Confess Your Sins! But How?

The Scriptures contain both imperatives, which command the individual to confess sins, and examples, in which people actually do confess their sins. To admit that one has done something wrong — that one has done evil — requires and nurtures humility, honesty, and courage. Only in articulating a realistic view of one’s self are certain levels of spiritual growth possible. Doing so while knowing that an omniscient Deity is listening requires full truthfulness and candor: God cannot be fooled.

(A note on vocabulary: the word ‘confession’ has two different usages. On the one hand, to ‘confess’ is to admit that one has sinned. On the other hand, a ‘confession’ can also be a statement of belief.)

There are at least three settings for confession: an individual can confess sins directly to God in prayer; an individual can confess sins to another Christian; or a group of Christians can confess their sins together to God. This last setting is called ‘corporate confession.’

Because humans are imperfect, our relationship to God is imperfect. That means that each of these settings has its own drawbacks and advantages.

A confession given directly to God by an individual in prayer can foster intimacy with God, but it lacks an element of coaching in discipleship which a fellow Christian can give; it lacks a straightforward sense of accountability; it is easier to omit entirely.

A one-on-one confession to a fellow Christian can be meaningful, but requires an amount of courage, self-knowledge, and self-disclosure which few people have, especially if it is to be done on a regular and thorough basis.

A corporate confession offers encouragement because it is done with, and in the presence of, fellow believers, but it can be misunderstood, and it can become an empty ritual in which words are recited without thought or feeling.

Perhaps some mixture of all three is best.

Corporate confession requires some agreement as to wording: a liturgy. It can be useful and thought-provoking to compare texts. Here are some common examples:

• We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
• Most merciful God, we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean. We have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved You with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We justly deserve Your present and eternal punishment.
• O almighty God, merciful Father, I, a poor miserable sinner, confess to you all my sins and iniquities with which I have ever offended you and justly deserved your punishment now and forever.

There are, of course, many other possible and actual wordings. Each phrasing will have its strengths and weaknesses. Theologians will be able to analyze them ad infinitum and even ad nauseum. Maybe the best practice would be to alternate or vary the wordings from time to time, to retain the congregant’s attention, and to benefit from the peculiar strengths of each wording.

Corporate confession is necessarily general, whereas individual confession allows the person to state specific and concrete sins. In either case, emphasis should be placed both on the “sinful nature” (i.e., original sin) and on sins actively committed (including sins of omission).

Many liturgies include a plea for mercy after the confession. Having admitted that they’ve done something wrong, the people can only beg God for mercy. The word ‘beg’ is central here. One does not say to God, “Because I’ve been good enough to confess my sins, and because I’m sorry for them, please forgive me.” That would amount to a quid pro quo — amount to persuading God to forgive you because of your sincerity and repentance. The true plea for forgiveness is the acknowledgement that people desperately need God’s mercy, but can in no way influence, sway, or talk Him into giving it.

Most historians agree that Martin Luther’s last written words were: “We are all beggars. That’s the truth.” The phrasing points to the absolute powerlessness of the sinner before God. Like a beggar, the only thing people can do is ask.

Whatever form a confession may take, and whichever plea for mercy might follow it, the essential Gospel message is found in the absolution.

The announcement of forgiveness must be clear: the sinner suffering with a terrified conscience must be left with no doubt about God’s forgiveness. To encourage an individual or a group to confess, and then to fail to issue the clearest absolution, is a form of spiritual abuse.

The harm done by not clearly stating forgiveness is so grave that, in a very different setting — in a situation of what is called ‘mind control’ or ‘thought control’ — extracting confessions but withholding absolution is a favored technique by those who would deliberately damage the mental health and thought processes of their victims.

An absolution should identify God as the source of forgiveness, and point specifically to the death and resurrection of Jesus as the transmitter of that forgiveness in the form of atonement — the paying of the price. An absolution can point toward a joyful future in which the forgiven people serve God and delight in His Will.

