Psalms 53:4

God Expresses His Surprise At The Inability Of The Nations To Recognise That Israel/Judah Are His People (Psalms 53:4)

Psalms 53:4

‘Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge,

Who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call on God?'

God is perplexed at the folly of men. He cannot believe that they are so lacking in wisdom and common sense. Do they have no knowledge and understanding? Do they not recognise that those who are in covenant with Him are His people? They neither call on God nor treat well those who do truly call on Him.

The fact that they do not call on God, that is on YHWH (Psalms 14:5), would appear to point to foreign nations. They ‘eat up My people as they eat bread'. ‘My people' must refer here to Israel/Judah, but especially to those who truly call on Him, the faithful in Israel (Micah 2:9; Micah 3:5). For while ‘my people' is used of Israel as a whole it is always with the understanding that they are potentially responding to the covenant. Those who fail to do so in the end cease to be ‘His people'. They are then seen as combined with the enemy (this is made clear in the Book of Ezra). Devouring or eating up His people refers both to depriving them of their possessions, devouring their wealth, and to oppressing them, giving them a hard time and even doing violence to them (compare Micah 3:1; Isaiah 3:14; Ezra 4-5). So the world is seen as in deliberate antagonism against God, and against true righteousness as personified in His true people.

‘The workers of iniquity' are thus those who deliberately continue in the way of sin having refused to become one of His people. They have turned away from the covenant. They are not necessarily great sinners as the world would view it, but they are from God's viewpoint, because they fail to truly respond to Him.