Psalm 1 stands as the doorway to the Psalter. It was almost certainly placed there by the editors who gathered Israel's hymnbook after the exile, and it functions as a sign over the whole collection: this is wisdom literature as much as it is worship. The first readers were a chastened people learning to live faithfully without a king, without a temple, or with a rebuilt temple that felt small. The psalm tells them — and us — that the blessed life is not a matter of geography or politics but of where a person plants their attention. Two ways stretch out from verse one. Everything that follows in the Psalter assumes you are choosing one of them.

From the writers we read together

Dallas Willard

philosopher at USC, author of The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines (1935-2013)

Willard spent his career arguing that most Christians have been handed a gospel that forgives them but does not actually train them. Psalm 1 is exactly the corrective he kept reaching for. The blessed man is not blessed because he had a feeling on a Sunday; he is blessed because his attention has been quietly and stubbornly relocated. He does not walk, stand, or sit where the scoffers gather. He delights, and he meditates — day and night. That is a description of practice, not of mood.

Willard would press us on verse two. Where, in the actual hours of your week, is the law of the Lord being chewed? Not admired, not agreed with — chewed. Most of us have arranged our lives so that the counsel of the wicked is on continuous audio in our pockets and the law of the Lord gets eight rushed minutes before bed. The psalm does not scold; it diagnoses. The tree by the streams of water (v. 3) is not the reward for the right belief. It is the result of the right roots.