The Tree by the River

Israel's songbook holds a hundred and fifty songs,
and whoever gathered them chose this one to go first.
It is a short song about two roads,
and it starts by pointing down the wrong one.

"Happy is the one," the singer begins,
"who does not walk along with wicked people,
or stand around where sinners gather,
or sit down with the ones who make fun of God."

(Walking, then standing, then sitting.
Watch how comfortable a person gets on the wrong road.
First he strolls past, then he stops to chat,
and before long somebody has pulled up a chair for him.)

The happy one goes another way.
He loves the law of the LORD.
(The law was everything God had taught his people:
how he made the world, how he rescued them, how to live as his.)
He murmurs it to himself in the morning
and again at night,
the way a song gets stuck in a person's head.

"He is like a tree," the singer says,
"planted by streams of water."
Someone chose that spot on the bank and set it there.
Its roots go down to where the water never stops.
Summer comes, and the hills turn brown as toast,
and its leaves stay green.
When the time for fruit comes round, the fruit is there.
Whatever he does goes well.

"The wicked are not like that.
They are like chaff the wind blows away."

(Chaff is the papery skin around a grain of wheat.
At harvest, farmers tossed the crushed wheat into the air with big wooden forks.
The heavy grain fell back onto the threshing floor,
and the wind carried the chaff off in a dusty cloud.
Anyone standing on the wrong side of the floor
went home with chaff in their hair and up their nose.)

A tree has roots. Chaff has nothing to hold on with.
One stays where it was planted.
The other goes wherever the wind says.

The singer does not soften the ending.
When God judges, the wicked will not stand.
They will have no place among the people who are his.
"The LORD watches over the road of those who love him,
but the road of the wicked will perish."

Israel sang this song for hundreds of years,
and not one singer fit it all the way.
Even David, who wrote so many of their songs,
had sat down with a wicked plan, taken another man's wife, and had her husband killed.
Every tree in Israel had dry branches somewhere.
Still the song stayed at the front of the book,
and the people kept singing it, waiting.

At last a man came who loved his Father's words
in the morning and again at night.
He never once walked the wicked road
or pulled up a chair beside the mockers.
On his last night with his friends he told them,
"I am the vine; you are the branches.
Whoever stays joined to me bears much fruit."
The next day they nailed him to a tree outside the city,
and he died there, sent away like chaff on the wind,
so that people from the wicked road could be planted by the water.

On the third day he was alive again.
Jesus is the tree by the river,
and the branches joined to him are still growing green.