Thoughts for the Day

Denunciation of Godlessness

Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’
They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;
there is no one who does good.

The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind
to see if there are any who are wise,
who seek after God.

They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse;
there is no one who does good,
no, not one.

Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers
who eat up my people as they eat bread,
and do not call upon the Lord?

There they shall be in great terror,
for God is with the company of the righteous.
You would confound the plans of the poor,
but the Lord is their refuge.

(Lectionary, New Revised Standard Version)

Thoughts

I am amazed that I have never looked at this psalm by King David before. I have a complicated system of checking the work I've done over the last six and a half years - one by computer and one by a paper trail. I needed to check both system, but surprisingly I hadn't looked at it. Its opening line, "Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God", rings a bell with me in practical terms.

I could never say "I had no Grandmothers!" because I had no memory of them, after all I had a mother and a father and they must both have had mothers, so that statement is patently untrue, and from what I was taught both grandmothers had a very positive effect on the life of their children. Neither could I say "There is no wind", because I had never seen the wind. After all I had seen and in some cases felt the effect wind has on us and our world.

King David has an unshakeable conviction that it is up to us to seek God. We will not find evidence of Him in the evils of this world he says, because He is a righteous God. But He knows we will find evidence of His hand at work in all that is good and true; where love overcomes hate; and where the poor, the weak and despised are rescued. I challenge all of us to seek God!

Father-God,
we understand that Your Son came into our world
to re-establish our link to You,
and that He sought to offer us release from the bonds of sin.
When we forget to seek You out
and try to go it alone,
we only find it harder to defeat evil
and tend to get caught in the snares of this world.
Lay our doubts to rest,
and gives us the strength to stay faithful to You.
Amen.