Why is it foolish to live as if God didn't exist?
Text: Psalm 14
Hosts:
Brian French
Vicki Hitzges
Nathan Norman
Narrator: Kristin Norman
The CrossTalk Podcast is a production of CrossTalk Global, equipping biblical communicators, so every culture hears God’s voice. To find out more, or to support the work of this ministry please visit www.crosstalkglobal.org
Produced by Nathan James Norman/Untold Podcast Production
© 2025 CrossTalk Global
Kristin: I wonder how many of us are atheists now. I don't mean the sort of atheist who believes that God does not exist. No, I'm talking about the sort of people who go about their lives and live as if God does not exist. I'm talking about those of us who compartmentalize God to Sunday mornings, then go about life without calling to him or considering what his will is. This is a reality for many of us Christians. But why shouldn't we live like this? Being a Christian is hard and other people seem to be having so much fun. Isn't it just easier to accept Jesus, come to church once a week, give a little money in the offering, and move on? Why shouldn't we live like God doesn't exist? Today, while Dr. Kent is away teaching with CrossTalk, join Vicki Hitskus, Brian French, and Nathan Norman as they discover why King David warned against living like God doesn't exist in Psalm 14. Welcome to Crosstalk, a Christian podcast whose goal is for us to encourage each other to not only increase our knowledge of the Bible, but to take the next step beyond information into transformation. Our goal is to bring the Bible to life, into all our lives. I'm Kristin Norman. Today, Brian French, Vicki Hitskiss, and Nathan Norman take a look at the Psalms. If you have a Bible handy, turn to Psalm 14 as we join their discussion.
Nathan: Vicki and Brian, Kristen mentioned in the intro that many people live as functional atheists. Have you seen believers act as if there was no God? And if so, how?
Vicki: Yeah, I have. Many times. It's. It's hard on my heart, and it makes me wonder if they really are believers, because if they are believers, they should live like God exists. And even in my own life. Sometimes, sometimes when we're doing this program, I think you need to live like that. And it changes my behavior. This has been a good program for me.
Nathan: Me too. Don't you hate that? So convicting.
Brian: Physician, heal thys. Right. Yeah.
Nathan: We're not doing this for you listeners. We're doing it for us. But go ahead, Brian.
Brian: I have seen that, and it's probably my greatest frustration. I remember back during the COVID years, there were people who disagreed on how to handle Covid as believers, and there was just outright condemnation that if you don't believe what I believe on how to respond to this, then you clearly don't love God. And I remember thinking back then going, really? That's the divider between the sheep and the goats, the ones who are inside the kingdom and outside the kingdom, as to how they respond to A worldwide pandemic. But in all honestly, where I really see it the most is just sort of a. A passive apathy where people come and they smile and they say, nice sermon, pastor. And over a period of time that I get to know them as a pastor and I ask them, so what are the big things that God is working on in your life? And they either come up with the same answers over and over again or they don't know. It's very challenging. I mean, Jesus was pretty clear that he wanted us to ask the heart's questions. The motive behind the method when it comes to obeying the law and the Sermon on the Mount and things like that and wrestling and processing, and it just kind of seems like I'm just nodding and listening.
Nathan: So Psalm 14 is attributed to King David, and it starts out strong. Vicki, this is maybe one of the strongest psalms that we're going to read. Go ahead.
Vicki: It says, the fool says in his heart there is no God. They are corrupt. They do vile deeds. There is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the human race to see if there is one who is wise, one who seeks God. All have turned away. All alike have become corrupt. There is no one who does good. Not even one.
Nathan: Wow. All right, let's back up here a little bit. A fool in the Bible is not the way we think in 21st century English. It is not a mentally deficient person. It's a morally deficient one. Not only a sinner, but one who embraces his or her sin. And David says, this morally deficient person says in his heart, meaning the innermost of a person. So this isn't the seat of emotions. This is who you are, that there is no God. In Hebrew literature, the heart is the seat of the will. So to go through life as if there is no God is an act of the will. David is talking here not only about intellectual atheism, but functional atheists as well, who live out each day as if there was no God. They might say there is a God in their minds, but they live as if he doesn't exist. And why is it foolish to live as if there was no God? Because David says, the whole of humanity is corrupt. The whole of humanity is sinful. This is one of the strongest passages in Scripture concerning the depravity of humanity. And it's so important that this psalm is almost repeated verbatim in Psalm 53. How sorrowful this psalm is. Apart from God, all of humanity is morally bankrupt. Even the good things we try to do are twisted and corrupted by our selfishness, by our sin. Okay, a long explanation for what a fool is. But, Brian and Vicki, what emotions is David invoking in this part of the psalm?
