Psalm 1:1-2:Which one of these things is not like the other things?

Presented to the Swift Current Corps 07 November 2010
By Captain Michael Ramsay




Which one of these things is not like the other things?

- A banana, a lemon, a yellow crayon, a black shoe

- Pen, pencil, ruler, a pencil crayon

- Vancouver, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg

- The letters A, E, I, Z

- Dog, Cat, Doughnut, bird

- A carrot, an apple, a pear, a tomato,

- A pillow, a bed, a good night’s sleep and a wide-awake baby

In the psalm that we are looking at today, we will be answering this same sort of question. We will notice how a righteous person is not like the others. We will be contrasting the righteous to the wicked. But before we do that, I think we should have a brief introduction to the book of Psalms.

Can anyone tell me what a psalm is? A poem, a song, a hymn: in the Bible they are written by a few different people. King David composed many that are included in our Book of Psalms (among other things, David was a very famous Psalm writer). Psalms is a collection of hymns and songs; in this way is not unlike our Songbook (or a hymnal). Now I don’t know if everyone here is aware of it or not but there has been discussion in this last year about maybe updating our Salvation Army Songbook. The ancients had done the same sort of thing with the Book of Psalms on at least one occasion. Psalms, in the form that we have now, was probably pulled together from other Psalm-books for use in worship in the Temple in Jerusalem[1] (Zerubbabel’s, Herrod’s Temple and later the synagogues) the same way we traditionally have used songbooks traditionally in worship in The Salvation Army. This version of the Psalm-book that we have in our Bibles with us today may even have been compiled as recently as after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple (586 BCE - 400 BCE)[2] and it could have been used in worship in Zerubbabel’s Temple:[3] this is the temple mentioned in the book of Ezra-Nehemiah which we have been studying here on Tuesdays.

Psalm 1, the psalm that we are looking at today, as well as being the first Psalm in the new Psalm-book, is an introduction to this whole hymnal, the whole collection. “In the Leningrad Codex, on which the standard critical edition of the HB [Hebrew Bible] is based, the first psalm is unnumbered, suggesting that it stands as a heading to the psalms that follow.”[4] Psalm 1 is a holiness psalm and rabbinical traditions at some point actually combined with Psalm 2 as one psalm.[5] Prolific and famous Biblical scholar Walter Breuggemann tells us about Psalm 1 that it is “placed intentionally as a prologue to set the tone for the entire collection [of psalms]. It announces that the primary agenda for Israel’s worship life is obedience. The fundamental contrast is a moral distinction between righteous and wicked, innocent and guilty, those who conform to God's purpose and those who ignore those purposes and disrupt the order.”[6] This quote brings us back to our opening test this morning: Which one of these things is not like the other things? We’ve all seen those criminal line-ups on TV shows; Psalm 1 here separates the Godly from the wicked in the eternal line-up.

Psalm 1:1-3 says of the righteous:
1 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.
2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.

And Verse 6:
For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.

Contrast this to verses 4 and 5:
4 Not so the wicked!
They are like chaff
that the wind blows away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.

We’ll be focusing on verses 1 and 2 today. Verse 1 says:
1 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 does it mean to walk in the counsel of the wicked and how do we avoid it? Does it mean that we should not spend time with so-called ‘sinners’? Does it mean that we should not be around people who aren’t ‘holy’? Does it mean that we should spend our whole lives either at home or at church and not be around anyone else in this corrupt, fallen world? Is that what it means? I’m sure we’ve all heard the old expression that bad company corrupts good character. Is that what this is talking about when it says that we should not walk in the counsel of the wicked? Not really: let us not forget that it is only when we are around people that need the Lord that we have any opportunity to share the Lord with them.

The Lord birthed The Salvation Army through the Booths by doing just this – serving the Lord by helping the marginalized in society and sharing the love of God with others. Consecrating our soldiers from the profane world through our covenant, the Lord is able to use the Army in the world to reach many people who may otherwise just slip through the cracks. We do not hide from the wicked. And Jesus, himself, when his disciples are asked why he eats with tax collectors and sinners answers “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick…For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12, Mark 2:17, Luke 5:31). Jesus does not separate himself from the everyday people of the world in this way. And the Apostle Paul tells us that he has become all things to all people so that by all possible means some may be saved (1 Corinthians 9:22). Jesus and his disciples spent their ministry showing mercy to the people of the world, to the outcasts of society: the poor, the widow, the immigrant. When Jesus is confronted with a women caught in adultery (John 8:1-11), a woman guilty of the death penalty, what does he do? Does Jesus shun her? Does he say ‘bad company corrupts good character’? Does Jesus condemn her? No. Does Jesus accept her sin and tell her to not worry about it because we all sin all the time anyway. No way! He saves her and then Jesus tells her to go and sin no more and if indeed she decides to reject his salvation and does sin again, she will probably receive the due penalty for her sin (Romans 6:23). Jesus, his disciples and apostles do spend time with the outcasts and with sinners; so removing ourselves from them, shunning the sinner can’t be what this psalm should mean to his followers. So what does it mean in Psalm 1, the introduction to this whole anthology of music and poetry, in this the preface to the Hebrew Psalm-book, what does it mean when it says, “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked” (Psalm 1:1)?

