Psalm 14

Psalms 14:1

The fool of this verse is not a man lacking intelligence but the Hebrew nabal, a man whose practical living denies God even where his mouth might not, so the corrupt and abominable works follow the statement as its natural fruit rather than a separate charge. Psalm 53 opens with nearly the same three lines, changing chiefly the divine name from the Lord to God and adding its own ending, which the older commentators take as the same composition kept for two different uses rather than two unrelated psalms. Henry reads the denial as wished for more than reasoned, a fool's heart persuading itself of what it wants to be true.

Psalms 14:2-3

The Lord's own search from heaven, seeking anyone that did understand and seek God, returns the verdict of verse 3: they are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy, there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Paul quotes this verdict directly at Romans 3:10-12, as it is written, to prove that Jew and Gentile alike stand under sin, the New Testament's own use of this psalm as a universal indictment rather than a description of one wicked class. The search itself, God looking to see if any exist, is the psalm's own way of ruling out any claim that some were overlooked.

Psalms 14:4

The indictment turns concrete: who eat up my people as they eat bread names oppression so habitual it has become appetite, the poor consumed as easily and as often as a meal. Call not upon the Lord ties the practical atheism of verse 1 to this cruelty directly, the fool's denial and the oppressor's hunger read as one and the same failure. Spurgeon notes the bitterness in the comparison, bread being the commonest of foods, so that the wrong done to God's people is made to look ordinary to the men who do it.

Psalms 14:5-6

A sudden fear falls on the oppressors with no stated cause, and the psalm gives its own reason, for God is in the generation of the righteous, his presence among the poor rather than his absence the ground of their coming reversal. The counsel of the poor that the wicked shamed stands answered by the same verse, because the Lord is his refuge, the mockery undone by the fact the mockers denied. Gill reads the fear as the guilty conscience meeting a God the fool had talked himself out of believing was watching.

Psalms 14:7

Oh that the salvation of Israel: The psalm closes by widening from one man's complaint to the whole nation, oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion, and when the Lord bringeth back the captivity of his people. Some commentators read the verse as David's own prayer for a people still scattered among enemies in his day, while others take the captivity language as evidence the verse was kept in use, and possibly supplemented, during Israel's later exile; the positions are named without a verdict between them. Jacob shall rejoice, and Israel shall be glad closes the psalm on the same two ways the book keeps returning to, the fool's corruption set finally against a whole people's joy.