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A Biblical Meditation on Experience and Truth

Psalm 1

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Truth from Psalm 1


I would like to invite you to turn in your Bibles to Psalm 1. After I’ve read the psalm, then I will lead in prayer. As I read it, I would like you to observe for yourself what the divisions of the psalm are (that is, how it’s put together). You will instantly see, if you’re not already familiar with the text, that this psalm offers us a contrast between the righteous and the unrighteous. The first three verses are devoted to the righteous, verses 4 and 5 to the unrighteous, and verse 6 gives us a final summarizing contrast. Hear, then, what Holy Scripture 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. 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.

Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor 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.”

This is the Word of the Lord. Let us pray.

Now may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. We ask through the mercies of Christ Jesus, amen.

I want to begin with an exposition of the psalm, but we’re not going to end there. So when I get to the end of the psalm, don’t think, “Whew! I’m glad that’s over!” We’ll barely be one-third of the way, just so that you know what’s coming.

Psalm 1 gives us a description of the contrast between the righteous and the unrighteous. In verse 1, the righteous are described negatively. That is, what they’re not like. The psalm does not begin by saying, “Well, this is what the righteous are like.” It begins by saying, “This is what they’re not like.” Verse 1: “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, who does not stand in the way of sinners, and who does not sit in the seat of mockers.”

Even a superficial reading shows that there’s a danger of slowing down. You start by walking along, picking up the advice and the pattern of life of wicked people. This notion of walking in the Hebrew Bible is often ethical. You start walking, picking up the worldview, the frame of reference, the advice, the counsel, and the perspective of wicked people.

You do that long enough, and then you start standing in their way. That’s what Hebrew says, all right, but it’s still a bad translation. Because to stand in someone’s way in Hebrew does not mean what it means in English. If you stand in someone’s way in English, you’re blocking them. You’re barricading them. People in my generation read a whole lot of Robin Hood stories. Robin Hood and Little John meet on the bridge, and they stand in each other’s way. One of them falls in the drink because they’re standing in each other’s way.

But to stand in someone’s way in Hebrew does not mean to block them, to prevent them from going, or to hinder them. It means, rather, to walk in their moccasins, to stand where they stand, and to do what they do. So you start by picking up the advice of wicked people and, eventually, in terms of all that you do, you are so identified with them that you’re standing where they stand. You’re standing in their way.

If you do that long enough, then you may actually sit in the seat of mockers. That is, you’re in your La-Z-Boy chair. You pull the lever, and your feet go up in the air. You look down your long, self-righteous nose at all those stupid, ignorant, right-wing, fundamentalist Christians.

Now it’s not enough just to do your own thing and call it pleasure. Now you have to sneer at everybody else. It’s not enough just to walk in the counsel of the wicked; you have to mock anybody who doesn’t do it with you. At this point, in the name of tolerance and freedom, you just become terribly intolerant with anybody who doesn’t actually line up with you.

The very first verse in the very first psalm (of a book of 150 of them) begins, “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.” It’s what he’s not like.

You know as well as I do that the Bible is full of poetry. You can tell in most of our printed Bibles today by lines being broken up into poetic structures. You know that. So the book of Psalms is poetry, but an awful lot of the oracles of the prophets are also written in poetry and so on.

Poetry works in different ways in different cultures. There are different kinds of poetry, even in English. English has limericks. I myself don’t know any language that has anything quite like the English limerick. We also have things that vary all the way from E.E. Cummings:

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

To a stentorian Shakespearian sonnet:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no; it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;

And then there’s free verse. Oh, I’m just old; I was brought up with this stuff! There’s no merit to it. Even blank verse has its place. I was brought up to love Robert Frost:

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

Ice-storms do that.

Oh, that’s clever. So the question is.… How does poetry work in the Bible? How do you read it? Because how you read it affects how you understand it. By and large, Hebrew poetry doesn’t work on beat like E.E. Cummings. It doesn’t work on clever rhyming schemes, like Shakespearian sonnets. It doesn’t work on blank verse.

Hebrew poetry tends to work on parallelism. You say something; then you say it again a slightly different way, and the two parts help to explain each other. Or you say something; then you say the opposite in the opposite sort of way, and make a contrast. Then you bless it with an adjective and call it antithetic parallelism. Or sometimes you say something, then take one thought in that first line, and increase it just a wee bit in the next line. Then you take one thought in that line, and increase it in the next line, and call that step parallelism.

You look at this psalm, and it is Hebrew poetry. You get what people are not like in the first verse. The first verse says, “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, does not stand in the way of sinners, and does not sit in the seat of mockers.” So you would think the second verse would run something like this: “Blessed, rather, is the man who walks in the counsel of the righteous, who stands in the way of the just, and who sits in the seat of the praising.”

That would be wonderful antithetic parallelism. I think I should become a psalm-writer, don’t you? But what the blessed Holy Spirit does instead, as he gives this psalm to a human writer, is to break the expected parallelism. Because it’s enough, in verse 2, when the righteous person is described positively, to give just one criterion: “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” Because if he has that, he has the full answer to the problems of verse 1.

Now the counsel is coming from the Word of God. That counsel, because he’s meditating on it day and night, is shaping how he thinks and what he does. It’s the law of the Lord; how can anyone boast in that kind of framework or talk sneeringly or condescendingly toward others? It transforms everything. Of course, there are so many parts of Scripture that say the same sort of thing. Read all of Psalm 119, all 176 verses. It’s full of meditation on how the Word of God functions in our lives, how it’s true, how it’s rich, how it’s satisfying, and how it’s transforming.

