Introduction: Summer in the Psalms

We have come to the beginning of our journey in the book of Psalms. We will probably be in and out of Psalms for the next several summers. The Psalms are unique in scripture, and when I first became a Christian, I didn’t understand the Psalms. I didn’t have a category for them. I remember being in high school in 1998, and there was a song that came out called ‘Iris’ by the Goo Goo Dolls.

I was a junior in high school at this time, and I remember listening to this song. This song caused an unbelievable, powerful thing inside of me because there had been these emotions and sentiments that I had been feeling for several years. Then I heard this song, Iris, and it put to words things I had been feeling for years that I never knew how to articulate. ‘I don’t want the world to see me, because I don’t think that they’d understand.”

I remember I was talking to one of the youth leaders at our church, and I was telling her about how I love this song because it resonates with my soul. This guy feels what I feel, I’m not alone in the world in feeling these emotions. Someone else gets me and is singing about it, and I can sing about it in my bedroom, yelling at the top of my lungs, singing this song.

The youth leader at my church said to me, You know, that’s what the Psalms do for us. That part of scripture that God has put right in the middle of the Bible. They put words to things that many of us are feeling that we’re unable to articulate. The Holy Spirit has given us this gift of the Psalms that put words to reflections, meditations, prayers, and laments. They’re put down so that you can read them and know you’re not alone.

Not long after, I came across a music artist by the name of Shane Bernard. He would later team up with another guy named Shane, and they would become the band we know today as Shane and Shane. But Shane Bernard was sort of an unknown artist in the late 90s, and one of his early albums was called Psalms. In that album, he put to music a dozen or so psalms. I remember listening to that in my bedroom by myself on a CD.

I remember him singing from Psalm 103. The Lord is gracious, he’s slow to anger. He is rich in love. He is good to us. I remember reading or listening to these songs and thinking, wow, what a gift that God has given us, the Psalms, to put to words the things that are inside of us that he wants us to articulate.

The Psalms are incredibly valuable, and it took me several years to really appreciate the Psalms and understand them. But the more I spent time in the Psalms, as I grew in my late teen years and in my 20s, it began to shape me. The Psalms have shaped how I pray. It gave me vocabulary that I didn’t have before.

The Psalms taught me how to sing to God. I remember listening to some old hymns and recognizing some of the language in hymns. Oh, that was borrowed from these Psalms. The Psalms also taught me how to grieve and to cry. The Psalms are a powerful gift from God to us that are immensely helpful to us in so many ways, and therefore, they are worthy of our study. They’re worthy of our attention.

This morning, if you’re not familiar with the Psalms, I want to give you a quick overview of the entire book of Psalms. Then we’re going to hone in on Psalm Chapter One. Specifically, I want to give you a tool on how to read the Psalms. I want to give you some basic, tangible things to do when you’re reading the Psalms that will make it much more helpful to you. We’re going to look at Psalm 1, and I’m going to model how we can examine the passage. Before we do that, let’s ask God for his help one more time.

God, would you help us understand the Psalms? God, thank you for this gift. May it profoundly shape how we live, how we pray, how we sing, how we cry, and how we see you. Would you help us now? Would you be pleased to glorify yourself through Psalm Chapter One? I ask in Christ’s name. Amen.

Overview of Psalms

If you don’t know this, the Psalms are not one book. It’s not one writing. It’s a collection of writings. There are one hundred and fifty different writings. Seventy-five of them are written by a man we call King David. Some of them were written early in his life, before he became king, some were written during his reign, and some were written immediately after he was ousted from being the king.

David wrote about half of the Psalms. These Psalms were written over about a thousand years. So the earliest Psalm was probably written somewhere around 1500 BC. The last Psalm was written somewhere around 500 BC. These Psalms were written through human beings by the Spirit of God. Soon after the last Psalm was written, they were compiled together by Jewish leadership and prophets in the nation of Israel, after they came out of exile.

So the Jewish people had been in exile as slaves in Babylon. Then, after 70 years, God rescues them, and they come back into the promised land. While they are there, around 500 B.C., they compile these Psalms. They organize them not chronologically, but thematically. The Psalms are not in order. Psalm 1 was not the first one written. Psalm 150 is probably not the last one that was written, although Bible scholars argue over that. But the first one written was probably either Psalm 29 or Psalm 90.

When the Psalms are collected, they’re put together by themes in five different books. Book one, all of those Psalms, they all fit a particular theme. Book two fits a theme. The five books of Psalms all have their five different themes, and they tell a story. At the beginning of each of the five books, the Psalm that was placed there lays the foundation for the rest of the Psalms that are in that book.

