Devotional Messages

DEVOTIONAL MESSAGE

Psalm 67:1-2 – May God be gracious unto us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, that your way may be known upon earth, your saving power among all nations. (NRSV)

This is a lovely and fairly familiar passage.  Who wouldn’t want God’s face shining upon you?  But if we look at it more deeply, we see that these lines raise questions about our relationship to the rest of the world.  There is more than one way to read these verses.  Our assumptions going in make a difference.

One might assume that the writer wants his tribe to be blessed so richly that everyone else will notice and think, “Wow!  Those people’s god must be really awesome!”  This sentiment is clearly present in other places in the psalms.  In a world of many different gods, that kind of competition may have made some sort of sense.

But another way of reading these lines would have us understand that if God is blessing us, we ought to be blessing others so richly that they know God through our love.  Rather than being jealous of God’s love for us, others are invited to share in it with us.  I would argue this is the gospel reading of these verses.

Finally, there is an even more expansive way to read these lines, which also resonates with the gospel, and that is to assume that those who make up the “us” in the first verse are the same people who populate the “earth” and “all nations” in the second verse.  In this reading, all God’s people are one, and we are all blessed richly so that we know God’s way and saving power.  May it be so!