When I was a boy growing up in French Canada, I lived on the banks of la RiviËre Saint-FranÁois: the St. Francis River, the dirtiest river in French Canada. We had three paper mills upstream. In those days, they weren’t quite as careful as anybody is today in the Western world because of all kinds of ecological restrictions.

So in the summer, the river stank when the water went to lower levels, and the way it was drinkable through our taps was because of the addition of tons of chlorine. So from the river, you got the smell of paper mills, and from the taps, you got the smell of chlorine. At least it was safe. The dirtiest river in Quebec.

At that time, when I was still a lad, one of the bottled water companies moved into our area. Drummondville, where I lived, was 97 percent French speaking. They came in with bottled water for the home. I think it was Hinckley and Schmitt, but it might have been another one; I can’t quite recall.

They had these one-liner ads, both in French and in English. In English, the one-liner ad was, “You are what you drink!” Well, of course, in terms of body weight, they were right. What is it, 67 or 68 percent of our body weight is water? You’re drinking that water, and you are what you drink? No wonder they sold a lot of bottled water.

But the Bible takes it up one step further and says, “You are what you think.” That’s what Proverbs says. “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” You’re not what you say, and you’re not what you do; rather, you are what you think. You men, how would you like your mum or your wife or your daughter to know absolutely everything you think? You are what you think.

You women, how would you like your dad or your husband or your brother or your son to know absolutely everything you think? Every nurtured bitterness, every secret lust, every well-watered resentment, and every barely snuffed-out piece of anger. You are what you think. That’s why one of the things the apostle Paul says, when he talks about the transforming power of the gospel, is, “Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Garbage in; garbage out. You are what you think.

So this criterion for a righteous person is unambiguous, and it’s radical. That is, it goes right to the radix, to the root, of everything. “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” What is presupposed, now, is not the kind of rapid “hiding a verse in your heart” or “a verse a day keeps the Devil away” or a kind of mystical piece of magic (“I had my devotions”).

Rather, it is the kind of reading of the Word of God so that we think God’s thoughts after him. It shapes how we view everything: relationships, marriage, money, eternity, time, service, and everything else. It just shapes everything. We meditate on it and delight in it. Our delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law we meditate day and night.

You who have your devotions regularly, do you ever come in at the end of a day and think, “Oh, yes! You know what I’d really like to do for a couple of hours tonight? I’d like to read my Bible.” I know you’ve had your devotions, but do you ever just come in and want to read your Bible because you delight in the law of the Lord, and on this law you meditate day and night. You come up to a red light, and your mind goes into neutral. Where does it run? This transforms everything.

So the righteous person is described negatively in verse 1, positively in verse 2, and metaphorically in verse 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.” Of course, what is presupposed is the land of Israel, with its semi-arid geography. The early rains come, and everything springs to life and looks wonderful. But then everything dries up, and you have these dry wadis (what the Spaniards, in Arizona and Nevada and places like that, call arroyos).

It’s a desert; there’s no life (except for the odd cactus, maybe). There’s nothing there until the latter rains come, and then the desert blooms again. If you’re not careful, you can get washed out in a sudden gushing stream too. But that’s not a good place to grow a tree. You just get wild scrub and desert flowers.

But this is a tree that’s been carefully planted in a confluence of streams, so that there is always a nourishing supply of water. In consequence, its leaf does not wither. The idea is not that it’s an evergreen in our Northern Hemisphere notion of evergreen. The point is that there’s a water supply that’s there all the time. It’s not a semi-arid situation. Rather, whatever the aridity all around, here there’s a careful supply of water such that there’s always a sign of life.

In due season, there’s fruit too. “It brings forth its fruit in its season. Whatever it does prospers.” This is not advocating some kind of prosperity gospel in the line of Joel Osteen or the like. Rather, it’s still within the metaphor. That is, regardless of the east wind coming through or regardless of a year of famine, still there is fruit in season and sign of life because it’s a well-watered plant.

In fact, if there is some sort of conceptual connection between verse 2 and verse 3 (it’s not quite certain, but it’s at least likely), the water that is envisaged here is, in fact, the nurturing water of the Word of God, which comes along and gives life. It produces all signs of life, vitality and fruitfulness.

This sort of metaphor is pretty common in Scripture. I’m sure that you remember the passage in Jeremiah 17, where you have a remarkable contrast that is entirely in line with this. On the one hand, in Jeremiah 17:5, “This is what the Lord says: ‘Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord. He will be like a bush in the wastelands; he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives.’ ”

By contrast, “ ‘But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.’ ”

So here is the righteous person then described negatively (verse 1), positively (verse 2), and metaphorically (verse 3). Then in verses 4 and 5, you get the contrast. It’s a very strong negation in the original. “Not so the wicked!” Not so! The psalmist wants you to hear that anything that you say of significance regarding the righteous, if it’s really significant, you have to negate with respect to the wicked.

Are the righteous those who avoid following the counsel of unruly people? Not so the wicked. Not so. Are the righteous those who avoid standing in the way of sinners? Not so the wicked. Not so. Are the righteous those who really avoid becoming sneering mockers? Not so the wicked. Not so. Are the righteous those who meditate daily on the Word of God and who find in it their delight? Not so the wicked. Not so. Are the righteous those like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season? Not so the wicked. Not so.

Well, what are the wicked like then? The psalmist tells us. “They are like chaff that the wind drives away.” Not like a tree, but like chaff, the external husk of the seed. You cut down your grain, and you have a little winnowing shovel. After your grain has dried a bit, you toss it up in the air, and you beat it with the shovel. The chaff, the external husk, falls off, and the wind just blows it away. The seed falls to the ground. You let it dry a little bit more, and then you crush it. You make your flour and your bread and so on.

