wonderful occasion. For others, it can be difficult. So, instead of focusing on earthly fathers, we’ll focus instead on our common heavenly Father who sees full of mercy, he’s full of love, he’s full of compassion, he’ll never abandon us, he’ll never let us down, and his words speak wisdom to our souls. So, God’s word to us this morning, Psalm 14, at first glance, it may seem like a pretty harsh word, but it’s actually a very realistic word about life. Begins by talking about atheists, about people who don’t believe in God. What it says is not at all subtle. Beginning of verse one, this is poised to instantly offend anyone who puts themselves in the category of an atheist. These words, “The fool says in his heart, there is no God.” Now, as we’ll see, that that’s not a comment about anyone’s intellectual abilities. It’s not saying that atheists are dumb. We all know people who don’t believe in God who are much smarter than we are. They could jump circles around us mentally. So, why would God’s word then make such a sweeping statement about unbelievers? The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” Why might very smart people be called fools? Well, I’d suggest there there may be three types of atheists that we run into in our world. The majority might be what we would term casual atheists, people who are just nudging their way through life and they don’t give their unbelief a lot of thought. Their life might be running smoothly. It might have some great challenges, some suffering. But regardless, life doesn’t seem to demand any serious thought or decisions concerning unbelief or belief. Casual atheists, they seem to arrive at their unbelief almost by default. The last time your casual atheist may have thought about God or religion at all, even for a fleeting second, might have been this morning when they saw you going out in the rain to get in your car on a Sunday morning dressed up and they thought, “Hmm, people going to church. What’s that about? I didn’t know people did that anymore.” And then the neighbor goes in and they have a nice Sunday brunch and uh go on with their day. They watch the whole US Open. A second type of atheist might be academic atheist. Now, these are people who have really given the notion of God considerable thought. They’ve concluded that God doesn’t exist. Maybe they approach things very rationally and they can give persuasive philosophical, scientific arguments for not believing in God. Might think of the so-called new atheists. Earlier in this century, people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. They turned their outspoken atheism into a bit of a cottage industry. And they’re very willing to take a position that directly opposes the Psalm. They would quite confidently say, “The real fool is the one who says in her heart that there is a God.” And then finally, there’s a third category of atheist we might call the militant or functional activist atheist. These are the most dangerous of all because they carry their atheism to a real logical conclusion. If there’s no God, there’s no such thing as sin or judgment. There’s no accountability. Nothing’s truly out of bounds when it comes to human behavior. And this third category of functional atheism, it gets addressed in Psalm 14 because it calls these unbelieving fools also who become corrupt and their deeds are vile and they devour people with no more thought or conscience than eating bread and they frustrate the plans of the poor. To these atheists, poor, vulnerable, weak people, they’re just there to be manipulated and exploited and taken advantage of. These functional atheists, they don’t just keep their atheism to themselves like a card in their wallet. They take it out into the world of ethics and behavior and whoever gets in their way, whether it be religious people or some detested ethnic group or anyone who blocks their political goals, everyone’s disposable, everything’s possible. And they might vigorously try to enforce their atheism on the lives of others. The Soviet Union would have been a very good example of that. Some some Communist China at times has been a great example of that of the worst case scenario of atheism. So, it’s a real good thing that we rarely run into those who practice their atheism so consistently. Most atheists that we know or they’re much more casual and restrained. They don’t follow their unbelief to any logical limits. Lukewarm, comfortable, casual atheists, they make the safest neighbors and friends that we can have. So, we’re suggesting there are three types: casual, academic, functional. Let’s get to the question though we set out to answer because why would this Psalm begin by calling any brand of atheist, anyone at all who says in their heart that there is no God, why does the Psalm so bluntly refer to them as fools? In what ways are atheists of all stripes considered by God to be foolish? You know, the Book of Proverbs has a lot to say about fools and foolishness and it begins by stating that every one of us came into life with foolishness all infused in us. Proverbs 22:15 says, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child.” And parents are given the task of dislodging that foolishness before it becomes an adult problem for their child. Parents aren’t to sit back and just watch foolishness spread unchecked or they’re setting their child up for a horrible life. So, steady, thoughtful, consistent guidance and discipline are needed to prevent the child from hurting themselves or hurting others. Again, we’re not saying that children are dumb or children are idiots, but they come into life, they don’t they