article on a website, one of the top seminaries in the Reformed Circles website. And it was an article on Pope It Habits. And it's funny because one habit that they mentioned, and it was just kind of discussing people's pastors, personal habits that they have when they're behind the Pope it or here. Some tap, some, do a funny one guy talked about how he scuffed up, he had to buy a new pair of shoes every month because he was scuffing them up as he was preaching, he would rub his foot against the carpet. But one individual talked about how excited they would get, whenever it was time to read, when they let worship, and they had to read or sing from the hymns, if they opened up when they exact him, how excited they would get. And I laughed because I was Jarvis, Minister Singleton announced the second hymn, I landed I was just one page away, so I just wanted to share that with you, thought it was funny. And yeah, so it's good to share in that joy in the Psalms, there are a collection of many things, but songs and praises is one of them, so we share in the praises of those who wrote these Psalms, and most importantly Christ, who sings them with us. Again, our passage for this evening is the first Psalm, Psalm number one, and I'll read it again. Our main focus would be verses one and two, but we'll read it all for contextual purposes and we'll also reflect on some of the other verses or the Psalm as a whole. So again, Psalm number one, beginning in verse one, this is God's own holy word, and it reads, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. And on his law, he meditates day and night. He's like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither, and all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like the chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous, for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. Once again, I would have you all bowed with me as we go before God in prayer once more. Our gracious God and our Heavenly Father, Lord, once again, we call on you. We trust in you, Lord, to do all things at this time. Now Lord, your word is open, and you speak. So God, help us to pay careful and close attention to what thuseth the Lord. Not any man, Lord, not me, but you. I give us everything that we need right now. We come in thinking we know what we need, Lord, but we pray that you will give us what you know that we need. Bless us to hear, bless us to see, bless us to elevate our Lord and Savior. May you get the glory. Again, it's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen. Amen, as we, I guess going to the second week of September, it helps me to notice kind of how time just seems to fly by, but also how much further we drift away from summer, and that's a good thing, not a bad thing, because for myself and many of us, we're able to go back to work, our students have returned back to school, and that means that our teachers are back in their classrooms. And I pray that everything is going well in those classrooms, for me to ensure that that's the case, I actually spent the first week, the entire week, with my students going over, implementing, practicing our procedures and our rules, and we call them expectations in my class. And I have a slideshow that's dedicated to my expectations. And by the time that that presentation is over with, when I go to switch on the lights, every student in my room is an absolute complete silence, and our eyes are wide open. And it's because of this, my expectations are high expectations, not going to lie. But see, this is what actually is happening when I'm showing my students, or telling them about my expectations, what's really going on is that I'm actually showing them the model student. I'm telling my students what the ideal perfect student looks like, because that's what I want in my class, only perfect students, of course I won't get that. Psalm 1 gives us a concise and a crafty, beautiful description of the model man. Psalm 1 describes the type of person that you and I, that we should strive to be, to want to be. The ideal man, and it does this by presenting to us the two paths that everyone in this life will travel on, or the two paths that everyone in this life will choose out of. And that's the righteous, or the way of the righteous, and the way of the wicked. In fact, many of your Bibles may give that heading to Psalm 1, the way of the righteous, the way of the wicked, or the two ways. Psalm 1, what it's doing, it's telling us that there is the righteous man or person. And this righteous person stands as the model. When it shows us these two paths, it's put in an emphasis on the way of the righteous. And again, thereby showing us that this is the way, this is the person who is the model. And it calls him blessed. Now in the Hebrew, that word blessed is different, is translated from different words into our English Old Testament. Here, that word is ashrai, ashrai, happiness, happy, ashrai haish, happy, happy, ashrai haish. Happy is the man, happy is the man. First thing that the Psalm gives us is this, it's the description of the man in the negative. That's the first thing that we'll see. Once the highlighting shows us that, the description of this man in the negative, Psalm 1 tells us about the blessed man. The happy or the righteous man by first telling us what it is that he is not, or better yet brothers and sisters, by pointing out what it is that he does not do. Kind of follow me here. In the first verse, we read three things. Number one, the man who was blessed, he does not walk in the counsel of the wicked. The man who was blessed, he does not stand in the way of sinners, and the man who is blessed or happy. Well he does not sit in the seat of scoffers. The Psalms are lyric poems, and the poetic devices that we find in Hebrew, there's meter kind of like a rhythm, like English poetry, but there's no rhyme in Hebrew, instead there's parallelism. There's parallelism, and for the sake of time what I'm going to do is just kind of outline some of the parallelism that we see occurring in this song. In verse one, we have synthetic parallelism, and that's actually not parallelism at all. The best way to describe it, because it's so broad, is that if you don't identify that parallel as synonymous or antithetical