If you would turn with me this evening actually to Psalm 73. I am intending to conclude our day's messages on Psalm 1 this evening. But I want to reference this psalm as we come back to Psalm 1 together. So I thought it would be good to read this psalm, a more lengthy psalm. A familiar psalm as well, but let us read it together. Psalm 73, a psalm of Asaph. Truly God is good to Israel, even to such as are of a clean heart. But as for me, my feet were almost gone. My steps had well nigh slipped. For I was envious at the foolish when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For there are no bands in their death, but their strength is firm. They're not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men. Therefore, pride compasseth them about as a chain. Violence covereth them as a garment. Their eyes stand out with fatness, They have more than heart could wish. They're corrupt and speak wickedly concerning oppression. They speak loftily. They set their mouth against the heavens and their tongue walketh through the earth. Therefore his people return hither and waters of a full cup are wrung out to them. And they say, how does God know? And is their knowledge in the most high? Behold, these are the ungodly who prosper in the world. They increase in riches. Verily, I've cleansed my heart in vain and washed my hands in innocency. For all the day long have I been plagued and chastened every morning. If I say, I will speak thus, behold, I should offend against the generation of thy children. When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me. Until I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I their end. Surely, thou didst set them in slippery places. Thou castest them down into destruction. How are they brought into desolation is in a moment. They are utterly consumed with terrors. As a dream when one awaketh, so, O Lord, when Thou awakest, Thou shalt despise their image. Thus my heart was grieved, and I was pricked in my reins. So foolish was I and ignorant. I was as a beast before Thee. Nevertheless, I am continually with Thee. Thou hast holden me by my right hand. Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. For lo, they that are far from Thee shall perish, Thou hast destroyed all them that go a-whoring from Thee, but it is good for me to draw near to God. I have put my trust in the Lord God, that I may declare all Thy works." Now over to the first psalm together. Just reading from verse 3 to the conclusion of the psalm. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season. His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. Amen. We trust the Lord to add His blessing to the public reading of His inspired Word. Let's do with the Word open and read, bow our heads and our hearts together. Our Heavenly Father, tonight again we come rejoicing to be able to sing praises to a worthy God. We come rejoicing at the privilege of being under the reading of Your Word. Lord, we have privileges, even those we've considered this morning, with a yet uncompleted written revelation. Lord, what a privilege we have to possess copies, our own copies of your eternal word. Lord, let us take up that privilege even more and more as we see the day approaching. And Lord, we ask that as we consider it together, even tonight, but in all of our gatherings in this place on the Lord's Day, that you will minister to us, graciously meet with us, and give us wisdom and help as we live in such perplexing days. So grant us some of that grace even tonight, we pray in Jesus' worthy name. Amen. Well, as we said this morning, I thought I'd take this Lord's Day near us to the first day of the new year and turn us to these very familiar words of this very familiar psalm. We looked this morning something at the characteristics of the blessed man, the happy, righteous man, and tonight from verse 3 to the close of the psalm, something of his condition. I wanted to read the 73rd Psalm because as I said, we'll reference something of that mindset in a moment, but suffice it to say that a firm understanding of Psalm 1 would have been of great help to Asaph and the struggle he confesses and works through in that particular psalm. But as we see this evening and begin from verse 3 in our meditations tonight, There's illustration of what is true of this blessed man that was described this morning, further put before us here this evening. And I want to just lay before you firstly then the illustrated benefits of this man. The pictures that the Scripture uses to describe the benefits, the happinesses, the blessings that belong to Him. There's a picture here that is duplicated in Jeremiah 17. There's even a portion of Ezekiel that has an image that is strikingly similar to this. And we see that He, it is described, verse 3, shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water. Now, if we were to turn up the passage in Ezekiel, It's not as parallel as Jeremiah 17. That portion really reminds us of the psalm. There's certainly a portion of the psalm included in Jeremiah's reflection there. But Ezekiel's picture and descriptive of Israel in particular is of the top of a tree, of a tender branch that is there that is cut off and transplanted to another place and nurtured and cared for by the hand of the Lord. It lives where it's thus planted and prospers. So is the description of the blessed man in this psalm. It's not merely a planted tree, but a transplanted tree. A tree that is purposely taken from one place and planted in another. And beyond this careful transplanting, we see that it is placed in this transplantation by the rivers of water. We don't have hot, dry climate here as would have been true in Israel. Many of the nations surrounding it there in the east. But the form of irrigation and care that would have been used and would have been a vivid image here, often of trees and other plants planted in rows and water irrigated and placed to flow in between the trees. Water sent there specifically to nurture the trees and provide for them constant supply. This is how the blessed man is described. There's