Capital Gains

and all these blessings shall come on you and overtake you, if you will listen to the voice of YHWH your God.   Deuteronomy 28:2

Overtake – “God bless you.”  How often have you heard that?  Now, let me ask you, “What does it mean?”  Is it just an expression of wishful thinking?  Is it just a polite greeting?  What if I told you that God has a specific method for blessing your life?  Did you know that He wants you to enjoy these blessings?  Did you know that you are the only one who prevents them from being realized in your life?

Take a look at this verse again.  The Hebrew verb here is nasag.  It means “to reach, to catch up with, to overtake.”  What do you think that implies?  Isn’t it obvious?  God’s blessings are coming at you like a run-away freight train.  They are designed to overtake you as you journey along the way.  You don’t control the speed at which they approach.  All you do is get run over, or, step out of the way.  That’s the problem, isn’t it?  God designed His blessings to catch up to you and overcome you.  He designed them to pour on your life like a fast-moving rainstorm.  He planned them to bowl you over.  He engineered them to knock you down with goodness.  In fact, if you carefully read the section on blessings in this part of Deuteronomy, God says that His children will reap where they did not sow and harvest where they did not plant.  So, who’s responsible for all this overwhelming goodness?  Not you and me, that’s for sure.

Now let me ask you the second question.  What happened?  If this is what God had in mind, why is life so hard?  If God’s blessings are aimed at us like a benevolent, spirit-guided missile, how come we aren’t exploding in joy?  The answer, my friend, is in the conditional clause.  “If you will listen to the voice” is the reason that we don’t get knocked down by goodness.  Of course, you know that the verb for “listen” is shama.  It means both “listen” and “obey.”  You see, God’s guided missiles of goodness take aim at the life of the one who obeys His instructions.  Disobedience is the sure-fire way to sidestep the blessing because disobedience causes you to step away from the center of God’s target.  The Hebrew word for “sin” literally means “to miss the mark,” like an archer who misses the center of the target.  Blessings never miss the mark.  God aims them at the center, pulls back the bow and lets them fly right at the target.  Of course, if you and I aren’t standing in the center of the target when God’s blessing arrives, we won’t experience it, will we?  If we are not following God’s instructions for living, then we will not be in the center of His target when He arranges the divine blessings of universe to overtake us.

Seems pretty simple, doesn’t it?  We follow God’s instructions.  He aims at the center of the target.  We’re standing there when the rain arrives.   We get dumped on.  How cool is that?

So, want a better life?  Then go stand in the bull’s eye.  Become the target of God’s aim.  (Oh, by the way, being God’s target also means that the world will do all it can to get you off-center, but that’s the other side of the story.)  Of course, that raises a very important question.  Are you really following God’s instructions?   I guess the best way to answer that is this:  have you been rained on by God recently?

Topical Index:  Blessings