Blessed to be a Blessing

“May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations.” (Ps. 67:1-2 ESV)

Most of the people I know including myself are incredibly well off in material terms. We are not worried about where our next meal will come from or how we are going to protect ourselves from the elements. We are surrounded by an incredible assortment of gadgets and gizmos that move us from place to place and keep us connected, informed, and entertained. Almost every single one of us has at our fingertips access to power the vast majority of our ancestors, including the most powerful of them, could not have even dreamed. Here in the United States even the poorest are wealthy by world standards. And yet, blessed as we are with such bounty, we are anxious and afraid.

Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. once remarked that modern man “suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance.” The focus and direction of material advancement has been to make our lives more secure and more comfortable. And, as witnessed by the affluence around us, mankind has accomplished remarkable things in the material world. But I will argue that these endeavors have not been able to address the greatest human needs because humanity’s deficiency is not material but spiritual.

I am not against material achievement. I do believe science and technology can and should be harnessed to alleviate suffering and hardship wherever and to the maximum extent they can be. The problem as I see it is that rather than channeling our efforts to uplift our brothers and sisters the fruits of our achievements are largely employed in a vain attempt to temporarily fill a vast experiential emptiness. We allow ourselves to be programmed to believe the best use of our material wealth is to satisfy our own craving for relevance. Watch broadcast television for one evening and notice the number and appeal of skillful advertisements for material goods promising to bring meaning and fulfillment to what we are told is an otherwise dreary and unsatisfying life. Dreary and unsatisfying! In the midst of such unparalleled prosperity!

Our material well-being is a modern day Tower of Babel. In Genesis 11 humans united to build a tower that reached to heaven. The implication of that story is that humans sought to place themselves on equal footing with God, even to replace Him. And God responded by confounding their efforts. The sin of Adam and Eve was essentially the same. Whenever mankind denies and attempts to usurp God’s sovereignty disaster follows. The destruction resulting from the misapplication of science and technology should be readily apparent to any student of twentieth century history: from the killing fields of the Western Front to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The less apparent but no less devastating tragedy lies in the soul of modern man who, spoiled and pampered beyond imagining, feels emptier than ever before.

The problem is not the blessing; it is what we do not do with it. In the passage cited above the psalmist petitions God for blessing, but notice what he does not pray for. He does not write “bless us… that we may have more fun, buy a nicer car, live in a bigger house, go on a more decadent vacation, have more material security, or just in some way feel less profoundly empty inside.” His focus is on making God real in the earth. He is saying the very act of God blessing us will be a blessing to others. It was for this that God chose Israel – to be a light to the nations. And it is to this that we Christians, the new Israel, with the incomparable blessing of the Cross, have also been called. The truth that all of our scientific and technological cleverness has not been able to grasp is that a blessing to ourselves is only really a blessing when it is freely shared.