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The one who delights in the law of the Lord learns to fear his own good works and trust God outside of them.
One of the last things Luther wrote while he was yet a "good monk of the papacy" was an old commentary on the Psalms. One of the first things he wrote as a free Christian man was a new commentary on the Psalms. According to Luther, "There is not one book of the whole Bible in which I have been so much exercised as in the Psalms." Let us start our own meditation on these Psalms, starting with the very first Psalm that we call "Blessednesses to the Man."
1 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;
Blessed is the man! But lest you think that this "blessed" man is rewarded for good behavior, we note that the Hebrew word for "blessed" is a plural noun. It sounds a little cumbersome in English, but it means, "Blessednesses belong to the man!" Many—all! The plural "blessednesses" are not simply trinkets added to your charm bracelet; they are the source of life itself. Sometimes we say this man has "life abundant" or that "many lives belong to this man." He is bursting with life. Who would not want to be this man? But who exactly is he? He is not a Jew as opposed to a Gentile, nor a male rather than a female. He is not even an old man rather than a young one; he is whoever does not walk, does not stand, and does not sit with the wicked, sinners, and scoffers.
It is true that everything in life depends upon the company you keep—including every moment of the day walking, standing, or sitting. But who are these sinners, scoffers, and wicked that I should keep from walking with? There are many attempts at describing sinners and many warnings made about the company to avoid. Philosophers say you must seek "virtue" as a high and lofty goal. Common folk tell you that you are not to seek your body's desires, as that leads to wickedness. But King David jumps from the negative "walks not" to the positive in the second verse to tell us something different:
2 but his delight is in the law of the LORD,
This is what it means to be taught by God rather than by philosophers and educators of this world: the man is blessed with blessedness who loves the law of God. In fact, loving God's law is the only way to stop walking, standing up with, and sitting down among sinners. Delighting in the law of God means ceasing to walk in your own way by learning to walk in God's way. You quickly learn that things go God's way, not your way. Yet, if you do not know this, every step you take, every stand you make, and every time you sit down to judge, it will go badly when you do not know the difference between your way and his way. God's law is not your law, and "delighting in" or "willing" God's will rather than your own is the first step into life that is blessednesses upon blessednesses. You are not God! Yet, how many sinners, scoffers, and wicked do not know this? Blessed is he who has a God and is not one.
Yet the way of the Lord (his law) is not only different than yours, but it is also opposed to it. Your way looks at a deed, or a "work" to be done, and attempts to call it good or evil. But as a great old preacher of the church, Hilary of Poitier, once said, "The sin that God warns against is not about this or that deed, but is the single wickedness of unbelief." Sinners look at their hands and feet as the source of their sin, but sin actually begins in the heart. The "way of the Lord" (which is different from your way) is the difference between faith and unbelief. If you were in a hurry and you wanted the law of the Lord to be summed up in one word, it is "Trust me!" That is the first commandment and the sum of all commandments: Trust God and no other. Wickedness or sin is being "ungodly." Walking in the counsel of the wicked means trusting those "ungodly—fake gods" rather than the true God. Taking a "stand in the way of sinners" means literally to become "stiff-necked" or "hardened of heart" against hearing God's word. In that case, sitting in the seat means to "act as a judge over others" and so to judge not according to God's law but your own thoughts.
Blessed is he who has a God and is not one.
Instead, faith in God sees men not as they want to appear (righteous in comparison to your neighbor) but as they really are. Wicked, ungodly, sinful men may be grossly bad (and so easy to spot), but more often, they are the ones who trust in their own righteousness rather than what God says is righteous. They are harder to recognize as sinners and ungodly. However, the one who delights in the law of the Lord learns to fear his own good works and trust God outside of them. It becomes impossible to teach God's law rightly unless you first teach faith in the only Son of the Father. Unlike the ungodly, Jesus teaches his own righteousness rather than your own righteousness. His way is the kind that gives righteousness to the unrighteous. What a strange way of God! "Delight" or "Will" springs not from your desire to do good things or even your knowledge of right and wrong but only from your heart's faith in Christ. The government you live under or the churches you attend will often elevate human traditions and their own human laws as the end of all righteousness, but only Christ-faith matters. All of God's laws flow from this faith and return to it.
and on his law, he meditates day and night.
How do you learn this law of God that is different from that of men? You meditate on it day and night. Delight does not come from desire; it comes from faith, and faith is not a power within you but a thing to which you cling—you have faith in something. Since this faith is only right when it is in Christ, you will want to know where he is and how you can get such trust in him alone. The answer is specifically in what you meditate upon. The law of God is a word of God, and the word of God is what you "meditate on day and night." You will not find this law to meditate on it unless you have a preacher to give it to you, and the preacher won't be worth anything unless he has given you the actual word of God that has come to be written for us in his own Scripture. So it is that you will meditate on the words from Scripture that have been proclaimed to you—as belonging to you—day and night.