Traditionally, this collection of 150 distinct writings has been known as the ‘Psalter’. That’s the traditional word for the book of Psalms. We don’t use that word much in our contemporary Christian circles, but the Book of Psalms was traditionally called the Psalter. It was organized in five books thematically, not chronologically. That’s the overall structure.

Two other important things to know about the Book of Psalms, the Psalter, are that all of the Psalms are poems. They are written in ancient Hebrew poetic style. Since it’s poetry, it uses a bunch of different poetic literary mechanisms. That’s important because that helps us interpret the Psalms a little bit better. It’s not just straightforward prose, it’s not just history, although there are elements of history, but there’s poetic commentary on history.

The history is told in a poetic fashion using metaphors and imagery. It’s important to understand that when you’re reading the Psalms, it’s not the same as reading the book of Hebrews. It’s drastically different style demands a different type of hermeneutic, a different approach.

The last thing I’ll give you this morning is that all of the Psalms are songs. They were put to music. There’s a rhythm, there’s a cadence, because they’re meant to be sung. The Jewish people, all throughout their history and especially after they came out of Babylon and came back into the promised land, would have used the Psalms as their hymnbook.

The early Christians did this too. When we look back at early church records, the bulk of the singing of the early church in the first, second, and third centuries was the Psalms. Certain psalms were especially popular. In the region of Antioch (the modern day northern part of Israel, Syria, and Jordan), the churches in that region, for about 200 years, sang Psalm 63 at the beginning of their worship gathering every single Sunday.

They looked at Psalm 63 as so valuable, all of the churches in that region would sing that same Psalm at the beginning of the worship service every single week for about 250 years. They valued it that much. Throughout church history, the early church and in the Middle Medieval era, Psalms were the primary way Christians worshiped God in music.

Hymns came on the scene in the early Middle Ages. You start seeing some hymns appear in the middle part of the Medieval era. There are some hymns, but it’s predominantly Psalms. Up until the Reformation era, hymns made significant inroads into music. For the first 1500 years of the church, it was mostly Psalms. From the 1500s up until the mid-1800s, there is about a 300-year period where there’s a slow progression when Psalms are getting less popular in church services and hymns are becoming a little more popular.

There’s this trade off. By the time you get to the mid-1800s, hymns dominate singing in churches. By the time we get to the late 1800s, especially. From the late 1800s up until about the 1970s, what we call hymns today really dominated music singing. In the 1970s, 1980s, we began to see a shift toward what we now would call contemporary worship music.

Although hymns still have a place, they’re still around. We like to do hymns here. Contemporary worship music has dominated over the last 40, 50 years or so. But Psalms dominated church history. Now I’m not advocating that we go back to that necessarily, although there probably could be a good argument to be made for that. I’m not saying that we should do that. I’m just giving you history.

The Psalms were extremely important to Christians for a really long time. It’s a part of our Christian heritage to care deeply about the Psalms. I think it’s a heritage we ought to wholeheartedly embrace. Make the Psalms a big part of your life. The best Bible reading plans are the ones that include Psalms daily. There are Bible reading plans that will have you read a little bit from this book, and then cap off your reading for the day with a Psalm or two. Those would be the ones I would commend to you. So that’s the overview and introduction to the book of Psalms.

How to Read the Psalms

The next thing I want to highlight is that there are two different ways to read the Psalms. There are two different approaches. There’s more than just two, but we will focus on two of the main approaches. You can read the bible anthropologically, or you can read the Psalms Christologically. The anthropological reading of Psalms is that you read a Psalm as if it’s written by a human being, for human beings, because we are human beings reading it. You’re asking, how can I become a better human being?

That’s the anthropological reading of the Psalms, and that’s a very helpful. There’s immense goodness in reading the Psalms that way. That’s how most Christians in America read the Psalms. Read Psalm 1. It’s going to talk about the blessed man. You’re going to ask yourself, I want to be a blessed man. What must I do to be more blessed?

That’s the anthropological reading of a psalm, and we should do that. There’s a lot to be learned from an anthropological reading of the Psalms. However, you should not stop there. You should go beyond that. You should read the Psalms anthropologically, as well as Christologically. Meaning, you’re asking yourself, how does this Psalm reveal Jesus Christ?

