Psalms 1:4

The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.

The chaff driven away

Who are the ungodly? Are they open and wilful sinners? Certainly these are included, but not mainly intended. Are they the atheists, scoffers, and those who make a ribald jest of all sacred things? Yes, but not they alone. For the godly man is he who has a constant eye to God, recognises Him in all things, trusts Him, loves and serves Him. The ungodly man is he who lives in the world as if there were no God; he may be religious, but that is not enough. He attends to outward forms, but the heart of them he does not perceive. How many there are in all our congregations, therefore, who are ungodly. They do not love the Lord, or delight in communion with Him, or desire to be like Him. They are ungodly. Now concerning all such, the text utters--

I. A fearful negative. “The ungodly are not so.” For

1. They are not “like a tree planted.” The Christian is so. The tree planted is visited and in every way cared for by the husbandman. But the wild tree in the forest, the tree self-sown upon the plain, no one owns, no one watches over it.

2. Not like a tree planted by the rivers of waters. The believer is. He is planted not by banks which may soon dry up, far less in a desert; but by the rivers of waters. And is it not so? We know what it is to drink of the rivers of Christ’s fulness. But “not so the ungodly.” Days of drought will come for them.

3. Does not bring forth his fruit in his season. The righteous does so. If the ungodly have here and there a shrivelled grape it is brought forth in the wrong season. Many think that so long as they don’t do wrong it is as if they did right. But mere negative goodness will not suffice. The curse on Meroz was for not coming to the help of the Lord. They did not oppress, only did not help.

4. His leaf also shall not wither. Not so the ungodly. And

5. Whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. Yes, though the righteous may suffer much earthly loss. They have an inward prosperity even when the outward one is wanting. No so the ungodly. Is he really happy now? To him there is nothing good in this life. That which looketh fair is but as the paint upon the harlot’s face.

II. A terrible comparison. “Like the chaff”--so useless, so light and unstable, so worthless.

III. An awful prophecy. How near the chaff is to the grain. As yon godless parent of a Christian child. As yon helpers in various forms of Christian work; sitting side by side with the godly. Close to the grain, and yet only chaff. And to be driven away--Where, where? Jesus Christ has said, “He shall burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” Who here is prepared to make his bed in hell? I beseech you by the living God, tremble and repent. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The gate to the threshing floor

“Not so!” The Psalmist does not dwell upon the details of their ungodliness. As in the case of the righteous, he confines himself to indicating the sources of their life. The great object of this Psalm is to show us the “fountain heads” of moral character. The character that is “not so” is set forth by a figure. We leave now the garden gate, and not far off behold a raised platform of earth beaten hard. It is the threshing floor. Here stand the workmen with their earthen vessels, and scooping up the threshed grain, mingled with chaff, throw it up into the air, or let it fall in a stream from the uplifted jar; and the wind, with its whirling gusts, which arise so suddenly on the plains, catches the chaff and drives it away before it. “The ungodly are like the chaff”--light, shifting, worthless Here three aspects of the ungodly character--its instability; its worthlessness; its insecurity. One of the happiest phases of goodness is its fixedness. A life rooted in God, based on settled conviction, has a single aim, a uniform tendency, and a permanent result. In these particulars the opposite character tails. Take a life away from God, and you take from it unity of impulse. Passion, pride, selfishness drive it hither and thither as the winds drive the dismantled ship. Nowhere but in God does man find a consistent law. The second phase of this character is its worthlessness. The wind drives it away, and the husbandman is glad to have it driven away. Here we find ourselves in the track of gospel thought. An ungodly life is not used under God’s direction and for God’s uses. The present age is very susceptible to this fallacy--the identification of activity with usefulness. But we ask, under whose direction? For what? For whom? We call that man useful who works on God’s lines, in God’s ways, and for God’s ends. It is the unchanging law of God, that the life which gives nothing has no place in His Divine order. The chaff, which only lives by the grain, which feeds no one, which has no power of reproduction, is driven away. The third phase of this character is its insecurity. The contrast is between the fixed tree and the shifting chaff: How safe is the man who abides in God, while he who puts himself outside of the restraints of Divine law forfeits likewise its protection. The weakness and instability of the character which is not founded in God’s law shall finally be made manifest. The whole current of the Psalms moves in the direction of a day of final tests which shall lay bare the foundations of character. It is only in romances that virtue always triumphs and vice always goes under. But our Psalm does not leave us here. It carries us over this time of the growing together of wheat and tares, to the time of separation. There is coming a day of judgment, whose searching tests shall resolve the confusion, and make clearly manifest to the world what is weak and what is strong; what is solid and what is superficial; what is wheat and what is chaff. (Marvin R. Vincent, D. D.)

