Psalm 1 is justly famous among biblical texts. It opens the Psalter, it’s a paean to the life-giving power of the Law, and it beautifully describes righteous life as a stable, fruitful tree. It subtly weaves the contrasting threads of wickedness and righteousness into a succinct summary of biblical wisdom: meditation on the Law leads to life.
Great art yields not only multiple possible readings but many true perspectives: rather than seeking “the right way” to read a great text, many ways of reading yield beauty and insight. Briefly, I’d like to examine a pattern in Psalm 1 that shows an important contrast between righteousness and wickedness as God defines them: the ultimate “narrowness” of sin versus the “expansiveness” of Word-based righteousness.
Chiastic movement and action
Chiasmus is a common literary feature of Scripture, where verses interact with one another in a “pyramidal” format like A – B – C – B’ – A’.1 I’d like to combine this assumption with James Jordan’s reminder that ancient literature works with “picture-oriented” visual imagery.2 When we take those things together—chiastic structures and an emphasis on pictures and images—we see a “chiastic movement” that contrasts verse 1 with verses 5 and 6. Specifically, we see sin gradually “immobilizing” us into rootless, fruitless chaff, and righteousness, gained through meditation on the Law, leading us into increasingly wider horizons of righteousness and life.
I’ll give a chiastic breakdown of Psalm 1 and then trace this “chiastic movement” dynamic.
The path of wickedness: immobility and instability
Verse 1 uses the imagery of movement to show the “trajectory” of wickedness. The un-blessed man walks in the counsel of the wicked, following the guidance of evil. He goes on to stand in the way of sinners, abiding in paths of unrighteousness. And finally he sits in the seat of scoffers, making a home for himself among those who scorn God and his ways.
As plenty have noted, this is a trajectory of increasing comfort with evil that warns us, like the father at the beginning of Proverbs, against flirting with sin. But it’s also a “trajectory,” ironically, of gradual immobility and ossification, a slow-motion version of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt. Verse 4 tells us the result of this in the vegetal idiom of the Psalm: the wicked become dry husks, with no motion or life of their own, driven away by the wind.
The trajectory of sin, therefore, is toward spiritual immobility and instability: shrinking oneself and one’s world to nothing. Psalm 115 similarly describes idols as dumb and blind and then warns, “Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them” (18). Though the gate to destruction can seem wide, later writers have reflected on how its end is narrow. Dante depicted hell as increasingly cramped, with the center a frozen lake; Lewis builds on that image in The Great Divorce by depicting hell as a crack in the earth of heaven. Chesterton likewise describes hell as marked by “a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment.”3 While sin and idolatry may seem more varied and vivacious on earth, Psalm 1 tells us they lead rather to becoming like the fruitless, dry branches Jesus warned his disciples about in John 15.
The path of righteousness: from stability to freedom
If the velocity of wickedness is from walking to sitting to disintegration, the trajectory of righteousness is its opposite.
Verse 3 is the structural climax of the psalm. It describes the blooming bounty of the one who meditates on God’s Law: a life of spiritual stability and fruitfulness. Delighting in and mediating on the Word leads to true human flourishing, as God defines it. It also introduces the “trajectory” of righteousness, which follows an opposite path from that of wickedness.
Verse 3 starts in a “narrow” place: He is like a tree planted by streams of water. The man who delights in and meditates on God’s law is “seated” in one location: by the streams of God’s Word. This is equivalent to Jesus’ narrow gate: the life of righteousness seems like the rejection of a world of pleasures and powers.
But in verses 5 and 6, we see where this commitment leads. The man who is “seated” at the Word is able to “stand” in the judgment and in the congregation of the righteous. This recalls both how the righteous of Israel “stood” in times of judgment when their wicked brothers fell (e.g., Joshua 7:16-26)4 and how they would come to stand and worship God (Nehemiah 8:1-8). Righteousness leads not only to familiarity with God’s Word but also to community with the entire congregation of God’s people. John says the same:
If we say we have fellowship with [God] while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
1 John 1:6–7
The righteousness of faith—of confessing God truly, owning our sin honestly, and committing to his Word sincerely—leads us to fellowship with one another. Righteousness widens our social world.
But it also does more. Psalm 1 says, “the Lord knows the way of the righteous.” The righteous not only “stand” with their brothers and sisters; they walk a “way” that is smiled on by God himself. Their path is infinite because it is lived under the light of the infinite God.
C. S. Lewis captures this beautifully in his depiction of the Narnian new creation, where each more “inward” ring of heaven is somehow larger than the one “outside” it. His implication is that the closer we draw to the infinitely glorious God, the more vivid and varied our life becomes. The psalmist’s line, “I shall walk in a wide place, for I have sought your precepts” (Psalm 119:45) is a fitting understatement. Rather than the cramped crack of hell, the righteousness that comes through meditation on God’s Word guides into the eternal delights of the new heavens and new earth, under the unimaginable glory of God. Or as Paul prayed for the Ephesians:
that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:17–19
May we be seated at the Lord’s table, rooted in his Word and grace. May the grace we gain from that rootedness strengthen us to stand among God’s people and walk in the unmeasurable expanse of his love.
Joseph Rhea is the Discipleship Pastor at Redeemer Community Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He and his wife, Allison, have four kids. Joseph writes on Substack at Mere Immortals.