And the chaff? It is worthless, lifeless, rootless, fruitless, dead, and useless. Not like the tree, with its signs of life and fruit in due season, and whatever he does prospers. From God’s perspective, the wicked are just like chaff that the wind blows away. In case we don’t pick up the significance of this, it’s spelled out in verse 5. “Such do not stand in the congregation of the Lord.” In the day of judgment, they’re swept away.

Verse 6 gives us a final summarizing contrast. Strictly speaking, if you’re following the text, you will see that it’s not a contrast between the righteous and the unrighteous. It is, rather, a contrast between the way of the righteous and the way of the unrighteous. “The Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”

“The Lord watches over the way of the righteous …” That is, he acknowledges it as his. He preserves them in it. He owns it. He protects it. He nourishes them. He nurtures them. The Lord watches over this way. But the way of the wicked? Even their way will perish. It’s not just that the wicked perish because they don’t stand with the assembly of the righteous in the previous verse. Even their way perishes. As significant as tracks made along the seashore when the tide is out … then the tide rolls in and the tide rolls out … there are no more tracks.

To put this in New Testament terms, 50 billion years into eternity, there are not going to be any learned disquisitions on the significance of Pol Pot or Adolf Hitler because the way of the wicked will perish. No one will remember it. It’s gone. It’s insignificant on an eternal order. But every glass of cold water given in the name of the Lord will still be celebrated because the Lord watches over the way of the righteous. He owns it. And the way of the wicked will perish.

So here’s the first psalm. There are two ways. There is no third. But someone might well say, at this juncture, “Is this really realistic? I hear that’s what the psalm says all right. Just two ways; there is no third. But give me a break! In reality, aren’t we strange mixtures?” Abraham, father of the faithful and friend of God, was also a liar more than once and gets his wife in trouble more than once.

Moses, the humblest man who ever lived, starts off as a murderer. Even past the age of 80 when he should know better, he loses his cool and doesn’t get into the Promised Land. He’s Moses, the humblest man that ever lived! Then David. What shall we make of David? Why, we’re told again and again that he’s a man after God’s own heart. He commits adultery and murder. One wonders what he would have done if he hadn’t been a man after God’s own heart!

Then there’s Peter, prince of the apostles (primus inter pares they say, first among equals) and the great hero of Pentecost who has seen so many people converted. He’s the one to whom God graciously gives a revelation (“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”) and then who promptly earns a rebuke from the Master (“Get behind me Satan! You don’t understand the things of God.”)

Peter is the one who with oaths swears that he doesn’t know the Master on the night that the Master himself is betrayed. Then he gets his theology all mixed up and has to be rebuked by the apostle Paul. That’s Peter! What chance is there for the rest of us, for goodness’ sake?

Two ways to live sounds a bit idealistic to me! It’s all jumbled up, isn’t it? It’s not as if there are two ways; it’s sort of a whole spectrum. Sometimes I follow this way, and sometimes I follow that way. Doesn’t the apostle Paul acknowledge the same thing? “With my heart I want to do this, but in reality, I do that.” Two ways to live? Isn’t this just a wee bit idealistic? What do you make of that?

In fact, when we hear this kind of thing, aren’t we in danger when we read Psalm 1 (unless the words are just falling off our lips and we’re not actually thinking about them very much)? If you actually start thinking about it, aren’t we in two dangers here? We read Psalm 1 and, somehow, we think, “Yes, I’m on the good side myself. I’m in the first three verses. Isn’t that nice.”

Or else we read these three verses and read the whole psalm, and we think, “Good grief. If that’s the definition of a righteous man, what hope is there even for me?” The psalm just ends up crushing us. Where shall we go? What do you do with Psalm 1?

What I want to do in the rest of my time is take seven steps to think through this psalm again, within the framework of various elements of biblical theology, to see where it fits into the Canon and into our thinking: how we should be processing this sort of thing and what we should be thinking about as Christians when we read something like this.

1. It is important for thoughtful Christians who read their Bibles regularly to remember that God has given us a Bible full of different literary genres.

He has chosen not to give us a simple text on systematic theology. Don’t misunderstand me. You can build a systematic theology out of what’s in the Bible, but that’s not the form in which he’s given it.

So the Bible is made up of letters, chronologies, genealogies, proverbs, parables, apocalyptic symbolism, and so on. It’s made up of many, many different kinds of forms of literature, and each of them has their own way of making a certain kind of appeal to the conscience, of getting across certain kinds of things.

When Jesus says, “I am the door,” no one here thinks that he’s flat on both sides, turns on hinges, and squeaks! Right away, we recognize a metaphor. In the context, we can tie it to other related metaphors. We do that automatically. So many things about literary genres, we pick up automatically just from growing up reading. You don’t need technical language.

On the other hand, sometimes it is helpful to understand how certain kinds of literary genres work. Wisdom Literature tends to think in polarities. In the book of Proverbs, for example, you’re either following Lady Wisdom or you’re following Dame Folly; you’re following one of the two. You’re either following one chick or the other.

It’s the way it is. It’s not that you want to follow, instead, someone who is sort of halfway in between. That’s not what wisdom offers you. You either have the wise way or the foolish way. That’s the way it works. Psalm 1 is often called a wisdom psalm, precisely because it sets things out in such polarities. There’s the righteous way, and there’s the way of folly.

