Sunday Devotional: Psalm 1:2

² Rather, his joy is in the Law of the Lord, and he meditates on His Law by day and night.

Last week we saw that the blessed man doesn’t walk in counsel of the wicked, nor does he stand in the path of sinners, or sit in the assembly of scoffers. The blessed man’s behavior is in contrast to this. Rather, he finds his joy, his delight, his pleasure in God’s Law, and rather than spending his time with the wicked, the sinners, and the scoffers, he devotes his time to God’s word.

The Hebrew in this verse specifically refers to the Torah, and at the time this was written, the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, was the entirety of Scripture.  So, while on the one hand this is a reference to the literal Torah, it can also be taken as a reference to God’s revealed Word in Scripture, which for us encompasses the entirety of the Old and New Testaments.  The righteous man takes great pleasure and delight in the revelation of God.

We also need to remember that this is a Psalm, so it is poetic in nature. When it says that the blessed man meditates on God’s Law “by day and night,” it doesn’t mean we should have our noses in our Bibles 24-7. Look at the image the words convey. The blessed man is the man whose thoughts are dictated by the word of God. His meditations are saturated with Scripture. He takes in God’s word and is consumed by it. It is his bread and butter; his meat and potatoes.

The psalmist makes a stark contrast between the unrighteous man (the wicked, the sinner, and the scoffer), and the blessed man. It’s very easy to go along with those who take delight in scoffing. Today, there are many scoffers among those who consider themselves clever. They mock God’s word and His people. They deride His holy standards, and take great pleasure in defiling His name. And many fall to their peer pressure. The path of least resistance in our world is the one in which we take our understanding of the world from these people and walk shoulder-to-shoulder with them, being counted as one of their number.

The hard road is to turn away from the wicked, the sinners, and the scoffers, and fix our devotion to God and His word, to put the counsel of Scripture above the counsel of men, to dwell in the courts of His praise, and sit among those who share our love for God and His word. This means being counted among those the scoffers scoff at. But if our soul’s desire is to please God and be numbered among the blessed, then this is what we must do.

May we enjoy the Lord and His word this week!