This is a weekend with the Psalms. Now, my goal is to give you a survey. We'll look at a couple of Psalms in depth, maybe three or four, but I'll refer to a lot more. I'm going to do something different tonight, probably than what any of you have experienced with respect to the Psalms, and that is to give a literary introduction. The Bible is a library. with many different kinds of literature in it. It has history, it has prose sections, doctrinal sections, it has poetry, and we're looking at poetry. Now, the ancients seemed to prefer poetry to prose. If you'll go back and read early literature, The earliest literature that we have in, for instance, in the Greek language, the Iliad and the Odyssey, it's poetry. Much of the earliest parts of the Bible are in poetry, and so we are going to look at the Psalms in that way. Now, I Don't see a clock, that's a dangerous thing to let a guy like me get up here and not get a, where is it? That's the clock, that's it, okay, okay. So, Mark, raise your hand when we need to do question and answer, okay, we'll put it that way. Now, let me start off by introducing you to the Psalms. And since they were collected by the rabbis, I'm going to do a survey of the Psalms. But I want you to see how they brought these Psalms together. They have some sense of arrangement. They're literary. And you'll see that they had quite a theological understanding as well. And let me start off by simply referring to what Jesus and the rabbis referred to as the Old Testament. Now, they didn't know about the Old Testament. What did they call it? They called it the law, the prophets, and the writings. Now, in Hebrew, the law is Torah. The prophet is Nebi'im and the writings is Kethubim. Now if we take those letters T-N-K, put a couple of vowels in there, an N with an H, we have a word called the Tanakh. And so the Jewish people call the Old Testament the Tanakh. It is arranged in a certain literary fashion that they understood. In this way, it worked theologically as well. The core of the Old Testament is Torah, which means law or teaching. It's probably better translated as teaching. But you have a core in the Old Testament, the foundational events for Israel, is contained in the Torah. Particularly, we can read those events, the greatest historical event in the Old Testament, the one referred to the most, obviously, is the Exodus. And maybe the single greatest event in the Old Testament, as far as Revelation is concerned, is when God reveals His name to Moses at the burning bush. That forms the heart of the Old Testament. And so the first five books, we call them the Pentateuch or the Torah, they form the core of the Old Testament. Then along came the prophets. And we'll put an outer layer, a secondary layer around that Torah or the kernel. And this is called the prophets, the law, the prophets. Now, what did the prophets do? Well, they called people back to keeping covenant with God, keeping Torah. And they also explained the Torah further. And they did tell about the future. They did prognosticate. But a lot of their ministries were done calling people back to faithful covenant keeping and pronouncing judgment for not doing that. And then there is a third section called the writings. Let's think of three baskets. The first is the Torah, the second is the prophets, and the third is the is the writings, and whatever doesn't fit into the first two, they put into the third. Usually that had to do with things like the Psalms, Proverbs, things like that, that were used for service in the temple and wisdom teaching. Now, by the way, the New Testament is exactly arranged that way literarily as well. You have gospel, epistles, and then you have that third category that you throw in the basket, and that's revelation or whatever doesn't fit in the first two. So they had a sense of an arrangement, order. I'm gonna talk a lot about order this week. It's akin to redemption in a way. God orders all things, and redemption is a kind of reordering. And so there is order in the scriptures. It has a literary arrangement, and it fits in certain ways. Now, let's look at the Psalter. There's an interesting verse in, I think it's in Luke chapter 24, is it, where it says, the law, the prophets, and the Psalms, being referred to the Old Testament. Now, why did they not say writings? Because the Psalms happens to be the principal book of the writings, so it almost characterizes the whole. Now, I say that because the Old Testament was Israel's prayer book, I mean, the Psalms was Israel's prayer book, and it was also their hymn book. There are lots of prayers and there are lots of Psalms, I mean, lots of hymns that you will see in the Psalter. So the Old Testament is Israel's hymn book and prayer book, and it's quoted quite frequently in the New Testament. If I'm not mistaken, I believe that the Psalter is quoted more times in the New Testament than any other book, even more than Isaiah. even though it's only the third longest book in the Old Testament. And so the early church likewise made much use of the Psalms in this way. What did they sing? Well, they sang Psalms. That's what they were used to do. They sang these Psalms. They also had the readings in the synagogue. So the Psalms became