Human History Set to Music

Human History Set to Music

Psalm 53

Main Idea: If you live as though God doesn’t exist, you will face judgment.

Born and raised in former Yugoslavia, Miroslav Volf currently serves as professor of theology at Yale Divinity School. Volf describes his journey in considering God’s judgment.

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love. (Volf, Free of Charge, 138–39)

Our culture sneers at the idea of God’s judgment. Were this psalm set to music, it wouldn’t likely be played on popular radio stations. The outcry would be severe: “God scattering the bones of atheists? God rejecting people? That’s not the God we believe in.” Friends, this is why it is so good that we have God’s own Word. God himself has given us these sixty-six books of Scripture. In the Bible, God, our Creator, tells us about himself. He tells us about who we are. He tells us why everything feels off—not only in the world around us but in our own hearts. He tells us how the wrong is made right.

Every person reading this and every person you encounter today has a developing narrative of how the world works. We’re trying to make sense of it. In Scripture God tells us, “This is how it is.” God’s self-revealing Word is a means by which reality, if you will, walks up, taps us on the shoulder, and invites us in.

Psalm 53 is a shoulder-tapping passage. It’s the story of human history since the fall, and God wants us to understand what this story has to do with our lives now. If God, your Creator, stooped to tell you about life, to tell you where the dangers are, to point the way to a happy ending, would you be interested? Here’s a spoiler: We need more than for God to just point the way, but we’ll come back to that later.

The song about human history develops in four stages in Psalm 53.

Fools Reject God

Psalm 53:1-3

The Bible doesn’t use the word fool in a cavalier way. A fool isn’t merely someone who is unintelligent. A fool isn’t a person who goofs off all the time and can’t be taken seriously. A fool is someone who says in his heart, “There’s no God” (v. 1).

The psalmist isn’t limiting this description to the card-carrying atheist. The emphasis is on functional or practical atheism. The fool in verse 1 has a God-denying heart. Regardless of what this person may say with his mouth, his heart—the controlling center of his life—screams, “There’s no God.”

Since our actions flow from the heart, this God-denying heart produces a God-denying life. The psalmist talks about corruption and vile deeds. He talks about wisdom or, in this case, the lack of wisdom. Wisdom, like foolishness, is defined in terms of how we live in relation to God. In verse 2 wisdom is related to one practice—seeking God. The wise person seeks the Lord. The wise person lives in the awareness that God is Creator and King, that God is good and wise. In the Old Testament the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10). Wisdom is found in pursuing the knowledge of God—his character, his commands, his promises, his workings in history. Scripture can’t conceive of someone being wise apart from knowing God and living in accordance with reality as God defines it.

Tragically, since the fall in Genesis 3, foolishness is our natural-born condition. When Adam and Eve bit the fruit, the juice of foolishness ran down our chins. The story of humanity from that point forward is described in verse 3. Left to ourselves, the only thing that happens in this fallen world is corruption. We are born with foolish, God-neglecting hearts. We come of age, and our hands and feet and words express our God-neglecting hearts. No one has to teach children to lie. No one takes a class on envy and unforgiveness. We don’t have to learn the ways of foolishness.

Friends, this is why the gospel of Jesus Christ is unavoidably confrontational. Paul says the message about salvation through faith in what Jesus did on the cross—the message that displays God’s manifold wisdom—is considered by unregenerate people to be foolishness.

For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to us who are being saved. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will set aside the intelligence of the intelligent.

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the debater of this age? Hasn’t God made the world’s wisdom foolish? For since, in God’s wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of what is preached. For the Jews ask for signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. Yet to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, because God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor 1:18-25)

Once we’ve read the whole Bible, we discover that God’s wisdom is seen in its highest expression in the cross of Jesus Christ. God’s wisdom exposes the foolishness of humanity. In our God-neglecting life, if we thought God didn’t see our sin or that he isn’t bothered by it, the cross says otherwise. If we thought wisdom is found in books and philosophy, rhetoric, technology, and cultural sophistication, the cross of Jesus Christ shouts, “No!” The wisdom of God—the wisdom this world calls foolishness—is the proclamation that Jesus Christ, God’s Son, came into this world, lived a perfect life, was crucified in our place, bearing the judgment against our God-neglecting lives in his body on the tree, then rose again with new life for all who believe.

