Psalm 14

From: Short Meditations on the Psalms: Chiefly in Their Prophectic Character By: John Gifford Bellett

Psalm 14 • 1 min. read • grade level: 10

This Psalm gives us the solitary musing of a godly soul over the atheism of the world. He recites God’s verdict (Psa. 14:3-4³They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one. ⁴Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread, and call not upon the Lord. (Psalm 14:3‑4)) upon man after making a solemn inquisition (such as he made of old at Babel and at Sodom, Gen. 11:5; 18:21⁵And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. (Genesis 11:5)
²¹I will go down now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know. (Genesis 18:21))—then anticipates the confusion of the children of men, when God shows Himself in the midst of His generation (thus morally opposed to the generation of Psa. 12:7-8⁷Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever. ⁸The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted. (Psalm 12:7‑8)), and closes with uttering a desire for that occasion.

The “willful king” of the last days is surely contemplated in “the fool” or atheist of this Psalm; for the confederacy which he heads is to be broken up when the salvation here anticipated comes out of Zion. But man is man. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh.” And thus the Apostle can quote this Psalm, when describing men in Romans 3. All of us by nature have the mind of “the willful one,” or the atheist—alienated from the life of God (Eph. 4).