part of the cycle of Israel's year, if you will. They had kind of an ecclesiastical calendar. And the Psalms was used throughout that year. Augustine, for instance, was extremely, extremely interested in the Psalms. And when the great theologian of the West in the fourth century and he began to fade and realize that he wasn't going to live very long, he had founded the Augustinian order and he took to his cell a room and he kind of excluded everyone, but before he did, he had some of the monks to copy out the shorter penitential Psalms, and they were all placed on the walls, and he spent his last few weeks alive reading those Psalms, meditating on them, and weeping about his sins, preparing his heart, if you will, to see God. Luther, when Luther came to the Psalms, he loved the Psalms, by the way, and in his introduction to his work on the Psalms, a commentary, he calls the Psalms the little Bible. Now, why did he call it the little Bible? Because he saw in it almost everything that you would see in the whole Bible. You have all the great doctrines there in one way or another, either in seed form and sometimes pretty well blown. In the Reformed tradition, of course, the Psalms have become extremely important to our tradition. In Calvin's Geneva, Louis Bourgeois developed hymn tombs for all the Psalms, and the first hymnal they had was simply a Psalter. And so in the Reformed tradition, it's been very important. When I first came to my church in Newburgh, Some of the, a lot of Scots people there, some Dutch, but mainly Scots. And I can remember one little old lady who used to make me some shortbread, Scots shortbread for Christmas that when she referred to the Psalms, they called them the Psalms, the Psalms. And I understand I haven't been to Scotland, but that's the way a lot of Scots people refer to the Psalms, the Psalms. So we have here then a tremendous, the Psalms have been tremendously valued through the centuries. I might just add this as a way of showing you how important the Psalms were in the Middle Ages, early Middle Ages or late, from the early fathers into the Middle Ages, they developed canonical hours of prayer, about eight hours, about three hours, Actually, it reduced to seven at a certain point, but about almost three hours, they had prayer all through the night. You'd have to get up. If it were three in the morning, you got up and went to the room and their gathering place. So they did that at least seven times and early on, eight times a day. That's mentioned, I think, in Daniel or someplace about praying eight times a day. I'm not sure where it is. But what they did, they used the Psalms almost exclusively. And in about a week's time or less than a week, I calculated it would be about six days and something, they went through the entire Psalter, all 150 Psalms. So can you imagine going through the Psalms 52, at least maybe 56, 57 times through the year? They had memorized the Psalms by heart, of course. They sang them, they prayed them, and so forth. And so we have a great heritage when it comes to the Psalms, and that's why I chose to do this. Now what does the word, what do these words mean? You know, we talk about the Psalms, the Psalter, and actually the Hebrews had another name for it. So let me talk about the name of the work. The word Psalms actually comes from the Greek. About 170 years before Jesus was born, Jewish people in the Diaspora, particularly down in Egypt, Alexandria, had the Old Testament translated into Greek, because they had lost the ability to read Hebrew, so they needed it in their native language, Greek. That's called the Septuagint, or the LXX. The tale is that 70 scholars copied the Hebrew Bible into Greek, and so it gets that name, the LXX, the Septuagint. And the word that they translated the Hebrew was Psalms, or psalmoi, Psalms. So when you talk about the Psalms, you're really referring to the Greek word that was given by those scholars at that time. And then during the time when Jerome, about the third, fourth century, translated the Bible into Latin, he used the word Psalter. So sometimes we refer to the entire book of Psalms as the Psalter. But the Hebrew people never used either one of those terms or something like it. Psalms and Psalter means the same thing, to sing with musical accompaniment, stringed instruments. There is a word in Hebrew for psalm, it's called mizmor. And so you might think that the Hebrew would have named the psalms mizmorim, which means psalms. You put an i-m on the end of Hebrew word and it's plural, many of them. But they didn't use that either. They read the Psalms and they read the Psalms theologically. And even though there are many different kinds of Psalms that I'm going to show you, they believe that all of them led to praise. So therefore, the Hebrews actually called the Psalms or the Psalter, Tel Halim, or praises. So you have three words for the Psalms. Among Jewish people, it's called praises. Among English-speaking people, we call them Psalms or Psalter. Now, I'll refer mainly to the Psalms as the Psalms or the Psalter. So, that just for what it's worth. Now, let's look at some of the structure collections and if you've got a Bible, I'm gonna have you do some work. If you look at a modern Bible of any sort, I'm actually using The NIV, I understand through Mark you use the ESV here. Many PCA churches now do, but I have an old copy of the early NIV. It's not the modern one. But if you open up to Psalm 1, the editors have placed something there at the head. What does your book say? You may have some editorial comments there. Do you see any? What's the first thing it says? Book one. Thank you. Book one. Well, that's interesting. Look at what it says. Blessed is the man. And let's go to the end of book one, which is in 41. We turned the end of 41 and there is book one. First 41 Psalms. And look at the verse 13 of Psalm 41. What does it say? Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Amen and amen. Now at the end of book one, you have a doxology. That's one book. That's one book. But now in my Bible, maybe many of yours, it does say book two, doesn't it? Well, it starts out with that famous hymn tune, As the Deer Pants for Streams of Water. We sing that in the hymn book. But we turn over to the end of book two. And what do we have there? Well, we have this conclusion in verse 19. Praise be to his glorious name forever. May the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen and amen. There's another doxology. So book two ends with a doxology. Now, book three is shorter, but there's something else that I want you to notice at the end of book two, though. Look at verse 20. Verse 20 of Psalm 72. Someone read it. So, the first two books, most scholars would agree, when they have Psalm titles, they're attributed to David. Now there's a problem here, though. We're gonna find more David Psalms in other parts here, and maybe we can figure that out, why it says it's concluded, but at the same time, it's not concluded. So I'll warn you, there are at least 17 or 18 more David Psalms. Go to 89. When you turn to 89, which ends the third book, what does it have? Praise be to the Lord forever. Amen and amen. So there's the third book. And then we have to go, of course, for the fourth book to 106. And when we turn to 106, I'll read the end of that, just to catch you up on what's going on here. Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Let all the people say amen. Praise the Lord. So now what do we have in the first four books? We have each book concluding with a doxology. Now, let's go to the end of the Bible. In the fifth book, we have an interesting thing. Many scholars believe that actually the fifth book ends, not at Psalm 150, But they somewhat think that it ends at 145 and there's no doxology. But there are five concluding Psalms that almost consist entirely of doxologies. Praise the Lord, they're called Hallels, the last five Psalms. They begin and end with Hallelujah, each one. Moreover, Many scholars believe that the rabbis understood that the last five Psalms is the, if you will, the doxology for the entire collection of the Psalter. And so that's why they named him Tel Halim, or praises. It ends on praise God, praise God, praise God, praise God. Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord. Now I think that's a helpful arrangement to understand. What a wonderful arrangement. Every section leads to worship, doesn't it? So no wonder the rabbis named the psalms, which there are not as many praise psalms, for instance, technically, as there are prayers and supplications and other types of psalms. But they believe that everything in the Psalter led to the worship of God and His praise, and surely it does. Now that's a nice, if you will, understanding of the Psalms. Now there are also collections of Psalms. I'm going to complicate things here for you. We have five books in case you didn't know it. The first four conclude in doxologies and then the entire Psalter with five hallels or hallelujah Psalms. And then there are collections. You'll notice there are psalm titles. Have you noticed those psalm titles? Now, there are a lot of psalms that don't have titles, but there are all kinds of titles. And these collections, you'll notice that some psalms are attributed to David and some to the Korahites and others to other Levitical orders. And I've already mentioned Psalm 146 to 150, that's a collection in itself of hallels or hallelujah psalms. So we also have individual collections here. And the Levitical order or the tribe obviously collected some of these and they wrote hymn tunes to them to be used in the temple. And let me get back to that in a moment. But there are also, one more complication, different kinds of psalms within these collections called genres or kinds. Now notice what kind of psalms there are in addition to the collection. There are books, there are collections, and there are kinds. What kinds are there? Well, we have wisdom psalms. We're going to look at one tonight, Psalm 1. What is a wisdom psalm? A wisdom psalm teaches us how to live and how to go. They're primarily instructing us in Torah or God's teaching and law. We have other kinds of psalms that you find, royal psalms, Psalm 2. Psalm 2 is a royal psalm. It refers to God's Messiah. And David becomes, if you will, the exemplar for what a king is to be. And of course, he points to King Jesus. So you have royal psalms as well. You have what are called laments, individual