When we read Psalm 1, it tells us the righteous will prosper but the wicked will perish. And yet, in the book of Romans, we're told that none of us is righteous. So what does this mean?
Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg digs into Psalm 1 to find the only way sinners can be declared righteous. Saturdays in Scotland for me as a boy, along with my sisters, were always marred by rain. When it rained, they were always marred. Let me put it that way.
It didn't rain every Saturday. But the way to deal with that for me was to take my pocket money and to buy for myself an Airfix kit. And this was a little piece of plastic that you assembled into a Second World War plane of some kind.
And I got more glue on my mother's dining room table than I ever got on the plane, and it's memorable for that. But also because while I was doing this, my younger sisters had those big books that you bought in the newsagents, and one of their favorites was Simply Join the Dots. And I used to interfere with this—well, you'd be no surprise in that—in that I would tell them, Oh, I see what it is. I can see it, even before you join it. And they would say, Well, don't interfere with us.
We'd like to join them for ourselves. And we wanted to see the picture form up. I mention that because one of the great concerns in reading the Bible is that we learn how to join the dots, that we learn how the dots, when they are joined, particularly in the Old Testament, form up in a picture of the Lord Jesus.
And so it ought to be that we don't have to scramble around for this, but it becomes apparent. The disciples were the beneficiaries of essentially a join-the-dots lesson that is recorded in Luke chapter 24. And what a Bible study that must have been, when Jesus takes these fellows who were so disconsolate and brokenhearted, who believed that the story of redemption and transformation had come to a horrible end at Calvary, and he joined the dots for them. And he took them to the law and to the prophets and to the Psalms.
And who fits the bill in the description of the first three verses of Psalm 1? Have you ever met this man? The man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but delights in the law of the Lord, meditates on it day and night, and he's like a tree planted by streams of living water. Now, you'd have to say, no, I've met a number of people who would like to be that man, but I'm not sure I have ever met a man who fulfilled this in its entirety.
Well, of course. Because only one man has—namely, Jesus. Psalm 1, verses 1 to 3, is true, ultimately, of only the Lord Jesus Christ. What you have in Jesus is essentially the one who starts it all. He's the prototype of Psalm 1, and he invites us all to join in, along with him.
In him. In him who is my rock, who is my refuge, who is my Redeemer. He's not asking us to do it in order that we might be placed in him, but because by grace we are in him.
Now, I wonder, does that make sense to you? Because the only other way you're gonna go at it is to take this psalm and all the other psalms in a moralistic way. Instead, what we do is we respond to Psalm 1—we have it applied to our lives—in a sense of gratitude and of wonder. Now, as we come to the psalm, and we have to have a way of navigating it, I've chosen to take a leaf from John Stott, who looked at this psalm in one of his brief books and gathered the thinking under two simple headings.
I think they're good, and we can use them. Verses 1 to 3, the righteous will prosper. Verses 4 to 6, the wicked will perish. And I have found the study of this again—although I've known this psalm since I was a child, I learned it in the authorized version off by heart.
I think I can still quote it. The old hundredth is the theme of Truth for Life and our intro and our outro. I know this psalm. But what I found quite startling as I was studying it again this week is the way in which it leaves no middle ground. There's no middle territory here. Either people are righteous or they are wicked.
Wow! So that must be true of us this morning, then—that the great divide that is represented in humanity is the division of Psalm 1. Blessed are the righteous who will prosper, and cursed are the wicked who will perish. It's not very politically correct, is it?
What makes it particularly difficult is when you have been to apply faces and names to it. When you think about going back to your office tomorrow morning and to sit opposite your colleague, whom you like very much and who's a very respectable lady, but you know that she has no interest in the Bible—she would never say that she loves Jesus or has ever considered possibly following him—well, what does the Bible say about her? She's wicked.
She's wicked. And the wicked will perish. Well, you say, this is dreadful stuff. Why do we have to go into the Old Testament? It's much better if you stay in the New Testament, Alistair. Sometimes it's hard, but not as hard as this.
And if you just get out—no, no, no, no, no. Go into the New Testament. Let Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, begin similarly. Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Same word. Let him go along the line, follow his thought. And where does he go?
How does he apply it? Enter, he says, by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. And in our relativistic culture, absolute statements like this really jar. One of the ways in which we become aware of the fact that we have taken on a significant amount of the thinking of the world—that is, the world oriented against God—is when we come to statements just like this, and we find ourselves saying, Well, we gotta be able to do something with this.
Yes, we do. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. There's only two possibilities. Prospering by grace, perishing without it. I can tell that you find this quite daunting too. And so you should.
Categorically, there's the wide and the narrow. There's life, just death. He goes on to the builders. Remember, the man built a house? He who listens to my word and puts him into practice is like the man who built this house on a rock, and when everything came and beat on it, it stood firm. The other man was the man who hears my word, comes to church, listens to the Bible, says, Oh, yes, I like those talks.
