What a pleasure to hear devotional thoughts from Autumn Stewart this week! Stop by the contributors page if you’d like to learn more about her.
Poetry is often an acquired taste. I tell my students to give it a try like they have done the coffee that so many consume in massive quantities. When I became an English teacher many years ago, I made this move—with poetry, not coffee. I started with many of the classics—Shakespeare, Dickens, Frost.
As my students with their coffee, I grew to love the lyricism, the imagery. With this new affection came another love; for as I grew to love poetry, the Psalms started to come into focus. I grew to love the emotional pleadings, the yearning questions, and the heartfelt confessions of the various Psalmists.
As I read the Bible year after year, I savor the Psalms. The last couple of years, I have saved it until the end of the year, like dessert at the end of the meal. This central book begins with one particularly parallel Psalm. In Psalm 1, we are told how we can live a blessed life.
The steps to blessedness are quite practical, explained with verbs—walking, standing, sitting—verbs that we all do daily. The commonality of the verbs seems to suggest that blessedness is built in our everyday. While we might try to complicate doing right, we are instructed to “delight in the law of the Lord” by “mediat[ing] day and night” (Psalm 1:3).
The simplicity of the blessed life does not mean that it is a sparse life. The blessed man has bounty—“bringeth fruit in his season . . . whatsoever he doeth shall prosper” (vs. 3). The imagery of the ungodly stands in sharp contrast to the blessed, for the ungodly man lives an unsatisfying life of chaff (vs. 4).
The productive life ascribed to the godly reminds us that God’s law is not grievous, but gracious. In His law, He directs us toward what He knows will bring us good. Again, in contrast, those who reject God’s law and “walk . . . in the counsel of the ungodly” will not find blessing (vs. 1).
The simplicity of the Psalms has come into focus now that I see them for the poems that they are. The more I have noticed the poetic elements in the Psalms the more I have been reminded that God desires good for mankind and that He hears us when we have veered from this good path.
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