STUDIES IN THE PSALMS No. 2

“Psalms 1 and 2 Continued”

Jan. 11, 2003

Review

Last week we noted that Psalms 1 and 2 together form an introduction to the Psalter as a whole. We also talked about what the Bible means when it says that God’s people are “blessed.” Often the Bible seems primarily to mean that God’s people are blessed in the sense that someday, at the consummation, when they enjoy God’s salvation in its fullness, they will live as human beings were intended to live, with the most complete measure of peace, joy, and prosperity imaginable and all experienced in immediate communion with God. In that sense the “blessedness” of God’s people is the certain prospect of heaven and eternal life. But also in the Bible the blessedness of God’s people is a characteristic of believers’ lives already in this world. Both aspects of our blessing are found in the first psalm, with v. 3 referring to the blessing that is already ours in this world and vv. 5-6 at least suggesting the blessing of the world to come.

As we concluded our study last Lord’s Day evening we noted that just as in the Lord’s beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, so here in Psalm 1, this blessing, this blessedness is related to and is the Lord’s reward for the faithfulness of his people. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are they who mourn; blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; blessed are the peacemakers, and the like.” It is to those who are faithful and holy, in other words, that this blessedness of life is promised. Here, in Psalm 1, the accent falls on two aspects of the believer’s faithfulness to God and we will take those up tonight.

Read Psalm 1

v.1 “Walk, stand, and sit” are together a merism, a figure of speech in which the mention of parts (the Greek word meros [or meris] means “part”) indicates the whole. So “walk, stand, and sit” together represent this man’s entire life, everything he does. There are not, after all, too many moments in our lives when we are not walking, standing, or sitting; at least not too many conscious moments. In this case, in every part of his life he keeps himself separated from and uncorrupted by the wicked people around him. In any case, the blessed man is first characterized by what he does not do.

You will notice the highly negative, even provocatively negative depiction of the unbelieving here. They are “wicked,” “sinners,” and “mockers.” Now, obviously unbelieving people do not think of themselves this way and, in fact, are highly offended at the thought that Christians characterize them in this fashion. “Who are you to call me a sinner or describe me as wicked?” they ask. But difficult as this may be to overcome in personal dealing with people – and there are ways to overcome it, of course, not least to admit that we believe and say the same things about ourselves apart from Christ – this is the Bible’s characteristic way of speaking and we need to understand it. In the Bible it is always black and white, not various shades of gray. There are saints and there are rascals, no matter that the Bible is unrelenting in forcing believers to admit how sinful they remain even as Christians. That is because, as the Bible often teaches, there are only two kinds of hearts and two relations that men sustain to God. Everything in human life comes from the heart and from the particular relation that a person has to God. If he is reborn by the grace and the Spirit of God, if he has a new heart, his life will change and eventually he will become perfectly good. He is in fact, relatively, and in prospect, absolutely, a saint! His union with Christ defines him and characterizes his life. The unbeliever who is not united to Christ, who remains unregenerate, is a sinner in fact – no matter that there may be some pleasing things about him and about his living – and will, eventually, when those influences that sweeten and strengthen his life are removed – he will become a sinner absolutely and nothing but. He is already horrible in principle; he lives sinfully in many, many ways, and will become more so and finally absolutely so at the end. Hence, the relative differences that we tend to concentrate on in thinking about people, how and why we like them or dislike them, for example, are not nearly so important or fundamental as their hearts, black or white, that determine the outcome of their lives. The Bible is always after the true meaning of things and forbidding us to lose touch with reality by concentrating on appearances. Hence in the Bible there are only saints and sinners. There is a righteous man and there is a wicked, sinful, and mocking man. Only those two. Everyone is one or the other.

v.2 After saying what this man does not do, now we are told what he does. “Day and night” is another merism indicating the totality of his time. He is, in other words, always in the Word of God, always reading it, always turning it over in his mind, always reflecting on its application to his thinking and his behavior.

v.3 In a dry land as the Holy Land was and is, a green tree by a stream is a particularly powerful image of a fruitful life. You have the same thought again, for example, in Jeremiah 17:8:

“…blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.”

