13.01.07
Psalms (8): Jesus and God’s Law - Psalm 1
Six months ago, or so, I decided to take up birdwatching. I thought it would be a nice, easy hobby to take my mind off things and get me some fresh air. But after a little while, my enthusiasm for birdwatching started to wane – the reason? Because I was struggling to tell the difference between different kinds of birds. In fact, if I am being honest, and I know you’re all going to laugh at me when I tell you this, but I’m still struggling to tell the difference between a crow, a rook, a jackdaw and a raven. And if I can’t tell the difference between these four big, common birds, how am I going to tell the difference between wing patterns on a tiny little bird? I have begun to realise that there is far more to bird-watching than I once thought.
Now the same principle works in the realm of the Psalms even more. We think we know what they mean – after all, Psalm 1 is simple and straightforward right? There isn’t really an easier Psalm to understand than this one. It stands right at the beginning of the Book of Psalms, like the A of the Alphabet, and it’s talking about those who are righteous and those who are wicked. And the moral of the Psalm is that you are to be righteous by reading God’s Word, and not unrighteous, by ignoring it and walking in the way of sinners. That’s what it means, right? But is Psalm 1 as simple as that? After all, what do we do with Jesus? How does He fit into Psalm 1 and how does knowing Him make a difference to us? Why is Psalm 1 really at the beginning of the Book of Psalms? Psalm 1 isn’t as simple as you might think – there is a lot more to it than meets the eye. You may think to yourself that I am complicating things, but I believe, that unless you understand this next type of Psalm, the Psalm of Wisdom, in the way I’m going to explain today, you haven’t really understood it and if you did, it wouldn’t cheer you up, it would drive you to despair.
Before we get in depth to the kernel meaning of the Psalm is to take a quick sweep at what it tells us. Vs. 1-2 tell us of the present practice of those who are righteous, and those who are unrighteous. The righteous man is blessed – where that word blessed means ‘truly happy’, and that on account of his refusal to walk in the counsel of the wicked, stand in the way of sinners and sit in the seat of mockers. There are things he will not do – he is not afraid to say no to conforming with the counsel, the ways and the seat of authority of this world. He’s not going to conform! He’s man enough, and he’s righteous enough to go God’s way and not give in to the pressure the unrighteous place upon him. But he also says yes to other things – he finds his chief delight in the Law of God, and his mental energy is taken up with meditating on the Law of God continuously. In any and every situation, this righteous man will follow the Word of God as opposed to the pop vox and prevailing ideas of this world.
And then in vs. 3-4 we are told of the present state of those who are righteous and those who are unrighteous. The righteous man, according to vs. 3, is like a tree planted by an irrigation channel – he is fruitful, he prospers and he endures. He is able to withstand droughts because his roots are deeply embedded into the source of all true life – God Himself. And so there is this sense that the righteous man is insulated from what goes on around him – he is able to find 100% of his satisfaction not in outward circumstances, but in God. And so, in a spiritual sense, this is a man who endures, who is fruitful and who prospers. But then, by contrast in vs. 4, we have the wicked – they are like chaff which is blown away by the wind. Now this is a reference to what happened at harvest time in olden days. The grain would be harvested, and the ‘ears’ would be piled up. Then the harvesters would throw the ears up into the air and the heavy grain would fall back to the ground, whilst the chaff, the useless husks, were light enough that the wind would blow them away. So what you were left with was the pure grain and the chaff was scattered to the four winds. And that’s a picture of the unrighteous – there is no solidity, no meaning or purpose, no true prosperity. Everything they have follows them into the grave – their lives are characterised by being manipulated and driven about by changing philosophies and therefore they are at the mercy of their external circumstances. When the dry weather comes, they die and the earth remembers them no more.
Finally, in vs. 5-6 we are told of the future state of those who are righteous and those who are unrighteous. Those who are unrighteous, here called the wicked, will not stand in judgment – every one of them, even those who have managed to embed themselves within the institutions of the church, will be found guilty, will be punished and will perish. By contrast, the Lord knows the righteous and will fulfil His covenant promises of eternal blessing and prosperity to them.
That is the impartial, objective reading of Psalm 1. And yet, I don’t feel that we’ve even begun to understand the key issues behind this Psalm – we’ve understood the words, we’ve maybe even understood the concepts behind the words, but we are nowhere near understanding the message of Psalm 1. We are no-where near answering the awkward questions Psalm 1 throws up, like, why is it at the beginning of the Psalms? Why is Psalm 1 at the doorpost of the Psalms? How can I be righteous?