don’t know how toasters work, they don’t know how TVs work, they have no understanding how relationships work, why it would be wrong to grab a toy from someone else and keep it for yourself. So, foolishness, it’s not defective mental equipment, it’s being out of touch with reality. It’s not knowing or seeing how things really work. And in Proverbs, adult foolishness is tied to willfulness. It’s a refusal to let anyone else tell us what to do. So, when Psalm 14 states that the fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” It’s identifying someone who’s out of touch with reality and really willfully so. Someone who says, “There is no God. There is no God. No one’s the boss of me.” So, Romans 1 is a great place to go to see how that unbelief gets built into a person’s life. And it’s a result of two things it would say, suppressed evidence and substituted worship. Suppressed evidence, substituted worship. So, suppressed evidence is described in Romans 1:18 where it states that the wrath of God is being reve- revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. It’s like holding a beach ball underwater. There’s an act of suppression needed to keep the truth from popping up. And why does Romans says it say that? It says that because evidence of God’s existence, it says, is all over the place. Evidence of his power, his divine will, it’s so obvious to all. Says it’s it you have to deliberately take it off the table and plunge it underwater and suppress it. And God says suppressing that truth, it’s inexcusable. Wrath of God’s revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is it’s plain to them. Because God has shown it to them, his invisible attributes, his eternal power, his divine nature. They are clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that God has made. So people are without excuse. It says that creation is completely revelatory. It speaks plainly of God’s existence, his nature, mountains, rivers, planets, meteors. And if we can’t see that, then we’ve become wrapped up in this this enormous conspiracy of suppression. We’re shutting out the big story, the true story, and we keep ourselves occupied with a small story about the universe and our place in it. You know, cosmology, that’s the scientific study of the nature of the universe, the cosmos. It deals with models the universe by physics and math and chemistry and biology and astronomy. And since the 1960s, the standard, widely accepted cosmological view has been that our universe traces back to an absolute beginning. That our universe is historically finite. Universe has scientifically been proven to be expanding like a balloon blowing up, meaning it had to have a very tiny speck of a beginning. Now, inconveniently for us, that also means that our universe has an inevitable ending. There’s a point where thermal heat death will come into play and everything will grow deadly cold. I wouldn’t worry about that. It’s not likely to happen this year or next, but but it is coming. If the universe had a speck of a beginning, it also has an ending. Everyone in cosmology believes that now. But prior to the 1960s, despite the mounting evidence, many refused to accept the data of an expanding universe because it sounded far too much like the beginning of the universe as described in the Bible in Genesis chapter 1. So, the brilliant British astronomer Fred Hoyle, he was so convinced that the universe had no beginning, and he was so opposed to Christianity, he fought tooth and nail any theory that suggested the universe had not always been in a steady state the way it is. He was the one who coined the phrase the Big Bang, and he did it as a way of mocking or dismissing the theories of those who viewed the universe as expanding. Again, everyone in cosmology believes in the Big Bang today, but Hoyle used the term to try to discredit the theory. He strongly associated a steady state universe with his atheism. His hatred for religion, for Christianity, went hand in glove with what he would accept and what he wouldn’t accept scientifically. He called religion a blind attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Any security that religion offers is an illusion. He said that the attributes of God that people preach from pulpits were clearly man-made and without meaning. And he didn’t think much of Jesus, either. He said that religion, if it was going to be considered as anything more than pernicious nonsense, it would need to change its dogmas and see Jesus as nothing more than an exceptional man, not God incarnate. Another key figure in cosmology who was highly committed to a steady state universe was no less than Albert Einstein. He actually fudged a figure in one of his relatively relativity formulas. This was just an arbitrary number that he plugged in, known as the cosmological constant, and it jimmyed the equation, and it allowed the idea of a steady state universe to be upheld. When he was challenged on the math, he didn’t like it. He issued a scathing rebuke and then eventually in 1931, he went to see Edwin Hubble and his new highly sophisticated telescope. Einstein was clearly shown beyond any doubt how the universe was expanding and to his credit, Einstein later disavowed the figure he’d fudged. He called it the worst blunder in his life. Both Hoyle and Einstein were eventually convinced, [snorts] but it had to come against their instincts, against their will that the universe indeed had an instantaneous beginning. Some of the more consistent atheists, the brutal functional atheists of the Soviet Union, they were so determined to eliminate not just the idea that the universe had