The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): We all seek God's blessing for our lives. It's been said that the way to God's blessing is to begin with God, to continue with God, and to end with God. Psalm 128 provides the framework for that journey.

Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. The ramifications of a blessed life are significant. It's been said that the blessings of an ordered life are traced from the center outwards. It begins with a godly man, which leads to a godly family, and in turn, to a God-fearing nation. Join Dr. Boice as he studies the steps to a life of blessing from Psalm 128.

Dr. James Boice: You remember how we began our study last week? We were studying Psalm 127 and the very first word was useless, meaningless, and in vain. It was the theme of the opening stanza of that psalm, and we saw that although the psalm moved to a more positive note, it was only half of what the psalmist had to talk about. Nevertheless, useless, meaningless, and in vain was a downer. That's a very discouraging thing to have said and a hard place to begin.

It's quite different when we come to Psalm 128 today. Psalm 128 begins with the word blessed. Blessed or blessed has to do with the favor of God, and because God's blessing is great and unending, those who benefit from His blessing benefit greatly and benefit constantly. God's blessing is something that just goes on and on. Now, that's what this psalm is all about. It's the dominant and unifying word of the psalm. The psalm has six verses and that word in one form or another occurs in four of the six verses. It's either blessed, blessings, or blessed, and you find it in verses 1, 2, 4, and 5. Only verses 3 and 6 are without it.

In the Hebrew text that lies behind this, it seems that one word wasn't good enough, so they have two words for blessed: barak, which is the one we probably know the best if we know any Hebrew at all, but also asher, which means much the same thing. Asher is used in the first half of the psalm and barak in the second. Now, there's a connection between the two. The last psalm, 127, was a psalm that had to do with God's blessing on the family, beginning with the city, and it said that arrows are in the hand of a warrior like children in the life or the family of a man who fears God.

Now, that kind of blessing carries over into this psalm. I said when we were looking at the last one that it begins with useless but it moves to blessing. You notice that that carries right over to Psalm 128 because verse 5 of the preceding one says, "Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them," and the very first verse of this psalm begins, "Blessed are all who fear the Lord and walk in His ways." Now, you see the progression. The two really go together rightly. You start with anything that is useless if it's not done for God, including our physical, mechanical work and the family too.

But on the other hand, if we do it for God and in God's power and for His glory, then He does bless it. It's not in vain. The family is blessed. Now, in this psalm, we get an expansion of that to find out what it is to have our work and our family blessed by God, and at the very end, we find it growing even to embrace the nation, or the people, or the city. Derek Kidner is one of the most useful commentators on the psalms, and he says the quiet blessings of an ordered life are traced from the center outwards in this psalm as the eye travels from the godly man to his family and finally to all Israel.

Well, that's the way we have to look at it. It's a progression from the God-fearing man to the God-fearing family and finally to the God-fearing city or nation. Now, since the psalm has so much to say about blessings, it's not surprising to find that it begins with the word. It's worth reflecting on that. That's very much the heart of the Bible's teaching. God begins with a blessing. God is a good God. He wants to bless. It's true that our sin brings us into a contrary or hostile position over against God, and so judgment comes on sin, but that's secondary.

The blessing comes first. Think back to the very first chapter of the Bible. There God creates a magnificent universe and finally places within it the first man and the first woman, and then God's words to them from the very beginning are a blessing. The first chapter of Genesis quotes God as giving this blessing: "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." It defines it as a blessing. We're studying the Psalter. You go back to the very first psalm, and what you find is a blessing. It's talking about the godly man back there and it explains what he doesn't do and what he ought to do if he really is to be blessed by God.

The psalm begins by saying, "Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord." And let me give you one more example. You go to the New Testament, you go to that first public teaching of Jesus Christ that we find in the Gospel of Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7, and those chapters also begin with a blessing. We call them the Beatitudes.

As Jesus begins by pronouncing a blessing on those who are poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, those who show mercy, those who are pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. So let's take that lesson from the psalm as we begin it. God is a good God. His intention is to bless us. He wants to bless us. But of course, as we're going to see, there are things that we have to do if we are to participate in it.