Brian: I think he's pretty courageous to state this, but he's clearly frustrated.
Vicki: Yeah, he has to have some despair there, don't you think?
Nathan: Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Frustration. How terrible are you guys? But then. Right, Vicki? But he says, all of us. God looks at all of us and he's like, oh, you're all terrible. Wow. Wow. Those are hard emotions. Good answers to hard emotions. So David's making a pretty bold statement, but let's not get lost in it. The argument isn't that non believers cannot do morally good things. The argument is that apart from God, we will do morally wrong things. Those are a little bit different. Right. Because we have friends who are both intellectual and functional atheists. They can do good things because they're made in the image of God. It's not like they're as depraved as they could possibly be. But we're saying that apart from God, we don't have a understanding of what is good or wrong, and we will ultimately often do wrong unless we find ourselves grounded in God. So this might be a little more of a Sunday school answer, but why is it impossible to do good apart from God?
Brian: I think you answered that question just a couple of moments ago. We don't functionally know what good is, and we don't know the extreme level that good requires. How good is good enough? Is. Is a 50 a pass on the moral exam? We don't know what the number is to pass until God graciously tells us in Scripture that it's perfection. It's to be holy as he is holy. And that's a level that we cannot attain.
Nathan: Yeah. My metaphor is that the way I think of it is kind of like if someone told me, nathan, you got to build a 747. And okay, so I go to the library and I find books on how to build a giant aircraft. And if they said you have to do it on your own, Right. I might be able to find the information on how to build it on my own. But I can't build an entire 747 on my own. I need other people who know how to operate equipment. I can't possibly learn all the things that are to learn. Apparently, the wings are glued on. What kind of glue am I going to use? Am I using Elmer's glue? Hopefully not. And if I try that, what's going to be the result. It's going to be catastrophic. I can gain the information, but even the information is not enough. I need, I need help in, in, in doing the building of this 747. The same way I need help to follow after God, to take on his character and to follow what he's called us to do. So David adds insight into what happens when we make decisions without remembering that God is there, that God exists, that God sees. This is what he says in verse 4.
Vicki: Will evildoers never understand? They consume my people as they consume bread. They do not call on the Lord.
Nathan: This is a little tricky. What emotions is David getting in this part of the psalm?
Vicki: He's frustrated.
Nathan: Yeah.
Brian: I think he's disgusted that what they are doing is deeply harming his people and deeply harming him. And the metaphor he uses, they're just eating them alive like they're bread. And nobody thinks, I wonder if there's a moral conscious decision about eating this bread. Sometimes we do that with other foods. We do that with the carb foods, we do that with the sugar laced foods, we do that with the snacks. Should I really be doing this? But nobody thinks that way about bread. It's just. I need bred to live. This is so callous. I think he's disgusted.
Nathan: So stay with me here for a second, but have you guys ever hurt someone unintentionally?
Brian: Absolutely not. Or it depends on who you ask. And you're not allowed to ask anyone that knows me.
Nathan: I think I saw your wife in the background.
Brian: No, no, no, she's, she's, she went to. Yeah, she's not here anymore. Nope. Can't ask her.
Vicki: Oh, Brian. I did it last week. I went to a. I went to a banquet and it was a very conservative audience and there was a guy and everybody, they weren't even wearing gray. They were wearing navy blue and brown. And then there was one guy there who had long hair to his shoulders and he was wearing like granimals, like bright blue and pink and white and yellow and he had on long dangly earrings. And I mean, he, he was. And I just knew he was going to be so much fun and creative and nobody was talking to him. And I thought, oh, that's no fun.
Brian: Go.
Vicki: Come on, loosen up, people. And so I thought, I don't want him to just sit there by himself. And plus, he's going to be a hoot, you know? So I went over and I whispered in his ear. I said, of all the people here, you look like you don't quite belong. He would not speak to me.
Nathan: Oh.
Vicki: And he. That wounded him to his soul. And really, long story short, he got up and left. He didn't stay for the dinner. And. Yeah, and the person who invited him came up and tapped me on the shoulder and said, I want you to know this has been a huge disappointment. Yeah. And I was trying to have fun with the guy, and. Boy, that didn't go over well.
Brian: Well, thankfully, I've never done anything like that.
