Chuck Larsen

When Jesus spoke with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, he made it clear that the Old Testament was about himself. Then when in the upper room, he specifically included the current book of the Bible I’m looking at. He told them, “Everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” The next verse, Luke 24:25, is significant to anyone genuinely interested in understanding the Scriptures. Jesus “Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” Williams is right then when he says, “The Bible, as the written Word of God, reveals both God’s plan for the world and its center, the living Word of God, Jesus Christ (John 1:1–2, 14). Thus the psalms and the whole of the Bible must be interpreted christocentrically. As Luther puts it, in the Bible, we have the words of God, which are to be understood by the Word of God, Jesus Christ. All meditation on Scripture, therefore, and all movement in history must take us to Christ.”^[1]

How do we look at this verse christocentrically? Psalm 2:1 says, “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?” Rage is an exciting word. According to one dictionary, related words are “acerbity, acrimony, asperity; frenzy, hysteria, mania; agitation, perturbation, upset.”^[2] A word under which all of these might be is “chaos.” If God is a God of order, why all this chaos? God plans to bring order out of chaos, as demonstrated in the first book of the Bible. The world was “formless and void.” The Hebrew phrase is “tohu va bohu.” God’s spirit, through his word, hovers over the face of the deep and begins to bring order out of chaos. We read in both John’s Gospel and the book of Colossians that Jesus is the creator and the one who brings order from the chaos. There has always been war and confusion in the history of humanity. From the wars with the Canaanites in Genesis 15, through the Persian and Assyrian world conquests, Alexander the Great, the Roman empire, the countries of eastern and western Europe, the first and second world wars, the struggles in Korea, Vietnam, and the current war in Ukraine as I write this now, there has always been worldwide chaos. NATO has not been able to bring order! But Jesus will. We will see how every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. The beginning of bringing order out of chaos started in Genesis 1 and will be fulfilled with Christ’s return according to Revelation 22.

The Nations will one day unite against the King of Kings. There is a sense in which that unity has already come. All the nations’ raging for control and power throughout history will come to naught. The forces united against Jesus, and together they crucified him at Golgotha. The resurrection exposed the vanity of their raging against the true king of kings. Neither the Romans nor the King of Israel would surrender their power and position to Jesus, so they killed him. Courson says it well, “Why do the kings of the earth create federations of those who would normally be at odds with each other? I think of Herod and Pilate, an Idumean and a Roman. Normally, they would be at each other’s throats. But they came together in their hatred of Jesus, in their desire to destroy Him.”^[3]

^[1] Williams, Donald, and Lloyd J. Ogilvie. 1986. Psalms 1–72. Vol. 13. The Preacher’s Commentary Series. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc.

^[2] Merriam-Webster, Inc. 1996. In Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.

^[3] Courson, Jon. 2006. Jon Courson’s Application Commentary: Volume Two: Psalms-Malachi. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.

The first two Psalms are the introduction to the whole book. Neither of them has an intro explaining the song’s setting or its author. In some of the older manuscripts, the first Psalm is not even numbered, as are the others. Psalms 1 and 2 are combined into one Psalm in some other ancient manuscripts. That makes sense because the first Psalm begins with a beatitude, “Blessed is the one who…,” and Psalm 2 ends with a beatitude, “Blessed are all who….” The opening beatitude speaks of “one” man. Gaebelein says, The righteous, negatively, has nothing evil in him, no fellowship with sinners. Positively, he is fully obedient and devoted to God. He then acknowledges that this one man is not any of us. He says, “The godly One is the perfect One who walked down here separated from sinners and devoted to God. He walked in obedience, in dependence on God, and communion with Him, and therefore the blessing, honor, and glory are His.” The one man in the opening beatitude is the Lord Jesus Christ.

The closing beatitude says, “Blessed are all who take refuge in him.” Psalm 1 begins with the description of Jesus’ perfection. Psalm 2 ends with the transfer of that happiness, blessedness, from the one perfect man to imperfect sinners who will run to him for protection. He has taken care of their sins on the cross. When he said “it is finished,” all our sins have been taken care of, and the blessedness belonging to the righteous man of Psalm 1 is deposited in our accounts by faith.