Now, that first verse tells us what we have to do: "Blessed are all who fear the Lord and walk in His ways." Now, if we didn't get that right away, it's hammered home again in verse 4. Because having gone on to talk a little bit about the blessing that follows for one who fears the Lord and walks in His ways, it says, "Thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord." Now, you see there's an important balance here between this psalm and the earlier one.

The earlier one said that if we're going to experience blessing in our lives, it is because of God. If you try to do things apart from God, everything ultimately is futility. It's useless or meaningless. You labor in vain, as the Bible's language. If you do it for God and in God, then God does bless it. It says blessing is of God. That's the message of the psalm. But here in the 128th psalm, it says yes, that is true, but nevertheless, for those who are God's, there are things that we need to do. We have responsibilities.

And they are, number one, that we fear or reverence the Lord and, number two, that we walk in His ways. Now, I like the way that is worded. "Blessed are all who fear the Lord who walk in His ways," because as we get on in the psalm, we find that it's speaking primarily to the godly man, that is, the husband, the head of his household. And it begins to pronounce God's blessing upon him. His work is going to be blessed, his family is going to be blessed, wife, children, and even to generation after generation. It's speaking largely to the man.

But here at the very beginning, in that very first verse, it uses that word all. All who fear the Lord and walk in His ways are blessed. You say, "Well, I'm single. I don't have a family." That's right. That's a blessing that God does not give to everyone. But it doesn't mean that there are not blessings. If you don't have a family, if you're single, if you had a family, lost a family, whatever it may be, there are still blessings for you. That's what that first verse is saying. Blessed are all who fear the Lord and walk in His ways.

Now, what does this mean to fear the Lord and to walk in His ways? We usually talk about fear having to do with reverence, and I often say Bible teachers do it all the time that when we're told to fear God, it doesn't mean that we're supposed to tremble before Him the same way we would fear a thief who broke into our house or somebody who was threatening to do physical harm. Of course, it doesn't mean that. It has to do with reverence, but nevertheless, it's a very serious, somber kind of reverence.

The Webster's Ninth Collegiate Dictionary calls it a profound reverence or fear, especially toward God. See, when you approach God, you're approaching one who is majestic in His might and holiness, and fear is not a bad word to use because it means there ought to be a certain kind of holy trembling before Him. Let me put it in another language. It means that we have to take God seriously. He's not somebody to be taken lightly. The Almighty is not to be joked with.

We have to hold Him foremost in all our thoughts so He's in our minds at the commencement of any project. We're looking to His strength as we try to do anything that's worthwhile in our lives, and His glory and His honor are the ultimate goal for everything we do. Now, that's a big difference between Christians and the world. Because Christians who are really living as Christians, therefore in the fear of God, are trying to put God at the center of everything. They actually are working at that day by day, while the world on the other hand does just the opposite.

It doesn't have God at the center. People may acknowledge God or talk about God, but it has nothing to do actually with the way they order their lives today. Especially, they are what we call secularists, that is, people whose whole horizon is bounded by the saeculum. Saeculum comes from the Latin word saeculum, and has to do with this age or this time. It means for the world, there's nothing beyond what you see and touch and measure. So the world for the most part operates just within the here and now.

I suppose the greatest example of that that I've come across that I refer to a lot of times in our Bible Study Hour seminars is what Carl Sagan said on the Cosmos program on television. He was pictured looking out at the starry heavens in all their nighttime splendor and glory, and he was saying these words. He said, "The cosmos is all that is, or that ever was, or that ever will be." And that's secularism, you see. That has no place for God. It's just saying the only things that have ever been, are now, or ever will be are what we can see and touch and measure, and furthermore, man is at the center of it.

It's what Francis Schaeffer referred to in his apologetic writing as a closed universe. Nothing beyond, no God, nothing spiritual, no soul, no eternity, only what we see here and now. Now, that's the most marked of all differences between those who are Christians and those who are not. I'm sure you know the name of Harry Blamires. He was an Englishman, was a student of C.S. Lewis and then his friend. He wrote a book called The Christian Mind, in which he says this: "To think secularly is to think within a frame of reference bounded by the limits of our life on earth. It's to keep one's calculations rooted in this worldly criteria.