to more that we'll talk about in just a moment then it's probably synthetic. Verse one says, bless is the man, and it goes on to tell us about this blessed man by telling us something else. Again, he does not walk in the counsel of the wicked. He doesn't stand in the way of the sinner, and he does not sit in the seat of scoffers. But in verse two has a synonymous parallelism. In verse two we read, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and it repeats that using the different terms on his law he meditates day and night. In other words again, therefore you see his delight is in the law of the Lord, because he meditates on it day and night, synonymous parallelism. Then in verse three we have emblematic parallelism. There's an image showing or imagery with the tree and the shaft, the shape. And then in verse five we have, again, synonymous parallelism where we read, therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. Again, just restatement. Stating again what was already said, and then finally in verse six there's antithetical parallelism. And we read in verse six, for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, and in contrast, or the opposite of that, antithetical parallelism, says the opposite, but the way of the wicked will perish. Now what may also stand out, maybe a little more easier than a parallelism here, is at least the slightest progression that we see. We see it with the verbs used in verse one, walk, sit, or walk, stand, sit. And somewhat with the nouns, we see wicked, sinner, and then the scoffer. Now most scholars would agree that word, or the terms of wicked and sinner, they're interchangeable. They actually mean the same thing, but there's definitely a progression from the wicked or the sinner to the scoffer. And that's a little more easier to identify. So what is it that the song is saying so far, when we take together the progression that we see of one who walks, not in the counsel of the wicked. He doesn't sit at the seat of the, or with scoffers, and he doesn't stand in the way of sinners. And when we see the parallels, what is it that the song is first trying to tell us? Well number one, it's telling us that the blessed man is the man who is not falling into the trap of this world. Follow me. In the fallen world, it has become what we say normal to sin. It has become normal to sin. In fact, it's the one who doesn't follow the ways of the world that is often mocked and called weird. You see, you can, I guess, understand this if you think about maybe your children or yourself in school, I teach. So I see it all the time. Obviously a student who may come in, and the rules say that the shirts are supposed to be tucked in, and that should be the standard, the normal standard. But there are those who don't want to follow the rules. And so it's become so normal to break the rules that the one, the student who tucks in the shirt, is ridiculed and he feels ashamed for doing the right thing. That's what we find in this world. You see, that's why it's easy to fall into the trap of the world, brothers and sisters, because of the nature of this world. And this is what that progression looks like. First, it starts off this way by walking in the council of the ungodly, right, you kind of just passing through life and you're picking up on some of the advice of the sinner. Obviously my brother, he showed me a video of Louis Ferrican. And he was actually on a, what was supposed to be a Christian television network. We used that term loosely. But on this broadcast, he spoke about, I guess, the term oils that people are facing socially today. And he went on to say that the Christians, or the pastors, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. The Christian pastors ought to be ashamed of themselves because they try to put their cowardice on Jesus. He said, Jesus was not a coward. The forgiveness that you hear about, listen, he was not about that. And you pastors ought to be ashamed of yourselves because the people in your community are being troubled, they're facing turmoil and you're talking about forgiving. See, that's the council of the wicked because I saw many people there who would hope, if they called themselves Christians, profess faith in Christ, yet they nodded. And even the pastor who was on stage with him, kind of shook and said, he felt uneasy you could tell. But maybe he started to think, you know what, you're right. And I saw the manifestation of this because secondly, we talk about the standing in the way of the sinner. We say it starts off as just taking the advice of the wicked. But then you kind of start to settle down and get used to their ways. The gossiping doesn't become or doesn't seem as bad anymore. Cheating and lying, they become little things. And I said, I saw the manifestation of this because again, someone brought it to my attention a video of a local pastor who I heard kind of quoting what I saw from Farrakhan on that network. And this guy pastors, what's supposed to be again, a Christian church. And he told his people that forgiveness, we are, we're too forgiving, we're too forgiving. See, we go from kind of just walking and passing and taking the advice to kind of now just settling in it, to where Christians who were saved by grace, forgiven by a holy God start to think that they have a limitation to their forgiveness. And then it goes from there and progresses again. And then by now we're sitting and we're comfortable and sitting at the seat of scholars. And those aren't just the sinners who miss the mark. These are people who ridicule, who mock righteousness. As we read in the following verse where we see that there's delight in the law, the scoffers, they mock the good things, again making it weird to be right. That's the first thing, the blessed man, however, he's not like this. And if the apostle Paul was preaching Psalm 1, he would probably say about the blessed man that this man has not been conformed to the world. That's the picture that we get with the blessed man. He goes from, not, it goes from telling us what he does not do, and our second point that we want to look at is the positive description of what the man does do. So we first see the description of this man in the negative. He's a man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked. He