Psalm 1
You’ll notice the title of our
study tonight is Happy and Holy Instead of Sinful and Miserable. And that comes right out of the
children’s catechism. Adam and Eve in the garden were
happy and holy. They were happy because they
had fellowship with God. They had a right relationship
with God. They knew his law and they obeyed it. So they were
happy and holy. But what happened when they sinned?
They became sinful and miserable. And so tonight as we approach
Psalm 1, we’re gonna see a contrast of two ways of life. One way
is a life that is a life of happiness and holiness. Now, not perfectly
because we still live in a broken world. But the other side of
the coin is a life of sin and misery. We don’t read these books
in our house as often as we used to when the kids are little,
but we have a stack of Dr. Seuss books. And you know how
black and white, how either or his books are. Sometimes he speaks
of something as near and something as far, something as black, something
as white. Well, in the same way we come
to the scriptures and we see contrast, we see clear distinctions
between something, maybe the distinction between righteousness
and unrighteousness, or the difference between Adam and Christ, one
sinned, one perfectly obeyed. And in our psalm this evening,
we see the contrast between the blessed, now this word is not
used, but the opposite of that would be cursed. We read in Numbers
chapter six, we hear it most Sundays at the benediction, but
not always, we hear the Aaronic or the benediction Moses gave
to Aaron and his sons, the Lord bless you and keep you. as opposed to the Lord curse
you and cast you away. The Lord make his face to shine
upon you and be gracious to you as opposed to the Lord turning
his back on you and giving you his darkness, his unhappy counsel. The Lord lift up the light of
his face upon you and give you peace or as opposed to the Lord
sending his wrath and curse upon you and not giving you peace
but giving you giving you pure hell. And so that brings us to
the recall as we enter this psalm, the fact that blessing comes
as a gift from God. And what does it take for us
to receive blessing? We have to come by faith to Jesus,
the one who was not blessed, but cursed. You think Jesus on
the cross heard the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make
his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. No, he heard
the Lord curse you. The Lord cast you outside the
camp. The Lord not be gracious to you,
but give you every ounce of wrath and hell. but that was an order
that we might have blessing and peace. And so as we enter into
Psalm 1 and into the whole book of Psalms, I want us to remember
that there are distinctions in the Bible that are black and
white. They are near and far. They are
righteous and unrighteous. They are friend and foe. What we need to understand as
well as we look at Psalm 1 is that this is a wisdom Psalm.
It teaches us a wise way to live. If some of you have the Jesus
storybook Bible, in your houses, you’ve read the little introduction
that says the Bible tells us how life works best. And Psalm
1 is really gonna do that. It’s gonna tell us how life works
best. And in a sense, it’s also gonna tell us how life works
worst. Okay, you want a good life? Live this way. You want
a bad life? Go ahead and do this. So it’s a wisdom Psalm. And it
promotes the law of God. On his law, he meditates day
and night. As we’ve talked about the psalms
a little bit, some psalms do different things. This one happens
to be a wisdom psalm. It happens to uphold and promote
the law of God, as opposed to maybe a kingship psalm or a psalm
of lament or a psalm that does something else. I want you to
notice also one last thing before we really dig in. Psalm 1 verse
1 says, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the
wicked. And then look at Psalm 2, Psalm
2 at the end, At the end of verse 12, it says, blessed are all
who take refuge in him. If we are to understand the Psalms
as one whole book, as a collection of writings that are not loose,
I mean, they are that, but they actually do fit together as we’ll
see making our way through it. They are put in an order that
is specific. It’s a flower arrangement that
if you put it out of order, it would not look as beautiful as
it does. And so you see how Psalm one and two fit. Blessed is the
one who, who loves God’s law and bows his knee to the Messiah. I mean, how else, or what else
would you need to live life well? You got the law of God right
and the Messiah right. You can live a very blessed life.
So you’ll note how it connects in that way. Let’s dig into the
Psalm just a little bit. And here’s the question for you
as we look at Psalm 1. Do you want a beautiful life?
