“In all perfectly beautiful objects there is found the opposition of one part to another.” —John Ruskin
As we travel through the Psalms with devotional comments along the way, we’ll notice some helpful tools to make the most of our study. Right at the start, we want to ask: What are some components that distinguish Hebrew poetry from prose? Clearly one isn’t the rhyming of words, as is the case with much of our poetry. Instead we see rhythm, the rhyming of ideas, or parallelism. Notice the last verse of Psalm 1, “For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish” (v 6). The two parts are obviously related, but how? If the pivot word—the conjunction—is “and,” we’d expect two similar parts. Seeing the word “but,” the two sides will contrast. One side speaks about “the way of the righteous,” and the other, “the way of the ungodly.” How about the other words? We note not only the two ways contrasted, but the two results of going those different ways. And here we discover a benefit of parallelism. If we aren’t sure what one side means, the other side will give us a similar idea in different words (if the link is “and”) or the opposite idea (if the link is “but”). Do we know what it means to “perish”? We might think it means to go to hell or to be destroyed. But the opposite of “shall perish” is “the Lord knows.” Perishing means to be unknown by the Lord! When Jesus says, “I never knew you; depart from Me” (Mt 7:23), this is what it means to perish: to be unknown by the One who knows everything, and sent away from the One who is everywhere. How horrible, to exist but to no purpose, because you never accepted the purpose for which God made you. How are we known by God? Only our sins rightly introduce us to Him. We cry, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” (Lk 18:13).