Archive for the 'Psalm' Category

Mar 10 2010

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The Two Ways Described

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The Two ways described

Happiness is described as blessedness! Can you believe it? A happy life is a blessed life! This is the very first concept the psalmist portrays to the audience. Blessed means supremely happy or fulfilled. We can only be happy when our passion and delight is in the Law of the Lord. In other words, a godly man or woman who does not pursue the law of the Lord with the same “delight” finds that their joy or happiness in life missing.

In this psalm we see the parallelism, that is, saying the same thing or a variety of the same thing, in two linked lines. That is what we have here, only in this verse there are three linked lines and there are three parallel terms: Set 1, “walk, stand, sit”; set 2, “counsel, way seat”; and set 3, “wicked, sinners, mockers.” Spurgeon often thought that sinners went from bad to worse. He said, “When men are living in sin they go from bad to worse. At first they merely walk in the counsel of the careless, and ungodly, who forget God- the evil is rather practical than habitual- but after tht, they become habituated to evil, and they stand in the way of open sinners who wilfully violate God’s commandments; and if let alone, they go one step further, and become themselves pestilent teachers and tempters of others, nd thus they sit in the seat of the scornful. They have taken their degree in vice, and as true Doctors of Damnation they are installed


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Mar 04 2010

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Divergent Ways

Psalm 1 introduces us to the doctrine of the two ways, which is a very common concept. Most Americans are acquainted with Robert Frost’s use of the idea in the poem “The Road Not Taken.”

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference

There are examples in scripture that speak of this doctrine. The most important is the use of the idea by Jesus toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount as he contrasts, between which choices must be made: two gates and two roads, two trees and their two types of fruit, two houses and two foundations. Psalm 1 is the clearest and most carefully developed .

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