The promises that come with obedience and the curses that come with disobedience are clear messages that come to me from the Bible. What I like about them both is that they are clearly stated and not something I have to figure out or read between the lines to understand them.

Here are a few things I picked up today regarding blessings.

“The Lord will bless you with many children, with abundant crops, and with many cattle and sheep.

“The Lord will bless your grain crops and the food you prepare from them.

“The Lord your God will bless your work and fill your barns with grain. He will bless you in the land that he is giving you.

The Lord will give you many children, many cattle, and abundant crops in the land that he promised your ancestors to give you. He will send rain in season from his rich storehouse in the sky and bless all your work, so that you will lend to many nations, but you will not have to borrow from any.

Deuteronomy 28:4-5, 8, 11-12  GNT

I do not think that it is all about being rich or having the good things in life – even though they are promised – I think that this is about me having the opportunity of honouring God. These blessings are about things that are helpful and even a source of encouragement to serve HIm cheerfully and to move forward in my spiritual journey in my obedience to Him. It is my place to see my needs constantly being met as coming from God’s good treasure – even if it means, at times, that I am obligated to Him for them. Why? Because I know without His blessing I will not make it. I know that I depend on God and His blessing – that is why the Lord’s Prayer is taught and I pray for it every day.

The writings in the Psalms expresses this well too. There is a desire to keep the law of God. Yet the confidence in doing so is coupled with prayer asking God not to forsake them.

I will obey your laws;
    never abandon me! – Psalm 119:8  GNT

It is my prayer because I have no other grounds of persuasion that will enable me to keep any of the commandments of God other than the truth and belief of that truth and the hope that comes with that truth – that He will not leave me.

This is the place, in this particular Psalm, where David moves from petition to praise. He sees and is thankful that God empowers him to learn and thereby obey His Word. Here we read of his resolve to do his best. I think it is an exercise of my will, while I am praying, to expect God’s Holy Spirit to enable me to do His will. His presence, His constant presence is needed for I know without Him I can do nothing.

There is a sense of God’s holiness and transcendence in these works that is significantly absent from much modern writing and thinking about God. Of course, such can be misplaced—there are right notions of God’s transcendence and holiness and wrong notions of the same; but I would dare to say that a wrong notion of such is better than no notion at all. We live in a casual age when we stroll flippantly in and out of God’s presence. The mystics did not do so. Indeed, what makes them mystics is their sensitivity to their very smallness and insignificance before the vastness of God who, in himself, is unknowable and who has chosen to reveal himself in the fragile forms of human words and human flesh. If the theology often leaves much to be desired, it would seem that the answer is not to reject the ambition of the mystics but to combine this ambition with appropriate theology. For example, our theology should be shot through with reflection, for example, on the law of God in all of its terrifying demands upon us and on the mysterious—and sometimes disturbing—passages of the Old Testament that underscore that God’s ways are not our ways. The loss of a sense of God’s mysterious and awesome holiness surely lies at the root of much of today’s shambolic theology. Medieval mysticism is a sharp corrective to this, a reminder that when we have dealings with God, we should be aware that we tread on holy ground. – Carl Trueman