Psalm 1

D. A. Carson highlights the life-guiding structure of the Psalm 1, focusing on the contrast between the righteous and the wicked. He emphasizes the importance of delighting in and meditating on God’s laws, which shape moral character and lead to prosperity and stability, likening the righteous to a tree flourishing by water. This thematic exploration calls for embedding the values and wisdom of the scriptures early in life to fortify against future adversities.

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My mandate in my sessions is to introduce you to a select number of psalms. By and large, for people under the age of 40, the Psalms are not the biggest turn-on chunks of biblical literature in all of the Canon. People who have been long in local church ministry will tell you, almost always, it is the elderly who like the Psalms. So why am I teaching the Psalms to a bunch of 20-somethings and 30-somethings?

The reason is that whole logic can be reversed. That is, the reason why, often, elderly people really do cherish the Psalms. It’s because the Psalms reflect a huge diversity of human experience, and until you have had enough human experience you don’t appreciate a lot of things the Psalms say. Here you find despair and discouragement and hope and faithfulness and sin and wonder at the beauty of creation and the goodness of God and God’s providence and anguish and angst and betrayal by friends and on and on and on.

Beyond the over-arching biblical theological themes (God is King, and nature is God’s own preserve, and many, many other themes) … Until you have had a certain diversity of experience, the Psalms don’t speak powerfully to you. On top of all of that, most of them are not cast as narratives, and this is an age full of media stories and the like, video and the like, that doesn’t think easily and quickly in abstract terms, which are the terms of the Psalms.

But when you reverse the logic, the other way of saying it is, if you get these Psalms under your belt when you’re relatively young, they will prove to be immensely fortifying when you start going through those sorts of experiences.

One of the reasons, to take it out of the Psalms for a moment, for studying the book of Job when you’re 23 is so when you get kicked in the teeth (and sooner of later, you will get kicked in the teeth if you live long enough; the only alternative is not living long enough) then the lessons you have learned from the book of Job will stand you in good stead. They will already prepare you.

Otherwise, instead of learning from Job, in order to have some spiritual inoculation against the evil day, you will be much more likely to go through and repeat all of Job’s kinds of anguished self-examinations and the like, in which case, you’re learning Job the wrong way. The purpose of the book of Job is so to study the book of Job, and thus the God behind the book of Job, and so on, that when you get kicked in the teeth like Job, you don’t go through all that Job went through.

So, also, with many of the psalms. On top of all of that, the Psalms are full of (I don’t know what else to call them but …) messianic prophecies. Now they’re strange prophecies, some of them. The chapter of the Bible most quoted in the New Testament is a Psalm. It’s not Isaiah 53. It’s Psalm 110. Thus if you start studying the Psalms well, you will also be learning how to put your whole Bible together in one fashion or another.

I had a choice. Shall I try to outline the whole book of Psalms and its five internal divisions and so forth or shall I pick on four or five psalms and have a go at them? I chose the latter course. One further word of warning. The first one I am going to look at is Psalm 1, and I have spoken on Psalm 1 at a number of places, including the UCCF graduates meeting three, four, or five years ago. Some of you were at that. Part of what I am going to say (not quite all of it, but part of it) is going to be a re-run. After that, it won’t be material that you have heard before, at least not from me. Let’s begin with Psalm 1.

“Blessed are those who do not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but who delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on his law day and night. They are like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever they do 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 be destroyed.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

The psalm is easily broken down into three parts: a description of the righteous, verses 1, 2, and 3; a description of the unrighteous, verses 4 and 5; and a final summarizing contrast in verse 6.

1. A description of the righteous.

Verses 1, 2, and 3. They are described, first of all, negatively, in verse 1, what they are not like. “Blessed are those who do not walk in step with the wicked or stand in that sinners take,” and so forth. In verse 2, they are described positively. It’s meant to be the flip side of verse 1. In verse 3, they are described metaphorically. Let’s take them one by one.

First, described negatively. “Blessed are those who do not walk in step with the wicked or stand in that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers.” There is a one-line vignette of walking, then of standing, then of sitting. You walk, first of all, in step with the wicked, picking up their counsel, their advice, their frame of reference, their way of looking at things. If you do this long enough, then you stand …

Most of our English translations say, “stand in the way of sinners.” That’s exactly what the Hebrew says, and it’s a wretched translation, because to stand in someone’s way in Hebrew is not the same as standing in someone’s way in English. To stand in someone’s way in English means to hinder them, you block their path. You think of Robin Hood and Little John on the bridge, each standing in the other’s way. One of them ends in the river. Whereas, to stand in someone’s way in Hebrew means you do what they do, you take up their lifestyle.