That’s a rhetoric question, but the answer is yes, right? Do
you want a blessed life? I mean, none of you sitting here
saying, no, not really. I’d rather have a hellish life.
I’d rather… rather a stinky life, a crummy life. No, we want
a beautiful life, we want a blessed life. Well, the way the psalmist
tells us to have that is in our way of life, our manner of living,
how we walk, how we stand, how we sit, what we delight in and
what we meditate on. And it’s all in light of being
in covenant with God. in covenant relationship, I will
be your God and you will be my people. And God says to us, he’ll
write his law upon our hearts. We’ll love what he loves, we’ll
live the way he desires for us to live. Our hearts will beat,
our hearts will beat with desires for him. Now think just for a
moment about asking the question I just asked y’all, out in the
world, do you want a beautiful life? Do you want a blessed life? What does that look like? What
catalog would you flip through? What magazine would you go into
the grocery store line and purchase in order to achieve some dreamy
picture in your head of what I need to have? a blessed life. It will probably involve money,
fame, some sort of nice home and fast, zippy, beautiful car. And after looking and cataloging
and deciding, you’re gonna say yes to this and no to that. Well, God takes care of that
for us in the Bible and he doesn’t use pictures, he doesn’t use
things, he doesn’t offer things that will pass or fade, though
he does actually, but he gives us either or. And the bottom line in Psalm
1 is you can be a tree that is fruitful and prosperous or you
can be chaff which is blown away by the wind. So there’s the there’s
the either or for you this evening. Tree or chaff. And of course
every one of you raises your hand and says I want to be the
tree and not the chaff. We do want a beautiful life,
a good life. So the first way to consider
this psalm is to say this, what the righteous man does not do. This is a negative way to look
at what the righteous man does not do. We find it in verse 1,
blessed is the man who walks not and the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scoffers. Now, if we have some English
and grammar minded folks in here, you know that a past tense verb
is an action already completed. And if it’s emphatic, if it’s
a strong verb, you understand that it means you never ever
do this. Well, here in Psalm 1 verse 1,
this is a don’t ever type verb. Okay, why is all that important?
Well, because it’s saying that the righteous man, the blessed
man, never walks in the counsel of the wicked. He never stands
in the way of sinners. He never sits in the seat of
scoffers. Now this is starting to sound
like a perfect life. I never fall short. I never disobey. But this is what the Bible is
saying is the character of the godly man. He doesn’t ever do
these things. He protects his gardens. He protects
the garden of his own personal life, his garden of marriage,
his garden of family. He protects his work. He protects
his spheres of influence, his environment. He distances himself
from wickedness. He dissociates with the ungodly
and says, I will only put myself in the path of the godly. Now,
we have seen in other parts of the Bible where the writers of
scripture speak to us about our whole life. We read here in Psalm
1 about walking and standing and sitting. Those are actions
that in the Old Testament depict a way of life. Where else do
we hear these sorts of things? Remember Deuteronomy chapter
6, hear all Israel, the Lord your God is one. He shall love
the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. And then he says, teach these
things to your children. When you, how does it go? When you rise up, when you sit,
when you walk, when you lie down, we teach our children minute
by minute, day by day, in all the moments of life. And here
he says we don’t walk, we don’t sit, we don’t stand in the seat
of scoffers or with the way of sinners or the wicked. Also Joshua
1, 7 and 8, what does it say? Do not let the book of this law
depart from your mouth, but meditate on it. day and night. So in the
Old Covenant, in the Old Testament, and we should adopt this in the
New Testament, we constantly have God on our mind and we stay
away. Now what does God sometimes say
in the scripture about a godly person? He fears God and shuns
evil. Now, a lot of you, as I did,
were alive in the 1980s where we Stayed away from rock and
roll music, especially played backwards. You remember that
whole deal? You play it backwards and it
says Satan a thousand times or something like that. I still
love rock and roll. But we abstained, we stayed away
from things because we thought they were all, what, of the devil
and they were gonna kill us. And yes, we should think that
way, but maybe not in a legalistic way, maybe not in a way that
says, if we stay away from these things, it will save us, we’re
not gonna dance too close or wear skirts. I can’t speak, skirts
that are too short or listen to rock and roll and all that
sort of business. We had rules, we had measurements to say we’re
not gonna go this far or that far. And you remember what the
Apostle Paul says to the Colossians. They’re abstaining from foods.
