The gospel of blessing: Psalm 128

Psalm 128:2b: “You shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you”. Pretty simple. Hard to misunderstand. There it is in Holy Scripture: blessings and prosperity will be yours.

Doesn’t this sound like the ‘prosperity gospel’, a theology that says God wants you to be healthy and wealthy? That if you do life right then God will bless you… if you have enough faith? It is a scourge that leaves the poor and unemployed full of discontent, the sick and suffering wondering what they’ve done wrong. I’ve known Christians sick with cancer who’ve been told they must have unconfessed sin or insufficient faith. Under the influence of the prosperity gospel, some of the sick are unwilling to contemplate any other result than healing.

So Psalm 128 is a little hard to clearly hear, with its promises of blessings and prosperity, because we’re already reacting against it. Our minds race to the exceptions, the qualifications, the perversions, rather than waiting to see what the Bible is actually saying.

That’s where Eugene Peterson, a professor of pastoral theology, comes in. Writing about this psalm, he says:

The easiest thing in the world is to be a Christian. What is hard is to be a sinner.¹

Easy to be a Christian? That’s not what I expect. I expect hardship. We’re told to make sure people count the cost when accepting Jesus. But Peterson goes on to say that in fact the Bible is just one long exposition of this psalm’s theme: that God wants to bless us. And we need to take this seriously, not just react against where we fear it might lead.

Blessing promised

I’ve already said that this psalm is promising blessing. So let’s have a closer look at verses 1-4:

Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord,
who walks in his ways!

You shall eat the fruit of the labour of your hands;
you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.

Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
within your house;
your children will be like olive shoots
around your table.

Behold, thus shall the man be blessed
who fears the Lord.

Work

Ancient Israel was an agricultural world. This song promised the godly Israelite they’d eat the fruit of their labour. Their crops wouldn’t fail, and their animals wouldn’t starve because of drought. Their farming wouldn’t be disrupted by invasion and warfare.

Now, of course, this psalm assumes hard work. You eat the fruit of your labour, not your laziness. The importance of hard work is stressed throughout the Bible (Prov 20:4; Eph 4:28; 1 Thess 4:11-12). But this Psalm is going further than the general biblical principle that you reap what you sow. It’s saying that all prosperity depends on God. Conceptually, this psalm is a parallel to Psalm 127, which makes it clear that, no matter how hard you work, in the end prosperity depends on the Lord. You can work hard and build a big house and be miserable inside it. All your gains may be snatched away from you in the tumbling of a stock market.

So it’s not automatic that we’re blessed in our work, or certain that we’ll have deep enjoyment or lasting satisfaction. If any of those things happen at work, it is the gift of God. But Psalm 128 makes it a promise to those who meet the conditions!

Family

The second blessing comes in verse 3: your wife will be like a fruitful vine and your kids like lots of little olive shoots. Think grape vineyards and wine-making. Think trendy olive oil, with all its health benefits, and the groves it comes from. Psalm 128 is a picture of a man with his woman surrounded by vigorous and healthy children. There is a parallel image in Psalm 127:3-5: children are like arrows in a warrior’s hand, where you’re blessed if your quiver is full of them.

Whatever you make of the images of arrows and olives, Psalm 128 forecasts a happy family around the table, extending out to grandchildren. It’s the sort of future a young groom might imagine for himself on his wedding day. That’s how God promises to bless us.

Ultimately, this psalm promises us blessing in the two main ways we define ourselves: what we do and who we’re connected to (exactly what Genesis 1-2 says we were made for: for work, to till the soil, and for family, where two become one and be fruitful and multiply). If one of these areas of our life is going badly, we tend to compensate by emphasizing the other. If work is unpleasant, then we escape home, to our refuge. And if things are hard at home, it’s easy to throw ourselves into work or study. The unhappiest people of all may be those out of work and without a functional family. But here God promises to bless us in these foundational arenas.

The condition: Fear the Lord

So what’s the condition for receiving these blessings? It’s in verses 1 and 4: blessed are all who fear the Lord.

What does it mean to fear the Lord? The psalm explains this too. You might know that Hebrew poetry works not by rhyme but by parallelism. The two halves of the one verse often say the same thing in different but complementary ways. Here in verse 1 the second line helps fill out the first: to fear the Lord is to walk in his ways.

It’s the opposite of our natural tendency, testified to in Isaiah 53:6: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way”. Praise God that, as Isaiah predicted in the same verse, “And the Lord has laid on him [the suffering servant Jesus Christ!] the iniquity of us all”. So to fear the Lord is to turn from the Frank Sinatra disease of “I’ll do it my way”, and to realize that God is the last person in the universe you should be ignoring, and that he has every right in the world to judge you and to expel you from his presence for eternity.