To think Christianly is to accept all things with the mind as related directly or indirectly to man's eternal destiny as the redeemed and chosen child of God." Now, that's what the psalmist is commending. He's saying the way to blessing is to begin with God, to continue with God, and to end with God. It's the very first thing we have to do if we're serious about the Christian life. But that isn't the only thing, is it? The very first phrase says, "Blessed is the man who fears God," but it continues by saying, "and walks in His ways."

In other words, it's a way of saying that the whole of Christianity isn't just what we have in our heads. It also has to work itself out in the way we operate day by day, the way we walk, the way we function, the way we relate to other people. We talk about it on The Bible Study Hour all the time in a little phrase that we use to kind of focus what we have in mind. We say that The Bible Study Hour is a ministry that involves teaching and seminars, preparing people to think and act biblically.

And there's a good connection there because if you begin to think in a Christian way, you'll begin to act in a Christian way. If you're not thinking Christianly, you won't act Christianly. But you see, you need to act Christianly as well, which is what this says. Now, there's a great example of that in the Old Testament. It's the man Enoch, who's mentioned way back there in the fifth chapter of the book of Genesis. Only four verses that are given over to him in Genesis, but in those four verses, it says twice over that Enoch walked with God.

It says it this way. When Enoch had lived 65 years old, the time most of us retire, he became the father of Methuselah, and after he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Enoch lived 365 years. Enoch walked with God and then he was no more because God took him away. Now, that's a long time to walk with God. 300 years is no casual stroll. That's a lifetime commitment. That's three centuries.

What was Enoch doing during those three centuries? Well, Jude tells us about it in the New Testament. It's interesting in regard to this man that we learn more about him in the New Testament than we learn about him in the Old. You turn to Jude and what you find out is that he was a preacher, and you even find out a little bit of the substance of his preaching, and it went like this: "See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of His holy ones to judge everyone and to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they've done in their ungodly way and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against Him."

Jude 14 and 15. So he was a preacher. The substance of his preaching was one of judgment, and it was coming. The flood came in the days of Noah shortly after this, and it was an explanation of why the judgment of God was coming. It was because of the ungodliness of his age. And in case you're inclined to miss that, the word ungodly is repeated four times in just that one verse. The kind of age in which we live. Can you imagine what it would be like today for the substance of someone's preaching to be ungodly, ungodly, ungodly, ungodly?

That's not a way to be popular. It's not commensurate with the church growth programs of our day. It's not preaching to felt needs. It's not making people feel good. But that's what Enoch did as he walked with God. And the bottom line of the story is that he pleased God because of it. Because you come to another great text in the Bible that has to do with Enoch. It's in the book of Hebrews, and it says, "Enoch was commended as one who pleased God."

So he knew God, he feared God in that reverential way, and because of that, he walked in His way. And at the end of it, even though he didn't have a lot of converts, God is standing there to say, "Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Lord." Now, that's the framework with which this psalm begins. Now, having explained what the God-fearing person will do in order to share in God's blessings, the psalmist begins to explain in kind of broad categories what some of these blessings are.

And the first has to do with his work. If you'll fear God and walk in His ways, the psalmist says, then you will eat the fruit of your labor. Blessings and prosperity will be yours. Now, it's useful to compare that with some other portions of Scripture. I mentioned several times the psalm that goes before, and the gist of that, it said if you're not fearing God and you're not walking in His ways, then everything you do ultimately is going to be in vain or useless. You labor in vain, as the Bible's language.

Now, this psalm says, but if you do walk in God's ways and fear Him, what you do will be blessed and will prosper. Does it mean that you'll get rich? No, it doesn't say that. But it does say that God will bless your work, that God will see it, He'll honor it. It'll be something good. You'll be able to look at it and say it's good, and God Himself will look at it and say it's good. That's an important thing. Imagine spending your whole life laboring for something which in the end isn't worth anything at all, even if it amounts to all kinds of money.

And we fool ourselves by saying, "Well, I have all this money and I can give it away and think of all the good I can do." Imagine coming to the end and finding it's not worth anything at all. On the other hand, because we fear God and walk in His ways, whatever we do, whatever He's called us to do, will be blessed by God and we will thrive in it. Well, there's another thing we ought to think of. This phrase, "eat the fruit of your labor," reminds us of the Lord's Prayer, which Jesus gave His disciples when they wanted a pattern for prayer.

