Psalm 1 (The Blessed Man We Could Never Be)

Psalm 1 opens the book of Psalms with a striking portrait of the blessed man, but this description goes far deeper than simple moral instruction. The psalm begins by showing us what the blessed person doesn't do: he doesn't walk in the counsel of the wicked, stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of scoffers. This progression reveals sin's gravitational pull from passing through to lingering to finally settling down and making ourselves comfortable in ungodly patterns.

Positively, the blessed man delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night. This isn't dutiful obligation but genuine joy and appetite for God's Word. The result is spiritual fruitfulness like a tree deliberately planted by streams of water, yielding fruit in season with leaves that don't wither. In contrast, the wicked are like chaff driven away by wind - weightless and without substance.

The transformative insight comes when we ask ourselves honestly: Are we this blessed man? The answer for all of us is no, and that honest admission opens our eyes to the psalm's true meaning. This is primarily a description of Jesus Christ, who alone never walked in the counsel of the wicked, perfectly delighted in God's will, and bore fruit that never fails. Through faith in Christ, His righteousness becomes ours, and we receive the blessedness described in this psalm not through our own efforts but as a gift of grace.

Transcript

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Well, with summer here, we are going to take a little break from Revelation and do some sermons through Psalms. And this morning we're going to start in Psalm 1. So if you would turn in your copy of God to uh copy of God's word, sorry, this is not God. Um, this is God's word.

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Turn in your copy of God's word to Psalm chapter one.

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Every great book has a front door that welcomes you in, it encourages you to further explore its pages. And before you enter the house of that book, you stand on the threshold, you get your first impression of everything that waits inside. And Psalm 1 is the front door of the entire book of Psalms. And it is not there by accident or just mere happenstance. The Holy Spirit has placed Psalm chapter 1 right where he wants it. He's given it to us here as a set of instructions for how to read the rest of the 149 Psalms that follow. So follow along with me in your copy of God's word as we read together Psalm chapter one. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seed of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither, and all that he does he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. The Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. Now the first word out of the mouth of Psalm one is really a question. Not a question that's really stated in so many words, but a question that's embedded in the portrait that we're giving. The Psalm begins with Blessed is the man. And immediately we find ourselves asking, Who is this man? Who is this person that walks in the counsel, that does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, whose delight is in God's law day and night? Who is like a fruitful tree that never withers? Do you know anyone like that? Are you like that? Have you ever met someone like this? Because I know that I am not this man. And the longer that I sit with this psalm, the more I realize that none of us are. And that discovery, that reckoning with the failure of us not being what Psalm 1 describes is not the end of the message of Psalm 1. It's the beginning of it. Because the Psalm is not first a description of you or of me, it is a description of someone else. And understanding who that someone is will change everything about how you read your Bible, about how you pray, about how you live, and the lens by which you view God through. And this morning we're going to walk through this psalm carefully, its portrait of the blessed man, its stark picture of the wicked, its announcement of two final destinies, and then we are going to ask one final question that is the foundation of it all. Who is this psalm really about? So, first in verses one through three, we see this portrait of the blessed man. Now the psalm opens with a beatitude, a declaration of blessedness. But notice that before we are told what the blessed man does, we are told what he does not do. Verse 1 traces these three movements in a declining order. He does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, he does not stand in the way of sinners, and he does not sit in the seat of scoffers. Now, if we look at those verbs again, walk, stand, sit, we notice there's a progression here. Now walking is movement. You can walk and pass through somewhere. Standing is to linger. You're now lingering in a place, you've slowed down, and sitting is settling. You've made yourself at home, you've gotten comfortable in that place. The psalm is warning us that sin has a gravitational pull. We just saw and celebrated yet again another uh rocket launch to the moon, and we we just are so fascinated by how they're able to use the gravitational pull of the moon in order to just kind of slingshot around. Sin works in a similar manner. It's gravitational pull lures you in from simply passing through to lingering to making yourself comfortable in a and the slide from walking to sitting is not dramatic.

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It's almost imperceptible.