So the TNIV has paraphrased it, “stand in the way that sinners take.” We would say in North America, “to walk in their moccasins.” That is, you’re now doing what they do. You picked up their advice and now your conduct is now indistinguishable from their conduct, your life habits, your ways of addressing thing, and so forth. You’re indistinguishable from the world and the flesh and the Devil.

If you do that long enough, you may end up in line three and “sit in the company of mockers.” At this point you look down your long self-righteous nose at those stupid, negative, right-wing, bigoted Christians. No words of sneering malice are too strong for your dismissal of them. It’s not enough that you want to walk the way wicked people walk. It’s now that case that you have to sneer at those that don’t take the same path.

At this point, Spurgeon says a person receives his master’s in worthlessness and his doctorate in damnation. That is the image that the entire book of Psalms begins with. “Blessed are those who do not do the one or the other or the third.” For, as has often been said, certain actions become habits and habits stamp character. It begins by taking on the lifestyle and the frame of reference of wicked people. Then, over against that, by contrast …

Secondly, described positively. What is on offer in verse 2? Now then, I’m sure that at this stage you know perfectly well a lot of Hebrew poetry works on the basis of parallelism. Poetry sometimes works on the basis of beat, or on the basis of rhyme, or on the basis of some combination of the two, as well as how metaphor is used. Thus, Spenserian verse can’t be confused with a Shakespearean sonnet. E.E. Cumming’s poetry can’t be confused with the blank verse of Robert Frost. Each kind of poetry has its own power, its own ability to communicate. I like 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.

Isn’t that clever? If you have ever seen the results of an ice storm, you know exactly how accurate all of that is. He goes on to talk about how the twigs and the branches “click upon themselves.” But Hebrew poetry does more than any of those principles. Hebrew poetry works on the principle of parallelism, and sometimes synonymous parallelism, so that you have a line and then you say roughly the same thing using slightly different words.

Then in synthetic or step parallelism you say something, then you say another line, and you take the argument just a little bit further, then you say a third line and take it just a wee bit further, again. You have had a kind of synthetic step parallelism in verse 1. But now if you’re going to have a contrast between verse 1 and verse 2 (how the righteous people are described negatively in verse 1, now positively in verse 2), you might have expected in verse 2 something like, “Blessed, rather, are those who walk in the counsel of the righteous and do stand in the way of the godly and who sit in the seat of the praising.”

Now you have preserved your parallelism exactly. Instead of all of that, the author breaks the structure. Now you can only break structure effectively when you have mastered structure. That’s why people don’t write good blank verse unless they also know how to write sonnets or something equivalent. You have to know structure to break it effectively. What the author does is break the structure.

He breaks the expectation of a simple antithetic parallelism here, and gives us one simple criterion, one positive criterion. What is it? “The righteous delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on his law day and night.” When you stop to think about it, this criterion answers everything that has gone wrong in the first verse, because this law of the Lord (the word literally means instruction), this instruction of the Lord is providing a foil now to the advice of wicked people.

This is God’s perspective, and if it is properly taken in and absorbed and thought through and lived out, then it transforms absolutely everything. It is surprising how often that sort of thing is said in the Bible. Joshua takes over from Moses, and the first thing God says to him is, “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth. You shall meditate in it day and night. Then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success.”

Or re-read Psalm 119, all 176 verses. If you’re reading quickly, it’s easy to get bored by it. You think, “Okay. You have made this point. Move on.” But then you start reading it more slowly and discover there are certain recurring themes in Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is written by a psalmist who is facing deep, deep distress and agony. We don’t know why. Some of it seems to be external, opposing voices; some of it may be internal. There is a constant, recurring theme of meditating on God’s law.

It is stunning how many themes are interwoven with the importance of the Word of God and being thankful for the Word of God, the transformative power of the Word of God. Or, a passage that I have come to cherish, in Deuteronomy 17. This could be used at a commencement address. In fact, I used it at a commencement address last week in another country. Deuteronomy 17, verses 14 and following. Here Moses is telling a future king the responsibilities of the king when the time comes for a king to be appointed and come to power.

“When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, ‘Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us,’ be sure to appoint over you the king the Lord your God chooses. He must be from among your own people. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not an Israelite.

The king, moreover, must not require great numbers of horses for himself or make the people return to Egypt to get more of them, for the Lord has told you, ‘You are not to go back that way again.’ He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold. 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 Levitical priests.

It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he can 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 fellow Israelites 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.”

