Divine Desire
So I will bless You as long as I live; I will lift up my hands in Your name. Psalm 63:4 NASB
Bless You – You probably grew up in the ethos of the omnipotent, immutable God. You know, the God who can do everything and doesn’t really need anything. That is the philosophical epitome of a perfection kind of God; the one who is the Unmoved Mover, the summum bonum of all, the transcendental holy Other in need of nothing.
Just one question from all this: What can it possibly mean to “bless” such a God? I mean, God doesn’t need anything. So how can we “bless” Him? Or even, what difference does it make to Him? I suppose it is nice to pay homage to God by acknowledging that He is, actually, God, but other than bowing to the title, what can it possibly mean to God? He certainly doesn’t need our accolades. His plans are not dependent on our obeisance. In what sense does the Hebrew verb bārak apply?
Christian answers follow this kind of reasoning:
“To bless the Lord is done out of understanding that He alone is genuinely deserving of worship as Creator and Lord. The Lord is glorified when His people bless, praise, and acknowledge Him.”[1]
Of course, Christian apologists tend to throw in a few theological conditions, like: “No man can bless the Lord unless they have been made right with God through Christ alone.” That seems ridiculous. Does this mean that someone who hasn’t acknowledged Yeshua as the Christian Second Person of the Trinity can’t offer praise to God and acknowledge Him? Even the Bible provides examples of pagans (and certainly non-Trinitarians) who bless God but don’t know a thing about Yeshua. Furthermore, in what sense does praise God glorify Him? Does He really need our praise in order to be the Glorified Holy One? I don’t think so.
According to John Piper: “man’s blessing God is an ‘expression of praising thankfulness’ (ein lobendes Danksagen). When the OT speaks of blessing God it does not ‘designate a process that aims at the increase of God’s strength’ (THAT, 1:361). It is an ‘exclamation of gratitude and admiration’ (THAT, 1:357).”[2] Doesn’t that mean that “blessing God” is simply a human response? It doesn’t actually do anything for God.
Once again we are driven back to the Hebrew verb. “In general, the blessing is transmitted from the greater to the lesser,”[3] but this obviously cannot be the case when we bless God. Oswalt’s comments on the verb are important:
Whatever may have been the ancient near eastern conception of the source of blessing, the ot sees God as the only source. As such he controls blessing and cursing (Num 22f.). His presence confers blessing (II Sam 6:11–20), and it is only in his name that others can confer blessing (Deut 10:8, etc.). Indeed, God’s name, the manifestation of his personal, redemptive, covenant-keeping nature, is at the heart of all blessing.
As a result, those who are wrongly related to God can neither bless (Mal 2:2) nor be blessed (Deut 28) and no efficacious word can alter this. Those who are blessed manifest God’s ḥesed and ʾĕmet (Deut 15:14; I Sam 23:21; I Kgs 10:9; etc.). To rely upon the existence of the covenant between oneself and God without manifesting his nature is to bless oneself and to court disaster (Deut 29:18f.).[4]
Blessing is serious business, and if the prophets are correct, it is also an exclusive business. But, again, all of this uses bārak as the transfer from God to men. We want to know how it works in reverse. Theological requirements might make us overlook some critical changes. It’s comfortable to think that blessing God is nothing more than penitent acknowledgement and thanksgiving. The idea that God might actually depend on us is disturbing. It shoots holes in the transcendent God. That’s why the rabbis changed the verse about Abraham negotiating with God over Sodom. The text says that Abraham stood before God, but clearly that isn’t theologically acceptable since God is higher, greater than Abraham. So they changed the verse to read that God stood before Abraham. The other way was just too risky.
Until Heschel.
God in Search of Man wasn’t just insightful. It was radical. The universe is unfinished. Man has a crucial, irreplaceable role to play. God is waiting. God needs Man to complete the project.
Radical! Disturbing! And maybe the real reason why “we bless You” matters.
Topical Index: bless, bārak, Psalm 63:4
[1] https://www.christianity.com/wiki/god/what-does-it-mean-to-bless-god.html
[2] https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-bless-god
[3] Oswalt, J. N. (1999). 285 בָּרַך. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 132). Chicago: Moody Press.
[4] Ibid.
