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PSALM 1
You Have a Choice
Itâs Independence Day today in the United States, and our visiting preacher on Sunday more than once referred to our freedom to make choices as a reason for rejoicing. I imagine that as well as the freedom not to have oneâs destiny shaped by guys the other side of the Atlantic, she was referring to our freedom to choose where to live, where to send our children to school, when to retire, where to go for health care, or what treatment to have when we go to our health-care providers. Of course the other side of this freedom is the burden of responsibility. The more choices you have, the more chances you have to make a bad choice. People are more likely to buy jam when there are three kinds on the supermarket shelf than if there are thirty. Making choices can be confusing.
Psalm 1 believes in the importance of choice, believes that the key choice we have to make is enormously important, but also believes that it is straightforward. There are two ways that open up before us as individuals; Jesus takes up the idea in Matthew 7 when he speaks of the broad and narrow way. We are like people on a journey who face a split in the path and have to decide which way to take. One of these ways involves âwalking byâ Yahwehâs torah; the image suggests a way to walk that is well signposted. Itâs a bit like having GPS or SatNav.
Walking this way is both easy and difficult. The kind of thing that the Torah says is âBow down only to Yahweh; donât make any images; keep the Sabbath; donât commit adultery; tell the truth in court; donât fancy other peopleâs belongings.â Itâs not rocket science; God doesnât expect anything very complicated of us. Yet the Torahâs expectations also constitute a narrow way; they go against human instincts. We like to hedge our bets about what we bow down to; we like to worship in ways that are helpful or convenient; we treat the whole week as though it belongs to us; and if another man or woman attracts usâcan it be wrong to love and be loved? The psalm calls that the way of the faithless, of the offenders, the people who are prepared to take no notice of what the Torah says.
If you want to avoid that way and stick with the company of the faithful, you need to watch who you walk with, where you stand around, and who your friends are. Further, you need positively to make Yahwehâs teaching what you delight in and talk about. The Hebrew word for âtalk aboutâ suggests meditation but not a meditation that happens simply inside our headsâGodâs teaching is on our lips. And if you need encouragement to delight in Yahwehâs teaching, then one encouragement is the promise that the route with those signposts that could seem so limiting (donât you ever get annoyed when GPS keeps telling you what to do?) is the route that leads to blessing. Jesus again takes up the psalmâs perspective when he comments on the blessing that comes to people who hear Godâs word and keep it (Luke 11:28). In contrast, the route that looks like the open road with lots of freedom and good company is actually a route that leads nowhere that you would really want to go.
As the parallelism suggests, the âjudgmentâ the psalm refers to is not a final judgment at the end of time. The Old Testament focuses more on the way Godâs purpose is worked out in our everyday lives. Any local community has an âassembly of the faithful,â a meeting of its elders that is charged with resolving matters of conflict in the community, with making a judgment or a decision about things that happen. The psalm has a touching faith in the communityâs civil processes and invites people who pray the Psalms to trust them for themselves. God will see that life works out fairly. God will thus acknowledge the faithful.
The fact that the Psalter begins with this psalm reminds us that the life of worship and prayer on which the Psalter focuses cannot be separated from living life in light of the Torah; you canât expect to worship or pray if you are not living by that teaching. Many psalms that constitute a plea for help include a declaration that we have lived a life of faithfulness. They thus declare that our being in a mess does not result from our own faithlessness, but that you canât pray in that way unless you have lived in light of Psalm 1. If you have lived according to the Torahâs teaching, then your being in a mess implies that God has not fulfilled the promises in Psalm 1. In such circumstances, the Psalter invites you to live with the tension between Psalm 1 and the mess you are in. You donât deny the mess, but you donât stop believing in Psalm 1. Indeed, it informs your prayer because when you are in a mess you are in a position to say to God, âExcuse me. What about what you said in Psalm 1?â
PSALM 2
God Laughs on His Peopleâs Behalf
We watched Independence Day fireworks last night, and I recalled how people sometimes ask me, âDo you celebrate Independence Day in Britain?â I say, âYes, of course: parents are glad when their kids grow up and take control of their own lives so that the parents are free of responsibility for them.â Living in Britain, I was hardly aware of the fact that the United States had once been a British colony. Only through living in the United States have I come to appreciate the significance of the successful rebellion by the ragtag colonial militias against the British authorities. For the citizens of the one superpower in the twenty-first century, it may also be difficult to imagine the nature of that achievement.
Old Testament Israel had something more like the power of the United States in the eighteenth century than in the twenty-first; for nearly all of its history it was an underdog. An FBI antiterrorism chief is said to have called the U.S.-Pakistani force searching for people behind the first World Trade Center bombing âa small ragtag army of racketeers, bandits, and murderersâ; you could have described Davidâs army in the same terms. Yet God told David and his successors that they were going to control the nations. Yahweh has become Davidâs father. He has adopted him as his son. David is going to be the means of Yahwehâs sovereignty operating in the world. One would have expected God to commandeer the forces of a superpower, but working through a ragtag army fits Godâs regular way of acting, turning human expectations on their head.
There was a short period in Davidâs lifetime when the king of Israel did rule a small empire, but generally nations such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Greece could indeed have laughed at the idea that Yahweh was going to control their destinies by means of the king he anointed. Usually the nations were invading, besieging, defeating, killing, transporting, taxing, and generally making life unpleasant for Israel. Itâs easy to picture Israelâs praying century after century the psalms about invasion and defeat that will follow in the Psalter. Thus we can see the link between Psalms 1 and 2 at the beginning of the Psalter. What Psalm 1 does for the individual, Psalm 2 does for the nation. It invites Israel to acknowledge the toughness of its life over the centuries but not to assume that this reality will have the last word. As the individualâs life stands under the promise expressed in Psalm 1, Israelâs life stands under the promise expressed in Psalm 2. To churches living under the autocratic sovereignty of another superpower, the risen Jesus promises that they will exercise the kind of forceful rule of which God here speaks (e.g., see Revelation 2:26â27). Of course neither the psalm nor Jesusâ promise is for people who themselves belong to a superpower. In this psalm, Western readers are the nations, not Israel. But reading the psalm as if we are little Israel can help us put ourselves in the position of the little nations that are under our domination.
When a superpower such as Assyria controlled the destiny of little peoples like Ephraim, Judah, Syria, Philistia, Moab, and Edom, from time to time the little peoples would band together to try to throw off the Assyrian yoke and gain their independence (this usually issued in disaster). The opening of the psalm imagines the shoe on the other foot, with the nations that form the superpower coming into conclave to throw off the sovereignty that Yahweh intends to exercise through the Davidic king. Israel often heard the scornful laugh of a superpower mocking its trust in Yahweh (the story in 2 Kings 18â19 is a great example). Psalm 2 reminds us of another ...
