Psalm 1 Commentary

Psalm 1 is such a positional psalm.  By that I mean that from start to finish this song is all about where a person is situated and what their posture or position is.  We begin with a negative litany of where a blessed person must not be.  A blessed person does not walk with sinners, does not stand on a sinful path, does not sit in the company of mockers.  Walk.  Stand.  Sit.  

So what is the proper posture of the blessed one, of the righteous one?  A meditative posture.  The blessed one meditates on God’s law day and night.  We often picture a meditative person as also perhaps sitting, though if you have ever seen videos of Jewish people praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, then you know that one can stand and meditate too while also perhaps constantly bowing in meditation.  But Psalm 1 quickly gives us another image: a well-planted tree beside a stream of life-giving water.  

The wicked eventually scatter like confetti on the wind.  There is no rootage for them.  There is in the end no substance to the wicked.  And because this is so, the end of Psalm 1 returns to one last positional image: the wicked will not stand.  They won’t stand in the judgment nor stand with those whom God deems righteous and good.  In the end of the path that the wicked were just sure was the road to success will be the road that goes nowhere, as it turns out.  Or it does arrive somewhere but the destination ends up being not success but destruction.

As we have noted before in our CEP sermon commentaries, the Hebrew Psalter is no random collection of songs thrown together willy-nilly.  Rather, this collection of 150 psalms was very intentionally edited and ordered.  Psalm 1 was the perfect song to set the tone for the rest of the book.  Psalm 1 draws stark contrasts.  There are two kinds of people in the world: the righteous and the wicked.  And although we are tempted to want to say that the actual picture is more complicated and nuanced than that—and probably it is—this opening song in the Psalter needs the contrasts to remain rigid and sharp to get the reader’s attention.  

Because the psalms traffic in ultimate matters.  We live our lives before the face of God and that is true whether any given person is aware of it or not.  What’s more, this God has created and fashioned this world such that there are right paths that lead to flourishing and to shalom and there are wrong paths that lead to destruction and an unraveling of all life.  

Now, we might ask, could someone who might not self-identify as being very religious walk the right paths even if their motivation is not particularly tied to glorifying the God of Israel?  Are there good people in this world who you would not want to call wicked but who may end up where the righteous end up after all?  Maybe.  Some Christians do believe in something called Common Grace which, while not a saving grace per se, is a residue of the divine image in all people that allows non-believers to do and produce good works that contribute to shalom.  

Again, however, the writer of the opening psalm in the Hebrew Psalter will not be detained by such nuanced ponderings.  Because even if some of what was just speculated about turns out to be true, we cannot know that of a certainty.  Thus Psalm 1 proclaims what this writer—and each of the writers of the other 149 psalms in the collection—does know to be true and that is that if for sure you want to be found on the side of life and flourishing and shalom, then you aim to be that tree planted beside the streams of God’s Living Word.  If you have that kind of rootage in God and in God’s Law and in God’s Word, then for sure you will find yourself on the correct side of everything in the end.

Of course, even so Psalm 1 does not disclose the full picture of how life goes for those who seek to be among the righteous.  Psalm 1 ends with the assurance that God watches over the way of the righteous.  But if you kept on reading in this book, you would not get very far before encountering Psalm 10 that opens with, “Why do you stand so far off, Lord?  Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?”  Read on and you hit Psalm 13: “How long, Lord?  Will you forget me forever?”  And if you read all the way clear through to Psalm 150, you’d encounter about 48 more psalms that also traffic in the language of lament for all those times when it sure feels as though the Lord is not watching over the way of the righteous.

For now, then, despite Psalm 1’s tone-setting sentiments that create a nearly black-or-white picture of life on this planet, the truth is more complicated some days.  Or at least it looks more fraught from our somewhat limited perspective at the ground level of our daily struggles.  Even so and also—or perhaps especially—during those more difficult moments, Psalm 1 stands at the head of the Psalter to assure us that God does care, God does watch, God does show us the paths that lead to flourishing.  We are not alone.  Ever.

If Psalm 1 was intentionally chosen by some editor to open this book, then Psalm 150 was likewise chosen as the bookend to Psalm 1 to round out the larger Book of Psalms.  And what do we see there?  Nothing but praise and glory.  Nothing but singing and joy.  That closing portrait may be the Hebrew Psalter’s way of looping back to Psalm 1 to say that for all those who keep themselves from walking, standing, or sitting among the wicked, for all those who are that well-rooted tree, the end will be glory.

And that is a mighty fine promise by which to lead our lives.

Illustration Idea

If you frequent the CEP website very often, then you know that like many familiar things, eventually you just don’t see or notice something like our CEP logo.  It is based on a stained-glass window that was designed by a local West Michigan artist years ago to grace the interior of the Calvin Theological Seminary Student Center.

The artist based that window—and now our logo—on Psalm 1 and the image of a tree planted beside a stream of water.  For Calvin Seminary as for its Center for Excellence in Preaching, that is what we want our students to end up being.  We want our graduates to be well-rooted in God’s living waters but for those who go on to preach, we want their sermons to help create still more well-rooted trees, as through preaching we do what Psalm 1 commends: we meditate on the Word of God because through it and it alone there comes true life.