I was reading through Psalms 9 and 10 this morning, and one verse stopped me cold. It is not the verse most people would expect.

Everybody knows Psalm 14:1: "The fool has said in his heart, There is no God" (Psalm 14:1, NKJV). We quote that verse at the outright unbeliever, the one who has made a formal case against God's existence. But Psalm 10 is not describing that man. Psalm 10 describes someone far more common and far more uncomfortable to talk about.

"The wicked in his proud countenance does not seek God; God is in none of his thoughts." — Psalm 10:4 (NKJV)

Read that again slowly. This man is not arguing that God does not exist. He never says so. He has simply stopped factoring God into anything he does. God is not denied. God is simply not there when decisions are made. That is not atheism of the mind. That is atheism of the moment.

Two Different Diseases

Formal atheism says, "There is no God." Practical atheism says nothing at all. It does not need to, because it has already answered the question through its behavior. A man can stand and sing every verse of every hymn on Sunday and still live all week as if God were not in the room. He is not lying when he says he believes. He has simply stopped letting that belief shape his thoughts when it costs him something.

That is what makes Psalm 10:4 sharper than the usual question we ask people. "Do you believe in God?" is a survey question. Almost everyone in a Sunday pew will answer yes without blinking. But "was God in your thoughts the last time you were dishonest?" is a different question entirely. Was He in your thoughts the last time you told a lie you would never call a lie? Was He in your thoughts the last time your eyes or your mind lingered where they had no business lingering, entertaining an improper, lustful thought about someone who was not yours? Was He in your thoughts the last time you lost your temper and let your mouth run wherever it wanted? If God was in none of those thoughts, the survey answer was true, but the diagnosis is still bad.

Our Hearts Are Wicked

It is easy to read Psalm 10:4 and picture a stranger. Someone hardened, clearly outside the faith, someone who has never sat in a pew. Scripture will not let us keep that distance. Our hearts are wicked. Not theirs. Ours.

"The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?" — Jeremiah 17:9 (NKJV)

That is not a verse about the man down the street who does not know the Lord. It is a verse about the organ beating in your chest and mine, apart from Christ actively ruling it. Paul said the same thing about himself and Titus, and both were already serving in ministry when he wrote it.

"For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another." — Titus 3:3 (NKJV)

If you doubt that a delivered people can slide straight back into the wickedness they were rescued from, read the book of Judges. God delivers Israel. Israel obeys for a season. Comfort sets in. Israel drifts into idolatry, worse than before. God hands them over to their enemies. They cry out. God delivers them again, and the whole cycle repeats (Judges 2:11-19). That is not one bad chapter in Israel's history. That is the entire structure of the book. Comfort kills them every time, not persecution. Nobody had to talk Israel out of their faith. They simply stopped staying close enough to keep it.

That is why "we are doing all the right things" is such a dangerous sentence for a Christian to rest in. We pray, fast, tithe, and give our time to missions. Somewhere in the middle of all that faithfulness, we quietly start believing we could never become the man in verse 4. That belief is not humility, and it is not safety. It is the drift already underway, because the moment you decide your own heart is not desperately wicked apart from Christ, you have stopped watching it.

This is also part of how the church earns its reputation. Not because holiness offends people (it should not), but because a Christian who has forgotten his own capacity for wickedness will look down on the very people who have not yet been rescued from it, instead of remembering he was rescued from that same place himself. Jesus condemned exactly this in the Pharisee who prayed,

"God, I thank You that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector." — Luke 18:11 (NKJV)

That man went home unjustified. The one who beat his chest and could not even lift his eyes to heaven went home with God (Luke 18:13-14).

When the Wicked Man Keeps Going

Psalm 10 does not end at verse 4. Keep reading, and the same man who excluded God from his thinking does something worse a few verses later.

"He has said in his heart, 'God has forgotten; He hides His face; He will never see.'" — Psalm 10:11 (NKJV)

Notice what happened. He did not remain a man who simply forgot God. He became a man who reshaped God, quietly deciding which kind of God would be convenient for him to answer to. A God who forgets. A God who looks away. That is not denial anymore. That is invention. And this is the word I want to leave with believers, not unbelievers, because this is our temptation more than theirs. We are far more likely to build a comfortable Jesus who agrees with us than to become outright atheists. We do not deny God. We quietly edit Him until He stops being inconvenient, and then we call the invention by His name.

The Most Terrifying Verse in Scripture

If you do not remain in the Word and do not stay prayed up every day, your heart will harden and drift back toward wickedness. It will not knock and ask permission first. It will not feel like rebellion as it happens. It will feel like ministry. This is exactly what Jesus describes in what I believe are the most terrifying words He ever spoke.

"Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'" — Matthew 7:22-23 (NKJV)

These were not people faking it for an audience. They cast out demons. They prophesied. They did so in His name and believed every bit of it. And He still tells them He never knew them. That is what a wicked heart does when it is left to build its own version of Jesus instead of submitting to the one revealed in Scripture. It does not announce itself as a departure from the faith. It dresses itself up as service, right up until the day it stands before Him and hears those four words.

This is why the diagnostic in Psalm 10:4 matters more than the survey question. "Do you believe in God" will not keep you out of Matthew 7:23. Only a heart that stays in His thoughts, day after day, will.

A Word From My Own Life

I can say this because I have lived it. There was a season when I made decisions without giving God a thought first. I did not deny Him. I simply did not consult Him. It went badly, as it always does when a man leans entirely on his own judgment. I do not make decisions that way anymore. I do not move on anything of weight without seeking His counsel first, because I learned the hard way what Psalm 10:4 describes. You do not have to reject God to live without Him for a season.

This Week

Do not ask yourself the survey question this week. Ask the Psalm 10 question instead.

The next time you are tempted to shade the truth, stop and notice whether God was in that thought before you spoke. The next time your temper rises, stop and notice whether He was in that thought before you let it loose. And examine the Jesus you have been carrying around. Is He the Jesus of Scripture, or is He the version you built because the real one asks too much of you?

God is not impressed by a right answer on a survey. He is looking for a man whose thoughts He is welcome in.

Pastor Keith