been care in his placement. There's been care and nurturing that is involved in nourishing him and sending that supply. And the supply is of such a nature that he brings forth fruit. This man is a fruitful man. We're giving something of a hasty survey of the psalm. Fruit is an aspect of Christian living. It is a description, a metaphor that is used in Christian living. And I remember in my formative years being, I guess, re-educated. We often think, and I had at least the impression as a little guy, that fruit in the life of a Christian was pretty much confined to souls that we led to Christ. Well, certainly we want to have fruit in that way. We want to share the Gospel, be that channel through which, as we sang this morning, others might find and rejoice in and receive Christ. But if I could suggest that is not only but one aspect of fruitfulness in Christian living, in some ways it's only if we could say a small percentage of the fruitfulness, if we can feebly speak that way, of what fruit is in the life of the child of God. Read that, again, beautiful description we referenced this morning of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians. Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, temperance. These are the aspects of fruitfulness that belong in the life that are exhibited in the life of the blessed man. And this fruit results from the tender care that the Spirit, of course, gives this supply, this limitless, constant supply that is given of the Spirit. It's changing the metaphor somewhat. I'm tempted to turn you to Zechariah's prophecy, but you see there a prophecy of two olive trees, the servants of the Lord in those needy days. And the image, the vision was of the olive trees and the lamps that were there that stood before the Lord. And there were pipes, as it were, from the olive trees themselves that fed the oil directly into the lamps. A picture there of the supply. And obviously in that picture of the ongoing, limitless supply of the Spirit that belonged to God's servants. Here, very similar imagery. Again, the benefits that belong to this blessed man. And it's said of these streams that He's placed by that supply Him, His leaf will not wither. He doesn't say that this tree doesn't endure seasons. No, in fact, seasons are mentioned. But the drought will not overcome him. The supply, can we say that unnatural supply? Where drought is maybe supernatural is the better word than unnatural. As the drought would impact other plants, as we'll see in a moment, This tree is supplied even through those seasons. Here is a description, a beautiful picture of the benefits that belong to this blessed man. I remember my father was moved back in the day, some of you old Cedar Forest people, I remember they had a school for a while, and their theme verse was Isaiah 61, 3, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord. I remember it was my dad that thought up that particular theme verse for the early days of that school. The planting of the Lord. Trees of righteousness. Well, such is the description of this happy man in our opening psalm. But as we come to a second thought this evening, there's a contrast that is brought in. Someone other than this blessed man. We see the comparative condition of the ungodly. We read verse 4, the ungodly are not so. They're not as this transplanted tree, cared for and nurtured by the purposeful, constant supply of the waters, the leaf that doesn't fade, the fruit that comes season by season, and whatsoever he does shall prosper. You think of that, and it's not the prosperity gospel. Come to Jesus and be a billionaire. But yet prosperity. to be able to see and find and understand prosperity even in the trials of life. To suffer reproach with the people of God, Moses discovered by faith, was a better thing than the riches, the treasures of Egypt. God's people can find joy more than in the time where their corn and their wine increase. such is the prosperity of this well-supplied tree." But we read the ungodly are not so. They're like the chaff which the wind drives away. Here the comparative condition of the ungodly puts before us, puts before this righteous man an important understanding. It's when we come away from this foundational truth that we can fall into the pitfall that Asaph described so vividly in Psalm 73. He opens with a confession of truth. He closes with a mighty confession of his new understanding or newfound revived understanding. Truly God is good to Israel, even to such as are of a contrite heart. But my steps had slipped. His thinking became a little challenged. He began to listen to counsel from other places that we can borrow from this morning. And he imagined somehow that the ungodly are the ones that prosper. The ungodly are the ones that don't have trouble in life. You know, it's easy just to float along with the current. It's hard to swim against the tide. It's hard to be persecuted for walking a different path than the masses. And Asaph struggled. I love that phrase. Until I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I their end. I always pause in my own reading and thinking of that verse. I know it's a complete sentence. And he is talking about understanding the end. The final destiny of the ungodly. And that was so helpful to him in understanding looking at this world without the lens of faith. Without the lens of eternity. But I always just pause and say, until I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I. You can understand even more than just their end. Understand the end of the godly. Understand the means whereby this prosperous, this happy, this eternal, redeemed end. That purchased price we sang of. Well, here, this opening psalm provides the foundation that Asaph was lacking. He hadn't properly understood meditated on that aspect of the law of God when he was tempted to think highly of the ungodly and have a distorted low view of himself as a child of God. The ungodly are not like this prosperous tree. not like this transplanted, nurtured tree. They are instead like the chaff which