The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): According to God's word, our lives are all headed down one of two distinct paths. And the one we're on not only determines our final destination, but also the quality of our journey as we walk. Thanks for tuning in for the Bible Study Hour today as Dr. James Boice teaches from Psalms chapter one to unpack this powerful analogy and remind us that the path we choose will truly make all the difference.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. As we listen in today, we'll learn something new about Hebrew poetry and discover what it really means to delight in God's law.

Dr. James Boice: It's been a number of years now since I first thought of doing a series of studies on the Psalms, but I put it off, and I put it off for a very good reason. The Psalms are the deepest, most profound, most penetrating, most insightful portion of all the word of God. They speak of the heart, the struggles, the aspirations, the trials, the rewards, the duties of the Christian man or woman.

And I reasoned, I think rightly, that in order to treat them well, you need to have some experience in the Christian life and some maturity. I trust as I begin this that you'll be praying for me, and you'll pray for God's blessing as we turn to this important portion of his word.

We're going to begin with Psalm one, and Psalm one is unique in that it is the chief biblical expression of the doctrine of the two ways. We're well aware of that from literature, especially if we are well-read at all. Most Americans would know that Robert Frost used the idea in what is probably his best-known poem, "The Road Not Taken".

Frost says at the very end of that poem, after having developed the ideas of a fork in the road and his walking and the fact that he took one fork rather than the other: "Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference."

That same idea is in that great classic of the Middle Ages, "The Divine Comedy", written by Dante. And those that know literature well would know how that begins. It begins with the idea of the two ways. Dante begins by saying that in midlife, he was having a midlife crisis, he came to his senses in a dark wood. It's a metaphorical introduction to the Inferno, the first portion of the Divine Comedy, and he recognized that the true way was lost.

Here is the way it is translated by Dorothy Sayers in her version: "Midway this way of life we're bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood where the right road was wholly lost and gone." There are biblical examples. You may know, I'm sure you do, that toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus Christ himself developed that idea. Having explained his way in the bulk of the sermon, when he gets to the end, he has a number of choices that he puts before people.

There are two gates and two roads, there are two trees and two types of fruit, there are two houses and two foundations. And then he says this: "Enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

Well, as I said a moment ago, the first Psalm is the first, great, and full expression of this idea of the two ways in the Bible. But let me back up a minute and look at it another way. The Psalms generally, in the hands of commentators, are divided into different types or genres. They divide them up in different ways. Frequently, they talk about five or seven or nine different types.

One of these types is what is called a Wisdom Psalm. There are not a whole lot of them, but this is one. And it stands significantly at the very beginning of the Psalter. It answers the question: who is the wise man or who is the wise woman? And the answer is the wise person is the one who delights in the law of God and does not go in the way of the wicked.

This has been called a Preface Psalm. That's what St. Jerome called it. He called it the "Preface of the Holy Spirit to the Psalter". Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who has done a masterful study of the Psalms called "The Treasury of David", called it the same thing, no doubt because he had read it in St. Jerome. He called it a Preface Psalm.

Here's what he said: "It is the psalmist's desire to teach us the way to blessedness and to warn us of the sure destruction of sinners. This then is the matter of the first Psalm, which may be looked upon in some respects as the text upon which the whole of the Psalms make up a divine sermon." Another way of looking at it is to say the Psalm asks a question. It puts the two ways before us, and it asks us, each one as we read it, what way we're upon.

Are we upon the fast road that leads to destruction, the way he describes first, or are we walking in God's way? That path that leads unto eternal life. A question that is asked here is the same question the Lord is asking in the Sermon on the Mount, and therefore, obviously, it's a basic question to all the word of God. Now let's look at it in that way.

I'm pleased when I turn to a Psalm that obviously talks about the two ways, that the very first word of the Psalm is the word "blessed". That's certainly no accident. When the first Psalm begins with the word "blessed" and therefore the entire book of Psalms, all 150 of them, begin with that word, that's a way of saying that God has given us the Psalms to bless us.

In other words, God means good for us. When we're in sin, we get away from that, or when things aren't going exactly the way we think they should, we take a different approach to things and we say, "Well, surely God doesn't want the best for me. If God wanted me to be happy, God would do so-and-so, he'd give me this that I want."