I now want to present to you, as I understand it, the true meaning of Psalm 1 – a meaning which lies underneath the Psalm but without which, we will never truly understand both how to live out any of the teaching of the book of Psalms or to live in relationship with the God of the Psalms. And so, for the remaining time we have together, I want to do it by suggesting three things to you:
[A] Psalm 1 Shows Me Who I Am
Wouldn’t it be great if we could all come to church, punch our tickets at the door, turn to each other and say, “this week, I did not walk in the counsel of the wicked, I did not stand in the way of sinners and I did not sit in the seat of mockers. But my delight was in the Law of the Lord and on His Laws I meditated day and night.” It would be great to be able to say that at no stage did we listen to the world and to its subliminal messaging service to us – we didn’t listen to it when it advised us to find all our delight in our jobs, in our houses, in our families, in our health, in our pleasure – we didn’t listen to it when it told us that unless we got the latest gizmo then we were sub-human – we didn’t listen to it when it pressured us to go out and get blitzed, because that’s what normal people do. Wouldn’t it be great to say that above everything else, our delight was in the Word of God – and that besides it, everything was a dull? In fact, we prized it so much that it was in our minds continuously?
Wouldn’t it be great if we could report to each other that this was a week of fruitfulness, prosperity and endurance, where never once did we find our spiritual nourishment from anywhere outside of God, never once did we produce anything but good fruit and never once did we wish that we weren’t Christians so that we be like everybody else.
The problem is that as you stand up beside this blessed man of Psalm 1, you begin to get worried – because unless you are lost in a dream of self-delusion and hypocrisy, you know that you don’t take the delight in God’s Word that the blessed man does; you know that you listen far too much to what the world has to say and you adopt its judgement systems and make your decisions based upon what it tells you; you know that you call yourself a Christian but the whole of life is spent trying to be as normal and as non-different as possible just to cut out the shame of it all. You know you haven’t been fruitful – you know your roots aren’t sunk deep in God and therefore you are pushed around from pillar to post by your external circumstances rather than finding your satisfaction in God and in Him alone. In fact, as we read Psalm 1, we get kind of depressed, because if we have to put ourselves as the righteous man or the wicked man of Psalm 1, we’d have to admit that we are probably a closer match to the wicked man. And that means our future isn’t bright – it is the judgement of God and our eternal perishing. This Psalm is like a spiritual X-ray shining through us revealing just how dark and sinful we truly are – revealing to us that left to ourselves, we will never attain to the status of this blessed man.
And so, right at the beginning of the Book of Psalms, we are being told that in and of ourselves, we are not righteous, and we do not possess the necessary resources to live in the way of blessedness and happiness. We might love the Psalms, but they begin by telling us harsh things about ourselves, and yet, if we never know the truth about who we are, we’ll never be able to deal with our sin and our corruption.
[B] Psalm 1 Shows Me Who Christ Is
Is there anyone who keeps Psalm 1 perfectly – someone that spends their entire life following what God says in His Word and taking His cues not from earth but from heaven? Because if there is, there is the person who is blessed – there is the person who is like a tree – who is fruitful, persevering and prosperous. There is the man we need to follow. And then we turn to the New Testament Gospels and we have our answer – the blessed man, the truly happy man, is Jesus.
Psalm 1 is a portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the only One who can truly be called blessed, because He is the Only One to have kept God’s Law perfectly – never to have walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of mockers – the One whose life was marked by the desire and delight in doing what God wanted Him to do; the One whose penetrating understanding of Scripture showed that God’s Law was on His mind day and night. Jesus could well have been sitting for this linguistic portrait the Psalmist is drawing here.
And then you say, but this blessed man died in agony on the cross – how could He be the blessed man, the man who was like a tree planted near the stream of water; how could He be the blessed man when on the cross, to all intents and purposes, it looked as if He was being blown away like the chaff – it looks, for all the world, as if Jesus is perishing on the cross and the Lord ignores Him with the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
A good question – how come, the only man who fits the description of the first part of Psalm 1 as being the righteous and blessed man, also fits the description of the second part of Psalm 1 as enduring the fate the wicked have to endure? How come the righteous man endures the punishment which is due to the unrighteous man? And what does this have to do with the first point I made in this threesome; that Psalm 1 shows me how dark and unrighteous I truly am?
