BibleProject - The Good Life According to Psalm 1

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Psalms 1 & 2 E1 — The Psalms scroll—Israel’s ancient hymn book—has deeply shaped the worship and prayers of millions of people over several millennia. The first two psalms work together as a unified introduction to the whole collection. Psalm 1 starts with the phrase “How good is life for the man who…” or in most English translations, “Blessed is the man who…” We then find a list of activities to avoid and an instruction to practice daily Scripture meditation. So how does this way of living lead to “the good life”? And what happens to those who follow it—and to those who don’t? In this episode, Jon and Tim start a short series in Psalms 1 and 2 by first meditating on Psalm 1.FULL SHOW NOTESFor chapter-by-chapter summaries, biblical words, referenced Scriptures, and reflection questions, check out the full show notes for this episode.CHAPTERSThe Path of Tragedy (0:00-21:35)Becoming Like a Tree (21:35-40:40)Standing in the Judgment (40:40-1:06:14)OFFICIAL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTView this episode’s official transcript.REFERENCED RESOURCESThe Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary by Robert AlterCheck out Tim’s extensive collection of recommended books here.SHOW MUSIC“Growing Season” by Gas Lab & Guillaume Muschalle“New Dae” by El Train & G MillsBibleProject theme song by TENTS SHOW CREDITSProduction of today’s episode is by Lindsey Ponder, producer, and Cooper Peltz, managing producer. Tyler Bailey is our supervising engineer, who also edited today’s episode and provided the sound design and mix. JB Witty writes the show notes. Our host and creative director is Jon Collins, and our lead scholar is Tim Mackie.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Bible Project podcast. Tim and I want to start reading the Psalms together. And so today we begin. The Psalms are Israel's hymn book, full of songs that are intended to train our hearts and teach us how to approach God. There are 150 individual Psalms. So where do you start? You got to start with Psalm 1 and 2. Because the two distinct poems have been brought together into a unity as an introduction to the whole Psalm scroll. Today, we're starting with Psalm 1. Most translations begin Psalm 1 with the phrase, Blessed is the man who. Tim translates it, How good is life for the man who? This word, Asheret, is the Hebrew word underneath Jesus' nine part opening to the Sermon on the Mount.

How good is life, four, or how happy is. This is opening with, here's an ideal way to be human. Psalm 1 introduces us to a key idea, We're meant to meditate on the Bible and delight in it. We think deeply about that which we find arresting and interesting, fascinating, beautiful. And that's the experience that the good life person has with God's instruction embodied in scripture. But the poem begins with what the good life is not. It describes a person on a journey towards a place called The Seed of the Mocker.

It's a person who pretends to sit above it all, critiquing everything in life with contempt for people around him. How do you end up opting out of doing right by God and neighbor and making fun of people who are trying to do right by God and neighbor? How does a person get there? It starts by just small repetition of decisions from bad input. Instead, this psalm invites us to become a tree, full of life, planted by a stream of flowing water. The good life is a life sourced in something outside itself, God's instruction, and it leads both to personal flourishing and the generation of value for everybody else around. That's a lot different than being stationed in the seat of the macher. Today, we read Psalm 1.

Thanks for joining us. Here we go. Hey, Tim. Jonathan Collins, hello. Hello. We are going to read a song. together today. Yes, we are. That's the thing that we are doing. Yes, and it is a psalm we've read many times together. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah, that's right. Not only is it the first psalm in the collection of psalms, it's a key psalm that reflects on what does it mean to be a reader of scripture. Yeah, which is why we've talked about it so much over the years. Which is why? It's the ultimate meta-salm. It's a psalm in the Bible that's about reading the Bible.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah, we were talking recently, and I thought a cool addition to the podcast would be that we start meditating on some Psalms. So I thought, let's start at the beginning. Yeah, and if you're going to meditate on Psalms, start with Psalm 1. You've got to start with Psalm 1 and 2. Ooh, Psalm 1 and 2. Because the two distinct poems have been brought together into a unity as an introduction to the whole Psalm scroll. Now, that's the claim that I'm making that isn't just made by me.

There's a lot of psalm scholars who have advanced that claim. But I want to explore a reading of Psalms 1 and 2 over the next couple episodes that way. So we'll do Psalm 1, and then next episode we'll do Psalm 2. Yes. And then we'll reflect on how they work together. Yeah, then we'll read them as a unity and so many cool things pop when you do that. So that's the short little mission we have before us. Meditate on Psalms 1 and 2.

Where does the word come from, Psalm? Ooh, it's a Greek word. It's a Greek word. It's literally a Greek word, Salmos. Which means song? Salmos, yeah, since there's no silent P in ancient Greek. Yeah, it just means a song, poetic, composition that's meant to be sung. Okay. What's it called in Hebrew? Tehilim, which means praises.

Praises? Tehalim. Heelim, and that heel is the same root that's being used in the word hallelujah. Halel. Okay, halal. It is the verb to praise, and then tehila is the noun praise. Okay. In Hebrew tradition, it's called Tehilim praises.

And what would they call an individual psalm? Mismore. A mismour. Okay. Yep, Mismor. Which means a poetic composition designed to be sung, connected to the root Zamer, which means to sing a poem. Mm-hmm. And, you know, of the 150 poems about...

two-thirds of them have some kind of heading. Yeah. Like if you look in your Bible, often they'll be the words Psalm and then a number. Then sometimes our Bible editors put in a little summary of the main idea of the poem, like a song of deliverance or something like that. And that's not in any of the Hebrew manuscript. Oh, it's not. But usually there's a little superscription that'll be like a Psalm of David

when he ran away from Absalom. Right. these kind of notes, those are in the Hebrew manuscripts. And sometimes there'll be a song of David, a song for the day of Sabbath, and stuff like that. And those are in the manuscripts. Hmm. All right.