Gaebelein adds another feature to these two Psalms and makes them prophetic for the whole nation of Israel. The blessed man of Psalm 1 transfers his righteousness to all believers in this age and depicts all of Israel’s future. He writes, “It is still more a description of what the true-believing remnant of Israel will be someday ‘like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season.’ Such is converted, redeemed Israel’s future as revealed here and by Isaiah: ‘Thy people shall all be righteous, they shall inherit the land forever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified (Isaiah 60:21). We behold then in these opening verses of the Psalms the Lord Jesus Christ as the perfect Man, the individual believer in his separation and devotion, and what Israel, saved and converted, will be in the future.”^[1]

^[1] Gaebelein, Arno C. 2009. The Annotated Bible: Ezra to Psalms. Vol. 3. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software.

I often think that nobody sees me. I remember recruiting for the Navy in 1977 in Detroit, Michigan, and hearing the civil servant who issued autos to the recruiters tell us that if we get in an accident, be sure to say to the police that we were wearing our seatbelts, whether we were or not. He said, “No one knows but you and God, and he’s not talking!” I remember how that shocked me at the time. In Luke 16:15, Jesus confronted the Pharisees for similar attitudes. He said, “You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God.” It might appear that God is not talking, but there will come a day when he will not only speak but judge. I think that’s the point of Psalm 1:6. It says, “for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.” Although the verse only talks about God’s knowledge of the righteous, it’s implied that he also knows the ways of the wicked. God knows everything.  In John 2:25, we read that Jesus did not need to be informed about the thoughts and intentions of any man because he already knew what was in them.

God’s omniscience is viewed in different ways. The fact that God knows everything is a bit frightening at times. It’s scary for those wrapping fig leaves around themselves to hide sin. It’s not frightening for those who love God and seek to do His will, even when they fail. It’s very frightening if you try to hide something from God, but it’s not when your heart is pure toward God. Jeremiah 12:3 tells us how the prophet looked at the trials of life and reflected on the faithfulness of God, and wrote, “But you know my heart, Lord. You see me and test my thoughts about you.” Matthew Henry, the old bible commentator, writes, “Let this support the drooping spirits of the righteous, that the Lord knows their way, knows their hearts, knows their secret devotions, knows their character, how much soever it is blackened and blemished by the reproaches of men, and will shortly make them and their way manifest before the world, to their immortal joy and honour. Let this cast a damp upon the security and jollity of sinners, that their way, though pleasant now, will perish at last.”^[1]

The righteous man is not the one who does all the things in the first part of this Psalm. The righteous man is the man who lives by faith. The whole book of Job presents us with the case of the righteous suffering. This causes Job to speak out in Job 21:7-9. He says, “Why do the wicked live on, reach old age and grow mighty in power? Their children are established in their presence, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, and no rod of God is upon them.” Job’s friends tell him that in some way he has brought these trials on himself, but Job will not accept this argument and insists on his innocence. I think Job’s claim is prophetic, not actual. He knows he’s not perfect, but he also knows that his deliverer lives. We too can make that claim. We’re not perfect but our redeemer is. Williams says, “It is He who lives in perfect communion with the Father. It is He who delights in the Word of God, and it is He who prospers in all His ways. In Christ, we become the blessed person of Psalm 1. It is He who gives us His own righteousness.”^[2]

^[1] Henry, Matthew. 1994. Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible: Complete and Unabridged in One Volume. Peabody: Hendrickson.

^[2] Williams, Donald, and Lloyd J. Ogilvie. 1986. Psalms 1–72. Vol. 13. The Preacher’s Commentary Series. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc.

The righteous man avoids the wicked ways of the ungodly, and the ultimate end of each is as different as a fruitful tree and chaff. The tree produces much fruit and is tended to, while chaff produces nothing and is blown away. Chaff in the wind is a frequent image in the Old Testament. Futato explains, “This is a prevalent image of divine judgment (see Isa 17:13; 29:5; 40:23–24; Jer 13:24; Hos 13:3). Zephaniah 2:2 makes explicit what is implicit elsewhere: The image of chaff driven before the wind is an image associated with the day of the Lord.”^[1] The Psalmist takes this idea of the wicked being like chaff and says in Psalm 1:5, “Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.”