The proper response to an absolution is a prayer of thanksgiving, or joyful praise music, or both.

Was Luther’s Reformation Successful? What Counts as Success?

Martin Luther presents an interpretative challenge to anyone who studies him. His written output is immense. An edition of his collected writings is thousands of pages of books, short pamphlets, letters, sermons, lectures, and other jottings. Not only is there a mountain of text to analyze, but there is little organization to it, and individual texts are often quite different from one another — even contradictory, as Luther worked his way through developmental stages in his thought.

Beyond that, Luther wrote in different styles. In some passages, he writes with the nuance of a philologist. Sometimes he writes as a caring and kind-hearted pastor. In other passages, he uses the invective and hyperbole of a polemicist. He sometimes writes passionately about his own personal spiritual struggles, and sometimes academically about theology.

Beyond his written output, there are his actions and interactions, his relationships with different thinkers of his era.

To do a close reading of a Luther text can be energizing and fascinating. To attempt to draw large conclusions about his career, to summarize it, to draw a bottom line and boil it down to clearly stated principles, can be frustrating.

Perhaps that is why James Payton wrote a book titled Getting the Reformation Wrong: it is easier to identify erroneous perceptions of Luther than to articulate a correct perception. One can more confidently say what Luther was not, than say what he was.

Some have attempted to see Luther and his Reformation through the lenses of sociology, economics, or political science. While there were ripple effects from Luther’s work in those fields, he was quite clearly not primarily oriented around any of them. Luther was not a political revolutionary, he was not working to restructure society, and he showed little interest in economics. To be sure, there are isolated passages in which he alludes to those disciplines, but always and only in the service of a larger spiritual topic.

Indeed, there are mentions of nearly any conceivable topic in Luther’s writings, which is inevitable, given the sheer volume of his texts. There is an apocryphal story about the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who is supposed to have once pointed to the many volumes of Luther’s works, and said “you can find anything in there!” The story continues by alleging that Barth then threw a rug over the massive bookshelf, and promised to ignore it for an extended period of time. It will be left as an exercise to the reader to see if this story has ever been documented.

James Payton poses the question: What did Luther expect to come of his work? Would Luther have considered his Reformation successful?

This question is posed about Luther’s Reformation, as distinguished from the Anglican Reformation, the Roman Catholic Counter Reformation, or the Radical Reformation of Calvin, Knox, Zwingli, and others. Luther’s Reformation has the distinction of being chronologically the first of these.

Patton’s question might be phrased this way: What was Luther trying to do?

Again, it is easier to state the negative: what Luther was not trying to do. He was not trying to create an established religion, in the sense that it would be an institution promoted and supported by the state. He was not interested in a theocracy. He was not interested in a detailed programmatic morality to be imposed upon society.

Luther was interested in promoting an understanding of God’s grace — God’s propensity to freely give unearned gifts to undeserving people. Human beings are declared righteous — “justified” — not because of their actions, but because of God’s generosity. People respond to God’s grace by placing their faith in Him. Luther’s central goal was to explain this view of God. From it, he believed that many benefits would flow: primarily, the peace which he himself experienced when he first conceptualized this understanding of God.

The biography of Luther reveals that in his early years, he was an anguished and even neurotic young monk, tortured by the knowledge of his imperfection and sinfulness in the face of a righteous and omnipotent God. How could he ever make peace — make amends — with God? The turning point in Luther’s life was when he discovered that he couldn’t. It would be God who made peace. The relationship between God and humans is restored by God’s action, not by a human’s action. Humans then respond to God’s forgiveness with thankfulness and joy. Luther’s demeanor was less anxious and more bold from that point forward.