Anyway. We'll have to point them out as we go, which ones are. That's right. Which ones are? And what makes Psalm 1N2 stick out in the first collection of the Psalm scroll is that they don't have those little headings. They're absent. They are anonymous Psalms, as it were.

Okay. That's atypical of the Psalms. It's atypical in this first collection. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So with all that said, should we just read Psalm 1? Let's do it.

Cool. How good is life for the man who doesn't walk by the counsel of the wicked? And in the path of sinners, he does not stand. And in the seat of mockers, he does not sit. Rather, in the instruction of Yahweh is his delight. And on his instruction, he meditates day and night. And he will become like a tree planted by streams of water, which gives its fruit and its time,

and its leaf does not wither, and everything he will do he makes successful. Not so the wicked. Rather he is like chaff, that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous, because Yahweh knows the path of the righteous, but the path of the wicked will perish.

Psalm 1. Psalm 1. Short, dense. Yeah. And I guess in one sense, not that hard to understand. When you start to crawl through it, little puzzles and treasures merge. So let's do that. Okay.

Okay. Let's start at the beginning. Opening line. How good is life? for the one who, for the man who. And actually, what's so great is it's three words in Hebrew, and they all are spelled with similar Hebrew letters. Oh.

And they, when you say them together, so I'll say them in Hebrew. Ashre Ha'ishashir. Oh, it's very poetic. So ah and shh and r. Asheret haish ashre haish ashire. Ashera Ishae-ish-shaer. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

That line in itself probably, became just a really wonderful poetic turn of phrase in Hebrew. Yeah. How good is life for the man who? Ashraya he shall share. Yeah, three words. And interestingly, the psalm is kind of bound together in three main parts. It'd be a fun puzzle to try to think of an English way to have a more poetic way of saying,

how good is life for the one who? Oh, sure. But has that kind of repetition and sounds. I want to like spend some time considering that. So it's this word, Asre, is the Hebrew word underneath Jesus's nine part opening to the sermon on the Mount, which in Greek is Macarios,

but it's phrase, how good is life for, or how happy is the ideal. This is opening with an ideal. Here's an ideal way to be human. How good is it? Asheria is it. Ashrey. Say it again?

Ashrey Ha'ish Asher. But you blend it together. Ashrey aish-ashar. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I see it. So usually when you, if you were to point at somebody and say, dude, that person's, they're winning. Yep.

They've got the good life. Yeah, the one who wins is. The one who wins is. That has some poetic resonance. Yeah. The one who wins. The one who wins. Oh, the one who wins.

The one who wins. And the winner is. And the winner is. What you expect to follow is a description of the winning life. And that is not what follows. What follows here in Psalm 1 is three descriptions of what the winner does not do. It's a way of delaying the positive description. And it starts with three negatives.

Here's three ways to lose. Lose at life. Yeah. So here's three ways you can lose at life. And the good life man doesn't do these. and there's three lines that match very closely he doesn't walk in the council

or by the council of the wicked in the path of sinners he doesn't stand in the seat of mockers he doesn't sit do you switch the sentence structure because that's what's happening in Hebrew the poet yeah switched

okay yeah so how good is life for the man who doesn't walk in the council of the wicked and he wants to give you two more parallel descriptions but he switches the word order so that that's phrase by the counsel of the wicked

matches in the path of sinners and in the seat of mockers. All three of those phrases actually start with the same Hebrew letter, which is bait, which is also the second letter of the alphabet. And the first letter of the alphabet is what Asre, the poem begins with.

Oh, so that first line has a bunch of... Ashré Heeshashire, all three of those words have the first letter of Hebrew alphabet, three of them. Then, the next one. three lines, I'll start with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And the bait comes from which word?

It's translated as by the council or in the council of the wicked, then in the path and in the seat. So it's the preposition word has the bait. Yeah. And what's interesting then is I think we're meant to both see them as a progression, but also meditate on the relationships of all three of the lines. So there's three verbs. He doesn't walk, he doesn't stand, he doesn't sit. So that right there is interesting. There's a little story being told there.

Walking to standing, to sitting. Or missing then is maybe laying down. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That would be the final progression. Yeah, you lay down in the bed you've made. But we're going from motion to like a stopping motion. You go from walking to sitting. and in between the two is where you stop walking,

but you're not yet down on the ground, you're just, you stand. Walking is one of the primary metaphors in the Hebrew Bible and in most languages for the story of your life and the trajectory of your life and your life decisions, the path, you know. So walking by the counsel of the wicked means you are walking and making decisions. Every day of your life, you're walking through life. and you're making calls. Yeah.

What values are guiding your decision making and the call that you're making? That's the council. The council is how are you deciding how you're going to walk? Yep, that's right. Yeah. How are you making your life decisions? What are the bigger true north, the point of your compass helps you know, I'm not going to go right here.

I'm not going to go left here. I'm going to go straight. We're all making those calls all the time every day. Yeah, I would say that if I had a friend who was like, oh man, I just think it's such a good idea if I, X, Y, Z. And I'm like, wait, who told you that? Yeah. Okay, you're getting counsel from people who just don't get it. That's what counsel means.

Yeah, input. But I don't think out there of like, oh, there's the counsel of the wicked. Let's go meet with the counsel of the wicked. Oh, sure. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, it's just a turn of phrase to talk about people who don't have good advice. So we're also introducing a character here, the Rasha.