Now transparently, there are some elements of this commencement that are unlikely to parallel any of our experiences when we start a new job, or when we graduate with a new degree and face new appointment, or just get appointed to the London district of UCCF, or whatever. Most of us are not contemplating becoming monarchs, and we’re not planning to set up a dynasty, Davidic or otherwise, from which a messiah will come. So there are some obvious differences.

Yet, there are several things that this king, at the beginning of his ministry, is not supposed to do and one crucial thing he is supposed to do. The crucial things he is not supposed to do all have parallels today. They’re not exact parallels, but they’re pretty close. First, he must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself. You think, “Yes, well, the closeness here quite escapes me.” This is not talking about the number of horses under the bonnet, the displacement size of the engine, or anything like that.

No, no, no. Think military tank. The number of horses referred to the power to make war, and it becomes part of a warning that the king is not to establish his self-identity in sheer military power. Nations rise. Nations fall. Your self-identity must not be bound up with military prowess. After all, the Lord Jesus says things equally clearly (does he not?) in Matthew 20:20–28 when James and John want to sit on his left and on his right when he comes into his kingdom.

They are thinking in political terms, one perhaps the Minister of Defense and the other perhaps the Home Secretary. And Jesus says, “The rulers of this world lorded over others, but it shall not be so with you. No, the one who wants to rule must be servant of all, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.” Now, out of that passage has come endless talk about servant leadership, most of which (am I allowed to say this without being too rude?) is wretched stuff.

There’s an awful lot of stuff on servant leadership that is really very bad because it’s so sentimentalized. It is talking endlessly about humility and gentleness.… All things that are true. On the other hand, if Jesus is our model, this is also the same Jesus who can tell people they are a generation of vipers and snakes in the grass and call the wrath of God upon them even while he weeps over the city.

What exactly is meant by “Jesus came not be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many?” It doesn’t mean a reduction in his authority. This book, Matthew, ends up, in the closing verses, “All authority is given unto me in heaven and earth.” Where is the servant leadership in that? No, the difference, when you examine that passage closely is, leadership is still leadership, authority is still authority. The whole difference is motive, because the rulers of this world, whether in commerce or in politics or anywhere else, eventually begin to view their leadership as their due.

They eventually become more concerned about preserving their patch than about doing good. They might even start with a certain amount of idealism, but before long, that’s not the way it is anymore. One of the strengths of a democracy is precisely that it provides a fairly peaceful way of turfing the blighters out every few years when they really do become arrogant, because just about everybody falls into that trap in due course. “But it shall not be so with you.”

The entire exercise of our leadership, of our authority, is for the good of others. We come not to be served, but to serve, and the supreme model there is Christ. The supreme demonstration of his leadership is precisely, finally, in the cross. Which does not mean that he reduces his authority. Even as he goes to the cross, he says, “Do you not know that even now I could call 12 legions of angels?” This irony is what generated 300 years of the early church speaking of Jesus with a profound irony, almost a grin on their faces as they said it. “Jesus reigns from the cross.”

So, authority, yes. Authority, leadership, of course. But not for the sake of self-promotion. Not so you can multiply tanks and horses, but to serve. And then, not to go back to Egypt. In this case, there is always the danger of looking back nostalgically to things that in the past, have been bound up with our sinful former existence, or the like. There is always a danger of nostalgizing over these things and not listening to what God is doing as he calls us forward to follow him.

“He [or she] must not take many wives [or husbands],” condemning both polyandry and polygamy. I suppose there is something subliminal that’s said here about the sanctity of marriage, but that’s not the point. The point is that for kings, having many wives was often a way of sealing alliances. You married a lot of princesses from surrounding countries and little fiefdoms and the like, and thus you built up more and more and more of a network that guaranteed a certain kind of stability. That’s what Solomon did.

It promotes your image as being a rich person and a person in control, but also, you have got all of these allegiances. But not only does that mean that you’re sometimes making a lot of foolish alliances, it means that, at the end of the day, your commitment to endless networking can actually have a negative effect. In Solomon’s case, many of these princesses were pagans, and paganism was introduced back into Israel again in the name of political networking.

There is a kind of networking that is good and responsible and wise and opens up the horizons. There is a kind of networking that says, “Networking is an absolute good. Unity is an absolute good.” At this point the whole thing becomes political, and you’re no longer concerned for the truth, for the Word of God, which is where this whole argument regarding the king is going.

“He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.” Look at the things that are prohibited. Self-identity bound up with power. A nostalgic view of the past that constantly casts an almost-nostalgic eye, even over sinful existence. A kind of networking that knows no boundaries. A kind of openness to more and more and more associations, even when they stand over against what God has said. And a lust for the perennial, this worldly. It’s all idolatry! It’s all idolatry!

