He Shall Be Like a Tree
Planted by the Rivers of Water

The Psalmist painted a portrait in six verses. Acts and the Pauline Epistles supply the living sitter. The blessed man of Psalm 1 is not an abstraction — he is a tent-maker from Tarsus who crossed three continents, planted congregations from Antioch to Rome, was stoned and left for dead in Lystra, shipwrecked off Malta, imprisoned in Jerusalem, Caesarea, Philippi, and Rome, and who wrote — from a dungeon — the most luminous statement of confident faith in the canon of Scripture: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." The Psalmist described him; Luke narrated him; Paul himself became him.

Notice the three verbs of Psalm 1:1 — walking, standing, sitting. They describe a progressive entrenchment in ungodliness. Sha'ul's biography moves in the opposite direction: from a man who walked in the counsel of the Pharisaic persecution of the Messianic movement, to a man who was arrested mid-stride on the Damascus Road and redirected by the Risen Lord toward an entirely different kind of walking — the three great Shlichus journeys that would plant the Tree of Life from Cyprus to Corinth to the gates of imperial Rome.

The blessed man's first characteristic is not productivity but rootedness. He meditates. The root goes down before the fruit appears. This is the Psalmist's agricultural wisdom: no one sees the roots working. But without them, there is no tree. The silent years of Sha'ul's formation — three years in Arabia, years in Tarsus, a year in Antioch — are the invisible hydrology beneath every epistle he ever wrote.

The First Shlichus yields first fruits, small clusters — the first-century equivalent of early figs: a proconsul in Cyprus, a handful of households in Pisidian Antioch, the nucleus of what will become the Galatian congregations. The Psalmist says "in its season" — a patient phrase. The first harvest is never the great harvest. But it is irreplaceable: without Cyprus and Galatia, there is no Corinth, and without Corinth there is no Rome.

The Epistle to the Galatians, almost certainly composed in this period (c. 48–49 C.E.), is the literary fruit of that rootedness in truth. The tree that cannot be felled by stones cannot be bent by false doctrine either. "O foolish Galatians — having begun in the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?" The same vigor that re-entered Lystra after stoning re-enters the Galatian congregations after the Judaizing assault.

The Second Shlichus carries the tree to a new continent. The Macedonian vision — a man saying "Come over and help us" — is the Ruach HaKodesh acting as the river, carrying the tree's seed across the Aegean. This journey produces the great harvest: Philippi, Thessalonica, Beroea, Athens, and eighteen months in Corinth (50–51 C.E.). The season has changed. The first-fruit clusters of Galatia give way to the full vintage of Greece.

The Third Shlichus is the three-year vintage that produced Romans — the greatest letter, the systematic exposition of the gospel that Augustine read in a garden and was converted, that Luther read at his lectern and the Reformation began, that Barth read in the trenches of the Great War and wrote his Commentary, shaking the foundations of liberal theology. Romans was composed at Corinth during the return leg of this journey. Its vintage could only have been pressed by what happened first in Ephesus. The three years in the Hall of Tyrannus are the three years in the vineyard before the harvest.

Here the sermon reaches its most paradoxical movement. How does the leaf not wither in chains? How does the tree prosper in a Roman dungeon? The answer lies in what the Prison Epistles are — Philippians, Colossians, Ephesians, Philemon, and ultimately 2 Timothy. These letters were not written in spite of imprisonment but through it. The chains are the watercourse. The dungeon is the riverside. "I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole Praetorian Guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ" (Phil 1:12–13). The leaf does not wither — it writes Philippians.

Observe the rhetorical economy of the Psalmist: four verses describe the tree; two verses dismiss the chaff. This is the correct proportion. A preacher who spends equal time on the wicked as on the righteous has misread the Psalm. The chaff is real — it causes real damage, real grief, real danger — but it is episodic. The tree is permanent. What follows is the parade of chaff in the narrative of Acts and the Pauline Epistles — named or nameable, each one a gust of wind that rose, struck, and dispersed.