According to these words from Paul, at our stage in history—on this side of the cross—we can’t study foolishness and wisdom without reference to what God did, in the fullness of time, when he sent his Son to be our Redeemer.

You want wisdom? The wisdom of the ages begins its lesson here. Embrace Jesus Christ as Lord. Believe that what he did on the cross was enough to cover every God-dismissive, God-neglecting word, thought, and deed.

What an unbelieving world needs is not more proof of the existence of God. Scripture makes clear that every person in the world knows—at the core of his being—there is a God (Rom 1:18-22).

The foolishness that instinctively pushes God aside—the foolishness that says, “There’s no God”—lives in the heart. Our passage announces this as a universal reality (Ps 53:3). Paul, in Romans 1, says the primary work of this innate, God-neglecting foolishness is to suppress the truth that we know about God. The card-carrying atheist and the practical atheist are motivated by the same desire: I don’t want to serve a God; I want to serve myself. I want to live by my own dictates. I want to define my existence, to live for my own pleasures. I’ll distract myself away from the truth God has revealed. I’ll close my ears to creation as it declares God’s “handiwork” (Ps 19:1 ESV). I’ll twist the evidence to rid my world of God.

Here’s the sobering reality: there comes a point when God stops speaking. Go read the rest of Romans 1. There comes a point when we’ve worked so hard to suppress the truth that God gives us over to foolishness. It becomes baked in. At first the atheist closed his ears to God’s glory-revealing symphony in creation. Once hardened, he removes his hands, and he doesn’t hear the trees of the field clapping their hands and the mountains singing for joy. They’re just trees and mountains.

Psalm 53’s portrait of the fool, however, isn’t limited to a functional rejection of God.

Fools Oppress His People

Psalm 53:4

Again the focus here is not so much on a formal, conceptually developed atheism. In a way this psalm, like Psalm 1, divides humanity into two categories of people—the ones who are with God and the ones who aren’t. The former group are “my people” (v. 4), “you” (v. 5), “his people . . . Jacob . . . Israel” (v. 6). They are, by implication, those who do seek God (contrast of v. 2) and who do “call on God” (contrast of v. 4).

In wisdom psalms the contrasts are absolute. The world is full of two kinds of people: the righteous and the unrighteous. The righteous live this way; the unrighteous do exactly the opposite. Psalm 53 has elements of a wisdom psalm. The way the fool treats God (v. 1) carries over in his hostility toward God’s people (v. 4). It’s a kind of hatred by association. So the people who “do not call on God” are the same people who “consume my people as they consume bread.” The curse that fell in Genesis 3 included a promise that there would be enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. That is to say, world history is a battle of light and darkness.

Christian friend, if we think we will have an easy road in this life, we have not yet understood what it means to live as children of light in a world of darkness. Jesus told his disciples he was sending them out as sheep among wolves (Matt 10:16). Notice how binary that is. Jesus, in that moment taking up the rhetorical tools of the wisdom tradition, divided the world in two. There are sheep, and there are wolves. What did he mean? He meant, don’t expect this to be easy. He told them, they hated me; they’ll hate you as well because you’re with me.

This is why Paul said, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against evil, spiritual forces in the heavens” (Eph 6:12). And this is why you hear, for example, Paul speak this way:

But Elymas the sorcerer (that is the meaning of his name) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul away from the faith.

But Saul—also called Paul—filled with the Holy Spirit, stared straight at Elymas and said, “You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery, you son of the devil and enemy of all that is right. Won’t you ever stop perverting the straight paths of the Lord?” (Acts 13:8-10)

It’s almost as though Paul is looking not just at Elymas but through him to invisible realities that operate behind flesh and blood, seeking to keep the world in darkness.