Christ is the hero of the story. So I want to ask myself, what is it in this Psalm that gives me better insight into the person and work of Jesus Christ? This is where most modern American Christians fail in the reading of Psalms. This is not a very common thing, but I want to commend you to do this when you’re reading the Psalms. An anthropological reading and a Christological reading are both useful to us; they are not mutually exclusive. We want to make use of both of those.

Anthropological Reading

We’re going to look at Psalm chapter 1, and I want to give you a model for how to do both of these. The first Psalm was written by David. He starts off by talking about the blessed man. The opening phrase is ‘Blessed is the man who’. It begins to describe how that man behaves. That’s his goal. He gives us a description, and in essence, the idea of the blessed man is any person who lives like this.

Then I want to read Psalm 1 and go, How does the blessed man live so that I can live like that and be blessed? That’s the anthropological reading. Before we get to that, it would be valuable for us to define the word blessed. What does it mean to be blessed? Often, we refer to blessings as material blessings. If someone is, let’s say, financially wealthy, we may say, that person is really blessed. Or if someone has a lot of gifts or talents, we may say that person’s really gifted, they’re blessed.

That’s not necessarily the wrong way to use that language. I remember when I first got married and soon thereafter we had our first child, Lettie. I remember one of my friends saying, Kenny, you are so blessed. You’ve got a great wife, a great kid, and you are so blessed. That was true. That’s an appropriate way to use that language. You’ll hear people say, Count your blessings. What they mean is, be cognizant, acknowledge all the good stuff that’s come your way. Count your blessings.

Again, that’s not necessarily a wrong use of the word. But it’s not the only way to use the word blessed. It’s not even the primary way. When the psalmists are writing the Psalms, that’s not the primary way they use the word bless. The word bless is used 27 times in the Psalms. Every time you get the sense of a state of being, a state of emotions. Psalm 32 says this:

“Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity.”

Being blessed is the person who knows he’s been forgiven and becomes blessed. When you know you’re forgiven, it does something in you. Psalm 65:4, the psalmist speaking to God, says:

“Blessed is the one that you, God, choose to bring near to dwell in your courts. He shall be satisfied with goodness.”

You get the sense that to be blessed is to have been drawn close to God and to be satisfied by him, to be satisfied by God. Psalm 89 says this in verse 15:

“Blessed are the people who know the festal shout.”

You want to see a blessed man, the person who knows how to celebrate and shout because he’s seen the goodness of God. You get the image, the sense that to be blessed means that you know something about God that has satisfied you or has birthed joy in your soul, and it makes you want to shout and celebrate.

To be blessed is to be satisfied and happy in God, not necessarily to have a bunch of stuff. Now, if God has given you a bunch of stuff and you recognize these are gifts from God, and it causes you to be satisfied in him, then those blessings are helpful. But you don’t necessarily have to have a bunch of good stuff, humanly speaking or materially speaking. To be blessed is to be happy, because you know who God is.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to interchange the word blessed there with satisfied, happy, or fulfilled. The blessed man is the happy man, the satisfied man, the fulfilled man. So what the writer David is doing here is saying, you want to be happy. I think we all want to be happy. You want to be satisfied in this life, you want to be fulfilled. Let me tell you how that person behaves. Then he begins to give us some behavior in the first two verses. He gives us a picture of how the blessed man functions. The result of being blessed is this: look at verse 3:

“He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.”

What an unbelievable image. In 2008, I was in Thailand on a short-term mission trip. I was leading a group. My assignment was to lead 70 high school students to the nation of Thailand for two months. As a part of our trip, we ended up in Chiang Rai, which is the very northern part of Thailand, at a place called the Golden Triangle.

This is where Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar, also known as Burma, come together. The Mekong River comes down from Tibet, China, and flows through this region. The Mekong River, one of the largest, fastest-paced rivers in the world. We went up there and we did some speedboats on the Mekong River. The Mekong River is almost 3,000 miles long. It’s the third-longest river in Asia. In some places it’s as much as a mile wide, and in some places as much as 300ft deep. At the Golden Triangle, it’s much less than that. It’s only a fifth of a mile wide, and it’s only about 100 feet deep.

But it’s pretty big and pretty long, and it’s known as one of the fastest-paced rivers in the world. But it’s remarkable. When we were on these speedboats traveling up the river, you’ll find right in the middle of the Mekong River, you’ll find these trees called Lam Sung Trees. Some of these trees come up 20 feet above the river. The river is 100 to 150 feet deep. It means these trees are 100 to 170 feet tall.

