Wednesday, September 23 — Blessed So It Doesn't Stop With You
We ask God to bless us and usually stop the sentence right there. Psalm 67 finishes it.
Psalm 67 — KJV
1 God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us; Selah. 2 That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations. 3 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. 4 O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth. Selah. 5 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. 6 Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us. 7 God shall bless us; and all the ends of the earth shall fear him.
Psalm 67 — WEB
1 May God be merciful to us, bless us, and cause his face to shine on us. Selah. 2 That your way may be known on earth, and your salvation among all nations, 3 let the peoples praise you, God. Let all the peoples praise you. 4 Oh let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you will judge the peoples with equity, and govern the nations on earth. Selah. 5 Let the peoples praise you, God. Let all the peoples praise you. 6 The earth has yielded its increase. God, even our own God, will bless us. 7 God will bless us. All the ends of the earth shall fear him.
Explanation
Psalm 67 is a harvest song. Israel sang it when the crops came in, and it opens with words any Israelite would have recognized from the old blessing Aaron spoke over the people: God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us. Familiar territory. Comfortable. The kind of prayer we know how to pray.
Then comes verse two, and the whole psalm turns on one small word: that. Bless us — that Your way may be known upon earth, Your saving health among all nations. The blessing is not the destination. It is the delivery vehicle. God pours something into this people so that it will run through them and out to everybody else.
From there the psalm can barely contain itself. Twice it repeats the same line, and the repetition is the point: let all the peoples praise you. Not our people. All of them. The nations are invited to be glad and sing for joy, because the God of Israel governs the whole earth with equity. That is a startling thing for a small nation surrounded by larger, hostile ones to sing out loud. It is also exactly the theology that makes sense of Rahab.
Because here is what this psalm does to the week. On Monday we met a Canaanite woman — one of the nations, an outsider by every marker Israel used. Sunday's lesson is about God's compassion for her. Psalm 67 tells us that was never an exception or a loophole. God being good to Israel was always aimed at the day when a woman in Jericho would hear about what He did at the Red Sea and decide He was worth risking her life on. The mission was in the blessing from the beginning.
And it turns the mirror on us. Most of our prayer life stops at verse one. Bless my family. Bless my job. Bless my health, my house, my children, my checking account. None of that is wrong — the psalm prays it too. But the psalm will not let us stop there, and neither should we. What has God put in your hands lately? A raise, a healthy year, a skill, an open door, a stretch of peace after a hard season? Psalm 67 asks the follow-up question we usually skip: who is it for?
The harvest imagery makes it concrete. A field does not eat what it grows. The earth yields her increase and then hands it over. The blessing moves. When it stops moving, it spoils.
So take stock today. Somebody near you is one kind word, one introduction, one paid bill, one shared meal away from seeing that God is real. You may be holding exactly what they need, and you may have been calling it "mine" this whole time.
Thought for the Day
God's blessing was never meant to stop with you.
Reflection Question
What has God given you lately that somebody else was supposed to benefit from?
Prayer
Gracious God, thank You for a kindness I did not earn and cannot repay. Keep me from hoarding it. Make my home, my table, and my paycheck a place where Your goodness keeps moving outward. Let somebody know You are real this week because of something You gave me. Amen.
This week we walk toward Sunday's lesson: God's Compassion for Rahab.