The Gateway

At least once a day I repeat Psalm 1 to myself, and I say it out loud to Samuel. I do it both as reminder and prayer. I'm reminding myself of the characteristics of the blessed man, and praying that my son will grow up to be like the fruitful tree. Memorizing the Psalms builds spiritual muscle. Ambrose called them the gymnasium of the soul.

Psalm 1 acts as a kind of gateway to the Psalter. Put another way, it's a gateway to life. Some anonymous arranger put this particular psalm first for a reason. It's a perfect intro.

The First Psalm ends with a classic bit of antithetic parallelism, a device found often in Hebrew poetry.

Thesis: the LORD knows the way of the righteous,

Antithesis: but the way of the wicked will perish.

Recently, two things struck me about these lines.

First, the emphasis on the way rather than the individual. It's the way that governs here. It's not just the wicked man that perishes, so does the very way he walks on. The psalmist may have had literary reasons for expressing it in this way, but I think he also wanted to emphasize that every vestige of opposition to God's law will perish.

Second, note that the opposite of perishing is having your way known by YHWH. One would think the poet would have made the more obvious comparison of life versus death. But no. To be known by YHWH is not merely to live—it's to experience his covenant love. And to have one's way known is to be on the approved path. The path that winds its way through the Psalms.

Step through the gate and discover it.