Psalm 1 (1: TBC)

 

Psalm 1

‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ is the title of a film starring Will Smith, but it’s also what a lot of people assume the meaning of life is.

We all want to be happy, so it seems to make sense to pursue happiness. The problem is that happiness is an emotion which comes and goes. Pursuing happiness is a bit like chasing the wind, it’s a very hard thing to do!

A better way to live would be to pursue God, because He is the Source of happiness, joy, and blessedness.

Psalm 1 is all about happiness, joy, and blessedness. The Psalms in general are literally and metaphorically at the heart of the Bible. They are song lyrics to help us worship God. We might assume then that Psalm 1 is full of ‘hallelujahs’, ‘praise the Lord’, ‘let everything that has breath praise the Lord’, ‘let all that is within me praise his holy name’.

Perhaps surprisingly, Psalm 1 is more about blessedness, joy, and happiness. God wants us to be happy to praise and worship Him. Nonetheless, there are Psalms that reflect when we’re not feeling happy: Psalms of lament in response to suffering.

Psalm 1 clearly outlines two ways to live: there’s the way of blessedness, joy, and happiness; and the way of wickedness, sin, and mockery of God.

Let’s read it:

‘Blessed is the man who doesn’t walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stands in the way of sinners, or sits in the seat 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. In 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.

for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.’

 

What inspired me to look at Psalm 1 was a phrase that came to mind that’s from a poem that I’d never actually read, but it talks about the ‘road not taken’ and the ‘road less travelled’. It’s a poem about a man who takes a walk in the woods and comes to a fork in the road. He decides to take the well-worn path, but then wonders whether he should have taken the other path.

This is a bit like when someone asked Jesus whether only a few people are going to be saved. He replied that we should make every effort to enter through the narrow gate, because wide is the gate and wide is the road that leads to destruction, and many are on it; but narrow is the gate and narrow is the path that leads to eternal life, and only a few are on it.

So, if we aren’t following Jesus, we’ve come to a fork in the road this morning. Today is a day of salvation. Today there is an opportunity to start living for Jesus.

Blessedness is something we often might talk about. We might say ‘bless you’ when someone sneezes. We might say ‘bless’ when a child falls and scrapes their knee. We might upload a photo of our holiday on a tropical island for example with the caption #blessed!

The danger is however that we trivialise blessedness. We can’ t divorce blessedness from the Source of blessing who is the Lord God Almighty. Everyone wants to be blessed. Even Pharoah who enslaved God’s people asked Moses to bless him when he finally let God’s people go (before he changed his mind again!).

‘Blessed is the man’ doesn’t mean to say that women can’t be blessed. King David probably wrote this Psalm; he was a man. If you’d have asked David how he was he would have said ‘I’m blessed’.

Also though, Jesus on the road to Emmaus after he rose from the dead said that the Old Testament all points to Him. So, if we read Psalm 1 and can’t find Jesus, we’re not looking hard enough. Jesus is the ultimately blessed Man, in whom we are blessed.

Yes, He was a Man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering in His time on earth. But for the joy set before Him He endured the cross, scorning its shame, and is now sat at the right hand of Father God, where countless angels, glorified saints, and even us bless Him for what a blessing He is to us.

If we trust in Jesus, we too can be blessed.

‘Blessed is the man who doesn’t walk in the counsel of the wicked’- I don’t particularly know what the counsel of the wicked was 3,000 years ago in ancient Israel, but I know what it is nowadays.

The counsel of the wicked nowadays is to do whatever makes you feel happy. It sounds good at first glance, but really, it’s terrible advice. If I did whatever made me feel happy for example, I might eat chocolate for breakfast, lunch and tea and get very unhealthy very fast. I’d probably be very lazy and unproductive. Being governed by our feelings is a bad idea.

Another counsel of the wicked I would describe as ‘Disney theology’. Disney make entertaining films, but they have bad theology. They tell us to follow our hearts, in other words to be selfish and to be all about ‘me, me, me’!

The Bible says the opposite. ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can understand it’ says Jeremiah. Ezekiel says we need God to give us spiritual heart transplants! Our hearts of stone need to be replaced with spiritual hearts of flesh that are full of the Holy Spirit of God.

God doesn’t literally want a pound of flesh from us, but He does want us and Him in partnership to metaphorically circumcise our hearts, to cut away all that it bad and to make sure we’re pure in heart. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’, says Jesus, ‘for they shall see God’.

‘Blessed is the man who doesn’t walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stands in the way of sinners, or sits in the seat of scoffers’- there’s a progression there. Progressiveness isn’t necessarily wrong- if we’re progressing in the right direction. I sometimes walk to church. Then I stand and enjoy a coffee. Finally, I sit and wait for what God has to say to me.

My wife and I were #blessed to go on honeymoon to Los Angeles, the ‘city of angels’. One evening we drove through the desert to Las Vegas, ‘sin city’. We parked up, went for a little walk to a shopping mall. Then we stood, in the queue for some fast food. Then we sat and ate our fast food. There was a progression. First, we were walking, next we were standing, and finally we were sitting. Thankfully then we stood, walked to the car, and drove back to the city of angels.