The Wicked. The Wicked. Yeah. So this is someone, as we're going to see, who from the poet's point of view, has rejected all forms of God's instruction. They don't heed God's wisdom and instruction. So when you get input from them, it's not God's input. So underneath this is an assumption to walk in life. You need counsel. You're going to need counsel. You need counsel. Yeah, none of us are born knowing how to live. How to walk the walk. Yeah. But you can get counsel from people who get it or don't get it. Yep.

Who will lead you on a path of life or a path of destruction. That's right. And actually, they don't walk by the decision-making input of the wicked, which is just kind of the binary opposite of the word good or righteous. And then they don't stand. So you go from walking by the counsel of the wicked, all of a sudden you're going to find yourself not just walking anymore, standing, you're beginning to settle in a way of life. And that way of life is then associated with

the path of sinners, the Hebrew word chataim, which means to miss or to fail. It's used of sling stone throwers in the army of Benjamin, the tribe of Benjamin in the book of judges. They were left-handed, some genetic trait in the tribe of Benjamin. Some genetic trait in the tribe of Benjamin. They could sling a stone at a hair, like a human hair. You could hold a hair. Okay. And they could sling a stone at it and never chata. Never fail.

Never fail to strike the target. Never miss the target. So to be a sinner is somebody who consistently fails to meet the goal, to hit the target of what a human being is for. Okay. Yeah. Moral failure. The path of moral failure.

And then you stand in that road long enough, and you'll find that it's not just like a temporary way station on the path. You've taken a seat. You've like settled into a habit of thinking and decision making. And that's called the seat of mockers. Isn't that interesting? Mockers. You go from wicked to sinner to mucker.

Someone who is very cynical and thinks of themselves as very, kind of better than everyone? Yeah. Yeah. A mocker is somebody who sits outside the game because they've said

they've opted out. Yeah. I'm not going to play the game. And I'm going to take it upon myself to just make fun of everybody else playing the game. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the mokker. You view yourself as separate. You view yourself as above and you have contempt for others. Who's the ancient version of this? I mean, like, what would they be doing?

in the ancient world. This would be somebody who makes fun of a person who decides to tell the truth even though it doesn't lead to their advantage or gain. Oh. Sucker. They didn't know how to spin the story. So they told the truth at work

about their involvement in a thing. and they ended up getting demoted and they could have spun the story differently and not gotten, you know, associated with those people and they could have gotten a promotion, sucker. We're going to do the Ten Commandments series that won't have come out yet as this airs,

but we are looking at the ninth command, which is don't bear false witness. And then we meditated on a passage about how you could join your hand, with a wicked man. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And then do violence against someone together by conspiring and like telling a story, weaving a little untrue story about that person.

And then we benefit. And so I guess I'm imagining now if you came to me and said, hey, John, like, we could go and we can like get this guy's field or as ox or whatever. We just have to weave this tail, come conspire with me. And I'm like, no. Then you would mock me. Yes, yep. And you would be the moker.

Yeah, I'm thinking of Psalms 15 and 24, which talk about who's the person who can go up to God's Holy Hill and hang out with God. And there's one line that's echoed in both of those about somebody who will swear an oath to their own disadvantage. So let's say your neighbor needs help and they've run out of money. I'm going to put down the money on their monthly mortgage for their field. So they don't go bankrupt and they can get that month's crop and hopefully pay their bills to the next month. I swear, by the name of Yahweh, neighbor, I'm going to help you.

I'm going to give you this money. And you know there's no way they're ever going to be able to pay you back. So you're swearing an oath to your own disadvantage. Yeah. And that's the kind of person who Yahweh likes to hang out with. Yeah. And that person is easy to mock. And the mocker would stand by and say,

sucker. Sucker. Sucker. You think you need to take care of. the poor. Oh, that's cute. That's cute. You think that you need to do right by your neighbor and that that person's your neighbor? And suffer for it? And you're going to suffer for it? Oh, that's sweet. Yeah, nice sentiment. Good on you. That's the mocker. That's the mocker. Yep. Yep. Bless your heart. How do you, is a person born that way? Like usually somebody starts to build that kind of contempt in their

heart over the course of, right, a time and of decision making. And they began to view other people who are actually trying to do right by others and they view them as suckers. I don't know why the word suckers in my mind, but it's just they're just easily taken advantage of. And how do you get there? You're saying it's a progression towards sitting in that place. And that's what this is meditating. These three lines are doing. Yeah. How do you end up opting out of doing right by God and neighbor and Making fun of people who are trying to do right by God and neighbor. How does a person get there? You don't wake up one day and just decide to do that.

It starts by just small repetition of decisions from bad input. These three lines are a little tragedy. They are. Of the person who begins to listen to really bad advice from people who don't have good in mind. Yep. And then slowly begins to stand and put themselves in situations where they're just going to miss They just start failing at loving God and neighbor. It's going to happen all the time.

And then over time, they're just going to be like, you know what? Just even trying to love other people. That's ridiculous anyways. I just got to get what's mine. And we're just playing this game. Yeah. And I'm above it all. Yeah.

How good is life for the man who doesn't begin walking down the path that leads to that, what you just described? That's the opening line of someone. one. How good is life for the one who doesn't fall into this tragedy? Yeah. And it begins with walking, that is, patterns of daily decision making. And who are you getting your counsel or your instruction from? Yeah. Not the wicked. And then here we go. Now on to the next line, which begins with the word, rather. Verse two is set in complete contrast. So how is the way? So how is the word? So how is the good life guided. And that's what

verse 2 is all about. Rather, in the instruction of Yahweh is his delight. And on his instruction, he meditates day and night. So the word instructions were Hebrew word Torah. It comes as

a designation for the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. But here it seems to stand for the voice of Yahweh, the direct instruction of Yahweh, as a way to refer to the whole scriptural tradition, but also to what it is that people encounter when they read and meditate on scripture, they hear the instruction of God. They hear God's voice. Notice how it's phrased

delight. Yeah. The Torah, the instruction is their delight. Their delight. Yeah. Now, is this a different word than desire? It's a synonym. It's a synonym. Yeah. So desire, like in the Ten Commandments, you know, do not covet. Yeah, do not desire your neighbors. Yeah, and those words come from the Garden of Eden story. God made every tree desirable to see. Okay. And if a tree is desirable to see, it's a delightful tree.