But here at the very beginning of the Psalms, you see, God says, "Blessed is the man." What he does here is set a way before us which, if we walk in it, will lead to happiness. Blessedness means the fullness of satisfaction or happiness. Not just in the world sense, but in the deepest sense. And so the Psalm says, "Look, if that's what you desire," and in one way or another that is what we desire, "well then, here's the way to go."

Now it is surprising, isn't it, that having begun that way, having begun by saying "Blessed is the man", he does not go on to talk about the way of blessedness. In the contrary, he does it in a negative way, saying "Blessed is the man who does not do the following", and what he talks about in the first verse is the way of the wicked. That's puzzling, as I say at first glance, but as soon as you reflect on it a little bit, it's evident that it's actually a very brilliant way of introducing his theme.

For one thing, one thing he accomplishes by it is he starts where we are. You see, where we are naturally is not upon the way of righteousness, the way of blessedness. We begin in sin. And so when he says the counsel of the wicked, the way of sinners, and the seat of the mockers, that's where we start out from. Many of us get into the other way, it's by the grace of God. But by beginning here, it's a way of saying, "Look, God knows who we are, he knows what has happened to us because of our sin, and so he starts right there."

The second thing he accomplishes by starting that way is to introduce the doctrine of the two ways from the very beginning. He's going to say it later when he gets to verse four, he's going to say, "Not so the wicked", but for the first time by way of explicit contrast, the wicked are brought into the picture. But you see, at the very beginning in verse one, already the two ways are before us. He says, "Blessed is the man who doesn't do so-and-so", and immediately the question should arise in our mind, "Well then, what is the way that is blessed?" And so he does that.

There's the third reason why this Psalm begins this way and the third great thing it accomplishes, and that is it helps to define the way of the righteous by way of negation. You know, I'm sure, that if you're to have a good definition for anything, you have to be able to say not only what it is but what it isn't. If something is this and that and the other thing and a fourth thing too, and you end up saying that the thing you're trying to define is virtually everything, well you've said nothing about it at all. Definition involves distinction.

So when the psalmist begins to outline the way of godliness, the first thing he does is show what it's not. In order to say that A is B and have that mean something, you have to be able to say A is not C. And so that's what he does. This way of a blessed man, the happy man, is not a way he describes.

Now, it's really wonderful how he does it. You know, one of the characteristics of the Psalms and of Hebrew poetry in general is what is called parallelism. In English, our chief idea of poetry is that it rhymes, or failing that at least it has to have meter. You have to flow along with a certain dump-da-dump-da-dump or variation of that. And you know there are variations of that kind of meter in English poetry, but above all it has to rhyme.

Neither of those characteristics is necessarily present in Hebrew verse. Scholars have struggled a great deal with trying to get meter out of the Psalms and even yet they haven't quite agreed, they've more or less given up on that. It's fortunate for us, isn't it, and I must say also an indication of the wisdom of Almighty God, because if the poetry of the Bible required rhyme and fixed meter, there would be no way to convey that easily in other languages. You see, words that rhyme in one language just don't rhyme when translated into another language.

But Hebrew poetry isn't like that. Its chief characteristic, as I said a moment ago, is parallelism. That means that an idea is set in one line and then in the line following a similar idea, virtually the same thing but expressed in different words, is said. Sometimes there's perfect parallelism. A positive statement is followed by a positive statement in the same word. Sometimes there's a negative parallelism. A positive statement is followed by a negation of it in the next words.

Sometimes the order is reversed. A leads to B, the next line B leads to A or follows from A. Sometimes it's done like that, but that's the way it's done, and it's a very sophisticated device. It is interesting that here in the very first verse of the very first Psalm of the Psalter, the parallelism is not just double, which is what you would expect, but triple. And as a matter of fact, it's a triple set of triples, three times three.

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. Notice the sets. First of all the verbs: walk, stand, sit. Next the nouns: counsel, way, seat. Then the people that are involved, the third set: wicked, sinners, mockers. That really is very sophisticated writing.

