The Winner’s Formula: Insights from the First Psalm

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The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.

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I’ve been doing some writing recently in the Psalms, and there are some profound lessons that just keep growing on me. I can’t help thinking that there’s something quite special about this book of the Bible, but it’s hard to put my finger on it. It may be the musical style of the Psalms, but it’s hard to figure how that would quite come through because they even had a different musical scale. Their style of poetry was different from ours. The poetry does survive, though, because Hebrew poetry is a poetry of ideas, of thoughts, not so much words, lengths of words and rhymes and so forth. But nevertheless, the power of music still hovers over this book. I don’t know, years ago when I was having some hard times, I took the Bible with me to my place of prayer one day, and I opened it up to the first psalm. I laid it out there in front of me. I began to talk to God about the psalm. It was a change in my approach to prayer. I’m no longer asking God, well, give me this or give me that or heal that person’s sickness and all that type of thing. It’s just a talk, a conversation with him. What does this psalm mean, and what should it mean to me? When I finished it, I made a mark there at the end of Psalm number 1, and the next time I prayed, I started where I had left off. I was surprised some time back when I was looking at that old Bible, and I saw how many times I had gone through the entire book that way. And back in those days, I had actually worn out two Bibles, it seems, and I went and looked at the other one, and it was just as many times through that one. So it was really a very constant study of mine, part of my daily devotionals throughout that period of my life. But that’s still not as surprising as the way the Psalms unfold over time. I think the reason for that is that you and I change with the years of our lives. We face different challenges. We learn many lessons. And then we return back to this marvelous work, the Psalms, and find something entirely new. It isn’t that we didn’t see it before. It’s not that if we had read it aloud, we wouldn’t have read it before. It’s just that now it says something to us that it didn’t say before. Take the first psalm as a case in point. Now, for a long time, I have seen this psalm as a winner’s formula for life. And it begins in really fine poetic style by saying, Blessed is the man. The focus of the psalm is that. just that this is the kind of a man who is blessed, the man that walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. Now, this is a really nice piece of work because it introduces one to a pattern that repeats over and over and over again in the Psalms. Usually it’s a couplet. This is sort of a triplet. where it lays out the same sort of a thought in parallel structure, sometimes in reverse structure. First time telling you what it is, the next time telling you what it’s not. And these couplets help us understand the significance sometimes of words that are so ancient, so archaic, we don’t even know what they mean any longer. Now, these are three things that a blessed man will do. He doesn’t listen to the advice of bad people. He doesn’t stand even nearby sinners. And he doesn’t sit in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night. You know, it seems to me that a fairly large segment of the Christian faith has lost touch with this idea. This is a man who is not burdened by the law. He is stimulated by it. Think about that. Some people go back and they read the Old Testament law and say, boy, I’m glad I don’t have to do that, or I don’t have to do that anymore, or the law’s been abolished, the law’s been done away with. They really want to dismiss the law and not have to have anything to do with it. Not this guy. He is stimulated and excited by the law. Now, I