The serpent who wants nothing more than to seek, kill, and destroy (John 10:10) has workers (John 13:27; Acts 13:8-10; 1 Tim 1:19-20). The King who came to give life and that abundantly (John 10:10) has workers as well (Matt 9:38; Phil 2:15; Rev 12:11).

This means, church, we are not living in peacetime. The kingdom of God advances through bold witness and light-bearing holiness. We will not march unimpeded. There is an enemy who will oppose Christ’s glory in your life and your witness to Christ in the world. He wants to distract you, to discourage you. Some he’ll attack with spiritual pride and self-righteousness. Others will be drawn in with the bait of different sins. Others, perhaps many Christians in our culture, he’ll simply distract with a materialism and busyness that, in effect, takes us off the field of kingdom action. This world’s God-rejecting foolishness notwithstanding, our call is forward!

We are counted as fools in this world, but God is the one who defines the terms, and in the end reality will win out. God’s wisdom will prevail. The foolishness of God will be wiser than the God-neglecting “wisdom” of this world. This is where history is heading. Whose side are you on? Are you with God and with his Christ?

God Rejects Fools

Psalm 53:5

Verse 5 is sobering. Remember, this isn’t just a song. And, since we have New Testament revelation throwing its light back into the Old Testament, we also know verse 5 isn’t just ancient history. Verse 5 is prophecy. Verse 5 is coming.

Dread will fall on those who have foolishly pushed God aside and opposed the progress of his kingdom through his people. Conceptual, card-carrying atheists and practical, God-patronizing dabblers—all will fall before him when God the Judge appears in glory.

This verse paints a picture of where this world’s God-denying “wisdom” is headed. Bones scattered. Rejected by God. The ones who consumed God’s people (v. 4) are consumed.

God’s judgment is righteous. No one is wrongly punished. If human history seems to be one unending tale of injustice and oppression, that story will end. All wrongs will be made right. A world that has desired to live without God—outside the light of his love, out from under his rule and blessing and provision—will have what they desire. Jesus said they will be cast into outer darkness (Matt 22:13).

God Restores His People

Psalm 53:6

If humanity is divided into two categories, verse 5 tells us what happens to the fools. Verse 6 tells us what happens to those who belong to God—the ones who have called on his name, the ones who were evildoers but, by grace, stand righteous in his sight because of the work of Jesus Christ.

Look at the concepts that collect around God’s people in verse 6: Deliverance. Restoration. Fortune. Rejoicing. Gladness. This is the salvation the psalmist is praying for. Apparently there was some experience that felt like verse 4. They were being consumed like bread. They were not strong enough to fight off their adversaries. The psalmist announces that the adversaries of God’s people will be put to shame, and what remains for the people of God will be joy. Peter calls it “inexpressible and glorious joy” (1 Pet 1:8). King David calls it “eternal pleasures” at God’s right hand (Ps 16:11).

The story of the world is seen in this psalm through what God is doing. He looks for one who does good. He finds no one seeking him; all have turned away. The New Testament tells us what God does about this. He sends Messiah to rescue us from our sin and God-neglecting foolishness. Then, in the end, God scatters and rejects a world of fools who have suppressed the truth in unrighteousness, and he restores and saves and gladdens the hearts of his people forever.

Where are you in the story?

Reflect and Discuss

1. Do you agree that our culture sneers at God’s judgment? How do you see this play out?
2. What would you say to someone who believes God’s judgment is more of an Old Testament thing and not something anyone needs to worry about today?
3. How would you help someone see the cross as revealing both God’s mercy and his righteous judgment? Where might you go in Scripture to help explain this?
4. As a Christian, how are you pursuing wisdom? How are you cultivating your relationship with God and pursuing obedience to him in all things?
5. Do you catch yourself complaining as if life was supposed to become easy when you became a Christ follower? How does it change the way we live in this world if we expect persecution and pushback?
6. How does the future hope of the believer impact the way we live now? What difference do you think it makes if Christians stop thinking about what God has in store for us when this short life is through?
7. How can you cultivate thankfulness today that God sought you when you weren’t seeking him and opened your eyes to the wisdom and power of the gospel?