A Psalm for the New Year

Psalm 1

 

 

Two Roads

 

Well, it’s New Year’s Day this morning - the end of 2005 and the start

of 2006.

 

And so this morning I want us to look together at Psalm 1, and to think

about it as a psalm for the new year.  It’s a psalm that paints a

picture of two possibilities for the year ahead;  two contrasting ways

to live - two roads, two paths.

 

Whenever I think about that sort of image I remember a poem that I

learnt back in high school days - you may have learnt it too.  It’s by

Robert Frost, and it goes like this.

 

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,  and sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;  then took the other, as just as

fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,  because it was grassy and wanted

wear;

Though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the

same,

And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.

 

Oh, I kept the first for another day!  Yet knowing how way leads on to

way,

I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a

sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less travelled by,  and that has made all the difference.

 

Back in my high school days I read the poem with deadly seriousness,

with that feeling that you have when you are seventeen that every

decision you make about subject choices and uni courses and so on is

loaded with such a weight of destiny.  And then years later I read an

interview with the poet, with Robert Frost, and discovered that in his

mind at least, the poem was actually meant ironically - it's making

gentle fun of the way that we agonise over our choices as if they were

so desperately important.  But the fact remains that there are actually

a few choices that we make that are really important.  I look back on

the choices that I was making back in my teenage years, and i realise

now that the things I was taking so earnestly and seriously were mostly

not all that important at all, and yet there were other choices that I

was making where I drifted almost without thinking along the paths that

were laid out before me - other choices that i was making that were of

enormous significance, had I only realised it.

 

Psalm 1 is about those sorts of choices - about the choices I make both

large and small that end up shaping not just things like what I do for

a job (though they will have implications for that) but the much more

important questions about who I am as a person and where I am headed

for in eternity.  It’s about the little, almost unnoticed choices and

patterns and habits that end up determining those things, and about the

consequences of those choices.

 

 

Let’s have a look together at the Psalm, beginning at verse 1.  It’s a

psalm that begins with the word “blessed”, which is the word the Bible

uses over and over again to describe the truly happy person;  the

person who has the life that’s really worth living;  the person that

you really want to be like.  Literally, that first word is in the

plural, and it says something like:  “O the blessings that belong to

the man who... and so on.  O how many things he has to be happy about.”

 

If you like, it’s a psalm about the good life, and it’s a psalm that

talks about the good life by contrasting it with its opposite.  You

see, according to the Bible there really are only two different ways

that you can live in the things that matter most - sure there’s all

kinds of different things that people are into, and different types of

personalities and different gifts and abilities and cultures;  all of

that is true, but when it comes to the bottom line, to the question of

the overall direction of your life and of your relationship with God

and your eternal destiny, there are ultimately only two options.  And

Psalm 1 contrasts those two options, in terms of the two different

sources of guidance that they rely on;  the two different outcomes that

they lead to in this life;  and the two different outcomes that they

lead to in the next.

 

The first contrast it draws is in verses 1 & 2, between two contrasting

sources of guidance.  “Blessed is the man,” verse one says:  “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 on his law he meditates day and night.”

 

“Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.” 

It’s a strange expression, isn’t it.  “Walking” is like a metaphor in

Hebrew for the way you live your life, the direction that you follow. 

We use it too a bit - we talk about people who talk the talk but don’t

walk the walk.  And to “walk in the counsel of the wicked” is to go to

the wicked, to the ungodly, for advice and for guidance on how you

should live your life.  It means to look to those who don’t know God,

and who live their lives without him, to be role models and to be the

people that you imitate and follow for the direction of your life.

 

Usually it happens in a fairly subtle way.

 

It’s the TV shows that present an attitude that God is irrelevant and

that life is really about the pursuit of pleasure or about looking good

or about having a nice backyard.  And you don’t consciously set out to

model your life on Renovation Rescue or Getaway or Extreme Makeover,

but the values kind of wash over you and they have their influence.

