Our pastor last Sunday preached on one of the most profound Psalms in the Psalter, the first one, that which serves as the gateway to all the rest. Psalm 1 starts with the words, “Blessed is the man who . . . ” The writer starts with the negative, that this blessed man does not walk, stand, or sit, in the counsel, way, or seat, of the wicked, sinners, or scoffers. The point is clear, this person does not get comfortable in the company of the God-less, does not think as they think, or live as they live. Then he contrasts this way with what makes this man blessed, he delights “in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” The question becomes, who defines our reality, God or man. There is no in between.
Since the dawn of recorded history, human beings have tried to figure out the conundrum that is life. Most have tried with human speculation and conjecture. Whether we call that religion, or philosophy, all of it ends up in the dead end of contradiction, none able to make an authoritative claim to truth, to be the definitive explanation for the way things are. Then these strange ancient people called the Hebrews came on the historical scene some four of five thousand years ago, and they claimed something no other peoples had, that their God, the one and only God, had created the universe, and that he alone was to be the object of man’s worship and devotion as their Creator. Talk about radical! The only reason it doesn’t blow our minds today is because we’re so used to the idea of a divine, all powerful being as Creator, whether we accept or reject the concept.
What the people of Israel introduced to mankind was the concept of revelation, truth about the nature of things coming from outside of those things. No longer would human beings be benighted, or being in a state of moral or intellectual darkness; unenlightened. Rather we could know, to one degree or another, how things really are, what these things truly mean, even if we could never have exhaustive knowledge of them being ourselves mere creatures. This, I believe, is what the psalmist is getting at in his stark contrast between the man who rejects the wicked but delights in the law of the Lord. What this person has allows him to prosper like a fruitful tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. Notice that the writer says that, “In all that he does, he prospers.” All.
He then compares such a life of prosperity to the life of the wicked, that they “are like chaff that the wind drives away.” Not living an agricultural economy as the ancients did, we aren’t familiar with chaff. Here is an explanation:
Chaff is the loose, outer covering on wheat and other grains that must be separated in the threshing and winnowing process of harvesting grain. In Bible times, grain was threshed, or trampled, crushed, and beaten, on outdoor threshing floors to separate out the inedible parts of the grain, called chaff. The lightweight chaff would blow away on the wind or sometimes was burned as fuel. In the winnowing process, the grain was then tossed into the air, allowing the wind to further separate any remaining bits of the husk from the wheat. These bits, called chaff, would be carried away in fine particles like dust.
What a wonderfully vivid picture of the futility of the wicked, the God-less, especially in contrast to the man planted by streams of water. They live lives, in a phrase our pastor used, of counterfeit blessings, those that are “an imitation or copy of (something), usually with the intent to defraud.” From outward appearances these people often seem to have prosperity, to live lives of ease and blessing, but these blessings are in fact chaff, hollow, lacking substance, blown away by the wind of a life leading inexorably toward death. As the Psalmist says, “The way of the wicked will perish.” Not those who meditate on the law of the Lord day and night, who delight in his law. The promised prosperity is not material, but something much more significant, a prosperity of meaning, and purpose, and hope, and love, a prosperity of life eternal with our resurrected Lord, where in the words of the prophet Isaiah, he will “swallow up death forever.”
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