Psalm 1

1:3 - Whatever he does prospers. T

With this line the encomium on the righteous person climaxes. It is a potent conclusion. But does it not claim too much, promise too much? Does whatever a righteous man does prosper?1

To appreciate this statement we need to remember that this is poetry, as as noted by John Goldingay, "[p]rose language majors on clarity; poetic language majors on suggestiveness."2

It is not the nature of poetry to expound. Exposition (prose) works by means of rationalization, point-by-point demonstration and substantiation. Poetry rather moves the heart to agree with what it asserts, our intuition to perceive the validity of what it says. One of the ways poetry does this is to resort to exaggeration. An exaggeration is not a nonsensical out-of-this-world assertion. If it were it would not work; we would see through it as nonsense straight away. An exaggeration is simply a statement that absolutizes what it claims. Poetry by its very nature is laconic; it would lose its power if it were long-winded. But short sayings can only say so much. When poetry resorts to exaggeration it recognizes that the reader knows that there will be particular instances when what it says does not hold; the righteous, for example, do fail, and often fail comprehensively, disastrously. But it is not the nature of poetry to say everything that can, or that needs to, be said in one scoop. Poetry is prepared to wait for another occasion, another psalm, to correct, to tip back the balance and to answer the objections that can be raised against it. Exaggeration speaks in monotonal black-n-white. In this way it speaks plainly, clearly, and without distraction. Poetry employs exaggerations in the trust that the reader will be wise enough to understand this. It does it in the confidence that, though it is being so overstated, it nonetheless says what we all know deep down to be true, that we, in fact, want to be affirmed as being so. In this way this exaggeration, that "whatever he does prospers," actually speak for us, and holds us up through all the rough and tough patches of life—when our values and ideals are challenged and tested—by reminding us ever so starkly what we know to be true even though many rational arguments might be raised against it.