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The certainty of faith is utter assurance because it depends upon nothing of your own. It is entirely trusting that God is a propitious, pardoning God—the God who justifies sinners by forgiving them.
Luther used Psalm 14 to teach faith and works in the new, evangelical way. To get the order of these two things right––faith and then works, not works and then faith––this Psalm also has to teach the nature of sin (which David does in the person of “The Fool”) and the nature of salvation without works.
V. 1 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God!” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good.”
The Fool (Nabal, in Hebrew) speaks! He is singular, but by synecdoche––the part standing for the whole––he is all of us. The Fool who speaks “from his heart” is not merely offering an opinion on nothing; he is offering his heart’s confession—his “last will and testament.” And what comes out of his heart? Unfaith! “There is no God!” We didn’t need to wait for the Enlightenment or the “modern world” to hear people like Friedrich Nietzsche say, “God is dead!” The Fool has been saying it since David’s time––indeed, since the beginning of time, since Adam and Eve. In his famous Song of Moses, the prophet summarized the plight of God’s chosen by saying God would use a fool-nation (Deut. 32:21). And what does this fool say? He says the same thing God’s chosen did when they rejected God’s word and wandered in the wilderness: “But Jeshurun [Israel] waxed, fat, and kicked; you waxed fat, you grew thick, you became sleek.” What, exactly, does a fool say then? Moses finished: “he forsook God who made him, and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation.” The Fool confesses “There is no God!” because he scoffs at the rock of his own salvation.
David opens Psalm 14 by saying 1) the Fool rejects faith in God, 2) the Fool is all of us (every son of Adam), and 3) this “all-Fool” is absolutely sinful. David’s opening line is an absolute expression referring to all people and absolute sin—what we call original sin. This is David’s version of the most scornful verse in the Bible: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth… And was sorry that he made man on the earth” (Gen. 6:5-6). God looked down on the earth and saw only hamas—violence everywhere. The cause of this violence was the Fool, who wakes up one day and says, “There is no God.” This, of course, is the sin against the first commandment, which is the greatest and summative commandment. Original sin is unfaith—not trusting God’s word.
Once this sin entered, there was no stopping it. The Fool, who is all of us, now openly declares that there is no God, which means he will be his own god. This Fool is us, and “they” are corrupt and so have become abominable in their doings. This word, Aelila, is a general noun for what we usually call “works” or “doings.” Sin is abominable doings, whose evil source is one thing: having no faith. This Psalm thus teaches us:
1. The totality of sin. All men are sinners, and all sinners are wholly sinful. We call this the “totality” of sin and of sinners. There is not one who is not sinful, and sin is not part of their deeds; it is all of them. There is nothing you do that is not sinful.
2. The Psalm also teaches the difference between faith and works. Sinners think works come first and produce no good works. Faith thinks it has no good works, yet they pour out like fruit from a good tree. Everything that those with faith do is good.
When Luther wrote his second commentary on Psalm 14, he produced a miniature book on faith and works, which became the basis for many writings after 1519 on this central theological point. It is excruciatingly difficult for a man to make the first confession of his sin. The first sin a man commits is ignorance of God: they know there is a God, but they turn this truth into a lie by ignoring God’s words and works; then they ascribe his words and works to themselves. This is what it means to have no God. It is to make yourself your own god. Sinners ascribe their words and works to God in what the modern world calls projection. In Freudian therapy, a disturbed person projects his own feelings onto his therapist. In real life, sinners project their own works onto God and eschew faith.
As Christian teaching developed in the Middle Ages, preceding Luther, the habit was to ascribe one’s works to God by dividing them into categories of 1) wrong things done, 2) neutral things (adiaphora) that were neither good nor bad, and 3) the morally good works of a man that were meritorious. This division of works into good and bad categories led sinners to think that at least some of the things they did were not sin—they might be adiaphora, or they might even merit God’s approval. Then what followed? They turned God’s part of dealing with good works into the man upstairs doling out merits according to the law’s standard. This not only turned God into a mere rewarder of good deeds, but it also turned the law into an imaginary accountant’s book that paid or collected debts depending upon the works a man produced.