What does it mean to walk in the ways of the wicked? What does it mean to follow their counsel? It means to do what they do. If you claim God but act like everyone else in our North American society and make your decisions based on popularity (democracy) or money (capitalism) and just look out for number one (individualism), for yourself first; if you act like everyone else then you really are no better off than the scoffers, the wicked, the atheists, who as Charles Spurgeon says, ‘have taken their degree in vice’ and are ‘true Doctors of Damnation’[7] (cf. Matthew 7:21-23; 25:31ff). We need to be, like the platitude says: 'We need to be in the world without being of the world’.

We must be the salt and the light to this world that so desperately needs Jesus but we must not be corrupted by the world in the process and this is not necessarily an easy task. Myself, personally, I was not always a tea-totalling Salvationist but I was as far back as I can remember I was always – as my nuclear family says – ‘a part of God’s love family’, a Christian. There were times in my earlier life where I was involved in a lot of bar room ministry that tragically by the end of the night often wound up being far more bar room than ministry. I have an old friend, who reminds me of one such incident – which I am not going to share here – almost every time I see him. In those days, I am sure that it would not be easy to pick me out from that bar room line-up, as one of these things that is not like the other things.

I know that Susan, the children, and I don’t have cable television at home and I never have voluntarily paid for cable TV. I’d like to claim to have done this on moral grounds but the truth probably is that I’m just too cheap – cable is expensive! I have noticed though that whenever we take advantage of a free trial or when I first start watching TV after an absence for a while that I am outraged at the amoral, atheistic, self-serving, perverse values that are promoted on the screen. I am disgusted by all of the greed, lust, vengeance and violence that we invite into our homes through the television. But then if I am still watching TV programmes a month later after my initial shock has dissipated, (even if I am just watching the news or the ‘good shows’ there are always commercials) I find that after a while I don’t notice the sin on the TV screen that once repulsed me. I let myself get drawn into the counsel of the TV producers. I permit myself to be drawn into the ways of the wicked, drawn into the ways of sinners, drawn into the ways of mockers. This is a problem.

This is a real problem. TV isn’t the only example of we Christians being desensitised to sin in our society, so simply turning off our TVs won’t solve this problem and make us immediately identifiable in a line-up of the wicked as one of these things that is not like the other things – it couldn’t hurt though.

More on this: There is a thing called the sin spiral. There is a certain desensitizing that happens when we are surrounded by sin all the time: what might repulse us at first, later we don’t even notice: it has no effect on us. As you know, I have just released my book on covenants. In our greater society as we have started taking our covenants lightly, the Christians have – at least as far as the marriage covenant is concerned – fallen into exactly the same trap as the world becoming indistinguishable from the crowd so that no one would be able to identify us as holy, as separate, as not like the other things.[8]

In our culture today where the majority of us were once followers of Christ, we these days – Christians and non-Christians alike - see sexual assault on the news, TV shows, and newspapers all the time, and students are now it seems not infrequently sexually assaulted on university campuses. In our culture where we see many books and movies about serial killers, North America boasts more serial killers than the rest of the world combined. In a world where violence, murders and killings are shown on TV every night, since the 1990s Canada has been at war steadily and has now albeit abandoned its traditional peace keeping role and has been directly involved at least one illegal war of aggression (NATO’s invasion of Yugoslavia). Canada, which was founded upon the Word of God (Psalm 72), no longer reads the Bible or prays in our schools. We no longer pray the Lord’s Prayer in the federal House of Commons, and instead we as a culture have embraced pornography at rates unheard of in our history. We have chosen instead of walking in the way of righteousness, we have chosen to walk in the ways of the wicked. In North America, pornography generates more wealth than all of the pro-sports and the billions of dollars that are tied up in them, combined. In the US, instead of being salt and light, more than 90% of pastors themselves have confessed to using pornography. They are apparently not unlike the other: the wicked, the sinners, the scoffers of Psalm 1.

