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Wisdom

              Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in obedience to him. You will eat the fruit of your labor; blessings and prosperity will be yours. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table. Yes, this will be the blessing for the man who fears the Lord. May the Lord bless you from Zion; may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life. May you live to see your children’s children— peace be on Israel. (Psalm 128)

                What are the results of being blessed? According to this psalm, it’s domestic prosperity. You get to eat what you’ve earned. Your family will grow. Your homeland will peacefully prosper, which means that you’ll be able to eat what you’ve earned and your family will grow. Of course, this was written thousands of years ago, when things were a little simpler. Wealth was connected with the capacity of your family to provide for itself and the size of the family. Granted, the size of the family was partly a cultural thing, but if you had more people to help with the chores, you were better able to provide for them. Another reason having many children was useful was because when the parents got too old to care for themselves, their children were the ones responsible for caring for them.

                As a side note, this is a definite problem the next few generations are likely to face. They are not having children, or they are having only a few, which means they have no one to come alongside them as they get older. They will be reduced to three choices: the misery and difficulty of caring for themselves, looking to some organization, most generally the government, or depending on God. I can tell you that the first two options are bad bets at best. Simple wisdom.

                The point is that being blessed, according to this psalm, had nothing to do with being idle, rich, powerful, influential, famous, or even having lots of friends. It had to do with your relationship with God, your taking responsibility for yourself and those closest to you, and (by extension) their taking responsibility for you.

 

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