the wind drives away. Now we don't have, many of us, an agricultural background or experience, and add to that an eastern agricultural background. But the winnowing floor, taking the instrument and tossing up the grain and the pieces of chaff blown away and the solid kernels of the grain falling back down, purging then that worthless part, saving that which is good to eat. What a picture of the ungodly. If I can borrow the descriptive words of Derek Kidner again, that which is rootless, weightless, and useless, This is a description of the ungodly. Asaph struggled. He didn't view them in that way. He viewed their earthly existence as something to be desired and his something to be pitied. How backward his thinking was. How off target he had gone. Here, the ungodly are not so. They aren't blessed. They aren't happy. God's man is blessed. God's man is happy. And notice in verse 5, the imagery is dropped. The ungodly are not so, but like the chaff which the wind driveth away. Therefore, the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. How many times do the ungodly base their thoughts, their pursuits, what they see, their own fallen, frail, rebellious reasoning? But who will stand when He appears? I think I've shared with you the first time I saw the Rockies. Canadian Rockies just outside of Banff. If you ever have an opportunity to go to Banff, it is a remarkably beautiful place. But those towering peaks, and it's not a mystery why they call them the Rockies when you see them, huge stone. I was moved with the thought of the Day of Judgment, the Lord's return. when the ungodly would cry for the rocks and the hills to fall upon them? What could possibly move someone to desire that that mountain fall on him rather than something else? To face, as Revelation describes it, the wrath of the Lamb. The ungodly will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners." Notice the description. "...in the congregation of the righteous." The congregation of the righteous. "...blessings of the blessed man is not only as we considered something this morning, his right relation to God, but his right and renewed relationship with others." If we look at that crystallized description of God's moral law, the commands with reference to our God, and those with reference to our neighbor, the great commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second is likened to it. Love your neighbor as yourself. The blessed man is reconciled to both of these. He's reconciled to God. and He's reconciled to His neighbor. Heaven will be the enjoyment of that reconciliation. We'll be in God's presence. We'll be in God's presence with one another. We'll be enjoying one another's presence as well. You ever think about the joy that belongs to us as believers? Do you ever meet another believer or someone you've never met before? And in a very few moments, you're drawn to them like you've known them your whole life? Because you kind of belong to the same family? Think of how many times that will be multiplied when sin is completely eradicated from us. We have our glorified nature Sometimes we just think of the glorified body. No more pains. No more aches. Some of the hair's back. That'll be great. What do we look like in eternity? The glorified nature. To love Christ with an unsinning heart. To be able to interact with one another without the presence of sin on either side. What a joyous, blessed condition. The ungodly are not so. They're like the chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore, the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. The ungodly laugh at times and say they hear of eternal judgment. They hear of the fires of God's hell. And some would laugh and say, well, I'll be among friends. No, you won't. You'll be alone in outer darkness. Not reconciled to God. Not reconciled to men. I was thinking a couple years ago, and I was reading something from the creation research guys that come every other year or so to join with us here. I love to hear those guys with sanctified mental horsepower. But just thinking of the phrase, outer darkness, I don't know what cosmological information, if I can try and speak in that way, is contained in that inspired description. It's, I would say, definitely above my pay grade, as we say. But it is a sober thought. Outer darkness. Asaph, in making use of the means of grace. You ever think about that in Psalm 73? Until I went to the sanctuary of God, then understood I their end. Our thinking is challenged and we begin to lose sight and abide more in unbelief. We absent ourselves from the means of grace from the constant supply of helpful direction from God's Word to govern our thinking. If he'd had a good grasp of Psalm 1, we wouldn't see the deep struggle of Psalm 73. But for these that are cut off They won't stand in the day of judgment. They will not enjoy the presence of others in the congregation of the righteous. But lastly, we see the final parting of the ways. Verse 6, For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. Can I ask you to turn with me for a moment to Deuteronomy 6. Excuse me, Exodus 6. I wasn't planning on this little diversion, and I don't have my marked Bible to guide me in unplanned things. But there's a description here I want to put before you again. We've looked at it some years ago, but perhaps particularly for some of you young people. Exodus 6, verse 1, Then the Lord said unto Moses, Now shalt thou see what I will do to Pharaoh. For with a strong hand shall He let them go, and with a strong hand shall He drive them out of His land. And God spake unto Moses and said unto him, I am the LORD." Notice the all caps there in the authorized version. It's indicating the title Jehovah is underneath. And I appeared unto Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob by the name of God Almighty. But by My name Jehovah was I not known to them. If you ever come to study the origins of what became the roots of liberalism in the modern unbelieving church, there was a theory with regard to the Pentateuch described in various