My thinking of late has become very flabby. The mind, like the muscles, can get out of shape in a hurry. It takes days for muscles to begin to show that they are atrophying, though I suppose the process is going on when we don’t use our muscles. Flabby thinking can manifest itself in three seconds.

So, it is the first day of October. I am determined to shape up my thinking by reading five psalms in the Book of Psalms each day and one chapter of Proverbs each day. I also plan to marinate in at least one verse of what I am reading. The word “marinate” is used to express two things. The first aspect of marinating is that I need to season my reading with humility, openness, and the willingness to act on whatever God is saying to me by the means of these writings. Second, I need to spend time soaking in God’s Word. Marinating a steak or a mind for a few brief moments is not all that helpful.

In my mental marination, I decided to stir in some Derek Kidner, regarding Psalm 1.

I was struck by his comments on Psalm 1:1-3. I quote them in their entirety, in order to cement them in my own mind as well as for your mental (and behavioral) marination.

“The way of life

Preferable to Blessed, for which a separate word exists, is ‘Happy’, or ‘The happiness of …!’. Such was the Queen of Sheba’s exclamation in 1 Kings 10:8, and it is heard twenty-six times in the Psalter.¹ This psalm goes on to show the sober choice that is its basis. The Sermon on the Mount, using the corresponding word in Greek, will go on to expound it still more radically.

            Counsel, way and seat (or ‘assembly’, or ‘dwelling’) draw attention to the realms of thinking, behaving and belonging, in which a person’s fundamental choice of allegiance is made and carried through; and this is borne out by a hint of decisiveness in the tense of the Hebrew verbs (the perfect). It would be reading too much into these verbs to draw a moral from the apparent process of slowing down from walking to sitting, since the journey was in the wrong direction for a start. Yet certainly the three complete phrases show three aspects, indeed three degrees, of departure from God, by portraying conformity to this world at three different levels: accepting its advice, being party to its ways, and adopting the most fatal of its attitudes – for the scoffers, if not the most scandalous of sinners, are the farthest from repentance (Prov. 3:34).

2. The three negatives have cleared the way for what is positive, which is their true function and the value of their hard cutting edge. (Even in Eden God gave man a negative, to allow him the privilege of decisive choice.) The mind was the first bastion to defend, in verse 1, and is treated as the key to the whole man. The law of the Lord stands opposed to ‘the counsel of the wicked’ (1), to which it is ultimately the only answer. The psalm is content to develop this one theme, implying that whatever really shapes a man’s thinking shapes his life. This is conveniently illustrated also by the next psalm, where the word for ‘plot’ (2:1b) is the same as for meditates here, with results that follow from the very different thoughts that are entertained there. In our verse, the deliberate echo of the charge to Joshua reminds the man of action that the call to think hard about the will of God is not merely for the recluse, but is the secret of  [Vol 15: Psa, p. 65]  achieving anything worthwhile (cf. prospers, here, with Josh. 1:8). Law (tôrâ) basically means ‘direction’ or ‘instruction’; it can be confined to a single command, or can extend, as here, to Scripture as a whole.

3. With this attractive picture, forming with verse 4 the centrepiece of the psalm, cf. the more elaborate passage, Jeremiah 17:5–8. The phrase its fruit in its season emphasizes both the distinctiveness and the quiet growth of the product; for the tree is no mere channel, piping the water unchanged from one place to another, but a living organism which absorbs it, to produce in due course something new and delightful, proper to its kind and to its time. The promised immunity of the leaf from withering is not independence of the rhythm of the seasons (cf. the preceding line, and see on 31:15), but freedom from the crippling damage of drought (cf. Jer. 17:8b).”^[1]

I was especially struck by Kidner’s comment that “. . . whatever really shapes a man’s thinking shapes his life.”

What is shaping my life these days? Playing chess? Eating? Lazy thinking because I’m retired? Selfishness in the form of thinking only about what I want?

And, of course, this is an unwelcome question that you might need to be asking yourself as well. What is shaping your thinking these days?

^[1]Derek Kidner, Psalms 1–72: An Introduction and Commentary, TOTC 15; IVP/Accordance electronic ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 64-65.

https://accordance.bible/link/read/Tyndale_Commentary#21798, accessed 10-01-2021)