doesn't stand in the way of the sinner and he dare not get comfortable and scorn and mock what is right. But what is it that he does do? Well, here's the positive description that this Psalm gives us of the man, and there seems to be some sort of parallelism again between verses 1 and 2 along with the parallelism that we already find in those verses by themselves. You understand what I'm saying? There's parallelism in verse 1 and verse 2. But then if we take those verses together as a whole, verse 1 and verse 2 kind of parallel each other as well, and I would guess, or venture to say, that is, it's antithetical. It's the opposite of what was stated. But you would think that after listening what it is that the man doesn't do, the parallel would go on to say in the positive what it is that he doesn't do, right? It's said that he, or what it is that he does do, it's said that he doesn't walk in the way of the sinner, or the wicked, he doesn't stand in the way of the sinner. He doesn't sit at the seat of the scoffer. You would think that the parallel would now tell us what he does walk in. He walks in the way of the righteous, or he stands in the way of the godly, and he sits at the seat of those who are holy. But it doesn't do that. It doesn't tell us any positive action at all brothers and sisters. This is what it says. It simply says that he delights in the law of the Lord. There's a parallel. It tells us what he doesn't do, but then when it goes on to talk in the positive, it doesn't give us an action at all, a physical action at all brothers and sisters, again, this contrast is not a physical action, notice what it is, it is a condition of his heart. You understand what I'm trying to say? Hopefully you're getting it by now. When was the last time I'm going to ask you that you flipped on your delight switch so that what you did not delight in, all you did was just change your mind, and you began to delight in it. You could do that. I'm sure Mr. Singleton would agree with me. It would be easier to feed the babies, their vegetables at night, or just flip the switch and they go from not liking the greens to liking them, or better yet work. Wouldn't it be easy to just that morning when you don't feel like getting up, when you're tired of that same old job, doesn't pay enough, just flip on it, just change your delight and begin to delight in that job, but you see it's not that easy, it's not that simple because by nature, brothers and sisters, we delight in what we delight in. And now here's what you asked yourself, well what is it that I do delight in? Romans 3 tells us that there's none who are good, not even one, right? We don't seek God, and we surely don't delight in God's law by their fallen nature. They are opposed to it, by their fallen nature they're opposed to it. As verse 1 said, they mock it, and the difference that we see, or that the song tries to highlight between the blessed man and the sinner is simply the difference in their hearts, brothers and sisters. Because of that, they behave in two different ways, and understand that because the blessed man has a different heart condition, he does not walk in the same way that the wicked walks in, only because of the difference in their heart, because of the heart of the blessed man. The happy man, because of his heart condition, is the reason that he does not stand in the same way that sinners stand. Because of his heart condition, he doesn't sit at the seat of scoffers, and mock what should be delighted in. And I hope by now again that you're starting to figure this out. I hope you're starting to see where we're kind of going with this, so finally we'll get to our third point, and the song I think, thirdly, kind of prompts us to ask this question. First it shows us the negative description of this man, the model man, the ideal man, what every man should have seen to be. And it shows us the description of him and the negative, but then it goes on to give us a positive description, and that positive description does not include any works or deeds. It just tells us about his heart. And so thirdly, I think the song would have us ask ourselves, which man am I? Act yourself. As you look at someone, act yourself. There's only two. We said that the song paves out only two ways in life. There's no third way. There's no middle ground. Jesus himself gave us two paths, the narrow and the white path. And so there's two ways. There are two men. Which one are you? Which one am I? There's three answers to this quiz. A is the blessed man. Maybe you're him. Or B, maybe you're the wicked man. And then there's the third option, C, all of the above. So which man are you? A, your B, your C. And I'm going to do something that I don't allow in my class. I'm going to let you see the answer, key. I'm going to let you see my answer and cheat off of me. Because brothers and sisters, my prayer is that we get this right. But depending on the individual, I will warn you answers. May vary. Now, if you say that, hey, I'm B, you could be right. Because all of us are born after Adam. And as we know, Adam did not remain the model ideal, perfect man. He sinned. And we know that his sin has affected us. And so you may be right. You may be that wicked person. But I hope we'll get back to that. And then you may say, well, maybe I'm A. And again, you could be right. You could be getting really close. Or you may be way and left filled. It all depends on how you arrive to that answer. Those two will revisit. But for any of us in here who call ourselves Christians, we've been called out of darkness and to light. Christ is our joy, our hope. If that's you, then your answer should be C. Yeah. I'm both of these people. But it starts off. And I think this song, we're going to walk through it again. And this song kind of meets us right where we're at. Because brothers and sisters, before we can call ourselves the blessed man here, we have to understand that no, we actually start off as the wicked. You see, song one, again, it meets us where we're at. Number one, blessed is the man. That's not us. But here we are who walk not in the counsel of us, the wicked, who stands not in the way of the sinners, us, and who sits or doesn't sit at the seat with the scoffers. So