ways, the documentary theory, I guess perhaps the most common title. There was a suggestion that in the books of Moses, We have a compilation of books that were drawn from different source material, and they organized the different sources based on the divine names that were used. It's sometimes called the J-E-D-P theory, and you have to add other letters in there. It's not quite like some of the acrostics in our day that you keep adding letters and sequencing to, but Jehovah, Elohim. The priestly codes is where the P comes from. But the different divine names, and it's suggested, of course, there's an underlying premise that what we have in the Pentateuch isn't what we take at face value, what we take at its own testimony. The inspired Word of God that was given to Moses as we find it. but rather the collected thoughts and writings of men at different stages of their religious development. Of course, these liberals were trying to approach the Bible with all the newfound understanding that evolutionary theory brought to modern man. If you note a little sarcasm in the voice, you've caught on. But they said, well, God's name was used differently at different times. And so whenever Jehovah appears, well, we know that came from this place. And when Elohim appears, we know it came from this place. And it's been interesting if you read the... And I'm glad that there are scholars that have to spend time with this. But you see even the liberal unbelieving scholars that take the previous version of the theory and say that can't work. Because if you look here and then look there and look there, it doesn't work. Some of them even came to the point where none of this fits, but we don't have anything better, so we still teach the documentary theory to our seminary students. It's like we can't abandon it as demonstrably false and take the Bible at face value. That would be doing something like believing it was inspired and that it came from God and not from the ideas of men and the evolutionary development of their ideas. Once you treat it as the Ideas of men. And you can pick and choose what ideas you want to live by and which ones you don't want to live by. And you have the modern mainline churches. What is the Lord saying in that passage in Exodus 6 where a lot of these liberals would cast anchor? By my name Jehovah was I not known to them? You read earlier in Genesis, the name Jehovah appears in the narrative during the lives of these men. And so, that must have been inserted later. Well, there's a very simple answer to what's said here. The patriarchs knew the name Jehovah. They had revelation, interaction with Jehovah. But that word there, by my name Jehovah, was I not known to them? We plug in our understanding of the English word to know, and we draw from that that they were ignorant of the name Jehovah. They didn't know that name. That's not the point at all. Look at the context. Moses has just left Pharaoh's presence. Pharaoh's threatened his people. He said, no more straw. And Moses is distraught. Lord, are You going to deliver us or not? And the Lord says, of course I'm going to deliver you. I'm going to exercise My power in such a way to get glory over the gods of Egypt. I've raised up Pharaoh, as we read later, to show My power in him. The word no has a breadth of meaning. It has meaning beyond just intellectual knowledge. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob knew the name Jehovah. But Israel in the days of Moses and their deliverance from Egypt and that Old Testament example of redemption were going to experience Jehovah in a way that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob didn't. There was going to be a supernatural deliverance that they experienced. They would know Jehovah in a way. They would experience Jehovah in a way that the others hadn't. Well, that's a lengthy little sidelight I guess historical and conservative consumption. But come back to our psalm, the Lord knows the way of the righteous. It's not intellectual awareness that is described here. There's a special acknowledgement that is described. The Lord knows The Lord's hand, the Lord's purpose and direction and nurturing care as we see in that imagery of the tree is upon His own. A special acknowledgement of His people. And to have that understanding, to be rightly related to God, to be reconciled, redeemed, counted as His own. We saw last week that peculiar treasure. That's the position of the blessed man. The Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. The word perish is used in different contexts and different ways. A futile end. A frustration at times. Perhaps the most familiar verse in all the Bible sheds light on this most familiar of the Psalms. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish. but have everlasting life. We want a psalm for the new year. Again, not just some special point or season of emphasis. A psalm for every day. This is the blessed man. The man that knows the smile of heaven. There's happiness. And the ungodly that seek to suppress that and come out from under it and will not be ruled by this man, this king, their way will perish. If we can keep these truths in our hearts, what help we'll have in this year not to stumble into Asaph's trouble. But walk in understanding beforehand. Not just be rescued afterwards. May the Lord bless these readings and meditations on this psalm of the blessed man. Let's bow our heads and hearts together. Lord, we ask tonight that You would take up this Word. Lord, give us even to write this Word upon our hearts. Lord, more than committing its phrases to memory, But meditating on them, as even the psalm itself describes, having your spirit take them up. Give us that understanding that Asaph lacked and then thankfully regained. Let us walk with understanding in this year. Whatever this year may hold, may we meet it with gospel thinking. with applying the truths of the Gospel to every circumstance and marvel and say, oh, the blessednesses of such a man. Lord, we ask these things in the worthy name of our Savior, the Lord Jesus. Amen.