His was a lonely and a despised path. All through it He was bearing Israel's strokes, not making atonement; that was only on the cross when He made His soul an offering for sin. On the cross were the heaviest strokes surely, but there was atonement also, there was blood-shedding which gives a vicarious, a substitutory value (we may say) to all that He then endured for Israel. The healing power of the stripes is because His blood was shed. He died under the claims of a broken law, and thus, declared the inexorable justice of God; in His death He was fulfilling righteousness and establishing truth. But it is His blood that brings redemption (Eph. 1:77In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace; (Ephesians 1:7)). Christ had died having been made sin, and from a dead Christ the atoning blood flows. The soldiers saw that He was dead, but one of them pierced His side and the precious blood flowed, without which there could be no remission. As on the passover night, not the dead lamb within but the blood without was the salvation of Israel. His blood was shed for the purposes of grace. His death was the completing of that righteousness of which His baptism was the initiation.
Precious blood! What makes His blood so precious to God? Is it because He was that holy thing born of the Virgin? Because He was that perfect blessed Man, who always, day and night, meditated in the law of God? Who always did the things that pleased His Father? Yea, it is precious because He, the spotless One, was made sin, and bore the full weight of God's wrath against sin even to death, He paid the full penalty and glorified God. The offering was accomplished, He had dismissed His soul. The law can demand nothing after death; and the redeeming blood flowed not from a dying Christ, but from a dead Christ. The vindication of righteousness, the honor of God's law, was proclaimed by the cross, and could not be added to when He died. The blood was shed after that. It is the blood of Him who thus glorified God, therefore it is precious to Him. It is precious to God because He can now remit sin and righteously forgive. Christ is the wisdom and the power of God, as well as the infinite expression of His love.
To return to our Psalm; it speaks not of His divine glory as Son of God, nor of His official glory as King of Israel—that is in the second psalm—but His own personal character, of moral glory as the perfect Man. “Blessed is the Man.” Yea, blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven; and believers in Christ know that this blessedness is of a higher character than what we could have had in creation purity as Adam before he sinned. It is more blessed to be joined by the Spirit to Christ, than to have been maintained in Adamic innocence and goodness. It is this superior blessedness that led Paul, with his eye fixed upon the immense fact, that believers had died with Christ and were risen with Him, so that in the power of resurrection life we might live to God after a holier sort than an innocent but unredeemed man could know—that led him to thank God that we, having been the slaves of sin, had now obeyed from the heart the form of teaching into which we were instructed (Rom. 6).
But this Man of the first Psalm is perfection and needed no forgiveness. His blessedness is peculiar to Himself. His is not the innocence of the first Adam, who (as created) knew no evil, but the perfection of the last Adam, Who in divine purity lived in the midst of sinners, and delighted in the law with cognizance of all and condemned sin. He meditates in the law day and night, no intermission, uninterrupted communion with God in His law. The law implies the presence of sinners; the law is not made for the righteous. This perfect Man is in the midst of sinners, and alone among them. When the Lord was here, there were a very few who slave to Him. In our Psalm He alone is looked at till we come to the last verse. All others were walking in the counsel of the ungodly, standing in the way of sinners, sitting in the seat of the scornful. It was on their account that law was there. He does not ignore the law because it could not touch Him—had nothing to say to Him as it had to all others; He delights in it. To other men it imposed a check, placing a barrier against their wills. To Him it is the expression of God's will as to what a man should be, and He, both in nature and in life, fully answers to it, and finds joy in it. Yea, it is the expression of His own will, in perfect accord with the will, of God.
This perfect Man is not in heaven contemplating the divine attributes, nor is it the enjoyment of the works of God in the peaceful garden of Eden, but He is in the midst of sinners, surrounded with evil, yet delighting in the law which pronounces the judgment of God upon sinful men. These are the circumstances in which the perfect Man is found. All outside Himself is imperfect and evil, He alone walking in perfect obedience. We hear the same perfect wondrous Man in the Gospel, “I do always the things that are pleasing to Him” (John 8:2929And he that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please him. (John 8:29)). Consider Him in the midst of evil: how unlike the first man, who with everything in his favor failed at the first testing, and entailed death upon his race, sin, death, and judgment, the heirloom of his family.
This blessed Man will have His reward. “He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf shall not wither and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” As man He receives this reward. And we may notice here that the remnant (just named in the last verse) have the same character of blessing though He alone in its fullness; and indeed their blessing is given to them for altogether a different reason, as Jeremiah declares (17:7, 8), “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought neither shall cease from yielding fruit.” This looks onward to millennial peace and joy. Israel restored will enter into the joy of their King, their prosperity will take its color from His joy. The land itself shares in blessing described in the same way, no doubt if a figure for man, it is literal for the land, “And by the river upon the bank thereof, on this side and on that side, shall grow all trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit thereof be consumed; it shall bring forth new fruit according to its months, because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary; and the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine” (Ezek. 47). When men and the land are so blessed, then will the tree of the first Psalm flourish. It is His portion as the perfect Man, theirs as those who trust in Him.
