Blessing after blessing

Psalm 128

The Psalms of Ascent. Psalm 128 is the ninth of these psalms and for some of you, this will be the ninth time you have heard this. But for the sake of those who are new, let me explain. The Psalms of Ascent, Psalms 120 through 134, were psalms chanted or sung as the Hebrew pilgrims made their way up to Jerusalem for one of the three annual worship festivals: the Feast of Passover in the spring, the Feast of Pentecost in early summer and the Feast of Tabernacles in autumn. These fifteen psalms were chanted or sung and served as reminders of various aspects of a journey toward God.

As Christians, we are all on a similar journey. God has made himself known to us, we have submitted to him and chosen to follow him, and we are now on that journey through life that will culminate at some time in our future and we will see him face to face. The Psalms of Ascent speak to us on our journey as well.

Psalm 128 is a psalm of blessing and begins with this pronouncement:

Blessed are all who fear the LORD,
who walk in his ways.

The word translated blessed is also translated as “happy” or “fortunate”. Happy are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways. Fortunate are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways. A person or group of people are blessed, happy or fortunate because they are privileged recipients of divine behavior. We are blessed because God, our creaator, cares about us, pays atention to us, loves us and interacts with us.

This is the heading for the psalm. Blessed, happy, fortunate are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways.

What does it mean to “fear the Lord”? When the Bible talks about fear of the Lord, it does not mean we are to be afraid of the Lord. Fear of the Lord speaks of our deep awe and respect for the Lord. Fear of the Lord leads us to keep in our minds the majesty and wonder and holiness of God. God is not one to whom we could go up and casually slap on the back and say, “Hi buddy, what’s up?”  God is not one we are to take for granted and use for our convenience.

Because of our proper respect, our fear of the Lord, we make the only wise choice and choose to walk in his ways. We seek to know God, to learn of his love for us and to find out how he wants us to live our lives. We learn and then we obey, we put into practice what we have learned.

And the psalmist says that those who fear the Lord and walk in his ways are blessed, fortunate, happy.

What does the life of one who is blessed look like? The psalmist paints a picture of this blessed and fortunate life using the Hebrew cultural understandings of blessing.

2 You will eat the fruit of your labor;
blessings and prosperity will be yours.

You will work and your work will prove worthwhile, it will result in a harvest that will feed you with its fruit.

In the sermon last week, the emphasis in Psalm 127 was on work with the teaching that when we work, we model ourselves after God who works. We are made to work and when we are deprived of meaningful work, we suffer. So part of being blessed or fortunate is that we have meaningful work that enables us to survive.

You will eat the fruit of your labor; blessings and prosperity will be yours. You will have meaningful work and it will result in a harvest that will make you prosperous. You will be prosperous not because you won the lottery or inherited money but you will have the satisfaction of knowing that your hard work paid off to make you prosperous and blessed.

Now the psalmist continues with this picture of blessing.

3 Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
within your house;

There is a lot of meaning in this brief verse. The vine was a symbol of fruitfulness, sexual charm and festivity. This is a wife who is a delight, beautiful and charming, bearing children and unlike the promiscuous woman in Proverbs, she stays within the house. She is faithful to her husband.

This is a blessed and happy man who has such a wife.

your sons will be like olive shoots
around your table.

Sons around the table are the hope and promise of the future. I mentioned last week the importance of sons in the culture of these psalms. When there were disputes with neighbors or when someone was trying to take advantage of you, it was your sons, many sons, who were your protection. Our culture today does not rely on sons as it did then so we can easily read this as children, not sons. The blessing is: Your children will be like olive shoots around your table.

When an olive grower walked by his trees, it was the olive shoots that delighted him. They were the promise and hope of future olives.

The picture is of a man who sits at his table and sees his children and his heart overflows with happiness because of the hope and promise of the future.

4 Thus is the man blessed
who fears the LORD.

Meaningful work that provides a harvest and prosperity, a beautiful and faithful wife and many children, a blessed man.

