PSALM 1 IS A PREFACE TO THE BOOK OF PSALMS. It’s the door into the world of psalms and sets the stage for all the psalms.
Psalm 1: Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; 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 that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. 4 The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. 5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; 6 for the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish.
Psalm 1 describes a person who meditates on God’s law day and night. Meditation is something we usually associate with new age religions or Buddhism. But meditation has an important place in Christian prayer. The psalms encourage meditation in two directions: pondering God’s words and pondering God’s works. Christian meditation involves choosing what your mind will ponder.
In this chapter we will focus on meditation on God’s words. In the next, we’ll consider meditation on God’s works.
The psalm sets before us a contrast between two ways: the way of the righteous versus the way of the wicked. It is important to note it is not about someone who is righteous because he works hard to keep all God’s commandments and actually pulls it off.
“Righteous” is a category meaning “one who is right with God.” “Wicked” is the contrasting category. It’s a term we don’t use much, which was clear to me when I highlighted the word in Microsoft Word and looked up “synonyms.” For words that mean the same thing as “wicked” I was given: good, great, outstanding, amazing, cool, fabulous! My kids talk like that sometimes: “That roller coaster was really wicked!”
In the Bible, the word “wicked” is a behavioral term that means evil. Something that is wicked is morally wrong. More specifically, it is a pattern of life set in opposition to God.
The “righteous” and the “wicked” are contrasted throughout the Psalms. The psalmists explain there are two ways you can choose: the way of life or the way of death. In other words, there are two paths you can follow in your life: a righteous path or a wicked path.
One way produces stability that will outlast this life (like a tree planted by streams of water). The other way produces a life that is inherently unstable, like chaff the wind blows away. When grain was harvested in days before machines, wheat was put in a basket and tossed in the air. The grain was heavier than the husk, so the shell, the grassy part of the plant, would blow away in the wind while the kernel of wheat fell back into the basket. The worthless part that blew away was called “chaff.” It wasn’t wanted, it was useless and not heavy enough to last. It simply blew away with the wind. That’s what the way of the wicked is like. Instead of stability like a tree planted by nourishing water, it just blows away worthless, like it never mattered. Saying the way of the wicked will “perish” does not only mean physical death, but spiritual death, eternal death. The contrast is eternally profound.
Blessed is the man
What does it mean to be blessed?
Some Bible translations say, “Happy is the man…” Maybe they thought the word “blessed” was outdated, but its meaning is much richer than what we mean by “happy!” To be happy means you feel good, you’re in a good mood, things are going great. You are happy when your problems are small. You’re happy when you’re not sad. “Happy” describes your experience at some point in time. Because you’re having a good time, you feel happy. When things are not going well or your problems increase, you become unhappy.
But to be blessed by God, in biblical terms, is to have God’s affirmation resting on you:
“The LORD bless you…The LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you…” (Numbers 6:24-26).
Being blessed by God doesn’t depend on how you’re feeling. You can be going through tough times, times of disappointment, times full of sorrow, times of emotional or physical pain, times when you don’t particularly feel very happy, and still have God’s blessing on your life. To be blessed is to have God’s smile of approval on you because you are united by God’s grace to Jesus Christ. You are blessed when the guilt of your sin is forgiven and you are adopted as God’s son or daughter. That is a condition that outlasts this present life; “a tree planted by streams of water.”
The blessed person of Psalm 1 is also called “the righteous.” It means someone who has chosen to live under God’s Word, trusting God, pursuing God, and is right with God through faith in God’s saving grace. You can read back into this psalm what it means to be right before God through the justifying grace of Jesus Christ:
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith’” (Romans 1:16-17).
That isn’t just a New Testament idea. It was there in the Old Testament, though certainly made more clear with the coming of Christ. We need righteousness. We don’t have it in ourselves. But God provides atonement for us, and gives us the grace to believe Him, to trust Him. To be right with God through his saving grace in Jesus Christ is what it means to be blessed.
Now look at the progression: Blessed is the man who does not….walk, stand, sit.
A treacherous walk
Imagine you’re walking down the street, and you pass an outdoor café. You see people eating and talking. The smell of good cooking invades your nostrils and you stop walking. You walk over to the door and stand there to read the menu! And pretty soon, you’re sitting at a table ordering something good for lunch.
That’s a pretty harmless progression. But it’s not a café offering harmless good food here in Psalm 1. It’s a purposeful, knowing, downward progression leading directly to “the counsel of the wicked.” This is not an innocent walk. It’s a walk down a road leading directly to people, places, thoughts, and actions in direct opposition to God. It’s a chosen path leading directly to wickedness.
Again, “wicked” means evil. More specifically, morally evil. It is a way of living that is opposed to what God says is right and true. The counsel of the wicked is everyone and everything set in opposition to God and to what he says is good and true and right.
