Page 21 - Psalms Ebook

other sins. Only the Lord Jesus, literally can be called righteous.

The point I am trying to make is this. The reality is spiritual. Is it true
that the godly man always prospers? Yes, but not necessarily outwardly.
In his heart he prospers, in his heart he has success, in his heart he has
peace, no matter what the outward circumstances are. This is a spiritual
Psalm. It is always true. This is the reality no matter what it looks like
out here. That does not mean necessarily that the man planted by the
river, the righteous man, is going to be a rich man or a famous man or
even a healthy person. It does not say that. It is talking about spiritual
prosperity. We need to understand that. Psalm 1 invites us to cling to
this reality no matter what it looks like on the outside. Sometime the
righteous suffer and the unrighteous are triumphant. That is the reality,
because God looks deeper than that and He sees what is going on inside.
God wants us to see, that when we delight in the Lord, no matter what
happens out here, our leaf is ever green and our tree is prosperous.

This ought to be easy to remember. We are going to look at Psalm 37
and Psalm 73, just turn them around – 37,73 – both of those are
wonderful because they deal with the problem of the wicked prospering.
God tells us in those Psalms “don’t believe the hype”. It is temporary,
and it is not real prosperity. Only the Christian has real prosperity. So
Psalm 1 describes for us what spiritual reality looks like.

Anyway, that is the method of Psalm 1. It is sort of the keynote of the
whole Bible, this striking contrast. Blessed, perish, righteous, wicked, a
tree of light, chaff driven by the wind. Positive, negative. character,
condition. All through the Psalm you have the same thing. It is spiritual,
not physical, the clash of the opposites. Every Psalm will invite you to
look away from this world and look unto the Lord so He can put a new
song in your heart. You can see it right here in these first six verses that
God is setting you up for the entire book. But not just the book of
Psalms it sets you up for the whole Bible.

Long ago when I read the first Psalm I thought the message was about
how to be happy. The Bible never teaches you how to be happy but
rather how to be holy. This is what the great message here is. Psalm
25:15, “My eyes are continually on the Lord.” You see that right here.
He meditates day and night in the law of the Lord and in the Lord. He
deals with happiness indirectly. He deals with prosperity indirectly, not
directly. The man who is looking unto the Lord is the happy man, the
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