Whereas, when you come to narrative literature, and you read the story of David, there’s not a whole lot of moralizing. You don’t have to have a whole lot of moralizing (“This thing that David did was a no-no”). You just tell a story, and you can see that it’s a “no-no.” In narrative literature, then, you start having the nuances of goodness and badness, failed anticipation, making a mistake, blowing up, hiding things, and so on.

Wisdom Literature doesn’t do that. What Wisdom Literature does is project antitheses. “Better this than that. Follow this one, not that. This is the way of life; that’s the way of death.” God, in his wisdom, has given us a Bible that has, amongst the different literary genres, Wisdom Literature in it as well. There are reasons for this that we’ll come to in due course. The first thing to do, though, is to recognize it.

2. We need to be aware of our own cultural location and what our biases are when we read this kind of thing.

We’re never simply neutral readers. We inevitably bring our own baggage with us. It’s really important to see that. So I bring all kinds of biases and bags when I come to read something.

For 10 years, I worked part-time with the World Evangelical Fellowship. Part of my job was bringing people together from around the world to work on some project, write essays together, and so on. One of the interesting bits of this was that I discovered people from certain parts of the world could be counted on to lean theologically in certain kinds of cultural directions.

For example, if I had an African theologian or pastor there, almost certainly he’d be reading chunks of Paul and would be thinking in communitarian terms. Whereas, the North American would, almost certainly, be thinking in individualistic terms. Then there would be a clash on the floor as we’d discuss some of these things.

We’d have to start thinking out, “Okay, what does Paul really mean here? Why? How can you know? Can you tell? Is there a difference? Is one right and one wrong in some particular context?” You don’t even raise the question unless you sometimes face people from other kinds of cultural perspectives. Now then, what kind of biases do we bring to the Bible, by and large, at the risk of huge overgeneralizations, when we read these sorts of polarities today?

By and large, we’re long since past the 1950s (the Eisenhower years) when cowboys on the film that were good guys wore white hats, and cowboys that were bad guys wore black hats. You didn’t have to be into the film by more than 30 seconds before you found out who was the good guy and who was the bad guy. You just looked at the color of their hats. Then you knew that everything the good guy did was very, very, very good, and everything the bad guy did was very, very, very bad. It was a simple polarity, a morality story with absolutes. We’re long past that.

We have something close to it every once in a while in our action films. You know, the Rambo stuff, where you need a lot of really bad guys so that you have targets to kill! But even then, you see, it’s nice to make the good guy at least a little bit evil, so you have a Dirty Harry. He’s not a Roy Rogers kind of really, really, really good guy, but a Dirty Harry good guy.

So suddenly, we’re in the generation that likes to smirch over the different kinds of categories so that good and evil are not quite so clear. What was the Academy Award winner a year and a half ago? (Or was it two and a half years ago? I begin to mix them up after a while.) Crash. Did you see it? Does anybody watch films here, or am I the only one who watches films? Did you see Crash?

There are four pairs in this film Crash. In the beginning of the film, one of each pair is pretty good, and the other is pretty bad. By the end of the film, it’s all reversed. That’s Academy Awards stuff right there, let me tell you! It’s morally ambiguous. This is hot! You’re not going to get an Academy Award for Rambo. In our culture, you’re going to get an Academy Award for something that’s morally ambiguous. This is really good!

Some years ago, I was working on Job. I read a lot of commentaries and studies on Job. I found many, many contemporary scholars and commentators saying, “It’s a wonderful book. So morally ambiguous. It’s terrific.” Job doesn’t know that God has a deal going on in the background, sort of a bet with the Devil himself. So he loses his friends, his health, his children, and his wealth. Then these three miserable comforters come in with their simplistic theology.

“Job, do you believe that God is good?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe that God is sovereign?”

“Yes.”

“So God is sovereign and God is good, and he’s punishing you. What do you infer from that?”

“Well, I don’t know what to infer. I know that God is sovereign, and I know that God is good. But I also know that I’m suffering unjustly.”

“Oh, Job, how can you say unjustly? That would mean that God is unjust. Do you really think that God is unjust?”

“No, no, no. I don’t want to say that God is unjust. On the other hand, there are times when I’d like to have a lawyer, you know?”

They push and push, and they say, “Job, you have so much guilt and sin over you, you don’t even recognize it. You’re so blind to it all. Even if you don’t see it, repent of it anyway. Because God is good and God is just, you’ll get blessings in any case. God will be constrained to give you all this stuff that he’s taken away from you. In fact, because he’s good and sovereign, you have to infer that he’s punishing you. You’re getting what you deserve.”

Job says, “Look, I know that God is good and God is sovereign. Though he slays me, yet will I trust him. But I have to tell you that what’s happening to me is not fair. I wish I had him right in front of me so I could ask him a few questions. This is not right!” The discussion about the book of Job goes, “Oh, it’s morally ambiguous. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

Then the debates between Job and his friends go back and forth. Eventually, the friends are shut up, and another friend comes in. Eventually in the book, God speaks. What does he say? “Job, have you ever designed a snowflake? Hmm? Were you around when I invented the hippopotamus? Hmm? Have you ever cast Orion into the skies? Hmm? Where were you when I suspended the whole world?”

After two or three chapters, Job says, “Okay, I get the point. I spoke too soon. I’ll shut up; I’ll put a seal on my mouth. I spoke too quickly. There are things I don’t understand.” God says, “Stand up on your feet. I’m not finished yet. I have some more questions.” There are two more chapters of questions.

