Prayer for Mercy and Blessing

“God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and show us the light of his countenance.”—Psalm 67:1.

This psalm we read now and then in the evening service. To-day it comes before us in the ordinary course of the evening psalms. Thus sometimes it is joined with the two gospel hymns of the New Testament which stand first for the evening service in our prayer book after the first and second lessons respectively: sometimes it takes its place among the ancient national songs of the Jewish people. Both these ways of using it are worth our notice, as they show us various ways of studying its words, and so of gathering more and more of its meaning. At whatever time in the history of the Jews, and by whatever psalmist it may have been written, it is probably intended as a lengthening out and filling up of the form of blessing which God committed to Moses in the wilderness, as we read in Numbers 6:22: “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons, saying, On this wise ye shall bless the children of Israel, saying unto them, ‘The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: the Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.’ And they shall put my name upon the children of Israel; and I will bless them.” The first germ, therefore, of the psalm comes down to us from a very early time indeed; and yet there is perhaps none which, if we listen to it attentively, rings out with so fresh a sound, as if it were written expressly for ourselves in this very day. It is easy to repeat it hastily as a general prayer for blessing, and so to think that it has nothing particular to tell us, nothing which we have not heard all our lives, nothing which we do not know so well as to be sick of what we feel to be the unchanging sameness. Alas! it is not our knowledge of this psalm, or of all the psalms, that is in fault first of all. It is our way of thinking that we have got to the bottom of anything, because we know so well the words in which it is spoken of, and have a certain loose notion of what they mean or are said to mean. This is the prevailing disease of all our minds: not one of us is free from it. It spoils and injures us in every possible way: it makes all our life dull and insipid, and, what is far worse, it makes all our life unkindly and unfruitful. The desire of novelty and change, of escaping now and then from the same thoughts and sights is not in itself wrong. God Himself has planted it in us. It is we ourselves who give the right desire a wrong twist, and turn it into an instrument of our own discomfort and injury, by neglecting the way in which God would have us gratify it. Our weariness of our old thoughts and sights comes from our fancying that we have known and seen already all that is to be seen and known in them. And so we either resign ourselves to hopeless emptiness and thoughtlessness, or else rush off to some other field which promises us a store of new things, but of which we soon weary in like manner, because we are so ready to imagine that it contains no more food for our minds. Oh, if we would only believe that we really know but a very little of the things which our minds and our senses are daily handling, that in all the years of a long life we can but take a little sip from the depths of wonder and glory which are always close to every one of us. When we once have begun to learn something of that belief, we can take up old things once more with a new interest, and find out by degrees that everything which our eyes behold, or our minds think about, or our hearts feel, is in truth so rich in matter for our thoughts that we need never complain of dulness. Or if, after all, we feel that the dulness is there and cannot be denied, we may be sure that the fault lies not in the things themselves, scarcely even in any mere ignorance or weakness of ours, but rather in the coldness and hardness of our hearts; in short, in evils within us which need the help of no human learning or other kind of human power, but only the influence of God’s Holy Spirit, and our own efforts that the Holy Spirit’s work within us may not come to nothing.

I have been a long time in coming to the 67th Psalm; but it will not have been lost time, if it makes you more disposed to believe that it is not an easy matter to get really to the bottom of a psalm, and that, though we may know the words by heart, and a trifle of their meaning also, there may be abundance of meaning remaining for us yet to discover. I do not mean that what I have been saying applies only to what we are accustomed to call religious subjects: it applies to all possible kinds of subjects. Only to-day I want you to apply it especially to this psalm, and the vague meaning which, I said, we are so much accustomed to put upon it, that is, as being a general prayer for blessing. Surely, supposing the meaning of the psalm to be truly conveyed by these words, are we so very sure that we know quite well what they mean? Is prayer such a very easy and obvious thing, and is it so very hard to fall into a wrong manner of praying, that we can afford to do without any help that God gives us as to the true meaning and purpose of prayer? It is at least strange that the Bible should say so much about the manner of praying, and above all that Christ should have taught His disciples what we call the Lord’s prayer, using these remarkable words, “After this manner pray ye,” if every one could certainly find out for himself how to pray aright. And again, that other word ‘blessing’ we must not hastily suppose that we fully understand; for, when we shall know fully what true blessing is, and when we can with all our hearts pray God to bless us according to the fulness of that knowledge, we shall have little more to learn in the Christian life. Perhaps from this psalm, or even a verse of it, we may learn to know better than we have known before, what a prayer for blessings should be.

The psalm from first to last is one strain of faith and trust in God, rising in the middle into a burst of proud exultation in Him. But it begins more humbly and quietly, and, as it were, feels its way up to a higher and louder pitch. Its first prayer is a prayer for mercy. There are no tormenting doubts and fears lest God should not really be merciful in Himself, or show mercy to him who utters the prayer. But there is a feeling of needing mercy, a feeling that, when God shows us kindness and favour, it is more than we should have a right to expect if our deserts were to be strictly weighed, that there is much in us which does not invite and call for kindness and favour, but rather repels it; that God knows all this evil which defiles us, and yet passes it over, and thinks only of His own lovingkindness and that we are still His children. A prayer therefore which begins with asking for God’s mercy is a prayer which begins with confession. It casts aside all notion of rights on our part. It throws us on our knees before the throne of the Heavenly King, and bids Him look upon us not according to our nature, but according to His; not as men deserve to be looked upon, who have sinned and rebelled against their rightful Lord, but as it becomes a God of love and grace to look. It asks him to listen with that look and in that mind to all the petitions that follow, and to grant them freely for His own great Name’s sake.

