How Shall a Man be Blessed?

Blessed is everyone who fears the LORD, who walks in his ways! You shall eat the fruit of the labor 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. (Psalm 128:1-4 ESV)


One of the wonderful things about God is that He is not like me. You and I have been created in His image, but that image has been twisted after the fall.

If I were God, and I spoke the above verses; I would show that the only way to have my blessing was to fear me, and walk according to my ways. People would know who was a Christian, and who was not by looking at the family. If a man and woman married and had an abundance of children sitting around the dinner table, this was a Christian family. I was giving them their blessing and it would be obvious to all.

God says that thus shall a man be blessed who fears the Lord. Thus? In this way. This is the way that a man shall be blessed who fears the Lord. The blessing is to have a wife barefoot and pregnant, bringing forth gloriously beautiful children. And to have these children sitting around the dinner table in abundance.

The amazing thing about God is that He not only blesses the Christian man with a fruitful wife and an abundance of children, He does this for the non-Christian man as well. The non-Christian man is receiving a blessing from God, yet does not acknowledge God is the giver of the gift. And still, God does this over and over again.

If you alone had a certain skill. There was no else in the world who was able to do what you could do. Would you do this skill for people again and again and again without getting any credit at all. Actually most of the time you performed this skill for a man, he gave credit somewhere else. He used the fact that you performed this skill for him in secret, as a springboard for showing all the world that no one needs you at all.