But what's he saying? Some of the commentators who look at this deny quite emphatically that this is suggesting any progression in wickedness or any rapid decline into sin. I respect them, they're the scholars, I'm not a scholar of Hebrew verse, but I can't help but think as I look at that, that it actually is saying that if you get on this fast track of sin, the track all of us are on unless by the grace of God we're taken out of it, the way really is downhill.

First you see, person is walking in the counsel of the wicked. That is, just standing around. Next he actually stands with them, he stops and he enters into their conversation and company, and finally he's sitting in their seat. There's a progression of counsel, way, and seat. There's a progression from wicked, sinners, and mockers.

Charles Spurgeon is generally wise when he writes about these things, and he thinks that it's a progression into evil. Here's the way he puts it: "When men are living in sin, they go from bad to worse." That of course is true enough. "First they merely walk in the counsel of the careless and the ungodly who forget God. The evil is rather practical than habitual. But after that they become habituated to evil and they stand in the way of open sinners who willfully violate God's commandments. And then, if let alone," he says, "they go one step further and they become themselves pestilent teachers and tempters of others, and thus they sit in the seat of the scornful."

When people sat in the gate of a city, they were the elders, they were the respected people who taught others, and that's what Spurgeon is talking about. He says, in a characteristic Spurgeon turn of phrase, "They have taken their degree in vice, and as true doctors of damnation, they are installed in the university." Now, that I believe to some extent is what the psalmist says. That's not a novel idea, of course, that's the sort of thing we find throughout the word of God in many other places.

I generally talk about three different sections of the Bible when I develop that idea. It's there in Hosea, in the story of his relation to his wife Gomer. She ran away, it's a symbol of Israel departing from the Lord, and when she ran away, the progress of her life was downhill. That follows, doesn't it? If God is a source of every good gift, all good things come from him, if you turn away from God, well you're turning your back on the good, and all you have is the downhill path. And so she slipped down further and further in the social scale of the city of the day until finally, no doubt because of debt, she was sold in slavery on the auction block in the city of Samaria.

Jonah is another example. Jonah ran away from God because although he knew God, God had told him to do something he didn't want to do. He'd sent him to preach the gospel to the people of Nineveh, and they were the enemies of his people, and Jonah was a bigoted man, he didn't want to do anything that might in any way, by the grace of God, actually end up blessing his enemies. And so he ran away.

And from the point at which he decided to run away from God, the path was downhill. It just went down, down, and down. I like the King James Bible at that point because four times over in the first chapter and into chapter two, that word "down" actually occurs. Jonah went down to Joppa, and he took a ship and he went down into the ship, and then when he was on board the ship and the storm, he went down into the inside of the ship, and then when they threw him overboard, it said he sank down to the mountains at the bottom of the earth, that is, the bottom of the sea, until the fish swallowed him.

The New International Version ruined that for me because in their translation the word "down" is dropped out twice. So I don't have a fourfold progression anymore, but the progression was there in the life of Jonah, and he kept going downhill until God finally turned him around and brought him back. The great statement of the downhill path is Romans one, where it says as you know three times over in that chapter, verses 24, 26, and 28, "Because they didn't want God and wouldn't follow him, God gave them up," and it begins to describe the downhill path.

They fall into all sorts of vice and perversion until at the very end they reach the point where they call the good evil and the evil good, truth falsehood and the falsehood truth. Now, that is what is suggested here. People don't want to believe that, of course, they don't want to acknowledge that the way of sin is downhill because the way of sin is made attractive to us. And the world promises the opposite.

The world says, "Oh, if you go this way, if you follow the way of our values, if you seek what we have, well you'll be greatly blessed and the path will be uphill." But actually it isn't, we get further and further away from God. You know how it was back in the Garden of Eden? Satan came to the woman who had known only the way of the righteous, and he set the other way before her.

He said, "You eat of that tree that God told you not to eat from, you will be like gods, knowing good and evil." There's the two ways. Before that, she only knew one way, she knew the way of the good, she didn't know the evil. Satan knew the evil. God knew both the good and the evil, but the woman only knew the good and Adam only knew the good. But now suddenly, the two ways were there.

