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I. THE PLACE WHERE THESE RIGHTEOUS PEOPLE SHALL DEVELOP is said to be the house of Jehovah. This is the temple of God's ancient people.

1. The psalmist uses this figure to describe the character of the righteous. "The righteous shall flourish like the palm-tree." This is the kind of plant that grow in the house of Jehovah, quite in contrast with the wicked described as springing as the grass. The grass springs up quickly and withers as quickly. The palm-tree grows tall and straight. So with the righteous. The palm-tree also is strong. The righteous, those who have been made righteous with God's own righteousness, can stand against the fiercest tempests of sin and temptation.

2. The palm-tree is the most graceful and beautiful of trees. In the Song of Solomon, the most beautiful of women is likened to it. We learn to esteem a most beautiful one whose features were at first repulsive, because of the character of righteousness that has enveloped his person.

3. The palm-tree, too, is endogenous. While many trees grow by additions of rings to the outsider this tree grows by adding cell within cell, thus developing from within outward. The man you have known as a boy, now developed into a truly righteous character, has done it by no change that you can detect without. You recognize his features distinctly enough as those of the boy. Character makes the difference. It is an expansion that has come from within.

4. The palm-tree is useful for its food products.

II. GOD IS IN HIS HOUSE. God dwells in His church to-day, in the assemblages of His people, as nowhere else, to make central power-stations for the production of righteous lives. The area for the growth of the date palm is limited. There is no fruit at an altitude of more than one thousand feet above the sea-level. So God has given us a place where He can successfully grow the righteous. It is His Church.

III. THEY SHALL FLOURISH. No one cares to start a business that is going to fail, or to live a life that is not going to be life indeed. A sixteenth-century man who owned a lot in London instructed his architect that the lot was small, but he would have him remember that he owned all the way up. That is the advantage the righteous man has. The possibilities of his development are limited only by infinite space upward. The immeasurable altitudes belong to him.

(D. T. Wyman.)

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KJV: Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God.

WEB: They are planted in Yahweh's house. They will flourish in our God's courts.