Nathan: As you just lied to us about your wife not being home.
Brian: Just this morning. We always take, like, five, ten minutes. We take some time to pray together, and then we take five to ten minutes just to coordinate the day, make sure we haven't missed anything. And I reminded her, yeah, I've got our. Our governing board meeting tonight at our church tonight. And she goes, well, it's not on the calendar. I don't see it. I held up my phone. I said, look, it's right here. How do you not have this working? And she held up her phone, and it wasn't there. And I said, well, it's clearly got to be a problem with the phone. So we went through, you know, about an hour of different types of troubleshooting things with calendars to try and get them to sync. I even moved all of my appointments from my work calendar to a new calendar so that it would automatically update on our. On our phones. And then I realized that I had the wrong date for the meeting on my calendar.
Vicki: Oh, no.
Brian: And I had blamed her. I had blamed technology, and she was just like, this isn't my fault. And I said, well, it's not mine, but clearly just trying to get it, you know, make sure that we were coordinated. I just pushed the blame onto other things and people without saying, hey, maybe it could be my fault.
Nathan: And the worst thing was you wasted everyone's time. Okay, well, the reason I wanted to talk about that is because I think that's a little bit of what David's talking about here. He says, will evildoers never understand. They don't get it. They don't get that they're eating people alive. Right. What they're doing is evil. He's not excusing their behavior, but he said, they can't understand because they're so disconnected from God, they lose sight of objective morality. Well, this is just what I'm doing, and it's fine. And there's nothing wrong with it. When they lose sight of God, they're able to dehumanize people. We also risk Losing sight of the fact that everyone is made in the image of God. David has a bit of grace here because he says some of the truly evil actions of the wicked seem unintentional to themselves. They don't know that they're causing harm because they've forgotten about God. I imagine it's a little like the way people interact with each other over social media. We write the horrible things we write because we forget that God sees. And there's a person made in the image of God on the other side of the screen. But there is a God, and he does take action. Verse five. Go ahead, Vicki.
Vicki: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you saying that my thing was sinful?
Nathan: No, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, good point. Good pushback. Let me back up. So in the same way that we sometimes unintentionally cause harm, he's saying that people who completely disconnect themselves from God, they don't see what they're doing as harmful. Often they see it as unintentional. As Brian, when he put the wrong date here and wasted everybody's time. Or as you, when you were trying to engage someone and you hurt their feelings and they left the place, which. There was no malice involved in any of those things. It's just, okay, this is. You know, we made a mistake. Whoops, sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. But the evil. Why can they do this evil over? And why can they consume people? Why can they take from the poor and make them starve? Starve? Right. Why are they able to do this? He's saying they're so disconnected from God and his moral virtue that they don't see what they're doing. It's almost like us stepping on someone's foot by accident. We're like, oh, yeah, didn't see your foot there. Sorry, no. So he's not saying that our unintentional actions are necessarily sinful, but the way the evil are working because they're so disconnected from God, they don't see a problem with it. They don't see a problem with it.
Vicki: Okay, verse five, it says, then they will be filled with dread, for God is with those who are righteous. You sinners, frustrate the plans of the oppressed, for the Lord is his refuge.
Nathan: The ungodly naturally afflict and hurt those who actually do call out to God, because without people who follow God there to remind them of God's presence, it would be easier to ignore God and his morality. But their belligerence, their selfish sin will give way to horror when they realize that they've been hurting God's people, the Lord's people. They will be terrified when they realize how foolish they've been, the implications of all their actions and of the realization that God really does exist. To oppose God's people is to oppose God himself. All right, what emotions is David bringing up here?
Brian: I want to say it's like a. He's trying to invoke fear in those who are wicked, who. Those who are saying, I can do whatever I want and there's no one around to judge me because he says there is a God and he is going to judge the people who afflict his people. But I think he's also trying to instill confidence in those who are righteous to those who do believe that there is a God, that no God sees you and God will judge and God will take care of you in time. So he's trying to instill some, some confidence, some hope as well.
Nathan: Yeah, yeah. There's like some bravado here, right? Like where he's, he's almost like a diss track on a rap album. You know, he's saying, yep, you're going to get yours, you're going to get yours. You should be scared. And we're encouraged by that. So where do we see oppression today? So 21st century, around the world, how are people oppressed? Not just Christians in general, but, oh.
Vicki: You see it with governments oppressing people. You see it unfortunately with the wealthy oppressing the poor. Bullies. You see it. Bullies.