They go down deep into the riverbed, and they just stick up out of the river. They are solid and strong. There’s no movement to these trees. It’s unbelievable. I remember thinking to myself, you have this river, all this water coming fast, pounding these trees, and they just stand immovable. I think that’s the picture the psalmist wants us to have when he says that the blessed man is like a tree planted along the streams of water. Water comes at it, nothing fazes the blessed man. If you’re truly happy in God, satisfied, fulfilled in God, the cares of this world come at you. They pummel you, they hit you, they hurt you, but you stand firm. The only way to do that is to be planted in God, to know him, to know his forgiveness, and to allow that to satisfy your soul.

The blessed man is planted firmly. He yields fruit. His leaves, they don’t wither. It’s a remarkable thing to consider. We all want this blessedness. I want to be blessed. I want to be stable in that way. I don’t want to be tossed about by the cares of this world. In our vision statement here at Horizon City, it has five pillars to it, five tenets. The first one is that we want to be a community of believers who possess steadfast happiness inspired by the grandeur of God.

That’s our number one goal. I want to present you with the grandeur of God, the bigness, the awesome, the beauty of God, for you to see it, for that to inspire in you a deep, strong happiness that doesn’t move, no matter what you face. So that when the cares of this world come at you, you stand strong and nothing knocks you over.

We want to be Christians who possess a steadfast happiness that’s been inspired by the grandeur of God. David calls that man blessed. David then gives us some instructions. Again, this is still the anthropological reading. He’s a human being, writing to human beings, explaining how you can be a better human being. In the early verses, he gives us a description. This sermon almost writes itself. If you look at the first two verses of Psalm 1, he says, speaking of the blessed man:

“He walks not in the council 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. Day and night.”

He gives us four things. This could be an easy, four-point sermon. Three things not to do, one thing to do. You go through each one of these, and you explain them. It’s a great anthropological sermon, and it would be a good sermon. It’s helpful to read the Bible in that way.

Two Pathways

The imagery we get here is two pathways. There’s a pathway that the righteous people go down, and there’s a pathway that wicked people go down. The psalmist David is saying, Don’t listen to the counsel of the people who are willing to go down the pathway of wickedness. It’s going to be bad for you. You won’t be blessed if you listen to those people. Don’t take advice from those people.

Some people embrace wickedness. Don’t listen to them. Some people believe wicked things. Don’t take their advice, ignore their counsel. You don’t have to listen to and tolerate every idea out there. Sometimes it’s okay to reject and ignore. Some people engage in behaviors that God says are disgusting, that are gross, abominations, wicked, and harmful. The psalmist is saying, people who do those things, it’s okay to ignore their advice.

There will be people who engage in behaviors that are contrary to God’s law, and they will look at you and expect you to do more of what they do. The psalmist is saying, You want to be happy, you want to be stable. You want to be like the one planted by the tree, the tree planted by the river. Don’t go that way. Turn your ear off when those people are talking to you.

Some people will champion and advocate for wicked behavior and wicked ideas, and we are to ignore them. There’s an interesting phrase in this section here. ‘The seat of scoffers’. The word ‘seat’ refers to proximity. If I said to you, Washington, D.C. is the seat of our nation’s capital, if you go to D.C., you will be in proximity to a certain type of person, to certain types of events. You’ll be in the seat. So what David, the writer of the Psalm, is saying is, don’t sit in the seat of scoffers. Don’t put yourself in proximity to those who feel the need to mock God or mock our Christian values.

We all know these people who are the super hostile type. The person who’s the secular progressive atheist who’s hostile toward Christian faith, hostile toward deism. They mock you. Ignore those people. Turn off the YouTube channel. Don’t listen to that podcast. There’s a group of people that we have to be very careful who we get close to and who we allow to influence us. The writer David is saying there are scoffers. Be careful how close you get to scoffers.

It will be impossible for you to be blessed, for you to be happy, for you to be satisfied, for you to be stable if you have a lot of scoffers influencing how you think. Now, certainly, we want to be friends with people like that because we want to share the gospel. We want to befriend them, we want to win them to Christ. We want to share the goodness and kindness of God.

However, it’s really easy for them to influence you and hard for you to influence them. That should inform how you engage with those types of people. It doesn’t mean you reject them. It doesn’t mean you’re a jerk to them, doesn’t mean you ostracize them. But it does mean you’re very cautious in how you engage in conversation and how much time you spend and how much access to your life you give those types of people.

