3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.
If you want to witness the miraculous, plant a seed. Or a seedling. One summer, when the writing was on the wall for our house on Collins Street, I ripped up the lawn in the backyard (well, most of it) and planted 70-80 tomato seedlings. Planting from seed is a bit overwhelming, but these 10cm seedlings hadn’t progressed too much beyond that.
The miraculous part is that with good soil, appropriate amounts of water, the right fertilising some occasional pruning, and sustained exposure to a summer’s worth of sun and…bingo, you have yourself a tomato harvest. For saucing, for soups, for salad. Pretty much anything that begins with an ‘s’ in the culinary world can be facilitated with a tomato. Even salsa (but not souffle).
Leave the seedling out on the driveway and you’ll cook the sucker. Leave it in the punnet and you’ll create a non-fruit bearing bonsai version of the real thing.
Here’s the idea (and it’s not mine!): the tomato’s DNA is activated by outside forces so it becomes what it’s supposed to be only in the right conditions with the right elements.
Marked on each of our hearts is the DNA of our creator. We’re image bearers of God. Yet when dislocated from the creator, it turns mutant. Or dies. Or has its best shot of becoming something entirely different. As Luke wrote in Acts: ‘it’s in Him we live, move and have our being’.
So, when the Psalmist writes writes about the blessed man, his activities and how he lives life, he’s describing the soil into which we need to sink ourselves to become the men and women God intended us to be.
First, we ‘delight ourselves in His law’. We love his Word, feed on it and are nourished and directed by it.
Second, we plant ourselves. Not in an unchanging, immovable way, but in a steady, deliberate, faithful way. It’s the one who is planted that yields fruit in season. While many use this ‘planted’ metaphor in a churchy way, I’m not. I’m talking planted in Christ—dependent on Him, reliant on Him and directed by Him. This is the man/woman God whose work God prospers.
Third, we limit our exposure and influence to the factors that are detrimental to our growth. We don’t walk in the counsel of the wicked, we don’t get tangles up in sin and we don’t take up our seat in the shooting gallery of the mockers.
The underlying notion of Psalm 1 for me is this: the faithful image-bearer of the creator positions themselves where their innate DNA can be activated. The deliberate gardener weeds out the bad stuff and feeds the good stuff so the tomato plant can do what it was meant to do: produce sensational tomatoes.
May our prayer be to seek the streams of living water that help us to become the image-bearers of our creator that our Father always intended.
(Simon Elliott – originally published, May 24, 2010)