Exactly, yeah. So this is the Hebrew word, Chefetz. And Heifitz is naming the pleasure you get from the experience of having a desire met. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And delight can be its aesthetically attractive, a song, a piece of art, a poem. You know, we delight in things that we find beautiful. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. How is your desire met? Yeah. Your desire is met by God's instruction, not the counsel of the wicked. So here, Torah, the Torah of Yahweh. You could have said the counsel of Yahweh. Right. But instead you get a little switch. The teaching of Yahweh is where this person delights. They don't make their calls in life from the counsel of the wicked. Rather, their delight. And so notice, in the Torah of Yahweh is his delight. And in the Torah, he meditates day and night. I can probably get a pretty good reading on what it is I'm delighting in in a certain season of life by Where my daydreams go?

In the moments when I'm not supposed to be thinking about something else, what do I find myself thinking about? What are my thoughts drawn towards? So what you delight in is shaping your imagination. Yeah, yeah. And focusing your tension. So delight is connected with meditation, which is fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Meditation, we've talked about this word a lot over the years.

Mm-hmm. I think you know this Hebrew word. Mm-hmm. We do. Haga. Ha-ga. Yeah. I like this word a lot. And it's not the type of meditation that we typically think of,

emptying your mind, just trying to disconnect from your thoughts. There's that type of meditation, which has become a practice that people do. Yep. It's not completely different, but it's distinct from that. Because in Hebrew, haga is what you are focusing your thoughts on. So you are basically emptying your mind of everything else except the one thing you're focusing on. Which is your focus, yeah. So yeah, ha-gha is an interesting word

because it refers in all of its uses specifically to quiet words that come out of your mouth. Quiet sounds or words. So this is used in Isaiah chapter 31 to describe a lion that haggas over its prey. So it just like got the rabbit, you know, broke its neck. And it's like hovering over it, kind of about to like eat it. It's like, rah-r-r-r, that kind of thing.

Doves haggah in Isaiah 38, like doves up on the power lines, they huga. Their little cooing sounds. Yeah. And then a person can haggaw. You can haga with your tongue in Psalm 71. My tongue will haggah on God's righteousness all day. long. So this is referring to the practice of quiet focusing of your mind through reciting something out loud to yourself. Okay. So what are you reciting? Torah, God's Torah. The Torah. Yeah,

instruction. The scripture. Yeah. And I do that because I actually delight in it. It brings, I think it's beautiful. It's bellbinding. I can't look away from it. Yeah, you know, in one sense, I don't get it in terms of I think the way I grew up thinking about the Bible as like a rule book I don't think of that as like a delightful thing just to like say out loud over and over that just feels like a discipline

yeah right that that feels obligatory and not fun but the way we just looked at those three lines of the man who does not and just like if you read that over and over the way I relish a poem you know yeah and I keep thinking about

Ashreya Escher remember when I read said that dude you smile? I know. He's got like super excited about it. And that like sits in you. That's delight. That's delight.

Yes. And then to think like, yeah, the wicked, the sinner, the mocker and to like really sit in that and to get these insights, that's a delightful thing too. Yeah. That's right. We think deeply about that which we find arresting and interesting, fascinating, beautiful. And that's the experience that the good. good life person has with God's instruction embodied in scripture.

And we still don't have a description of the good life. We have a description of the opposite of the good life. And we have a description of the source of the good life. We still don't know what it looks like. And here we come transition into the middle of the poem. The good life person will become like a tree planted by streams of water which gives its fruit in its time

its leaf does not wither everything he will do he makes successful we shift to another metaphor not a path metaphor walking on a path but a tree the good life is

someone who becomes like a tree yeah that's right there's a little riddle it is yes a little puzzle the first thing said about the tree is that it's planted which is not the same word is sit from sitting in the seat of mockers, but it is a provocative, well, synonym.

Hmm. Yeah, to be stationary. Yeah, and it's passive. It has been planted. So when a tree is planted, a tree doesn't plant itself. Oh, that's true. A tree doesn't decide where it's going to grow. It gets planted by someone else. Hmm. And then it's planted by a source outside of itself.

Where does it get, like, the energy to give fruit and have leaves that don't wither? Because it's by a source of life for itself that is a stream of water. Okay, so there's a type of life where I'm walking, I'm in charge, I'm going to find counsel from the people I think will give me a leg up that leads to failure and cynicism and contempt. Then there's another way of life which is I'm going to let something beyond me, not just direct my path, but plant me somewhere. And then I'm going to let something beyond me be my source of nourishment. And it's interesting because planted means stationary.

But when you're planted by a stream of water, you're constantly being renewed by new things. A source of newness. What a wonderful image of just perpetual newness than a river. Yeah. This is the old philosophical puzzle of like you never step into the same river twice. It's just new water in motion perpetually. So that's a lot different than being stagnantly stationed, right, in the seat of the macher.

This is planted by a stream of water. That also makes the tree, so it is producing newness all the time. Yeah, it's a fruit tree. It's a fruit tree. Yeah. And what is fruit except just new value constantly being generated out of this, right, this piece of wood stuck in the ground? by a stream and it keeps making new stuff and it's perpetually alive. It leaves never wither.