They are keeping Old Testament rituals. They’re doing all these
things that they think will attain godliness. And what does the
Apostle Paul say? They can do nothing to stop the flesh. And so as many boundaries as
we do put up, we need to remember above all else we guard our hearts
for it is the wellspring of life. But he says here that the man,
the righteous man, doesn’t do these things. He stays away from
the counsel of the wicked, from their way of life, and from those
who stir up strife. The classic example of this would
be Lot. Remember Lot? He and Abraham
came back from Egypt and they both had lots of livestock. And Abraham said to Lot, you
go this way and I’ll go that way. Or if you go that way, I’ll
go this way. And that way there’ll be enough grass and water for
our sheep. Well, what did Lot do? He looked
and he saw with his eyes a beautiful land. Now, what was he looking
towards? Sodom and Gomorrah. And Abraham went the other way
and lived a more righteous and peaceful life. But what do we
find in Lot? We find a progression towards sins. He looked towards
Sodom and Gomorrah. He moved towards Sodom and Gomorrah. And where do we find him at that
horrible story where Abraham and the angels go rescue him?
He is living in Sodom and Gomorrah. And what is his position? He’s
seated at the gates as an elder of the land. And so one way to
look at this is sometimes we progress towards evil and don’t
even know it. And so we got to be careful.
Now, I don’t think that’s exactly what the psalmist is saying here.
He’s just saying, make sure your total life is not with the ungodly. Because you can’t move every
time an ungodly person moves into your neighborhood. I mean,
it costs money to market and sell a house at closing costs and
loan fees and all that. We don’t just pack up and move.
And we know that we’re strangers and pilgrims living in exile. So we have to understand this
in the right way. But we put boundaries around
our lives. We take care to be concerned with our spheres and
the things that influence. And so the righteous person dissociates
with those whose worldview is not godly. He dissociates with
those with whom he would not be equally yoked. And we need
to remember this when it comes to marriage, especially what
does the apostle Paul say? Do not be unequally yoked. And so we remember also the teaching
of God with Israelites. Don’t marry the Canaanites. Don’t
marry your sons and your daughters off to them. No, they need to
marry the godly. Now, why should we dissociate?
Why should the righteous not sit, walk, or stand? It’s because
those who are wicked are going somewhere else. Their GPS, their
global positioning system, their map, their destination is not
the same as yours. And so we don’t follow them.
We don’t go the way they are going. They can’t help us unless
we want to be pagan. and unless we want to live an
unrighteous life. Now, do you see how clear the Bible begins
to be? You’ve got to think so seriously
about what the righteous man does not do. Now, here’s a positive
consideration here in Psalm. what does the righteous, or what
the righteous man does do. We’ve seen what he doesn’t do,
now here’s what he does do, and we find it in verse two. His
delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates
day and night. Have y’all noticed in our TV
watching over the years how we watch shows now that are more
moment by moment pleasure seeking, you know, you can watch a whole
channel on the Food Network about good restaurants to eat in. And
that’s kind of fun to do. It’s easier than watching the
cooking channel about how to cook it because you could just
go eat it. But if you notice how these shows they entice us
to meditate, to delight in something that could be ours. if we’re
in San Francisco or Washington, D.C. or Nashville, Tennessee
or Atlanta, Georgia or wherever the fair is being served in these
little episodes on television. And so we begin to delight and
meditate and think on these sorts of things. What will fill our
bellies? Well, We come to the delight
of the Christian and our delight is in the law of the Lord. Yes,
we’re allowed to like food and all that sort of business, but
our delight is in the law of the Lord and on it we meditate
day and night. Now we said in the last little
section about our little grammar. Those were perfect verbs, those
were past tense. The righteous man never walks
or stands or sits with sinners. Well here, the verb is imperfect,
it’s not complete. Our way of life is to continually
delight in God’s law. It’s to continually meditate
on it, to do so day and night. What does it mean that we delight
in something? It’s our chief desire. Some of
you, were to press the little button on your telephone and
look at the home screen, I might see a picture of your grandchild.