think we should keep in mind here, that the law is not an end in itself, but rather a means to an end. I think some Jewish scribes believe that the study of the law is an end in itself. It’s just a wonderful thing to do, and we do it as a glory to God. But there is still a burning question. What is the goal, the end, the purpose of the law? Why does this fellow take such delight in the law? Well, he goes on and explains. He said, Now, what’s that worth? I mean, whatever I turn my hand to, it works. This is not magic, by the way, nor is it mystical. It’s not that God has to sit up in heaven. He says, oh, there’s my friend John down there. He is keeping my law so well. Press that button over there. Pull this lever here. Let’s make life work for him because he’s keeping the law. No, that’s not the way it works. This is what he’s describing here in this man, is the natural result of ordering a man’s life by a set of godly moral standards. Everyone knows the law does not achieve salvation. It never did and never will. It’s not what the law is about. What the law does is make life work. Now he says, this man, he’s going to be like a tree planted by the rivers of water. But the ungodly, they’re not so. They’re like the chaff which the wind drives away. So the ungodly will not stand in judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. Now, just to take an overview of this, there are two important principles in this psalm that make all the difference in life. One, you don’t take counsel of a certain class of men. You don’t let this type of person control your life, direct your life, or make you who you are. And second, you make the law of God your counselor, your tutor, the teacher of your conscience. Now, when you do that, you’ll come to see very quickly that the law of God is not a yoke of bondage, as some people think it is. It’s not shackles and chains. It’s a lamp to our feet, a light to our path, to keep us from falling down and hurting ourselves. The law of God is a descriptor of what works in life. The man who internalizes it gains an edge. You know, think about this. Men will study books day and night to get that they think will give them an edge in the stock market. They do it for money. The law of God gives a man an edge in everything because it works. Now, I will say this about the law. The law of God can be a painful study because we break it so often. It’s not that we can’t keep the law in any one of its parts on any given occasion. Anyone can do that. God doesn’t give you laws that you can’t keep. But keeping the law perfectly all the time is, well, it’s beyond all of us. Superficially, the law of God seems complicated, but that is only because the law is about life, and it’s life that’s complicated. So when we study the law, and when we meditate on it day and night, we routinely come across mistakes we’ve made, stupid things we have done, offensive things. You say, oh, how could I ever have done that? But there’s no gain in agonizing over past mistakes. The gain is in recognizing them and correcting them. The grace of God is what allows us to use the law to our benefit without getting depressed. Because we know we have God’s forgiveness. We know we have his mercy. And a parent doesn’t get mad at a little kid because he doesn’t know any better than to make some stupid mistakes. We pick them up, we dust them off, and we try to teach them from what they have been through. God does the same thing. Now, when we study the law of God, we do feel guilty. But what God is after is not guilt, but change. What he wants us to do is to learn from our mistakes first. and not repeat them. It’s called repentance. Really, the lesson to be drawn from this first psalm is that simple. Just learn from your mistakes, take counsel of the law of God, plant your feet in this way, and you’ll be like that tree planted by the rivers of water. And there’s something else in there, but first, grab a pencil and a piece of paper. I want to offer you a free CD called

