“Songs for the Road #15: Blessing”
Psalm 134
This is our last song for the road—we’ve reached the end of the journey. What does the end look like? The end looks like Psalm 134. And this Psalm really sums up what the Christian is all about in some ways. It summarizes God’s grace and our response.
Kneeling in church—have you ever done it? Have you ever knelt while praying or worshipping? How does it make you feel? Is it hard to do?
In Psalm 134 the word “bless” appears three times. It might be translated “praise” in your Bible. When we are told to “bless the Lord” here we are being told to give reverence to God. It implies a continual and conscious giving first place to God. It is telling us to be attuned to His presence. It is an act of praise and worship. It is what we do when we think about how the God we worship is the maker of heaven and earth and has blessed us.
In the Hebrew “to bless” also means “to kneel.” Kneeling was significant in Hebrew worship. The knees were regarded as a symbol of strength—“to bend the knee is, therefore, to bend our strength before the living God.” We acknowledge all that we have comes from Him. It means, literally, bringing a gift on bended knee. In this case, we bring our gift of worship.
This is similar to when a man proposes marriage to a woman. Looking up this tradition online, this is what I found: “The man is offering himself wholeheartedly to the woman, without reservations, elevating her to an exalted position in their relationship, and offering her the choice to determine the course of their relationship.”
Now many husbands here knelt when you proposed and did you know that it meant this? Have you elevated your wife to an exalted position and given her the choice to determine the course of your relationship?
There’s another good description of this tradition that goes like this: “The idea of asking for a loved one’s hand in marriage while partially kneeling is a highly symbolic gesture embodying the very essence of committing one’s life to another.”
There are some important words here: wholeheartedly, offering, without reservations, exalted, commitment. Even if we haven’t done this without our spouses, should we not do this with God?
This isn’t easy to do. I guarantee that if I asked everyone here to kneel right now that you’d be very uncomfortable doing so.
Have you ever been in a conversation with someone, or been very involved in doing something, and had someone approach you and say, “Ahem!”? What is that like? Do you feel interrupted?
You see, God knows that blessing Him and kneeling before Him with our gifts of worship and praise isn’t natural to us. He knows we need reminding. That’s why Psalm 134 begins as it does. It says, “Come,” or “Behold.”
One OT scholar says that this is the equivalent of God saying, “Ahem!” or “Attention, please!” God is asking us to stop what we’re doing, to interrupt our thoughts, and to pay attention to Him.
This Psalm was likely written for the Levitical priests who would lead worship in the Temple. One person has said, “If the priests working in the Temple needed reminding to praise the Lord, how much more do we?”
Most of us begin the day with a million thoughts on our minds. Or if not, it doesn’t take long before our minds fill up with everything we need to do and worry about.
“Since you can only think one thought at a time, the time you spend praising the Lord is time you won’t be able to spend feeling bad about your situation.” In other words, why not focus on the Lord in praise and blessing and worship and prayer rather than focus on all those things that make life hard and difficult?
Friday night at youth group we read the story of David and Goliath and talked about “giants” that we all face. Max Lucado has a book called Facing Your Giants. The lesson he draw for us is this: focus on giants—you stumble. Focus on God—giants tumble.
We are called here to bless the Lord—and reminded that it doesn’t matter whether we feel like it or not. God wants us to shift our attention to Him. And like I said, this isn’t easy. It takes a lifetime of practice.
Now the really strange thing about this Psalm is that it not only says that we are to bless God, but that God blesses us. Why is this strange, you ask? Because the same word is used, the one that also means “to kneel.”
So is the Psalm saying that God kneels? In some ways, this is exactly what it is saying. Not that God worships and praises us, but that He does good things to us and among us: He blesses us.
Eugene Peterson, in his book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, says this: “God gets down on his knees among us; gets on our level and shares himself with us. He does not reside afar off and send us diplomatic messages, he kneels among us. That posture is characteristic of God. The discovery and realization of this is what defines what we know of God as good news—God shares himself generously and graciously.”
As soon as God reveals Himself—as soon as He chooses to enter into a covenant relationship with us—He kneels. That God is so willing to bless us and so willing to reveal Himself to us and so willing to enter a relationship with us means that this is a God whose main character feature is a forgiving and steadfast love.
Only this kind of love can explain how God’s people can hope that the Lord will bless them from Zion. God’s love was their only hope. God’s love is our only hope; and it is this love, this God, who was made flesh and blood in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the ultimate example of God’s kneeling. He kneels to our level and meets us where we are. This is what the good news is all about. It is about a God who sticks with us through hard times and good times, through laughter and tears.
And ultimately this is why we bless God. His blessing comes first, we must always remember that. When we bless, we are responding. When we kneel, we must remember that God has knelt first. He knelt to give us the gift of Himself, the gift of salvation, the gift of life, of peace, of love, of eternal blessedness in His presence.
So this Psalm is an invitation to worship—an invitation to bless God. No matter what brings you to Jerusalem, to the house of worship, to church today, bless God! It doesn’t matter what happened just before you arrived here, bless God. This reminds us that no matter how difficult the journey may be and no matter how arduous the road is we are still invited to bless God and that we are called to do so not only when the circumstances are ideal but always. The Psalm is also a command to bless God. It is a command to lay aside our tendency toward self-preoccupation and to direct our attention toward the God who has blessed us. Why are you here? You are here because, whatever your story is, the Lord has blessed you.
No matter how you feel, most of us are still capable of lifting our hands in the air. “Go through the motions of blessing God and your spirit will pick up the cue and follow along.” Calvin says, “For why do men lift their hands when they pray? Is it not that their hearts may be raised at the same time to God?”
The first people addressed by this command to lift holy hands in worship were probably the professional leaders of worship in the Temple, the Levites. During festival time they worked in shifts around the clock. Through the night there was always someone on duty. The danger here is that worship would become listless and slothful. What else would you expect at three in the morning? But the Psalm still says, “Lift up your hands.” You can still control your arms. To bless also means, ‘to speak well of,’ and “the Lord has spoken well of you; now you speak well of him.”
Such a Psalm is ideal for the end of a journey—it expresses what is truly meant to be our ‘end.’ Someone once said, “A joyful end requires a joyful means. Bless the Lord.” Worshipping now is our practice for heaven. This is what it says in the Westminster Shorter Catechism. This is the chief end of man: to glorify God and enjoy him forever. In other words, “Come, bless the Lord, all you servants of the Lord, who stand by night in the house of the Lord! Lift up your hands to the holy place, and bless the Lord. May the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion.”
