Psalm 67: Blessed to be a Blessing

The unknown author of Psalm 67 writes:
“May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us—so that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations.
May the peoples praise you, God;
may all the peoples praise you. May the nations be glad and sing for joy,for you rule the peoples with equity and guide the nations of the earth. May the peoples praise you, God; may all the peoples praise you.
The land yields its harvest; God, our God, blesses us. May God bless us still, so that all the ends of the earth will fear him.”
This psalm tells us three things that are just as important today as they were for ancient Israel:
1. God blesses his people for a specific purpose.
The psalmist quotes God himself when he asks God to “be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us.” In Numbers 6:22-27 God tells Israel’s priests to bless his people by saying the same thing. God then promises to put his name on his people in such a way that his identity and reputation are tied to how his people behave—what they say, what they fear, how they live, and how they die. Lastly, God promises to bless his people in that passage in Numbers, but Psalm 67 gives the purpose behind it.
God blesses his people, so they will make his ways known on the earth, namely his salvation among all nations. God does not go through the trouble of identifying himself with his people and blessing them, so they can misconstrue what kind of God he is. According to Will Willimon, the church in America has found itself abandoning Jesus’ call for his people to be salt and light in the world, so it can instead be “sweet syrup to enable the world’s solutions to go down easier” for anxiously affluent Americans who expect nothing more out of their pastor than to care for them and their family and nothing more out of their church than to provide therapy for coping with a thoroughly self-centered consumerist way of life.
But our psalmist rejects such an idolatrous substitute for true faithfulness to God. Instead, he calls God’s people to remember that the whole purpose of their being blessed is to make God’s ways and salvation known on earth. A fair question to ask, then, is How can we tell we are making God’s ways and salvation known?
2. Wherever there is joy, God’s ways and salvation are made known.
When we get sick, we focus on symptoms that will hopefully disclose what underlying condition is producing them. The psalmist says loud, obnoxious, joyful, glad singing is a symptom of praise to God. In other words, wherever you see people doing singing gladly, you know there is praise. It is nearly impossible to sing gladly when there is no underlying praise to produce it. In contrast wherever there is quiet, timid, depressed, muted silence at a gathering of God’s people, one would wonder what underlying condition is producing such a grim symptom among them? Have they no praise to sing? Maybe they have forgotten God’s ways and salvation.
Certainly they have forgotten the benefits of being God’s people, which, according to David in Psalm 103, include God forgiving all our sins, healing all our diseases, buying us back from a deadly pit, crowning us with love and compassion, satisfying our desires with good things, renewing our youth like that of an eagle, working righteousness and justice for all the oppressed, and so on. God’s ways, salvation, and blessings should produce one symptom—Joy!
3. God’s blessings include your stuff, so share it generously.
By the end of the psalm we read again about God’s blessings. But this time one particular blessing is listed: “The land yields its harvest; God, our God, blesses us. May God bless us still, so that all the ends of the earth will fear him.” God’s blessings include our stuff and the things we use to obtain it.
In the four Gospels Jesus talks about money more than he talks about heaven and hell combined. One out of every four of Jesus’ parables is about money. One out of every seven verses in the Gospel of Luke are about money. Jesus certainly had much to say about our stuff and the money we use to get it, and he is clear that any blessings attached to our money and positions come from the opportunity God gave us to be generous with others. A blessed person is not only a joyful person, but also a generous person.
As we have discussed here before, there are plenty of ways to make God’s ways and salvation known, but the psalmist and Jesus himself both recommend being generous with our stuff. Helping others should be a joyful privilege for us, because it befits the help we all receive from God—help we could never give out by ourselves but that we can point to by being generous.
Blessed to be a blessing
Sadly, a cliché among Christians is that we are “blessed to be a blessing.” There is nothing but truth in that statement, but we have safely gutted it of any significant meaning for us. Being a Christian should have a clear purpose to it—to make God’s ways known to the ends of the earth. Being a Christian should mean being a joyful person, for joy is the symptom of praise to God. Being a Christian should mean sharing your stuff generously, so that all the ends of the earth will fear God.
G. K. Chesterton once said that among the hardest things for Christians to believe is that every person actually matters. Stephen Holmes, drawing from Chesterton’s insight, wonders what the world would be like if churches everywhere were groups of people that focused on giving everyone around them (both inside and outside the church) a taste of God’s kingdom by treating each person as if they actually mattered. How would your church be different if each member resolved to be a person who joyfully accepts whoever happens to be among them—as if each person mattered?
Read Psalm 67 every day for a week. Pray its words in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. Most importantly, live it by doing what it says. As Augustine wrote about this psalm, “both to preach the truth is nothing, if the heart dissents from the tongue, and to hear the truth is nothing, if fruit does not follow the hearing.” How have you shown others that God has blessed you?