The critics continue to say, “Oh, wonderful stuff. It’s morally ambiguous. God doesn’t even answer. All he does is show what Job doesn’t know. It’s wonderful stuff.” Then along comes chapter 42. Job gets twice as many cows, twice as many sheep, and twice as many donkeys. He gets the same number of children. (I mean, you wouldn’t expect his wife to give 20 more children; 10 were enough!)

All the critics begin to say, “This is ridiculous! After all the subtlety and moral ambiguity of the previous literature, then, right at the end, Eisenhower years of cowboys with white hats and black hats. Everything turns out to have a happy ending. Give me a break! This is some idiot redactor penning stuff onto the end of the book years and years and years later. This can’t possibly be original. Whoever wrote this is a twit in comparison to the person who wrote such marvelous moral ambiguity throughout the rest of the book.” Isn’t that what our culture says?

That’s a huge mistake. Because, you see, narrative (whether the kind of narrative you get in the account of David or in the kind of epic that you get in Job) does present all the warts and all of that. But the difference between the kind of moral ambiguity you get in the Bible and the kind of moral ambiguity that our culture cherishes is this: our culture cherishes moral ambiguity as an end in itself, as an intrinsically good thing, whereas, the Bible sees the moral ambiguity for what it is: it’s already a sign of lostness and compromise and disorder.

Chapter 42 of Job, where everything turns out all right, functions, in the book of Job, the way Revelation functions in the New Testament. At the end of the day, God wins. Justice is not only done, but it’s seen to be done. That’s not disorder. That’s saying, “Wait.” There’s an eschatological element. At the end of the day, not only will justice be done, but it will be seen to be done.

Moral ambiguity is not an intrinsically good thing. It may help us, in our confused, absolutist, self-righteous lives to see that we are such compromised individuals. The narratives of Scripture help us to see that sort of thing; that’s right. But that doesn’t mean that moral ambiguity is itself an intrinsic good.

In that sense, we have to be aware that we’re bringing our cultural biases with us, so that when we come across the absolutes of Psalm 1, quite frankly, our culture is a bit embarrassed by them. We must prefer the account of David to reading Psalm 1. So as we try to wrestle our way through these things, it really is important to be prepared to be corrected by the Word of God.

3. The greatest New Testament wisdom preacher is Jesus.

That is, Jesus himself often presents things in the most amazing polarities. Think, for example, of how he brings the Sermon of the Mount, in Matthew 5–7, to conclusion. He offers us, there, four antitheses. You either enter in the narrow gate and the straightened way to life, few there be that find it, or you go in the broad gate and the wide way to destruction, and many it be that go in there.

There’s no point coming along and saying, “Quite frankly, Jesus, I’d like a sort of in-between-sized gate. Sample a bit of the nasty goodies over here, and then get to life by somehow squeaking in.” No, there are only two ways: the narrow way and the broad way. That’s it. That’s wisdom thinking.

A good tree brings forth good fruit. A bad tree brings forth bad fruit. Well, how about in-between fruit that’s not too bad? Crab apples, maybe. No, they are polarities. You either build on rock, with such a solid foundation that all the storms of life cannot dislodge you, or you build on sand. Then some nasty hurricane comes through, and you’re wiped out. How about building on hardpan clay, instead? It doesn’t work like that. It’s Wisdom Literature.

Jesus presents things, sometimes, in fantastic polarities. If Jesus does that, we’d better not be embarrassed by it. We’d better learn from it. So he can tell parables, for example, where some go to eternal life and some go to eternal death. The polarity is stark; it’s absolute. There are wheat and tares, not some sort of half-breed in between the two. But …

4. Jesus preaches in many different genres.

He’s not only the greatest New Testament wisdom preacher, but he also preaches parables. He preaches fiery denunciation. Re-read Matthew 23: “You generation of hypocrites, you snakes in the grass!” Then he also weeps over the city. He shows infinite compassion with little children and with public sinners.

Jesus is not easy to cubbyhole. He’s the greatest preacher of parables and the greatest preacher of wisdom. Then there’s the apocalyptic preaching of the so-called Olivet Discourse. Then there are the aphorisms, the one-liners. He’s so good at one-liners! He does all of this, which reminds us, then, of the first point. There are different literary genres; there are different oracular or oral genres too. Each makes their own appeal in their own way, and one needs to listen carefully.

5. Once we are this far in our thinking, it’s pretty easy to understand the wisdom of God in giving us both the absolute polarities and the narratives that tell us of our fickleness, inconsistencies, and ambiguities.

Supposing the Bible was only made up of stories of guys like David. What would we infer from that? “Well, if David and Peter and people like that goofed, it’s not too hard to understand that I’m going to goof too. Don’t feel too bad. Don’t pick on yourself. We’re all a bunch of failures. No reason for condemning yourself for that reason.”

What gets lost is the absoluteness of God’s claims and the absoluteness of the perfection of holiness. But supposing you had only Wisdom Literature, only the absolute polarities, and you had no accounts of the moral ambiguities. Then you have these absolute standards that none of us can meet. That’s all you have.

Some of us are so, so wicked that we actually think we do meet them, compounding our wickedness with our blindness, patting ourselves on our back for our moral superiority. Terrible. Instead of the law in that sense, the demand of God crushing us and showing us our weakness and inconsistencies by the height of its perfection, now we start thinking of ourselves as superior to all those other people who are not nearly as good as we are.

No, no, no, no. The moral ambiguities are really very helpful in making us see our own hypocrisy, our own two-facedness, our own inconsistencies, and our own brokenness. You can begin to see some of the reasons why God, in his great wisdom, has given us so many different literary genres. It’s not just that the different literary genres tend to appeal to different kinds of cultures.