You can’t stop living in this world when you become a Christian. You can’t protect your children from the counsel of the wicked by homeschooling or sending them to a Christian School or getting rid of the television. We are surrounded by the pervasive attitude of fallen people. To some degree you can’t help but be around the counsel of the wicked. But you don’t have to purposefully walk directly into it.
So often we don’t even think about what we’re letting influence our minds and hearts. We think so many things in our culture are harmless. But there is no neutral position in all this. There are only two ways: one thinks it can define good and bad, right and wrong, true and false without any reference to God or His Word. The other defines good and bad, right and wrong, true and false in light of God’s revelation in His written Word.
Follow the progression
It begins with a walk.
As has already been stated, this is a purposeful walk leading directly to a place you know you don’t belong – a place where ungodly thoughts, actions, and ideas are found. It’s a walk which takes you to the “counsel of the wicked.” For you are no longer even walking.
You stand.
The “way” of the wicked has now moved to the next level as you “stand in the way of sinners.” Standing gives you the opportunity to really observe and take it all in. You’re close enough to see everything for yourself. The psalmist says, you are now “standing in the way of sinners.”
As you stand, you listen to the thoughts, ideas, mindset, and views of the counsel of the wicked. The people sitting in this counsel seem quite typical and don’t appear all that offensive. In fact, the more you listen, the more normal, good, and appealing it all seems.
You sit down.
The third step in the progression has just been reached. You are now “sitting in the seat of scoffers.” “Scoffers” are those who mock what God says. They say “it’s stupid and unrealistic to live the way God commands.” They say it takes the fun out of life and it’s ridiculous to believe what God says in the Bible. They say God’s moral views and opinions about what is true or false are outdated and irrelevant to the modern world.
In the psalms, “the wicked” refers to people who defiantly choose a path that is contrary to what God commands. The most hardened people are the ones sitting – the mockers and scoffers – who are proud in their opinion that it’s stupid to believe what the Bible says or to build your life around God. This is the place where ungodly thoughts, ideas and actions are presented as wisdom – as good counsel. It is a place where thoughts, deeds and actions are set against God himself.
The wicked’s end
But “the way of the wicked will perish” (vs. 6). The “way” refers to the course of life, the pattern of life, the choices and behavior, and finally, to the consequences of living life opposed to God. The way of the wicked is a trajectory of life with an inevitable destiny.
So the psalm warns people who want to live under God’s blessing to avoid the downward spiral that starts with setting foot on this path: from thinking like those set against God, to choosing a godless lifestyle, to being at home with a godless life. Don’t even start on this path!
The blessed path
Why does the blessed person not go that way? Because “his delight is in the law of the LORD.” The reason he chooses not to go down the path of the wicked is that his heart delights in something completely different and his mind is preoccupied with different thoughts: “On His law he meditates day and night.”
On the surface, “meditating on God’s laws day and night” doesn’t necessarily sound motivating. But what does it really mean? Meditating on God’s “law” means so much more than just thinking about the moral law of God summarized in the Ten Commandments. For Old Testament believers, every word of Scripture was the law of God. The psalmist is saying, then, the righteous man meditates on the entire written Word of God.
On the surface, “meditating on God’s laws day and night” doesn’t necessarily sound motivating. But what does it really mean? Meditating on God’s “law” means so much more than just thinking about the moral law of God summarized in the Ten Commandments. For Old Testament believers, every word of Scripture was the law of God. The psalmist is saying, then, the righteous man meditates on the entire written Word of God.
Meditating on God’s law is to think and focus on what God has revealed about himself. It is to delight the structure God has given which points us to Christ and sets us free from the enslaving power of sin. And because this is where his mind and heart are centered, the result in his life is described in verse 3: “like a tree planted by a stream” drawing refreshing strength from God’s Word.
In other words, the person who meditates on God’s Word doesn’t dry up and become fruitless. In all he does, he prospers. That doesn’t mean he never has setbacks or difficulties, but in the course of his life, he has chosen what is eternal, what is best – he has set his heart on a treasure that can never be lost! The trajectory of his life is toward God and life under God’s blessing.
In contrast, the wicked are like chaff that the wind blows away. They won’t stand up in the judgment. They won’t have a place with the redeemed people of God. The wicked will perish in the end.
The Psalms develop these truths in lots of ways and expand on these basic ideas. As you read through the Psalms, notice how often the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked are contrasted. But let’s focus on what is said in verse 2: “His delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.”
Meditate?
