The other day I was praying through Psalm 67 and it struck me how closely this psalm ties together the blessing of God and the mission of God. It starts with verse 1, where the psalmist prays that God would “be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us,” a prayer that is redolent with echoes of Numbers 6, and the traditional priestly blessing that Aaron was to pronounce over the people. Here we have the same invocation of blessing, that God would provide for and prosper his people. The very next verse, however, gives the motive for this prayer, and the purpose behind God’s blessing: “so that [his] ways may be known on earth and salvation among all the nations.”
This is not a connection that usually gets emphasized now adays when we talk about the blessing of God. At least, I don’t often hear these two things brought together as tightly as Psalm 67 brings them together. Usually we think about God’s blessing—and hear I mean his material blessing, because as we’ll see, that’s what’s in view in this Psalm—in terms of our own personal security, prosperity, and needs. God gives us the things we need, we think, so that we’ll have the things we need.
Certainly our Heavenly Father loves us more dearly than even the most perfect earthly father ever loved his children, so no doubt there’s something to this simple one-to-one correlation. Jesus himself said as much in Luke 11:13.
But Psalm 67 points to a deeper, and more profound purpose underlying the blessing of God: when he blesses us, it is so that his salvation will be known to all the nations of the earth (v.2). If and when God provides for his people, it’s because he wants them to content for their witness—specific, concrete, glorious acts of God they can point to as they bear witness to him among the nations. This is underlined by the next three verses (3-5), where the focus is completely on the psalmist’s desire to see “all the peoples praise God.” He’s on a mission, this Psalmist is, and the blessing of God is simply fodder for the canon of that mission, fuel for the engine, as it were.
Verses 6 and 7 make the connection clear again, just in case it was missed the first time. Verse 6 describes the results of God’s blessing—the land is yielding its bounty, the crops coming in and the grain bins full—because God has blessed his people. And then verse 7 reminds us one final time why He’s done so: so that all the ends of the earth will fear him.
The application here, I hope, is obvious. When we pray for God’s blessing in our lives—and we can think here of the specific blessings we’ve been praying for lately—if we want to pray with hearts in tune with Psalm 67, we should be praying not simply that God will give us what we need just so that we have what we need; rather we should be praying that God would give us what we need, so we have more, and richer opportunities to bear witness to him among our neighbors, colleagues, co-workers, and friends.
And when he answers those prayers, if we want to receive his blessing with hearts in tune to Psalm 67, we should receive it with hearts ready and willing to make known among the nations what he has done.
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