Warning: potentially dense devotional ahead. But please indulge me this week a bit of literary analysis to arrive at an encouragement.
“Once upon a time, in a land far away, there lived a child who would change the world.” Or, “But there was no wolf.” Or, “And they lived happily ever after.” Quotations like these are typical of an omniscient narrator. No character in the relevant story would know (or admit) the truth of the given claim, yet as readers we receive the narrator’s comments as indisputable. Were such narrators characters rather than literary devices, they would have to be omniscient: hence the term.
The 14th Psalm sets those who ignore and disobey God in opposition to him. On one hand, there is the fool who, without looking up to search, says in his heart, “There is no God.” On the other hand is the God who, looking down from heaven to see if anyone is looking up to find him, appears to declare, “There is none good.” Such a tête-à-tête between the omniscient and omnipotent God and the fool would be powerful enough to make the point.
On a closer reading, though, it is not the omniscient God who says it. Neither is it opinionated David. It is an omniscient narrator, not even a real character. Ironically, because it comes from a literary device, the claim is more poignantly absolute and more powerful than if it had come from the omniscient and omnipotent God himself. It is not a tu quoque (“you too”), back-and-forth exchange between the fool and God. The fool’s empty utterance stands in contrast not with another utterance, but with an indisputable fact. “The fool says what he says. But the truth is otherwise.”
God magnifies his already boundlessly powerful voice through something as ethereal as a literary device, just as he does with shepherds, farmers, and fishermen; with repentant priests and former antagonists; indeed, with the “foremost” of sinners—through all of whom, by the way, he changes the world.
This week, may he do the same with us.