Meditation on the Text of the Week

The Real Songs of Bombadil

The Psalter opens with short song, which, like the songs of Tolkien's Bombadil, is a song of power. It sings up one of the most—if not the most—fundamental pattern of human existence. This song both creates and shapes the course and outcome of cultures and history, families and nations, rulers and ruled.

While the Psalm is addressed to an individual (“blessed is the man”), the Bible elsewhere makes it clear that it is a characteristic type that is being presented. The same applies equally to corporate entities which delight in the law of the Lord and meditate day and night in it. (For example, “blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” Psalm 33:12)

The image of the fruitful tree is one which resonates deep within--(and very Bombadil-like). The streams of water give the tree verdant life. The consequent fruitfulness of the tree shows that it brings life and blessing to others. The person whose life is molded by God's Law is both prosperous and successful. He becomes powerful.

To delight in God's Law means ipso facto that one must spurn and reject the counsel, wisdom, advice, ways, and the seats of the wicked—who mock and despise God and His Law, either overtly and militantly, or by means of dismissive disregard—considering both the Lord and His Law relegated to the dustbin of history.

So normative and dominant is this pattern of divine governance over humanity that the Bible takes care to provide an explanation when it does not appear, at first glance, to be working. Psalm 73 when Asaph was envious of the initial success of the wicked and arrogant is a case in point. In Isaiah 42, when Israel lay plundered and despoiled, the Lord is particular to explain that while He had made the Law great and glorious, the people o f the Law were now plundered because they had chosen the seat of the scoffers and had not walked in the ways of the Lord. (Isaiah 42: 19—25)

The course of the Kingdom of God in the earth is a movement from a position of extreme insignificance to one of world-wide, universal dominance. Its commencement in any particular nation or culture is always very small (the mustard seed)—a mere two or three gathered together, yet with the Lord in the midst of them. Eventually, it fills the whole nation.

The extent, richness, profundity, and depth of the blessedness promised in Psalm 1 is magnified many times over as the Gospel takes more and more hold in a society, as Jerusalem grows and Athens weakens. The blessing moves from strength to strength, as it were. In our generation, however, we live in a temporarily post-Christian world, a latter day Babylonian captivity. For us, many of the blessings we experience are more personal, individual, familial and congregational. But because Christ has ascended to the Throne at the right hand of God, the time is coming when the hills will once again be torn down and the valleys filled. The blessings of Psalm 1 will be multiplied and magnified many times over.

As Bombadil's songs shaped fictional Middle Earth, so the Lord of the Heavens and the Earth has given us this non-fictional song of power to sing that our lives might be shaped to the Law of the Lord and so God's rich favour and power might flow down upon us and all with whom we are in covenant.