Psalm Chapter 1

Psalm 1: The Tree and the Chaff

The Psalter opens not with a prayer but with a picture — and what a picture it is. A tree, planted (not wild, not accidental, but deliberately placed) beside rivers of water, heavy with fruit, its leaves perpetually green. Set against it, the ungodly: chaff, weightless and wind-driven, gone before you can close your hand around it. The whole of human life, the psalmist is telling us, comes down to this: rootedness or restlessness. The blessed man is not blessed because he is clever or strong or even particularly good, but because he has found something to delight in — the law of the Lord — and that delight has become his root system. He meditates on it day and night, which is to say he has fallen in love with it the way a musician falls in love with a melody, turning it over and over until it becomes part of the rhythm of his breathing. The question the psalm quietly puts to us is not whether we are good enough, but whether we are planted.

00:00 The Blessed Man
00:20 A Tree by the Waters
00:35 The Way of the Ungodly
00:50 Two Destinies