laments and community laments. That is prayers of seeking God's forgiveness or God's help in a time of trouble. And this is the largest collection or kind of psalms in the Psalter. There are hymns of praise and thanksgiving. I know in my church when I was pastoring, we always read the Psalms at our Thanksgiving, Wednesday Eve supper. We sang some Psalms of Thanksgiving and some hymns, and we used a lot of the Psalms. So, we have three different things then, books, we have collections, and we have kinds, and that may help you understand where you are. The way these psalms were used, of course, is that many people in Israel who confessed their sins sometimes would take a psalm and use that for their confession, like Psalm 51. Also, they were used for public confession in the temple. And in our tradition, it is pretty common to have a prayer of confession. in the worship service. Very often it is as part of the psalm, isn't it? We use Psalm 32 and Psalm 51 a lot in church. There are other places where you use them, prayers of confession. So we continue to do that to this day. Now let me talk about something else, the authors and the psalm titles. Now here we get into something that maybe you haven't really examined before or thought much about. If you read the Jewish Tanakh, these psalm titles are included in the psalm as verse one. But if you use our Bible, the arrangement, the psalm titles are apart, and then the first bit of the psalm is verse one. So if you ever pick up a Jewish Bible, you might be off in the numbering. Everything else is the same. Now, I remember I had a wonderful professor of Old Testament Covenant Seminary. His name was Dr. R. Laird Harris, and I can remember him discussing the Psalm titles. And in our class, we had to translate the Psalms from Hebrew into English, and not all of them, but I think we, through the course of the semester, maybe did about 20 Psalms. That's about all I could manage. I could hardly keep up with that, but nonetheless, we did that. And one of the things that you will notice is that there are Psalm titles. For instance, look at Psalm 3. a psalm of David when he fled from his son Absalom. Here's what R. Leonard Harris said, and this pretty much is the consensus among scholars, conservative Bible scholars, that the psalm titles really are not part of the psalms per se. However, they're very old and do reflect the circumstances which psalms were part of. Maybe the rabbis gave an introduction to the psalm and wrote it in and it tells a circumstance or maybe it came later. But they are not part of the psalms themselves, but they're very important and help us to understand what's contained in the psalm or the circumstance, the historical circumstance. Now other places in the Psalms, you're gonna have more difficulty with these than you might imagine once you begin to concentrate on them and what do things mean. Psalm 4, look at that, for the director of music with stringed instruments, a Psalm of David. So obviously this was sung by the Levitical choir for the director of music. They sang it in the temple. Psalm 5 for the director of music for flutes, a Psalm of David. Now, let me talk about some of these psalm titles. They do get pretty interesting when you look at them carefully. The word Selah, anyone know what that word is? You'll see that, by the way, throughout the psalms. You ever run across that word? Do you read it when you read the psalms? That's what most people say, and that's a good guess, but it's only a guess. We really don't know. It may be interlude or pause. I had one Bible teacher to tell me to think about it carefully. That's what it means. Well, that's what biblical scholars say we don't really know. We're guessing. We're guessing. So if you say, what is a shigonon? You notice that in Psalm 7? Did you ever think about that? What is a shigonad? We don't know. One guess is it means rhapsody. Sing it with rapturous singing. It's a musical direction. Maybe. You find the word mascal in Psalm 32. What is a mascal? Well, maybe again, musical direction, sing joyfully. A son to the Lord. And there are hymn tunes here. Psalm 67, according to the lilies, that's a hymn tune. So they knew that hymn tune and when you started that psalm, you sang it to according to the lilies. There's some other, a mictum here is a golden psalm, many people think, but again, we don't know. Now, a mictum may be something that's inscribed in stone. So, a lot of these Psalm titles, the original rabbis knew what they meant, but we really don't know because we weren't there to hear the singing and so forth. But notice, they were sung in many different contexts and prayed in many different contexts. We could turn to the Psalms of Ascent. If you look at Psalms 120 to 134, We're not quite sure what the songs of ascent meant when I was in seminary. Someone said, well, these are the psalms they sang when they went up to Jerusalem three times a year at the great pilgrim feast, because you always ascend to Jerusalem. You always go up, whether you're north, south, east, or west, because it's high in the mountains. Plus, it's where the temple is and the presence of God. Well, that's a good idea. I like to think that those caravans going up for Passover, for booths, for