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It's the slow drift of the heart. Now that alone should sound eerily familiar to all of us who know too well what sin does when it slowly takes root in our hearts. This picture in itself of what we see the blessed man do is a warning to us to be careful about what we let into our minds, into our hearts, into our lives, even in the slightest bit. Just walk with me for a while. It won't hurt. You can walk safely through sin. Before you know it, you're standing in it, and then you're sitting in it. Now, notice too the company that we're warned about here that the blessed man does not join the wicked, the sinners, the scoffers. Now, these are not three different groups of people, but they're three ways of describing the same posture towards God. A life oriented away from God. The wicked live practically as though God does not exist. And this is still true today. Everyone who is wicked who is not in Christ lives this exact same way. The sinners have chosen their path. The scoffers have moved beyond indifference to contempt. They have hardened their hearts and now mock those who take God seriously. Now, this is the trajectory of unbelief left to run its course. And we should note that this also fits the current attitude of everyone who denies God today in our own culture. In fact, as about the year 2010, 2011, the United States culture is now what we call a negative world. We've talked about this before, how our culture has gone from a positive worldview, a positive view towards Christianity that many of our senior adults were born in and lived in through the 50s and 60s. And in the 60s, 70s, 80s, we started shifting to a neutral world where the culture really didn't have a positive or negative view about Christianity. And as it continued to shift, and in the 2000s, a lot of sociologists say around the year 2010, 2011, the United States culture has now entered into a negative, a net negative view of Christianity, meaning that those in the world out there are mostly scoffers against Christ and Christianity and what we as the church stand for, and we see it on our television screens every single day. But the blessed man is conspicuously out of step with this world. He does not absorb its assumptions, he doesn't drift along with its current. He is, in the words of Jeremiah, not like those whose trust is in man and make flesh their strength. He is oriented differently. He lives in a completely different direction. Now, verse two gives us the positive counterpart. Verse one tells us what he's not, what he doesn't do. Verse two gives us the positive, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. Two words here deserve our attention: the word delight and the word law. First, delight. The blessed man is not merely dutiful about the scriptures. He does not read his Bible as a chore, grinding through chapters because he's supposed to. He delights in it. There is joy here, there is affection, there is an appetite. He thirsts for the word of God as the deer pants for the water. The word in Hebrew speaks of deep pleasure and deep desire. This is not a discipline of the reluctant, it is the gladness of the hungry seeking the word of God. The second word is the word law. The Hebrew word is Torah, which means far more than some cold, restrictive legal code. Torah is instruction, it's teaching. It's the revelation of God's mind and will to his people. But notice whose law it is. We're not just talking about a random law. We're saying it is the law of the Lord. In fact, it's given the divine name Yahweh. This is not some anonymous rule book. This is the word of the covenant God, the Lord who's made a covenant with the people, the God who revealed himself to Moses, who redeemed Israel out of Egypt, who promised Abraham a seed because of the revealed attributes of Yahweh, his power, his sovereignty, his omnipotence, his love, his grace, his mercy, his patience, all these should immediately confirm to us that the any law that proceeds from this Yahweh is perfect and it is good for us to follow. To delight in his word is to delight in him. Now, just do an exercise with me. Let's view this from a completely logical perspective. Let us hypothetically assume logically that there is an all-powerful being that is the creator of everything that is, and that this all-powerful being maintains control and power and sovereignty over everything. Now, if that being has an opinion on something, on how something should be, on how the creature should behave, how the creature should act, logically, do you think his opinion is worth paying attention to? Of course, the answer is a resounding yes. We know this is not a hypothetical situation. This is the reality that we live in. This is the truth. God has given us his opinion, and his opinion is always right, and it is given to us in his word, and we should seek to delight in it. And then we see that this blessed man delights in the law of the Lord day and night. This is not an occasional reading. This is sustained ruminating absorption. Like a cow chews the cud, the blessed man continuously digests the law of the Lord. Now, the Hebrew word uh used for meditation is the same word that can resemble like the low uh growling of a lion or the cooing of a dove. It suggests a sound, a murmuring, turning the words over and over in your mind until they've gone deep into the mind and into the heart. The blessed man is someone who carries God's word with him every waking hour, returning to it again and again and again, letting it work its way into the grain of his thinking, allowing it to be the primary source of the formulation of his mind and all that he does and says. And then verse 3 offers us a picture. He is like a tree planted by streams of water. Now, this is a beautiful image, but one small word should stop us. The word planted. It's not a wild tree that happened to grow near the water. This is a deliberately placed tree. Someone carried this tree to this spot and put it in this ground beside the water. The blessed man's fruitfulness is not self-generated. It is the result of being placed somewhere by someone else. And the tree yields its fruit in season. Its leaf does not wither, and whatever it does, it prospers. Now, this is not the naive prosperity gospel. It is a covenant promise. In Jeremiah 17, the same image appears in contrast with the shrub in the desert. The one who trusts in Yahweh is like a tree planted by water, unafraid in the heat of drought, because its roots grow deep into the living water. The outward circumstances may be hard, but the roots will hold. So here is the portrait. A man who refuses the pull of the ungodly world, who delights in the word and the law of Yahweh day and night, who is planted and fruitful and unshaken. And here's the question we must ask ourselves honestly: Are you that person? Am I that man? We should ask these questions. Have I ever sat in the seat of scoffers? Have I never absorbed the counsel of the world that lives as though God does not exist? Is my delight in God's law and in God's word truly unbroken day and night, without interruption or coldness or distraction? Do I prosper in all that I do?

