The Blessed God

The Blessed God.  Life is not truly cyclical, as in the philosophy of reincarnation, but we can nevertheless observe loops in life despite its linear trajectory. As physical energy is never lost, but only transferred into another phase, in big and small ways the run of our life’s story proceeds from God and recedes back to God in a grand loop. One of those loops is blessing.

Blessing comes from God; he originates all blessings everywhere because he is, in his very essence, “the Blessed God” (1 Tim. 1:11). He emits blessing just as he shines the light of his love—it is who he is. When his blessing finds us, when we redistribute his blessing to others, when we return blessing back to God in the form of praise, this loop is completed. Everywhere, everything that is God’s and everyone who is God’s finds its, his, or her resting place in God. This is our most blessed God’s blessed loop of blessing. “I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates” (Rev. 22:13-14).

A large cluster of “blessing” verses in the Bible uses two different words, stretching across the Old Testament’s Hebrew and the New Testament’s Greek. Most of the time, “bless” is some form of the verb: eulogizo. This action means to pronounce the good (eu-) word (-logos) upon, over, or toward someone else. Three times this kind of blessing (eulogizo) appears in one verse. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Eph. 1:3).

Yet a few times, the word for “bless” means happy (makarios). It is slightly alarming, but should not be, to read that Christ is “the blessed (makarios) and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords” (1 Tim. 6:15). Quite literally, Christ is the Happy One, and the only Potentate! He is eternally happy who uses his happiness to make the entire creation and all his new creatures, by way of salvation, happy in himself. In our state of alienation from God, we often thought of Christ and the idea of being with him forever as the ultimate killjoy, that the cost of heaven is unhappiness on earth. However, Christ is exactly opposite of our natural suspicions; he is the source and destiny of all happiness. His kingdom, therefore, is constantly misunderstood on earth: “Blessed (makarios: happy) are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3). The kingdom of heaven is so counterintuitively happy that spiritual bankruptcy sort of stands as its prerequisite, much like the imputation of spiritual sight sort of requires the confession of spiritual blindness (John 9:41).

 

Praise God from whom all blessings flow;

Praise him, ye creatures here below.

Praise him above, ye heav’nly hosts.

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost! Amen.