If we in this room here were lined up with people in our culture at large or if we in this room here were lined up with the wicked, the sinners, the mockers of our contemporary Canadian society and someone was given the test we were given at the beginning of the message today to pick out which one of these things is not like the other things? Which one of us is not like the others? Which one of these does not belong? Would they pick us? Are we any different than the wicked world around us? Are we here today the blessed people who do not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers?

How can we be? When our whole society seems to reflect the counsel of the wicked, how can we not walk in its ways? I think Verse 2 has our answer. Verse 2 of Psalm 1 tells us more about this person who doesn’t walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. Verse 2 tells us how to stand out as one of these things that is not like the other things. Verse 2 tells us what separates us from the wicked: it is a delight in the Law of God(cf. Song Book #652). Now this Law of God, this is not just referring to the Decalogue. This is not simply referring to the 10 Commandments. This is referring to the whole Pentateuch and Charles Spurgeon tells us “ ‘the law of the Lord’ is the daily bread of the true believer. And yet, in [King] David's day, how small was the volume of inspiration, for they had scarcely anything save the first five books of Moses! How much more, then, should we prize the whole written Word which it is our privilege to have in all our houses!’[9] We now have the scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments and Doctrine 1 of The Salvation Army – which really is my favourite of all our doctrines and I believe stands at the front of all our doctrines not merely by accident, Doctrine 1 states that “We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were given by inspiration of God, and that they only constitute the Divine rule of Christian faith and practice.” If we test everything against these like the Bareans (Acts 17:11) and meditate on them day and night (Psalm 1:2, 119:97, 143:5; Joshua 1:8) than we shall indeed be salt and light (Matthew 5:13). We will indeed be the light of the world (Matthew 5:14, Luke 16:8; cf. John 1:9, 3:19, 8:12 12:46).

This is the challenge for us today: as Christ was born, died, and rose again so that we all may have life and have life abundantly (John 15). Let us not reject that gift by being indistinguishable from the world at large. Let us not hide our light under a bushel (Luke 8:16), rather let us go out into the world armed with the sword of the Word of God (Ephesians 6:17) – remember that we as a congregation here have committed to invite as many of our friends out to church as we are able to; we don’t want any of them to blend in with the world. We want us all to be saved from that. After all Christ lived, died, and rose from the grave so that we can all live lives holy for him and so in the Scripture we read this week we are given a good tip as to how to do that - let us meditate on His Scriptures day and night; let us pick up our Bibles and read them; let us talk about what they say. Let us question each other on our exegesis and let us keep our friends accountable; let us delight in the Word of the Lord so that when he does come back and we are all standing before him on judgement day he will indeed readily identify each of us as one of these things is not like the other things of this world because we have accepted his welcome into his kingdom with open arms…

Let us pray.

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[1] Steven Shawn Tuell, 'Psalm 1' in Interpretation Issue 63 no. 3 (July 2009), p 278
[2] Derek Kidner, Psalms 1-72: An Introduction and Commentary. Downers Grove, IL : InterVarsity Press, 1973 (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 15), S. 21: For all this, Gunkel still considered that most of the material in the Psalter was post-exilic, but written still in the idiom created by the old rituals, although they were outgrown and religion had ‘come of age’—for this celebrated metaphor was his, a generation before it was Bonhoeffer’s. It was the conservatism of religious habit, he considered, which left the stamp of the old cultic patterns on the new spiritual material, so that the private suppliant used language that had been designed to serve the king, or spoke of his troubles and their cure as if they were the assaults of sickness and the rites of expiation
[3] NIV Study Bible Introduction to Psalms, page 777.
[4] Steven Shawn Tuell, 'Psalm 1' in Interpretation Issue 63 no. 3 (July 2009), p 278
[5] Willem A. VanGemeren, The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Pradis CD-ROM:Psalms/Exposition of Psalms/BOOK I: Psalms 1-41/Psalm 1: God's Blessing on the Godly, Book Version: 4.0.2. Cf. Craig, Psalms 1-50, p. 59; and "Psalms 1-2 as a Coronation Liturgy," Biblica 52 [1971]: 321-36.
[6] Walter Bruggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, 1984 Augsburg Publishing House, Augsburg MN. Available on-line: http://graham-turner.com/Resources/Brueggemann/The%20Message%20of%20the%20Psalms%20Walter%20Brueggemann%20NOTES.doc
[7] Charles H. Spurgeon, ‘The Treasury of David Vol. 1: Psalms 1-57’, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, pages 1-2.
[8] Captain Michael Ramsay, 'Praise The Lord For Covenants: Old Testament wisdom for our world today'. Vancouver, BC: Credo Press, 2010. © The Salvation Army, pages 48-50.
[9] Charles H. Spurgeon, ‘The Treasury of David Vol. 1: Psalms 1-57’, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, p. 1.