Galatians, chapter 6. The apostle Paul tells us in the first verse of Galatians 6 that we ought to go to those who are in sin and rebuke them, correct them with gentleness. Then he says in the latter part of the chapter, in verse 1 of chapter 6,

“But be careful that you yourself are not dragged in.”

Be careful that you yourself are not polluted, another translation says. The apostle Paul knows it’s easy in your desire to hang out with wicked people, in your desire to win them over for Christ. It’s easy for you to get sucked into their sin. It’s really hard to pull them out of their sin. That ought to shape how you think about friendships.

Again, we’re always going to be kind. We always want to be gracious. We want people to see the love of Christ. But we want to be extremely careful how much access to our minds, our hearts, and our lives we give wicked people who have wicked counsel. We’ll be very careful that we don’t sit in the seat scoffers because if we do, we won’t be blessed, we won’t be happy. Don’t take advice from wicked people. Don’t take advice from the scoffers. Then he says this in verse 2. Look at it again. Speaking of the blessed man, this is what he does:

“His delight is in the law of the Lord.”

He takes the law of God and he delights in it. It makes him smile. He reads it, he devours it. Do we do that? If you don’t, you’re not likely to be happy. You’re not likely to be satisfied. If you’re wondering, why am I not fulfilled? Maybe it’s because you’re not delighting in the law of God enough. We ought to do that. The more we delight in the law of God, the more blessed we will be.

Christological Reading of Psalms

That’s the anthropological reading of Psalm 1. You can do that with all of the Psalms. It’s a human being writing to human beings seeking how to be a better human being. Very helpful. Lots of good insights on how to live our lives. But if we stop there, we’re missing something really important. That’s how the Jewish people read the Psalms, Anthropologically.

Until today, Jewish people read the Psalms as if the New Testament didn’t happen or as if the New Testament is not accurate. So we don’t want to do that. We believe the New Testament actually happened and that it accurately accounts for the life and work of Christ. We should read the Psalms as if the New Testament is real and accurate.

I recently used the illustration of the movie The Sixth Sense. You wouldn’t watch the movie The Sixth Sense not knowing the ending of the movie. The second or third time you watched the movie The Sixth Sense, you know how it ended. He’s been dead the whole time. The second or third or fourth time you watch the movie, you can’t watch it pretending like you don’t know the ending. Because you do know the ending.

So when we read the Book of Psalms, don’t read the Book of Psalms like you don’t know the ending. We know the ending. The ending is that there is one blessed man above all. His name is Jesus Christ. We want to read the Psalms in a Christological fashion. John 5:39, this is Jesus speaking to Jewish leaders:

“You search the Scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life. And it is they that bear witness of me.”

He’s saying, you guys are reading the Bible, the Old Testament, and you think that just studying the Old Testament is going to be enough to give you eternal life, but it’s not. You could be an Old Testament expert and still go to hell. The Old Testament testifies of someone, Jesus. So he’s rebuking them for reading the Old Testament and not looking for Jesus in the Old Testament. That should inform how we read the Old Testament.

He’s rebuking them, saying, Don’t read the Old Testament without looking for me. When you read the Old Testament, look for Jesus. So when I read Psalm 1 and I read it Christologically, I want to ask myself, who is the blessed man? And the answer is, His name is Jesus. If we read it only anthropologically, it fails. Am I a stable tree planted firmly in my life? No, I’m not.

Do I bear fruit in every season? Of course not. There are moments I’m not bearing fruit of the Spirit well, because I’m a sinner, and I flop. Am I unscathed by the rivers of this world? No way. I’m not that tree planted in the river. I’m like a twig floating down, being pushed by the river into the Pacific Ocean.

When we read about the blessed man in Psalm 1, do you say to yourself, That’s me. I’m killing it. Not a chance. Not a one of us. We are so flaky and so fickle and so inconsistent. We’re tossed about by situations. We’re happy one minute, exhausted the next. Feeling excited one moment, totally saddened and discouraged the next, joyful one day, disheartened the next. We’re inconsistent, irrational, overly emotional, unnecessarily subjective, and defensive.

If you read Psalm 1 and you think to yourself, I’m the blessed man, you’ve read it wrong. We read Psalm 1 and think, This is describing Jesus. Jesus is stable and faithful, not tossed about. He is the tree planted. He is the one happy in God, fully satisfied, fully fulfilled. That is Jesus. So we read Psalm 1 and go, Wow, how did you pull that off, Jesus? You are so awesome.