Or if you’re young and in love, a picture of your boyfriend or
girlfriend or whatever is your chief delight. Maybe it’s your
puppy, something like that. But what is your chief delight?
When you sit down in the evening or wake up in the morning, is
your chief delight television? or the evening newspaper, or
maybe to read a good book. Those are all wonderful things,
but it’s your chief delight to meditate on God’s law, to think
on it, to digest it, to soak it in. This is like water to
a tree, food to a plant. And so the righteous continually
delights. His chief desire is the law of
God. Now what about this meditate business? get a little fussy as Christians
and, you know, say Christians can’t do yoga and meditate and
all that. We get a little, we get the heebie-jeebies when people
start using a word like that. But no, this is an Old Testament
word, and it literally means to murmur. You don’t wanna walk
around murmuring God’s word and mumbling and talking to yourself,
because then you might find yourself in a straitjacket and off to
an institution. But you remember, the Old Testament
people of God didn’t have their little handy-dandy ESV Bibles. They didn’t have their Reformation
Study Bibles. They couldn’t pull out their pocket phone and look
up the Bible in multiple versions. How did they hear God’s law?
They heard it on the Sabbath. And they heard it read. And it
was in a scroll that stayed there. Probably they were illiterate.
And that’s been the way it has been for generations. It is we
who live on this side of the printing press and translations
that have copies of God’s Word in plenty. And so when we hear
on God’s law, we should meditate, delight in it. We are more privileged
than generations of followers of God. For they had to hear
it and they had to keep it in their mind. They had to walk
and push their plow and feed their cattle and take care of
their children and live that nomadic and Middle Eastern life. They had to live it remembering
and recalling and murmuring God’s law. How many of you have a verse
memorized? Raise your hand, but I bet our
numbers are kind of low. It’s just a guess. How many of you have a hymn memorized?
Maybe. You know, we’re not as faithful
about this. We’re an instant culture. We hear it one minute
or we see it one minute and it’s out the next instant. And so
we would do well to go back to our our forebears and hear God’s
word and memorize it and carry it in our hearts and ponder it
and think on it. Maybe journal right about it.
But we hear the word and we can feel it. We can have it beat
in our hearts and roll off the tip of our tongue. That’s where
these Bibles to songs are very helpful. That’s why we’ll sing
out of the Psalter. That’s why having good Christian music in
your MP3 player or if you’re like me, you still have a tape
deck. use it except to play my iPhone through. But you remember,
was it Snow White who said you whistle while you work? How about you sing God’s word
while you work? You ponder God’s word while you work. It’s a habit
of life. As you live, as you sit, as you
walk, as you stand, as you lie down, as you rise up, God’s word
is with you. One of our elders who I won’t
name him, you could probably guess who it is if I said. It’s
not Jay, because I was looking over at him as I said that. One
of our elders tells me that he goes to bed every night listening
to Reformation Network. the online radio from Ligonier
Ministries. And he said, I go to bed every
night hearing John Gerstner in that scratchy voice speaking
God’s word. And he said, it’s such a blessing
to me. And take that as a godly example. Do what’s available
to you. What works for you to meditate
on God’s law day and night. So what the righteous man does
do, Here’s a third thing, what the righteous man receives. We
find it in verse 3 and in verse 6. And verse 3 says of the righteous
man, he is like a tree planted by streams of water. It yields
its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither. And then skip down to verse 6,
the Lord knows the way of the righteous. We have to look at God blessing
us as a gift of grace. He doesn’t owe us anything. Well,
actually, He does. He owes us His wrath. He owes
us His curse. He owes us His displeasure. He
owes us Eternal punishment. He owes us death for sin. But
no, He’s given us His covenant love. He’s given us His grace.