Over against all that, “No, no, no,” Moses says. “When he takes the throne of his kingdom he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law.” Now, there was no printing press. He couldn’t download it from the Internet without it passing through anybody’s brain and claim he has got it because it is now on his hard drive. He has got to get a copy of this law, which could be a part of Deuteronomy, all of Deuteronomy, or even the whole of the Pentateuch. I don’t know. The experts are divided.

But when he has got a copy, he has got to copy it out longhand in Hebrew, so clearly, that this becomes his daily reading copy. In other words, this is not just an exercise in fast copying to say it is done. It is an exercise to make sure he goes through the text slowly and writes with sufficient clarity that this becomes his reading copy, which he is then to read all the rest of the days of his life.

It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the rest of the days of his life so he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this towrah, of this instruction, and these decrees, because this is what will eventually help him. “Not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites, or turn from the law to the right or to the left.” This instruction is found constantly in the Old Testament, and in the New, as well.

There are many, many, many encouragements to think in transforming ways bound on the gospel or the Word of God, or the like. “Don’t be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Proverbs itself tells us, for example, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” You’re not what you say, you’re not what you do, you’re not the public persona; you are what you think.

Isn’t that what Jesus says? “Out of the heart [your whole inner being] the mouth speaks.” Garbage in, garbage out. So this one criterion is sufficient. “They delight in the law of the Lord; they meditate on this law day and night.” It’s not even a question of just doing it just because they have to do it. They’re doing it in such a way as to feed pleasure in the task. Something that you look forward to so that you think about it, turn it over in your mind day and night.

You wake up in the middle of the night. To what is your mind drawn? You’re sitting in the parking lot waiting for a friend or a spouse to come out from a shop, to what does your mind naturally gravitate? You meditate on this Word day and night. You so fill your mind with it that you keep turning it over and turning it over. That doesn’t come by anything other than lots and lots and lots of reading and re-reading of the Word of God. It just doesn’t. There are no exceptions.

Thirdly, described metaphorically. “These people are like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever they do prospers.” This is not talking prosperity gospel. This is within the metaphor of a semi-arid country and its vegetation. In the Southwest of the U.S., which is often pretty arid, they have what the Spanish called arroyos, dry beds. In Israel and Palestine, and so on, they are called wadis.

They are dry streambeds most of the year; they just look deserted. There is very little foliage. Everything looks dead, and then, when the rains come, they can fill up and flash flood warnings are everywhere. Then the desert leaps to life again; everything blooms. There is growth. There are signs of life. But this tree is planted by streams … plural … of water. That is, there is such a confluence of water that instead of the semi-arid conditions of wadis, with some spurts of growth and some languishing in death, now there is a steady, steady supply of nourishing water.

As a result, these trees are always green. That’s what it says. “The leaf doesn’t wither.” In due course, the season comes around, and you bring forth fruit. If verse 2 and 3 are linked, then this water stands for the nourishing, life-giving Word of God which produces this sort of fruit. This language is used often in the Prophets, as well. This is not strange. Listen to this.

Jeremiah 17: “Cursed are those who trust in mortals, who depend on flesh for their strength, and whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They will be like a bush in the wastelands; they will not see prosperity …” There is that prosperity again; the prosperity of life-giving water that produces fruit. “They will not see prosperity when it comes. They will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives.

But blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They 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.” The imagery in constant in the Bible. Here the righteous are first described negatively (what they are not like); secondly, positively; and thirdly, metaphorically. Then the first big division.

2. A description of the unrighteous.

The wicked are set over against the righteous with a powerful negation. Verses 4 and 5: “Not so the wicked.” It’s a strong negation. “Not so the wicked. Not so.” It’s as if everything significant you say about the righteous, you must negate with respect to the unrighteous. Are the righteous those who do not walk in step with the wicked? Well, “Not so the wicked” themselves, transparently. “Not so.” Are the righteous those who avoid standing in the way that sinners take? “Not so the wicked. Not so.”

Do the righteous avoid sitting in the seat of mockers? “Not so the wicked. Not so.” Are the righteous those who meditate on the Word of God and delight in it day and night? “Not so the wicked. Not so,” and so forth. Everything that is significant with respect to the righteous is negated with respect to the unrighteous. Well what are they like, then? They are like chaff the wind blows away.

That is, the image is of a small landholder in the Middle East where the heads of grain have been taken in from the barley or the wheat, and a little winnowing shovel is used to throw the seed up in the air and bash it, throw the seed up in the air and bash it, so that the chaff breaks off, and the wind carries it away while the grain is gathered down below, dried out, and ground up to become flour for bread.