Trees are images of life and godliness in several different places in the Bible. We find the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and then find an even more wonderful tree, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month, in heaven in Rev. 21. “Fruit in its season” emphasizes both the way a godly life produces good things – the good heart produces good fruit by a fixed law of the kingdom of God – and the quiet and occasional pattern of Christian prosperity. The seasons come and go; it will not always be a time of harvest, but harvest will come in due time and again and again.

v.4 Chaff, as you know, is the part of the harvested grain that is separated from the kernel and thrown away. The way the kernel was separated from the chaff, in those days, by winnowing. With pitchforks what was cut from the field, brought to the threshing floor, and beaten, was then tossed up into the air. Because the straw and the husks were lighter, the wind blew them away and only the heavier grain fell back to the floor. The wicked life is like that – weightless, easily blown away, useless except for burning. They are unlike the tree in that there is no root below and no fruit above! [Delitzsch, 87] Trees can stand up to the wind; chaff is blown away by a mere breeze. The unrighteous may appear to be substantial – some psalms will admit this – but the judgment of the Lord will reveal what they really are. Appearances can be deceiving.

v.5 Whereas in v. 1 the righteous kept himself from the company of the unrighteous, here it is the unrighteous who cannot find a place for themselves among the company of the righteous.

v.6 The NIV’s “watches over” is the verb “to know.” But that is what “know” means in such a context. The Lord is not merely informed about the righteous, he cares for them and identifies himself with them.

Psalm 1 is a wonderful example of how the different voices of Old Testament revelation all speak in perfect harmony [Kidner]. Psalm 1 is very like some sections in the wisdom literature, especially Proverbs in its speaking about the two ways – the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked, the way of the wise and the way of the foolish – but, at the same time, the nearest thing to Psalm 1 is a section in one of the prophets, Jeremiah 17:5-8. And, of course, the message of the psalm is rooted in the law, as we learn in v. 2. Law, Prophets, and Wisdom all find their message summed up here in a psalm.

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Now as the book of worship begins, in its opening psalm, there is this powerful reminder of the basic alternative of human life that gives meaning and power to worship. Men and women are either God’s people or they are not. That so many are not is what makes so extraordinary and wonderful the fact that we are! There is a terribly solemn issue posed by human life and existence. Looming above and behind everything that is said and done in worship is the reality of the last judgment and the final separation of human beings. Everything in life and certainly our worship must take its character from this single fact. It is a solemnizing beginning to the church’s manual of worship. What follows is for the people of God and is to be undertaken by them in strict fidelity to the Word of God and with a view to the ultimate issue of human life.

The strange fact is that everyone admits this at a certain level, but most are unwilling to face the implications of that admission. Everyone takes a profoundly moral view of human life, which is why zealous and emotion-laden moral judgments are flying in every direction all the time. Everyone pays homage to the terrible significance of human life in the love they have for some, in the almost desperate loyalty they invest in themselves, and in the bitter condemnation of those they judge in some way to be acting contrary to the interests of human beings. But, then, in a kind of wrenching inconsistency, they stop. They do not ask themselves where all of this love and moral seriousness comes from, they do not inquire about the God who made them with a conscience or worry that they fail to meet its demands, they do not ponder how it can mean anything if there is no judgment and no reward and punishment in the world to come, and they hardly ever ask themselves why they are so sure of the rightness of their own moral judgments and condemnations and yet so uncaring of the possibility that God would make and enforce moral judgments of his own and according to a far higher standard. One of the features of our faith that confirms its truth at every turn is the way in which it so perfectly describes universal human life and experience in those very ways that are most unwelcome and most worrying.

Now, as I said, I want us to pay attention to the two characteristics of the godly to which attention is drawn in this psalm. Other things might of course have been said, but here the godly character is reduced to two characteristics.

I. The first characteristic is that the godly renounce the world.

1. He does not walk in the counsel of the wicked. It begins, it all begins with the life of the mind. As the Puritans used to say, “first light, then heat.” Counsel refers to the realm of thinking. The world thinks one way and the righteous another. It is characteristic of Christian men and women that they think very differently from the worldly people around them. In Psalm 10:4 we read: “In his pride the wicked does not seek him; in all his thoughts there is no room for God.” Well, not so the righteous. He renounces the thinking of the world. All his thinking starts with the reality of the living God and with the truth of his revelation. It is not easy to renounce the thinking of the world. There are many bright and clever unbelievers who make unbelieving thinking seem persuasive, even attractive. And, of course, worldly thinking is relentlessly intruding upon us at every turn.