And as we read Psalm 1 and enter into the Psalter, the psalm book
of the Christian faith, of the Old Testament faith, we think
of it as a keel on a boat. If you’ve ever flipped a canoe
over, or maybe a small sailboat, it has a ridge down the center
of it. Or as the boat gets larger, that
keel is deeper. It keeps the boat from tipping,
but it keeps it going straight. And if you read Psalm 1 and make
it all the way through the entire 150 Psalms, you’ll see that Psalm
1 is a keel that keeps your life straight. Blessed is the man
who doesn’t do this. Blessed is the man who does do
this. And now we land on this section, how does God bless you? Well, he gives us a picture.
It’s a picture of a tree planted by streams of water. Now we walk
out our doors here and we see trees everywhere. How many of
you have been to the Middle East, to the Holy Land. Okay, trees
are pretty scarce. They don’t exist. Where do they
exist? They only exist where there’s an irrigation canal or
some creek. And so when he gives this picture
to the people of the Old Covenant, they’re not living in the Eastern
United States and the South where trees are aplenty and we have
fall and spring and autumn and winter and all that business.
No, he’s speaking to those who, when they see a tree, it’s quite
a sight because it’s in the desert. And not only that, a tree that
is flourishing is quite a sight. And so he says in verse one,
blessed is the man. Blessed is the man. And he, in
verse three, is like a tree, a tree that has vitality, a tree
that has fruitfulness, a tree that has security. It is planted
in the ground. And it’s a tree that flourishes.
It does not wither. No, it prospers. And so what’s
the thought that comes to our mind, a practical thought? If
you want to wither, what do you do? Don’t meditate on God’s law. Don’t delight in his word. Busy
yourselves with Netflix binging. There’s one of my besetting sins. Or just do something else but
read the word. Get busy doing something else. But if you want to flourish,
if you don’t want to wither, You soak yourselves in God’s
Word. But notice in verse 6 what he
says. He says, the Lord knows the way of the righteous. He
knows your way of life. He sees it. He cares for you. He loves you. And he knows your
way. He knows whether you are withering
and whether you are prospering. He knows what’s taking place
in your life. Take just a moment and think, how blessed are you? I mean, this psalm is tempting
to say, blessed is the man who doesn’t do this, who does do
this. And then there’s a picture of blessing. You’re like a tree.
And so probably some of you are saying, I don’t feel like that
tree. My leaves are a little droopy. My roots need some nourishment.
Maybe I should scoot my tree over to a creek. And so the answer
is, if that’s the case, yes, you should. Scoot your tree closer
to the word of God on your iPod, on your In your Bibles, in your
daily devotions, scoot it closer to the pulpit in your church.
Get near God’s Word where you will be nourished. But think
just for a moment how blessed you are. I mean, our little catechism
tonight, how are you righteous before God? because we have the
righteousness of Christ given to us out of his mere grace.
I mean, how else in the world could you get that? You couldn’t
buy it. You couldn’t sell it. You couldn’t trade it. You couldn’t
steal it. You couldn’t beg for it. It’s a free gift of God.
And so how blessed are you just with that in mind? You’re very
blessed. But God, this is from God’s perspective. Sometimes we might say, well,
I want to be blessed my way. I want some riches, a new car,
maybe a pool outside the house. And then we realize we’re starting
to think worldly. There’s nothing wrong with those things. We need
to look at how blessed we are from God’s perspective. He’s
given us everything that we need. So sometimes our pessimism, sometimes
our view of the world is half empty instead of mostly full,
or our melancholy, our depression needs a dose of God saying to
us, my brother, my sister, you are indeed blessed. You’ve got it good. And it’s
not based on our feelings. Actually, you know how to measure
your blessing? You measure your blessing by what the Bible says
is true. Okay, feelings won’t cut it,
will they? Because we get to feeling low
at times. We get to feeling weak and tired. But what does the
Bible say about us? It says we are blessed, we are
happy, we are fortunate, those of us who have faith in God.
So just in our position in Christ, We are blessed. Now how do we
wrap all this up? What do we say here at the end?
