Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on Two Ways to live from Psalm 1
Male: Welcome, on your behalf, Don Carson to our summer school. Let’s give Don a warm welcome. It is a couple of years ago now in our summer school committee we were discussing about speakers for summer school, and we got to know about Don Carson through his books and more especially through his visits to Moore College over the years.
We knew Don specialized in New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, in the USA. We also knew about every three years he’d go across to England to the UK and descend in Cambridge and there he’d do a bit of writing. Finally, we were able to encourage him to come and to share with us at summer school, and that’s now four years ago. Time goes, doesn’t it? He shared with us studies on the prayers of Saint Paul.
A special privilege a number of us had was a short time after that Don came back to Sydney to minister in the parish, and he was able to bring Joy, his wife, and Tiffany and Nicholas with him. Many of us had the real privilege and joy of meeting them. Joy, who Don often talks about as being the organizer, and Tiffany … My, how the children grow up, don’t they? Even our missionaries’ children as they come year by year … It’s hard to recognize them.
We also met Tiffany, who is growing up and has now moved on to high school and is a flute player. It was interesting in a letter Don sent to some people around about the family just before Christmas how he used a phrase … I thought a lovely phrase. Many of us with daughters (not that I would equate this with my daughter in any way at all) …
However, it is a lovely phrase and it does have a lot of truth in it. He speaks of Tiffany as being organizationally challenged. I thought that was lovely, Don. I really did, and that’s the real warm heart of the dad, I think, that has come from. I also notice where Nicholas has taken up self-defense, and I really don’t know what that really means when you think of poor Tiffany as well as Joy and Don, himself, and how all that ties together.
Don grew up in Canada and especially in French-speaking Canada and is a very gifted scholar and preacher and teacher and writer. We really thank God for the gifts he has given to Don, the gifts of scholarship and also the gifts of being able to effectively communicate his word to his people. We thank Joy and the family for their support in Don’s ministry so he can come and share with us in this summer school.
Don is going to share with us from God’s Word this evening from the Psalms, and as he opens God’s Word to us tonight and during the whole of our summer school I felt maybe a prayer we should have in our hearts and minds should be as Paul spoke to the Philippians in chapter 4, where he said to them, “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me or seen in me, put it into practice, and the God of peace will be with you.” Thank you, Don.
Don Carson: I would like to begin this evening by reading Psalm 1. This simple psalm of six verses at the head of the Psalter lays out two paths for us, and we will reflect on them briefly this evening.
“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.”
So reads the Word of God.
Most of us are rightly suspicious of people who discuss extraordinarily complex situations and have simplistic cut-and-dried answers. Whether they’re talking about Northern Ireland or a crisis in the Middle East or the next step in Zaire, they have formulaic, simple, three-step solutions that they propound with enormous dogmatism and enthusiasm.
But those of us who look at these things more closely want to put in the footnotes, and we want to say it’s not as simple as that and life is more complex. On the other hand, we’re also suspicious after a while of those who can look at almost any situation and find it so extraordinarily complex that they can never say anything straightforward. Everything becomes muddled in footnotes. There’s no moral straight line through anything.
In fact, the Bible has some parts that are very subtle and nuanced (think of what Paul says about leaders in the first four chapters of his first epistle to the Corinthians), but there are other parts, like Psalm 1, which are simple, cut and dried, and straightforward, but far from being reductionistic or simplistic, in fact, what they are is principled.
They go to the roots of something. They strip away all the little footnotes and they go to what you must see. If you can’t see anything else, you must see these things, and it is very salutary for believers once in a while to choose some of those foundational parts of Scripture, those parts that are not so nuanced but are absolutely basic that force us to make choices and meditate on them long and hard and see how our lives align with them.
This psalm is sometimes called a wisdom psalm. Wisdom psalms offer you two paths and only two. Here, the first three verses describe the just person, the righteous person; the next two verses describe the unjust person, the unrighteous person; and the last verse is a summarizing contrast. Here it is then.
After you’ve made all the allowances for personality types and different cultures and different languages and different gifts and graces in the church, when it all comes down to it there are only two kinds of people. That’s it. Thus, these verses probe us very closely to make certain we are not trying to equivocate, sit on the fence, and put in so many footnotes that we can bow to the Scriptures and yet run our own way at the same time with endless caveats.
Hear then what God says is his description of a just person. Verses 1 to 3. First, such a person is described negatively in verse 1, then such a person is described positively in verse 2, and then such a person is described metaphorically in verse 3. Positively, then, this is what a righteous person is not like.
1. Negative description of the righteous.
“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 …” This is the negative description. We don’t now hear what such a person does or likes but what such a person does not like and does not do. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked …”
Here is a picture of someone who hangs out with others who are fundamentally godless in their orientation, and gradually they pick up advice (they pick up counsel, perspectives, and worldviews) that draws them away from God and his truth. They learn to walk in the advice of ungodly people.
If they follow that course long enough, they may come to stand in the way of sinners. That’s a bad translation although it’s a very common one. To stand in someone’s way in English reminds you perhaps of Robin Hood and Little John on the bridge. They stand in each other’s way and someone has got to fall into the river.
To stand in someone’s way in Hebrew means what we would say in North America, to stand in someone’s moccasins, to stand in their shoes, to do what they do. To stand in someone’s way here means to adopt their lifestyle, their patterns of behavior, their habits, their ways of thinking. Now you are not simply picking up the advice of the ungodly; now you are actually adopting the lifestyle of sinners, and if you get to that point, you may drift toward the third.
You were walking in the counsel of the wicked. You were standing in the way of sinners. Now you sit down in the seat of mockers. You are in the La-Z-Boy chair with your feet up in the air, and you look down your long self-righteous nose at those stupid right-wing bigots who call themselves Christians. Now everything becomes a sneer and a giggle and a snicker. Sin isn’t something ugly; it’s something vaguely amusing.
At this point, Spurgeon says a person receives his masters in worthlessness and his doctorate in damnation. Now God says, “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, who does not stand in the way of sinners, who does not sit in the seat of scoffers.” This is what a godly person does not look like.
2. Positive description of the righteous.
Positively, what does a righteous person look like? One might have almost expected the converse of these three points. One might have expected, “Blessed rather is the man who walks in the counsel of the godly, who stands in the ways of the righteous, who sits in the seat of the thankful and the praising,” but that’s not what the text says.
It is almost as if that is too functional an approach to righteousness. One must go deeper than that, so in the second verse we read, “… but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” It is as if, provided you can say this of a person, you have said everything. The merely functional things will follow in its train.
“In the law of the Lord this person delights and on his law he meditates day and night.” Isn’t that a lovely passage? It’s not just that this person has resolved by dint of sheer self-discipline to study Scripture. No. There is delight in the law of the Lord. There’s a whole heart attitude that sings with pleasure to think God’s thoughts after him.
What do you think about when you wake up in the middle of the night? This person, day and night, tends to gravitate toward the law of God. If the mind goes into neutral, it just automatically goes back to thinking God’s thoughts after him. Day and night. It is astonishing how often Scripture in both testaments gets to this point: how important it is to think God’s thoughts after him.
Consider this passage, for example, in Deuteronomy, where Moses looks forward to what a king might look like, what kinds of habits he would have to have if Israel ever came to the point where a king were actually installed. We read Deuteronomy 17, verse 18. “When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from the priests who are Levites.
It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his brothers and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel.”
Isn’t that astonishing? It’s not just that he’s supposed to have five minutes of devotions between pulling on his socks and sipping his orange juice before he beats it out the back door to get to the royal throne room. He’s to take time to copy the whole thing out by hand, and then he’s to carry it with him and read it every day, the text says, so he may learn to think God’s thoughts after him and know his word and law and learn, also then, that he is not better than his brothers. Then things will go well with him. That’s what the text says.
Do you not find the similar sort of thing when Joshua begins to take over the leadership? Joshua 1: “Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their forefathers to give them. Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. Do not let this book of the law depart from your mouth.”
That means you have to talk about it. You not only have to learn it or go through the motions of quick devotions, but you have to talk about it. Talk it up. Then it says, “… meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.” The implication is unless you give yourself to meditation upon it you will not be careful to perform it. “Then you will be prosperous and successful. Have not I commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged …”
There is a profound recognition in Scripture that we are what we think. As some wag has said, “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.” “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he,” Proverbs says. What does Romans 12 say? We quote those verses constantly at youth conventions. They ought to govern all of our education.
“Do not be conformed to this world: but be transformed …” How? “I beseech you, brothers, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies as living sacrifices …” How? “Do not be conformed to this world; but be transformed …” How? “… by the renewing of your mind …” On the night he is betrayed, Jesus prays, “Sanctify them through your truth; your word is truth.” There is no genuine, long-lasting, effective sanctification apart from the ingestion, the reflection upon, the meditation upon God’s most Holy Word.
This is different, you see, from simply going through the motions. Yes, it is important to have devotions, but I could introduce you to people who sort of have devotions out of sheer duty. They’ve been brought up in a conservative home, and it’s much better, I would still want to say, to have devotions and not get a lot out of them than not have devotions and certainly not get anything out of them, but it is still pretty lean.
What is at stake now is such an imbibing of the Word of God that it shapes the way we look at things. There is so much superficial evangelicalism in the Western world today that, as a result, we pick up a little bit of gospel, and then we start studying psychology, and we adopt psychological categories for the way we think of all our relationships and bless each position with a text.
Then we start doing our cultural anthropology, and we start thinking through all of the relationships that cultures have with one another and we do not integrate that with any theology but bless each of those positions with a text. Then we start talking about purpose in life, and we, consciously or unconsciously, adopt self-fulfillment notions and notions of self-actualization and this rugged individualism that is so much a part of Western culture, and we bless all those things with a text.
The favorite text there, of course, is John 10:10. Jesus has come to give us abundant life, hasn’t he? Of course, I define abundant life. Somehow or other, we have not thought about Scripture long enough or humbly enough in a sufficiently sustained way. We have not read it through in such a way that God’s Word stands as a filter and a judge over all the varying currents of thought, which may help us in all kinds of ways.
I do read psychology and cultural anthropology and social sciences, but, but, but those things cannot set the agenda. They cannot define our task. They must not loosen the moorings of the biblical doctrines of sin and of justification and of the deity of Christ and of the significance of our being for all eternity. “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.”
3. Metaphorical description of the righteous.
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.” Many streams in Palestine in Israel are sporadic. They gush with water in the rainy season (they’re dry arroyos; we would call them wadis in the dry season), so a lot of shrubbery doesn’t really grow and prosper, but this tree has been carefully planted by streams of water.
That is, at some place where the streams come together so there’s always a fresh and abundant supply. Moreover, it’s not a deciduous tree that looks dead half the year; it’s an evergreen. It always looks full of life and shows signs of vitality. At various points in the appointed seasons such trees bring forth fruit. It yields its fruit in season, we’re told. Whatever it does prospers. Here is a picture of vitality, stability, enduring roots, roots that go down and suck life from the ample provision God himself has made. That’s the just person.
The unjust person … Verses 4 and 5: “Not so the wicked!” The Hebrew is very strong. The negation is powerful. It is as if you were saying, anything you want to affirm at this level of fundamental primacy about the godly, you must now negate with respect to the ungodly. “Not so the wicked!”
Do the godly then avoid the counsel of the ungodly? Do they avoid adopting lifestyles and mocking tones that are so much part of a secular world? “Not so the wicked!” Do the godly love to think about God’s Word? Do they turn their minds to it again and again and learn to meditate on it with delight day and night? “Not so the wicked!”
Do the godly find themselves planted, even in the midst of storms, at a place where their roots can go down and suck this life God himself provides? “Not so the wicked!” Do the godly produce fruit in due season in God’s own perfect timing? Do they show signs of spiritual life and vitality, they’re evergreens? “Not so the wicked!”
What are they like then? “They are like chaff that the wind blows away.” It was common with grains in those days to take the seeds from the grain (the heads from the grain) and take a winnowing shovel and toss it up in the air and beat it, toss it up in the air and beat it, toss it up in the air and beat it. Let the winds come by and blow away the chaff while the grains fall to the ground for another generation of planting or to turn into flour for bread.
You can still see scenes like this in parts of Africa and the Middle East to this day. Of what use is the chaff? None. It forms an utter contrast with the trees. The chaff isn’t planted. It shows no signs of life. It doesn’t produce fruit. It’s worthless. It’s not stable. It just blows away. That’s all! From God’s perspective, that is how much significance the wicked finally have. That’s what the text says. “Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.” They will not stand.
Sometimes God’s judgments fall, even within our lifetime. How many great world leaders come to a wretched end as their evil is exposed? A Hitler may stand like a colossus astride Europe. Would you want to be written up as he is written up in the history books? Would you want to face God on his terms? Or the Genghis Khans or the Alexander the Greats, the heroes of our pop culture? How many of the movie stars, the political heroes, the athletes? How many of them end well?
Oh yes, there are judgments even in this life. Think of this passage from Isaiah 2 as an analogy. “The Lord Almighty has a day in store for all the proud and lofty, for all that is exalted (and they will be humbled), for all the cedars of Lebanon, tall and lofty, and all the oaks of Bashan, for all the towering mountains and all the high hills, for every lofty town and every fortified wall, for every trading ship and every stately vessel. The arrogance of man will be brought low and the pride of men humbled; the Lord alone will be exalted in that day, and the idols will totally disappear.”
Eschatologically, of course, in the last day this is more telling yet. Fifty billion years from now where will all the wicked be? All the opinion makers, all the heroes, all the things that are so important in the press, where will they be? “… the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.”
The final summarizing contrast is startling. Verse 6: “For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.” The righteous endure and the wicked perish, but the way of the righteous endures and the way of the wicked perishes. That is, the Lord recognizes the way of the righteous. He owns it as his. The Lord knows it. He watches over it.
“Yes, that way is my way. That is significant. That endures. This way? It perishes.” Look at it from God’s perspective and it is about as enduring as tracks you make by the seashore when the tide is out. The tide comes in. It goes out again. It’s not just that the wicked are gone; it’s that even the tracks they left behind are gone.
To come to the end of a long life, what do you have to show for it? Has it made real tracks of eternal significance or has it disturbed the water, and then when you go, the waves lap over again, and there’s no significance to anything you’ve done? From God’s perspective. None. That is the way Psalm 1 looks at things.
I know you could start putting in footnotes, you can start talking about the doctrine of common grace, you can point out people are at various stages of spiritual growth and development, I know, but it is very important in our confused age to get certain basics right, to get certain foundational values nailed down. What does a righteous person look like? What does an unrighteous person look like? What is God’s valuation? For Psalm 1 says there are two ways. There is no third. Before I close, let me extrapolate this psalm a little further.
First, the principle articulated here is articulated with equal force in the New Testament. When this psalm is written, the psalmist thinks of meditating on the Word of God in terms of meditating on the Law, but for us who live so much later in the stream of redemptive history we have so much more of God’s Word on which to meditate. Do we not?
We meditate on the Law. We meditate on the Prophets. We meditate on the Writings. We meditate on the Gospels. We meditate on the Epistles. We meditate on all of God’s gracious self-disclosure because the principle remains the same: “Sanctify them through your truth; your word is truth.”
Not only so, but the ultimate self-disclosure of God is not, finally, simply in words but in the Word incarnate. We are drawn in new covenant terms to think of Christ, to meditate upon him, to reflect on him again and again and again. Indeed it is Christ himself who, of all the figures in the New Testament, most commonly puts this kind of two ways to us.
Do you remember how the Sermon on the Mount ends? It ends with these simple two ways forced upon us: the person who builds his house on the sand or builds his house on the rock, the tree that produces fruit or the tree that does not, the one who says, “Lord, Lord,” but doesn’t do what Jesus says or the one who does do what Jesus says. Two ways! That’s all! Jesus himself is constantly insisting there are, finally, only two ways.
The second point of extrapolation, it seems to me, is that if this is so then it ought so to govern our priorities, our value systems, our use of time, our use of resources, that, instead of thinking of Christianity as something that is sort of added on to the rest of our lives, it becomes our whole horizon, our whole perspective.
We ask God for forgiveness for where we have tacked him into a corner and considered our lives thereby sanctified and turn to him instead and say, “Grant, Lord God, that in my family, in my work relationships, in my priorities, in what I read, in what I do with my time, what I dare to watch on television, what I read … In all things, in my outreach, in my witness, in my dreams for my children … In all that I do I say, ‘Let God be God, let Christ be Lord, let me reflect on his Word and delight in it.’ ”
The very least that that means is we must develop stronger habits of meditation, quiet, nurturing reflection on God’s Word. I don’t know what that means exactly for you because our minds are different. I know that. Some of us are born readers and some of us are not. I know that. What you have to protect your mind against may depend a bit too.
When I was planting a church in the outskirts of Ottawa in 1966, I had an old jalopy that was so old I think it came out of the ark. The termites held hands to hold it together. It was a really bad car, but it had a fine radio, and I am inflicted with one of these minds that remembers music, so I would go along and turn on the radio and catch the latest news. Then the music would come on afterwards.
“If I kiss you, will you go away? Just like the game that my mother used to play. You’re so much hurt, I wish you wouldn’t say. If I kiss you, will you go away?” Now I could sing it to you and put in the chording, but I refrain. Ottawa in 1966. I remember this stuff. That particular one didn’t do me any harm, I imagine, but I have to watch what I listen to in the area of music or it takes over my mind.
I have to watch what I read. I have to watch what I think about. I have to watch what I watch in television or tapes. Don’t you find the same? It’s not just in computers that the axiom is true, “Garbage in; garbage out.” If you fill your mind with garbage, you will think garbage, and if you think garbage, you are garbage, for as a man thinks in his heart so is he. God said it. But if instead you fill your mind with the Word of God, which doesn’t mean just having devotions, but learning to read more deeply about these things …
For some of you it might mean reading some commentaries, getting devotional theologies that actually fill your mind with good things, reading John Piper’s The Pleasures of God or Jim Packer’s Knowing God or having a Bible study group that helps one another to think God’s thoughts after him, that asks questions about what this means with respect to relations in the family, until you find yourself gravitating to think about everything from God’s perspective. Until that is your whole heart’s desire, how is this description of you true? Let us pray.
Lord God, we confess that we are ashamed. Most of us have been reared in a culture and at a time when there are so many resources available to us to study your Word and think your thoughts after you and grow in holiness and conformity to your Son, but most of us have not availed ourselves much of these opportunities, and we are ashamed.
We are ashamed, too, for the ways we have nurtured bitterness instead of thankfulness, for the times we have secretly fanned greed and lust, for the ways and times we have thought about relationships and structures within the church and without from the perspective of simple party politics, from the perspective of simple scrabbling of the hierarchy and have not asked what brings you glory and how the gospel can be advanced.
Sometimes we have been so busy building our own castles we have not thought about you for days, weeks on end, except briefly during a liturgy forced upon us in one brief hour between and 11 and 12 one day a week. Lord God, have mercy upon us.
Grant, Lord God, we beseech you, not some new washing sense of guilt, but the freedom and release, the forgiveness that comes only from the cross and so fill us with your Spirit that our whole heart’s cry will be, “Make me as holy as a pardoned sinner can be this side of the new heaven and the new earth.”
Grant that the prayer of Jesus may be fulfilled in us, “Sanctify them through your truth; your word is truth.” Oh, fill us with your thoughts, with your words, that we may learn not to sin against you. We beseech you in Jesus’ name, amen.