By contrast with this tree that is living and active and fruit-bearing, the chaff is worthless, rootless, useless, lifeless, unstable. In case we don’t get the point, verse 5 explains, “Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.” Whether it’s talking about temporal judgments here or the final judgment, this still remains true. When God brings things to accounting, they’re like chaff that the wind blows away.

3. The final summarizing contrast.

Verse 6: “For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will be destroyed.” That is, the final summarizing contrast is not strictly between the righteous and the unrighteous, but between the way of the righteous and the way of the unrighteous. “The Lord watches over the way of the righteous.” That is, he owns it as his. He recognizes it. He claims it. He stamps it, watches over it. “This is mine.” He protects it.

By contrast, the way of the wicked will be destroyed, not just the wicked themselves, but their way. No one is going to be studying the life of Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot 50 billion years from now, if I may speak of eternity in the categories of time, but every glass of water given in the name of the Lord Jesus will still be celebrated. The way of the wicked will perish, as significant as tracks made on the seashore when the tide is out. The tide rolls in, the tide rolls out, and the tracks are no more.

Sometimes you may feel that you are a small group of minority Christian leaders on large, institutional campuses, but the work you’re doing lasts forever. An awful lot of whatever else is found on that campus isn’t going to last very long, not in eternal terms. Make all the allowances you like for common grace. The Lord watches over the way of the righteous; the way of the wicked will perish.

Now that’s the easy bit of what I’m saying tonight. Two ways, and there is no third. But do you really believe that? It’s possible to teach Psalm 1 in such a way that those who feel their lives are, at the moment, pretty righteous, go away somewhat pharisaical. “Boy, I sure am glad I’m not all those wicked people.” And those of you who are struggling with assorted sins, internal or otherwise, come away from the same psalm thinking, “Good grief. If these are the standards God demands, I’m damned.”

What do you do with Psalm 1? How do you preach it? How do you teach it? Is it even realistic? Am I allowed to ask that question? There is David, a man after God’s own heart, who also committed adultery and murder, didn’t know how to be a good dad, lost Absalom, didn’t defend his own daughter, a bit of a creep in all kinds of ways, you have to say. You wonder what kinds of sins he would have committed if he hadn’t been a man after God’s own heart.

And Abraham, the father of the faithful, the friend of God, lies on at least two glorious occasions, puts his wife at terrible risk because, deep down, he turns out to be chicken-hearted. What shall we say for the patriarchs? One sleeping with his daughter-in-law, 10 are trying to figure out how to put the eleventh to death or sell him into slavery. These are the patriarchs, for goodness’ sake!

And it’s not just the Old Testament. There’s Peter. “You are blessed Peter, Simon, son of John, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father which is in heaven.” “Get behind me, Satan. You don’t understand the things of God.” All in the space of about 10 verses. The mighty hero of Pentecost, blowing it quite gloriously in his debate with Paul in Galatians 2, not able to see a fairly simple theological distinction. What do you do with these things?

You come the sheer polarity of Psalm 1, and you start to say, “Well, yes, you can preach it straight-forwardly, but that sounds an awful lot like absolute black and white and, in reality, most of us live in this miserable gray zone where we have flashes of white and flashes of darkness. If you look at the absolute standards, that just means I’m damned.

If I’m really having a good day, I pat myself on the back and go away like a Pharisee. ‘I thank God I’m not like one of these ugly people who are sin, and the Lord doesn’t even recognize their way, and their way is not going to endure.’ ” What do you do with this? It’s important, it seems to me, to recognize several things, and then I want to work out some pastoral implications at the end.

1. It’s important to recognize the Bible is made up of many different literary genres.

Now literary genre is not the only factor, but it is made up of literary genres. Each literary genre has its own rhetorical ability to appeal. So, for example, a parable does not make its appeal in our lives exactly the same way as a statute on what you do with mold in the house does.

It’s not just that the message is different; the way it makes its appeal is different. With a narrative parable, you’re listening to a story and, in some of them, especially the parables that reverse things, you get to a certain point and then everything gets changed in the story. Your whole world is being blown up. Isn’t that the parable of the good Samaritan? Your whole world is blown up by the parable of the good Samaritan; your expectations are all changed.

For one, it tells you what to do when there’s mold in the house. Nothing is being changed. It’s just telling you what to do when there is mold in the house. There’s nothing that’s changed in all of that, except now you have some stipulations of what you have to show to the priest, and what the priest has got to do, and what you have to do in consequence of what the priest says. It’s just straightforward stipulation, isn’t it?