Very good, good, good. He listens to my word. He does nothing about it.
He's like a man who built this house on the sand, and when everything blew and beat on him, it collapsed like a ton of bricks. That's Jesus, the most loving man who ever lived. Now, I'm not saying this. It's in the Bible, isn't it? I would never invent this. So, we better get to the text.
That was a very long introduction. The righteous will prosper. The righteous will prosper.
Blessed or happy. When you read in magazines the surveys of what people are looking for—and it seems throughout every decade of life they have these, maybe every five years, if I find them everywhere, airline magazines and so on, what are people looking for—almost inevitably in the top five they say happiness. Because, after all, who likes to be unhappy? America, of course, is committed to it. Otherwise, why would we have written it into the Declaration of Independence?
Why would we have included it as one of the inalienable rights that has been given to us by our Creator that we would not only enjoy life and liberty but also the pursuit of happiness? So, every day we live our lives, we find people either on the radio or wherever it is trying to say to us, Come on, now. Don't be so disconsolate. You can be happy. It's only five days till Friday. You can get through this.
You'll be fine. And so what? Elderly people are encouraged in one way, and youngsters are encouraged in another. David Brooks, who I read routinely in The New York Times, his most recent piece this week was on, essentially, young people who are now graduates from college or from university.
And he was writing about the miseducation or the mismanagement of these folks. And it seemed to me apropos—I'll read it to you now, you can make your determination—but the thought is, Where is this blessing to be found? Where is this happiness to be found?
Does this not ring with clarity in a culture like ours? I quote from his article, People in their twenties seem compelled to bounce around, popping up here and there quantum-like, with different jobs, living arrangements, and partners, while hoping that all these diverse experiences magically add up to something. Their lives are rife with uncertainty and anxiety, and all the while social media makes the comparison game more intrusive than ever, and nearly everybody feels as if he or she is falling behind.
I think that's pretty good. I'm not gonna have another diatribe on Instagram and everything, but I'm thankfully free of that thing for myself. Because if I go on there, I'll know that I'm falling behind.
This pastor's doing this, this pastor's doing that, this pastor's tall, this pastor's handsome, this pastor's intelligent, this pastor's churches, this pastor's… And it's only quarter past eight in the morning! Is there a correlation between suicide amongst young girls and body image and the intrusive comparisons that are daily there for them? Probably. They want to be happy. So do you. Brooks says, And how do we as a society prepare young people for this uncertain phase? We pump them full of vapid but haunting praise about how talented they are and how their future is limitless.
Which, of course, bogus. Then we preach a gospel of autonomy that says all the answers to the deeper questions in life are found in getting in touch with your true self. So you have these university students, and they're very clever. Now they got into the job.
Now they got the case or the lap bag or whatever the trendy thing is that you carry around with you, strap it on the back of your bicycle because you're green, and go where you're going, and everything else. But eventually you're left saying, Where is their blessing? Where is their happiness?
Where is their significance? Where is there something that makes sense of this rat hole that I found myself in now? Seventeen stories high in Manhattan. But I'm only allowed onto the fourth floor. Perhaps if I do better, I'll get to the fifth.
Perhaps I'll start a company like Uber and finally be fired by the people that I finally gave employment to. No, it rings, doesn't it? You say, Well, it's a twenty-first-century phenomenon.
No, it's not. Augustine in the fourth century says, Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. The heart of man is restless, because there is nothing other than the God who made him and who can satisfy the longings that are within him.
And Augustine wrote from experience, as you know. Well, you say, Please proceed. All right. What, then, is characteristic of this blessing? Three negatives, two positives, and a picture. We won't get very far, but at least we can begin. Blessed is the man who walks not. This doesn't play very well either in our context. We don't start with a negative. Why couldn't we be very positive? We don't like negative stuff. What do you mean, tell me there's blessing and something that I don't do? People don't like that. Even those who are followers of Jesus don't like it. The grace of God has appeared, says Paul to Titus, teaching us to say no.
Oh dear, oh dear. They don't walk in the counsel of the wicked. Now, walking is a metaphor, isn't it?
We've seen this. When Enoch walked with God, it means that his lifestyle was tied up with God. When Noah walked with God in our studies in Ephesians, the same thing, especially in Ephesians 4, in the practical section. I urge you, says Paul, to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you've been called.
In other words, you've been made new. Now, your walk should reveal that. In fact, he goes on in verse 17 of 4 to say, you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do. You see, you used to walk in the counsel of the ungodly. You used to walk in the counsel of the wicked.
You didn't have any option. You were born into it. It was the breath you breathed. It was the ethos.
It was the context. Nobody's born into a neutral territory, where what they have to do is decide, Well, I would like to be righteous, or should I be wicked? You are wicked. I am wicked. The very word itself is daunting, isn't it? Well, don't you have a better word than wicked? How about sinful?
Oh, I think we'll stick with wicked. Yeah, okay, fine. Now, what is Paul saying there? He says we no longer walk as the old man—remember, Adam, as in Adam's then in Christ? We no longer walk as the old man.