I’ve spent enough time in Africa to have heard quite a number of African preachers who are really, really good at preaching narrative text, but they have a really tough time with Romans. On the other hand, in this country, you get a lot of preachers out of seminaries who all want to expound Galatians and Colossians and chunks of Romans. Don’t give them 2 Samuel; they don’t know how to do narrative! That’s partly a cultural thing. It’s partly what we’ve been taught in exegesis class and the like.

Whereas God, in his wisdom, has given us all of the diversity. Part of the responsibility of any Bible teacher or preacher, at any level, is ultimately to be able to handle the whole Word of God in all of its diversity in different forms and different kinds of appeals, and to let the different parts speak and see how they work together. So we can begin to see, at least a little bit, of why God has given us all of this diversity.

But it’s my sixth and seventh points that finally bring this to bear on our topic and what we’re really on about in this conference. You knew I’d get there eventually, didn’t you?

6. Sometimes, these two emphases (the absolutes on the one hand and the moral failure and ambiguity on the other) come together in simple passages, in singular texts, or in one small book.

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of that is 1 John, to which I invite you to turn for a few moments.

First John is unambiguously written to Christians and, writing to Christians, John says in chapter 1, verse 5, “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” That’s absolute. “If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.”

In other words, if you claim to know God but are not living like God and are not living in the light of his light, then, quite frankly, if you claim to know God and you’re acting like that, you’re just a liar. What’s the solution? Is the solution, then, “All right, we’ll be perfect then, and then we’ll make it”? Nope.

“If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and …” Presupposing that we’re still sinning, nevertheless. “… the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” That is to say, you now come to the only thing that will redeem our inconsistencies, our failures, our sins, and our moral ambiguities. You just can’t be good enough to know this God who is unblemished light. What you must have is the forgiveness that comes from Christ’s sacrifice.

When the text says that the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses us, it doesn’t mean that it’s sort of a magical elixir. When the New Testament speaks of the blood of Christ, it speaks equivalently of the death of Christ, the sacrifice of Christ, or the cross of Christ. Anything that the New Testament says that the blood achieves, it says elsewhere the cross achieves, the death achieves, or the sacrifice achieves. What it means is that Christ’s death on our behalf is what purifies us from all sin.

But supposing we claim to be without sin? “Well, then,” John says, “we’re kidding ourselves. We deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” In North America, there is not a very strong sector that believes in the possibility of sinners achieving sinless perfection in this life, but at various points in the history of the church, there have been strong sectors that have tried to argue for that.

They were rife in nineteenth century England when Spurgeon (certainly the greatest English-language preacher in England at the time) was alive. At one pastor’s conference, there was a minister who spoke one afternoon, basically on the subject of “Sinless Perfection and How I Achieved It.” Spurgeon’s students were amazed that Spurgeon said nothing. He just didn’t say anything (and he was not known for saying nothing). He just said nothing.

The next morning at breakfast, he crept up beyond the guy who had made these claims (and who was known to have a bit of a vile temper despite his having supposedly achieved sinless perfection). Spurgeon dumped a pitcher of milk over the man’s head. The man exploded in wrath and curses and oaths and this sort of thing. Spurgeon merely smiled and walked away.

Now I do not recommend this as a pastoral technique. Nevertheless, it really was quite effective. If I were to speak to you on sinless perfection and how I achieved it, you could immediately pierce my bubble by going and talking to my wife and kids. You don’t have to pour a pitcher of milk on my head. There are much simpler devices.

John, here, is very blunt. If you claim that you really don’t need Christ and that you don’t need to be purified from sin because you don’t sin, John says, “Don’t kid yourself. Come off it. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” No, no. The correct thing to do, verse 9, is we must confess our sins, knowing that God “is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

I don’t think this language of being faithful and just is accidental. It doesn’t say, “If we confess our sins, he is soft-hearted, compassionate, and generally forgiving, so that he will forgive us our sins.” No, it says that he is faithful and just. What is presupposed, as will become clear in the next verses, is the cross work of Christ and the new covenant already secured in Christ’s blood.

God is faithful to the terms of that covenant. Christ dies in our place, and God is faithful and just; if Christ has already paid for our sins, he’s not going to hold it against us again. He’s faithful and just, and he will “forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

But supposing somebody just comes right out and says, “We really have not sinned”? John says, “If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar.” In other words, we’re not only kidding ourselves, but there’s so much in the Bible that says that we people made in his image are sinners.

We are sinners all the way until we reach the perfection of the new heaven and the new earth and resurrection existence at the end. That’s why the Reformers used the phrase simul justus et peccator. That is, simultaneously just before God yet still sinners. So if we claim that we haven’t sinned, we’re going against what the Bible itself says. It doesn’t make us good, it just makes us not only self-deceived, but we’re actually ending up accusing God of not telling the truth, because the Bible does insist that we’re sinners.

So here, you see, despite the perfection of God and the light and all of that, now there’s all this moral ambiguity built right into our lives, all the way through here. The solution, again and again and again, is to come back to the cross. John hastens to add, at the beginning of chapter 2, “I’m not telling you this so that you have an excuse to sin.” Verse 1 says, “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin.” It’s as if he is saying, “I’m not telling you this so that you have an excuse.”

John continues in verse 2, “But if anybody does sin …” He just kept pointing out that we Christians have sinned, we do sin, and we will sin. “… we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the propitiating sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.” We come back to the cross. We come back to the gospel. We come back to Jesus’ death and resurrection. That is our argument.