Brian: I think another way that it shows up, I, I obviously because of the work that we get to do in crosstalk and the stories that we get to hear. Some of those stories are hard to hear because they are of the things that Vicki talked about that there's enormous religious persecution that we see from governments we see from wealthy to the poor. We also see from families where people are leaving ancestral beliefs to become Christ followers and their families are cutting them off because of that. Where I see it mostly at here in the United States and where I get to minister just outside of Washington D.C. i see a lot of pharisaical behavior where we're creating this type of tribe that is a closed off, gated community that says if you don't believe what I believe or do what I want you to do, we will withhold care and we will withhold justice from you. If you don't hold to a particular tribe, you don't hold to a particular set of secondary beliefs, then we are going to cut you off until you do. And we are going to show you who has the power. I see that kind of oppression come where you mentioned before that people are made in the image of God and so we will not treat them with a lack of dignity or respect. And yet sometimes the way we talk and so on does exactly that in order to puff ourselves up and make ourselves feel better.
Nathan: Yeah, yeah. It is hard, and it's hard to come to the realization that when I disconnect myself from God or I am not aware that God exists, that maybe I'm becoming the oppressor and God does not turn a blind eye to that. So we shouldn't live like atheists or like God doesn't exist. We should always be mindful of his existence and that he cares about our actions. Because the sins of the godless will injure everyone. It injures everyone. When we go about each and every day as if God didn't exist, we are blinded by sin and end up hurting others and ourselves without even knowing it. Humanity is so tainted by sin that we cannot see sin working within us. Well, what can we do? David saw sin destroying believers and nonbelievers alike. And so he cries out in verse seven, go ahead Vicki, take us home.
Vicki: It says, oh, that Israel's deliverance would come from Zion. When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice, Israel will be glad.
Nathan: And so he is looking forward to one day when this sin enslavement that we live under will be put to an end. He's looking forward to the coming of the Messiah. David doesn't have a full understanding of that, but as New Testament believers we do. When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice, Israel will be glad, God's help will come and we will no longer have to live under this oppressive sin. And we'll be able to clearly discern what is good, evil and what is wrong and not hurt others with our intentional or unintentional sins because we will know what is right and what is good and will have the power through Christ to stand up under it. To deny God's existence corrupts us. It's like an adult child forgetting about their parents. David looked forward to freedom from sin. And that freedom came not through human ability or education, but in Jesus Christ. But even as Christians, we tend to compartmentalize our lives. We have our family life, our social life, our work life and our church life. But being delivered by Jesus isn't just a one time event. It's not a One day of the week thing. It's transformative. When we come to Jesus, we stop living a life of self centeredness and we start living a God centered and other centered life. If Jesus isn't directing your daily life, your faith in him is damaged. You might as well live like an atheist is the argument that David's making here. So why shouldn't we live like atheists? Like God doesn't exist? We shouldn't live like God doesn't exist because the sins of the godless will injure everyone.
Brian: And God will hold us accountable for that.
Nathan: He will. He will. If you don't want to live like a fool, be mindful of Jesus wherever you go.
Kristin: We shouldn't behave like people who don't believe that God does not exist. That's because if you are a believer, you have the Holy Spirit inside you to guide you. The sins of the godless will injure everyone. Meanwhile, we should see Christians behavior and see the fruit of the Spirit in their lives. The crosstalk podcast is a production of crosstalk Global Equipping biblical communicators so every culture hears God's voice. To find out more about this educational nonprofit organization, please visit www.this month we're training biblical communicators in Panama and Kenya. And next month we're launching a new educational cohort group in Southern California. Help us empower the next generation of biblical communicators. All you have to do is click donate in the show notes and make a donation of any size. You can also support this show by rating it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you find it. Be sure to listen next Friday as we continue our discussion in the word of God and discover how to go deeper in our relationship with God. You won't want to miss it.
Nathan: My nut joke in there though.
Brian: You sound like my kids ministry volunteers. You're way too long. You need to cut that down.
Nathan: Nice.
Brian: Ken.
Vicki: And what's your name?
Nathan: Nathan.
Brian: Now it's a guy.
Nathan: You know, I was just telling someone how you were one of my closest friends and here we are. It's easier within our social group to criticize. Like, Vicky has no problem criticizing Kent. I still have a hard time with it. And the only person who has a harder time with me criticizing Kent is Kent. I gotta poke Vicki. Like, hey, tell him this. We love you, cunt.