Both the Hebrew and Greek words for "meditates" mean to "discuss" or even "dispute," but it was Augustine who said it best: to meditate is to "chatter" as with the birds who sing and talk continuously, or to "delightfully hunt" like when you hunt deer in the forest. You seek, look, wait, anticipate, and make ready for the moment the deer appears. Then you take your trophy! Of course, the only hunters worthy of the name are those who understand that the "stag is the Lord's" (as Luther once said), who furnishes us with our game and delights in this hunt. So, for example, meditation chatters and hunts on the word, "thou shalt not kill." It tosses this back and forth and soon realizes that this command is not only referring to what you do with your hands, but what you do also with your mouth—you may kill with a word more quickly than with a sword. More yet, your meditation on the law of God will lead in its chatter and hunting not to domination of the deer but to humbling yourself beneath it. That is, you will learn faith not works; you will learn trust, not deeds.
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.
Something happens to your own self and heart as you meditate on God's law: you become humble. Humility means that you trust that God blesses you, but faith is in that which is not seen. Your blessedness is real but remains hidden; it cannot be known except by faith's experience, not by the experience of deed or thought. In fact, your blessednesses will be "found" or felt in their contradictions: poverty, foolishness and even death. Furthermore, these blessednesses of a Christian are not desired by others—they are actually hated by the whole world, as Isaiah 53 said: you will be "despised and rejected by men" just as Christ was. When we say "blessed is the man," we mean the one hidden in faith. Nevertheless, we trust that Christ has made us like a "tree planted by streams of water" that not only thrives but now produces "fruit in its season." Fruit is not what is commanded by God's law; it is what is promised by the faith that justifies you apart from the works of the law.
Your blessedness is real but remains hidden; it cannot be known except by faith's experience, not by the experience of deed or thought.
This is a marvelous thing—and perhaps the greatest of the "blessednesses" you will get. You are like this tree—planted, not grown of your own accord. Further, you will not just "bear" fruit, you will "give" or "yield" fruit for others, not for yourself. Faith and God's righteousness are apart from the law in which you meditate—and while it humbles you, faith makes great yield for those around you. We call this the evangelical teaching of "good works" that comes after faith, not before it. Luther paused here and said, "'In its season' is a Golden Word from King David." It's a phrase which describes the freedom of the Christian. The ungodly, proud sinner tries to set his own season, but yields nothing. The Christian, to the contrary, is given a season and much is produced. The ungodly set up their own times and situations, but Christians give blessings to others wherever the opportunity arrives. God arranges the whenever, the wherever, and the whoever that he wants and then feeds them your fruit.
This is also why Christians don't "sit with the seat of scoffers" who are "fruit inspectors," assessing the value of your fruit to determine the veracity of the faith. Instead, they consider where the faith is, who it is in, and what the word of Christ is saying to justify that faith. Then, we trust that this fruit is produced as Christ wants. Meanwhile, the "leaf doesn't wither." Not only do you, the Christian, produce much good work, but God will not remove from you what he gives to another. He is not a tit-for-tat God who measures good works as a loss from the one by giving it to another. God keeps your tree alive and thriving as long as he wants your fruit. Prosperity, then, is not an "eye for an eye" but is just like the faith that produces it—it is "hidden prosperity" that cannot be measured by normal economic, political, or social instruments. In fact, the best measure of actual good works is how much the devil attacks it once you have produced. As Hilary of Poitier put it: "The Christian's prosperity looks like adversity, and his adversity looks prosperity."
4 The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
6 for the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
(Psalm 1:1-6)
Only faith understands these blessednesses. The wicked are the ungodly who have stuck their faith in the wrong places. They do not produce fruit; they end up like "chaff" that is swept away from the barn floor. They are blown by every wind of doctrine. But Christians can take heart that these fakers (who seem to be in control now) will be overthrown. Should we who trust Christ and suffer adversity then overthrow them now—as the radicals, terrorists, and enthusiasts say? Should we expose the chaff, judge them as fake, and throw them out of office in a military coup? No, for now, the "chaff" remains. The winnowing will come. Meanwhile, we do not obey and kneel to these ungodly shepherds/rulers; we endure them. The reason we can endure such "chaff" running our world, country, town, and perhaps even family, is that "the Lord knows the way of the righteous." They will be judged by faith, not by works, and there will come a time when there will be no "permixta" sinners in the congregation of the righteous. Their way will perish. Meanwhile, we are not here to overthrow the powers of this world, nor are we here to "snore" our lives away in Christian safety, but to cry out to God, who knows our righteousness (because he gave it to us), and trust only him so that we bear much fruit. We do not think of ourselves as wise, but we enter into meditation on the law of God daily. We trust that the fruit will be plentiful until the day when we see and rejoice in the congregation of the righteous.
