The Lord Watches Over the Way of the Righteous

Happy are those
    who do not follow the advice of the wicked
or take the path that sinners tread
    or sit in the seat of scoffers, 
but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
    and on his law they meditate day and night.
They are like trees
    planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
    and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.

The wicked are not so
    but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment
    nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous,
for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
    but the way of the wicked will perish.
(Psalm 1:1-6, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

The gods of this world do not wait silently for us to stumble upon them.

Few people deliberately seek out the path that sinners tread, but our modern culture makes its temptations—attractiveness, popularity, money, power—virtually impossible to ignore. Some people manage to resist these seductions, of course; those the wicked cannot persuade, they will next attempt to browbeat into submission.

When I say “modern culture,” I’m basically talking about, in bell hooks’s memorable distillation, imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. A kingdom of this world, if you will—or, as I like to call it, Empire. The apostle Paul warned about the cultural forces that enforce Empire’s will, urging the early Christians to maintain their struggle “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,” in the famous phrasing of the King James translation (Ephesians 6:12).

I imagine every generation since Paul’s has believed they lived in a world overcome by a deeper darkness than any that had come before. I don’t know that I’d go that far—we could have some provocative discussions about the mid-twentieth century—but I would not hesitate to agree that Empire’s shadow has intensified over the last decade or so. Assuming we don’t want to embrace the encroaching darkness of the authoritarian regimes around the world, Friends might either flee to the imagined safety of our meetinghouses and wait for everything to blow over or, as Paul suggested to the Ephesians (6:10), “put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”

George Fox would have considered the choice obvious.

“The Lord doth require more from Friends than all other people, because he hath given more to them,” he wrote in 1679, elaborating soon after: “And therefore my desires are, that you may all be valiant for the truth upon the earth; and keep up all your men and women’s meetings in the Lord’s power.” 

Notice that meeting for worship still holds a central place in Fox’s vision—he doesn’t regard the meetinghouse as a place to hide from evil, though, but as a place to gather strength from the gospel, “which hath brought life and immortality to light, and it will preserve you in life and immortality over him that hath darkened you.” A few lines later, he further recommends the gospel to Friends as “an everlasting perfect fellowship and order, which will stand when all others are gone.”

“An everlasting perfect fellowship and order” could also describe what numerous translators of the First Psalm have called “the law of the Lord.” The phrase appears frequently throughout Scripture, and many a person reading it has come to think of God as just another authoritarian figure demanding our obedience. The Hebrew word torah, however, has other layers of meaning, as in Robert Alter’s rendition of “the Lord’s teaching.” Other translators have gone with “instruction;” both alternatives evoke a spirit of guidance rather than one of compulsion.

Indeed, in the first volume of his recently launched series The Psalms: A Sanctuary for the Soul, Marty Folsom speaks of God’s “invitation” to the People of Israel and, by extension, to us today. “The Law is not a set of constraints or legislation,” he writes. “It is a story of unconditional love, unreservedly given. However, there are consequences for walking away: one can get lost.”

And Empire, as I said, does its best to lead us away from the blessed community.

The treasures Empire promises us if we will only embrace its tenets, though, never last—and the purported scarcity of those treasures requires our complicity in constant violence inflicted upon others in order to maintain our comfortable lifestyles. As a society, and as individuals, we spend so much time and energy defending our hoards that we have little time to truly enjoy them—instead, we live in constant anxiety and fear of imagined enemies who might take our treasures from us.

When we turn away from the darkness of this world, though, and sign on to the terms of God’s covenant, we’ll find ourselves able to truly flourish. The image of a tree planted by water holds such inspirational power that the prophet Jeremiah would invoke it as well, at a time when the people of Israel were suffering under foreign conquest. Although they had brought calamity upon themselves by taking up the ways of the world, Jeremiah said, they didn’t have to live in misery forever—God’s promise still stood.

The early Quakers similarly believed that they could turn their chaotic world around by living “not to please mortals but to please God, who tests our hearts.” (1 Thessalonians 2:4) That option remains open to us today, whatever we choose to think about God’s nature, and we’d do well to explore that option as thoroughly as possible if we want to diminish Empire’s power in this world. As Marty Folsom says in a poetic paraphrasing of Psalm 1:6, “It is ever tragic to miss Your delight, / to wander in darkness and miss the light.”