Getting Lost
Psalm 1
September 24, 2006
Associate Pastor Doug Forsberg
If we were to gather the men in the sanctuary today and ask them if they’ve ever been lost, they might admit to confusion about where they were one time or that they’ve wondered how to get to where they wanted to go, but they’d probably have great difficulty admitting that they’ve been lost. That’s why we won’t ask for directions. If we stop to ask for directions, we’re really admitting that you’re lost.
I was walking down Everett Street the other day when I noticed a car slowly coming toward me. A woman and man were in the car, and she pulled over and rolled down the window. She needed directions. She wanted to get to Bellevue Avenue.
I should have just told them how to get there, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to meddle, so I said, “Gee, it doesn’t look like your passenger is ready to give up looking yet. Are you sure you want me to tell you how to get there?”
Believe it or not, they didn’t laugh. Realizing that I had stepped into the most dangerous of relational waters, I looked at the man with compassion, or was it pity, and told them how to get where they were trying to go.
Psalm 1 serves as a map or guide to those who seek to come to God in prayer. Psalm 1 assumes that we are lost and refuses to bear with any prideful declarations we might make about our approach to God. Psalm 1 introduces us to the rest of the Psalms by telling us that before we pray, we need to figure a few things out. The first thing we need to figure out is that God is at the center of all things in such a way that our lives and our prayers are simply a response to him. The second thing that we need to figure out is that there are two ways we can go: with the righteous or with the wicked. Each way leads to a definite destination. Psalm 1 is an introduction, but even more, it is an invitation. It invites us to answer God.[1] Those who learn the way proclaimed in Psalm 1 are blessed.
There are 150 psalms, and the very first word of the first psalm is blessed. The whole of the Psalms come forth from this one word and what a wonderful word it is, for in this one word we find that there is hope, there is happiness, and there is blessedness. For those who are lost and trying to find their way home, the first word of this psalm invites them into a new and living way. As we look at this way as it is described in this psalm, we’ll discover what those who are blessed do, what they are like, and what happens to them. We’ll also discover the same things about the wicked.
Psalms are poems, and one of the interesting things about the way Psalm 1 is written is that the author moves quickly from this glorious word, blessed, to a description of the wicked. Why would the author do this? Why not stick with the positive? One commentator suggests that there are three reasons for this: 1. wickedness is presented at the beginning of the psalm because that is where we all begin, estranged from God, 2. if there are two ways to go, blessedness or wickedness, we should know about them from the start, and 3. if we want to understand Godliness, we need to be shown the opposite which is wickedness.[2]
One of the important traits of Hebrew poetry is parallelism in which thoughts and ideas are repeated and intensified. Verse one offers a great example of such parallelism in three parts. Each of these builds on the one prior to it, helping us to see that what starts with listening to the whispers and advice of the ungodly leads to stubbornly acting in a way that shows we’ve missed the mark of where we were aiming; and this kind of attitude leads to banding together with those who mock what is right. So it is that we move ever so slowly from listening to temptation to giving in to it and then encouraging others to follow the path we have walked. This is wickedness, not only thumbing our nose at God but inviting others to do the same. Something that strikes me as being important for us as we consider this way or possibility is that the Hebrew words that we translate into wicked and mocker involve a sense of making noise, disturbances, stuttering nonsense or speaking unintelligibly.
In contrast, we are told that the person who is blessed finds his delight is in the law of the Lord on which he meditates day and night. The wicked have listened to those who lead them to mock God. The one who is blessed delights in God’s word to us. The law of the Lord refers to the Torah, the whole of the scriptures. Often we use this word to refer to the first 5 books of the Bible, but it can also be used to refer to the whole of scripture and that is what we have here. The Hebrew word Torah means direction, instruction. Its verb form means to throw something with the intention of hitting the mark. My friends God has thrown his Torah at us. We are the mark or bulls eye. The ones who are blessed delight in what has been spoken to them. The Hebrew word for delight also has the meaning of bending toward or desiring. The one who delights in this word that hits the mark meditates on it ceaselessly. To meditate in Hebrew is to think out loud, to speak out loud to one’s self. This is what the blessed do. The wicked take in unintelligible speech and assimilate it, rejecting God’s instruction. The blessed take Torah, God’s Word, and make it their own, seeking to answer the One who calls them.