He told them to pray, "Give us today or this day our daily bread." You put all of that over against what happened back at the beginning of Genesis. Back in Genesis at the time of the fall, man and woman rebelled against God, and so the judgment of God came on them, and God said, "Now you're going to labor and it's going to be by the sweat of your brow that you're going to earn your daily bread." So this is a curse back there in Genesis. And yet here we come to the New Testament and we find that although we still need to work, the curse has changed to a blessing because now instead of being something that is imposed upon us by what seems to be a harsh judgment of Almighty God, we find in the hands of God it's turned into a blessing, and it's a blessing not only for us but for other people.

And our spiritual work will thrive too. Remember how Paul wrote to the Corinthians saying, "Therefore, my beloved brethren, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain." I really feel sorry for people that spend all their lives doing that which is utterly in vain. And I sometimes pause, and as I pray, I thank God that He's given me the opportunity to do something through the teaching of the Word of God that is not in vain, that bears fruit not only now but for all eternity. And the same for all of God's people.

Now, we come to the God-fearing family. That's the God-fearing man or individual. Now we come to the God-fearing family. How do you react to verses like 3 and 4? I think sometimes when we come to passages in the Bible that speak about a happy, thriving, blessed family, that many of us look at it with a certain amount of skepticism. Because after all, it's justified, isn't it? The problem with families is that families are made up with people, and the problem with people is that people are sinners, and the problem with sin is that sin's disruptive.

And so every family has difficulties in it and the kind of blessing that we seek is not something that we achieve all the time even in Christian families. Here is a fruitful wife described, but wives do not always appear so fruitful, and here are these wonderful little children that are growing up like sprouts around the table, described as little olive plants, valuable little plants. Sometimes they're more like weeds. Talks about them sprouting up like olive shoots.

Sometimes all they do is shoot around, and sometimes actually throw things around. It's not always quite that way. And yet, there is great blessing here. You say as you read something like this, "Are there exceptions?" The answer is yes, of course there are exceptions. Otherwise, whenever any child is disobedient, you would have to say, "Well, the parents are responsible for the disobedience," and it just is not true. And whenever you see disruption in a family, you always got to say the people themselves are to blame and it's not always quite an equal thing.

All kinds of things come, but this is wisdom literature. What this is doing is saying that in general terms, if you seek God, if you fear Him and walk in His ways, God's blessing will be upon the family. It's exactly like Proverbs 22:6, you know? It says, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." And yet many godly parents have trained up children who when they are old do depart from it. You say, "Well, is the Bible not true?" No, no, it's not that. It's wisdom literature.

This is saying as a general rule, if you get it into them when they're young, it's going to come out some way or another when they're older. Of course, they can rebel along the way. Now, this is what it's saying. And it's saying that if we walk in God's ways, as a rule, generally speaking, God's blessing is going to be on our home. Now, it uses two images here for the family. It has an image for the wife. She is like a fruitful vine.

Doesn't mean that she's going to produce lots of children necessarily, though that's what that usually suggests to us and it is true that in biblical times at least having a lot of children was counted as a special blessing of God. You see it especially in the opposite case where the godly wives of the Bible didn't have children. Someone like Sarah, for example, who didn't have children for a long, long time, or Rachel, who was greatly troubled because her sister Leah was having all the children, or Hannah, the mother of Samuel, who didn't have children for a long, long time.

It was counted a disgrace not to have children. When you did have children, it was a blessing. And yet, what I'm saying here is that that is not the essence of this particular image. A vine was a symbol of blessing and abundance, and the wine that was made from the grapes that grew on the vine was associated with times of celebration or perhaps as we would say a harvest time. So what this is saying is that a wife in a godly home like this is going to be a source of celebration.

You'd be out working in the fields, a hot day, coming home is like coming home to the harvest. And it's an image that is elaborated throughout the Bible. You can find many, many useful references to it. And how about the children? The children are described as olive shoots around the table. Olives take a long time to mature and become profitable. They have to be cultivated carefully, but once they do, they're not only profitable and they not only thrive, but they produce a valuable crop perhaps longer than any other plant or any other tree.