It may look like the wicked prosper in this life, but their “prosperity” is blown away like chaff when it’s all said and done. We want to classify the wicked as those that do bad things. They are, but there is more to it than that. The righteous are those that do good things, and they are, but there is more to it than that. Sometimes , it’s hard to tell the righteous from the wicked if we base our judgment on appearances in this life. Are the prosperous really righteous? Are the poor really wicked? Very often, it’s just the opposite. Only God knows, and only God can judge. God has entrusted that to Jesus. John 5:22 tells us, “ For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son.” John the Baptist pointed at Jesus and said, “Behold, the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.” But notice that In Matthew 3:12, John the Baptist prophecies that the Messiah is at hand and “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

The truth is evident to all that will see it. We are all sinners and are numbered with the wicked. There is nothing anyone can do to become “righteous” through his own efforts. Faith is the only thing that matters: Faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus told the crowds in John 6:29 that the only work that matters is to believe in the one whom God has sent. Both the wicked and the godly man sin. The one who is righteous in God’s estimation is the one who lives by faith in His son, Jesus Christ. Paul says in Galatians 2:16, “We know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” It is Christ’s righteousness that saves us, and the only way to receive that gift is to trust in Him. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life” (John 3:36). In the third century, Rabbi Simla noted that Moses gave 365 prohibitions and 248 positive commands. David reduced them to eleven commands in Psalm 15; Isaiah made them six (33:14-15); Micah bound them into three (6:8); and Habakkuk condensed them all to one, namely—“The righteous shall live by faith.”

^[1] Futato, Mark D. 2009. “The Book of Psalms.” In Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol 7: The Book of Psalms, The Book of Proverbs, 32. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers.

The “Man” of Psalm 1:1-3 is the Lord Jesus. He never walks with the wicked, stands with sinners, or sits with the scornful. He delights in the teachings of the Lord and meditates on them all the time. This “Man” prospers in all his ways. As Hengstenberg observes, “…in this life there is no one, who is not conscious of lacking to some extent this delight in the law of the Lord, by reason of the lust and the law in his members, which decidedly and wholly oppose this law of God; as St Paul complains, in Rom. 7:22, 23, saying: ‘I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin, which is in my members.’ Even the regenerate, although delight in the law predominates in them, yet have constantly to struggle with their sinful propensities. Perfect delight in the law presupposes a perfect union of the human with the Divine will, perfect extirpation of sin—for the measure of sin is the measure of dislike to the law—perfect holiness. Christ alone, who was the only righteous one on earth, could have laid claim to such a fulfillment.” He goes on to suggest that the fact that no one prospers in “all his ways” is “…a declaration on the part of God, that there is sin still dwelling even in His saints.”^[1]

But believers have this “righteousness” in their connection with the perfectly righteous one, and that connection works itself out in a practical way in this life bringing changes in their lives that bring prosperity in everything he does. They become fruitful trees in a real sense with the hopes of becoming like Jesus in the resurrection. The next verse, Psalm 1:4. says, “The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.” The Palm tree and Cedar tree or healthy and solid, and prosperous. Chaff is blown away with every breeze that passes by. As McGee says, “Two men, two ways, two destinies. One is a dead–end street; it leads to death. The other leads to life. God says what is right and what is wrong. We are living in a day when folk are not sure what is right or wrong. God is sure. His Word does not change with every philosophy of a new generation.”^[2]

Guzik reminds us that it often looks like the righteous perish while the wicked prosper. But that’s just the appearance. He says, “It may often seem like the ungodly have these things, (The prosperity of verses 1-3), and sometimes it seems they have them more than the righteous. But it is not so! Any of these things are fleeting in the life of the ungodly; it can be said that they don’t really have them at all.”^[3] Much of the wisdom literature deals with the apparent prospering of the wicked alongside the suffering of the righteous. The book of Job is all about that. Kidner points out, “Other psalms will point out that the wicked, rather than the righteous, may seem to be the people of substance (e.g. 37:35f.). But ‘the Day will disclose’ the man of straw as surely as the works of straw.”^[4]

^[1] Hengstenberg, E. W. 1869. Commentary on the Psalms. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

^[2] McGee, J. Vernon. 1991. Thru the Bible Commentary: Poetry (Psalms 1-41). Electronic ed. Vol. 17. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.