And the woman didn't know what to do. Satan tempted her. He said, "Look, if God says you can't eat from that tree, well he must not be a good God. There's something you can't have. God isn't good. Have you ever heard somebody say that?" You see, that's what I mentioned a moment ago when I was referring to the word "blessed". When we have something in our lives we want to do and it's against the law of God, we say, "Well God must not be good, he's keeping from me the one thing that's going to make me happy."

It's not that way, if God keeps it from you, it's because it won't make you happy. He sets the way of righteousness before you, that's the way to fulfillment. But you see, Satan said to the woman, "Oh, if you go this way, the way I know, you'll be happy. God doesn't want you to be happy." Then he denied the word of God. God had said, "When ye eat of it, you'll die," Satan said, "You will not die."

So there was a choice. His first choice was which is the way of happiness, God's way or the way that looked good to me. Now it's the word of God. What is true, is it the word of God or is it the word of Satan? And the woman didn't know. So he held out another temptation. He said, "Look, if you eat of that tree, you're going to be like God, knowing good and evil."

Now she didn't become like God, knowing good and evil, she became like Satan, and what they needed was to be rescued. Now all of that, in one way or another, is suggested here in verse one. Now, verse two begins to talk in positive terms about the way of the righteous, the way of the godly man.

We would think, you see, after having had the way of the wicked introduced in verse one in terms of relationships, that the wicked walk in the counsel of the wicked and stand in the way of sinners and sit in the seat of mockers, that now, when the way of the godly is described, it's going to describe it in terms of relationships too. We would think that it would say the godly are going to hang around with the godly, godly are going to go to church all the time, godly are going to have only Christian friends.

Actually, that's not the way the psalmist puts it. What the psalmist says instead is the mark of the godly man is that he delights in God's law. Now, you know, I'm sure, that when that word "law" is used, especially in the Old Testament, it refers to the whole of God's revelation. It can be used in different ways. It can refer to the strict law, the Ten Commandments, it can refer to the first five books, the Torah, if you're dividing up the Old Testament into parts.

But the word also refers to the whole of the divine revelation, and that's the way it really needs to be taken here. Unless we see that, we run into this kind of problem. C.S. Lewis in his reflections on the Psalms speaks of this idea of delighting in the law of God, and he admits there that when he first came across it, it was a real puzzle to him. Not because he didn't understand what it was saying, but because he didn't see how it could really be done.

Delight in a law? He said he could understand how you might admire a law as being a good law, and you might even recognize its utilitarian value, the law's restraining some great outcropping of sin, and in that sense, you'd respect it, and he said you can even recognize how you have an obligation to obey it. All of that is true, but not delight in it. Delight in God, yes, of course, delight in his attributes, delight in his love and so forth, but how do you delight in his law?

Well, he began to reflect on that, and the first thing he came to see is that there is a sense in which you really can delight in it as a body of material. He said, for example, we know people who get very high on a particular academic discipline, and we would say of people like that, "Well, they're really into the history of the Middle Ages, they really love it." Or we would say they're into English literature, they read that stuff all the time, they can hardly get by a day if they don't put a book in their hand and read through it a little bit, they certainly love their subject.

And there's a sense in which, when the psalmist says here, and he's going to say it later in the book, the 119th Psalm is going to say that again and again, scores of times in just the one Psalm, what he's saying is to meditate upon the law of God, to study the scriptures, really is a great delight. He begins to see something of the relationships and the applications and how it all ties together and what it means for him, and the more he reads it, the more excited he gets about it. It really is a blessed thing. You and I certainly know that in Bible study. We can fall in love with the scriptures.

And yet, Lewis said as he worked on this, that it did seem to him that it said something else as well. It's not just loving the Bible as an academic book, though to love it that way is not wrong, but the Bible is not merely an academic book, the Bible is a revelation. And it's a revelation from the heart of God. When you read the Bible, what you really find is God speaking in it.

You want to know God? The way you find who God is and how he thinks and what he wants of you and how he relates to you is by studying the scriptures. So the scriptures, though they could be an end in themselves, are not an end in themselves when they're properly studied. And the result of this, you see, is that to love the Bible or delight in the law of God is actually to come to know God and both love and delight in him.