They just go on century after century producing fruit. And something of that kind of blessing is involved in the image. These two are both symbols of the abundant life. And so what you're being introduced to here is not a kind of blessing that we would say is like a staple like wheat or corn, but something that enriches life and makes it abundant, and God says that's what will happen in such a home. Now, at the very end, having looked at the God-fearing man or person and then having explored something of the God-fearing family, the psalmist goes on to talk about the God-fearing city, branching out from the individuals involved to the community, city, or nation in which they live.

That's important, isn't it? Because although blessing comes to the individual, it's always incomplete unless it embraces other people too. If we're blessed, the blessing we experience has to be shared with those about us. Now, the psalmist prays this way: "May the Lord bless you from Zion all the days of your life. May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem and may you live to see your children's children." You know when the Jews were carried away into Babylon, Jeremiah was given a special word for them in the years of their captivity, and it had to do with their settling down in the city and praying for it and asking God actually to bless the city because if the city was blessed, they would be blessed too.

The actual words go like this: "Build houses and settle down, plant gardens and eat what they produce, marry and have sons and daughters, find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so that they too may have sons and daughters, increase in numbers, do not increase, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I've called you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it because if it prospers, you too will prosper." Now, if that was true in Babylon, which was a notoriously pagan city, it is obviously true for Jerusalem, which is the essence of these last verses of the psalm.

May God bless the city because of the people and for the people who actually live there. Now, it's not difficult to apply that. We can apply it literally to our cities today. St. Augustine pointed out that we live in two cities. We're members of the city of God, the spiritual family of those whom He has called to faith in Jesus Christ, but we are also citizens of the world. We live in earthly cities. And if it was true that the people of God in the Old Testament needed to pray for their earthly city, so is it true that we need to do that today.

What do our cities today need more than anything else? They need solid, godly Christian families. And what has been the pattern over the last generation or so is that the Christian families have left the city and then they say, "Oh, look at the terrible inner city, how bad it is," but the Christians have left. I suppose we need nothing more in our cities today, in our country, if we're thinking about our concern for the nation, than that godly families actually should live in the cities and strengthen them and actually make a difference.

Ron Sider put it very strongly some years ago in one of his journals when he said tens of thousands of evangelicals ought to move back into the city. If one percent of evangelicals living outside the inner city had the faith and courage to move into town, evangelicals would fundamentally alter the history of urban America and I think that's true. But now there's one more point. I've talked about two cities. We pray for our literal city, the one in which we live, our earthly city.

But we also belong to the city of God, that company of God's people, and particularly in a local setting, we belong to a local church. Isn't it true to apply the same kind of blessing here? We talk about God's blessing on the individual and then God's blessing on the family, but we also want to talk about God's blessing on the church. We are called to Christ as individuals, but we are not called individualistically. We're joined to the company of God's people. And if that's true, then we ought to pray for God's people.

We ought to pray and work and strive to see God's blessing unfold in the midst of the company into which He has put us because if it prospers, we will prosper. If God is present and blessing, then we will be able to say of our Zion what the psalmist says as he comes to the end of this particular psalm. May the Lord bless you from Zion. May He bless you right here in the church in which He's placed you.

All the days of your life, may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem, our Jerusalem, right here where He has placed us, and may you live to see God's blessing on your children and your children's children. God wants to do us good and that's the way He wants to do it. And so may we be able to say, as the psalmist does, peace, the peace of God, be upon the Israel of God. And amen. Let's pray.

Our Father, we're thankful that we've had time to study this important psalm. We ask You to bless it to us, not only to our understanding that we need to begin with that, but also to our actions, that we might begin in these ways also to walk so that our conduct pleases You. We thank You that You are a God of blessing, that You always have been a God of blessing, that You want to bless Your people.

And so we seek that blessing upon the individuals and the families, the parents, the children of our congregations, and may many come to participate in that blessing along with us for Jesus' sake. Amen.

Guest (Male): Thank you for listening to this message from The Bible Study Hour, a listener-supported ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance is a coalition of pastors, scholars, and churchmen who hold to the historic creeds and confessions of the Reformed faith and who proclaim biblical doctrine in order to foster a Reformed awakening in today's church. To learn more about the Alliance, visit alliancenet.org.

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