Yeah. Creating things that sustain life for others. Life for others. Yeah. Which is the opposite of the mokker. Oh. Right? Yeah.

The mokers opted out. And he's like making fun of people who are trying to do the right thing and create value by. The mokker thinks a fruit tree is kind of a dumb way to live. Kind of stupid. Why are you giving out all your goods? to others. Yeah, yeah. So notice that

the tree and the stream image comes right after we were told that the good life person, delight and meditation is the instruction of Yahweh. So that's the source, as it were. We're mixing the two ideas now.

What's the outside source for the good life person that is perpetually new and generates value out of their life? Okay. So the stream is the instruction. The stream is the Torah of Yahweh. Yep.

Yep. Now, if this is all pulling from Garden of Eden imagery too, the streams in the Garden of Eden seem really important, like the river. Yeah, yes, that's right. So Genesis 2, verse 4 begins a new literary unit, the Eden story. It begins with the wilderness and nothing can grow. But then God, or rather were just told. a stream popped up out of the ground,

and then God forms, begins planting a garden and forming the human. So the stream represents... Mm-hmm. A divinely provided source of life. Of life. Yeah. And actually, if you've ever had the chance

to go look at a spring popping up out of the ground, it's a miracle. It looks like a miracle because you're just like, it's just perpetual water coming up out of a crack in the ground. And it just creates these little oases

it's remarkable, especially if you, like the biblical authors, if you live in a desert region, those are really special places. Very special. That's the idea here. Okay. So, finally, we're to the good life.

The good life is a life sourced in something outside itself, God's instruction, and it leads both to personal flourishing and the generation of value for everybody else around. Its leaf does not wither. Mm-hmm.

My apple tree, loses its leaves. Yeah, drops its leaves. Yeah. Yeah, so probably we're meditating on a certain species of plant. I don't have my ancient botany Encyclopedia uploaded right now.

But we live in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. We have trees, evergreen. And also deciduous trees with leaves that don't ever fall off. There are certain species that do that. But that's become a metaphor here for a kind of life. Yeah.

that it just keeps producing value. And then this last line, everything he will do he makes successful. Yeah, right. That's going a little far, right? Yeah, sure. Right? This is a bit of an exaggeration. Yeah.

Though I think we're meditating here on the whole arc of a human life. Because, you know, you can have somebody who's had a lot of hard things happen. When you look at the trajectory and what their whole life produced. you can see that it was successful. So you could think of it as every little thing. You could think of it that way. Every project, every circumstance, success. Yeah.

Or you could say... Like Joseph's style. Actually, the story of Joseph's a good example because he went through a long period of suffering, hardship, like almost 20 years. And then that formed him into a certain kind of person that once he stepped into the courtroom of Pharaoh, boom.

You wouldn't say that everything Joseph did was successful. But that's right. If you're going through like moment by moment of his life story. Yeah. That one moment he like got thrown in a pit. Yeah, totally. But there was a long season of his life where he brought benefit to himself and others, to say the least.

So this line could have been and the, the fullness of the person's life, the trajectory of the person's life is success. Biblical authors work and write in terms of ideals and binaries and extremes. Right? We've got the good life and the wicked. Yeah. Right? The tree and as we're going to see, the chaff, that the wind blows away. So it's just a rhetorical strategy used a lot by the biblical authors to give moral instruction by painting things in terms of binaries. And that is helpful in one sense because it gives a

kind of clarity to the extremes, right? But most of our life isn't lived in the extremes. It's lived in the middle. But you don't often know what to do in the messy middle if you don't have a sense of what the extreme ends of the spectrum are. Yeah. So this poem is dealing in kind of extreme ideals. The extreme end of the spectrum is a man or a human who is so connected to the wisdom of God meditating on that day and night, so in line with, in union with God's wisdom, that that person is always in step with the right thing and things are always producing life. That's the extreme ideal state. It's the Eden ideal. Yeah. Now, here outside of Eden, it's a little more complicated. It doesn't always go that way.

Yeah. But I think it is the case that if over the course of a whole human life, someone who consistently loves God and loves neighbor tends to do better in life and to generate value, not always, not in every circumstance. Because you get Job moments, right? And that's super important too. But Psalm 1 isn't trying to deal with the messy middle. Yeah. You have a whole book of the Bible that's about the messy middle. It's called Book of Job. But Psalm 1's trying to paint the extreme ideal portrait. This guy who's like a tree planted, stationary, full of life. Verse 4 then comes and provides a contrast, not so the wicked. So that not so is a clear contrast to the tree. Not like the tree is the wicked one. So we pick up, that's from the first line.

Yeah. The wicked. Rather, that one is like chaff that the wind drives away. The word chaff is spelled with similar looking letters as the word tree. Oh, yeah. So like a tree is the phrase ka'ets, and like chaff is kamots. So it's the same first and last letters, and the middle letters look similar. Ca'et's like a tree, kamots, like chaff.

And not only are they spelled similar, they have opposite meanings. Because what could be more opposite? Okay, chaff. Okay, I didn't grow up as a farmer. I had to learn this from an encyclopedia. Yeah, what is chaff? So chaff is referring to wheat.

So look up at stock of wheat. And when you look at the little, like, fruit seeds growing at wheat, the grain that gets, you know, grounded to bread and flour and all that kind of stuff, That's the goods. That's the good. That's the fruit. And every one of those comes

surrounded by a little dried type of shell that you kind of have to separate and break off from the seed itself. You really do? I've never done it. That's what you do. You crack it open. It's a little seed.

It's a little seed. It's a little different than like a sunflower seed, which has a hard shell. Yeah. It's a little... It's a little... It's a little...

