Psalm 1:4.   The one who drinks in God’s Word is the opposite of the wicked who will be blown away like chaff for they have no useful purpose. As a boy who spent a lot of his time on a farm, I am very familiar with chaff! It’s the left-overs when corn is “thrashed”. It is an irritant and seems to get everywhere, even under your clothes! It takes the slightest breath of wind to blow chaff away and when it is gone the ground is clean. In my boyhood the men used to talk about “cleaning the crop”, this took place when corn was “dressed” in a machine that removed all of the rubbish. Chaff is blown out of threshers and combine harvesters for it is of no use to anyone; even straw has its uses but chaff does not. In ancient times threshing would be done with a flail or alternatively animals would trample the corn on a threshing floor and the chaff would be the rubbish that is left. Threshing floors were often elevated so that the wind would blow the chaff away. 
There is a fascinating story in 2 Samuel 24. It seems that King David had rather foolishly ordered a census of his fighting men, no doubt to take pride in the empire that he had acquired! Too late he realised his folly and a plague came on Israel and 70,000 people died. An angel of God was preparing to destroy Jerusalem from the threshing floor of a Jebusite called Araunah. David was devasted by the trouble and loss of life he had caused and pleaded that he and his family be punished by God. The prophet Gad told David that he must buy the threshing floor from Araunah and there build an altar to the Lord God. David did so and he sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings. His prayers were heard by the Lord and the plague came to an end. The extraordinary aside to this story is that Araunah’s threshing floor was on Mount Moriah where Abraham offered his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. The same mountain where the Temple was later built and where the Son of God was offered as a sacrifice for sin. Today this site is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  Jesus blew away the chaff when He suffered on that ancient threshing floor, He removed the sin plague that affects the whole world.
Our spiritual foes are temporary, their ways are short lived, their future destiny is judgement and destruction, why would we wish to be like them? Why would we model our lives on chaff when our heavenly Father offers us the reality of becoming a sturdy tree? There’s just no comparison. The wicked and their adherents will not stand when God judges and they certainly will have no place in God’s sanctuary amongst those who worship Him.  

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