You know how hard it is to avoid the counsel of the wicked? We are bombarded every single day with advice and ideas from wicked people all around us, way more than we realize. We embrace it way more than we realize. Sometimes we foolishly invite wicked advice from the media we consume, the TV we watch, the podcasts we listen to, and the social media we engage with. We invite counsel from wicked people all day.

We are not the blessed one. We have to think, how Jesus lived on this planet with all the stuff that was around him, coming at him, and not walk in the way of the sinners, not do what sinners do? How did he live the human experience and not go down the pathway of wickedness when all of us have done so? You should read Psalm 1 and go, Wow, Jesus is impressive.

So many of us have bad friends with bad ideas. Terrible, wicked behaviors. In our fear, we don’t want to offend them. So we let their advice ruminate, to come into our eyes and float around our brains, float around our ideas and our homes. In the name of evangelism, in the name of being good friends, in the name of not offending, we invite people into our lives who scoff at the things we believe are true. Then we wonder why we’re not happy, why we’re not satisfied, why we’re not fulfilled.

We inevitably, foolishly end up allowing the wicked ideas and wicked people to influence us. I can’t help but think to myself, Jesus, how did you pull it off? You are even better than I thought. Then it says that the blessed man delights in the law of God. Jesus delighted in the law of God. We don’t. Maybe a little bit here or there. Do we devour the Scriptures the way we ought to?

I don’t know about you. Sometimes I come home and I’m like, I can’t. I’m chomping at the bit to go watch the next episode of whatever show my wife and I are bingeing on Netflix at that time. I just want to see the next episode. Or I want to go see the game that’s on, or I’m chomping at the bit to do this thing. I’m delighting in this thing.

How often do I delight in these things more than I delight in the law of God? The answer is almost all day, every day. But Jesus delighted in the law of God perfectly. He meditated on it day and night. See, if I read Psalm 1 anthropologically, it’s helpful to me. But if I read Psalm 1 Christologically, it humbles me and it puts my eyes on the one that deserves my worship, the blessed man, Jesus, the Christ.

Conclusion: Jesus Christ, The Blessed Man

We want to read the Bible, the Psalms in particular, Anthropologically and Christologically. Not one or the other. I want to read to you Psalm chapter 1, the first few verses. I hope this doesn’t offend anyone. But I’ve edited it slightly to give you the Christological reading of Psalm 1. I’ve edited the first few verses to put Jesus’ name in it, because he is the blessed man. Psalm 1:

‘Jesus Christ 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 Jesus Christ delights in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. Jesus Christ is like a tree planted by the streams of water. Jesus Christ yields his fruit and his leaf does not wither in all that Jesus Christ does, He prospers.’

We look to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We look at the grandeur of who he is. We are in awe of him, and that births in us the steadfast happiness that he longs for us to have. Jesus is the blessed man. Jesus obeys. He does all that a blessed man would do. He earned the right to experience the benefits of being the blessed man. Jesus earned it, not us.

Then Jesus chooses to share it with those who believe in him. Jesus is the blessed man. He did all the things that a blessed man must do to be blessed. Then he says, if you believe on me, I’m going to share with you all the benefits of being a blessed man. You’re going to experience being blessed, although you’ve not done that which needed to be done to be blessed. In Romans chapter 8, the apostle Paul is writing, he says this:

“You did not receive a spirit of slavery, but received the spirit of adoption.”

When you came to faith in Jesus, you didn’t become his slave. You were adopted into God’s family. Then he says this, Romans 8:17:

“And since we are children, we are heirs, heirs of God, coheirs with Christ.”

God the Father has given an inheritance to His Son, Jesus. We believe in Jesus, and Jesus shares his inheritance with us. For those who genuinely believe in him, for those who have trusted in Christ and in Christ alone for salvation. You receive the benefits of being blessed not because you did what you needed to do to become blessed, but because Jesus did it, and he shares his blessing with you.

So those are the two ways to read the Psalms. Anthropologically, we read the Psalms, we get some wisdom, and there’s some good instruction we can apply to our lives. We’re thankful for that. But ultimately, we read something like Psalm 1, and we go, This is what a blessed man does. I’m not that. I flop every day, and then I read it again, but Jesus does that.

Jesus does it, and he has earned a blessing, and he will ensure that he shares it with me. The blessed man is Jesus Christ, who has done on your behalf what needed to be done so that you will be blessed. Church, our hope is not built on our ability to do the right things. We are fickle and inconsistent. He is stable and reliable. In the middle of the storm, he will be the anchor that holds you. When we are weak, he is strong. He is the cornerstone of our faith. He is the blessed man.