What Does Psalm 1 Mean? — Spurgeon on the Two Ways
⏱ 13 min read
The question underneath Psalm 1 is rarely the one most readers think they are bringing. They open the Psalter assuming the first Psalm is going to be a welcome — a gentle introduction, a soft beginning, the kind of Psalm that warms the reader up before the harder ones. And then they read verse one — blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful — and the verse does not feel like a welcome. It feels like a fork in the road. There are two ways, the Psalm is saying before you are five lines in, and one of them leads to the tree planted by the rivers of water and the other leads to the chaff which the wind driveth away, and you, reading at the kitchen table in November, are already, somehow, on one of them — and you do not know, on a tired Tuesday, which one. The drift of an ordinary life has carried you somewhere, and the question of which way has gone quiet under the slow accumulation of small undirected weeks.
This is the slow read. Charles Spurgeon’s Treasury of David opens, of course, with Psalm 1 — and Spurgeon spends more pages on the first Psalm than the editorial logic would suggest, because he understood that Psalm 1 is the door into the whole book. Get this door right and the other 149 Psalms read in the key the first Psalm sets. Get it wrong and the rest of the Psalter is a confusion of voices without a frame. The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women is the daily companion to this kind of slow reading, if you would like a place to take Psalm 1 after the article. For now, read slowly. We will walk the Psalm in two movements — the blessed man of verses one to three, and the chaff of verses four to six — and listen to Spurgeon at each.
(If the deeper question is whether you are even on the path of sonship at all, MacDonald on what it means to be a child of God is the older theology underneath Psalm 1’s blessed. If the question is whether the image you were made in is still operating in the drift, Athanasius on being made in God’s image walks the older ground. And if the question is what to do with the daily, practical delight in the law the Psalm names, Spurgeon on the faithful steward is the working-out of the blessed man’s daily orientation.)
What does Psalm 1 mean — the door into the Psalter
The traditional reading wants Psalm 1 to be a moral teaching. Walk the right way, do not walk the wrong way, and you will prosper. This is the Sunday-school version, and it is not wrong, but it is thin. Spurgeon’s reading is older and richer. Psalm 1 is not a moral lecture. It is a description of the two interior conditions a soul can be in — the rooted condition and the driven condition — and the Psalter that follows is the long, varied, honest record of life lived from inside either of them.
The blessed man in verse one is not blessed because he has avoided the wrong friends. He is blessed because his delight is in the law of the Lord, and his interior centre of gravity has shifted. The verbs in verses one and two matter. Walketh not, standeth not, sitteth not — a slow progression from passing through, to lingering at, to settling into. The drift of an undirected life moves in that direction by default. You walk past something, then you stop, then you sit. The Psalm is naming the chronic shape of how souls quietly relocate themselves without intending to.
This is what makes Psalm 1 useful for the modern Christian woman who is not in any obvious moral trouble. The drift the Psalm warns about is not melodramatic. The walking, standing, sitting is gradual — a year of small choices that, in their accumulation, have moved the interior centre of the life away from the rivers of water and toward the seat of the scornful. The Psalm does not ask you whether you have committed a great sin. It asks you whether you have, slowly, sat down somewhere the soul was not built to sit.
The first movement — the tree planted by the rivers of water
“He is so prolific of grace, that like the sun which shines as it rolls onward in its orbit, his path is radiant with lovingkindness. He is a swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. Virtue is evermore going out of Jesus, as sweet odours exhale from flowers; and it always will be emanating from him, as water from a sparkling fountain. What delightful encouragement this truth affords us. If our Lord is so ready to heal the sick and bless the needy, then, my soul, be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice, slowly.
Spurgeon’s image of water from a sparkling fountain is the same picture Psalm 1 verse three is painting. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The blessed man is not described as a man of great works. He is described as a tree planted. Notice the verb. Planted. Not self-grown. Not self-cultivated. The man is in the place he is in because someone planted him there. The blessedness is not the man’s achievement. It is the consequence of the planting.
The rivers of water are doing the work the tree is not. The roots draw from the water. The fruit appears in its season. The leaf does not wither. None of these are things the tree produces by effort. The tree was planted by the water and the water is doing what water does. The tree’s job is to be near the water. The water’s job is to be water.
This is the part the modern Christian woman misses. You have been trying to produce the fruit. You have been trying to generate the leaf. You have been measuring your devotional life by the visible output and feeling, in November, that the output is thin. The Psalm gently disagrees. The output is not what makes the tree blessed. The planting near the water is what makes the tree blessed. Stand near the water long enough and the fruit will come in its season — which is not necessarily the season you wanted, but the season the tree’s life was built for.
Spurgeon’s be not thou slow to put thyself in his way is the same instruction. The grace is evermore going out, as water from a sparkling fountain. Your job is not to manufacture the river. Your job is to be planted near it. The five minutes in the chair tonight. The verse read slowly before the phone. The half-page in the workbook before bed. These are not productive transactions. They are the small daily being-planted-near-the-water, the slow keeping of the roots in proximity to the source.
And whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. Spurgeon is careful with this line. It does not mean the blessed man becomes financially successful. It means the doings of the rooted life have a root-deep substantiality that the doings of the drifted life cannot have. The same act — the conversation, the meal, the work, the prayer, the listening, the writing — performed by a tree planted near the water is different from the same act performed by chaff. The chaff version of the act dissipates the moment the wind blows. The tree version of the act has roots underneath it that hold even when no one is watching, and the prosperity of the doing is the root-depth, not the visible result.
The second movement — the chaff the wind driveth away
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it once. Then read it slowly.
