The Divine Senses and the Senseless Man Text: Psalm 94:8-11
Introduction: The Rebellion of the Witless
We are living in an age of celebrated foolishness. Our generation has mistaken its technological prowess for genuine wisdom, and in its arrogance, has concluded that it can successfully ghost God. The modern project is an attempt to build a world where man is the measure of all things, where our courts can redefine reality, our scientists can explain away the Creator, and our philosophers can assure us that we are accountable to no one but ourselves. But in doing this, they have become like a man sawing off the branch he is sitting on, all the while congratulating himself on his progress.
The psalmist here is addressing a similar brand of folly. He is speaking to the "senseless" and the "fools" who live as though God is deaf, blind, and ignorant. They carry on with their wicked schemes, their oppression of the righteous, and their proud boasts, laboring under the delusion that the God of Jacob does not see, that the Almighty does not notice. This is practical atheism. It is not the intellectual atheism of the university lounge, but the functional atheism of the corrupt judge, the greedy businessman, and the petty tyrant on a school board. They may pay lip service to God, but their actions betray their true creed: that God is safely distant, conveniently detached, and ultimately irrelevant.
This psalm is a direct assault on that delusion. It is a series of rhetorical questions designed to be unanswerable, questions that expose the sheer irrationality of thinking one can outwit the Omniscient. The argument is profoundly simple, an argument from creation. It is an appeal to the most basic logic, a logic that our generation has abandoned in its mad flight from accountability. The psalmist grabs the practical atheist by the lapels and forces him to confront the absurdity of his position. If you believe in a God who creates, you must believe in a God who perceives. If you deny the latter, you are not just a rebel; you are a buffoon.
This passage is a divine rebuke, not just to the wicked of ancient Israel, but to every secularist, every materialist, and every proud sinner who thinks his thoughts are his own and his deeds are done in the dark. God is not an absentee landlord. He is the one who wired the universe for sound and light, and He is listening and watching with perfect, unfiltered clarity.
The Text
Discern, you senseless among the people;
And when will you have insight, you fools?
He who planted the ear, does He not hear?
He who formed the eye, does He not see?
He who disciplines the nations, will He not rebuke,
Even He who teaches man knowledge?
Yahweh knows the thoughts of man,
That they are vanity.
(Psalm 94:8-11 LSB)
A Summons to Sanity (v. 8)
The psalmist begins with a sharp, exasperated command.
"Discern, you senseless among the people; And when will you have insight, you fools?" (Psalm 94:8)
This is not a polite invitation to a dialogue. It is a spiritual slap to the face. The word for "senseless" here is related to the word for a brute beast. It describes someone who operates on instinct and appetite, someone who is incapable of grasping the most fundamental realities. He is addressing those who live as though the material world is the only world. They are spiritual livestock, grazing their way to the slaughter, utterly oblivious to the farmer who owns the field.
The psalmist calls them "fools." In the Bible, a fool is not someone with a low IQ. A fool is a moral category. The fool is the man who says in his heart, "There is no God" (Psalm 14:1). He is the one who has suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. He knows God exists, the evidence is screaming at him from every corner of creation, but he shoves that knowledge down, holds it underwater, because he loves his sin more than he loves the truth. The psalmist's question, "When will you have insight?" is a challenge to repent of this willful stupidity. It's a call to stop playing the fool and to start thinking, to start connecting the most obvious dots in the universe.
This is a direct challenge to our own time. We are surrounded by highly educated fools. Men with multiple doctorates will tell you with a straight face that everything came from nothing for no reason. They will insist that the intricate genetic code, a language more complex than anything man has ever devised, wrote itself. They are the brutish among the people, and the church's task is to call them to their senses, to demand that they use the reason God gave them to acknowledge the God who gave it.
The Logic of Creation (v. 9)
Next, the psalmist lays out his devastatingly simple argument from creation.
"He who planted the ear, does He not hear? He who formed the eye, does He not see?" (Psalm 94:9 LSB)
This is the Creator/creature distinction applied with common sense. You cannot give what you do not have. An artist cannot paint with colors he has never seen. A composer cannot write a symphony with sounds he has never heard. The very capacity for hearing and seeing in the creature is derived from the infinite capacity for hearing and seeing in the Creator. To suggest that the God who engineered the astonishing mechanics of the human ear, with its eardrum, ossicles, and cochlea, is Himself deaf, is an absurdity of the highest order. To propose that the God who designed the photosensitive retina and the optic nerve is Himself blind is not just wrong, it is idiotic.
God did not just make ears; He "planted" them. The word suggests careful, intentional cultivation. He did not just make eyes; He "formed" them, like a potter shaping clay. These are acts of intimate, intelligent design. Our senses are derivative. They are finite, created analogues of God's own infinite perception. God does not have physical ears or eyes, because He is spirit. But He is the reality of which our ears and eyes are but a shadow. He is the archetypal Hearer, the archetypal Seer. He doesn't need sound waves to travel through a medium; He perceives the thought behind the word before it is even spoken. He doesn't need photons to strike a retina; He sees the darkest deeds done in the deepest pit.