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Do my leaves wither? Am I always producing fruit in season? And the honest answer for all of us is no.

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And that honest answer is the very first step to understanding what this Psalm is really saying. Now we move on to verse 4. We have the portrait of the wicked in verses four and five. Now, verse 4 opens with what is in Hebrew a very sharp contrast to what we just saw with the blessed man. It simply says, the wicked are not so. Two original words in the Hebrew language, not so. The transition is jarring, almost violent. Everything the psalm has been building, this portrait of the blessed man, the the the tree, the streams of water, the fruit, it's just flippantly or intentionally flippantly set aside with the wave of a hand. Not so the wicked. Notice what their wicked do not receive. They don't get a portrait. So I'm gonna paint them out for you. The righteous man is painted with care, like an artist going before and being very intentional with every brushstroke and every color. We learn his posture, we learn his loves, we see his roots. The wicked wicked are given only a contrast and a metaphor. Not so, they are like chaff that the wind drives away. Now, chaff is what remains after the threshing floor has done its work. You know, the grain is a substance, the weight, the thing that nourishes, the chaff is the husk, light, dry without root or substance, a breath of wind, and it's gone. There's nothing to hold it, there's nothing to it. In fact, when harvest season would come and they would go with their winnowing fork and separate the wheat from the chaff, uh, the changing of the seasons was so um uh divinely inspired by the Lord as they would be able to toss the wheat and chaff into the air on the threshing floor while some wind was coming in through the window, and it would simply blow the chaff away, and the grain would fall to the floor. That's how easily the chaff is gone.

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A little breeze from outside coming in through the window blows it away. This is the Psalm's image of a life lived apart from God.

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Not a portrait of dramatic evil necessarily. Chaff is not monstrous, it's just weightless. It has no meaning. It is a life without roots, without the deep anchor of the covenant relationship of Yahweh. And so when the wind comes, and that when the breeze comes, when when judgment comes, it has nothing to hold it into place. Simply driven away. Now, verse 5 draws out the implication that the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. Now, the word judgment here uh points beyond ordinary human courts. This is the final reckoning. The day when all accounts are settled and every life is weighed. On that day, the chaff will not stand. It will be driven away by a wind that cannot be stopped. Now, the interesting thing here is the Hebrew word used for wind is the word ruach, which means wind and also means spirit of God, which is a play on words for what blows the chaff away. Instead of experiencing the covenantal love of Yahweh, he disposes of them just like blowing away the dust. Now, verse six is the hinge of the whole psalm, for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. We have two ways, two final outcomes, and at the center of it all, the Lord knows. Now, the word knows is not just he has a knowledge of it, but it's the nose, a covenantal nose. In the Old Testament, to know someone is not merely to have information about them. It is to be in a living relationship with them, to watch over them, to be committed to them. When the Lord knows the way of the righteous, it means he sees it, he accompanies it, he guards it. The righteous man is not merely just on the right road. He is on a road that the Lord walks with him. The way of the wicked, by contrast, perishes. Not just the wicked themselves, their whole way of life is shown to be a dead end. It leads nowhere, it terminates into nothing. The person who builds their life apart from God is building on sin, and the final collapse is absolute and certain and eternal. So the Psalm confronts every one of us with the question, which way are you on? And it also, as we're about to see, pushes us to ask, is there any way to get from the second road to the first? How can I get from the way that perishes to the way of the righteous? And here's where everything changes. Here is the question that Psalm 1 has been raising all along Who is this blessed man? Early in church history, readers notice something very striking about this Psalm. The early church fathers pointed to verse 1 Blessed is the man who walks not in Counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, and said, This is a description of Jesus Christ.

