Friday, September 18, 2020

Psalm 1:1-3 Meditation

God created human beings, and He knows better than anyone how we are built.  How human life functions for it to prosper and do well.  He knows what activities will produce the most lasting joy and what things will make life work out best.  This doesn’t mean that life won’t have difficulties or unpleasant surprises, but God knows how a person can be suited so that these things don’t or won’t overwhelm or destroy us.

He explains all this in Psalm one, first in things that a person should avoid and then positively, what things one must do to make it through life in the best way.

I want to look first at what things God says we need to do to build a solid life that can withstand whatever it is that life may throw at us as well as how to make the best of it.

You can boil it down to one thing, yet it is founded on another.

The single most important thing is to meditate in God’s Word day and night.  And we can do this if we learn to delight in His Word.

That may sound excessive or extreme, but compare this with Joshua 1:8.  Joshua had been given command to lead the people of Israel into the long-awaited Promised Land.  This promised land represents your life, as God would want you to have it, a life of prosperity and success.  If the words prosperity and success repel you, I’m just using the words the Bible uses. 

God tells him over and over to be strong and very courageous, and that “this book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success.”

So here meditation is explained by our speaking the Word of God throughout our day.  Let the Word of God be the topic of most of your conversations.  Paul says in Ephesians 5:18,19 to be filled in spirit, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.  Psalms, of course, are parts of the Bible.

It’s this meditation that is needed so that we can see what God would want in various situations, and we will know how to live our lives. 

Then he says that we will be like trees firmly planted by abundance of water that continually bears fruit and whose leaves never die and fall off.

AND all that he does prospers.  Some translates say that a person prospers in all that he does, but literally it’s: whatever he does will prosper.

This is all contrasted with the things not to do in verse 1.

Don’t walk in the counsel of the ungodly.  That doesn’t mean that your doctor has to be a Christian, or does it? 

The first thing has to do with people who don’t see life as God sees it, as through the Bible, but the second and third thing are with people who actively reject God’s Word and His ways.

The most important thing to get out of this is that God wants His people to prosper and do well.  And He gives them here the how to see it happen.

 


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