a beginning, but any scientist who actually propagated that. In Russia, Lenin said, “If matter’s not eternal, if this universe had a beginning, some people, maybe even non-believers, might be tempted to think that it was created by that transcendental cause that some call God.” So, Lenin’s strategy was to kill off the priests by tens of thousands. His successor, Stalin, he was once a seminary student planning to be a priest himself, but he took his atheism to a whole new level. He boldly declared that the Soviet Union would be there’d be no more God by 1937. And under his watch, not only were the clergy killed, great many of Russia’s prominent great scientists and astrophysicists and cosmologists, mathematicians, anyone who dared crack open the door that there was a beginning to the universe. Large numbers, those those scientists were poisoned and they were shot and tortured and exiled and denounced and thrown into psychiatric institutions, sent to gulags, all for merely acknowledging what the scientists all throughout the rest of the world were rapidly reaching consensus on, that the universe had a beginning in a far-off age when it was no bigger than a speck of dust. Romans 1, this suppression of plain evidence is just continued in every generation since. God’s attributes, his eternal power, his divine nature can be clearly perceived in creation, but people it says in their unrighteousness choose instead to suppress the truth. There’s this There’s sin, unrighteousness, and the suppression and truth that go hand-in-hand. Einstein and even Hoyle, they eventually saw that resistance was futile to this overwhelming scientific evidence. So, in time even that combatant Fred Hoyle famously said, “A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology.” And he’s the one who also said, “The probability of life arising by chance is like a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747.” Mhm. Now, I don’t know how close Einstein ever came to Jesus, but he did up saying some very humble things like this. He said, “My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of this infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we can comprehend of the knowable world.” He says, “I’m not an atheist. What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.” Then he added, “I’m a deeply religious non-believer.” He says, “This is a somewhat new kind of religion.” And I suppose it is. So, he didn’t seem to want to follow the evidence toward a personal faith and a personal God. Alec Alister McGrath, he’s a theologian. He also has an Oxford degree in biophysics. And he says that most of the many unbelieving scientists he knows, they’re atheists on grounds other than their science. Because many complex factors lead a person to belief or disbelief in God. Some personal experiences and some are intellectual and some are social. Sociologists of knowledge have shown that our peer group, our primary relationships, they shape our beliefs more than we might want to admit. And McGrath says that scientists, like non-scientists, are very affected by the beliefs and attitudes of the people from whom they want respect. In McGrath’s experience, most of his atheist colleagues, they brought their assumptions about God to their science, rather than basing them on their science. See, all evidence can be suppressed by even the smartest people in the world, depending on their pre-commitment to other things, which allows them to to suppress and not see the evidence. But there are a great many scientists who do acknowledge the inevitability of creation, the inevitability of God. I have a list of about a hundred citations from eminent scientists. One of them is a comment like this made by a Nobel Prize winner in physics. He says, “I don’t conceive of the world without a creator, which is to say without a God. For a physicist, a single atom is so complicated, so pregnant with intelligence, that the materialist universe simply makes no sense.” Another professor of chemistry at Harvard, another Nobel Prize winner, he put it a little more bluntly. He said, “I think only an idiot can be an atheist.” I don’t know how many friends this guy had, but he said, “We must admit that there exists an incomprehensible power or force with limitless foresight and knowledge that started the whole universe going in the first place.” And lastly, another Nobel Prize-winning physicist. I like this quote. He says, “Probably every physicist would believe in a creation of the universe if the Bible had not unfortunately said something about it many years ago and made it seem old-fashioned.” You know, we go back to Romans chapter 1. It says that once people have suppressed the plain truth and the evidence of God’s existence, the next move is to fill the void with God substitutes in order to manufacture some artificial truth and meaning. It says, “Although they knew God and the evidence was all out there, although they knew God, they didn’t honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.” Foolish hearts, claiming to be wise, they became fools. And they exchanged or they substituted the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. See, once we’ve suppressed the truth, an exchange takes place in our lives and and we still need idols that we need to worship. We still need things to find meaning in our lives. So, we can take good things and turn them into ultimate things. We take good things and those are the God things in our lives. Could be really good things like family and friendships and romance and education and jobs and achievement. They provide some temporary meaning in our lives. They’re