Today’s Passage: Psalm 1
Psalm 1 does not open with a plea, the way so many of the psalms after it will. It opens instead with a fork in the road. There are two ways a life can go, and the poem sets them side by side: a tree standing by water, and chaff blowing away on the wind. The first poem in the book is really a kind of door, and before it lets you walk on into all the prayers that follow, it asks you to consider which of the two ways you mean to walk.
It is tempting to hear three separate sermons here, one about the life that refuses, one about the life that delights, and one about the two endings that wait at the last. But they are not three claims; they are one. The LORD guards the one path, and the other path loses itself.
As you read, hold this: Two ways. The LORD guards one.
Context The door of the book
Psalm 1 carries no superscription over it, no author’s name, not even the familiar “of David” that stands over so many of the psalms. It has been set here as a preface, the poem the gathered book chose to put first. And unlike most of what follows, it is addressed to the reader rather than prayed up to God. That is an unusual way to open a book of prayers, and yet it is fitting, for before the praying begins the book wants to show you the two ways a life can go.
Psalm 1:1 (BSB)
¹ Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or set foot on the path of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers.
The happy life is named first by what it will not do. Three verbs climb through the verse, walk, then set foot, then sit, and three kinds of company come down alongside them: the wicked, the sinners, the mockers. Nobody wakes one morning already seated in the mockers’ circle. It happens by drift. First there is the counsel you listen to, then the path you find yourself on, and only then the seat you settle into. The ’ashre, pronounced ash-RAY. Strong's H835, blessed, happy, oh the happiness of. The first word of the whole Psalter is not a command but an exclamation. ’Ashre means something closer to “oh, the happinesses of” than to a flat label pinned on a person. It is not a wish, and it is not a promise of an easy life. It is a glad shout raised over a life that anyone watching would want for themselves. The book has lament to teach, and praise, and the long work of asking, but it opens here first, showing you what a truly happy life looks like before the very next breath begins to describe it. life learns to refuse the whole slow slide, and not merely the last chair at the end of it.
This is why the book sets the poem first. Before you are handed the vocabulary of grief or the vocabulary of praise, you are shown a life, not a technique to master but a person whose happiness is real because it is rooted. The rest of the Psalter will be prayed by people who already know this fork is there. Some of them will be walking the guarded path in the dark, and some will be watching the chaff blow past and asking how long it must go on, but for every one of them the door still stands where it stood.
There is mercy in those three steps as well, because naming the slide so plainly gives you the chance to refuse it early. Counsel, then path, then seat: the blessed life is the one that notices the first step for what it is, and not only the last.
Psalm 1:2 (BSB)
² But his delight is in the Law of the LORD, and on His law he meditates day and night.
Refusal, though, is not the whole picture. Verse 2 goes on to name what this person actually loves. The word is Torah, which means instruction, the whole of what God has shown of His will, and not some thin list of statutes. And the word set beside it is not grit or duty but delight. He turns it over the way a favorite thought comes back to you on its own, unbidden, by day and again by night.
Psalm 1:3 (BSB)
³ He is like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding its fruit in season, whose leaf does not wither, and who prospers in all he does.
Context Planted, not wild
The tree in this verse is not a volunteer sprung up on some hillside; it has been placed. In the old world farmers would cut channels from a spring so that water still reached the orchard in the seasons when the rains failed. A wild tree lived at the mercy of the weather, but this tree does not. The picture is not one of good luck. It is a life rooted where its fruit no longer depends on the season you happen to be able to see.
To say that he “prospers in all he does” is not to promise him a comfortable life. Jeremiah reaches for this very same tree later on, and when he does he names the heat and the drought aloud. Still the leaf does not wither and the fruit does not stop, because what has been feeding the tree all along was never the weather.
Study notes Jeremiah's tree
"But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in Him. He is like a tree planted by the waters that sends out its roots toward the stream. It does not fear when the heat comes, and its leaves are always green. It does not worry in a year of drought, nor does it cease to produce fruit." Jeremiah 17:7-8 (BSB)
Psalm 1 shows us delight in God’s instruction, and Jeremiah names the root of it more plainly still: trust. It is the same tree and the same stream in both. The heat comes as surely in the one as in the other, and in both the tree still holds.
Psalm 1:4-5 (BSB)
⁴ Not so the wicked! For they are like chaff driven off by the wind. ⁵ Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
It took three whole verses to plant that tree; the wicked are given a single image, and the image is chaff, the dry husk left lying on the floor after the grain is threshed. It has no root and no weight, and the next wind that comes carries it off. Verse 5 draws the line out to its end: whatever ground they seemed to hold while they were walking and sitting so surely, it will not hold under the judgment, and it will not earn them a place in the assembly of the righteous.
Psalm 1:6 (BSB)
⁶ For the LORD guards the path of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
The last sentence of the psalm names the reason behind it all. The tree does not survive because the righteous are stronger or hardier people than the rest. It survives because the LORD guards their path. And the other way does not simply come to a bad end; it loses itself altogether. Two ways lie open, and the LORD guards the one.
That final contrast holds the whole psalm in a single line. One path guarded and the other perishing, a tree with a living stream beneath it and chaff with nothing at all underneath. The book of prayers is open now, and the rooms that come next will teach you how a guarded life actually prays.