Psalm 1 proclaims “Blessed is the man . . . [whose] delight is in the law of the Lord.” The psalm then tells us what this person is like. He’s like a tree. Does this image surprise you? Perhaps we’re trained to think of someone who delights in the law of the Lord as a monk or rabbi or pastor. You know, someone who actually has the time to think about these things. That’s not the image we’re given though. Instead we’re told that such a person is like a tree.
Now trees are some of the most common things we find in nature. They’re everywhere except, of course, in the place where this psalm was probably written. The whole book of Psalms was gathered together in its present form while the Israelites were in exile in Babylon. As a community, they had missed the mark, they had become just like the wicked that are described in verse one. As a punishment for their wickedness, God allowed the Babylonians to destroy the Promised Land and take some of the Israelites into exile. These were lonely years for God’s people. They wondered if God was still with them, if his word was for them. The community spent time bending itself to the Torah, and after some time found themselves delighting in it. As they came to delight in the Torah again, they found that a tree was the best image to describe what they were like. In the land of their exile, trees could only grow right on the banks of the great river or alongside irrigation canals. In such places trees could grow tall and strong. Surely we can understand this image and take joy in the fact that those who are blessed can plant their roots deep in God’s Word and grow high producing fruit in season.
We also should understand this image to ground us in prayer that is real and tied in to our daily lives. A tree is something we can understand. You can feel it, see it and touch it. As they looked at the trees along the waterways of Babylon, the Israelites thought of prayer. They didn’t go into seclusion or onto lonely mountain tops to think of prayer. Instead, they embraced what they found in their lives, the normal everyday things that should cause us to seek to answer God. Some of these things bring us joy, others frustration, others fear, and still others anger. In each case, Psalm 1 is inviting us to learn how to answer God using the full range of human emotions. Prayer is not dignified speech. Prayer is made up of the stuff of earth, the stuff of our lives, the stuff we actually care about. The author of Psalm 1 uses a tree to remind us of that fact because when we start to think of prayer as dignified speech we are no longer answering the One who sent us his Word. Instead, we are speaking to idols.
Such is the case of those whom the Psalm calls wicked. They believe they know the path they should take even as they ignore God, but verse 4 tells us that these people are like chaff that the wind blows away. If you don’t know, chaff is produced when grain is threshed. The grain is crushed by a thresher or animal and then thrown in the air. The heavier grain falls back to the earth, but the lighter chaff blows away in the wind. It has no value. It is absolutely worthless. It is waste. That’s what the wicked are like in God’s eyes. This is a sobering thought for us. Psalm 1 makes plain that there are two roads on which we can travel. These two images make clear what the people who travel each of these roads are like.
So it is that we aren’t too surprised by the final two verses of this psalm as we discover what happens to those who travel each of these roads. There will be a separation between the righteous and the wicked. Those who have come to know God’s word and seek to answer him find that the Lord watches over their way. Those who mock the Lord and seek to follow their own desires find themselves excluded from the assembly of the righteous. They perish with no one to speak to them or for them.
This is a strange invitation to prayer isn’t it? There are relatively few who willingly and openly mock God. No one wants to be counted with the wicked, yet the psalm makes it clear that some are because they refuse to acknowledge that God has spoken to us first and so their lives are lived not seeking to answer God but throwing up their fist at him.
It’s tempting to think of ourselves as the blessed ones. We are after all, very serious about our faith. But to think of ourselves as the blessed ones is a lie. To do so ignores God’s word to us that reveals the fact that we are wicked and without hope of delighting in his law. When we lie to ourselves in this way we set up idols and we are no longer able to answer God’s Word to us. We are lost; hopelessly headed down the wrong path.
Thanks be to God that there is One who knows the right path. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection prove that he knows the way. Jesus calls the wicked to himself and says, “Come follow me.” Jesus is able to stand in the judgment bringing all those who follow him into the assembly of the righteous. As we follow Jesus we are enabled to delight in the word of God, for the word gets into our hearts and minds so that we can actually understand what God has spoken to us and then answer him with integrity.
Psalm 1 is an invitation and an introduction, offering us the opportunity to follow one of two paths. Which one are you following?
May it be that we all turn from wickedness, follow Jesus, and be numbered with the blessed.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms As Tools for Prayer, San Francisco: Harper, 1989. While I don’t directly quote Peterson in this sermon, his book forms much of my thinking about how the Psalms direct us to answer God, so Peterson’s thoughts and ideas are a part of this sermon and should be acknowledged.
[2] James M. Boice, Psalms vol 1: Psalms 1-41: An Expositional Commentary, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994, 15.