“The ungodly are not so.” Nebuchadnezzar on the throne was a tree (see Dan. 4:2222It is thou, O king, that art grown and become strong: for thy greatness is grown, and reacheth unto heaven, and thy dominion to the end of the earth. (Daniel 4:22)), but his leaf faded. For a brief moment prosperity shone upon him; where is he now and his glory? “But are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.” Alas! it is the ungodly in Israel the Psalm speaks of, and the prophet Hosea (13:3) pronounces the same judgment upon Ephraim, “Therefore they shall be as the morning cloud, and as the early dew that passeth away, as the chaff that is driven with the whirlwind out of the floor, and as the smoke out of the chimney.”
The day is coming when He shall flourish as the tree, and the chaff be driven away by fiercer winds than the ungodly have yet known. What day is that? Not that day when the dead shall stand before the great white throne, but when Christ comes to judge the living. Its commencement will be when He appears with His saints, and will continue till the wicked are consumed from off the land, for they “shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.” The Psalm goes beyond this judgment and gives a glimpse of the godly remnant who will then be the congregation of the righteous. “All thy children shall be taught of Jehovah” (see Isa. 54:13, 1413And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children. 14In righteousness shalt thou be established: thou shalt be far from oppression; for thou shalt not fear: and from terror; for it shall not come near thee. (Isaiah 54:13‑14), also 65:20). No sinner shall endure among them. At that time the “Blessed Man” will have the joys and prosperity described under the figure of the tree planted by the rivers of water.
The flourishing tree of this Psalm is no symbol of the gospel in its dispensational aspect. For the preacher now, like the prophet of old, may indeed cry, “Who hath believed our report?” Christendom outwardly receives, virtually denies, the gospel. Christendom as read in its most popular writers teaches “another gospel which is not another.” Its doom is near, its last stage is being developed, whose features are becoming plainer with awful rapidity. And then “I will spue thee out of my mouth.” Neither the worldly spreading of the Christian name nor the saving power of Christ's name in the hearts of believers are referred to in this Psalm by the flourishing tree, but the earthly glory of Christ when the earth is purged (Matt. 13:41-4341The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; 42And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. 43Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear. (Matthew 13:41‑43)).
Three classes are before us in this Psalm. The perfect Man, the ungodly, and the righteous. In the first there could be but One. His perfection is intrinsic, and is in absolute contrast with the ungodly. Then the righteous, the associates of the perfect and blessed Man. These have a relative righteousness, and He calls them the excellent of the earth, in whom He delights (Psa. 16:33But to the saints that are in the earth, and to the excellent, in whom is all my delight. (Psalm 16:3)). These will rejoice in the day when the “tree” shall flourish, and will share in His prosperity. These take their character from Him. He is the “tree” whose leaf never fades; they are, through their association with Him, “trees” of righteousness. And when they are established in the land and have become a nation, they too will delight in the law of God. The clean water will have been sprinkled, the new heart will have been given (Ezek. 36). For then will have come the acceptable year of Jehovah, “that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of Jehovah, that He might be glorified.”
Grace has given us a better portion; yet it is not less grace that will thus exalt Israel in the coming day. As the prophet said and the apostle repeated, “And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.” Not so the perfect Man. He needed no grace, He never failed. And looking at the demands of law and of government, which being God's government must be according to inflexible justice, none but He could be entitled to the full blessedness of the first Psalm. He delighted in the law, and God delighted in Him.
Where is a more striking contrast between the prosperity of the righteous and the destruction of the ungodly than the stable tree and the driven chaff? Eternal doom is not the thought here though it does lead our thoughts on to it. The final triumph of righteousness and the putting down of all ungodliness for the earth is the theme of these two Psalm and declares the righteousness of God in government. Hence grace as proclaimed in the gospel is not found here. No call to repentance (Psa. 2:1010Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. (Psalm 2:10) is rather a warning), no promise of forgiveness to the guilty on his confession, nor of restoration to a failing saint. Righteousness and reward are linked together, so also are ungodliness and judgment. Man's probationary term had not yet expired, he was not yet proved to be lost and dead, and therefore the time was not yet come for the fullest display of grace. Man's utter rain and God's richest grace are revealed together. Two great facts, the second death and eternal life. The law contemplates neither. It tested man declaring what he should be and making bare what he is; it therefore necessarily takes its form from man's condition. It is holy, just, and good, and demanded that righteousness which Jesus the blessed Man and He alone did present to God.
“For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous.” Here the righteous (not one but many; in the Sept. the word is plural) are distinct from “the Man.” Jehovah knows their way, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. The knowing and the perishing placed side by side as here means destruction for the ungodly and preservation for the righteous; yea, a moral approval of the righteous, but does not rise to the height of God's delight in the blessed Man.
(Continued from page 37.)