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Not first of us, but of him. Now think about it carefully.

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Who has never walked in the counsel of the wicked? Jesus Christ, who is tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin, Hebrews 4:15, who was offered all the kingdoms of the world by the devil himself and refused, who stood before religious leaders, consumed by power and ambition, and he did not absorb their logic, who was surrounded by a culture of compromise, and he never once sat down in it. Who delighted in the law of the Lord? They and not Jesus Christ, who said in Psalm 40, in the words of the author of Hebrews, explicitly applies to him. Your law is within my heart. It was in the will of his father. The Torah of Yahweh was not a burden he bore, it was the very shape of his love. And who was the tree that was planted by the stream of water?

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Jesus Christ.

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He was placed there by the Father, beside the inexhaustible spring of the Holy Spirit, who bore the fruit that does not fail, who, even through the winter storm of Gethsemane, and the scorching drought of Golgotha did not wither. As he was suffering on the cross, the leaves did not fall.

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The roots held.

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And on the third day fruit came. Resurrection life, the first fruits of new creation. And who prospers in all that he does? Jesus Christ, whose mission to seek and save the lost did not fail, whose work on the cross accomplished everything that the Father sent him to do, who sits now at the mighty right hand of God on high, reigning until every enemy has made his footstool.

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But here's the most astonishing part. Who stood in judgment on behalf of the wicked?

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Jesus Christ, the righteous one, the truly blessed man, the only human being of whom this psalm is perfectly and unqualifiedly true, stood in the place of those who deserve the chaff's fate. I agree with R. C. Spruell when he said, uh, when I get asked why do bad things happen to good people, and he said, that's only happened one time, and he volunteered. He took the judgment that we could not survive. He was driven away so that we would not have to be. The Spirit of God blew like the wind wrath onto Christ for the sake of sinners until God said, I am satisfied. Psalm one is a riddle, and Jesus Christ is the answer. It's not primarily a moral instruction for us to try harder. It's the portrait of the one who is everything that we are not, and who gives us freely what we could never earn. But now the crucial pastoral question that I have for you, if someone is primarily about Jesus, what does it mean for us? Are we simply spectators? Are we just watching someone else's blessedness from a distance? Not at all, because the Bible tells us something that's almost too good to believe. That those who are united to Jesus Christ by faith are counted in him. His standing becomes our standing. His righteousness is credited to us. Paul explains it plainly in 2 Corinthians 5 21. The one who is the blessed man takes our place as the unrighteous, so that we might be counted as righteous in him. This means that the blessedness of Psalm 1 is not something that we've produced or what we manufacture. It is something that we receive. We are not planted by our own efforts. We are planted by God in Christ beside streams of living water. Jesus said to the woman at the well, whoever drinks of the water that I give will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. The tree in Psalm 1 is planted beside this water. And the Father, through the gospel, is the one doing the planting. And then something beautiful begins to happen. In Christ, our delight in the Word is being renewed. The Spirit is writing the law onto our hearts, as Jeremiah 31 promised. It is not that we now instantly have the unbroken day and night delight of being the perfectly blessed man. We know that. But we are being drawn toward it. There are seasons in every Christian life when the world feels dry, when our delight in reading the word is small, when meditation and prayer takes a lot of effort, when delight feels distant. In those moments, some of you in this room, many of you may be experiencing this right now. So I want to talk to you. In those moments when you feel far from the Lord, I want to tell you what the Bible tells never tells you to do. The Bible never tells you to manufacture feelings that you do not have.

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You are never told to put on a mask and pretend like it's okay. You are invited to draw near to the giver of joy, and to find that in him, slowly, joy returns.