 

It’s the people one or two rungs up the ladder from you at work, the

parents of the other kids at preschool or at school, the next door

neighbours with the really nice house.  It’s the whole tide and current

and direction of the society that we live in.  and it is so easy for us

to just float down that river in our little canoe, to travel in the

same direction and to make the same decisions about work and money and

holidays and possessions and parenting.

 

And notice the progression in the first three lines of the psalm, there

in verse 1.  I don’t know if this is reading too much into it, but

notice how it progresses from walking to standing to sitting.  Do you

see how each step in the process is a little more settled and

established than the previous one.  From walking to standing;  from

standing to sitting.  And that’s the way that it happens;  little by

little you become cemented in the lifestyle of those who live without

God;  you become just a part of that crowd, you become one of them

yourself, sitting in the seat of the scoffers.

 

“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.”  What’s

the contrasting way of life to that?  Where does the person look for

guidance who doesn’t follow down that path?

 

Verse 2:  “But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he

meditates day and night.”  he looks for guidance to the law of God;  in

fact, he delights in it, and he meditates on it day and night. 

Sometimes I think we get too used to writing off the Old Testament Law,

and we think of it as just an oppressive system of rules and

regulations that we have thankfully been delivered from.  And we forget

that the Law of Moses was God’s word to his people.  It was God’s

instruction and guidance to them on how they should live as his people.

  And so the godly Israelites delighted in the law of God, and pored

over it and meditated upon it, and tried to make it the pattern for

their lives.

 

Now for us as Christians we’re no longer under that law in the same way

that Israel was under it.  It’s a law that has been fulfilled and

satisfied and has reached its goal in Jesus.  So when we look to God

for guidance we don’t just look to the Law of Moses.  We look to Jesus,

and to the whole of the Bible that testifies to him, and we follow in

his footsteps.  That is where we look to for guidance.

 

And if we’re sincere in that, then surely the study of the Scriptures

and the things they tell us about Jesus will be as much a ‘delight’ to

us as the Law of Moses was to the godly Israelites.  And we will

meditate on these things.  They will be on our minds, and we will

ponder how to live them out, and they will seep into our thinking, and

into the way that we view everything.

 

Ultimately, there are only two possible places where we will look for

guidance.  Either we will look to God as he has revealed himself in

Jesus, or we will turn our backs on God and take our cue from the

non-Christian world around us.  And they are two very different sources

of guidance.

 

(ii) Two outcomes in this life (vv.3-4)

And, secondly, they lead to two very different outcomes in this life. 

What is life like for those who put their hope in God, who put their

trust in him and look to him for guidance?  Verse 3:  “He is like a

tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season,

whose leaf does not  wither.  Whatever he does prospers.”

 

That doesn’t mean that nothing ever goes wrong for the righteous, or

that God shelters them from anything evil happening to them, or that

their lives will always be full of material prosperity.  The Bible

writers are very aware that often it is the wicked who prosper, and

that terrible calamities and disasters can happen to people who have

put their trust in God.  You just have to read on through the book of

Psalms to be reminded of that.

 

Psalm number three is a psalm of David, the man after God’s own heart. 

And what does it say at the top?  “When he fled from his son Absalom”. 

He wrote the psalm when his own son Absalom had risen up in revolution

against him, and David had had to flee his own city Jerusalem, and it

seemed that he was on his own, on the run, hunted down by his own

family.  It doesn’t get much worse than that.  And so the opening

verses of the psalm read:  “O LORD, how many are my foes.  How many

rise up against me!  Many are saying of me:  “There is no help for him

in God.”  But he can go on to say, verse 3:  But you are a shield

around me, O God, my Glorious One who lifts up my head...”  Verse 5: 

“I lie down and sleep;  I wake again, because the LORD sustains me.”