Pentecost were going up singing. Wouldn't that be wonderful? If that were the case, I'm sure they did sing. joyously going to celebrate in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was turned into, if you will, a city of normally 25,000 was turned into over 100,000 three times a year. That's when all the merchants made their money. It was Christmas three times a year. And I'm sure there's lots of celebration and so forth and singing, but we don't know. Now, I mentioned There's a little problem, too. I debated whether to mention this or not, but I'm going to. The word of, a Psalm of David, the word is li in Hebrew, and it means of, but it also means in the manner of. Dedicated to, like all prepositions, it has lots of meaning. And when young students get into, seminary students get into Greek language in seminary, they don't understand why these prepositions don't have one meaning, but they have a whole bunch of meanings. So that may account for some of the later Psalms of David are actually dedicated to David or in the manner of David. And so the first two collections are David's and some of the later Psalms may very well be dedicated to David or in the manner of David. One more thing I probably should tell you about this before we start. I think it is important. The earliest Psalm we have is of Moses. we have some of Solomon. But what is the latest Psalms that we have? Turn to Psalm 137. I think you can see that the Psalms were composed pretty much over Israel's history. In Psalm 137, Reading it from the NIV, it says this, by the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. So here's a Psalm that was written in exile, Psalm 137. So that's about the fifth century. And from the time of Moses to the fifth century, That's 1,000 years or 900 years. That's the period over which the Psalms were read and composed. And it became then the prayer book and the hymn book of Israel. Well, that's enough for literary criticism. How's that? Gives you some understanding of what you are. I'm not going to go into the poetry except to mention a couple of things. The poetry is not unique. This is just part of ancient poetry in the region. What's different about the Bible's poetry is it takes it to a different level and of course the subject matter makes it of the highest order. It's the theological content that makes the Psalms, as to its poetry, to the highest level. We have examples of the same kind of poetry in Canaanite literature and Syrophoenician literature, so that's not the uniqueness of it. The uniqueness of it is the thought. and the degree which it was dedicated to the Lord. Scholars have recognized at least since an English bishop by the last name of Lyle, Bishop Lyle. When did he live? In the 18th century. lived pretty much through the century, I don't know when he wrote, about the middle of the 18th century, he made a discovery that the rabbis probably already knew, but they never put it down on paper, that biblical poetry in particular is called parallelism. So you can read the first line and you read the second line and sometimes it's synonymous, it means the same thing. So if you don't get it the first time, you got it the second time. Now it's a parallelism of thought though, not of rhyme. A parallelism of thought, that's what the bishop came up with. So it is parallel, people knew that, but it is a thought, not words necessarily. And so the thought is the same in line one and line two. Sometimes it's antitheticals. Line one will say one thing and line two will say the opposite, as we have in Psalm one. But I'm not gonna go into all of that. It's very much different than the way we understand things. For instance, in Psalm 23, let me see if I can remember. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. I think that's about Maybe I'm wrong, 17 words, 20 syllables. The same thing in Hebrew, I think, is 10 words and 14 syllables. So the biblical Hebrew is very compressed. And in English, we have to make it a little longer and not quite put it in poetry. It's hard to capture. It's hard to translate into English. We can get the thoughts and the meaning and so forth, but it's hard. But the King James probably does the best. Surprisingly, most scholars today, regardless of their orientation, will say that King James did a magnificent job in capturing the psalm. So I hope you'll learn to read the Psalter in the King James. It's unparalleled as to its beauty. Now let's look at Psalm 1. See if I can get a little bit through this. Psalm 1 and Psalm 2 are introductory psalms. So my lecture series is going to commence with Psalm 1 and Psalm 2, the introductory Psalms to the entire five books, and conclude with the last five books. I'm making a change according to schedule, but the last five Psalms I will look at, the concluding Psalms. So we're going to look at the beginning and the end, and a few things in between. Psalm 1, let me talk about the word blessed. Blessed is the man. There are more than one word in Hebrew for blessed. The traditional one for blessing is barak, to bless. They did not use that word. It's another word that is being used here for the word blessing. The word is aser, and it means not the kind of formal blessing that Mark would give at the