Psalm 1 Commentary

The Book of Psalms begins with a beatitude.  But unlike Jesus’s well-known Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount that begins in Matthew 5, Psalm 1’s beatitude is not for what a person is or for what a person does.  Instead, this blessing concerns what a given person does not do.  Principally a person is declared blessed so long as they keep plenty of daylight between themselves and the wicked.  The blessed one does not keep step with the wicked nor so much as stands on the roads they travel.  The blessed one also does not sit among those whose chief delight in life appears to be mocking God, mocking other people, mocking probably very good people.

As the poem continues it becomes plain that such a blessed person would not have time to do any of that in the company of nasty people because they will be too busy meditating on the things of God morning, noon, and night.  Anyone who focuses on God’s law and word and ways will be firmly planted somewhere far from the paths and citadels of the wicked.  They will in fact be like a tree planted right next to the very source of its life: a stream of water.  Tapping into that source of hydration and nutrients will yield a rock-solid and very healthy tree.

But we’re not finished with the wicked in Psalm 1 just yet.  Instead we return our focus to them in verse 4.  If the righteous are well-watered and well-rooted trees beside a life-giving stream of water, the wicked are the exact opposite: they are like the chaff that gets shaken loose from grains of wheat.

The chaff of course is the outer skin around a wheat kernel but once it is stripped from the kernel, it is so lightweight and lacking in substance that the smallest breeze can be enough to blow the chaff clean out of sight.  There is in the end nothing to wicked people, much though in this life they try to puff themselves up so as to appear more than they really are.  But since they lack the depth of the righteous, it is clear they will never be found in the company of the righteous.  And those blessed righteous people round out the psalm with the promise that God will watch over them so that they will never end up in the place of utter destruction that is the ultimate destination for the wicked.

As we have noted in past sermon commentaries here on the CEP website, the entire Book of Psalms is far from a random or haphazard collection of 150 songs.  This book was carefully edited and Psalm 1 was chosen to be the headline psalm for a reason: it sets the tone for everything that will come in the balance of the Psalter.  Psalm 1 establishes, if you will, the worldview of the Hebrew Psalter and that worldview is pretty simple: at the end of the cosmic day for all the booming, buzzing confusion we often encounter in the world, everyone boils down to being in one of two groups: the Righteous or the Wicked.  As you navigate the following 149 psalms, you will have ample opportunity of see the differences between righteousness and wickedness and you will again and again be challenged to identify yourself with the righteous group.

In some ways this worldview may seem to us to be too simplistic.  Although we can all think of examples of people who we would regard as being singularly good or singular rotten, most of the time as we think about ourselves and others we know, it feels like we are somewhere a bit more in the middle.  We know people who profess to be a Christian but who have, shall we say, some real issues with their character and behavior at times.  We know this to be true of our own selves.  No one who is honest enters the “Confession of Sin” part of a worship service by saying, “You know what?  This week I am coming up empty on the sin front.  Nothing to confess this Sunday.”

Then again, we also know some people who are not particularly religious, who maybe don’t belong to a church or any other religious body but even so we would not look at such a neighbor or co-worker and chalk them up as simply wicked.  They are nice folks, a lot of them.  We let them babysit our kids or we give them our house keys so they can water our plants while we are on vacation.  And in so doing we don’t worry that they are secretly and deep down such wicked people that they will rob us while they have the chance or vandalize our property.  Far from it.

So what do we make of Psalm 1 and its setting the stage for the entire Book of Psalms by forcing everyone in the world to shake out into one of these two groupings?  Well, perhaps we could observe that while it is true that real people are more of a mixed bag, in the long run there is only one path to flourishing in this life and the next and that is to be connected closely to the Creator God who has given us his Law and his Word so that we can root ourselves in all that in order to live.  That is the stuff that will last.  But the things some people seek out to give them life turn out to be transitory and finally empty.  Power, fame, money, influence: that all looks good and much to be desired but if the people accumulating all that remain disconnected from God, it won’t matter.  As the old adage has it where money is concerned: You can’t take it with you.  You cannot take fame and power and influence with you either.

To understand the psalms, Psalm 1 is essentially saying at the head of the Psalter, you need to remember that there are eternal things and temporal things and there are people who lean into eternal things and people who lean into other facets of life at the expense of tapping into the eternal.  And if it’s true that in the end maybe just maybe some people who are not obviously very righteous for now end up in that group after all by God’s good graces, then that will be a blessed thing but even the prospect of such gracious generosity on God’s part takes nothing away from the fact that in the end, those are the two groups each person will be revealed to be included in.

In short, Psalm 1 rings true even if does not address every facet of life in a complicated world.  For sure it reminds us that even if there are lots of people who status we cannot be certain about, we leave all of that in God’s good hands even as we make very certain that we do not hang out with or copy the behavior of the obviously wicked in favor of marinating ourselves day and night in the revealed will of God in Scripture.  Because that is indeed a beatific state of blessing forever.

Illustration Idea

“Dust in the Wind” is a lyrically lovely acoustic ballad by the musical group Kansas.  The lyrics however are a bit troubling when you get right down to it.  The refrain claims that “All we are is dust in the wind.”  The song just generally is a meditation on the fleeting nature of life, that kind of “now you see it, now you don’t” sense about life that we get as we age and as the years seem to do the cruel thing of speeding up the older one becomes.  At one point the song says something else that is partly right and partly wrong.  “Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.”  Well, from a Christian standpoint that is not right.  But then the song also correctly notes, “All your money won’t another minute buy.”

Psalm 1 reminds us that some people really are just dust in the wind.  But there is something that lasts much longer than even the earth and sky.  Those who root themselves in God’s Word and who grow in that Word the way a tree planted by a stream of water grows into an ever-more substantial tree, those people will be anything but dust in the wind.  They will flourish.  They will endure.