Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: October 31st

RECIPROCAL BLESSING

I will bless thee . . . and be thou a blessing. - Genesis 12:2

There are two kinds of blessing which answer to one another - God’s blessing of man and man’s blessing of God. The one is communicative, the other receptive and responsive. The one is the great stream which pours itself over the precipice, the other is the basin into which it falls, and the showers of spray which rise from its surface, rainbowed in the sunshine, as the cataract of Divine mercies comes down upon it. God blesses us when He gives. We bless God when we thankfully take, and praise the Giver. God’s blessing, then, must ever come first. We love Him because He first loved us. Ours is but the echo of His; but the acknowledgment of the Divine act, which must precede our recognition of it, as the dawn must come in order that the birds may wake to sing.

Our highest service is to take the gifts of God, and with glad hearts to praise the Giver. Our blessings are but words. God’s blessings are realities. We wish good to one another when we bless each other. But He does good to men when He blesses them. Our wishes may be deep and warm, but, alas! how ineffectual; they flutter round the heads of those whom we would bless, but how seldom do they actually rest upon their brows! But God’s blessings are powers; they never miss their mark. Whom He blesses are blessed indeed. The channel through which God’s blessings come is - "out of Zion." For the Jew, the fulness of the Divine glory dwelt between the Cherubim, and the richest of the Divine blessings were bestowed on the waiting worshipers there. And no doubt it is still true that God dwells in Zion, and blesses men from thence. The correspondence in Christianity to the temple where God dwelt and from which He scattered His blessings is twofold - one proper and original, the other secondary and derived. In the true sense, Jesus Christ is the Temple. In Him God dwelt; in Him man meets God; in Him was the place of Revelation; in Him the place of Sacrifice. "In this place is one greater than the temple"; and the abiding of Jehovah above the mercy-seat was but a material symbol, shadowing and foretelling the true indwelling of all the fulness of the Godhead bodily in that true tabernacle which the Lord hath pitched and not man. So the great Fountain of all possible good and benediction, which was opened for the believing Jew in " Zion," is open for us in Jesus Christ, who stood in the very court of the temple, and called in tones of clear, loud invitation: "If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink." We may each pass through the rent veil into the holiest of all, and there, laying our hand on Jesus, touch God. and opening our empty palm extended to Him, can receive from Him all the blessing that we need. There is another application of the temple symbol in the New Testament - a derivative and secondary one - to the Church, that is, to the aggregate of believers. In that Zion all God’s best blessings are possessed and stored, that the Church may, by faithful service, impart them to the world. Whosoever desires to possess these blessings must enter thither, not by any ceremonial act or outward profession, but by becoming one of those who put their whole heart’s confidence in Jesus Christ. If we are knit to Christ by our faith, we share, in proportion to our faith, in all the wealth of blessing with which God has blessed Him, We possess Christ and in Him all.