Why? Because we no longer are in the old man. But our walk now is an expression of the fact that we are in Christ. So the blessing is directly tied to where one takes one's counsel, who walks not in the counsel of the wicked.
Secondly, who stands in the way of sinners and then who sits in the seat of scoffers. One of the questions in terms of interpretation here is whether this is just straightforward poetic parallelism. In other words, is the writer saying the same thing three times, or is it actually a description of a kind of downward spiral? Is this a description of three degrees of departure, as it were, from God?
First of all, paying attention in the mind, then beginning to enter into the way of life, and then finally becoming established in that perspective. Remember that we are engaged in Christ in a continual and irreconcilable war, that we're wrestling not against flesh and blood but against spiritual wickedness in the heavenly places, that the dark forces of the universe are tied to the Evil One, that the Spirit of the Age is opposed to the truth of Christ and to the gospel, and that we live in that world, and the counsel of that world is pervasive. It is relentless.
It never, ever quits. And the insinuations of the Evil One are crafty. He seduces little by little.
And he comes to us, and he says, You know, that stuff that you've been reading there about Psalm 1, it's very, very absolutist. I think you should back off that just a little bit, at least just as you work it out on your own. It won't really matter.
Just a little counsel for you, a little help for you to think it out. You'll be much better received by your friends if you will just ameliorate it to some degree. And so the person says, Well, yeah, I think so.
I could fudge that just a little bit. And then suddenly they find that they are surprised by what's coming out of their mouths. They used to be standing on the edge, as it were, of the conversations in the workplace, and they used to say, Oh dear, oh dear, I can't believe these people are saying that. But the counsel of the wicked began to seep in, and then it began to become something of the framework of their living.
They began to take a stand, actually in the way of sinners. People would say to them, That's strange that you would be engaged in this. I can't believe I heard you say that. How did you come up with that? Well, first of all, in your mind. You see, if the Bible teaches us anything, it teaches us this, that whatever shapes my mind shapes my life. That's why Paul says at the beginning of Romans 12, Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold, but make sure that you are transformed by the renewing of your minds. And our minds are constantly in need of renewal.
He's saying to us, the psalmist, Listen, in the gospel you know all of the blessing that attaches to the life that is yours by grace, and it is one in which you do not pay attention to that counsel, you do not take your stand there, and you certainly don't sit. I could give you chapter and verse for people that sadly have gone in this direction in the thirty-four years that I've been here at Parkside. I wouldn't name them. But the progression goes like this. They begin to come, they talk to me or one of my colleagues, and say, You know, I'm growing doubtful about some of these truths of the Bible. So we would engage with one another and say, Well, you know, it's good to doubt your doubts. And then as time goes by, they come back, and now they're debating with you. They're not telling you they're doubting. Now they become convinced. They've actually begun to take their stand in the way of sinners. And then, finally, they become defiant. First of all, just debating. Well, maybe. Then dialoguing in a forceful way.
And then finally… When I've preached on this before, I preached this sermon, I think it was called Two Men, Two Ways, Two Destinies. Wasn't very good. I'm not saying this is any better, but I'm just saying. But don't let's miss that. Don't let's miss that. If we remain in the camp of the wicked, we will perish. And the invitation of the Bible, is to seek the Lord while he may be found.
Call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. And let him return to the Lord, that he may beat the daylights out of him. No, let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and return to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. Not eke out a grudging forgiveness, but gather you up in the outstretched harms of Calvary, and make you his very own. This is the gospel.
Thank you, Bob. In the study of Psalm 1, we're considering the way in which the teaching of God's Word shapes our minds and frames our lives. The underlying conviction, of course, as we often say here at Truth for Life, is that the Word of God does the work of God by the Spirit of God, in order that men and women might come to know God through Jesus. And the daily programs that you hear are entirely funded by your donations. And the fact that you care and participate in this way makes it possible for us to distribute these things, not only around our country, but actually throughout the world. And that's why as we come to the end of the year, it's not wrong for me to reinforce the fact that we rely upon your support in order that we might achieve our objectives. And if you've benefited from the ministry this year, as I hope you have, contact us so that you can provide a donation.
And Bob will tell you how. The best way you can contact us right now, while our team is at home celebrating Christmas, is by going to our website. You can give a gift securely online at truthforlife.org slash donate. If you'd rather mail your year-end donation, our address is Truth for Life, Post Office Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio 44139. And when you make a donation, be sure to ask for a copy of the book, Every Moment Holy, Volume 3. The book is our gift to you, our way of saying thank you for your support. It's a book of everyday prayers. It's a great way to begin the new year, acknowledging God's holiness and presence, even in the smallest of moments. Again, you can donate securely online at truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine. We heard today from God's word that the righteous will prosper. Why does it seem like sometimes the wicked prosper even more? Tomorrow we'll hear the answer. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