A mistake often made by parents in the training of their children and often made in turn by Christian schools is to underestimate the thinking, the counsel of the unrighteous and the unbelieving. They teach that it is thinking unworthy of credit. Christian children are taught that it is an easy thing to disprove worldly thinking. Christian books on biology and evolution have often been guilty of this sort of superficial critique. The problem is that Christian young people go off to college and find out how sophisticated evolutionary thinking is, how complex the sciences are, how impressive are the thinkers who advance these non-Christian theories, and, understandably, the young Christians are inclined to think that they were hoodwinked by their parents or their Christian school teachers. The Devil has plenty of first class minds in his service. Unbelieving thinking is foolish, in the moral, spiritual sense – the sense in which the Bible judges that thinking, but it is definitely not intellectually insubstantial. It can be very impressive and difficult to disprove. But the wise Christian is not fooled. He knows that there is a worldly way of thinking about everything – the world and its origins, the nature of human beings, of right and wrong, of salvation and the meaning of life – and that, at root, it is not right, even if he or she is not able to show in every case where it is wrong.

But, let every Christian accept that there will be a great divide that separates his thinking from that of the world around him. There is a kind of thinking that pervades the world of unbelief and a very different kind of thinking that is characteristic of Christians in the world. They think in a very different way from other people. There are two minds, the Christian mind and the unbelieving mind. And so there must be two peoples in the world.

2. Also, the godly renounce the behavior of the world.

If “counsel” refers to the thinking of the world, “way” refers to its behavior. There is a conduct that distinguishes unbelievers and a conduct that distinguishes Christians and they are very different from one another. How often we have Paul making this point in his letters. Don’t live as the pagans do, as you yourselves once lived, he tells them, but now live as the followers of Christ. It is not enough to have a different philosophy of life, a different set of beliefs. One must also have a different way of life. In fact, in early Christianity, as we learn from the book of Acts, the Christians were referred to as “the Way.” They spoke of themselves and others spoke of them with this word, “way,” that in the Bible refers to conduct, to behavior, to what we call one’s “way of life.” And it is a way, the great commentator Johann Albrecht Bengel said “is for walking, not for loitering.” Love, purity, faithfulness, honesty, kindness, generosity, humility, peaceableness – all in the name of Jesus Christ – are conduct to which Christians commit themselves in a definite, intentional, determined way.

These two things always go together in the Bible: faith and life, belief and obedience. How many times we are taught that we cannot be Christians if we do not follow the Lord and keep his commandments.

3. Finally, the godly renounce the company of the world.

If “counsel” is the thinking of the ungodly, and “way” is their behavior, then “seat” refers to their company. The righteous know with whom they belong and they do not belong with the enemies of God and with those who mock the truth of God’s Word. They must live and work among such people, and love them indeed; they must seek to win them for Christ, but it must always be clear to them, and to some degree to the unbelievers themselves, that Christians can never find their place among non-Christians. And, finally, hard as this may be for some Christians to face, that comes down to any number of decisions not to spend time and to keep close friendship with ungodly and unbelieving people.

You will immediately think of Paul telling Christians “not to be yoked together with unbelievers.” This is, as are the first two points, a universal principle and is, therefore, taught as emphatically in the NT as they were in the OT. You cannot be loyal to Christ if you prefer to keep company with people who do not acknowledge him as Lord or serve him with their lives.

You young people need to be prepared for this and to prepare yourselves. Christians can sometimes seem to you an uninspired lot, lacking “coolness” to a serious degree. Unbelievers often can appear to young people to have real savior faire; they know how to live in the world, how to have a good time, how to be appealing and interesting. Christians, contrarily, can seem to be fuddy-duddies in comparison.

But this is what Christ is calling you to. This faith by which you understand Christians as your people and unbelievers as not, no matter how appealing they may seem. And when we ask you to make your identity clear – by not dating an unbelieving fellow or gal; by not choosing to keep company with unbelievers in ways that make it seem as if you like their life better than a Christian’s life – we are not asking that of you simply because it is your duty, but because the company of the unbelieving is corrupting, infecting. “Bad company corrupts morals,” Paul says in 1 Cor. 15, and it is so. The company you keep will very significantly influence you in what you come to believe, to love, and to desire. Christians may be an acquired taste, they may seem at first much less cool than the worldly people you know, but the living God is with them and not with your unbelieving friends and the Christians will carry the future with them not the unbelievers you know.

So, that’s the first thing. And then there is the second, the positive characteristic of the believing man who lives under God’s blessing.

II. The second characteristic is that the godly are people of the Word of God.

His delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night. He doesn’t make his way with the wicked and instead he conforms his life to what God has told him in the Bible. In this particular case, “law” probably refers to Moses and, even more specifically, to Deuteronomy, the great account of God’s covenant with his people. That is confirmed by the very close similarity of Psalm 1:2-3 to Joshua 1:7-8 where we read the Lord saying to Joshua,

“Do not let this book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.”