“God be merciful to us and bless us.” What is the blessing here prayed for? Does it mean, ‘God send us good things’? I cannot think so. A prayer for good things may be a quite right and lawful one, and yet the whole teaching of the Bible tends to show that, if our minds are filled chiefly with that thought, we cannot pray in the manner in which Christ taught His disciples. Nor does that meaning of the word suit well its place in the verse, considering the force of the words which go before and of those which follow. It is true we often call things blessings, only because they are pleasant or useful to us. But this arises either from a careless way of using words vaguely without considering what we mean by them, or, worse still, from a fondness for cant and a mere pretence of godliness. Whenever we speak of blessings thoughtfully and deliberately, we mean to point to them not merely as they concern us, but as they concern God and us together; we mean that they are marks of God’s favour and approval to us. When we receive a present from any friend or relation whom we love and whom we know to love us, we value it not only for its own sake and the use of which it may be to us, but still more for the sake of the giver, as a keepsake and mark of his love. Just so is it in our dealings with God and His gifts to us. When we speak of them as blessings, we mean to say that we value them chiefly as keepsakes, as it were, from Him, as tokens that He does really love us and has pleasure in bestowing gifts upon us. A prayer for blessing is therefore not so much a prayer for gifts as a prayer for that favour and friendliness in God’s mind towards us, which we value most in His gifts to us or in any other gifts.

This is a part of the meaning of the word ‘bless,’ but it is not the whole. If you look at some of the passages in the earlier books of the Bible where the word occurs, you will see that it is generally used respecting words pronounced by God, rather than actual gifts sent by Him. Thus, in Gen. 1:21, 22, we read, “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.’ ”

You will see the force of this meaning better by remembering the opposite word ‘curse.’ When we speak of a curse, we think more of the actual uttering of the words of the curse, and of the fierce and destroying mind of which they are the utterance, than of any actual evil results produced. We should shun one whom we believed to be under a curse, even though he should be as prosperous as any of his neighbours. Just so it is with a blessing. When we give a friend joy, as we call it, we believe and know that, if he cares for us, our words themselves are a real joy to him; they bring us more closely into each other’s presence, so that we can more entirely rejoice together; and the pith and substance of our friend’s delight consists in this, that something of our warmth and friendliness towards him seems to go out of us to him in the very words. It is the same when God blesses us. We cannot hear Him speaking to us with our outward ears, as we can hear our human friends speaking to us. But yet He does speak to us and give us joy in all the gifts which He sends us. They too, like the words of a friend, seem to come out of Him and to be a part of Him, and to bring us near to the tenderness and love which He feels for us, and which He wishes us to see and rejoice. And thus the heartiest greeting that we can give to a friend is “God bless you!” We do not merely wish that God will shower upon him all good things, though this may be included in the wish; but we pray that God’s own heart may be open to him in love and favour. We bless him ourselves, tell him of our love, but more than this we pray that God will greet him as we are greeting him, nay, a thousand times more; that all that which we now feel for him may be felt for him by God, only with all the infinite strength and depth of God’s nature. We bless him all we can, but we feel that our heart is too feeble for our wishes, and we pray God to make up our shortcomings and bless him as only God can bless. The psalmist has therefore gone a step beyond his first prayer. He prays that God will not only overlook our sinful state but greet us as His friends, and send forth words and acts which may express His welcome and approval.

In the next clause he goes still further. “God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and show us the light of his countenance,” or, as the Bible translation expresses it, “cause his face to shine upon us.” This prayer springs from a strong faith indeed. The psalmist knows most securely what look will be on God’s face when He turns it towards us. He has no fears that God may, like man, be fitful and moody. He knows that it will not be turned in anger, that the tenderness of His love cannot pass away from His face, even when He is punishing sinners with the sharpest judgments. Even in the severest wrath, that face will still fill him with such a joy and gladness as no other vision can. When Adam and Eve had sinned, and then heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, they hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. Not so the psalmist. He seeks the face of the Lord God, although he knew himself to be a sinner, although he had begun by craving mercy as a sinner, whereas Adam and Eve strove only to justify themselves. And this, dear brethren, is, after all, the truest test whether we are in the right way or not. When we have committed sin, our conscience accuses us; we feel and know that we are guilty in God’s sight. The devil tells us to flee away from our offended Lord, to hide ourselves if possible from His dreadful presence. We are only too well disposed to listen to the tempter’s voice. We dread nothing so much as to meet God’s eyes and see His lips opening to speak to us. But if we will listen to His Spirit whispering within our hearts, we shall thrust from us the cruel and deceitful advice. We shall go forward eagerly to meet our God and say, “God be merciful to us, and bless us; and make his face to shine upon us.” There may be stern reproofs in store for us, and sharp stripes after them; but, if we are not wilfully blind, we shall see and know that the light of that countenance is the light of love, and that only that searching, all-conquering light can set us free from the bondage of our sins. That He may deliver us from sin, He will smite us still; but not the less does He greet us and bless us as His own, for He has forgiven us long ago, even before our sins were committed.

But it is not the mere turning of God’s face once towards us that we want. We have need to gaze at it for ever and ever, that we may know it well. And to us, brethren, is it given to gaze upon it as no Jewish psalmist ever could. In the hymn of Simeon which goes in our prayer-book along with this 67th Psalm, uttered by him when he took the infant Jesus in his arms, he blessed God and said, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation” (thy saving health). “He that hath seen me,” said Christ Himself, when He had grown to full manhood, “hath seen the Father.” All the love that He showed to sinful man in taking human flesh and dying on the cross was in very deed the love of the Father. Every time that a chapter of the Gospels is read in church, a vision is set before every Christian man such as prophets desired in vain to see. God grant us strength to pray with willing hearts the prayer of David, “Lord, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us.”

Hort, F. J. A. (1897). Prayer for Mercy and Blessing. In Village Sermons (pp. 16–25). Macmillan and Co., Limited; The Macmillan Company. (Public Domain)