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And then I’ll be right back.

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There’s an odd expression at the close of this psalm when he says, For the Lord knows the way of the righteous. The word know is the Hebrew yada, which is also the word in Genesis 4, where it says Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bear king. We basically know what that means in Genesis 4. What does it mean in this psalm when it says the Lord knows the way of the righteous? Actually, it’s the root of the word for knowledge in the tree of knowledge and good and evil. So it means rather more than knowing about something. Words often come to have special meanings beyond their denotation. For example, we can say that we hope a person will not see adversity or know pain. In both cases, the verb has to do not merely with seeing and knowing, but about experiencing pain. So when the psalm tells us the Lord knows the way of the righteous, it’s saying something more merely than that he watches us walk that way. Both the New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version render the phrase the Lord watches over the way of the righteous. Well, that sounds nice, but it’s more than that. The Lord knows the way we walk because he has walked in it. Jesus was in the flesh, and he knows what we have been through. There’s another thing about this psalm, some miscellaneous little thoughts to add in. The psalm also serves as a good introduction to poetic structure. The psalmist could have said, Blessed is the man who is neither ungodly, a sinner, nor scornful. That doesn’t have the power at all of the way he chose to say it. He’s talking about whether we are walking, sitting, or standing. We must not conform to these patterns of life. As I said earlier, Hebrew poetry comes through in translation because it doesn’t depend on words. It’s a poetry of ideas. At the end of the psalm, he returns to his opening theme about what we should not be like, but he gathers all these contrasting ways of life into one. He calls it the ungodly. First, we’re led to understand the benefits of walking in God’s law. Then we turn to the consequences of the ungodly way of life. And when they get through them, you just don’t want to go that way. That word scornful that he uses in here, it occurs to me that one really needs to be very careful in the use of satire, especially if the audience is not in on the joke. Satire has an angry undercurrent, and it’s very easy to slip over the line into scorn. You hear this a lot in the kinds of humor people often try to use about political leaders. There’s another thing in this psalm that you can easily overlook if you haven’t taken the trouble to read the introduction to your Bible. You may know this, but throughout the Hebrew Bible, the name of God is used repeatedly. It is either Yahweh in the Hebrew, or as we anglicize it, Jehovah. But most places in the Bible where it appears, they use the small caps LORD to replace it. The custom grew out of an attempt not to overuse the name of God or take the chance of falling into blasphemy in the name of God or breaking the commandment that says, you shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. It’s intended to be a gesture of respect. But in the process, we kind of lose track of what’s going on. Because what the psalmist says here is, blessed is the one that walks in the law of Jehovah. In that day, other gods were a constant presence, even a threat. So it was important to identify whose law the psalmist was talking about. In this convention, as I said and followed in every version of the Bible nearly, is to substitute the word LORD in small caps, wherever you find it. There are places in the Psalms, though, where it’s important to know that God is personal and has a name. Watch for this when you’re reading the Psalm, because it’s all over the place. Another thing, too, about this psalm, he spoke of how the man meditated on God’s law day and night. We are so blessed in this generation. I say that. I sometimes wonder. Through most of human history, meditation on the law required memorization, something that earlier generations were much better than we are at that. Now, if you’re a shepherd, for example, out on a hillside somewhere, and you’re going to meditate on the law of God, how on earth are you going to do that unless you can remember it, unless you’ve memorized it, unless you’ve familiarized yourself with it? For most people back in the ancient world, in the world of the psalmist, they heard these scriptures read, the law read, every Sabbath day in synagogue or in some location or perhaps in school. They heard them again and again and again, and they were required to memorize them. So then when he’s sitting on the side of a hill somewhere, he could think his way through the implications of what that law was all about. Now, we can carry a Bible with us wherever we go. We can load it up on a BlackBerry. The problem is that something so readily available is neglected because, well, I can have that anytime. And it’s not as precious to us as it might be, and thus it requires a different kind of discipline. Our discipline will be different from that. It’s a time discipline. It’s that we have to set aside time for God. We have to say, this time belongs to God, and I will not use it for anything else. Otherwise, you’ll never find the time. Now, I said that even having read the Psalm for years, every time I go back through them, I find something new. This happened to me just in the last couple of weeks. I hope you’ll bear with me for a moment while I tell a personal story. I only do this because I think it might help somebody else. I was a little frustrated. I was frustrated over what I thought was a lack of results, visible, tangible results coming from my work. At the same time, because I was writing on the Psalms, I noticed verse 3 of this Psalm. Here it is again. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that brings forth his fruit in his season. Even now I can see how easy it is to miss the point. A tree does not bear fruit year-round. It has a season when it may appear dormant. The roots are still at work, drawing up water, developing new root systems, and waiting for the season to change. In the spring, when it warms up and the sunlight falls on the tree and the branches of the tree and warm them, the little buds begin to come forth. A little later, the leaves spread out and those little chemical factories in there that power the whole process of the tree go to work. And in the summer, the fruit begins to appear. When I read that, I thought… You know, my problem is I’m just not patient enough. Patience is often a short supply in the modern world, but I find it helpful to be reminded I don’t have to bear fruit all the time. I have different kinds of work to do. I have times when I need to be reading. I have times when I need to be studying. I have times when I need to be writing. And sometimes I will see the results, and sometimes I may not live long enough to see the results. But while there are times when we have to work like dogs without seeing the results, if we stay faithful to the task, we can be sure that the fruit will come, whether we’re there to see it or whether we’re not there to see it. The Apostle Paul in one place wrote, he said, you know, I’ve planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. The truth is, we’re not the ones that really produce the fruit anyway. It’s God that does that. And there’s one other personal note about that. As you get older, it takes even more faith. And sometimes you have to trust that the fruit will be there, even if you don’t live long enough to see it. You know, it took me longer to come to this than I wish it had. But maybe it will help you a little to see it a little earlier in life. Now, the second psalm is entirely different from the first. But before I go into that, grab your pencil and paper again, and I’ll give you a short message, and then we’ll be right back.