James Payton writes that even thinkers who were not part of Luther’s Reformation adopted bits of Luther’s theology:

The Wittenberg Reformer wanted to proclaim the doctrine of justification by faith alone which had brought him such comfort after the years spent desperately but fruitlessly searching for peace with God. Luther was unquestionably successful in that endeavor: the whole of his teaching, as we have seen, grew out of and was integrated by his insights on justification sola fide. Moreover, since the other Protestant Reformers joined with him in proclaiming this foundational doctrinal principle, Luther could look with some satisfaction on the success of this teaching.

Even before he famously posted his 95 debate topics in Wittenberg in 1517, Luther had wrestled with, and identified as central, the notion that people cannot reconcile themselves with God. Rather it is God who reaches out to people, who are powerless because they are trapped in their own sinful human nature.

This notion would remain central for Luther for the rest of his life.

Luther was not a programmatic thinker. He did not have a plan or a system which he wanted to institute. Rather, he began by identifying errors or malfunctions in the church as it existed in his time and place, and in people’s perception of God. He wanted to correct those mistakes.

For Luther, then, if someone had asked him if he’d been successful, he might have answered that the extent to which people internalized the concept of being reconciled to God by grace through faith was the extent to which he’d been successful.

In James Payton’s interpretation, Luther was also deeply eschatological. A “reformation” would only happen at the end of time, when all things would be made new. Until that Judgment Day, a true and thorough reformation would not be possible. Rather, Luther thought in practical terms of repairing the church until it was serviceable, fixing it up until it was good enough to get the job done — the job of proclaiming God’s love for people. The ideal church, the product of a true reformation, would not and could not exist in this world, but it would in the next world.

According to Payton, Luther did not see himself as building a new institution — that was never his goal — nor did he flatter himself that his impact would result in the ultimate church, free from every flaw. Luther knew that people and churches will never be perfect in this life, but rather in the next one:

But would he have thought of this large movement he launched, the Protestant Reformation, as a success? It may be startling to many readers to discover that Luther had no intention of starting any “reformation.” It is striking that he never uses the term itself, and he certainly did not think he was involved in any renewal of the church. In his own understanding, Luther was calling it back to its founding truths, but not as a way of “setting things right again”; rather, he believed that he (and others as associates) had been commissioned to prepare the church for the cataclysm of Christ’s impending return. To be sure, Luther was no apocalyptic seer, prognosticating dates for divine interventions to bring history to its end. Even so, he viewed the church and European culture around him as irremediably corrupt, a stench in the divine nostrils that must surely result in the irruption of the end times. A reformation would be a work of the future, to be achieved not through human endeavors but by divine power and intervention at the end of history. In the time that still lay at hand, he believed that he and others should proclaim anew what God had revealed through the apostles and so prepare humankind to meet its Maker. For Luther, if this movement in which he was involved took root, that would not be what he expected.

Luther was often frustrated. Unlike the pre-reformation church, he was not asking people to donate huge sums of money, to make long and arduous pilgrimages, to fast, to self-flagellate, or perform other heroic works. Rather, he was asking people to trust Jesus and to rely on Jesus and to rest in the peace of mind which comes from such faith. But often Luther’s simple message got lost, and people were inclined to return to pre-reformation habits.

It was not merely the habits of the pre-reformation church which led people astray. It was and is human nature itself. Even a person who had not been shaped by the superstitions of the pre-reformation era would be naturally inclined to find something which she or he must “do” in order to merit salvation. The belief that salvation is an unearned gift is a belief which conflicts with human nature’s tendency to believe that it can achieve or earn salvation.

As James Payton explains, Luther was dismayed how the New Testament’s message of “salvation by grace through faith” kept getting lost in old superstitions or in new socio-political concerns:

In the meantime, in the brief span before the cataclysm that would bring history to its culmination, Luther hoped to see the proclamation of justification by faith alone which he and others proclaimed bearing fruit. That fruit would include: many embracing God by faith and, like Luther, finding peace with God; lives transformed by the love received from God, a love freely shown by the recipients to others; and the church edified in and committed to the faith so gloriously reclaimed and proclaimed. However, in the last few years of his life, Luther traveled throughout the regions of Germany into which he could safely venture, conducting church visitations. This experience profoundly dispirited Luther: what he found was so little transformed from what had been common before his labors that he became morose and discouraged. Even the little change he expected to see, a change not leading to a whole-scale reformation of the church, but resulting in small advances in faithfulness before God, he did not readily find. Furthermore, that his own prince and other German rulers used the movement begun under Luther’s efforts to seek their own political ends provoked the Wittenberg Reformer, who viewed this as a perverse misappropriation of his teaching.