Well, there’s two ways to live. There’s two ways. There’s two
outcomes to life. There’s the character of the
righteous and the unrighteous. And there’s the prospect or the
outcome of the righteous or the unrighteous. Do you want to be
blessed? Do you want to be like that fruitful and prosperous
tree that is green? Or do you want to be like the
chaff? that’s brown and just like the wind, it’s gone. Notice
what verse four says of the wicked. It says, the wicked are not so.
The wicked don’t prosper. They’re not like a tree. They’re
not so. They are like chaff that the wind drives away. They have
no future. They do not have the blessings
of God. Oh, sure, they may have riches in this life. They may
be able to beg, borrow, and steal and have some semblance of blessings
in this life, but they have no future. And notice the two things
it says about the unrighteous. It says, one, they will not stand
in the judgment. When God looks at them and says
to them, what fruit do you bring to this judgment seat that should
allow you in heaven? What are they going to say? all this sin and it was not placed
on the cross. It was not put on the back of
Christ. It is not paid for. And it also
says they will not be in the congregation of the eternal church
of God. Now this is where it gets really
serious. This is where we start having
these feelings of sadness and wanting to evangelize and wanting
to proclaim to our children and stare at them in the face and
go to our grandchildren and say, do you know I love Jesus? And
I sure hope you do. because we want them with us
in that eternal congregation. We want them to stand before
the judgment seat and not plead on their own merits, but to plead
on the merits of Christ Jesus. And so he gives us very quick,
clearly two ways, two outcomes. We’re reminded of Jesus speaking
of a similar thing in Matthew chapter seven. He says, many
will come to me and say, Lord, Lord, and what does he say? He
says, I don’t know you. away from me, out of my presence. Another consideration we have
is the church. You know, Jesus says that in
the church on this earth will have wheat and tares in the congregation. And so from time to time, we’ll
have in our congregation, those who say, Lord, Lord, but in the
end, they prove not to be. They prove to be those where
the gospel fell on poor soil. But in this life, we have those
who profess faith outwardly, but in reality, they are not
of the church. But what does Revelation tell
us about the eternal church in the New Jerusalem? It speaks
of excluding. those who are unrighteous. And
it gives a catalog of sins, most of them sexual sins, and it says
outside of the New Jerusalem they will be. Because the walls
and the gates are high and firm and strong. And so we realize
the seriousness of the two outcomes of life, one of righteousness
and one of wickedness. So how do we think of this? In
the South, sometimes we say it either is or it ain’t. Right? It either is or it ain’t. So how do we nurture this way
of godliness? How do we walk in the path of
godliness? First of all, we need to decide,
do I want to follow God and have a blessed life? That’s a huge
question. And the answer to that, I hope,
is yes. And you lay hold of Christ by faith and say, I’m a sinner
and I need a savior. and by faith we come to him,
but we put our lives, we put our way of life into practicing,
staying away from ungodliness, but we gotta get in the path
of godliness. And so we put ourselves under
the word. And you know, after a time, you
look back and you see a lot of fruit. You see that your leaves
aren’t withering, that your stalk is thicker, your tree is getting
taller. And you know what’s even more
amazing about that is a tree in the desert. is quite a sight. And we speak of wanting to be
evangelical. We speak of wanting to be a witness
to the world. Well, guess what? When people
see a tree flourishing, it gives you an opportunity to speak of
the God who blesses and the God who curses and to speak of the
one who received the curses in order that you might receive
the blessing. And so my prayer is that not only will you live
this way, but that you will proclaim the goodness of the one who makes
our trees bear fruit. Let’s pray together. Our Father,
we thank you for this psalm and the richness in it. We pray that
it would be a blessing to us and that it would guide our way
of life. We pray that we would be blessed because we love your
law, but also because we kiss the sun. We love the Messiah
and we bow our knee to him. And so in humble submission,
here we are. Take us and use us and help us to live this way,
not legalistically, not out of pride, but because of your grace.
and because we know it is a steady and godly way. We pray this in
Jesus’ name, amen. Let’s stand together and sing
Psalm 1. It’s from the Trinity Psalter,
which is a modern rendition of Psalm 1. And the tune is gonna
be, Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing.