Two Ways to Live

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of having a devotional life from Psalm 1.

I’d like to begin by inviting you to turn to Psalm 1. As I read it, you will detect in its structure … The first three verses describe the righteous person, the next two verses describe the unrighteous person, and the last verse provides a final summarizing contrast. Let me begin by reading it, and we’ll spend some time working our way through it and then see its bearing on the larger question of this conference. Hear, then, what Scripture says.

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“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.

The righteous person is described in verse 1 negatively, what he or she is not like. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked.” Then within that verse you cannot help but notice a kind of declining gait. “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.” The danger is walking in the advice, the worldview, the frame of reference, the perspective of wicked people.

To walk in that pattern for a while means, sooner or later, you are indistinguishable from such people. The translations today almost all have in the second line, “Stand in the way of sinners,” but it’s a bad translation. It’s exactly what the Hebrew says, but it’s still a bad translation, because to stand in someone’s way in English conjures up images of Robin Hood and Little John on the bridge. They stand in each other’s way, and one of them ends in the drink.

But to stand in someone’s way in Hebrew means something like to walk in their moccasins, to be in their life, to be indistinguishable from them, to be following their lifestyle. So you begin by following the advice of ungodly people, of wicked people, and pretty soon the way you conduct yourself is indistinguishable from wicked people. Then sooner or later, you may sit in the seat of mockers. The image is of someone sitting in a La-Z-Boy.

You pull the lever, your feet go up in the air, and you look down your long self-righteous nose at those stupid, narrow, right-wing, ignorant, bigoted Christians. At this point, Spurgeon used to say, a person has received his master’s in worthlessness and his doctorate in damnation. The whole book of Psalms begins with a blessing. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of the ungodly or sit in the seat of mockers.”

You know as well as I do that a great deal of Old Testament literature is poetic, and, of course, that is eminently true of the Psalms, but there are different kinds of poetry, and their rules are a bit different. There are different styles of poetry. In English, we have vast diversities of poetry. I love poetry myself, but E.E. Cummings is not the same as Shakespeare. You don’t interpret the two the same way.

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

You don’t interpret that in the same sonorous way as “Sonnet 116,” and you certainly don’t handle it the same way as Robert Frost’s blank verse. I’m a Canadian. I love this one.

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.

The kind of rhetorical appeal that is made by that is different from the kind of rhetorical appeal that is made by the beat of E.E. Cummings, and it’s different again from the kind of rhetorical appeal you have in a limerick. How does Old Testament poetry work? It works above all on parallelism, all kinds of parallelism. Even in the first verse you have a kind of mounting parallelism. “Blessed is the man who does not do this, nor this, nor this.”

Sometimes there’s antithetic parallelism. “You mustn’t do this, but rather you should do the other.” Thus, you have a kind of contrast that’s presented. At this juncture, after this blessing in verse 1, what you might have expected in verse 2 would be something like, “Blessed, rather, is the man who walks in the counsel of the godly, who stands in the way of the righteous, and who sits in the seat of the praising.” Maybe I should go in for writing Old Testament poetry … except that’s not what the text says.

What the psalmist does is break the expectation to make one simple point, because the point itself is overwhelming. If the righteous person has been described negatively in verse 1, that same person is described positively in verse 2 but with just one criterion. “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” That does give you the advice. That is to stamp your conduct, and it will draw you out in praise. Break the form. Get to the heart of the issue.

The heart of the issue is positively we can describe such a person this way: his or her delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. When I first arrived at Trinity 28 years ago, we had a chap teaching homiletics, how to preach the Bible, who was given to a lot of one-liners that sort of pronounced on this or that or the other. One of his favorite ones was, “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.” Of course, he was right. There’s biblical warrant for that view.

When I grew up in French Canada, we were brought up on the RiviËre Saint-FranÁois. It was the dirtiest river in Quebec. Upstream were three paper mills. Nowadays they’re all cleaned up, but in those days they weren’t so concerned with ecology, and in the summer when the water was low and the stink was high, it was not a pleasant place to be. If you didn’t get the fumes from the paper mills, you got the fumes from the chlorine that made it drinkable.

Eventually, one of the bottled water companies came into our area and, both in English and in French, started advertising and were enormously successful. Everywhere the slogan was, in English at least, “You are what you drink.” Considering that 67 percent of our body weight is water, that’s not bad. The Bible is more profound yet. You are what you think. Proverbs says, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

In other words, with a little bit of discipline and decent culture and a good mummy and daddy, it’s possible to have a kind of veneer of sophistication, poise, and courtesy, but at the end of the day, God is more interested in what we think, what is in what the Bible would call our hearts, than merely on how we perform in socially acceptable circumstances. You are what you think.

If you see people in need and are immediately drawn out with compassion to them and with love for people, then you are a loving person. If, despite the smiles on your face and the courtesies you have disciplined onto your tongue, you are instead nurturing bitterness and resentment, you are a bitter person, because you are what you think.

After all, the Bible is full of texts that further that point. “Do not be conformed to this world,” the apostle tells us, “but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” because you are what you think. So there is Joshua taking over the leadership from Moses. What is he told right away? “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, for then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success.”

Or rather neglected passages. Deuteronomy, chapter 17. This envisages the time when eventually there would be a king in Israel, even though there wasn’t one yet. We are told in the last three verses of that chapter, “When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from that of 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.”

So he becomes king. What’s he supposed to do? Appoint a chancellor of the exchequer? A new secretary of war? Audit the books of his predecessor? Organize his cabinet? No. The first thing he’s supposed to do is take out his quill pen and start copying out longhand the words of this law. Whether this law refers to the book of Deuteronomy or all of what we call the Pentateuch, the first five books, is up for grabs, but still it’s quite a lot.

It’s not a question of downloading what’s on a CD onto your hard drive without it passing through your brain. It’s a question of copying out the text longhand so carefully and faithfully that the copy becomes your reading copy all the days of your life. You’re supposed to keep reading it. To what end? That he learns to revere the Lord his God and not depart from his works and not think of himself as better than his peers. That’s the very first thing he’s supposed to do.

If just those three verses of the Pentateuch had been observed … just those three … all the rest of Old Testament history would have been different, because you are what you think. Garbage in, garbage out. 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.”

I’m sure some here have been to Israel and know the lay of the land. A lot of streams are dry beds in the summer. You get the early rains, and there is life everywhere, even in the desert. Many colored plants. Then the rains disappear. Everything dies to all appearances. There’s nothing there. It’s like the Southwest of the United States. There they call these dry beds arroyos. There they’re wadis nowadays.

Then the second rains come, and things come back to life again. In those dry wadis, nothing seems to grow during the summer months. This tree has been carefully planted, not in a dry wadi but, intentionally, by a nexus of streams so that there is always a water supply. As a result, we are told, its leaf does not wither. It is always alive. It always shows signs of stability and health. In appropriate seasons, it grows. Indeed, whatever it does prospers.

Not whatever he does, as if this is teaching some kind of prosperity gospel. You’re still within the world of the metaphor. The tree, regardless of the weather, regardless of the circumstance, still prospers, because there is a life-giving supply of water. So even when all around people are dying or withering, collapsing morally, you are still being fed, nurtured, spiritually alive, with your green leaves, as it were, and in due course producing good fruit.

This sort of metaphor shows up pretty often in the Old Testament in one passage or another. Think of this passage, for instance, from Jeremiah, where a very similar application is made. Jeremiah 17. I’ll begin at verse 5. Listen to the contrast. “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.’ ” Same word. Prosperity. An ability to grow and flourish.

No, he won’t see prosperity. “He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives.” Then the 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.” That’s the contrast.

So here’s the righteous person described negatively in verse 1, positively in verse 2, and metaphorically in verse 3. Then in verse 4, a very strong contrast. It’s very strong in the original. You might render it, “Not so the wicked! Not so.” As if everything of significance you want to affirm of the righteous you want to deny to the unrighteous.

Are the righteous those who do not walk in the counsel of wretched people? Not so the wicked! Not so. Are the righteous those who will not stand in their way, adopt their lifestyle? Not so the wicked! Not so. Are the righteous those who want to avoid sneering mockery, wretched condescension? Not so the wicked! Not so.

Are the righteous those who think about the law of the Lord, turn it over in their minds, reflect on it day and night until it becomes part of their lifeblood, informs their vocabulary, shapes their values, their direction, their belief systems? Not so the wicked! Not so. Are the righteous those who can be likened to a plant, a tree carefully nurtured by a confluence of streams? Not so the wicked! Not so.

What are they like then? The text tells us. They’re like the chaff the wind blows away. Rootless, unlike the tree. Lifeless, unlike the tree. Leafless, unlike the tree. Fruitless, unlike the tree. Worthless, unlike the tree. Dead, unlike the tree. It just blows away. In case we don’t catch the deep significance of this, we are told in verse 5, “Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.” Sooner or later, in God’s own timing, in God’s own judgment, they do not stand before him.

Verse 6 gives us a final summarizing contrast. Strictly speaking, it’s not a contrast between the righteous and the unrighteous. Strictly speaking, it’s a contrast between the way of the righteous and the way of the unrighteous. The text reads, “For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”

It’s not just that the wicked perish. It’s that their way, their patterns of life, all that they deem significant, all that establishes their identity … It all passes away. If I may dare to speak of eternity in the categories of time, do you think that 50 billion years from now we’ll spend much of our time contemplating the activities of Adolf Hitler?

But each cup 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 that way. He acknowledges it. He approves it. He blesses it, and it has eternal significance, whereas the way of the wicked just perishes, as significant on the eternal scale of things as a track left on the seashore when the tide is out. The tide rolls in and the tide rolls out and there’s just nothing left.

Of course, in our short span of life it may not look exactly like that. It may seem as if evil is all too triumphant. You start putting this into an eternal grid and remember that God is the God who inhabits eternity, and what he has pronounced about what is significant, what remains, what endures, what is watched over by him is everything. Of course, if this book of the law is in your mind and heart and you think about it day and night, it will shape your values, your priorities.

So here it is, then. Psalm 1. Two ways to live, and there is no third. So does that define spirituality for us? When Susan Nash and I were talking about the titles, we managed to insert a question mark at the end of each of them. You’ll find the other titles of mine in the program all have question marks. Maybe some careful compositor was afraid this was going to sound far too doubtful and we’d better put a period at the end of one of them, but the title here should have been Two Ways to Live?

It’s pretty straightforward in this psalm. There are only two ways to live, and yet you know as well as I do that the Bible seems to be a lot more subtle than that. Two ways to live? Well, let’s talk about David. He’s a man after God’s own heart. He also manages to commit adultery and murder. You wonder what he would have done if he hadn’t been a man after God’s own heart.

Then there’s Abraham, the friend of God, the father of the faithful … also a liar who puts his wife in terrible jeopardy. Then Moses, the most humble man who ever lived, if you please, manages to blow up and lose his temper and not get into the Promised Land, making the whole book of Deuteronomy end on a rather sad note. The law doesn’t transform after all. He tries hard, but even Moses doesn’t come out successfully under it.

Then Peter. Oh yes, Peter, hero of the faith, great preacher at Pentecost, a man of enormous gift and quick on the mark, blessed by Jesus himself. “Blessed are you, Simon, son of John, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father who is in heaven.” The next pronouncement of the Lord Christ on Peter is, “Get behind me, Satan. You don’t understand the things of God.”

It’s not just, “Oh, that’s pre-Pentecost. Once he had the Holy Spirit, that was all right.” You have to wrestle with Galatians 2, one apostle rebuking another apostle for having his theology a bit skewed. That too is Peter. Two ways to live? Give me a break. It’s more like a spectrum. People slide along this thing, and sometimes they’re on one end of the spectrum and sometimes on the other.

Two ways to live? You look at Psalm 1, and you think, “I don’t fit either of those ends, thank you. I’m somewhat sort of squashed in the middle.” Isn’t that what you think? Then why does the Bible include texts like this? What do these absolutes contribute? Don’t they distort reality? How do you mesh them with all of the texts that, quite frankly, do speak of the subtleties of compromise and inconsistency? How do you put it together? Let me offer some reflections on this larger question and bring it to the point.

First, we must be careful of the biases in our own lives in this discussion, generated by our own culture. There are many people here far too young to remember this, but there are quite a number here who are old enough to remember. The cowboy movies of the Eisenhower years, the 1950s, white hats and dark hats … The movie didn’t have to be going for more than about 30 seconds before you knew who was the good guy and who was the bad guy. You knew who was going to win, and you knew who was going to lose.

Nowadays, it’s all very different. Nowadays, everybody has to be conflicted. The movies that receive most attention are those where … Apart from a few action flicks and things like that, which never, ever win Oscars, you have to have people conflicted. The good person, who starts off smelling like a rose, is almost indistinguishable from the wicked person at the other end, and the wicked person, who has the stench of death, actually displays a heart of gold somewhere in there, and they sort of cross somewhere in the middle, and we’re all part of this moral morass, aren’t we?

In one sense, that’s realistic, because we are a compromised, inconsistent bunch, but nevertheless, it goes a bit far. Even Spider-Man has to be conflicted, a cartoon character, or else it’s not going to get enough sales. Nowadays, the films that are touted invariably turn out to be the ones where good and evil are more and more mixed up. You say, “Well, yes, but aren’t there all of these biblical passages that also show that people are mixed up, like David?”

The difference is in our culture, these sorts of films and books that are pushed and advanced and portrayed in a variety of positive ways make the moral confusion an intrinsic good. The Bible is realistic enough to recognize all of the moral confusion and conflict but doesn’t make the moral confusion an intrinsic good but rather an intrinsic tragedy. That’s a huge difference. Yes, there is a sense in which we need to avoid the simple absolutes of white hats and dark hats, of good guys and bad guys.

Yes, there is a sense in which we need to be a little more realistic than that. Yet on the other hand, do you really want to make all moral chaos a good in itself, an end in itself? We are influenced, whether we like it or not, by our culture. We deem absolutes to be unsophisticated, and we are pressed along these lines all the time. So to read Psalm 1 just sounds nihilistic, unsophisticated, cartoonish, unless we start thinking a little more deeply beyond the constraints of our own culture.

The second thing to say is that the Bible is, in God’s rich mercy, made up of many different literary genres, literary forms, and each has a different way of making its literary appeal, its rhetorical appeal. For example, there are laments, and there’s a fable, like Jotham’s fable in Judges 9. There are parables. There are genealogies. There is history. There are letters. There is apocalyptic. There is poetry. There is prose. There are songs of exalting praise, and there are cool calculated utterances.

This Bible of ours is enormously diverse, and we have to start learning how the diverse parts make their respective appeals. Consider this passage, for example. Jeremiah again. “Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, ‘A child is born to you—a son!’

May that man be like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, and a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?”

A literalist is going to have great fun preaching that. “Point number one: Jeremiah wants his mother to be eternally pregnant. Point number two: he wants the poor chap who brought his father the news of his birth to be overthrown like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity.” Do you see? It has its own way of making its rhetorical appeal, and that sort of crass literalism just abuses the text.

What kind of literature is Psalm 1? Psalm 1 belongs to a larger category often called Wisdom Literature. Sometimes it’s found in proverbs, sometimes in brief narratives, often in axioms of one sort or another, and sometimes in psalms and poetry. This is often called a wisdom psalm. Wisdom has many different characteristics, but one of the things that is typical of a lot of wisdom literature is that it forces you to think through alternatives.

“Better it is to dwell on a rooftop with peace than to dwell in strife down below in the house.” It’s a little axiom that tells you a great deal. It puts a lot of light on something in fairly absolute terms but doesn’t put in any footnotes. It doesn’t tell you what happens when it rains, for example, or how bad the trouble might have to be in the house before you want to be up on the roof. It doesn’t say things that way.

So here there are simply two ways to live. There’s the way of the righteous and the way of the unrighteous. That’s sometimes why people misunderstand the proverbs and get into quite a lot of trouble. For example, there are movements afoot in North America today, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, which absolutize some of the proverbs and treat them as if they’re either case law or universal promise from God.

For example, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Quite apart from translation challenges within that verse itself that I won’t go into, if you absolutize that, as some do, then you draw some inferences like this: “ ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.’ If one of your kids comes off the tracks, whose fault is it according to this verse? Don’t make excuses. Whose fault is it?”

But you’re not a Christian very long, you’re not a pastor very long, before you discover that sometimes, although very often you can see how the failures of the children can be traced to the parents … yes, you can … yet sometimes, God help us, you find parents who are as good and as solid and substantial and caring and wise as you can find anywhere on God’s green earth, and a wheel comes off in the kids sometimes anyway. It’s a fallen and broken world.

“Oh, but wait a minute. Are you suggesting that God’s Word does not really stand?” No, that’s not quite the point. A proverb is not meant to give all of the possible permutations and combinations. It gives you a principle of how to live under the sun in God’s universe. These are the values, because this is the way things are structured. It does not put in all of the footnotes. It does not put in all the narrative.

The biblical texts that tell us the most about inconsistencies and failures are almost without exception narratives, because narratives have the ability to weave together the diverse components in a person’s life. You see David’s heroism. You see David’s wisdom. You see his courage, his humility, his ability with a bandolier so that he’s a singer. You see his charm. You see his enormous growth, but you also see his inconsistency, his arrogance, his lust, and his intensity in every domain.

He’s like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead.

And when she was good, she was very, very good,

But when she was bad she was horrid.

That almost defines King David. All of those bits are put together in the narrative. So you have two different literary genres here: a narrative and a proverb, and a proverb is not case law. Do you want demonstration that a proverb is not case law? It rather articulates the kind of thing that operates in God’s universe under the sun.

This is the principle by which you build your life. These are the structures. You must have them in place, and you watch them working out again and again, but the footnotes aren’t in. The nuances aren’t there. If you think differently, what are you going to do with these two proverbs, both from Proverbs 26? Verse 4: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly.” Verse 5: “Answer a fool according to his folly.”

If you want to absolutize those two together, I’d love to hear what you make of them. In fact, by putting in the second line, you begin to see that the second line in this case gives you some hint. “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” But still you have to figure out which one you apply when.

There are some kinds of debates, theological and others, that are so stupid, in all fairness, that if you get involved in the debate you’re merely dragged down to the same level of stupidity. Don’t answer a fool according to his folly. There are times when it’s best to smile, give the chap a hug, walk away, drink a cup of coffee, do something else, or else you’re just going to be dragged down to the same sort of stupid conversation that chap is in. You don’t want to do that.

So don’t answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him. After all, that’s what Paul says in epistolary terms, letter terms, in the Pastorals. Don’t get sucked into stupid disputes about genealogies and the law and so forth. On the other hand, “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he should be puffed up in his own conceit.” When do you do that? My best illustration on that point comes from a faculty member at Trinity. His name is Perry Downs.

Perry is in his mid-60s now, and he and his wife Sandy have two daughters of their own who are now married with their own children, but between them they have also nurtured for longer or shorter periods of time 30 foster children over the years, many of them really tough cases. They have adopted the last one. They’ve seen it all. The two of them together are just remarkable people when it comes to handling children and communicating with young people. They’re extraordinarily gifted.

Perry couldn’t be boring if he tried. He just has one of these personalities where the humor is slipping out all the time. That’s on a restrained day. Not too long ago, he was asked by a local junior college, the College of Lake County, to go in with two or three others in this evening school religion class that was being offered there to talk about Christianity.

One night was given to Buddhism, and another night to Islam, and so on. The night for Christianity, they brought in a Catholic priest, an Episcopalian minister, and Perry. Well, you know who was going to shine. That was to be said, but it was worse than that. As it happened …

It might have happened differently, but as it happened in this particular instance, the Catholic priest arrived drunk, which did not improve his presentation. The Episcopalian, bless his heart, had just won a PhD and was more than a little impressed with his own erudition and thus went floating right over the heads of all of these 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds. Then there was Perry. Quite frankly, Perry stole the show.

Then in the question and answer, after two and a half hours, some 18-year-old popped up her hand with the first question, chewing gum. “Yeah, but Dr. Downs, what about all the Hindus?” Perry said, “I hadn’t thought about that. I’m going to have to start all over.” Now I couldn’t get away with it. I couldn’t pull that off if my life depended on it, but Perry can pull that sort of thing off. Everybody is howling with laughter.

Then he says, “Look, I’m not putting you down. It’s a good question. It’s a serious question. But I answered that way because I want you to understand that Christians have been thinking about these things for 2,000 years, and you can’t wipe Christianity off the map with one smart question. Now let me try and answer it seriously.” What had he done? He had answered a fool according to her folly, lest she should be puffed up in her arrogance.

Which of those two proverbs you deploy itself demands a bit of wisdom. It’s not the sort of thing where you can say, “That’s the verse. That’s the proof text. That’s the universal.” Proverbs work like that. Psalm 1 is a wisdom psalm. It offers only two ways to live, and it doesn’t put in the footnotes. In the New Testament, do you know who is the most distinguished wisdom preacher? It’s the Lord Jesus.

Think of how the Sermon on the Mount ends, for example. With absolute polarities. “Some people build their house on the sand. When the storms come, they’re washed away in a tsunami. Others build their homes on the rock, and they can withstand anything.” “Oh, not me. I want to build on hardpan clay.” It doesn’t work like that, does it? He’s a wisdom preacher.

Then there are two ways, two gates. There’s a narrow gate and a narrow way that leads to life, and there’s a broad gate and a broad way that leads to destruction. Many go in there and just end in destruction, but few are those who go into the other gate. “Oh, I myself am going to choose an in-between-sized gate, thank you very much.” You can’t do that, can you? Jesus is a wisdom preacher.

The good tree, he says, produces good fruit, and the bad tree produces bad fruit. So it’s either a rotten crab apple full of worms or it’s at least a McIntosh and maybe a decent Gala. No, how about an in-between tree that’s not too bad? Jesus is more than a wisdom preacher, for that brings us to a further reflection on the Lord Christ.

Although he is the most gifted wisdom preacher, the most pronounced wisdom preacher in the New Testament by far, yet one of the things that marks Jesus out is the diversity of his preaching, of his teaching, of his interrelationships with people. That too is remarkable. So to a man who has a great deal of wealth he can say, “Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven,” because for that man it was his wealth that was his stumbling block before God.

For the woman caught in adultery, he says, “Repent, and sin no more.” For Zacchaeus, he expects righteousness after the corruption. For Nicodemus, full of self-righteousness and knowledge of the law and deep commitment to the historic Judaism of his day, he is telling him, “Don’t you understand? The Old Testament Scriptures themselves demand the sovereign transforming work of the Spirit. You must be born again.”

Jesus is not only a wisdom preacher; he’s an apocalyptic preacher. Read Matthew 24–25. He’s a moral preacher. He’s a law preacher. He’s a grace preacher. He just covers the whole field. Learning how Jesus’ various speeches, talks, parables, utterances, and one-liners fit together into a broad spectrum is part of becoming good readers of the Bible and learning to think God’s thoughts after him. Isn’t that part of what’s going on?

That brings me to my last point. The fact of the matter is we need Psalm 1, and we need the narratives that tell us of our moral sliding scale, but we’d better let both kinds of biblical text inform us appropriately. Do you see? If you peg everything on texts like Psalm 1, then either you will be crushed in despair as you discover you really can’t add up, or you will become a self-righteous hypocrite, thinking that you do add up, however mistaken, and you’ve gotten beyond the lesser breeds without the law. Now you are really quite wonderful yourself. “I’m of the righteous.” Insufferable.

Similarly, if you begin with the narrative, with a lot of compromise, then you can say, “Well, David slept around and even committed murder, and he remained king. I guess it’s not too serious if I sleep around myself. I can remain pastor. I can remain a man of integrity and get through all of this. There’s grace, isn’t there? There’s a lot of grace in the Bible.

After all, the Bible is realistic. Even these great heroes of the faith are just about all compromised. There aren’t many in the Bible of whom no evil is depicted. Esther maybe, and one or two others. Daniel perhaps, but not many. Ruth sneaks in there, but there aren’t too many.” Thus, the narrative becomes an excuse for sin. That’s not right. So how do you put them together?

To deal with this at length in a synthetic way would take far more time than I have, so I want to draw your attention to the book in the New Testament that puts these two antecedent patterns, a pattern of absolutes and a pattern of genuine recognition of failure, together in the most spectacular way. So spectacular that Christians have been arguing about it and debating it for centuries and centuries.

That New Testament document is 1 John. In 1 John, after the introduction, the apostle begins by saying that if we pretend we don’t sin, if we claim that we haven’t sinned, then we’re kidding ourselves. We’re liars. The truth isn’t in us. In fact, John goes further and says in that first chapter that not only are you a liar if you claim that you haven’t sinned, but you’re calling God a liar, because God says we have sinned and do sin.

First John, chapter 1, in other words, is astonishingly realistic about the fact that we have sinned and do sin, and those who claim sinless perfection are in a horrible way. They’re not only self-deceived; they’re laying an accusing finger against God himself. There’s a marvelous story of Charles Spurgeon at the end of the 1800s. He was at a preacher’s conference at a time in England when there were quite a few people around claiming that they had achieved sinless perfection.

This particular man preached a sermon on sinless perfection and how he had achieved it. He was known in clergy circles for having a bit of a short temper in any case. The younger clergy were expecting Spurgeon to stand up in the Q&A and put this man down and question him on biblical and exegetical grounds and warn him against the foolishness of his theology. Spurgeon didn’t say a thing.

The next morning at breakfast, however, he came up behind this man with a pitcher of milk and poured it over his head. The man’s short fuse ignited, and there were cursings and swearings and stompings around. Spurgeon merely smiled and walked away. As a pastoral style, I’m not recommending that, but nevertheless, sometimes the pricking of pretensions has a certain kind of strategic good effect.

Over against that kind of “I’m above it all” sort of stance, 1 John 1 is pretty ruthless. Writing to Christians now, not to unbelievers, he says, “You do sin, you have sinned, and you will sin.” This isn’t to encourage them to sin. He goes on to say at the beginning of chapter 2, “My dear children, I’m not writing this to you so that you will sin but that so you won’t. I’m telling you these things to be realistic. The solution we have is Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is our advocate, and he is the propitiation for our sins.” He takes them back to the cross.

Then there’s the other strand. John lays out three heavy tests, which he cycles around two or three times. It says, in effect, “If you don’t really love the brothers and sisters, you’re not a Christian. If you don’t obey Jesus, you’re not a Christian. If you don’t believe certain fundamental theological truth, you’re not a Christian.” The language is very strong. So there’s a truth test. There’s a doctrinal test bound up with certain theological confessions, in this case Christology, certain doctrines about Christ that we needn’t go into here.

Then there’s a moral test. Obedience to Christ is entailed, and if there’s no obedience, there’s a big question mark put over your claims. There’s a social test, a love test, and if you fail that one too, then quite frankly, you can talk about your Christian faith until the cows come home; you’re not in. In John’s thought, it’s not best two out of three. In fact, some of the language here is startling. Listen to this in 1 John 3:7 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.” Isn’t that absolute? Then this in 3:9: “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.”

Even that little bit on “continue in sin” sort of softens things down a bit much. It’s a Greek present tense, and it’s trying to soften things up a bit. It’s just a Greek present tense. You could read it perfectly legitimately like this: “No one who is born of God will practice sin.” “Continue to sin” sort of softens it too much.

“… because God’s seed remains in him.” That could be understood one of two ways. God’s nature remains in him, the Christian, in the light of the new birth, or God’s seed could be all of God’s people. Paul uses the language that way. All of God’s people remain in him, in Christ. Either way, that becomes the ground for saying, “Because of this, he cannot sin.” Not “go on sinning.” That’s softening the present tense down too much. He cannot sin because he has been born of God.

You absolutize that … Which one of us in here wants to put up our hand and say, “I’m born of God; I quit sinning”? Then you’re going to run into trouble with chapter 1. How do you put this together? Well, it does help to remember that cannot … he cannot sin … can be a tricky word. When I was in grade seven a long time ago, the teacher in our school was a man called Mr. Cooper. I can give you his name now. I know it’s being recorded, but he’s long gone to his reward.

Mr. Cooper was a veteran of World War II in the Canadian Forces and had a bit of a gammy leg. Quite frankly, he still thought he was in the forces, and wished he were still there, and teaching was not really his mÈtier. To handle grade-seven boys as if they’re in a drill field is not really realistic. He thought of himself as strong in discipline and leadership and all of that, but in point of fact he missed his calling. He was, I’m sure, much better with a machine gun than with grade-seven boys.

If things got really out of hand in the classroom and noise was rising, if you weren’t part of the noise and were looking up to see what he was doing, he might stand up behind his big heavy oak desk, put his fingers under the lip, and lift up this big heavy desk until one side had about six inches off the ground, and slam it down. Then he would say, “That’s only one-tenth of my strength,” as if we cared. He was really hopeless.

One of the things he really deplored with a passion was gum chewing. He was Canadian army. What do you expect? This was in the ‘50s. If he found anyone in the class chewing gum, he would get up, pick up the garbage can, the dust bin, by his desk, and then walk down the aisle, stick this can under the poor student’s nose, and recite in this parade-ground voice, “ ‘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!”

This was his way of getting rid of the problem. Let’s pause for a moment and analyze what he was saying. He was saying, “You cannot chew gum here,” and it would have quite missed the point if I had put up my hand back there in the third row and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Cooper. Ontologically speaking, you are mistaken. I’m doing it.”

Sometimes cannot is not expressing an ontological impossibility, that which cannot happen, that which is impossible to happen; sometimes it is expressing a moral imperative. That’s the point. This is the church of Jesus Christ, and sinning is not done here. You cannot sin here. Every single sin we ever commit in thought and word and deed, in omission or commission, is without excuse, because this is the blood-bought church of Christ, and we have Christ’s nature.

God’s seed remains in us, and sinning is not done here. You cannot sin here. It quite misses the point to say, “Excuse me, but ontologically speaking, Don, I’m doing it.” The point is sinning is not done here, but God help us, we do it anyway, which is why you need the first chapter and the return to Jesus Christ, the propitiation for our sins.

Unless you come to the place where every single sin you see as detestable, indefensible, wretched, unacceptable before God, even while realizing that until the consummation, until Christ comes back, you and I will be inconsistent, you and I will sin, you and I will be driven back to that same rugged cross again and again and again to ask for cleansing … Unless we get to that point, we don’t see the ongoing power of the gospel to transform. We just don’t.

Any form of putative spirituality that does not wrestle first and foremost with our acceptability before God, which finally brings you back to all of these sin questions, these gospel questions, is not worthy the name. We desperately need Psalm 1 so we don’t play around. We need the cross or we’ll all damned. We live in that tension and will live in that tension until Jesus Christ comes back, and all of whatever it means to be spiritual must be worked out in that tension until Jesus himself returns. Let us pray.

So forbid, Lord God, that we should be easy on ourselves with respect to sin, but forbid equally that we should writhe in endless anguish, as if we have any hope of trying harder and sorting it out that way. Bring us back again and again and again to the cross. For Jesus’ sake, amen.