The Practical Atheist's Guide to a Prosperous Hell Text: Psalm 10:1-6
Introduction: The Honest Cry and the Brazen Lie
We live in an age that prides itself on its authenticity, but which is, in reality, drowning in a sea of self-deceit. The modern man wants to ask hard questions of God, but he is rarely prepared for the hard answers God gives about him. This psalm opens with one of those honest, gut-wrenching questions that every saint, at some point, has wanted to cry out. And then, in a masterful turn, the psalmist stops looking up at the apparently silent heavens and begins looking around at the noisy, prosperous, and arrogant wicked. In doing so, he gives us a perfect anatomy of unbelief.
Psalm 10 is a continuation of Psalm 9. In many of the ancient manuscripts, they were one psalm. Psalm 9 is a song of high praise for God's judgments, and it ends with a plea for God to remind the nations that they are but men. And then, as though in answer, Psalm 10 opens with the raw cry of a man who sees these mere men getting away with bloody murder. This is not a contradiction; it is the biblical realism of the life of faith. We live in the tension between the "already" of God's declared victory and the "not yet" of its final consummation. We sing God's praises for His justice, and then we look out the window and ask, "Lord, where is it?"
The first verse is the cry of faith under pressure. The next five verses are a clinical, unflinching diagnosis of the spiritual disease that has infected the man of the world. This is not just about some distant, cartoon villain. This is a description of the operating system that runs in the heart of every natural man. It is the worldview of practical atheism. And we must understand it, because this is the spirit of our age. This is the logic that drives our media, our universities, our politicians, and very often, our neighbors. It is a logic that appears to work, for a time, but its end is destruction.
The Text
Why do You stand afar off, O Yahweh?
Why do You hide Yourself in times of distress?
In his lofty pride the wicked hotly pursues the afflicted; Let them be caught in the thoughts which they have devised.
For the wicked boasts of his soul’s desire, And the greedy man curses and spurns Yahweh.
The wicked, in the haughtiness of his countenance, does not seek Him. All his thoughts are, “There is no God.”
His ways prosper at all times; Your judgments are on high, out of his sight; As for all his adversaries, he snorts at them.
He says in his heart, “I will not be shaken; From generation to generation I will not be in adversity.”
(Psalm 10:1-6 LSB)
The Painful Question (v. 1)
The psalm begins with a lament, a cry born of confusion and distress.
"Why do You stand afar off, O Yahweh? Why do You hide Yourself in times of distress?" (Psalm 10:1)
This is the cry of Job. It is the cry of Asaph in Psalm 73. It is the cry of David in Psalm 13, "How long, O Lord?" It is even the cry of our Lord on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Psalm 22:1). This is not the question of a skeptic trying to trap God. This is the question of a believer trying to find God in the middle of the storm. The very act of asking "Why do You stand afar off?" is an admission that he believes God is, in fact, there. He is Yahweh, the covenant-keeping God. The problem is not God's existence, but His apparent distance.
To the saint, the problem of evil is not a philosophical abstraction; it is a personal agony. It is the felt absence of God when His presence is most desperately needed. "Times of distress" are precisely when we would expect the covenant Lord to show up. But sometimes, in His inscrutable wisdom, He seems to hide. This is a profound test of faith. Do we trust what He has said in His word over what we feel in our circumstances? Do we believe He is near, as He has promised, even when He feels a million miles away? God is not testing us to see if we have faith. He is testing us to give us faith, to forge it in the fire of apparent abandonment, so that we learn to walk by faith and not by sight.
The Profile of Pride (v. 2-4)
The psalmist then pivots from his question to God to a detailed description of the wicked man who is causing the distress.
"In his lofty pride the wicked hotly pursues the afflicted; Let them be caught in the thoughts which they have devised. For the wicked boasts of his soul’s desire, And the greedy man curses and spurns Yahweh. The wicked, in the haughtiness of his countenance, does not seek Him. All his thoughts are, 'There is no God.'" (Psalm 10:2-4 LSB)
The root of all wickedness is identified immediately: "lofty pride." The Hebrew speaks of an arrogant burning. This is not a quiet, internal arrogance. It is a hot, active, consuming pride that fuels his persecution of the weak. The wicked man sees the afflicted, the humble, the poor in spirit, and he despises them. Why? Because their humility is a constant rebuke to his pride.
Notice the prayer that is shot up in the middle of the description: "Let them be caught in the thoughts which they have devised." This is a foundational principle of biblical justice. God's judgment is often to give men exactly what they want, to let them fall into the very pits they have dug for others. The noose that Haman built for Mordecai was used to hang Haman. This is not vindictiveness; it is the simple outworking of a moral universe. What you sow, you will also reap.
