So I want to continue in my thoughts about “blessing God”. I feel a bit busy these days, too many good things to think and research about, and a book I’m reading and take millions of notes from. It’s neat, but I almost need a schedule for my free time now, to make sure I do the right things on top of these good things, like keeping in touch with family and friends and hanging out with people and etc.
Basically I started thinking about this because of Sharon. I hope she doesn’t mind her name is written here. Anyways, I hope I’ll come up with good thoughts. So the big question is this: what does it mean to “bless God” or to say “blessed be the name of the Lord”. Obviously, I am sure that all of you who sing the song “Blessed be your Name” by Matt Redman (?) should know what it means to “bless the Name of the Lord”… maybe not actually.
I took my friend’s concordance and read all the semi-verses that contained the word “bless, blessed, blessing & blessings” that took me a while. I ended up finding that most of the reference were God blessing men, or men blessing men. Just a smaller amount of references spoke of men blessing God.
Reading many verses about people blessing their children or other people or blessing God, I’ve come to notice a few things… that I am not sure yet of, but I shall expand. I think that if we come to understand a bit more about how and why people blessed others, then we’ll understand better how and why they blessed God, it cannot be two totally different things, although, it must be.
- I noticed that many times, for example, when Isaac blesses Jacob (Gen. 27:27ff) the father’s blessings upon his son, is more like a prayer than anything else. “May God give you of heaven’s dew and of earth’s richness – an abundance of grain and new wine…” But does this work with God. Can we pray to God for God? Hum… Solomon sort of said something like that in Psalm 72:15b “May people ever pray for him (God, the coming Messiah) and bless him all day long” that’s interesting ‘cause there’s the aspect of prayer and blessing. So I don’t know what it means to pray for God or if I am taking this all out of context.
- Often, people don’t actually bless others. It’s something done “through” God. People would say “The blessing of the Lord be upon you, we bless you in the name of the Lord” (Psalm 129:8) so, people recognized that they were not the ones who could bless others, and that it was only God who could bless and work for the good of human beings. That’s why they “prayed” (asked) God to bless people.
- There is still this kind of “human” blessing as in 2 Samuel 13:25, when Amnon “gave him his blessing” I think it’s more the kind of “blessings” that we use in saying “I give you my blessing on your marriage” or “blessings on your work” we are simply saying that we agree with what they are doing and wish them good.
- Nehemiah 9:5 says “… Blessed be your glorious name and may it be exalted above all blessing and praise. You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens…” At times, people don’t literally bless God, but ask for God to be blessed. “Blessed be your glorious name” I think is more a way of saying “May your name be blessed” than “I myself bless you”. But the question still remains: Who’s going to bless His name?
Truly, I don’t know. I really don’t know how we could be able to utter the words “I bless you Lord” Or what it means to call God “Most blessed”. I don’t know. I think that usually we say “I bless you Lord” or “May your name be blessed” meaning “I thank you Lord”, “May all praise you” than anything else. For sure, we cannot and will never be able to bless God in the same way He blesses people, because He has power over everything and can change times and circumstances, we cannot. We cannot bless God that way. So when we use the word blessed, sometimes is to say thanks or to praise God, sometimes it is to describe how unique, set apart and awesome He is. I don’t think we can bless God, because the lesser person is blessed by the greater (Heb.7:7 hopefully this is contextual). So we are bless God in the way that we humble ourselves and praise Him for who He is and thank Him for what He does.
No further thoughts Sharon.
Please tell me (and everyone else reading) what you think about this and your own beliefs by leaving a comment.
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2 comments:
hey gabe,
just a quick note, I was visiting the blogs of your sask friends and i noticed the link for Quit the Queue is not right...i think you typed, blogapot instead of blogspot, so it's not working.
oh! Bettyknowsbest also isnt working...
a la prochaine.
esther :)
thanks so much, Gabe, for taking the time to research my question so thoroughly!
I, too, have considered the question, "how do we bless God?" or what does it mean to bless the Almighty Blesser?
I found my Vine's Bible Dictionary pretty helpful. Like you, I found that most often, especially in the O.T., it is God blessing man with "righteousness, prosperity and salvation" (Vine's), or man blessing man, in the sense of "a wish or prayer for favorable circumstance" (Vine's).
It was interesting though, to see that the literal meaning for the Hebrew word used most often for 'bless' in the O.T. (barak) is to kneel, as in an act of adoration. This idea fits well with the meaning of the Greek word for bless used most often in the N.T. The word is 'eulogeo' - which I figure must be where we get our word eulogy. It means "to speak well of", "to praise, to celebrate with praises" (Vine's).
So, for how we bless God, it seems that part of it must be our adoration and praise to God, when we 'speak well of Him', "acknowledging His goodness, with desire for His glory" (Vine's). Whenever we speak of how good and how great God is, we are blessing Him, like the disciples, after Jesus had gone back to heaven, they were "continually in the temple praising and blessing God" Luke 24:53
There is a second way that I think we can bless God, based on the definition of the word. Another sense of the Greek word eulogeo is "to make happy". "'asher" is another word for blessed used in the O.T., which means a "state of prosperity or happiness" (Vine's).
I certainly agree with you, Gabe, that the lesser is blessed by the greater, so I'm not sure if this works, but I think that maybe we can bless God with our lives when they bring Him hapiness. We are exorted in Colossians 1:10 to "walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him...", so it would seem that when we are obedient our lives can bring God pleasure. We know that God rejoices in His people - "For behold, I create Jerusalem as a rejoicing, and her people a joy. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in My people" Isaiah 65:18,19
So my thought is that we can bless God in the words of our praises by speaking well of Him, but also in our actions, whenever we make our Father smile.
"...Blessing and glory and wisdom, thanksgiving and honor and power and might, be to our God forever and ever. Amen." Revelation 7:12
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