The chaff in the wind

My heart aches when I begin a sermon on a theme like this. But what makes my heart ache is that a man or a woman born so high should sink so low. That one who had the possibility of being the good grain in God’s field, that might have been useful and happy, should have so resisted the gracious influence of God’s husbandry as at last to have become of no value, and only to be compared to the chaff which the wind driveth away. Importance hinges on the word “ungodly.” Who are the ungodly? I do not understand that it means, necessarily, that a man is outbreakingly and viciously wicked. The ungodly man or woman is simply a person who does not live in the way that God demands; one whose thoughts and purposes and conduct are not in harmony with God’s laws; who does not please God. What a graphic suggestion is here of the vanity of a sinful life! The man who loves and serves God is building up a character which is abiding like a great tree. He is gathering many treasures of character and personality that can never be taken from him. Truth, and integrity, and love and faith, and hope, and patience, and gentleness, these great spiritual qualities in which God develops the Christian, are qualities that cannot be taken away from us by any disaster that can come. Money, and honour, and friends, and health, and life itself may go, and all these qualities remain in their full measure; but a sinful life, a life that resists God’s grace, has nothing left that is substantial. If a man gives himself up to worldliness he may be ever so successful in his ambitions, but there is nothing about it that will last. A rich man goes out of the world as poor as when he came into it. His wealth fails, and is like the chaff which the wind driveth away Physical strength is fragile in the same way; often a man rejoices in his strength one week and the next he is in his grave. But if he lives to be an old man, with trembling hands and tottering footsteps, his physical strength fails him at last and is like the chaff in the wind. The same is true of physical beauty and all the attractiveness of physical life. Many people who do not obey God are nevertheless very ambitious to make themselves of some account in the world; but one’s work must be like the chaff if it is not in harmony with God. God could not be the good God that you dream of if He did not make a difference between chaff and wheat. It is not that God is not good, but that the ungodly man has failed to avail himself of God’s goodness, has sinned against God’s goodness and mercy, and has brought ruin upon himself. You say that the chaff cannot help being chaff; yes, but the man can. You will not be chaff unless you choose to be chaff. God did not make you to be chaff; He made you ill His own likeness and image, and when you had wandered from Him by wicked ways Jesus Christ wrought out your salvation on the Cross. (L. A. Banks, D. D.)

The fruitless life

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.)

The wicked compared to chaff

Natural chaff is light and unprofitable. It is light, containing in it no solid or weighty matter, but a very slight and frothy substance subject to many alterations; even so the wicked are not solid in their purposes and enterprises, and weighty in then carnage and courses, but as chaff, light, easily tossed and blown away. They are light in their words and light in their minds. They are unprofitable ill two ways. In matters temporal, concerning this life, wherein, though they have ability, they want the will to do good with the same. In matters spiritual, wherein, though they have a will, yet they want ability. In that the Spirit of God compares all wicked men to chaff, we learn that the estate and condition of wicked men is exceedingly inconstant, void, uncertain, mutable, and changeable. They have no certain stay, no sure and settled estate in this world. Whether we consider the matters of religion and God’s worship, or the things of the world, we shall see them like unto chaff--vain, vile, uncertain, mutable. (Samuel Smith.)

The ungodly described

Where, first, we may observe that the prophet observes here a different course in handling of this proposition from that he held ill handling the former; for there he only described a godly man, but named him not; here, he only names the wicked, but describes them not; and, indeed, it needed not, for Rectum est index sui et obliqui [Justice defines both the just and the unjust]; by telling what a godly man is he tells, by virtue of the law of contraries, what the wicked are, for it that be affirmed of a wicked man which was denied of a godly, and that denied which was affirmed, the description is made ready to your hand, and you have him deciphered in his fulness. And yet we may take notice of a further reason, for godliness is subject to many falsifications; it may suffer much alloy by mixture of base metals, and there is need of a touchstone to try whether it be right or no. Many colours may be laid upon wickedness, to make it seem godliness, as Satan can transform himself into all angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14); and then there is need of marks to know whether it be a good angel, whether it be true godliness or no; but in the case of wickedness it is not so; there is no need of any such marks, for there cannot a worse vizard be put upon wickedness than its own face, there is no baser metal to be mingled with it; and though a wicked man will be counterfeiting to be godly, yet it was never known that a godly man would counterfeit to be wicked; and therefore the prophet, who is no waster of words in vain, would not give marks where they needed none, but left wickedness to be known by its own ill face, which is seen plainly enough by the law of contraries. (Sir Richard Baker.)

The wicked as chaff

But may we not make a stand here, and question the prophet about his similitude? for look upon the wicked, do they look like chaff? One would think them rather, in all appearance, to be clean wheat, and the best wheat too, for they only are flourishing--they only carry the price in all markets. But the prophet speaks not how they look, but what they are; he saith not, They look like chaff, but, They are like chaff; and before he hath done, for all their appearance, he will make it appear they are like chaff, and chaff they are like to have for their similitude. Well, be it so: let the prophet have his will, and let them be like chaff; what hurt take they by this? for doth not the chaff grow up, and is it not brought up with the wheat? and when harvest comes, are they not both reaped together, and both together laid up in the barn? and what more misery in all this to the chaff than to the wheat itself? All this is true; the prophet sees it welt enough, and therefore stays not here neither; he ends not with saying, They are like to chaff, but, They are like to chaff which the wind scatters. For this is that which perfects the similitude; and now let any man except against it if he can. (Sir Richard Baker.)

The wicked as chaff

And such is the condition of the wicked; a gale of prosperity hoisted them up, that they neither know themselves, nor where they are; a blast of adversity blows them down, and makes them tear the heavens with murmuring, and themselves with impatience. No state, no time, no place contents them. (Sir Richard Baker.)

The wind within

The chaff hath the wind without it that disquiets it, but a wicked man hath the wind within him (his own passions) that disquiets him. (Sir Richard Baker.)