It's a little soft. It almost looks like little leaves. Oh, little leaves. growing fresh, they're green, but as it begins to ripen, the whole stock turns kind of tan brown as it dries out. And then the dryness of both the stock and that little chaff thing, that crumbles away. It crumbles away. And so when you separate off the chaff, you might just rub it with your fingers. I see. And the little, the chaff, it's just like this dry biomass that just kind of just blows away. Just blows away. It's the exact opposite of a planted tree.

That's camotes, like chaff, is the opposite of being caats, like a tree. Caates or comotes? That's right. Yeah. So the middle of the poem gives you a description of the good life, like a tree, which is the opposite of like chaff, which is no longer connected to the source of life. It's shriveled up, and it's driven away by the wind. So now we've got, how good is life, for the person who doesn't end up on a trajectory, that leads to sitting in the seat of mockers.

Rather, they've got a source of life outside themselves that is their delight. What kind of life does that lead to? And you get two contrast portraits. The tree life or the chaff life. That's the center of Psalm 1, which leads us then to the last movement of Psalm 1, which begins in verse 5.

Therefore, that's a nice break in the poem. It's a clear signal. All right, we're going to last. land the plane here. Therefore, the wicked, there's our key actors again, the wicked, will not stand up in the judgment, nor will sinners in the assembly of the righteous. Okay, yeah, lots of questions. Great. All right, so the judgment. Yeah. What's the judgment? Ba-mish pot. Ba'-mish-pott. Ba's in. Oh, that's that preposition.

with the bait. Same bait, yeah, exactly. Ba-Mishpott. And the Mish-Pot. Mish-Pot. Yeah, Mish-Pot. Yeah, Mish-Pot. This most basic refers to a decision that you make

about a situation that has come up in my community or in my life, usually your community, because it's a public social impact kind of decision. This is the word often translated as judgment. Yeah, but sometimes justice. Justice. Yeah. Justice. Yeah.

So these are decisions. that a leader makes that has a social or communal impact. There's some dispute that's between two people. You did wrong to me. No, I didn't. You did wrong to me.

Who's going to decide? Who's going to decide? That's the Mish Potts. A show fate. A judge will be the one to decide. This is what Moses is doing all day long when his father-in-law, Jethro, comes to him, his Exodus 18,

and says, like, hey man, you got to appoint some delegate judges. to make these calls in your community. So that, a mishpah. So in day-to-day life, almost every community has to find some way of appointing someone, a position of wisdom and leadership

and making calls about justice. Yeah. Okay, I'll go quickly. Mm-hmm. So, ba mishpat. Yes. There's no the in there. Ah, there is.

There is? There is. No, because the, the, the is ha, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. But the ha got absorbed into the long vowel. That's why it's ba-mishpot. Oh.

Perhaps great, great-great-great-grandpa-grandpa'rata said, Bah-ha-Mish-Pot. But a few generations in, and Baha-Mish-Bat comes Ba-Mish-Pot. Okay. So it is the judgment. The ha falls out. It's the judgment. There is coming a Mish-Pat.

This is referring to some kind of ultimate sorting out. the judgment of a final sorting out that God, the ultimate righteous judge, will accomplish at the fulfillment of his plans. I see. Because you look out and the wicked win a lot in life. The wicked are making lots of deals, lots of wins, fracking up. Yep. But there is going to be an ultimate moment of sorting.

That's right. And what are the words about the two outcomes? I can be declared guilty? I'm in the wrong, or I can be declared righteous to be in the right. To be declared guilty or in the wrong is the word rasha, the wicked. Oh, that's the guilty. And to be declared, I'm somebody in the right, is to be the sadiq, that is the righteous. So in the judgment, there's going to be two assemblies, the assembly of the righteous,

those who have been declared to be in the right and the assembly of the wicked, That is, those are declared to not be in the right. These have done right by God and neighbor. These have not done right by God and neighbor. Okay. So in other words, the ultimate, like, the ultimate measuring line, both is how you fare in the present, right? Whether you're like a tree or like chaff. Yeah.

But we all know that we're outside of Eden. And how somebody fair is in life, success or failure, may or may not. be a sign of whether they do right by God and neighbor. You might do right by God and neighbor and be like Job. Terrible stuff happens. So the ultimate kind of measure of whether you're doing right by God or neighbor is about how my life measures up to the ultimate standard of justice, that is divine justice, the divine decision. In other words, what it's saying is there is a way to live in the universe that's in line with the purpose of being human and for the purpose of the universe and to be out of line with it. And there will be an ultimate moment where that line is made clear.

Is made clear. Yep. And you can be in the assembly. You could be in the group of people who held that line. Oh, that's right. And this is fantastic because the assembly of the righteous is called the Adat Sadikim. Be Adat Sadikim. It's in direct contrast to the council of the wicked, which is Be'atatatat.

of the wicked. Was it the same word? It's one letter different. The assembly is the Eda. Counsel is ETSA. Oh, wow. So you can be in the counsel of the wicked or you can be in the assembly of the righteous.

That's verse one, matching verse four. Okay. So why is it that in the Mishpat that the wicked will not stand up and that they won't be counted among the assembly of the righteous? And the last line of the poem makes that clear. Because Yahweh knows the path of the righteous.

We're back to the path again. But the path of the wicked will go to ruin or will perish. Yahweh knows. This is back to the wisdom, instruction of Yahweh. Yeah, yeah, that's right. There is a path that is formed by God's wisdom. He knows it. Yeah, that's right.

He will plant you there. Right. So God is the ultimate knower of what is good and not good. He's the author of creation itself. Also, knowing is about relational intimacy. This is echoing the use of the word no in the early chapters of Genesis. Because God is both the knower of good and bad. By declaring things good and bad.