This verse obliterates any notion of a deistic, detached God. The God who is intelligent enough to design perception is necessarily a perceptive God. Every time a wicked man whispers a conspiracy, he is using a God-designed ear to hear the reply, all while assuming the Designer of ears cannot hear him. The folly is breathtaking.
The Logic of Providence (v. 10)
The argument then expands from creation to providence and governance.
"He who disciplines the nations, will He not rebuke, Even He who teaches man knowledge?" (Psalm 94:10 LSB)
If God's involvement is clear in the microscopic world of the human ear, it is just as clear in the macroscopic world of human history. The psalmist points to the fact that God "disciplines the nations." History is not a random series of events. It is a story being told by a sovereign author. Empires rise and fall according to His decree. He raises up a Nebuchadnezzar to chasten His people and casts him down when his purpose is served. He is the governor among the nations. The question, then, is simple: If God is capable of correcting entire civilizations through war, famine, and exile, will He not correct an individual scoundrel? If He rebukes Babylon, will he not rebuke you?
The second clause reinforces the first. God is the one "who teaches man knowledge." All truth is God's truth. Every scientific discovery, every logical syllogism, every bit of insight into agriculture or engineering is a gift from Him. He is the fountainhead of all knowledge. The unbeliever who uses logic to argue against God is like a man using a flashlight to search for the sun, all the while unaware that the batteries powering his light were charged by that very sun. So, the psalmist asks, shall not the source of all knowledge Himself know? Shall the great Teacher be ignorant of what His pupils are doing? The question answers itself. To think you can hide your actions from the one who judges nations and the one who is the source of all knowledge is to be willfully deluded.
The Divine Assessment (v. 11)
The psalm concludes this section with God's final, authoritative verdict on the pinnacle of man's autonomous striving: his thoughts.
"Yahweh knows the thoughts of man, That they are vanity." (Psalm 94:11 LSB)
This is the capstone of the argument. God's knowledge is not limited to external actions that He can see or words that He can hear. His perception penetrates to the very source, to the heart, to the thoughts and intentions. Yahweh, the covenant Lord, knows the thoughts of man. There is no firewall between your mind and the mind of God. There is no private, internal space where you can retreat from His gaze. He knows your secret ambitions, your hidden resentments, your lustful fantasies, your proud calculations.
And what is His assessment of these thoughts, when they are generated by man in his self-imposed autonomy? They are "vanity." The Hebrew word is hebel. It means a puff of smoke, a vapor, a breath. It is the same word that echoes throughout Ecclesiastes. Man's thoughts, when detached from the fear of God, are utterly futile. They are insubstantial, fleeting, and ultimately worthless. The grand political schemes, the sophisticated philosophical systems, the intricate plots of the wicked, they are all just smoke. They appear for a moment to have substance, but God sees them for what they are: nothing. They have no weight, no permanence, no ultimate reality. They will dissipate before the wind of His judgment.
Conclusion: The Only Wise God
The practical implications of this are immense. For the wicked, this is a terrifying reality. There is no escape. There is no place to hide. Every sin is seen, every word is heard, every thought is known. The judge of all the earth will do right, and His judgment will be based on a perfect and complete record. The call to the fool is therefore a call to repent before it is too late, to abandon the vain and brutish rebellion against the God who sees and knows all.
But for the believer, this is a profound comfort. The God who planted the ear hears our faintest prayer. The God who formed the eye sees our hidden tears. The God who disciplines the nations will surely defend His own children. The God who knows the vain thoughts of men also knows the faithful thoughts of His people. He knows our desire to please Him, even when our actions fall short. He knows our love for Him, even when our words fail to express it.
The Apostle Paul quotes this very verse in 1 Corinthians 3:20, saying, "The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile." He is making the point that even the most impressive human wisdom, the wisdom of the Greeks, is hebel when compared to the "foolishness" of the cross. Our only hope is to abandon our own vain thoughts and to take on the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16). True wisdom, true substance, true reality is not found in the autonomous reasonings of fallen men, but in submission to the revealed Word of God.
Our thoughts are vanity. But God sent His eternal Thought, the Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ, to become flesh. He entered our world of smoke and vapor to give us something solid to stand on. He took the judgment for our vain thoughts upon Himself, so that we, in exchange, might be given His righteous thoughts. The only escape from the vanity of our own minds is to be found in the mind of Christ. He is the wisdom of God, and in Him, and in Him alone, our thoughts are no longer vanity, but are being transformed into an offering of praise to the God who hears, and sees, and knows, and saves.