So, what would Luther have said, if someone had asked him if his reformation had been a success? Luther probably wouldn’t have understood the question. He didn’t see himself as trying to start or implement a reformation. He saw himself as someone who was trying to proclaim God’s message of salvation, a message which Luther had found in the Scriptures and had experienced in his own life.

The Two Israelite Kingdoms: Is There an Anti-North Bias in the Text?

The reader will be familiar with the civil war which permanently divided the single unified kingdom of Saul, David, and Solomon into two separate kingdoms, one to the North, and one to the South. The civil war and the establishment of the two distinct kingdoms took place somewhere around 922 or 931 B.C.

The Northern Kingdom is often referred to as Israel or Samaria, and the Southern Kingdom as Judah.

A prima facie reading of the texts — the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles — might lead the reader to conceptualize the Northern Kingdom as bad, and the Southern Kingdom as good.

But a closer reading of the texts raises questions: Could it be that the authors of these texts were Southerners? Is there an anti-Northern prejudice in the text?

There is evidence in the text which prevents the reader from embracing a simple polarity in which North is bad and South is good. If the hypothesis of a pro-Southern favoritism on the part of the author is accepted, then it might be that the author recorded the data despite himself.

Consider:

• God sent prophets to both kingdoms, not only to the South. To the North He sent Elijah, Elisha, Hosea, and Amos. Some prophets had messages for both kingdoms. The South therefore cannot claim exclusive reception of the Word of God.
• There was apostasy leading to idolatry in both kingdoms.
• Individuals in both kingdoms committed the atrocity of human sacrifice.
• In both kingdoms, among those who refrained from idolatry, there was a mixture of well-executed and poorly-executed worship of the Lord.
• In both kingdoms, there was a continuous “remnant” of people who were faithful to the Lord.
• Both kingdoms, by the time each of them ended, had become largely displeasing to God.

Does the attribution of some kind of slant or spin to the author or authors of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles constitute an attack on Sacred Scripture?

It is possible to discern different leanings among biblical authors. The New Testament authors of the four Gospels seem each to have had his own target audience, and his own purposes in writing; yet the four Gospels relay the same facts. That the authors had their distinct angles and twists in their telling of the events in no way undermines or rules out the veracity of the text.

If the four New Testament Evangelists each offer their own unique packaging of the same account, then it is clear that the human personality colored, but did not violate, the truth of the message given by God.

To ascribe distinctive personal predispositions to the authors, and to hypothesize that these predispositions are detectable in the final form of the text, is in no way to violate the doctrine and dogma that Scripture is infallible, inspired, and true.

To assert that the four New Testament Gospels reflect the distinctive temperaments of their authors is in no way to doubt the reliability of Scripture: so, in the same way, to say that the author or authors of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles had a pro-Southern partiality is in no way to question the accuracy of those texts.

The pro-Southern interpretation of events might be seen, e.g., in the readiness of the author to condemn as apostasy and idolatry actions in the North which might simply have been less-than-ideal implementations of the worship of the one true God.

Correspondingly, the author seems to be more lenient of similar events in the South, accepting as sincere worship which was perhaps suboptimally performed.

Does this question of historical interpretation point to a deeper spiritual axiom?

Perhaps it is salutary to be reminded that God is always at work in every person’s life — those in the Southern Kingdom as well as those in the Northern Kingdom. God has concern for every human being, and desires that all should be in a healthy relationship with Him. The Northern Kingdom fell into apostasy and idolatry quicker, and perhaps with more gusto, than the Southern Kingdom, but in the end, sin is sin, and all fall short.