Verse 3 unpacks the psychology of this pride. The wicked man "boasts of his soul's desire." He is not ashamed of his lusts; he celebrates them. He calls his sin "authenticity." He parades what God calls shameful. Our culture has this down to a science. We have entire months dedicated to boasting in what the Bible calls abomination. And the second half of the verse shows the flip side: he who blesses what God curses must necessarily curse what God blesses. The greedy man, the one who blesses his own covetousness, "curses and spurns Yahweh." You cannot serve God and Mammon. If you praise your own desires, you will inevitably spurn the Lord who commands you to deny them.
Verse 4 gets to the theological core of the issue. "The wicked, in the haughtiness of his countenance..." The pride is written on his face. The Hebrew is literally "in the height of his nose." He walks around with his nose in the air, and from that lofty vantage point, "he does not seek Him." Why would he? To seek God is an admission of need. It is an act of humility. The proud man is constitutionally incapable of this. And so he comes to his grand conclusion, the central tenet of his entire operating system: "All his thoughts are, 'There is no God.'" This is not primarily an intellectual conclusion. This is a moral one. He is not an atheist because the arguments for God are weak. He is an atheist because the desires of his heart are strong. He cannot afford for there to be a God, because a God would mean a Judge, and a Judge would mean he is not, in fact, the center of the universe. This is practical atheism. He may not write books on the subject, but he lives, breathes, and thinks as if God does not exist.
The Prosperity of the Fool (v. 5)
Now we come to the part that so often troubles the saints, the part that drove Asaph to the brink of despair in Psalm 73.
"His ways prosper at all times; Your judgments are on high, out of his sight; As for all his adversaries, he snorts at them." (Psalm 10:5 LSB)
This is the brutal, observable fact of the matter, at least from a street-level view. The wicked man's schemes seem to work. His business ventures succeed. His political machinations pay off. His sinful lifestyle brings him pleasure. His "ways prosper at all times." There appears to be no immediate divine retribution. The lightning bolts stay in the clouds.
Why is this? The second clause tells us: "Your judgments are on high, out of his sight." God's moral law, His standards of justice, are so far above the wicked man's head that he doesn't even see them. He is like a man standing at the bottom of a skyscraper, unable to see the penthouse. He lives entirely in a horizontal reality. Because he cannot see God's judgments, he assumes they do not exist. He mistakes his own spiritual blindness for the absence of light. His worldview has no category for transcendent justice, so when he gets away with something, it simply confirms his bias.
And because he feels no threat from above, he certainly fears no threat from below. "As for all his adversaries, he snorts at them." This is a picture of utter contempt. He sees those who oppose him, the afflicted and the righteous, as gnats. He simply scoffs and moves on, confident in his own strength and success. This is the bubble of the wicked, a self-constructed reality where God is irrelevant and man is supreme.
The Delusion of Permanence (v. 6)
Finally, the psalmist records the internal monologue of the wicked, the creed that he whispers to himself.
"He says in his heart, 'I will not be shaken; From generation to generation I will not be in adversity.'" (Psalm 10:6 LSB)
This is the great lie that pride tells. Because things have always been good for him, he assumes they will always be good for him. He mistakes a temporary trend for an eternal principle. He builds his house on the sand of his present prosperity and declares it to be bedrock. He believes he is untouchable, unshakable. He is the captain of his own fate.
This is the same spirit we see in the rich fool in the parable, who told his soul to "relax, eat, drink, be merry" (Luke 12:19). It is the spirit of Babylon the Great in Revelation, who says in her heart, "I sit as a queen, I am no widow, and mourning I shall never see" (Rev. 18:7). This is the ultimate self-deception. He projects his current success into an infinite future, declaring himself immune to adversity. He believes his own press. He is convinced that his little kingdom will last forever.
Conclusion: Two Worldviews, Two Destinies
So, what are we to do with this? This psalm sets before us two starkly different ways of seeing the world. The first is the way of the psalmist, who begins with the painful reality of a world that seems out of joint, where God seems distant, but who brings that pain and confusion to God in honest prayer. His distress drives him to God.
The second is the way of the wicked, who also sees a world where God seems distant, and who concludes from this that God is irrelevant. His prosperity drives him further from God. He builds a worldview on the foundation of his own pride, he papers the walls with his own desires, he furnishes it with his temporary successes, and he locks the door from the inside. He says, "There is no God," and "I will not be shaken."
But the Bible declares that God is not silent forever, and that every man will be shaken. The day is coming when God will rise from His apparent slumber, and His judgments, which were once "on high, out of his sight," will come crashing down into the wicked man's living room. On that day, the only one who will not be shaken is the one whose trust is in the Lord. The wicked man's self-made world is a house of cards in a hurricane. God's patience is not His approval. His silence is not his absence. It is the space He gives men to repent.
Therefore, when we are in distress, when we are tempted to ask why God is so far off, let us look at this portrait of the wicked man and thank God that He has delivered us from such blindness. Let us bring our honest questions to our covenant Lord, knowing that He is not distant, but has drawn nearer than we can imagine in the person of His Son. And let us pray for the wicked, that God would mercifully shatter their delusions, topple their pride, and grant them the humility to seek Him before the shaking begins.