Now, how's that possible? How can you and I come to delight in God? In ourselves, we don't naturally do that. I said a moment ago the place we start is in verse one. Left to ourselves, the thing that we find delightful is the counsel of the wicked or the way of sinners or the seat of mockers. The only way we ever come to delight in and love God is by regeneration or the new birth.

I'm well aware that in the Old Testament that's not a highly developed doctrine. You have to read carefully to find it there, but I do remember that when Nicodemus, the ruler of the Jews, a man versed in the Old Testament scriptures, came to see Jesus and wanted to talk about spiritual things, Jesus said to him, "You can't understand spiritual things unless you're born again."

Nicodemus didn't understand it, he said, "What do you mean born again? Do you mean I have to go back into my mother's womb and be born all over again? Are you talking about a physical birth?" And Jesus said, "Oh no, I'm talking about a spiritual birth. It's what happens when the Holy Spirit comes upon a person," and then he challenged him this way, he said, "Are you a leader in Israel and don't you understand these things?"

It was Jesus' way of saying to this great ruler of the Jews, "If you really understood your Old Testament, you would know that the only way you can ever become God's man and grow in holiness is by the new birth." Now, that's interesting, isn't it? Because if you understand it in its fullness that way, then here at the very beginning of this very great book of the Old Testament, we're asked the question: "Are you born again? Do you have the life of God within you? Do you delight in God's law, knowing that that law reveals the God of all glory, of your mind, your heart, and your soul?"

If you're not born again, this is a meaningless message. You're going to say, "Well, I guess I could make it my duty to study the word of God, I could apply myself to it as an academic discipline, but I certainly am not going to love it." But if the nature of the God who has given the revelation is within you, if his Holy Spirit is within you, then as you read these things, the spirit within will bear witness, you'll say, "Ah yes, not only is that fascinating and interesting, it is true, it is profoundly true, and it's what I need. This is where I'm going to find nourishment for my soul."

Now, that's what we come to next. Having described the two ways in the Psalm, the psalmist now begins to talk about the result of the choices that lead to these two ways. Verses three and four do that. He does it by way of images. He uses an image for the righteous man, he says he's like a tree planted by the streams of water, and then he uses an image for the wicked, he says the wicked are like chaff that the wind drives away.

Let's take the image of a tree planted by rivers of water first. Here's a reference to something that people in arid lands would understand very well. When we're in a well-watered area of the country as our area generally is, and trees are growing everywhere, it doesn't seem particularly remarkable to us to have a flourishing tree. But in a very barren land, if a tree is flourishing, it's because it's getting water somewhere.

A tree planted by rivers of water, whether it's on its banks or whether it's drawing that water from deep underground from a spring, is a tree that is nourished and fruitful. And the psalmist says, "You see, that's what a righteous man is like." We might say when we come to this, you see, that when he talks about these two ways and the results of the two ways, what he's going to say is something like this: if you go in the way of the wicked, God will zap you, and if you go in the way of the righteous, God will reward you.

And that of course is true in one sense. God certainly does reward godliness, and God certainly does punish wickedness. The final judgment is an expression of the latter idea. But that's not what the psalmist is saying. He's not talking about what God does in that sense, he's rather talking about the fruit of the two ways of life.

You see, he says if you go in God's way, your life will blossom, and it will blossom even in the driest of times. I'm sure that's one reason why we go through dry times. You say, "Isn't that contradictory? You're saying that if we follow in God's way, God's going to bless us and now you're talking about dry times?" Oh yes, we think it's contradictory because we think only of a certain type of blessing. Our idea of blessedness is not to have dry times.

But God does send them into our lives, and people who go through them with the Lord testify that it is in times like that that God really reveals himself in the most blessed way. I think of one example of that, the last missionary family to get out of China at the time of the communist takeover were the Matthews. They missed their opportunity to leave, they were placed under house arrest, given just one very small room to live in, the two of them and their young daughter, Lyla.

They didn't have any furniture in the room at all, just a stool. All their funds from home had been cut off except for the smallest trickle that enabled them to buy little bits of rice to live on. They didn't have any fuel to heat their house, it was cold. They had a tiny little stove but they only heated it once a day and that was to boil their rice for supper.