There are beatitudes; these open-ended blessings are sometimes curses, maledictions, on the other side. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God.” You turn it over in your mind, and you think of all the possible parallel texts, and it’s evocative, it’s seminal, it’s feeding, it’s nurturing. You realize it’s not case law, but at the same time, it’s wonderful for the ability to engender a certain kind of meditation.

You want to know how that beatitude fits with the next one and the one after that and how all of them fit together into the prologue to the Sermon on the Mount and how they compare with other beatitudes elsewhere in the Bible, and so on. There’s apocalyptic, where you have a dragon with a tail that sweeps a third of the stars out of the sky and plunks them down on the earth.

Then you have letters, and then you have laments. “Cursed be the day I was born.” “Let the man who brought my mother the news be like the cities that the Lord overturned without pity.” “Why did he not leave me in my mother’s womb, her womb enlarged forever?” That’s all Jeremiah 20. Try to preach that the way you preach Romans. “Point 1. Jeremiah wants his mother to be eternally pregnant. Point 2. He wants to poor bloke who told his father the news to be like a city the Lord overthrew without pity,” and so on.

That’s just misreading what of kind of literature it is. This is a way of saying, “Not only do I wish I were dead, I wish I had never been born. God is not kind to me for allowing me to live or even to be here in this miserable, wretched world, this existence to which he has called me. It’s not right. It’s not fair. I wish I had never been born, and I wish I were dead.” That’s what it is saying, but in far more powerful language than simply “I wish” stuff.

You never forget the kind of language Jeremiah uses. All of these different literary forms have their own ways of making certain kinds of appeals. Psalm 1 is often called a Wisdom psalm. The reason it’s called a Wisdom psalm is it partakes in one of the chief characteristics of literary wisdom. Now there are different kinds of wisdom, and they have different kinds of characteristics, but one of the chief characteristics of wisdom is it offers you a polarized view of reality.

So the Proverbs, for example, you’re either following Lady Wisdom or you’re following Dame Folly. You’re not following someone who is wise some of the time and foolish some of the time. You’re either following Wisdom, or you’re following Folly, only two women. This is a polarized Wisdom psalm. It sets out the absolutes. This is what the good is; this is what the bad is. If this were the only thing you had in the Bible, you would have a very polarized view of reality. But the Bible also has stories of David and all of his moral failures.

In that sense, the Bible is full of narrative that shows us human beings are not going to align perfectly with a polarized view of reality. We’re such mixed people. In that sense, the biblical view of even the saints, as it were, is uncompromisingly honest. But if all you had were stories like the story of David, one of the lessons you would be inclined to come out with at the other end would be, “Well, and you know, if even David, a man after God’s own heart, ended up like that, if I commit adultery, it’s not too serious. After all, God forgave David. He can jolly well forgive me.”

Which is probably not what you are supposed to be learning from David’s account. And if all you had were the Wisdom psalms, you would be taught in absolute, polarized terms that don’t allow anything for compassion or the mystery of malevolence and the inconsistency of our ways. No pastoral wisdom, finally. What do you do with these commonalities?

That’s the first point on which you must reflect. That is, the Bible is, purposely, in God’s own good wisdom, not given as case law, not given as one literary genre, but a mixture of literary genres with the different parts forming their own individual, rhetorical, and moral appeal. Now you still have to put them together, but you do need to recognize these literary realities.

2. We have to recognize that we are, ourselves, culturally located.

In the Western world, in our own cultural location, we tend to idolize and lionize those literary pieces or video pieces that show the moral confusion of our times. Do you remember what won the Academy Award in the “Best Picture” category for 2006? It was Crash. How many of you saw Crash? Enough of you didn’t see it that I should say something about it.

Crash is a stunningly powerful film in its own way. It pictures four couples. I don’t mean men/women couples. They are four pairs. They might be husband and wife, but they might not be, but they are four pairs. At the beginning of the film, there are vignettes from their lives, in which one of each pair is transparently good, and the other is transparently bad. There are two cops, for example, and one is clearly corrupt, and the other one is a young idealist.

But by the end of the film, there are enough reversals of roles in the unfolding storyline that these four pictures are beginning to weave together, and your understanding of who is good and who is bad has been changed. It’s all been transformed. That gets an Academy Award. Rambo never gets an Academy Award. You’re going to sell a lot of tickets when you have a Rambo-style film. In that case, bad is bad because you need a lot of targets to blow up, but that never gets an Academy Award.

To get an Academy Award, you have to have a certain amount of moral ambiguity. We love this moral ambiguity. The difference, however, between this analysis of moral ambiguity, and the kind of moral ambiguity you get in the account of David is we cherish moral ambiguity as a good in and of itself. It’s judged to be realistic. We are satisfied with our moral ambiguity. We glory in it. It accounts for our diversity. It lets us off the hook. It explains who we are in a morally ambiguous universe. It means we’re not accountable to an ultimate God with ultimate standards.