end of a service when he gives the benediction. But the blessing, it's an intensified word for happiness. And so some scholars will translate this blessed in Psalm 1 as, oh, how happy. Now I need to make another comment about the word happy. When we use the word happy, we're talking about giddy. We're talking about I just won a million dollars. My football team won. You know, we can go from sad to happy very quickly. When I hear a football score, I can get very sad quickly or very happy. But that's not the kind of thing, that's kind of a mood. Think of, oh, how happy here is being in a right relationship with God. It's partly shalom, being in a right relationship with God and your neighbor. You might say in that hymn, all is well with my soul. So happiness here doesn't necessarily connote a certain mood per se, it's just knowing that everything is right and that you're seeking the Lord's face. And so that certainly fits with the psalm here. Oh how happy the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked nor stand in the way of sinners nor sit in the seat of mockers. I'm sure you've heard this preached many times. You see some of the parallelism here, don't you? Oh, how happy is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. These are kind of three lines of parallel meaning. Let me comment on this just a moment about the walking, the standing, and the sitting. Notice there is a progression here in Psalm 1. It introduces us to the entire psalter, remember. It's a wisdom psalm telling us how to live, how to please God. And there's some things you don't do. You don't walk in the council of the ungodly or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of the mocker or the scorner. There is a progression here in that the psalmist pictures A person walking in this way and getting progressively worse and worse. There are degrees of sin. There are degrees of sin. Jesus said it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the Day of Judgment than this generation, meaning that When God judges, he is able to discern our hearts and the degree to which we have rejected him. Of course, it's still a condition of being lost, but nonetheless, there are different stages of it. Some people are more hardened in their attitude than others. I'd like to pair this with a thought that I have read in St. Augustine. St. Augustine talked a lot about forming good habits. We are creatures of habit. I get amused sometimes when someone says, you know, they have an addiction or a habit. Well, human beings do that to function properly. The problem is we have to form good habits rather than bad. It's a good thing to pick your Bible up in the morning and read and make that a habit. It starts out as a practice and then it becomes a habit. It becomes easier, doesn't it? And that is a good thing, as Martha Stewart would say. But notice you can also turn things, particularly bad things, into compulsions. That's worse than a habit. It's as if you have no control over it. A person who has compulsions in some ways have lost the ability to do anything but that. It's taken away their choice. And we can see that in the path of drug addiction. can't we, where people actually get to a place where they really need help. They're overcome. They're trapped. And so I think in these first three verses here, it suggested to St. Augustine and to others that you can turn things finally to where you practice a sin so much that it overtakes you and controls you. It's a compulsion. So we have to be careful how we live, just from simply a psychological standpoint. It's much more difficult, if impossible, to give up a compulsion. You might change a habit, and you certainly can change a practice. But let's continue. His delight is in the law of the Lord, but, is the adversative here, of course, meaning here's the other way to live. Now someone has said there's only one way to go right, But there are many ways to go wrong. And the Lord has one will, his way, it's pleasing to him. And so the second way is the way of the Lord. But his delight is in the law of the Lord or in the Lord's teaching. And on his law, he meditates day and night. The word meditates here means to kind of have a low moan. Now, in a world where people, when they read, they read aloud or mumbled. Have any of you been to Jerusalem? Anyone here? I understand that when you go to the Wailing Wall, people will be reading. but they're mumbling, bowing, mumbling, or praying, whatever, and it's done with a low audible voice. We're not used to that. You know, we make fun of people if their lips move when they read. But in this case, it was the way things were done. And so, this meditation is really reading over and over, as we would say today, a careful reading. Over and over. It's a studied reading. of the word of God. And meditation too in our understanding sense, but it really is learning to understand what the word is teaching or what the psalm is saying. But his delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night. Notice what he is like. He is like a tree planted by streams of water. which yields its fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither, and whatsoever he does prospers." Now, it prospers in the way of the Lord. I