The psalmist says that the man who fears the Lord and walks in his ways will be blessed, fortunate. He paints a picture of that fortunate man’s life and then continues with a benediction of blessing.

5 May the LORD bless you from Zion
all the days of your life;
may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem,
6 and may you live to see your children’s children.

The psalmist asks that this blessed man will continue to be blessed by God for the rest of his life. He asks that this blessed man will experience the delight of a Jerusalem that is prospering. He asks that this blessed man will live a long life and live to see his grandchildren.

And he concludes by asking that this blessed man will live in an Israel experiencing God’s peace.

Peace be upon Israel.

This is good news. In making the journey up to Jerusalem, who would not want to hear such good news? Who among us does not want to hear such good news, that we will live a long and fruitful life, that our spouse will be faithful and our home will be blessed, that our hard work will pay off and provide us with a comfortable retirement, that we will live to sit at a family reunion surrounded by our children and grandchildren, that our country will be at peace.

There is within us a deep longing for this peaceful, contented life.

We long for this life, but our journey is not always peaceful. There are bumps in the road. There are storms. There are accidents. There are robbers.

What if you were making that journey up to Jerusalem and you had no children? How would Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel, have felt reading this psalm on her way to Shiloh to make sacrifices to the Lord? Year after year she went to the annual sacrifice and pled for a child but remained childless. Psalm 128 was not yet written, but how would she have responded to this blessing?

How would you respond to this psalm of blessing if your son had died or if your wife was not faithful? What then?

How do we reconcile this psalm of blessing with the pain, sorrow and tragedy we experience in life?

Are we to be oblivious to it, pretend it is not there? Are we to somehow transcend the suffering as Buddhists attempt to do?

What about the teaching of Peter and James that tell us to rejoice when trials and temptations come our way because in the process, our faith is being strengthened?

I have struggled with this psalm this past week and while I can’t pretend to have perfectly resolved my struggle, I have two responses.

The first response centers on the fact that God has created us to be spiritual as well as physical beings. Let me explain what I mean by this distinction. Dallas Willard in his book, The Divine Conspiracy, makes the point that what is spiritual about us is what cannot be detected through our five senses.

We are more than the animals around us. Like animals, we feel an urge to eat, but we also can choose to fast for a period of time for a higher purpose. Like animals, we feel a sexual urge but we are able to resist that desire for the sake of fidelity or because we have a sense that we are called to be celibate. Our physical nature links us with the animals of this world but we are also created in the image of God and have this spiritual nature, calling us to something higher and more noble.

We differ from the animal world around us because we are spiritual as well as physical beings. We have been created with this spiritual nature and as a consequence are able to acknowledge our creator’s attempts to make himself known to us and to learn how to fear him and walk in his ways. A dog wakes up (after barking all night – at least in Rabat) and looks for food, chases any other animal that comes along, sleeps in the shade, comes up to be petted. But does a dog contemplate? Does a dog consider the stars at night and feel insignificant in comparison to the vastness of the universe? Does a dog wonder who its creator is? Does a dog have desires for its pups and the pups of its pups?

A physical nature is not able to comprehend the mysteries of the universe and the creator of the universe. But our spiritual nature allows us to be aware of these realities. For as long as man has existed, men and women have paused in their work to consider what it all means. They have dreamed and sought for meaning. They have searched for the one who created them.

And God entered history with Abraham and revealed himself to Moses and was born as a baby in a manger to be a Savior for his people. God has given us the Scriptures that make more clear what he intends for us and how he desires we life.

God has created us to be spiritual as well as physical beings and when we fear the Lord and walk in his ways, we follow the smooth, straight road God has made for us. Our life is smooth and blessed because we are following the path he has made for us.

But we are also spiritual and physical creatures who are free to choose our course. Paul, in Romans, discusses our awareness of God and the fallen nature of mankind.

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,  19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools  23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.  25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

If you are forever trying to carve your own way, creating your own system of rules, making your own list of acceptable behaviors and you get into trouble, why be surprised? It is as the quote in the bulletin this morning says, “If you go against the grain of the universe you get splinters.”