Whereas, in the Bible, wherever there is moral ambiguity, the ambiguity itself is recognized. There is honesty in it all, but it is never lionized. To recognize moral ambiguity is to recognize the deceitfulness and brokenness and corruption and depravity of the human race, but to lionize it is to say, in effect, this moral ambiguity is a good in and of itself. The Bible never does that. One of the things that saves us from such lionizing of moral ambiguity is, precisely, Wisdom Literature, where the polarities are sharply drawn.

3. You have to recognize when you come to the teaching of Jesus that he is able and willing to teach and preach in remarkably diverse styles.

So he can give what we call the Olivet Discourse, or the eschatological discourse, and use a whole lot of apocalyptic imagery. He can tell parables, for example. He can give these one-line aphorisms. But one thing that he does, transparently, is function as a wisdom preacher. He’s a powerful wisdom preacher. That is, a preacher of wisdom in the literary sense.

So that you come to the end of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, which already has quite a lot of genres within it, but it ends up with four brief contrasts, all reflecting a wisdom view of reality. “Don’t go in at the wide gate and the broad path, for many go in there, and they go to destruction. Go instead at the narrow gate and the straightened path, for that’s the way to eternal life.”

There’s no point coming along in saying, “How about an in-between-sized path? I know it would be narrow and bigoted over here. I’m not debauched like over there. I want an in-between-sized path.” You can’t do that. It’s wisdom. You either build on the rock or you build on the sand. If you build on the rock, then, when the floods come and the winds come, your house is stable, its steady. Nothing is destroyed.

If you build on the sand, it’s all washed over. It’s destroyed. It’s another Katrina. “Well, how about hardpan clay? That’s pretty good, isn’t it? I’ll throw down a few pillars really, really deep?” You can’t do that. It’s Wisdom Literature. A good tree produces good fruit; a bad tree produces bad fruit. “Well, how about an in-between one? Let’s say, a McIntosh apple. Not a crab apple, on the one hand, and not a decent Bramley on the other. No. How about a McIntosh right in the middle?” No, no. It’s good fruit verses bad fruit.

Jesus himself insists on these absolutes that are just so embarrassing, because it’s not how we live. They end up condemning us, but they are also part of what Jesus teaches, this same Jesus who is immensely compassionate to those who have sinned and are broken. That’s also part of who Jesus is. This Jesus who finally answers all of the defections of our lives by taking our sins in his own body on the tree.

Moreover, in the New Testament, there are places where these two kinds of voices (the absolute polarity voices and the voices of recognition of our internal inconsistencies) come together with astonishing proximity and clarity. Perhaps the most dramatic of these is 1 John, which begins, from 1 John 1:5 to 2:2, by insisting that Christians do sin. “If you say that you don’t sin or that haven’t sinned, you’re a liar. You’re calling God a liar. God tells you that you do sin. Don’t deny it. You’re a liar. The truth isn’t in you. You’re kidding yourself.”

No, no, no, no. Our hope in this argument is in 1 John 2:1 and 2. “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” Here there is a reliance upon Christ and his cross work to meet us in all of our need and a frank recognition that in this fallen, broken, damned order we will sin. It is no answer to our wretched estate to pretend we don’t sin or haven’t sinned.

In that sense, it’s a non-narrative form of the kind of narrative experience of a David or an Abraham. Then, the rest of the book is made up of what a lot of people call the three tests. It’s not the best language, but it’s not bad. Basically, three large challenges that say, unless you actually love the brothers and sisters you’re not a believer, unless you actually believe the truth (there are certain christological truths he has in mind) you’re not a believer, and unless you actually do what Jesus says and obey his commands you’re not a believer.

The last chapter and a half actually ties those three up together so that the three become one because, for example, the command business, the moral structure.… One of the things the moral structure teaches you is to love. Thus, the obedience test and the love test come together. Gradually, the three are all tied up into one unyielding, powerful absolute. You’re not a Christian if you don’t meet these tests, and some of them are put.… I don’t know how else to say it other than … brutally.

I did mention this passage in New Word Alive because I went through 1 John there. How many of you were at New Word Alive? I don’t need to repeat myself. About a third of you. Let me just draw your attention to the passage again. What do you do with 1 John, chapter 3? “No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.” Verse 9: “Those who are born of God will not continue to sin because God’s seed remains in them. They cannot go on sinning because they have been born of God.”