“Meditate” means not only the recital of Scripture by memory, the rolling over of the teaching of God’s Word in one’s mind. In Hebrew poetry, the parallels to meditate are verbs such as “remember, ponder, calculate, inquire, and investigate.” This explains the sense of the metaphor of writing the law on one’s forehead or one’s wrist. The law in one’s mind and one’s action is what is meant: the constant relating of our lives to the truth God has revealed in his Word. Christians, therefore, are not simply people who know about the Bible, but who take the Bible into their hearts, make it a transcript of their own thinking about everything, and try their best to work its teaching into their internal and external behavior. The Christian is the one who is always trying to conform his life to the Word of God.

Jeremiah speaks of his unbelieving contemporaries – these in the church; how much this must also be true of those in the world – “Their ears are closed so they cannot hear. The word of the Lord is offensive to them; they find no pleasure in it.” But not so the Christian. The godly man, we read in Isa. 66:2 trembles at the Word of God. Paul says the law of God is holy, just, and good. He says that it thoroughly equips the man of God for every good work. Jesus, who was preeminently a man who lived by the Word of God, said that Scripture cannot be broken. Elsewhere in the Psalms we have a great many references to the light, the comfort, the direction provided for believers in the Word of God and, in Psalm 119, the account of a man who is just the sort of man described here in Psalm 1:2. “Your word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against you.” “Oh how love I your law! I meditate on it all day long.” “How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to your word.”

Young people, here is what we urge you to think. The Bible is not a duty – as if reading it amounts to checking a box that God expects to be checked – it is light and life. It is God’s own voice, his will, his wisdom, his fatherly instruction. People who come to the Bible and read it this way, find in it a wonderful power and goodness that bless their lives in countless ways. It is not unlike having God at your right hand all the time when you have his Word in your heart and are constantly remembering and pondering it and applying it to your life. As Amy Carmichael wrote,

“The amazing thing is that everyone who reads the Bible has the same joyful thing to say about it. In every land, in every language, it is the same tale: where that book is read, not with the eyes only, but with the mind and heart, the life is changed. Sorrowful people are comforted, sinful people are transformed, people who were in the dark walk in the light. Is it not wonderful to think that this book, which is such a mighty power if it gets a chance to work in an honest heart, is in our hands today? And we can read it freely, no man making us afraid.” [Thou Givest…They Gather, 7]

Marshall McLuhan, the modern philosopher of media, took his cue from the discussion of idolatry in Psalm 115 and said, “we become what we behold.” That is, when we become habituated to a particular form of communication that form of communication leaves its mark on us. We begin to think, to reason, to feel, as, for example, TV teaches us to think, reason, and feel – superficially not seriously, immorally, enamored of appearance over reality, of image rather than substance. That is the worldly way of thinking more and more. But the Bible teaches us a different way of thinking, of viewing the world, a different way of living. To become like the Bible, to learn to think like the Bible, to feel like the Bible, to view the world and the life of human beings like the Bible is to live as human beings were made to live. No wonder God blesses such a life.

I promise you in the Lord’s name, that if you make the Bible your daily companion, and read it so as to hear the Lord’s voice in it, because you desire to know what he says about everything and how to live and how to enjoy his blessing, then you will live a very different life than those who do not know or love the Word of God and that life will be so much better, happier, holier, than otherwise it will be.

What we have in this great psalm is “the antithesis,” the fundamental and radical opposition of faith and unbelief and the blessing that attends the life of man or woman who understands that life will be lived either for or against God – there is no middle ground – and that his blessing will attend those who live for him. Ask yourself at this moment: do I really believe this? You know it is so if you are a Christian! But are you actively believing it and believing it so as to practice it? Are you careful not to be giving a place to the world in your life – in your thinking, behavior, and company – and are you careful to make God’s Word the principle of your daily living?

Verses 3-6 remind us that only those who are faithful to God will prosper, now and forever; only they will bear fruit; only they will remain.

All empires, institutions, plans, philosophies, and intentions of man – from ancient civilizations to communism to modern Western Civilization – have come to nothing. Man without God has never and will never succeed. But the kingdom of God has stood from the beginning and will, because God stands above history to ensure the blessing of those who trust in him.

That fact should govern and guide us at every turn of our lives! And that fact should send us daily running to the Word of God, to meditate, ponder, investigate, and apply its teaching to ourselves.

Think of it carefully,

    Study it prayerfully,

Deep in your heart

    Let its oracles dwell.

Ponder its mystery,

    Slight not its history,

For none ever loved it

    Too fondly or well.