So that’s one side of the book. It recognizes that we who are Christians do sin, have sinned, and continue to sin. That’s not going to change, finally, until what John describes in chapter 3: we will see him face to face; we shall be as he is, and shall sin no more. That’s coming, but it’s not here yet. If you claim that it is, you’re deluding yourself, and you’re calling God a liar.

Nevertheless, most of the book, from John 2:3 on, presents an absolute antithesis. It sounds a bit like Wisdom Literature. It’s really strong. It says, in effect, that there are really three tests, as it were, for genuine Christianity. Do you know what they are? First, real Christians really do love the brothers and sisters in Christ. There’s a social test, a love test.

Second, there’s an obedience test. You really do what Jesus commands. If you don’t do what Jesus commands, you fail the test. How can you possibly be a Christian? Third, there’s a truth test. You have to believe certain things to be the truth, and if you deny them, then you’re not a Christian. In this particular case, the truth tests have to do with who Jesus is in the face of certain denying movements of their day.

It’s not best two out of three. It’s the three things all standing together. In fact, at the end of chapter 4 and the beginning of chapter 5, what John spends his time doing is showing these so-called three tests are actually part and parcel of the same thing. They all hang or fall together. He spends a whole chapter and a half just making that one point. It’s one big massive test. You do love the brothers and sisters, obey Christ, and do hold to who Jesus Christ is. The whole thing hangs together or falls together. If you don’t pass that test, you’re not a Christian.

Sometimes the language is outrageously strong. Look at chapter 3, verses 7 and following. “Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning.” Do you hear the echoes of the antithesis that you get in Psalm 1? It’s not halfway between the two, but, “This is what the righteous look like; this is what the unrighteous looks like.” It’s the same sort of antithesis. It’s absolute.

“The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning.” Whoa. Now I know the commentaries give you long, long excursuses on the significance of the Greek present tense.

If I were translating very briefly, “No one who is born of God will sin,” but because it’s a present tense, our versions tend to soften it to “will continue to sin” or “will practice sin.” So maybe they’ll sin every once in a while, but they won’t actually continue to sin; they won’t actually practice it. It softens it just a wee bit; it’s not quite so hard.

“God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning.” The Greek literally says, “He cannot sin.” Oh, it’s a present tense, but then you sort of milk it for everything, as in, “You cannot sort of go on practicing sin, maybe just as the way it was before.” Thus, you domesticate the text so the sheer starkness of the whole thing doesn’t hit us. Oh, there’s something to that argument, but not very much. It’s milking the present tense pretty thickly, I have to tell you.

Then there’s a certain amount of ambiguity in what is meant by seed. This could be understood one of two ways. This could mean, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed …” God’s nature by regeneration. “… remains in him.” That is, the Christian. “He cannot sin; he cannot go on sinning.” Or it could mean, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed …” God’s real children, his real descendants, those who are born of God, his seed. “… remain in him.” That is, in God.

But either way, the antithesis is very sharp, isn’t it? We’ve just been told in chapter 1 that Christians have sinned, do sin, and will sin; now we’re told that because of God’s seed in them (exactly what that means doesn’t really matter too much), you can’t sin. So which is it? Do you feel the tension? Before we’ve seen it when we’ve looked at Wisdom Literature on the one hand and then narrative on the other. At least you have different genres. Now you have it in one flaming epistle! It has all come together. How do you synthesize that? What do you do with that?

When I was in grade seven (a few years ago), we were taught by a gentleman called Mr. Cooper. Mr. Cooper was a World War II veteran in the Canadian armed services. Deep down, I always suspected that he wished he was still in the armed services. He tried to run his classroom more or less like a platoon. It didn’t work. He blustered and yelled; he could be abusive. But you know grade seven boys.

I remember on one occasion, he stood up behind his desk (this great, big, massive, heavy oak desk on a hard linoleum floor), and he got his fingers under the lip of this thing. He lifted it up about six inches off the ground and slammed it down on the ground. Immediately, everyone looked up. “That’s only one-tenth of my strength!” The dear man didn’t have a clue about how to discipline grade seven boys, I have to tell you.

But if there’s one thing that Mr. Cooper reprobated with every ounce of his being, it was gum chewing. He hated it with a passion. If he caught anybody doing it, he’d pick up the dustbin, the garbage can, by his desk, and he’d walk down to the poor victim who was there chewing gum. He’d hold the bin under the victim’s nose, and he’d stare at him and recite the words, “ ‘A gum-chewing boy and a cud-chewing cow look so much alike, yet different somehow. What is the difference? Ah, I see it now. ‘Tis the thoughtful look in the face of the cow.’ SPIT!”

You may wonder how I remember that so well. Ask yourself, analytically, “What was Mr. Cooper saying?” Wasn’t he saying, “You cannot chew gum here”? It would have quite missed the point if Johnny, three rows over, had said, “Mr. Cooper? Ontologically speaking, you’re mistaken. I’m doing it.” You see, when Mr. Cooper said you cannot chew gum here, he was not making an ontological remark about what is not possible to be done.

So I looked up every instance of cannot in the New Testament. I discovered that about a quarter of them don’t have anything to do with ontology either. They don’t have to do with what you can and can’t do; it’s a moral ontology. This is the church of the living God. You cannot sin here. It quite misses the point to say, “God, you’re mistaken. I’m doing it.”

This is the church of the living God. You cannot sin here. Every single, solitary sin is without excuse. You either have God’s seed in you or you are, collectively, God’s seed in him. Sinning is not done here. You cannot sin here. It is not done here. You cannot sin here. It is always evil. It is always without excuse.

