The Psalter opens at a door. Some old manuscripts copied Psalm 1 without a number, as though it were a preface to the whole collection. Psalm 2 ends on the word Psalm 1 begins with, "Blessed are all who take refuge in him," and together the two frame everything after them.
1"Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked," and the psalm goes on to stand and sit, three verbs that trace a slow settling in. The Hebrew behind "blessed" is an exclamation: oh, the happiness of. It appears about twenty-six times in the Psalter, and this is its first. A person moves from passing through to stopping to settling in, and most of us do not choose our roots all at once. We settle into them, one small choice about whose voice to trust at a time.
Against that stands one picture. 2"His delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night." The word for law is torah, instruction, a teacher's word. The word for meditates is a low murmur, the sound of someone turning words over aloud. The very next psalm uses the same root for the nations who plot in vain. The murmuring is the same in both places, and what matters is what is being murmured. Every life has a steady mutter going, over grievances or plans or money or the words of God, and whatever fills it shapes the one doing the muttering.
Then the tree: 3"He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither." An Egyptian scribe drew a similar picture around 1200 B.C., the quiet man as a tree grown in a meadow. The psalmist took a stock image of ancient wisdom and rooted it in something specific, the word of the LORD. The word for streams can mean channels dug by hand, so this tree did not happen to grow by a river. Someone planted it where the water was. It bears fruit in its season, a quiet, unhurried promise. A tree does not produce on demand. It takes in what it is given and bears what is proper to its kind.
The wicked are the other picture. 4"Chaff that the wind drives away." Chaff is what is left on the threshing floor when the grain is tossed in the air, light and rootless, with nothing to hold it when the wind comes. The psalm closes with the reason for the difference. 6"The LORD knows the way of the righteous." One life is known and held by someone else, and the other has nothing under it.
Read alone, "in all that he does, he prospers" can sound like a formula for an easy life. The Psalter pushes back, since Jeremiah's version of the same picture allows for a year of drought (Jeremiah 17:8). The promise is of a tree that bears in its season and whose leaf does not wither. It is not a life without weather.
One more small thing: the righteous man is singular and the wicked are plural, and many have heard in that one man who delighted fully in the law. Hebrews hears Christ saying, "I have come to do your will, O God" (Hebrews 10:7), and he offers his people a place in himself (John 15:5). The tree by the streams is a picture of being planted in him.
Ask what you mutter over all day, where you were planted, and whose company you are walking, standing, or sitting in.
Prayer
Father, we mutter over so much that does not feed us. Forgive us for the counsel we have walked in without noticing and the seats we have settled into. Thank you that Christ delighted in your word without failing, and that you have planted us in him. Turn our murmuring into meditation, and let us bear fruit in its season. In Jesus' name, amen.