 

You see, whatever the circumstances of life deal out to us, the

righteous person, the person who knows God, is still sustained by that

relationship with him.  Psalm 1 says, the righteous man is like a tree

whose roots go down deep into the grace and the goodness of God.  There

is a deep source of strength and joy and stability there, that

undergirds your life whatever is happening on the surface.  And so the

writer of Psalm 37 says:  “Better the little that the righteous have

than the wealth of many wicked.”

 

Jesus spoke in terms like these about the person who believes in him,

and he says that whoever puts their trust in him receives from God the

gift of eternal life - and that eternal life doesn’t just mean

existence that goes on forever after you die;  it means a life in

relationship with God that begins even here and now, in this life.  

And so he said to the woman at the well:  “Whoever drinks the water I

give him will never thirst.  Indeed, the water I give him will become

in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  And he tells the

crowds in John 7:  “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said,

streams of living water will flow from within him.”

 

If you put your trust in Jesus, if you live your life looking to him

for guidance and following in his footsteps, you don’t miss out on

life.  You actually find what true fulfilment  and happiness is all

about.

 

Look at the contrast in verse 4:  “Not so the wicked!  They are like

chaff that the wind blows away.”  What is the outcome of a life lived

out in accordance with the way of the world, the advice of the godless?

  It’s an empty and hollow life.  You know what chaff is?  It’s the

husks around the grain of wheat.  No substance, no reality, just the

shell around the outside.  The poet T.S.Eliot wrote about life before

he came to faith in Christ:  “We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed

men, leaning together, headpiece filled with straw.”

 

The non-Christian world looks so impressive and enticing and its way of

life can be so attractive, but, when you weigh it up, the writer of the

psalm says, it is like so much chaff that just gets blown away in the

wind.

 

(iii) Two outcomes in the next

Which leads us to the third contrast between that these two ways to

live.  Not only do they lead to contrasting outcomes in this life; 

they also lead to very different outcomes in the next.  Verse 5: 

“Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, or sinners in the

assembly of the righteous.  For the LORD watches over the way of the

righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”

 

It’s difficult to know how much the Old Testament writers actually knew

about life after death, and about the end of the world and judgment

day.  Sometimes they seem to write as if this life was all there is. 

It seems that the belief in the resurrection from the dead and the day

of judgement was something that God revealed gradually across the

period of the Old Testament.  But certainly the writer here seems to

look forward to a future judgment day, when God will gather together

his people as “the assembly of the righteous”;  and those who have

lived their lives without him will not be among them;  instead, they

will be destroyed in the judgment of God.  Verse 6 - they will perish.

 

Jesus said in John 3:  “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; 

but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains

on him.”  And in John 3:16 - “For God so loved the world that he gave

his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have

eternal life.”  Two very different outcomes - eternal life, and eternal

condemnation.  Life with God, and life - and death - without God.

 

What is the good life?  Well, it’s not the pursuit of materialistic

pleasure.  It’s not about living selfishly, indulging yourself and

turning your back on God.  That is a hollow and empty and insubstantial

life.  As the old hymn goes:  “Fading is the worldling’s pleasure, all

his boasted pomp and show.  Solid joys and lasting treasure, none but

Zion’s children know.”

 

Where is the good life to be found?  The truly blessed life is the life

lived by those who are single-minded, who are uncompromised in looking

to God for their guidance.  It is a life that is sustained and directed

by reading the Scriptures and spending time to dwell on them and to

soak in their message, and to put what they say into practice.  It is a

life lived out in relationship with God.

 

If you’re into the making of new year’s resolutions, maybe it would be

good to make one or two simple resolutions along those lines about the

direction of your life in the year ahead.  It might be that the whole

path that you are following needs to change - that for the first time

you want to make the decision to let the direction of your life be set

by Jesus Christ, and to become a follower of him.  Or it may be that

there are one or two aspects of your life in which you want to resolve

to follow him more closely.  Either way, let’s take a minute or two to

reflect in silence about these things, and then I’ll lead us together

in speaking to God in prayer.