11
11
“BLESSED IS THE MAN”
M. Pavlik
Coming back again, beloved brethren, to what we were
privileged to have before us here in the past days, I would
remark that often the matter of the quality of life has been
referred to.
So in that connection these two scriptures already became
very precious to me some years ago, and now they have
afresh come to my mind. These are not the only passages in
the Psalms where we find the expression, “Blessed is the
man”, or “Blessed are they”, but I have selected these two
passages to show the connection between the first and the
second. As we know, Psalm 119 can be regarded as the last
psalm of the book of Psalms, what follows is a sort of
appendix. (see F. E. Raven. Vol. 12 p.40).
Psalm 119 is a wonderful top point, a wonderful end to the
whole teaching of the Psalms. So I would say that in Psalm 1
we have “the man”, one person. It is wonderful that the Psalms
should be introduced by such a thought. We have here the
man according to the thoughts of God, the ideal man of God.
We know it is fully presented in the blessed Person of the Lord
Jesus.
I think we have here a blessed antitype of what we have in
Leviticus 11 as to the clean and unclean animals. There we
have prescriptions as to food, as to what the people of God
should feed on and what they should not eat. There are two
principles brought before us. The animals which they were
allowed to feed on were characterized by the divided hoof and
by chewing the cud. I think we find in Psalm 1 a blessed
antitype of this—“the man that