The Fruitless Life
A. Maclaren, D. D. Psalm 1:4 The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind drives away. The second half of the Psalm gives the dark contrast of the fruitless, rootless life. The Hebrew flashes the whole dread antithesis on the view at once by its first word, "Not so," a universal negative which reverses every part of the preceding picture. The remainder of the Psalm has three thoughts — the real nullity of such lives, their consequent disappearance in "the judgment," and the ground of both the blessedness of the one type of character and the vanishing of the other in the diverse attitude of God to each. Nothing could more vividly suggest the essential nothingness of the "wicked" than the contrast of the leafy beauty of the fruit laden tree, and the chaff, rootless, fruitless, lifeless, light, and therefore the sport of every puff of wind that blows across the elevated and open threshing floor. Such is indeed a true picture of every life not rooted in God and drawing fertility from Him. It is rootless, for what holdfast is there but in Him? or where shall the heart twine its tendrils if not round God's stable throne? or what basis do fleeting objects supply for him who builds elsewhere than on the enduring Rock? Chaff is fruitless because lifeless. Its disappearance in the winnowing wind is the consequence and manifestation of its essential nullity. Just as the winnower throws up his shovelful into the breeze, and the chaff goes fluttering out of the floor because it is light, while the wheat falls on the heap because it is solid, so the wind of judgment will one day blow, and deal with each man according to his own nature. It will separate them, whirling away the one and not the other. The ground of these diverse fates is the different attitude of God to each life. Each clause of the last verse really involves two ideas, but the pregnant brevity of style states only half of the antithesis in each, suppressing the second member in the first clause, and the first member in the second clause, and so making the contrast the more striking by emphasising the cause of an unspoken consequence in the former, and the opposite consequence of an unspoken cause in the latter. "The Lord knoweth the way of the righteous" (therefore it shall last). The Lord knoweth not the way of the wicked (therefore it shall perish). The way or course of life which God does not know perishes. A path perishes when, like some dim forest track, it dies out, leaving the traveller bewildered amid impenetrable forests; or when, like some treacherous Alpine track among rotten rocks, it crumbles beneath the tread. Every course of life but that of the man who delights in and keeps the law of the Lord comes to a fatal end, and leads to the brink of a precipice over which the impetus of descent carries the reluctant foot. (A. Maclaren, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. WEB: The wicked are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away.