I’ve been teaching through the Psalms recently and wanted to share the observations from our class. The Psalms are quite literally, man’s cry to God from the points of life that make sense and the ones that don’t. They are a glimpse into feelings that God has approved. They are real, honest, painful, and deeply profound.

Many scholars believe Psalm 1 was never meant to stand alone as just another song in the collection. Instead, it functions as a preface — a doorway the reader walks through before entering the rest of the collection. Its central idea is a contrast between the righteous and the wicked and it uses the simile of a fruitful tree and the wind-blown chaff. By presenting an up front principle, it becomes an interpretive key for everything that follows. Once you’ve read Psalm 1, you can’t help but sort every subsequent Psalm through that righteous or wicked lens.

We’ll explore Psalm 2 next, but as we begin, it’s worth noting they seem to be a package (or at least a couplet). Neither one of them carries a superscription, which is unusual, and both read more like the work of an editor than the work of a songwriter. If the entire collection required a compiler, it’s possible we’re reading that compiler’s own word here in these two psalms. If that’s true, we may be reading words written after all the other psalms had already been spoken, sung, and known among the people of Israel. That means, Psalm 1 may not just be the first song; it may be the last one written.

A Beatitude to Begin

The Psalm opens with a beatitude in verses 1 and 2 when it says, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.”

A beatitude is different from a command or a promise. It is an observation, a statement of something that is already true. “Blessed is the man” isn’t telling us what will happen if we obey; it’s describing what a certain kind of life already looks like.

The Hebrew word behind the word blessed is esher, and it means “happy.” Some modern translations, like the CSB (Holman), render it that way. But it’s worth tracing the word back further. Esher comes from the root verb asher, which means “to be” or “to go straight.” That root shapes how we hear the whole verse because the blessed man is the one who walks a straight path. Not a complicated path, not a difficult path, but the straightest path between two points, the kind that’s easy to follow once you’re on it.

This blessed man doesn’t merely avoid wrongdoing; he avoids the snares that trap those who’ve wandered onto a crooked path. Notice how carefully the psalmist builds the picture: he does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, does not stand in the way of sinners, does not sit in the seat of scoffers. That’s not accidental repetition because the psalm is showing us how compromise happens: not at once, but step by step, until you’re no longer passing by but taking a seat next to the sin you once avoided.

The word “sinners” translates the Hebrew chatta, meaning “guilty, criminal, offender, sinner.” Its root simply means “to miss.” Practically speaking, sinners are those living outside the covenant community, whether that’s the Gentile outsider or the prodigal insider who has wandered off. Either way, they’ve missed the path they are to follow socially and spiritually.

The righteous are not companions to the wicked. This is therefore a binary relationship (black and white, right and wrong), and the two are mutually exclusive. There’s no such thing as “partly righteous” or “a little bit wicked.”¹ You’re either on the straight path or you’re not.

In contrast to the one who is lost, the straight-path person delights in the torah. Many of us know that word, but it does not merely mean “law” in the sense of rules to follow, but “teaching” or “instruction.” The righteous person meditates on what Yahweh has said, continually. This isn’t a once-a-week obligation; it’s a comprehensive, fully-formed commitment to a faithful life. We see the same command given in Joshua 1:8 when the Lord says to the leader of Israel, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.”

A Simile from Nature

The psalmist now shifts from observation to image in verses 3 and 4, offering a simile (something different, yet similar; a “like this” comparison) drawn from creation. It says, “He (the blessed man) is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.”

The righteous person is like a tree – firmly planted, stable. This isn’t merely a description of height or width; it’s a description of strength. The tree is so deeply rooted that no wind can uproot it. That image should send our minds forward to Matthew 7:24-25 and the wise man who built his house on the rock (another equally strong simile). This tree yields fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither. It is healthy. It weathers every season. The wind blows, the rain falls, the seasons turn — and it remains standing.

The sinner, by contrast, is like the chaff – unstable, driven by the wind, without root. It’s the exact opposite of the tree. Chaff has no anchor; it goes wherever the wind takes it. There is no root, no fruit, no green leaf, in every sense, it is unstable.

This image should also send us to Ephesians 4:11-16, where Paul describes the purpose of sound teaching in the church when he says it prevents us from being, “children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine.”

Understanding the Word of God is what gives a person stability — both socially and spiritually. The tree and the chaff aren’t just two kinds of people; they’re two kinds of root.

The Outcome for All Mankind

The psalm closes by tracing out the destination of each path — comparing those who delight in the Word with those who walk in the counsel of the wicked. Verses 5 and 6 say, “Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”

Eternal judgment isn’t a fully-formed doctrine in the Old Testament the way we understand it in the New, but this passage should still bring Ecclesiastes 12:14 to mind, which says: “God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.” The wicked “will not stand…in the congregation,” because they will have been cast out by their own deeds — the ones seen by others and the ones known only to God.

The closing thought of verse 6 echoes forward to the end of Psalm 112, which describes the same fate for the wicked in almost identical terms when it says, “The wicked man sees it (bad news) and is angry; he gnashes his teeth and melts away; the desire of the wicked will perish!” That is a striking bookend to the thoughts of Psalm 1:1. The righteous are blessed, the wicked perish.

Verse 6 also loops us back to where the psalm began. The Lord “knows” the way of the righteous. This is intimacy, not mere awareness. It is the Lord’s way; that’s why He knows it so well. Destruction, on the other hand, comes to those who travel a different way, a way of their own choosing. All of this ties back to the “blessed” of verse 1. Since the two paths diverge from the very first step, so do their outcomes. The way that follows the Lord’s Word is blessed. The way that rejects it will perish.

As we begin this study of the Psalms, may we appreciate that thought deeply because it helps set the stage for our understanding of why lament, regret, praise, and trust flow from the Psalmists.

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Footnotes and Further Reading

1. James Luther Mays, Psalms, Interpretation, 42 ↩︎

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible, (c) 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition, 2016. Used by permission. All rights reserved.