I gave some illustrations for those texts at that series; I’m not going to repeat them here. The language is very strong. What you eventually come up with when you re-read and re-read and re-read 1 John is not Wesley’s ideal of perfectionism, based on these sorts of passages, because they ignore the first chapter and a half that keeps telling Christians they can’t say they don’t sin or haven’t sinned, and that the answer is the cross.

Nor do you come up with a kind of laissez-faire attitude that says, “Well, we have got the cross so a little bit of sneaky sin won’t matter too much because we can always go back to the cross.” The absolutes won’t let you get away with it. What you get from 1 John is a kind of living tension Christians will face all the days of their lives. Every single sin we commit, in thought or word or deed, a sin of omission or commission, is invariably, irreducibly, inescapably without excuse. Christians don’t do things like that; Christians can’t do things like that. It’s not done here.

And, God help us, we do it anyway. That’s why we go back to the cross. Now it’s easy to summarize the whole picture this way, but I want you to see the gospel power of understanding this. Historically, those in the Reformed tradition have sometimes spoken of three uses of the law: the first use, the second use, and the third use. Some Christians in the Lutheran tradition deny that there is a third use of the law, for example.

There is diversity of opinion, but in these uses of the law, one use is to point forward to Christ. Another is to establish rights and wrongs and curtail the people. But the third use of the law, in traditional Reformed thought, is to guide people in righteousness after they have become Christians. It’s to show what we must live up to. So, the third use of the law, tweaked in a variety of ways, in different traditions.

I’m not quite happy with that formulation. I think there is a third use, but I think it depends on other factors that I don’t have time to go into. My point, however, is when you see declining standards in a society, whether it’s in a CU group or in a local church.… When you see people not reading their Bibles anymore or when you see people sleeping around or addicted to porn or when you see people being sloppy in the courtesies of Christian life and thought, it’s immediately a temptation to appeal to the third use of the law in a way I would judge is always mistaken.

I think there is a legitimate third use of the law, but this way is wrong. This way simply gives the impression that the solution is going to be more law. But if the New Testament is clear about anything, it’s that the law is powerless. It’s not that the law doesn’t say a lot of important things and set up standards for us. It’s not as if the law doesn’t point forward eschatologically to all the teachings that are on Jesus’ mouth in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not as if the law does not speak powerfully in all kinds of ways, but it does not have the ability to transform.

Pastorally, it is virtually always a mistake to appeal to the law in the hope of transformation. In the hope of condemnation, in the hope of establishing God’s standards, fine, fine. In the hope of transformation that doesn’t do it. It’s the gospel that transforms. Mark Driscoll, who most of you will know or know of, is a bit of a firebrand in all kinds of ways, but he’s become a good friend. I cherish him for all kinds of reasons, even though we may not see eye to eye on some things.

But he has thought this through in his evangelism of a very secular city like Seattle. When he has dealt with people on porn or serious sexual addiction, one of his touted one-liners is, “You worshipped your way into this addiction, and you will worship your way out of it.” What he means by that is sex became a god for you. You worshipped your way into it.

You don’t have the power to beat this god by simply saying no. It’s the power of the gospel. It not only forgives us our sin but so holds up Christ and his glory and his beauty that by worshipping him, under the light of the gospel, the notion of worshipping sex becomes, at best, mediocre, and worse, cheap, tawdry, and dishonoring to Christ. You worship your way out of it. It’s the gospel that transforms.

4. You must recognize the importance of putting passages like Psalm 1 with the framework of a broader biblical theology.

This suggests that when you teach Psalm 1 and many other similar passages of Scripture, these passages of Scripture that deal with huge polarities, without footnotes, without narrative, without caveats, in absolute blacks and whites, one of the things you really have to do to be a faithful Bible teacher is to put such passages within the framework of a broader biblical theology, lest you merely give the impression that biblical Christianity is simply a set of dos and don’ts.

Now you may do that in pastoral ministry, for example, in the course of regular teaching and preaching of the whole counsel of God, as you work through book after book and theme after them, then, increasingly, the balance just happens in the context of faithful ministry. And that can happen in CUs, in well-ordered Bible readings, and so on. Yes, it can.

But it’s also helpful to have staff workers and your better students reading and thinking in these areas so they know how their Bibles are put together such that Psalm 1 is not inadvertently being taught as the way to know God, in and of itself, so somehow the gospel itself is simply lost, the sacrificial system is lost, the point of Christ’s coming is lost, Paul’s “I determine to know nothing save Christ and him crucified” is lost, and you do not see how the parts of the Bible cohere. Now if you study Psalm 1 in this larger biblical framework, then understand there are only two ways, and there is no third.