The Good Life According to Psalm 1

Reflection Questions

• What does the progression of movement in verse 1 tell us about the folly of listening to the wicked? How does someone become a mocker?

• How does the Hebrew word for meditate, hagah, inform what biblical meditation looks like in practice?

• How are the seated mocker in verse 1 and the person planted by the stream in verse 3 similar and different from one another? How does each relate differently to God and neighbor?

• How does the meaning of perish—tovad in Hebrew—help us understand the fate of the wicked?

• Consider if you meditated on Psalm 1 for your own self-reflection, rather than used it as an opportunity to judge others. How do these different ways of reading the psalm lead to different results?

Chapter 1: The Path Of Tragedy

Psalms 1 and 2 work together as a unified introduction to the whole Psalms scroll. The first word of Psalm 1:1 in Hebrew is ’ashre, and it represents the ideal way to be human and live the good life. Its Greek equivalent, makarios, is how Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:3. However, the psalmist follows this phrase with three things that the good life avoids: walking in the counsel of the wicked, standing in the path of sinners, and sitting in the seat of mockers. In these lines, we see a tragic path from movement to being stuck. The end state of a mocker is one who not only listens to the wicked and participates in evil, but also despises doing good and ridicules others for doing good as well (like in Psalm 15:4 where a righteous person swears an oath to help the poor).

Chapter 2: Becoming Like A Tree

Psalm 1:2 tells us the good life looks like delighting in the instruction of Yahweh and meditating on it day and night. In Hebrew, the word instruction is torah. This word can refer to the first five books of the Bible or sometimes the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole, but it also refers to hearing God’s voice in and through the Scriptures. Here, delighting in Yahweh’s torah means meditating on it day and night.

The Hebrew word for meditate is hagah, which involves focusing our mind entirely on one thing—and literally, muttering about it quietly. A lion can hagah over its prey (Isa. 31:4), a dove can hagah (or coo, Isa. 38:14), and a person’s  tongue can hagah about God's righteousness all day long (Ps. 71:15). Psalm 1:3 goes on to say that a person who does this will become like a tree planted by a stream that continually gives fruit and does not wither (an allusion to the Eden stream, rivers, and trees in Gen. 2:6-14).

This person’s “success” is not a promise of everything going right for them, but rather a principle that a whole life lived in love for God and others will arc toward goodness. But the opposite of becoming a sturdy, generative tree is to become chaff, which the psalmist says is the fate of the wicked (Ps. 1:4).

Chapter 3: Standing In The Judgment

In Psalm 1:5, the psalmist says that “the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.” The word judgment here in Hebrew is mishpat, which generally refers to a legal setting where a judge makes a decision that has social or communal impact. The one in the wrong is declared guilty, while the one in the right is declared righteous. In this situation, the final judgment is specifically in view, when Yahweh—the ultimate, righteous judge—will accomplish his plans for creation. Psalm 1:6 explains that this final, sorting judgment happens “because Yahweh knows the path of the righteous, but the path of the wicked will perish.” God is the ultimate knower of good and bad, and it’s an intimate knowing, because he is not only our judge, but also our creator.

The path of the righteous is God’s own way, where we can experience his life and love. In contrast, the Hebrew word for perish here is to’ved, which means to be lost from home and no longer fulfilling our purpose. Simply by going away from Yahweh’s path of life, the wicked destroy themselves and are lost. It would be easy to read Psalm 1 as an instruction to sort others into categories of either righteous or wicked. But the actual invitation is to examine ourselves and discern if we are headed down the path of the wicked or if we are living the good life, planted by Yahweh’s stream (compare this with how the Pharisee and tax collector examine themselves in Luke 18:9-14).