Yeah, that's right. And when the snake says to the woman, you will be like God, knowing good and bad. In other words, we all know that God is the ultimate knower of good and bad. But after the Eden narrative in Genesis 4, verse 1, you get another use of the word no, which is Adam knew his wife Eve, which means like referring to sexual intercourse. So to know is not just to have a knowledge about something. Yeah, it's not information, just information. Yeah, it is to actually have union with the thing that you know.

And if that's another person, then, so Yahweh is in relational union with the path of the righteous, because the path of the righteous is the imitation of God's own way, God's own path. Yeah. And man, if you are in relational union with the author of life, then you're going to be a lot like that tree. Okay. So what's great is, Yahweh knows the path of the righteous. but the path of the wicked and it doesn't say

God will destroy the wicked it doesn't say that right because you think in the divine judgment from the previous line you think of divine judge and you're like right all your stereotypes about the God of the Old Testament

and it's fire lightning that's not the picture here the picture of the path of life is being in relational union being known by God and if you are not in relational union with God on that path,

then your path is just simply going off the cliff to ruin. The path of the wicked goes into nothingness. The word here is parish? Parish. There's a story in First Samuel.

There's a guy named Saul, son of Kish, and his dad and uncle lose some donkeys. And these donkeys are said to Avad. It's the same verb. they got avad in the wilderness.

So it is most basic. It means to be lost. To be lost. Mm-hmm. To be lost. You are no longer home, secure, fulfilling your purpose. This is about purpose. Is this used to talk about people dying?

Would you say if someone died, they avod? Yeah, they avod. Yeah. But you could also use it as just wandered away and we can't find them. Wander away and they're gone. And the role that they play. and the harmonious ecosystem. They spun off.

So the point is that Yahweh doesn't have to destroy the wicked. The wicked destroy themselves by choosing a way that's away from the source of life. And that's Avad here. The path of the wicked will perish. Is this a passive verb? Will perish. It's called a state of verb,

but it has the same effect of the... it's the natural outcome. Okay. It's the logical outcome of their life choices. The path, remember? The path of the wicked. Right. This reminds me of the shaft blowing away.

Oh, exactly. Yes. It's just kind of like, no one has to go and be like, let's bury that shaft. Exactly. Let's put that shaft in its place. And no, it just blows away. It blows away. Yeah.

And it's gone. That's the line here. Yep. Yeah. So, which makes you go back up and meditate on the good life person. So the good life person is connected to God's instruction. It's connected to a source of life outside of itself that generates value for the tree and, right? For the leaves are like the tree flourishing, but also fruit.

Yeah. That's for everybody else. That's the opposite of the wicked that are both not sourced into life outside themselves. And so they eventually do wither. their life doesn't tend to generate value for others, and eventually they're just like lost donkeys going off and ovading in the wilderness. They just disappear. And that's the last line.

Yahweh knows is in union and intimacy with the path of the righteous, because it's his path, but the path of the wicked just goes back into the dust of the nothingness. Psalm 1. So, I think an initial reading of this Psalm, especially when I get to the end, it always feels a little jarring. I'm thinking about the tree and that's beautiful. And it just ends with like, you know,

the wicked are going to perish. And I think the initial feeling I have is, and I think other people have this too, is like, oh, it feels harsh just to label people wicked and then and then be like, yeah,

I'll get what's theirs. Yeah, sure. And then also, it just doesn't seem true of life. Like, when I think of myself,

right? It's not always a clear delineation between there's the type of person who doesn't have moral failure and there's a type of person who does. And we can make these clean buckets

and just like, it creates an us and them kind of thing. Yeah, I understand. Yes. So maybe this is about us tuning into a different culture's way of giving moral instruction. You know, I'm in a season of my life where music has always played a big role in my life,

in my family's life. And for a long time, whenever I heard country or bluegrass, I didn't grow up with it. It just didn't resonate. And I found a handful of bluegrass artists that are changing my life. And I just are blowing my mind. And I ended up at a country music festival with a friend and was just exposed to all these new, like, country bluegrass artists who were on tour. And it was the funnest day I've had in a long time. And I've been rediscovering this whole new genre of music

with a deep history, especially bluegrass. It has a very American form of music. It's really beautiful. And a lot of early bluegrass stories. We're talking like 1800s, 1900s, so many of the songs are cautionary tales that deal in the same kind of moral binaries as Psalm 1. And they're just, they're songs mostly about people

making decisions through life and then they destroy themselves. And that's the song. But those songs play a really, there's like Grimm's Fairy Tales, the brother's Grim. And they sound kind of harsh and extreme. to us now. But there's value in naming the fact that the small decisions that we're making day by day add up over the course of a human life. And they really do set you on trajectories towards relationship, wholeness, right? Stability, security, joy, and then the opposite of all

those things. And what's the type of literature that could motivate me out of the messy middle of my day-to-day life and see, like, there are real stakes in the course of a human life? And you can end poorly or you can end well. And it's getting jolted awake. So that's the function of wisdom literature or this kind of poem in the Bible is to say, get your periscope above the surface. and zoom out and think about measure my day-to-day decisions in light of these real outcomes. Yeah, I mean, that helps me appreciate the binary nature of this for my personal reflection. But then as I look out and I think about how do I relate to my neighbor? It feels like if I just go, well, is my neighbor the wicked or the righteous?