there's a blessed man, the Hebrew for that word is Ish Hayesh. And it actually means one certain specific individual. So when I say the model man, that's what this song is showing us. What it is, happy is this particular man, but that's not us, not as we are brothers and sisters. I know we like to read into the Psalms and find ourselves there and we'll get there, but by now I pray that you see Christ here first. I pray that you would see the blessed man and desire the joy that he has because the happiness that it speaks about isn't an excitement that you feel when everything's going right. Happy is the man, it's explaining a man who has a joy unspeakable even when everything around him is wrong. That's the man who's blessed. He's happy in that sense. And so as we walk through, we see blessed is the man who doesn't walk in the counsel of the wicked, stands in the way of the sinners, sit at the seat of scoffers. Just for a moment, turn with me to the book of Hebrews. We're going to look at chapter 1 and verse 9. Now notice what it says, speaking of Christ. Speaking of Christ, you Christ have loved righteousness and hated wickedness. Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness, happiness beyond your companions. Now, we know that the writer of Hebrews is referring to Christ, of course, and it's funny how it reflects the blessed man that we have here in Psalms. There's no coincidence, but as we go on a little further, turn with me back to Psalms 1.
As we go back, we notice that there is a blessed man and who brothers and sisters would you say is a blessed man who never walked in the counsel of the wicked. Maybe some of us are slow to listen to sinners, maybe, but I'm sure you've had your taxes done and you've taken some advice from the wicked. I'm sure that there's been days where you two did not feel like forgiving and you took your cues, not from the Word of God, but you took your cues from the Word and did not forgive. I'm sure we have not and we don't consistently walk in the way of the righteous. This can't be talking about us. As we go on it says that his delight is in the Lord the Lord, who is the blessed man who's the light is in the Lord the Lord so much that he meditates on it day and night, not just when trouble comes. What we think of Christ as he's out in the wilderness being tempted by Satan and he's hungry and as he surely could turn a stone into a loaf of bread, he makes it clear that his delight, his food which he prefers is the Word of God and so he meditates on it day and night in Christ the lighted in his Word. We go on to read that this blessed man is like a tree planted by the streams of water Christ became a man, aren't you glad that he became a man so that he can't qualify as this blessed man and as a man he didn't depend on his deity to defeat Satan. You know Christ was able to remain a perfect man as Adam should have been because he utilized all the resources that he had in God the Father, his Word and the Spirit and so this man Christ, the blessed man was planted like a tree and he got his supply from another source of brothers and sisters in Christ we do become the blessed and when we get to this next verse there's a switch and that's the good news. We are the wicked at the beginning. We are not the blessed man, the model man, but when our faith is put in Christ when God changes our hearts so that we can delight in the law of the Lord because none of us can do it on our own. And that does happen brothers and sisters there's a switch and Christ becomes though he wasn't wicked, he becomes as the wicked and he didn't stand in the judgment on the cross. He didn't stand on the judgment, he was born away like the chaff and we stood and we stand as the righteous verse six for the Lord knows the way of the righteous but the way of the wicked will perish. Christ starts off as the blessed man here and we start off as the wicked and as things progressed I pray that we see that all what great joy it is that we are counted as the happy the blessed because we delight in his law because God has changed our hearts and so now Christ makes us the tree planted and we get our source from him and he becomes the wicked who stands and God's judgment takes our judgment for us and so we as we read in John for God so love the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him brothers and sisters will not perish but we will have everlasting life. I pray that we see Christ in the song, song one because he fulfills it. We said that it's a song that shows us the model man and that model man is not us. It does not tell us that if we don't walk in that council, if we don't stand in the way of the center, if we don't sit at the seat with scholars, then we can make ourselves the blessed man because it won't happen. But it does tell us that when our delight is on God's law and God is promised and he has given us new hearts that can delight in it just by that delight just because of our joy in the Torah law instruction which is grounded in the covenant because of our joy in that covenant promise we are considered the blessed. See Christ as the blessed, see ourselves as the wicked and then because of him we can then see ourselves as now being blessed. What does this mean for us brothers and sisters? I know we like to hear, do this. Maybe if I told you what to take from here and do, go and do, be a little more excited. I pray that your hearts are moved to hear that this model man that we see here, this perfect righteous man is now counted as us and him. I hope that moves you with that said, let us pray. A gracious God and Heavenly Father, O Lord what joy it is to see in this song, a man who is called happy. Lord you were a man of sorrows but God, Lord Jesus, your joy was in that cross because you saw the salvation of your people and so you truly are the blessed and happy man and God we see ourselves as the wicked. You lived among wicked men but you did not sit, stand or take any advice from them Lord instead you took their punishment and you turned this song around. So bless us God to take joy and seeing you here so that we can see ourselves here. Bless us now Lord as we close, give us strength. We thank you for this and all things and it's in Jesus mighty, sweet, precious name that we pray. Amen. Amen.