And even that, the fuel was gathered by Art Matthews from the animal refuse around the streets, that's what they burned. They weren't even able to talk to their Christian friends. At the beginning, their Christian friends tried to keep in touch with them but the pressure was so great that by the end of the two-year period of house arrest, they were virtually cut off from everyone.

You would think in times like that, dry times, if there ever were dry times, that the Matthews would have dried up spiritually. And yet their testimony is exactly the opposite. They wrote a book about it and their book is called "Green Leaf in Drought Time", and it's a reference to what we have here in Psalm one. Their testimony was that the drier their circumstances, the more God enriched them through his word, and they grew undoubtedly in those two years more than most of us grow in a lifetime.

Now, that's the blessing of God. God does not always operate that way, but the first Psalm tells us that that is the way he will operate when we find times hard. It's worth reading that again. "A man who doesn't walk in the way of the wicked will be like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither, and whatever he does prospers." Don't you want to be like that? You want to be like that, well then, here's how: you go in God's way and you turn a deaf ear to the solicitations of the enemy.

Now, the second image is that of chaff. The wicked are not like that, they're not like a tree planted by the rivers of water, they're not even like a tree. All they are is like chaff which the wind drives away. Now, a very vivid image in view here. You know that when they thresh grain in those days, they didn't have threshing machines to do it, they simply cut down the grain by hand, they hauled it to a threshing floor which was generally placed upon a higher area of ground at the highest part of elevation. There are threshing floors in the Holy Land today.

And there on the threshing floor, a stone or very tightly packed earth floor, the grain was dumped and animals were driven around on top of it to break it apart, or a threshing sledge was used, sometimes the animals pulled a threshing sledge. And then when the grain had all been broken up, it looked like powder, all in little pieces, then the farmers would come and use something like a pitchfork or a shovel in order to throw the grain up into the air, the grain and the chaff together.

The reason it was on a high place of ground was that the wind would be blowing and the wind would blow the chaff, the light chaff, away while the grain fell back down to the threshing floor. If you kept that up long enough, eventually the grain would be scattered. Now, that's the image here. And the psalmist says that's what the wicked are like. They don't think that they're like that.

And if you're standing in the way of sin or sitting in the seat of the mocker, you don't think that of yourself either, but God says that nevertheless is what you are like. You are like the chaff that the wind blows away. There are two things about chaff. First of all, it's worthless, nobody wants it, just blows it away. And secondly, you do anything with it, you burn it. And that's a symbol of the judgment.

You know, I once heard R.C. Sproul talking about the word "useless", and he said that is the one word he never wanted to have spoken about himself. You can say all sorts of things about him, you can say that he makes mistakes or he sins or he gets off the track or he wastes his time or he fights at windmills or anything like that, but he didn't want anybody to say of him that he was useless because that's a way of saying that you just don't count.

But you see, that is what's being said here. That the way of the wicked, everything they produce for, and hope to achieve, and dream for is really useless and in the end is going to all be blown away. Nobody but a Christian has that perspective. How could you possibly have that perspective unless you see time in the light of eternity?

You don't know the God of eternity, you don't have an eternal perspective, all you see is time, and so you say to yourself, "Well, I want to build things up here." And of course, that's what you do because that's all you've got. If I don't get it now, I'm never going to get it. And so the world around us builds and builds and does everything it can to create these great structures which as soon as we're gone simply blow away.

One of the figures in government in the last administration was talking about what happens when you have to drop out. "Will you be missed?" somebody asked him, and the man I think who had served in the cabinet said, "You know how long it takes for the water to fill up a hole where your thumb has been once you pull the thumb out?" That's the way it happens.

You see, if you don't care about your life being useless, being like chaff, building it up and having it blow away, maybe even in your lifetime but certainly when you're gone being forgotten as people rush madly on to do their thing and get their fame and their money, well then, you go in the world's way. That is the way of the world.

But if by the grace of God you can see time in the light of eternity and recognize that what seems to count now is not necessarily what counts for the duration, and if you recognize that the Bible is speaking sober truth when it says the things that are seen pass away but that which is unseen is eternal, then you'll build a different kind of structure and you'll do what Jesus was talking about when he talked about building on a firm foundation. It means to build on him, to live for him, to serve him, to make his goals your goals. Certainly, that's what the Psalm tells us.