don't think it means that you will be driving a Mercedes and live in a million-dollar home or whatever, but it means in the way of God. So this really, when we are planted and rooted in God and seeking his face, it becomes effortless. It's just what you are. When your Christianity becomes what you are through and through, you know no other way to live, do you? Except to be what you are. I was teaching a class one time, And I never got to teach the Bible in college. I always had to teach, my major was religions, and I did learn something about them. But I taught world religions, Eastern religions, from an academic standpoint, of course. And I remember going around the class and asking the students if they could switch their religion. Now, some people can, they do, they have several, many in their lifetime, don't they? I've tried this, I've tried that. How many people I've heard say, I've tried Christian, it just doesn't work? It's like putting on a suit, a pair of clothes. But if it really is part of your life, I asked one girl, could she change her religion? She said, absolutely not. This is what I am, I'm a Christian. It kind of shocked the other students. I could not change. This is what I am." And this is really what the psalm is getting at. When you become truly filled with the presence of God in your heart and life, that's what you are. That's your identity. And you couldn't be otherwise under any circumstance. It's just the way it is. And he goes on to say, Not so the wicked, they are like chaff that the wind blows away. Most of you know what chaff is. It is the outer kernel of a grain or something and it has no substance. Now notice the one who prospers is of substance. When C.S. Lewis wrote, which is the novel where they get a busload from hell and they ride back to, which one is it? The Great Divide. The Great Divorce. The Great Divorce. Now C.S. Lewis does something very interesting there. It's from medieval metaphysics, what he draws on. But these people, notice when they're in hell they keep moving further and further and further apart because they can't get along with anybody. Then they get on this bus, they're going to go to heaven. But when they get there, the grass is hard, everything hurts, and they're just kind of like spooks crawling up out of cracks when they get to heaven. In other words, heaven is much more real, and where they are is unreal. And in a sense, he's thoroughly biblical at this point, because here in the Psalms, those who follow their own way or the way of rebellion end up having no substance. To pull a term from our political past, they have no gravitas, no weight, no substance. And so that's where self-serving life leads eventually. It leads to a lack of substance. And he finishes up this way, therefore the wicked will not stand And as Robert Alter, the famous translator at the University of California is Jewish, he says, and they will not have a leg to stand on, because if you have no substance, you have no leg. Won't be able to stand, that is in the judgment. For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. So there are only two ways. The one way may have many ways to go wrong, but it's still a way from God. There's only one right way, and that's the way Psalm 1 sets the tone for the entire Psalter. Now, Psalm 2, I'll briefly mention a couple of things here. Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against His anointed one. Let us break their chains, they say, and throw off their fetters. The one enthroned in heaven laughs, the Lord scoffs at them. And I'll stop there and let you finish reading it, but here is a psalm of God's sovereignty, and this is the second theme you will find in the Psalter, the sovereignty of God. This pleases Reformed people, to focus on the sovereignty of God. But throughout the Psalter, you will find that there is an emphasis on the sovereignty of God, and he is to be praised. There's some wonderful homiletic points to be made in these two Psalms. I won't go into any more to say that in verse 1 of this Psalm 1 through 3, it talks of the nations. Verses four through six, God's personal name comes up, Yahweh, or Jehovah, Y-H-W-H in Hebrew, and scholars believe that's pronounced Yahweh. In verses seven through nine, you have Yahweh, and then in 10 through 12, you have nations again. Now, what is interesting about this is in Psalm 2 is that the Lord's personal name is introduced. And we have what is called an envelope scheme here where it returns to the same theme that it begins with. And you'll see that in the Psalms 2 a lot. It'll start off with a certain theme in verses 1 and 2, and it will conclude with that in the last two verses or last verse. So notice that when you read the Psalms two as well. Well, let me just turn to ask questions, but let me sum it up this way. These first two Psalms introduce the entire Psalter and it focuses upon Psalm two, the sovereignty of God and who he is. And it also, since he is sovereign, he is sovereign in his commands to us that we are to obey him and to keep his commandments. And it is the right thing to do. It eventually leads us to being what we were made for. We are the sheep of His pastor, as one psalm says, and we are His people, and we are to do His will.