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One step at a time, through the ordinary means of grace, the word of God, the ministry of the church, the outpouring of his Holy Spirit. Psalm 1 is followed by 149 more Psalms. And many of them are the prayers of people who are not feeling particularly blessed. People crying out in the dark, asking where God has gone, wrestling with suffering and doubt and the apparent triumph of the wicked. The book of Psalms never pretends that the Christian life is a straight line from blessing to more blessing to more blessing. It maps the whole terrain of a life of faith with all of its valleys and all of its shadows, and Psalm 1 stands at the door of it all and says, the way through is Jesus Christ. The blessed man has walked every road of the Psalms. Follow him. And because we are in him, the Lord knows our way. He is not distant from us. This is a covenantal knowing. This is why he's called Yahweh, given the covenantal name here. The Lord knows the way of the righteous. He knows our way, not because we are perfectly righteous, but because we are in the one who was. He is known, and in Christ we too are known by God. So Psalm 1 is two things for us this morning at one time. It is a mirror and it is a promise. As a mirror, it shows us what we are not. None of us are the perfectly blessed man. We have all walked to some degree in the counsel of the wicked. We have all to some degree sat in the seat of the scoffers. If only in our own own hearts, entertaining a scoffer's logic that God is far away, and that his word is not worth much, that his word is not trustworthy. We are all, apart from Christ, a chaff waiting for the wind.

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The psalm does not allow us to be comfortable there. It confronts us.

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And if you are not yet in Christ, if you have not trusted him with your life, then Psalm 1 is the most urgent invitation that you have ever received. There are two ways, and only one of them does not perish. Come to Christ, be planted by streams of living water. You cannot plant yourself, but he can place you there, and he will if you come to him. You can be a tree planted by a stream through Christ, or you can be chaff that is blown away as dust. No other options. And if you are in Christ, church, brothers and sisters, if you know that you belong to Christ, then Psalm 1 is a word of solid comfort.

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Now you may not feel very much like the blessed man today. Perhaps your delight in God's word may feel thin, your fruitfulness may feel hidden. But you are planted by the streams of living water.

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The roots go down to water that you cannot always see, and fruit will come in its season. Be comforted, dear brother. Let your soul take rest, dear sister. The Lord is not far from you. He is closer to you than a brother. The Lord's nearness to you is not based on your efforts. Let me say that again. If you are in Christ, you have to know this. We have to know this. The Lord's nearness to you is not based on your efforts, it is based on the efforts of Jesus Christ. And if you are covered in the blood of Christ, if Jesus is your Lord and Savior, then God's love for you is based in that Yahweh covenantal love. And the covenant has been fulfilled in Christ Jesus. Christianity is not a works-based religion, except that the fact that our relationship with God is based solely on the works of Christ, who perfectly fulfilled some one. And so when God sees you, his children, he looks on you as he does Christ, of whom he said, This is my son, whom I love, with whom I am well pleased. So, dear brother, dear sister, do not linger in an emotional state where you feel that God is bitter towards you, that he keeps you at arm's reach, waiting for you to satisfy him. He is near to you this very moment. Collapse your soul into his loving embrace. Let your heart overflow with the loving tenderness of the heart of God, rest your weary mind in the knowledge that he thinks highly of you as his beloved. If you are in Christ, then you have roots. They may still be growing, but even now they have the ability to soak up the living water of Jesus Christ that is freely given to you. Drink up and take your fill, for the Lord is not stingy in what he gives to his people. He pours it out willingly and abundantly and infinitely.

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And in Christ, we as his people are not the chaff, or not the wicked.

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In Christ, we too are like a tree planted by a stream, a tree that does not strain to bear fruit, it does not grip the ground in desperate effort, convinced that if it relaxes for a moment, it will stop being a tree. It simply stays planted, it stays where it's placed, beside the living water day after day, in summer and winter, in drought and in rain, and in season the fruit will come. Stay in Christ, stay in his word, delight yourself in his word, not because you must, but because if you meet the one who is himself the living water, draw near to the blessed man, the only one of whom Psalm 1 is perfectly true, Jesus Christ, and find that in him you are blessed too because of the work that he did on the cross. The Lord knows the way of the righteous, and in Jesus Christ, that righteous way is yours. Let's pray together.