Blessed and Deeply Rooted

The Book of Psalms is the most unusual book in the Bible. A testimony to its uniqueness is that it often is printed as a single book. Images, not stories or arguments, convey the message of this book, and those images connect deeply with our emotions and experiences. Word precision and structured phrases abound, and the images often communicate their message by placing objects side by side in comparison. It is the most quoted book in the New Testament and the one Jesus quoted most often. The Psalms were the songs he sang, and they tell about him. As Christians, we understand that Psalms point to Jesus and our life with God. It is a book of prayers, to be sure, and meditation is an important theme throughout it as well. The two opening Psalms have been called meditations on meditation.

Psalm 1 was placed at the beginning of this collection to serve as an introduction to this collection of poems. Psalm 1 invites us to meditate on the psalms which follow. This psalm gives us a picture of the good person who is flourishing. While the only person who fully has lived the life pictured in this Psalm is Jesus, the psalm invites us to adopt the pattern of living and the flourishing it portrays. When we consider the promised flourishing of the Psalms, it is worth remembering this is not the promise of an easy life. Jesus, our model meditator, flourished in his life and ministry but did not have an easy life. This Psalms reminds the reader that meditation is the God-given pathway to a flourishing and deeply satisfying life. Happiness is more than an abundance of pleasure when mentioned in the Psalms. John Wesley, in a sermon on love, captures the classic Christian understanding of what is meant by real happiness, “By happiness I mean, not a slight, trifling pleasure, that perhaps begins and ends in the same hour; but such a state of well-being as contents the soul, and gives it a steady, lasting satisfaction.” (Wesley, John; Outler, Albert 1984 386)

At the outset of this psalm, we are told that the blessed person avoids harmful entanglements and instead delights in and meditates on the law of God. Meditation and delight in scripture go hand in hand. Consider these statements in the psalms,

  • “whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and who meditates on his law day and night” (Ps. 1:2)

  • “I meditate on your precepts...I delight in your decrees” (Ps. 119:15-16)

  • “I reach out for your commands, which I love, that I may meditate on your decrees” (Ps. 119:48)

  • “Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long” (Ps. 119:97).

Meditation is delight-fueled thinking. The Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book published in British North America, nicely captures this emphasis with the phrase, “But in the law…is his longing delight.” (Zoltán Haraszti 1956A) There is a strong connection between what delights us and what captures the focus of our meditation. As you consider developing your practice of meditating on the Bible, coming to appreciate and delight in the Bible is the pathway to meditation. One of the lessons I have learned in life is that meditation happens. I will meditate in the sense of brooding on and worrying about or obsessing over what I care about. Meditation, dwelling on what we value, is part of the human experience. The call is to transform our thinking so that we dwell on God. One way to do that is not simply by trying to do this but by training our minds through deliberate meditation.

The connection between delight and meditation is pictured in Psalm 2:1. Here, the enemies of God and his rightful King are portrayed as being in conflict. The question is, “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?” The word translated “plot” is the same word rendered as “meditate” in Psalm 1:2, in one case, the delight in God’s wisdom prompts one person to focus and daydream about the beauty of God’s order, and in the other case, the hatred of God’s King drives them to murmur and conspire to attack him. These two Psalms are a gateway to the Psalter. In Psalm 1, meditation on God’s instruction leads to a person being a deeply planted and fruitful tree, and in the other case, nations, peoples, kings, and officials murmur against the Lord and his anointed king, and this leads to their being dashed “to pieces like pottery” (Ps. 2:9 NIV). I must underscore that the “happy way” of Psalm 1 is not easy or always pleasant, but it is the way of well-being and deep fulfillment.

Another set of images for deep engagement with the Bible is that of putting down roots. We find this image in Psalm 1, where the one who meditates “is like a tree transplanted by streams of water, which produces its fruit in its season.” (DeClaissé-Walford, Nancy L.; Jacobson, Rolf A.; Tanner, Beth LaNeel 201459) The life of the person who meditates on God’s law is compared to a deeply rooted tree. Meditators find sustaining nourishment in the life-giving soil of the riverbank. The tree was “transplanted,” reminding us that meditation is not a self-improvement project but a God-ordained means of grace. We are being transplanted by grace to a soil that will sustain us. The roots anchor the tree in place (anyone who has sought to move a shrub of any size knows how well roots accomplish this) and provide the tree with stability, unlike the chaff, which is blown every which way.

In his parable of the soils, Jesus warned us about what happens to the rootless plant. “A farmer went out to plant some seed. As he scattered it across his field, some seeds fell on a footpath, and the birds came and ate them. Other seeds fell on shallow soil with underlying rock. The plants sprang up quickly, but they soon wilted beneath the hot sun and died because the roots had no nourishment in the shallow soil. Other seeds fell among thorns that shot up and choked out the tender blades. But some seeds fell on fertile soil and produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as had been planted” (Matt. 13:3b-8 NLT). Without roots going deep into the soil, the plant cannot live.

Jesus explained the parable’s meaning; the seed represents the Word of God, and the story illustrates the importance of hearing well and rightly receiving the word. In Luke’s account, Jesus emphasized the importance of sustained retention of the word. Those persons represented by the good soil “retain it” (Luke 8:15 NIV) by taking it into their hearts, so they cling to it. They do this patiently and with careful attentiveness, producing “a huge harvest” (Luke 8:15 NLT). Once again, attentive dwelling on the word, where our roots sink into it deeply, results in fruitfulness.

What is out of sight, the root is connected to what sustains life. The remainder is simple: tend to your roots, and let them go deep into that which will nourish your soul, the riverbank of the Word of God, which keeps us “rooted and built up in him” (Col. 2:7, NIV). Our roots go down and draw our sustenance from him.

References

  • DeClaissé-Walford, Nancy L., Rolf A. Jacobson, and Beth LaNeel Tanner. The Book of Psalms. Nicot. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014.

  • Haraszti, Zoltán, ed. The Bay Psalm Book: A Facsimile Reprint of the First Edition of 1640. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.

  • Wesley, John, and Albert Outler. The Works of John Wesley. The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley. Vol. 4, Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1984.