But it’s more than just a negative fear. It’s not just about walking in his ways because otherwise you’ll be punished. There’s another parallel in Psalm 112:1: “Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments!” Fearing the Lord is about greatly delighting in God’s ways. Not only do you realize God’s commands are right, you know that God’s ways are good and beautiful. Peterson explains it this way:

The Bible isn’t interested in whether we believe in God or not. It assumes that everyone more or less does. What it is interested in is the response we have to him: Will we let God be as he is, majestic and holy, vast and wondrous, or will we always be trying to whittle him down to the size of our small minds, insist on confining him within the boundaries we are comfortable with, refuse to think of him other than in images that are convenient to our lifestyle? But then we are not dealing with the God of creation and the Christ of the cross, but with a dime-store reproduction of something made in our image, usually for commercial reasons. To guard against all such blasphemous chumminess with the Almighty, the Bible talks of the fear of the Lord—not to scare us but to bring us to awesome attention before the overwhelming grandeur of God, to shut up our whining and chattering and stop our running and fidgeting so that we can really see him as he is and listen to him as he speaks his merciful, life-changing words of forgiveness.²

But what about…?

So Psalm 128 says to fear the Lord that way and you will be blessed, at home, at work. Prosperity will be yours.

But what about the diligent Christian who ends up unemployed for a prolonged period? What about the couple who seem unable to have children? And what about the life cut short by cancer or car accident? Did they not fear the Lord? Could we who are employed and have children and live longer be so bold and blind and callous to claim we are somehow better than them at walking in God’s ways? How is this psalm not the prosperity gospel?

We could assert that this psalm perhaps belongs in the category of biblical wisdom literature. Like Proverbs, it is making wise generalizations about the way God has wired up the world. And typically if you obey God, and work hard, you’ll end up blessed—wise generalizations, not infallible promises to be inflexibly or insensitively applied. And the twofold mention of needing fear of the Lord is a link to the wisdom literature.

And clearly the psalm writers were not ignorant of the sufferings of believers. Just within the close context of these psalms of ascent, we see it referred to many times (Ps 120:1-2, 123:3-4, 126:5-6, 132:1). But each psalm takes the long view. So the Bible looks forward to the end for resolution.

We get a hint of this in the last two verses of the psalm, which actually form not a promise but a prayer for blessing:

The Lord bless you from Zion!
May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem
all the days of your life!

May you see your children's children!
Peace be upon Israel! (vv. 5-6)

The point of these verses is that the individual’s prosperity depended upon the prosperity of Jerusalem. Zion was the hill Jerusalem was built on, the place God’s temple was located—the symbolic place of his presence, the place God blessed you from. When Jerusalem was secure, an Israelite and his family could rejoice and thrive. When Jerusalem was attacked and defeated, your family and your very life were under threat. There is here a corporate connectedness or solidarity with Jerusalem.

However, the ultimate blessing this psalm points to is tied up with the new Jerusalem. Speaking to those who repented of sin and fixed their eyes on Jesus, Hebrews 12:22 says, “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem”. This is where the spirits of righteous men made perfect through the sprinkled blood of Jesus dwell. The new Jerusalem is the place where God promises he will be with us, without death, mourning, crying or pain (Rev 21:3-4).

This second Zion is the answer to the prayer of Psalm 128:5-6, and fulfils the prosperity the psalm promises—forever.

Deeper happiness

But in the meantime, is it truly easy to be a Christian, as Peterson says?

Part of his point is that in fearing the Lord and walking in his ways you go with the grain. When giving into your sinful impulses, you go against the grain. He says:

People who are forever breaking the rules, trying other roads, attempting to create their own system of values and truth from scratch, spend most of their time calling up someone to get them out of trouble and help repair the damage, and then ask the silly question “What went wrong?”… If you go against the grain of the universe you get splinters.³

But there is also a call here to a deeper happiness. In John Calvin’s commentary on this psalm, he pointed out that actually the blessing of verse 2 is very simple. It’s to have enough to eat from your own work. It’s contentment. By contrast, the world pretends that a happy life consists of ease, honours, and great wealth. Outside of Christ we naturally break into extravagant ideas of what happiness is, because the covetousness of the human heart is so insatiable. But with God as our ‘foster father’, as Calvin puts it so beautifully, with Christ we learn to pray, “Give us today our daily bread”.

Of course, the blessing of fertility points beyond literal children. It can apply to the single or the infertile. It’s about the sharing and delighting in life; it’s about giving to others. Multiplication is a characteristic of blessing. Think of the lifelong bachelor, John Chapman, terribly ill in hospital but surrounded by dozens and dozens of visitors and full of joy in the Lord, still looking to share his Saviour with the nursing staff. The deeper happiness begins now.

This psalm promises a life of blessings, but is not ignorant of sorrow. Fearing the Lord and becoming a disciple of Jesus is not a reduction from what we already are; it’s not a limiting of our lives; it’s not a subtraction from what we are used to. No, this psalm promises that Jesus will expand our capacities and fill us up with life so that we overflow with joy!

1. EH Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, 1980, p.111.↩

2. Long Obedience, p. 116.↩

3. p. 117.↩