Now, the very end of the Psalm in verses five and six, it tells of the two ends. You see, first of all the two ways and the fruit of the two ways in life, the product of our choices, finally the two destinies. The wicked, well they will not stand in the judgment or sinners in the assembly of the righteous, they'll be swept away. Judgment will come. But the Lord watches over the way of the righteous here and at the final judgment as well. The way of the wicked will perish.

One of the great mistakes that has been made in talking about the Psalms is to read too much of New Testament theology into them. Probably the greatest offender in that respect, although you have to be careful how you say this, was Saint Augustine. He was merely reflecting the approach to the Psalms in his time, and if you read his magnificent exposition of the Psalms, you find that he read Christian theology, specifically New Testament theology, into virtually every line.

I think that's a mistake. Psalms were not written in the New Testament period, they embody Old Testament ideas. Nevertheless, there is from time to time prophecy in the Psalms. And whether the psalmist had it in mind or not, the ultimate fulfillment of them is nevertheless always in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I want to tell a story as I close and that's the preface to it. I don't want to suggest that when the psalmist wrote this Psalm he was thinking of Jesus, I don't think he was. Nevertheless, the Psalm is fulfilled in Jesus, and that's the point the story makes. Harry Ironside tells it, it concerns a man whose name is Joseph Flacks, who went to Palestine years ago, before its recent history.

He was invited because he was a professor to speak to a group of mixed Jewish and Arab people who were living together at the time, learned men themselves, and he chose as his text the first Psalm. He lectured on it. He got to the end and he asked the question, he said, "Now I've finished talking about this Psalm, and I want to ask you who is the man, the blessed man of whom the psalmist speaks?" He's a man who did not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers, his delight was constantly in the law of the Lord. He was a perfectly sinless man. Who was it?

There was silence, so Flacks began to press the point slightly. He said, "Was it our father Abraham?" One of the men who was sitting there said, "No, it can't have been Abraham because Abraham was not like that, he compromised his wife's honor on two occasions in order to save his skin." "Well, that's right," Flacks said, "it can't be Abraham. How about Moses the lawgiver, could it have been him?" And somebody else said, "No, it couldn't have been Moses because Moses killed a man and hid his body in the sand, and furthermore at the waters of Meribah he struck the rock in anger. He was not a perfect man."

Flacks said, "Well, that is true as well. Was it David?" "No, it wasn't David, everyone knows David's sin." Named a number of other possibilities, and then there was silence. And finally, interestingly enough, an elderly Jewish man got up and he said this, "My brothers, I have a little book here, it's called the New Testament. I've been reading it, and if I could believe this book, if I could be sure that it is true, I would say that the man of the first Psalm was Jesus of Nazareth."

You see, Jesus is that man. It may not be the case that the psalmist was specifically thinking of him as he wrote it, but Jesus is the one who did not walk in the counsel of the wicked, who delighted in the law of the Lord and who was like a tree planted by streams of water and all that he did and does prospers.

And what I'm saying by that, you see, is that Jesus himself, the author of the book, stands here at the portal to the Psalms. He's to be our guide through it. And if you say to yourself, "I must admit as I look at my heart that I am far more like the man of verse one than I am the godly man who is described further on," well, the Lord Jesus Christ stands there to lead you in the way.

He said, "I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life, and if you follow me, you will find the way, you will know the truth, and you will have abundance of life. Not only now, but throughout eternity." The Lord Jesus Christ invites you to follow. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank you for the wonders of this book. No matter where we turn, whether we dip into the Old Testament or the New, we find ourselves being directed to Jesus Christ as the way that he himself was and which by grace he sets before us. Father, that's what we want to be. If we know him as our Savior, we want to go in this way.

We need his power, his strength, indeed we need his wisdom because we don't even know the way unless he shows it to us. Father, we know that that's exactly what you desire of us, that's why the Psalm is written. Give us grace to follow in his footsteps, for Jesus' sake. Amen and amen.