Ah, sure. Then it feels like I'm starting to label and group. and now I'm kind of being the judge. And if this Psalm leads to that, it seems like its own type of mockery. Yeah, that's great. No, this is fantastic. This is a great example of how the social location

of where a poem comes from and then the setting in which I read it makes a huge difference. So the Hebrew Bible comes to us out of a persecuted minority living in Jerusalem after the exile being ruled under one cruel empire after another. Okay. That's where Psalm 1 comes from.

Okay. That's where the whole Hebrew Bible comes from. It is not the literature of the powerful. It's the literature of the powerless, whose hope alone is not at any human kingdom or ruler or judge, whose hope is in, the author of all of life as the judge. So if you've spent most of your life living in occupied territory, paying taxes to a system that gives you no advantage, and I'm describing the life of an average inhabitant of Jerusalem,

after the exile, and in the time of Jesus, hearing Psalm 1 written by that community and for that community is a very different social location than reading. Psalm 1 as a 21st century Christian American who's living after hundreds of years of a Christianized Europe in America and culture. And Psalm 1, you're totally right, can become a tool for labeling and alienating and seeing the world in terms of us and them. And I think then we're out of touch with what the purpose of Psalm.

is trying to do. Well, it's interesting because there is a like good path, bad path, and there's value. Yes. Yes, and we need to be like, okay, I want to live a life that results in fruit and in ultimately being declared like, yes, what you've done is good and beautiful and this will last on. I mean, someone is not written to outsiders. It's written to God's covenant people to motivate and encourage faithfulness to Yahweh's word

and covenant, even when it looks like it's not going to lead to success and flourishing. In fact, it is. Well, let me ask you this way then. If I read Psalm 1 and I get self-righteous, right? I'm doing it right. And I'm going to stand in the judgment. And you can see how quickly that might become. Totally.

You might kind of corrupt yourself in that. Yeah, totally. And not realize like, there's a lot of my chaff that's going to get blown away too. 100%. And when I stand in the judgment, it's not going to be simply like, good job, you did all the things you're in. Yeah. You know, there's going to be, I mean, the Apostle Paul talks about that moment of, wow, all these things I thought were good are now being blown, like burnt up. Yeah, it's great.

And I'm escaping as if through the flames. Yeah, it's good. And that someone doesn't have any of that. Nuance. No. No. Again, it's not trying to do everything at once. But maybe also, you know, it's the value of moral education.

If you're trying to teach someone something that's complex, you don't start with complexity. Right? You start with simplicity and like the big picture. Big picture. You can ruin your life as a human being for yourself and everybody else around you. Let's paint clarity about how you end up there. Yeah. But the point isn't to say it's so that you can stand up and criticize everybody else who you think is on that path.

Someone is aimed at me. It's not for me to aim at everybody else. That's interesting. Because if you look at the way Jesus then relates with the people who are failing on the path and how he reaches out to them, it isn't by just like labeling them and being like, okay. Yeah, in fact, he has that parable. Luke, I think it's 18, where he says, yeah, two guys went up to the temple to pray. One guy said, oh, Lord, thank you that I'm not like those tax collectors. And thank you that I'm not ruining my life like them. And then a tax collector comes up to pray. And he's just like,

Lord, have mercy on me. A sinner, a failure. Yeah. And he says, which of those two went away in right relationship with God? You can see where he's gone there. Okay. So both of those people could be instructed by Psalm 1. Only one of them has read Psalm 1 rightly. That's a good way to put it. I love that. Yeah, if Psalm 1 is a tool for me and my community to label people and then begin to look down at people, we are by definition misreading Psalm 1. But if Psalm 1 is giving me and my community moral clarity about the kind of community we don't want to become and the kind of community we do want to become. And also a lot of empathy and desire to be like, the way I see someone living over there is destroying them, I want them to find life.

Totally. Yes, that's right. But I think an environment like we're inhabiting where one's life choices tend to be more compelling than talking about the reasons for your life choices. Yeah. And a tree of life is known by, often by its fruit, then by the tree trying to talk about its fruit. Maybe that's one way to put it.

Yeah. Yeah. I love that image you gave us of the two people going before God. And one, the ones. Jesus gave us. And the one says, thank you, God, that I'm not like those losers. And the other one says, have mercy on me. And you said, both could read Psalm 1 and get that conclusion, but only one read it correctly.

So with that in mind, would you just read Psalm 1 for us one last time? How good is life for the man who does not walk by the counsel of the wicked, and in the path of sinners he does not stand, and in the seat of mockers, he does not sit. Rather, in the instruction of Yahweh is his delight. and on his instruction he meditates day and night and he will become like a tree planted by streams of water which gives its fruit in its time and its leaf does not wither

and everything he will do he makes successful not so the wicked rather he's like chaff that the wind drives away therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous because Yahweh knows the path of the righteous but the path of the wicked will perish ashre haish ashare yeah man good job yep how good is life for the one who

hmm is known whose path is known by Yahweh hmm I want Yahweh know my path. Be in union with my path. Mm-hmm. My path to be in union with him. Yeah. Mm. May God have mercy on us.

Thanks for listening to Bible Project podcast. Next week, we read Psalm 2. If Psalm 1 is directed at the everyday man, learning to live by God's wisdom, Psalm 2 is directed at ancient warrior kings who are living in rebellion against God and God's anointed one. This is a way to say,

think about all of human history, of humans organized in planned rebellion against the kingdom of God. Bible Project is a crowdfunded nonprofit. We exist to help people experience the Bible as a unified story that leads to Jesus. Everything that we create is free because of the generous support of thousands of people just like you. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us. Hey, what's up? My name is propaganda. I'm from Los Angeles, California. Hi. My name is This Adrian and I'm from Malmonds. I first heard about Bible Project with my grandma and my grandpa show me the videos. I first heard of the Bible Project when a couple of buddies of mine came up here to, you know,

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