^[3] Guzik, David. 2013. Psalms. David Guzik’s Commentaries on the Bible. Santa Barbara, CA: David Guzik.

^[4] Kidner, Derek. 1973. Psalms 1–72: An Introduction and Commentary. Vol. 15. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Unlike the wicked person, the righteous one doesn’t walk, stand or sit in the ways of sin. His focus is on God’s teachings in which he takes delight. For the believer, the teaching of “Christ,” the Gospel message, inspire us because of the depth of God’s love for us and moves us to want to understand more about the Gospel. When the “word of Christ” dwells in us richly it works its miraculous changes in us from the inside out which produces happiness in many ways in our lives. This is the subject of Psalm 1:3. It says, “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.” Roy Gingrich identifies these five blessings. He writes of the righteous man, “(1) He is deeply rooted (established in the truths of God). (2) He is constantly nourished (by the water of the Spirit). (3) He is continually fruitful (in good works). (4) He is unfading (always manifesting spiritual life and beauty). (5) He is ever prosperous (in all of his undertakings).”^[1]

“The poet introduces a metaphor at this point to give concrete form to the more abstract concept of being ’ashre. (That’s the Hebrew for blessed.) Whereas a tree in the steppe or desert may live but not thrive, this tree intentionally planted by an irrigation canal will always be productive.”^[2] When we see a metaphor, we need to identify what “likeness” it’s referring to. We ask, “What is it about the tree that corresponds to the righteous person?” Psalm 92 might be understood to say that this is the “Palm” tree. If this is the case the reference is to how it flourishes. Palm trees seem to flourish under the most difficult circumstances. One blogger wrote, “Have you ever seen a palm tree in the midst of a great storm? That tree may be bent so far over that it’s almost touching the ground, but when the wind finally stops, that palm tree bounces right back up. What’s interesting is that while that palm tree is hunched over under the pressure of the storm, it is actually becoming stronger.”[3]

Psalm 92 also says the “righteous” are like the “Cedar” tree. It says that the righteous “grow” like the Cedar of Lebanon.  Ezekiel 31:4-7 tells us some things about the cedar tree that might be relevant to what the Psalmist wants us to understand about the righteous. It says, “The waters nourished it; the deep made it grow tall, making its rivers flow around the place of its planting, sending forth its streams to all the trees of the field.  So it towered high above all the trees of the field; its boughs grew large and its branches long from abundant water in its shoots. All the birds of the heavens made their nests in its boughs; under its branches, all the beasts of the field gave birth to their young, and under its shadow lived all great nations.  It was beautiful in its greatness, in the length of its branches; for its roots went down to abundant waters.”

Not only are the palm tree and the cedar tree pictures of the flourishing and growth of a believer but it also productivity in one’s later years. Psalm 92:12-14 tells us “The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.  …They still bear fruit in old age.” As someone who just turned 75 on his last birthday, this is an encouraging thought. I believe the “fruit” we bear in our aging is the fruit of stronger faith. Lange says, “The fresh foliage is a figure of faith, which changes the water of life of the divine word into sap and strength, and the fruit is the figure of works which gradually ripen and spread their blessings around.”^[4] We’re never too old to grow!

^[1] Gingrich, Roy E. 2005. The Book of Psalms (Book One). Memphis, TN: Riverside Printing.

^[2] Futato, Mark D. 2009. “The Book of Psalms.” In Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol 7: The Book of Psalms, The Book of Proverbs, 32. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers.

[3] https://shcofbowlinggreen.com/chaplains_corner/devotional-flourish-like-a-palm-tree/

^[4] Lange, John Peter, Philip Schaff, Carl Bernhard Moll, Charles A. Briggs, John Forsyth, James B. Hammond, J. Frederick McCurdy, and Thomas J. Conant. 2008. A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures: Psalms. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software.