David’s Psalm 14 rushes into this deplorable invention of mankind to say exactly what Paul later said in Romans 14: “whatever is not faith is sin.” Every sinner ought to believe that nothing he does is pleasing to God. Conversely, every Christian should believe that everything he does is pleasing to God. The law was never given chiefly to instruct people about good works or to encourage their fulfillment, but rather to expose the sinner’s lack of faith in the true God. The first commandment is the highest of all commandments and is the bulk of all Scripture. It highlights faith—presenting faith alone as righteousness. This prohibits the scholastics from starting with all the other commandments to establish categories of works in which there are elicited habits or external acts.
But all those attempts to explain the other commandments and the proper behavior of the Christian failed to understand the first commandment. They didn’t merely skip over faith, but scorned it. Morality and good deeds were piled up in the church without any recognition of faith. But faith, the first commandment, is the sole power behind all other works. And what is this faith? It isn’t just another good deed. Faith isn’t a work at all. That’s the point of the first commandment, and why The Fool has to replace God with himself by ignoring the truth: that everything he ever does is an abominable deed in God’s eyes. Faith is first not a work. Second, it is the absolute, assured certainty that God is pleased with you. Faith is absolute; it is not partial. The certainty of faith is utter assurance because it depends upon nothing of your own. It is entirely trusting that God is a propitious, pardoning God—the God who justifies sinners by forgiving them.
This teaching of faith goes completely against the “works mongers,” as Luther calls them. Having no faith, the works mongers are in constant “fermenting toil,” as Luther put it—fermenting like the hops in beer, bubbling and distinguishing, choosing and rejecting its stockpile of good works. In this fermenting of deeds, they teach faith as a mere beginning that must be awakened to get something done—not just once, but regularly until an Aristotelian habit is created by the repetition of works. Thus, the church fell into a habit of its own that puts faith on the same level with other virtues and works, thinking God is somehow appeased by these acts from his anger. That is not a propitious God! That is a money-lender God.
Instead, faith holds that all works are equal, and equally worthless. Worse, true faith kills the constant casuist, the scholastic fermentation over types of works. Faith is alone the “work of works” because it is God’s work, not your own. God doesn’t choose between works to find what merits salvation. Nor does the Christian use a list of virtues to determine where a particular act falls. The Christian to whom God has given faith doesn’t bother with a moral list at all: “he does whatsoever comes into his hands to do,” as Luther says. The scholastics believed God would be propitious after their good works, but God himself is propitious as the one who gives faith. Thus, faith is first, then good works follow—not with a list of deeds to do, but with absolute assurance in God’s choice of you. Luther again: “But no one can please God because he does good works; but he does good works because he pleases God.”
This evangelical teaching on good works, however, is up against a formidable foe. The sin of unbelief is deep, and when a man is without faith, every good work is a whitewashed sepulcher. Only faith, free and given by God, produces good works, and it produces them in a veritable fountain of good. Luther pointed out that his teaching especially runs counter to Aristotle. He and the scholastics hold that doing good means becoming good. This is the old canard that says, “By doing just and temperate things, we are rendered just and temperate.” No! We must be made just and temperate first, and then do just and temperate things, as a good tree produces good fruit.
The wicked think they are pleasing to God because of works, and so spend their lives trying to keep up the works constantly. Meanwhile, the faithful hear nothing but God’s propitious promise. Works try to run to God; instead, faith is where works flow from God. Faith doesn’t sort out sins to determine which are mortal and which are venial. The faithful know that however their works are categorized, they’re all sin. Meanwhile, what they don’t even recognize as good work is being pumped out like a fountain for the good of the neighbor; no good work will ever assure you of God’s favor. Instead, we fight against the constant fear of good works by faith in God’s total mercy. Even the church’s great ceremonies aren’t useful to faith. Luther says there really is only one ceremony of the church anyway—the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. But the power of the sacrament is not your doing or the priest’s doing, but is the promise of Christ for the forgiveness of sin—faith comes by hearing that promise.
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