John Henry Newman put it this way, “If I want to travel north and all the roads are cut to the east, of course I shall complain of the roads. I shall find nothing but obstacles; I shall have to surmount walls, and cross rivers, and go round about, and after all fail of my end.”

My first response to this psalm of blessing in a world that is filled with pain and sorrow and tragedy is that many times we are trying to go north when the road has been cut for us going east. This is a fallen world suffering from the effects of sin and it is no surprise that we suffer when we fail to walk in the ways of the Lord.

God has given us sex as a gift to be practiced within the institution of marriage. One man and one woman enjoying the gift he has given. When that gift is abused and tragedy results, why be surprised? Aids and other sexual diseases exist because people are going north when the road is cut to the east.

Children are born in poverty because their parents are alcoholics and drug addicts. Teenagers turn to drugs and alcohol and sex because they have parents who care more about their successful careers and social status than they do about their children. People are going north when the road is cut to the east.

This is not a completely satisfying response because not all suffering we experience comes because we go north when the road goes to the east. Sometimes we suffer because although we were going east, someone else was going north and hit us and made us suffer.

But in a broad sense, this view still gives me some satisfaction. Much of the pain we see in this world comes from people setting up their own rules, their own list of acceptable behavior.

My second response to this dilemma, a psalm of blessing in a world of pain, sorrow and tragedy, is that we are most often asking the wrong question.

When someone we know dies in a car accident as did the daughter of a Fulbright scholar in Ifrane this past week, we ask, “Why?” Why did this terrible thing have to happen?

But a more appropriate question to ask would be, “Why does this bad thing not happen all the time?” At the men’s breakfast this past Tuesday, we talked about this man’s daughter who died in the car accident. As we talked, we all had stories of close calls in which we almost died. We each had several stories. In my own life, I can think of multiple times when I had a brush with death.

Why is it that we have accidents in which we get cut above the eye or below the eye or to the side of the eye, but rarely do we cut the eye itself?

We live centimeters and seconds from tragedy and death and yet we are spared from tragedy time after time, day after day.

My second response to this psalm is that we are blessed over and over and over but seldom stop to realize it. When we get to heaven we will be amazed at all the blessings we received, all the times we were protected and spared from harm.

These are my two responses to the dilemna of a psalm of blessing in a world of pain, suffering and tragedy. God has created us to follow him but we rebel and make our own rules, our own way and suffer the consequences. And, in fact, we are spared tragedy and pain and suffering over and over and over but focus only on the few times when things do not work out as we want.

But even where these responses fail to account for this psalm of blessing in a world of pain, there is a sense that the one who fears the Lord and walks in his ways is blessed.

Experiencing difficult times does not preclude a person from sitting down at the end of a life and saying, “The Lord has blessed me. I have had a good life.”

Paul was shipwrecked, stoned, whipped and beaten. His life was not the life of blessing as described in Psalm 128 and yet at the end of his life, he was able to say:

6 For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure.  7 I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.  8 Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.

These are the words of a man who has experienced a full life with God and is content, at peace with God and ready to meet him face to face. These are the words of a man who has been blessed.

We live, day after day, amidst blessing after blessing. When God created Adam and Eve in Genesis, he blessed them.

God called Abraham and he blessed him,
“I will make you into a great nation
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.

Each of the twelve tribes of Israel received a blessing in Genesis 49.

And then all the way through the Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, blessing continues and concludes with seven salvos of blessing in Revelation 1:3, 14:13, 16:15, 19:9, 20:6, 22:7 and 22:14.

Blessing is not incidental to our lives, it is the constant in our lives, whether we are aware of it or not.

And so I pray for you that you will be blessed. I pray that you will fear the Lord and walk n his ways, that you will seek the east road and not fight your way through the north road. I pray that you will be surrounded by people who love and care for you. I pray that you will be encouraged in your relationship with God, that you will increasingly sense his love for you. I pray that you will discover the path God has made for you and that your journey will be blessed. I pray for you a long life full of experiences with God. I pray that at the end of your life you will be able to lean back, relax, and be ready to meet your Lord face to face.