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Why do the heathen rage and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves. The rulers take counsel together against Jehovah and against his anointed, saying, Let’s break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us. You see what I mean? This is a very different psalm from the one before. We’re in a position in history where Israel is a strong nation, David is a strong leader, but boy, does he have trouble with the nations round about them. When it says, let’s take counsel against Jehovah and against his anointed, I think at that time the assumption of the psalmist would be the anointed of God was the king of Israel, in this case, David. What’s interesting is the way this thing then follows on by saying, He that sits in the heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak to them in his wrath and vex them in his sore displeasure. Now, this is, of course, written from a human perspective, but nevertheless, it’s entirely consistent with what we know about God and about the situation they were looking at, seeing all these big kings around the earth who thought they were really something, pop and jays they were, imagining vanity and setting themselves, we’re going to rise up against Jehovah and against his king. Let’s break their bands asunder. And God looks down on this and laughs. He holds them in derision. What in the world do they think they can do? God speaks and says, Yet I have set my king upon my holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree. Jehovah has said to me, You are my son. This day have I begotten you. Ask of me and I will give you the heathen for your inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron. You shall dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Now, if you’re familiar with your Bible, there are probably some overtures, some thoughts that are coming to mind as you hear this saying, isn’t that familiar? I’ve heard of this before. Indeed, you have. This psalm has gone messianic on us without any particular warning. We’ll come back to it in just a moment, but he goes on to say, “‘Be wise, you kings. Be instructed, you judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear.'” And actually it says, “‘Serve Jehovah with fear. Get off with this business of serving Moloch and Baal and all these other gods, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and you perish from the way when his wrath is kindled but a little.'” Blessed are all they that put their trust in him. Now I have to wonder what the author of this second psalm thought it meant. It may have been written, as I say, at a time when Israel’s hegemony was being challenged by the surrounding nations. David had expanded Israel’s borders and oversaw something of an empire. He was, it turns out, the first major king to go in and disarm Iraq. He disarmed the whole area of Mesopotamia. And when the Syrians came to their aid, he disarmed Syria as well and set up some forts in Syria. And so it was that he didn’t fool around with these people. They prevailed against the neighbors every time they challenged him. But it’s plain enough when you read forward in this psalm, there’s much more to it than that. It goes messianic almost immediately. The expression, you are my son, this day have I begotten you, can apply to David only in metaphor. The verse is cited twice in Hebrews, and in both cases there, it’s applied to Jesus. So it’s plain enough we are dealing with a messianic psalm, a prophetic psalm, a psalm that looks far down in time at the latter days. The glorified Jesus made reference to this psalm in a letter to the church at Thyatira. Revelation 2, verse 26. He that overcomes and keeps my works to the end, to him will I give power over the nations, and he shall rule them with a rod of iron. Like the vessels of a potter shall they be broken into shivers, even as I received of my Father. Now, this is really something. It’s talking about they be broken to shivers. The Greek word means crushed completely. Now, in the psalm, the son seems clearly a reference to Jesus, the son of God, who is to rule the whole world with a rod of iron. The author of the psalm probably thought about David, but the idea of the son is transcendent. And this underlines a curious thing about the psalms. They aren’t just religious poetry or religious music. Many of them are highly prophetic verses. looking all the way down to the last days. And if you’re not aware of this, it might be helpful to bear it in mind that the prophecies of your Bible, almost universally, are musical. One prophet, in fact, when they called upon him to prophesize, asked for a minstrel. He wanted a musician before he could begin to prophesy. Well, the music of the Psalms would fall very strangely on our ears. David and others used stringed instruments, but the musical scale we use was way off in their future. Apparently, they had ten strings, ten tones to work with. I’m struck by the fact also that in the ancient world, when a nation went to war, they went to war with the opposing nation’s God. It was not merely king against king. It was God against God. Explains why the men of Israel carried the Ark of the Testimony into battle against the Philistines on that terrible occasion when they lost the Ark to the Philistines. And this is how we should understand the opening stanza of this psalm. The rulers take counsel together against Jehovah. and against his anointed. This war is, in fact, God against God.

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The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.

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People often ask me what translation of the Bible I’m reading from when I do a program, and I understand why they’re asking, because they are not likely to find it, what I’m saying, anywhere. I use the old authorized King James Version, but I paraphrase it as I go. King James English falls strangely on the modern ear, and the words are often archaic, so I go looking through lexicons to find more specifically what they say to the modern listener. Still, I think the King James is probably the most literate of all the translations, and it has strongly affected our language, and it reads well, reading aloud. I hope you’ll take advantage of our offer of a free CD of the beginning series on the Psalms. Our phone number again is 1-888-BIBLE-44. The address is Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas, 757-91. Until next time, I’m Ronald Dart.

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