The idea of meditating is a bit foreign to us. What comes to mind when you read the word, “meditation?” Maybe you think of religions that talk a lot about meditation: Buddhism, Transcendental Meditation (TM), New Age religions that have grown out of Buddhist ideas. In those religions, the goal of meditation is to stop thinking, to clear your mind of all thought. Suppose you have a problem or are full of sorrow. The way to find peace is to clear your mind of all thought. Buddhism tells you to think of life as an illusion – the pain isn’t real. Meditation is about learning techniques for calming your anxious heart by not thinking.
Have you ever tried to think of nothing? There are times when I sit on the sofa quietly, and my wife says, “What are you thinking about?” I respond, “Oh, nothing.” I don’t mean that my mind has been completely blank and no thoughts have been going through my head. I mean I’ve not been thinking of anything important or anything I want to talk about. It’s almost impossible to think of nothing! Something is going through your mind all the time!
The word, “amusement” comes from the root word to muse, which means to think. The letter “a” added to “muse” makes it a negative: to not think. But something is going on in your mind when you are watching a DVD or playing a video game. Your mind isn’t completely blank! You don’t stop thinking completely. It’s just that what you’re thinking about is a diversion from the daily routine. In that sense, amusement is a diversion that gets certain thoughts off your mind by allowing you to think about something different, something light-hearted or compelling enough to allow you to not think about the things that normally occupy your mind.
When the psalms encourage us to meditate on God’s law, they are encouraging us to choose what our minds will ponder. It is interesting how often the idea of meditation comes up in the psalms:
“I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word… –your servant will meditate on your statutes…” (Psalm 119:15-16, 23).
“Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day…” (Psalm 119:97).
“…your testimonies are my meditation…” (Psalm 119:99).
The psalmists tell God they delight in meditating. For a Christian, this means reflecting on what is true about the universe in light of what God has said in his Word and what he has revealed and accomplished in Jesus Christ. In the terminology of Psalm 1, since your mind is always occupied with something, choose to saturate your mind and heart with God’s thoughts. In 1 Corinthians the Apostle Paul encourages the same thing when he says, “We impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit…” (see I Corinthians 2:5 and 2:13).
Meditate on this
Many of the Psalms are prayers, but they are also meditations in which the psalmist ponders some aspect of the character of God. For example, Psalm 139 ponders the intimate knowledge God has of each of us: “O LORD, you have searched me and known me…before a word is on my tongue, you know it altogether…” He is pondering these things before God in prayer, talking to God about what amazes him about God’s knowledge.
Again, Psalm 1 tells us the righteous man meditates day and night on God’s law. He rolls things around in his mind as he works, as he walks down the road, when he wakes up in the morning, and when he lies down to sleep at night. He’s thinking about God’s Word, which means he’s thinking about what God has revealed about himself. He is pondering what it means to relate to God, to be loved by God, to be known by God, to belong to God’s covenant people, to experience God’s tender mercy and steadfast love, and much more – “His delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.”
Learning to pray
People sometimes ask me, “What should I talk about when I pray?” They usually tell me, “I end up asking God for things I need. I confess my sin, ask him to forgive me. But then what?” What they are really asking is, “How do I learn to enjoy talking to God so it doesn’t feel like a boring duty? How can prayer become a delight?”
First, think about how you grow to enjoy talking to anyone. You have to want to get to know that person. You have to be interested enough in what he thinks to ask him questions and listen to what matters to him. And you have to choose to spend time with him.
Prayer involves your mind. It requires thinking. You have to want to know about the God to whom you speak. And God has made himself known in his Word. So prayer flows out of a growing awareness of who God is and what he has said about himself. Maybe that’s why the psalmist says he meditates on God’s Word. You can’t really know God apart from what he has said about himself in Scripture. You can know certain things must be true about God by observing the world around you. But to know God, you have to learn what he tells you about himself.
Prayer involves your heart. You can “pray” out of a sense of duty – because you know you’re supposed to pray. But if you talked to your wife because it was your duty to spend a little time every day talking to her, how would she respond? She wants to know that you are interested in her, that you want to know her and listen to what is on her heart. In a similar way, prayer becomes a delight when you really desire God, when you are hungry and thirsty for God.
Prayer involves your will. It means choosing to spend time this way and training yourself to tell God what is on your mind and heart. Prayer becomes more of a delight as you learn to live with an awareness of being in God’s presence all the time. The more we meditate on his Word and get to know him, the more delight we experience in our thoughts, prayers, and life.
Some Practical Suggestions:
1. Meditation requires content (…on his law he meditates…).
If you’re going to meditate on God’s Word, you need to actually get some part of his Word before your mind to think about! There is no command in the Bible about when you should read your Bible (morning or evening) or how much Scripture you should read. There are times when it’s good to read a large section, maybe even a whole letter like Galatians or Colossians at one sitting. (These were, after all, letters, meant to be read completely, not little by little). But there are other times for taking just a few words as the subject of meditation.