I think there’s a lesson there for if we find ourselves on the wrong path. We simply need to repent, to change our minds about what we should be doing. We need to do a 180 and come back to God. Instead of pursuing happiness, we should be pursuing God, who delights to bless His people.

When we think of scoffers, or mockers, we might assume the Psalmist is on about non-religious people. In this Psalm we might assume the blessed person is a religious, churchgoing person. We might assume the scoffer is someone who reject religion. Not necessarily!

Jesus told a story of a religious man and a sinner who went to the temple to pray. The religious man was just massaging his ego, being all self-congratulatory. He said, ‘God, I thank you I’m not like other men, robbers, adulterers, murderers, evildoers… even like this tax collector! I fast twice a week and I give a tenth of all I get’.

The sinful tax collector stood at a distance. He wouldn’t even look up to heaven, but beat his chest and said ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner’.

Jesus in my paraphrase said, ‘I tell you what: that tax collector went home accepted by God, not the religious man. Because whoever humbles themself will be exalted, but whoever exalts themself will be humbled. As David’s son Solomon said in the Proverbs, ‘pride goes before destruction, and an arrogant spirit before a fall… but humility comes before honour’.

In my experience as a Christian, trying to share my faith, some of the worst scoffing and mockery I’ve had has been from religious people. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1, for religious people, the message of the cross of Christ is a stumbling block to religious people. Religious people like to think they can justify themselves, that they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and make themselves acceptable to God on their own terms.

So, we’ve heard a lot about what blessedness isn’t, but what is it then? It’s a bit like a man looking in a mirror, because that’s how James in the New Testament describes reading the Bible. It’s mainly about Jesus, but it also applies to us. It’s not necessarily a pretty picture. Paul in Romans 3 says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God- whether we’re religious or non-religious. Thankfully, we can be justified freely through Christ and His blood shed on our behalf. So, we can be victorious in our risen Lord. We can be seated with Him in the heavenly realms. We can be blessed by God with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

‘but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law, he meditates day and night.’

What we delight in says a lot about us. Hopefully it’s evident that I delight in my wife and daughters, and in my church family. But what is my ultimate delight? If I’m to be blessed, my ultimate delight should be in the Lord and in what He has to say to me in His word.

Now when we think of law we might think of dusty books on a shelf and a man in a wig hammering down judgement upon us. Biblically however, the word ‘torah’ has a sense of teaching or instruction. It’ s like a dad ‘laying down the law’ for his children: ‘come on now, it’s time for church/lunch/bed’ etc. As a child delights in a dad and his reassuring boundaries, so we can delight in God and in His law.

Now all David had to go on in terms of the word of God was the law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible. Yet even they delighted him. When we start our daily Bible reading plans in January for example, we usually start to flag by the time we get to the end of Exodus.

I just want to give us a whistle-stop tour of those five books to whet our appetite for how we can delight in them as we find Jesus promised in their pages.

So, Genesis is all about beginnings. It’s about how God created the universe to perfection, including us, but how sadly we messed up. Right from that point however, God promises Jesus. He tells the devil/snake that the Seed of the woman (by implication the virgin born Son of God) would strike the devil’s head, and that he would strike His heel. Jesus would be nailed by His feet and hands to save us from the mess we’ve made.

Then Abraham, Isaac, Jacob/Israel, and Judah are all promised a Descendant who will bless the world- and He’s Jesus! We’re blessed by trusting in Him.

Exodus is about how God takes His people from slavery to the promised land. It’s the same for us. He’s taking us from slavery to sin to the promised new creation. Having saved us, He gives His ten commandments to show us how we should live. In summary, we should love God wholeheartedly, and love one another as we love ourselves.

Leviticus is full of offerings and sacrifices for sin, because even though we have the law, we still mess up. Thankfully, Jesus is the ultimate and final offering and sacrifice for sin. If we trust in Him, we will be saved.

Numbers is the flip side of the coin of a verse in 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul is talking about love. He says that love doesn’t keep a record of wrongs. But Numbers says that love does keep a record of rights. It’s like the old hymn, ‘count your blessings, count them one by one, and it will surprise you (pleasantly!) what the Lord has done’. In Numbers, in the 40 years in the wilderness, God carried His people from slavery to the promised land. All the while they’re moaning and grumbling and sinning against Him, but because He loved them, He didn’t give up on them. It’s the same for us. He who began a good work in us will carry it through to completion upon the day of Christ Jesus.

Deuteronomy is a reminder. We so easily forget. We need to remind ourselves to love God wholeheartedly, and to love one another as we love ourselves.

‘on His law he meditates day and night’. Biblical meditation isn’t just emptying our minds of negativity; it’s filling our minds with God and His word. So I can picture David literally scrolling through the scroll of Leviticus and he gets to chapter 19 where it says, ‘love your neighbour’; and he’s meditating on what it means for him to love his neighbour.