I hope the problem is becoming clear in your minds and you are beginning to see the answer. What if Jesus, by enduring the fate of the unrighteous, wasn’t being punished for His own unrighteousness, after all – He had none, He was perfectly righteous – what if He was being punished for our unrighteousness? And so that means that the perfectly blessed man becomes the perfectly cursed man – the righteous man stands as the representative of the wicked man. And that means that the perfectly righteous Jesus takes upon Himself my sin and its guilt and endures the fate which is rightfully mine – the fate of being blown away and perishing on my behalf! But what does that mean for me; me, who as I look at myself, am unrighteous – who does not delight in God’s Law and who more often than not gives in to the peer pressure of this world’s opinions and philosophies? Jesus lives a righteous life and dies a sinner’s death. I have lived an unrighteous life, and yet Jesus has died for my sins – to take them all away. He has wiped the slate clean so no longer am I unrighteous. But, more than that – He has clothed me in His perfect righteousness – so that because He delighted in God’s Law, I am counted before God, as delighting in His Law; because He meditated on God’s Law day and night, I am counted before God as meditating on God’s Law day and night; because He obeyed, I am counted before God as obeying. And He gives me this blessedness. Because of what Jesus has done, and that great exchange which took place upon the cross where in exchange for my filthy rags, Jesus gave me His perfect righteousness, I am now the Blessed Man of Psalm 1 – this Psalm is describing who I am, when God looks at me, as I am in Christ.
But I hear you saying, that’s too good to be true – that if we have trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ, if He is our Saviour and our Lord, then we are the blessed man of Psalm 1, even though as we look in upon ourselves, we see people who don’t delight in God’s Law and all too often stand in the way of sinners? Listen, that’s the Gospel – if Jesus Christ is your Lord, then you are the blessed man of Psalm 1 and all these things about fruitfulness, prosperity, endurance – all these things about God knowing your way so that you will stand in the judgement and you will not perish but have eternal life – all these things are true of you. Really! Rather that it being too good to be true, it’s so good it must be true, because only an infinitely gracious and loving God could have dreamed up a salvation which is that good.
So, where are we when it comes to Psalm 1? In the first point, we noticed that because of who we are by nature, sinners and enemies of God, we do not keep God’s Law and we do not delight in it. It’s not that we don’t know what God wants, we don’t do what God wants. As we look at the 149 Psalms that follow this, we cringe, because if we can’t get past Psalm 1, what chance do we have when it comes to Psalm 15, or Psalm 53? But now, what we are saying, is that if you read this Psalm, and every Psalm, like it is meant to be read, you see that Jesus Christ is the ultimate fulfilment, He is the One to whom all these Psalms are pointing. He is One who took perfect delight in understanding, meditating upon and keeping God’s Law. And so, He is the subject for which the painter of the Psalms is forming the portrait. But then, we also notice that Jesus died the sinner’s death – the death that was due to you and me, so that we can enjoy the blessedness of the life of the righteous man, even though by nature, we are sinners. So what’s the message of this second, and by far the longest point? Simply that it is by grace that we tread anywhere near the Book of Psalms. If we think we have the spirituality, the righteousness, the piety to be able to understand and keep the Wisdom of the Psalms, we are legalists, we are deluded and we are liars. We come to the book of Psalms through Jesus, or we don’t even make it in through the front door. Jesus is the key to understanding and living the Psalms.
[C] Psalm 1 Shows Me Who I Can Be
So far, so good. It is only now, after we have established that Christ is the One through whom we are the blessed men of Psalm 1 that we can start talking about living out Psalm 1 in our day to day experiences. Jesus Christ gives us not only His perfect righteousness and His blessedness, He also gives us His Spirit so that we can live new lives; so that we can have the strength to walk as He walked. And one of the features of the new life He gives us is a new desire after God’s Word. We have this desire which doesn’t just come from us, but from the Holy Spirit working within us. But the Spirit wants us to want God and His Word more. And that’s the whole day to day question for us as we take our leave of Psalm 1 by applying it to our offices, our homes, our gyms, our lecture theatres – and that is the challenging question – what is it you desire most in life?
In your life situations, you’ll find pulls and tugs upon you to listen to the dumbed-down advice of the world – buy this, do this, be this shape, be that clever and you’ll conform. And what is your desire as a Christian? Are you being tugged just a little too strongly, as if to say there is something within you that still wants to be pulled away from God and the delight you can take in His Word? Then you need to pray hard – you need to pray that God would give you new taste buds on the tongue of your heart and mind, so that no longer will you desire the things of this world, you’ll only have eyes for Christ. And then secondly, you need to meditate on the staggering promises God gives us in His Word. Draw all your strength and ability from what God promises in the Bible. Read it, pray through it. And then, not just will you be blessed in your status towards God, you will also be blessed in your day to day life. You will start seeing fruitfulness in your spiritual life; you will start seeing stickability through difficulty and you will start seeing prosperity where before there was only poverty. Be who you who are – through the power of the Holy Spirit of God, live out the life of the blessed man of Psalm 1.
Psalm 1 is full of Christ as are the other Wisdom Psalms – Psalms like 19 and 119 – and its full of challenge. Take it away with you. You say you love the Psalms; have you got past the front door? Have you accepted Christ as your Saviour and Lord? Unless you do, you’ll never really live these psalms – they’re speaking about other people. But I pray that you may put your hand into the hand of Jesus Christ tonight, and become truly blessed. AMEN