With all the technological advances in our day, you can listen to someone reading Scripture on your computer or smartphone. Just find a way to get some portion of God’s Word before your mind. As you listen or as you read, ask yourself, “What does this passage tell me about God? According to this passage, what is God like?” Instead of guessing about what God is like, let his Word inform your thoughts about God.
2. If you’re going to ponder what you’ve just read or heard, you can’t let other thoughts occupy your mind.
This is hard for a lot of people in our generation to believe, but I can assure you it’s true: silence is okay! You’re actually going to need some silence if you’re going to let your mind ponder the truth you’ve just read or heard from God’s Word.
It helps to minimize distractions. My dad could sit in a room with people talking and read a book. He could tune out all the noise and think about what he was reading. But if you turned on the television, his attention was drawn to the TV. It distracted him enough that he couldn’t think with the TV on.
Some people seem to be able to read and think with music playing or with the television on. People say, “It’s just background noise. I tune it out.” I’ve never been able to do that, especially if the music in the background is something I know, or if it’s jazz music.
I need silence, without distractions, if I’m going to mull over things I’ve read in the Bible. I find some of my best time for reflecting on what I’ve read in Scripture is when I’m alone in the car or when I’m mowing the lawn. I don’t listen to music in the car. I have learned to enjoy the silence because it gives me time to think. And I’ve learned to turn my thoughts toward God and to talk to God about what he has said about himself in Scripture.
Your prayers don’t have to be long or carefully worded. You can tell God what you’re thinking about or that you have a hard time understanding something you read in the Bible. Tell him that you want to know him and delight in him.
3. If you’re going to meditate on God’s Word, should you have set times or should it be spontaneous?
The answer is “Yes.” The psalmist talks about reflecting on God’s Word in the morning and in the evening, when he gets up, when he walks down the road, and when he lies down at night.
You need to know yourself well enough to choose the times when your mind works best. For some people, that’s early in the morning. But that’s not true for everyone. Other people function better late at night.
Set times are great and building those times into your schedule is wise. If you don’t set times for reading scripture and for meditation, other things will take up your time. But on the other hand, a good suggestion is to take advantage of some of those times usually filled with television or other forms of amusement.
What about the time you spend every day commuting to work? If you have a drive to work, instead of listening to music on the radio, listen to a sermon or to a passage of Scripture. This can be an excellent use of your smart phone or CD player. But here’s the key, listen, then turn it off and ponder what you just heard. Make it a time of reflection and prayer.
What about when you mow the lawn? Instead of putting on headphones and listening to music, what if you read a section of Scripture before you started the lawnmower, and then pondered that passage as you mowed the lawn?
What about taking a little time before you go to sleep to read something from God’s Word and then ponder those words before you fall asleep?
4. Pray before meditation: Ask God: “open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your word and get to know you better.”
5. Learn to ask questions of the passage of Scripture you are reading.
For example, as you read Psalm 1, you can ask:
Why will the wicked not stand?
Why do the righteous flourish?
What would it mean for me to be like a tree planted by a stream, a tree that produces fruit and doesn’t wither?
What does it mean to be blessed by God?
How do I tend to follow that downward spiral: walking in the way, standing, sitting – where do I tend to do that?
What does it mean to be one of the righteous who stays away from the path of the wicked?
Based on all this, what do I need to say to God? What do I need to ask him to do in my heart? Where do I need his grace to lead me to Jesus in repentance and faith?
Think
Ask questions of the passage. Then ask God to give you insight. Pray God’s Word back to him! Thomas Watson said: “Study is the finding out of a truth, meditation is the spiritual improvement of a truth; the one searches for the vein of gold, the other digs out the gold.”
After meditation you have something to pray about! You can say: “Father, I’ve been thinking about what you said. This is what I see more clearly about what you are like. This is what I don’t understand. This is what I see more clearly about myself. This is what gives me joy…”
The Puritan pastor, Thomas Manton, said: “The Word feeds meditation, and meditation feeds prayer.” If this is a new idea for you — if you’re not used to taking some time to reflect and ponder a portion of Scripture or some words from a passage you’ve been reading, it is going to be like trying to build a fire with wet wood. It will take some time! But stay after it! Ask the Holy Spirit to help you focus on what this passage tells you about God. Ask him to help you focus your mind and heart on the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
What you think about, what you ponder, the content of your musing, reveals what matters to you. Someone said: “If farmers think about their land and crops; if doctors think about patients they want to help; if lawyers think about their latest cases; if store owners think about how they can sell more; shouldn’t the minds of Christians be drawn to contemplation of the truth about God our Savior?”
What you will find as you take the time to meditate on God’s Word and talk to him about what you are finding in his Word is that God himself will become a delight to your soul!