fragile, they’re temporary, they could all be taken away from us in the blink of an eye. But for the moment, they serve as a God substitute. And if one of those idols fails us, we can quickly scramble for another to take its place. And life is relatively short, so not too many of our idols are going to crash and burn before the end and need replacing before our lives are over. Psalm 14, Romans 1, tells us that the foolishness of atheism consists of avoiding reality, deliberately, willfully refusing to see what’s out there, being out of touch with the way things are in the universe, not realistically acknowledging our place in it as created beings who are accountable to our creator God. Avoiding the obvious while claiming to be wise is like collecting fool’s gold and thinking that we’re rich. Romans 1 says, “Claiming to be wise, they became fools.” Psalm 14 says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'” I don’t like to think of the atheist that I deeply love, and these are friends and family. I don’t like to think of them as foolish people who are out of touch with reality. But Romans 1 essentially says that no one arrives at unbelief honestly. Unbelief has to come through some form of deception. I don’t want to think of my casual atheist friends as dishonest, but they certainly are deceived. Every conspiracy gathers up its victims, and it takes them in, and they’re not even suspecting that they’re being deceived. The atheists, most of the people we love who are atheists, who don’t believe in God, they’ve been caught up in this conspiracy of suppressing the evidence about God, substituting meaning for things that are temporary and things that can be taken away from them, instead of pursuing Christ. Psalm 14, Romans 1 explains that there’s there’s nothing really innocent about atheism. There’s a dishonesty or a deception at its root. Even more than that, they tell us that evil lies at the very bottom of it as well. After declaring that the fool says in his heart that there is no God, the psalm goes on and gives us a God’s eye view of our world. Says they’re corrupt, their deeds are vile, there’s no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned aside, they’ve together become corrupt, there’s no one who does good, not even one. And if we think, “Well, that’s pretty pessimistic Old Testament type thinking,” we need to know that Paul quotes from Psalm 14 directly in the book of Romans chapter 3, and he reiterates again, “There’s no one righteous, not even one. There’s no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they’ve together become worthless, there’s no one who does good, not even one. And again, we think of our casual atheist neighbors and we’d trust them with everything in our lives. They’re they’re good friends. It’s one thing to think of them as being deceived, as having missed or suppressed the evidence about God. It’s quite another thing to think of them as evil. I mean, they never present as evil. They’re great people. But the Bible would say that evil is still operating in the basement of their operating system somewhere. The reason reason they might give for not believing in God, they could be intellectual, they could be emotional. Intellectually, people might say they can’t believe in God because there’s no actual scientific proof. Miracles can’t happen. Evolution adequately explains uh some un- unguided process of how we all got here. No proof at all of life after death. That’s kind of the intellectual argument against God. Or the emotional argument against God. People say they can’t believe in God because it’s emotionally impossible. There’s so much suffering and misery in the world. Innocent people are being subject to horrible things. Babies are dying of cancer. There’s no way to look at that and make room for the possibility of a loving God. So, both the intellectual, the emotional arguments against God’s existence, they might seem reasonable. But underneath those arguments, likely never realized by the ones making those arguments, is an operating system of evil. Because the one with the intellectual argument against God is saying that they have complete faith in their own intellectual brilliance. My thoughts against the existence of God are conclusive. And the one with the emotional argument against God is betraying complete faith in their own moral excellence. My morality exceeds that of any possible God. And if I don’t see any possible meaning in suffering, then there can’t be any at all. It is incredible arrogance to those kinds of arguments. They indicate that they haven’t seen enough proof to take a leap of faith toward God, but they don’t realize they’ve already taken a huge leap of faith in the opposite direction toward themselves. A leap of faith that causes them to rely wholly on their own intelligence or their own morality. Tim Keller says that the real problem behind your unbelief, it’s not intellectual, it’s not emotional, it’s because your heart has already put its faith in something else, something that rivals God. He says you can only doubt something from the vantage point of putting faith in something else. You can’t be skeptical of God without having already put your faith in something other than God. That’s why unbelief it’s never a neutral position to hold. My faith’s either in God or it’s in me. And if it’s in me, it’s being fueled by an arrogant sinful nature. I want to be my own boss. I don’t want to let God or anyone else tell me what to think or what to do. Unbelief puts people in a very precarious position. Seems nearly impossible to get out of it because verse four of the Psalm asks a