At the same time, there’s this brutal recognition that we still do sin, we still do rebel, and will until the last day. What is the resolution to that but what John has already presented? “The blood of Jesus, God’s Son, purifies us from all unrighteousness. We have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the propitiating sacrifice for our sins.” As the hymn says, “I have no other argument; I need no other plea. It is enough that Jesus died and that he died for me.”

You cannot ever, ever, ever weaken the absolutes. You cannot ever, ever weaken the sense of our moral failure. All you can do is return to the cross, and that’s enough. That’s why the Reformers sometimes spoke of double justification. What they meant by that was that we’re justified decisively when we come before God and, by his grace, our confidence is reposed in Jesus alone as the one who has borne our sin in his own body on the tree.

But for all the rest of our lives, even the good deeds that we do are so corrupted with motives that are halfway betwixt and between. You come to a conference like this and are really looking forward to it, but there’s a part way down deep that says, “Yeah, and I’m better than some of the guys that don’t come.” Isn’t that awful? Even the good things we do …

We go on a mission trip somewhere and decide to give 5, 10, or 15 years of our lives to working in a difficult culture and so on. Right, good, good, good. Deep down, you feel a wee bit heroic and sometimes a bit despairing. You wish there were more Christians, and at least you’re better than they are. Then you feel guilty for thinking that, even for letting the moment cross your mind; nevertheless, you have thought it.

Because even our good deeds aren’t going to commend us to God … contaminated as they are with darkness before the one who is Light, with no darkness at all … what we need is to remember that it is the blood of Jesus, God’s Son that purifies us from all unrighteousness. Justified again and again, as it were. Oh, I know that decisively you become a Christian; I know that. But even our good deeds have to be justified before God. It is the blood of Jesus, God’s Son, that purifies us from all unrighteousness.

7. What this suggests, then, is that there is an antithesis in Scripture between the absolutes of the standard of God and the realism of our compromises, moral ambiguities, and failures.

Or, more broadly, there is a running antithesis between God’s truth, which is unbending, and the facts of our experience, which absorb it in smaller amounts, distort it, and twist it in all kinds of ways.

In some ways, this is emblematic of still bigger tensions. On the one hand, you must speak the way Jude does, of “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” Truth: unchanged, unchanging, transmuted across generation after generation after generation in different languages and cultures and races. The faith once for all delivered to the saints.

On the other hand, there is the public recognition that we are all perspectivalists. That is, we all look at things from a certain kind of perspective, not only because we’re finite, but because we’re sinful. There are only two kinds of perspectivalists in the world: those who admit it and those who don’t. Because the fact of the matter is, perspectivalism is necessarily a function of human self-limitation. We don’t see everything all the time.

The only non-perspectivalist is omniscience. God doesn’t look at things from only one perspective. He sees it all: all the proportions, all the parts … the whole. He sees everything, the whole thing. It’s wonderful. Within that framework, then, he discloses himself to us. Do you know that God cannot disclose his omniscient knowledge to us? We don’t have minds big enough to take it.

God sees things non-perspectivally, but even when we’re perceiving the truth, we inevitably look at things from a certain perspective. It’s inevitable. Now what some postmoderns (of the more raw sort) do is infer from this perspectivalism that, therefore, we cannot know the truth. It’s only a matter of our functional perspective on something. That’s a huge mistake. We cannot ever know all the truth, but we can know the truth.

So we come from our experience and our limitations, sidling up to the truth and see things a little bit more clearly than we used to. We still insist that, because God has given it, it is the truth, even if we don’t understand it perfectly. Even if, God help us, we certainly don’t live up to it. And we say that this is the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

I recall, about 15 years ago now, one of the things that made me sit down and write the book The Gagging of God. I was asked to give a lecture to some English students at Cambridge University. I thought there were going to be five or six students who were struggling with matters of their faith around a table, and I’d sort of sit down and be a genial uncle to them and explain a few things.

What I didn’t know was that the young woman who organized this thing thought this was really cool, so she went out and plastered the university with signs that read, “Professor D.A. Carson on God and the Possibility of Truth.” She put them all over the university. It didn’t mention that I was a Christian or anything like that; it just looked like one more public lecture.

I showed up, and the biggest hall in Magdalene College was packed out with 350 people seated on the floor. They were all around me. About 10 percent of them were dons; they were academics. They were all there to hear “D.A. Carson on God and the Possibility of Truth.” Gulp! Take a deep breath. Fortunately, I’d done at least a little preparation, and I waffled on for my designated hour or so.

Then I took questions at the end. I will never forget the first question. It made me realize I had to write that book. The first question came from an academic don seated on the platform (because there were no more chairs). He said, “Do I understand you correctly? You’re saying that in all of our debates over postmodernity, everything changes if there is an omniscient God who talks to us?”

It doesn’t mean we understand perfectly everything he says. It doesn’t mean we have all our interpretive principles right. But there is an anchoring for everything in the God himself who speaks, who discloses himself in space-time history … so that we have ample room for admitting our failures, our misunderstandings, our theological errors, and all the rest … while we still insist, “Thus says the Lord. God speaks true. This is the faith once for all delivered to the saints.”

Thus we are anchored, at the end of the day, not in reductionism but in the truth of God’s most Holy Word and in the blessed cross of Christ, without which we are undone. Let me pray.

Give us much joy, we pray, in believing; an ability to understand, not so that we may puff ourselves up, but so that we may be more greatly conformed to the image of Christ; and return us, again and again, we beseech you, to the cross of the Lord Jesus. We ask in your dear Son’s name, amen.