Psalm 1 from South Woods Baptist Church on Vimeo.

Background

504 years ago this week, Martin Luther began teaching the Psalms in the city of Wittenberg, Germany. Here’s one thing he said about them, “The Psalter ought to be a precious and beloved book, if for no other reason than this: it promises Christ’s death and resurrection so clearly–and pictures his kingdom and the condition and nature of all Christendom–that it might well be called a little Bible. In it is comprehended most beautifully and briefly everything that is in the entire Bible.”[1]

Augustine, similarly, wrote, “What is there that may not be learned in the Psalms?” It seems as if the New Testament authors thought it summarized many of the Bible’s themes, as the New Testament alludes to the Psalms more than any other book. It’s the longest book in the Old Testament.

We could spend the duration of our time introducing the 150 Psalms that follow, but the Psalter actually introduces itself in the form of the first two Psalms. This is why, when we asked you to help us pick out Psalms for this series, we’d already decided on preaching the first two.

Psalm 1 sets up the Psalter. Sidney Greidanus writes, “The editors of the Psalter have placed Psalm 1, a torah (wisdom) psalm, at the head of this collection in order to signal that every following Psalm is to be read as part of God’s torah, teaching, instruction, for Israel.”[2] So, while many folks consider the Psalms to be a compendium on human emotions, it’s more than the mere expressing of affections, it’s instruction for our expression.

The Psalms, most importantly, teach us about the character of God. I remember a teenager asking Paul Washer what advice he had for someone who wanted to lead worship one day. Washer replied, “If you read books on the attributes of God, you’ll find the majority of references to God’s character come from the book of Psalms. So, if you want to be a worship leader, first be a theologian of that book.”

Songs teach, whether we realize that or not, and these songs are the ones that do so authoritatively. Let’s learn from them.

Psalm 1

About a month ago, I was having lunch with my cousin Josh. We grew up across the street from each other and he knows me about as well as anyone. Over fish, he started talking about tomorrow’s eclipse. Honestly, I was a bit skeptical as to how big a deal this was going to be. Josh could tell. So, for about 15 minutes he persuasively laid out the facts. As he described the rarity of this astronomical event being so close to us, the sky going dark in the middle of the day, he eventually said, “Matt, this is the kind of thing that if it’d happened 1000 years ago, the Mayans would’ve sacrificed one another.”

Now, why would they do that? Because their perspective was limited, they wouldn’t have seen the eclipse coming; nor would they have had an explanation for it.

Contrast that with the lead up to tomorrow. Not only do we know this is happening tomorrow, we can click on a map and know precisely where it can be seen in the world. Furthermore, we can pinpoint a specific address and tell exactly how long you’ll be able to observe it.

How can we do this? Because someone sees a bigger picture. We have spacecraft that fly around the moon, other things on the moon, and many of these transmitters tell us precisely how fast things are moving up there. As one person wrote, “There’s a giant clock going on in our solar system. The moon goes around the Earth, the Earth goes around the sun, we know those periods very precisely. In fact, we’ve known about this eclipse, and it’s been on all of our calendars for decades now.”[3] Because we’ve seen and measured factors galore, a scientist can tell us significantly more than the Mayans knew. If we didn’t have those spacecraft and transmitters, tomorrow would catch us completely off guard. It would trend on twitter. Baptists would go apocalyptic.

Instead, we saw it coming and bought glasses.

Now, zoom out a bit[...]