rhetorical question, “Will evildoers never learn?” And the expected answer is no, they won’t. They can’t even see what’s plainly in front of them in creation. They’re never going to be able to think their way out of truth and reality. Fact is, every one of us is in the same bind. Not one of us ever deserves faith. Both Psalm 14 and the book of Romans say that everyone’s turned away, no one’s done good. That doesn’t leave us really any wiggle room to to point at those atheists outside these walls and exclude ours exclude ourselves from the category of those. When God looks down from heaven, he says he sees evil, corrupt people who don’t understand, who fail to do good. That describes our natural state as much as it does anyone else’s. None of us ever deserve faith. So, where did our hope come from? And how is that saving faith now in our hearts? Well, Psalm 14 ends with a psalmist throwing up a a prayer in the form of a wish. He says, “Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion. When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, let Jacob rejoice and Israel be glad.” In the psalmist psalmist world, all these foolish functional atheists were running amok. They were devouring people like eating bread. They were frustrating the plans of the poor. What was the answer or the relief that he saw? He looked for salvation that would come from Zion. Salvation that would restore the fortunes of God’s people and make them glad. Now, Zion’s a name for one of the hills inside the city of Jerusalem. That’s the hill on which the temple was built. The temple was the place that represented God’s presence, where the great and almighty God dwelt. And to approach God, there was a there was a threat level to approaching God. You wouldn’t ever want to try to approach God if you’ve spent your life suppressing the evidence against him and substituting other things that you’re worshipping instead. And you wouldn’t want to ever approach God just leaning on your own intellectual or emotional arguments against his existence. The only way to safely approach God in Zion was to bring a blood sacrifice to spread out on the altar with the faith that God would actually meet you safely over that sacrifice. Now, Jesus always maintained that he was the substitutionary sacrifice that we would need to have our sins forgiven, to be washed clean so that we could safely approach God. Jesus said he was the sacrifice. In fact, he said he was the entire temple that would be torn down and rebuilt in 3 days. And his blood would make it possible for us to have all of our evil foolishness forgiven and we could be renewed. Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God. I don’t need God. I don’t need his bleeding sacrifice. If the Bible calls me foolish, I’ll say the real foolishness is the cross and the idea that the one nailed to it is the one I need to put my faith in to be forgiven. That’s the epitome of foolishness. And the irony is that’s exactly what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it’s the power of God.” And those of us who know that Jesus has saved us, we also know we know we didn’t deserve faith. It was given to us by God. We weren’t clever. We weren’t the smart ones who figured it out. Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. This isn’t your own doing. It’s the gift of God, not as result of works, so that no one may boast.” And apart from that gift of faith, none of us would be here this morning. Each of us would be one of those foolish atheists suppressing the evidence about God, substituting idols in their place, maybe even pursuing our atheism where we devoured people like bread. But because Jesus came from Zion, he’s met us over his sacrifice, the foolishness of the cross has delivered us from this perpetual place of having to live under our own foolishness. Whittaker Chambers, he was American guy, he was a Soviet spy. He defected. He became a real critic of communism and describes how the turning point in his life away from atheism toward belief in God came when he was considering the intricacy of his daughter’s ears. Now, she’s much older in this picture, but that’s Whittaker Chambers. He said, “I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear, those intricate, perfect ears. The The passed through my mind, ‘No, those ears are not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature, which was the communist view he believed in.” They could have been created only by immense design. He says, “The The thought was involuntary. It was unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind, but I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I’d completed it, I would have had to say design presupposes God. I did not know then at that moment the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.” Now, for all our atheist friends and family members, our prayer is that the finger of God would be laid on their forehead. There’s no other way for them to receive the gift of faith and come to faith in Christ. They would discover salvation coming out of Zion and the foolishness of the cross would turn into life-giving wisdom for them. Let’s pray about a few of these thoughts together. Here’s some things for the next couple moments in personal private prayer. You might have praise God just for the wonder of the cosmos and all that is revealed about him in the universe as we see it. Thank God for the for the grace that by grace you’ve been saved through faith. And then pray for those who come to your mind who need that finger of God on their forehead so that they can receive a gift of faith as well. Just take some time to pray.