The image is gentle, but the contrast it is being set against in Psalm 1 is severe. The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. Spurgeon’s meditation in the chair, finding peace in the heart, is the experience of the rooted soul. The chaff cannot have that experience. The chaff has nothing for the peace to land in. The wind moves it; the wind is the only thing in the chaff’s life that has agency.
This is what makes the chaff image so quietly devastating. Spurgeon notes that in the Hebrew agricultural context, chaff is the outer husk separated from the wheat at threshing. The chaff looks, at first, like wheat. From a distance, on the threshing floor, the chaff and the wheat are mixed. The threshing — the throwing-into-the-air with a winnowing-fork — is what separates them. The wheat falls back to the floor because it has weight. The chaff is carried away by the wind because it has none.
The not-so of the ungodly in Psalm 1 is not about visible behaviour. The ungodly may look, from a distance, like the wheat. The difference is weight. The rooted life has accumulated, over years of slow planting near the water, the kind of interior weight that holds when the wind blows. The drifted life has not accumulated that weight. The wind blows — the news, the diagnosis, the unexpected loss, the long boring stretch, the cultural pressure — and the drifted life is moved by it because it has nothing inside it that holds.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the part that quiets the small persistent question of why did the season knock me down so hard. The season did not knock you down because you were weak. The season knocked you down because the interior weight had thinned over years you were not paying attention to. The small choices to not-sit-in-the-chair, to not-read-the-verse, to not-keep-the-Sabbath, to not-pray-the-honest-prayer, had quietly stripped the weight that, in a better-rooted year, would have held. The Psalm is not blaming you. It is describing what happens to a tree that has not been planted near the water for long enough.
The good news in Psalm 1 is that the planting can begin at any age. Spurgeon is emphatic on this. The image of the tree planted by the rivers of water is a picture of a soul that has been quietly re-rooted by the One who plants, and the planting does not require a heroic season. It requires the small daily turning toward Him — five minutes in the chair, a verse read slowly, a single honest sentence in a notebook before bed. The roots grow downward in the dark, slowly, while the tree is doing nothing visible. The blessedness in Psalm 1 verse three is, mostly, an invisible underground matter for a long time before the leaf and the fruit become apparent above the soil.
The slow somatic the Psalm asks for
Pause for a moment, here in the middle of the Psalm. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is where blessed becomes translatable into a real Tuesday morning.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat against the floor — not in a noticeable way, just flat. Let the sit-bones feel the chair underneath them. The image to hold in the body, for one slow minute, is rooted. The feet are the roots. The chair is the ground. The water is below the feet, somewhere the tree does not see but trusts. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the body settle by a small degree into the chair — not by trying to relax, but by letting the small ongoing effort to hold yourself half-up be released. Stay there for a slow count of five. Then let the body lift again gently and return to reading.
That small settling, repeated once a day for a week, is the body’s version of the tree planted by the rivers of water. The drifted body holds itself slightly above the ground, ready to move. The rooted body lets itself settle. Psalm 1 is not asking you to feel more spiritual. It is asking you to let the body do the small physical version of being planted — and to discover, in the doing, that the chest opens and the breath lengthens and the weight that the chaff does not have begins, slowly, to gather in the soul that has allowed itself to settle.
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of small daily settling into a single Psalm. One short passage. Room for the honest sentence. The workbook does not demand more than a tired tree can bring on a slow Tuesday. It is the daily putting yourself in the way of the rivers Spurgeon is describing — the chair, the verse, the rooted body, the slow keeping-of-yourself near the water.
The two ways — what the Psalm is finally asking
“‘Come, then, my Lord, and give me Thy love with Thy grace.’ Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune, that when the fingers of mercy touch the strings, they may resound with full notes of communion.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it slowly. Twice.
Psalm 1 closes with the verse that names the whole: for the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish. The Hebrew word for know is the deep relational verb — not the Lord is aware of but the Lord is intimately acquainted with. The Lord knows the way of the rooted soul. He has been walking the path with the tree the whole time the tree was rooting. The blessedness is not, in the end, about the tree’s prosperity. It is about the Lord’s knowing of the tree’s way.
Spurgeon’s image of the heart in tune holds the secret of how the knowing is received. The fingers of mercy touch the strings. The rooted soul’s job is the tuning — the small daily keeping-of-the-heart-ready, so that when His mercy arrives in the form of a small kept moment, the heart is in tune and the music can sound. The two ways in Psalm 1 are, finally, the way of the tuned heart and the way of the un-tuned. The tuned heart resonates when the fingers touch. The un-tuned heart cannot. The fingers are the same. The mercy is the same. The difference is the tuning, and the tuning is the slow daily work of the rooted life.
What does Psalm 1 mean for the woman who is not sure which way her drift has carried her. It means this. The drift is real. The roots can begin today. The water is evermore going out, as water from a sparkling fountain. Your job is not to produce the leaf. Your job is to be planted near the water and to delight in his law — which, translated for the modern Christian woman, means to slowly turn the heart toward Him at the small daily moments the day affords, until the roots have grown downward enough that the tree’s weight begins, quietly, to hold against the wind.
The wind will still blow. The seasons will still come. The Psalm does not promise a windless life. It promises a tree planted by the rivers of water — a tree whose weight comes from the rooting, whose fruit comes in its season, whose leaf does not wither because the water that feeds it is evermore going out. That is what Psalm 1 means. That is the door the Psalter opens with. That is the question the rest of the book is the slow, varied answering of.
(The other slow reads in this Spurgeon series sit at Psalm 23 — Spurgeon’s Treasury walk and Psalm 91 — Spurgeon on the shelter of the Most High.)
Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that keeps the tree planted near the water, one verse at a time.
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the tree planted, the rivers of water, the fingers of mercy on the heart in tune — into a daily companion built for the woman whose drift is ready, at last, to be re-rooted in the One who plants.
Related reading