The important lesson to be learned from these texts is perhaps not about the moral and spiritual decline of the Northern Kingdom, but rather about the smug self-assuredness of the Southern author: a cautionary tale, warning the reader against a sinful and arrogant version of pride.

Consider the fact that individuals often have a distinct handwriting style. Often the reader can readily recognize the penmanship of a family member or close friend. Different people might write out the same sentence, each with her or his distinctive handwriting; but the differences in longhand do not affect the meaning of the text.

Likewise, the authors whom the Holy Spirit inspired to write Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles may have recorded the narratives in their own peculiar styles — possibly including an anti-Northern bias — without affecting the truth of those accounts.

The authority and integrity of Scripture is in no way questioned or undermined by observing that the process of inspiration used human authors, whose humanity, and whose individual personalities, shaped the formation of texts which nonetheless faithfully transmit divine truths.

Structures in Psalms: God, His Attributes, and His Actions

In Psalm 19 and Psalm 20, passages distinguish themselves as components within their respective larger contexts by a degree of parallelism which exceeds the usual parallelism of Hebrew poetry. In Psalm 19 a series of noun-adjective pairings form a definite subunit with the Psalm:

The law of the Lord is perfect,
converting the soul;
The testimony of the Lord is sure,
making wise the simple;
The statutes of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart;
The commandment of the Lord is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
The fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever;
The judgments of the Lord are true
and righteous altogether.

Each couple begins with a noun (law, testimony, statutes, commandment, fear, judgments). The pattern is formed by two singular nouns followed by a plural noun; the pattern occurs twice. All six times, the noun is modified by “of the Lord” and after the noun phrase, an adjective appears as a predicate for the initial noun (perfect, sure, right, pure, clean) in the first five instances. In the sixth instance, two adjectives appear (true, righteous).

After the first clause of the couplet, a present participle follows in the first five occurrences (converting, making, rejoicing, enlightening, enduring). The final occurrence abandons the participle for a present tense indicative verb.

The sixth couplet, violating the pattern of the first five in order to signify the end of the passage, doubles the number of adjectives in order to compensate for the omitted participle.

The question poses itself: If this is a more-or-less accurate analysis of the English text, is it also true of the underlying Hebrew Vorlage?

The reader will not be burdened with a detailed and nuanced discussion of Hebrew grammar, but will rather be given the conclusion of that discussion: The English translation of these verses is good enough.

Using the usual understanding of Hebraic parallelism, one might tentatively conclude that:

§ In the mind of the Psalmist, “law, testimony, statutes, commandment, fear, judgments” are, if not perfectly synonymous, then at least words with related and overlapping semantic fields.

§ Likewise with “perfect, sure, right, pure, clean, true, righteous.”

§ So then also the following phrases: “converting the soul,” “making wise the simple,” “rejoicing the heart,” “enlightening the eyes,” and “enduring forever.”

It would therefore be possible to take this well-defined structure and salva veritate rearrange its parts, as in the following examples:

The law of the Lord is perfect.
The testimony of the Lord is sure.
The law of the Lord is sure.
The testimony of the Lord is perfect.

Likewise, the second clause of each couplet could be arbitrarily replace and become the second clause of another couplet, to wit:

The testimony of the Lord is sure,
rejoicing the heart;
The statutes of the Lord are right,
making wise the simple.

To be sure, these arbitrary rearrangements will have different nuances than the original text. Yet they will be true. The result is fruitful for meditation and preaching. The Psalmist was doing his best to capture God’s majesty in human words; yet it is known that human words are incapable of doing that fully.

Commenting on Psalm 19, Franz Delitzsch and Carl Friedrich Keil note that the subunit in question sets itself apart from other parts of the Psalm by using “YHWH” instead of “Elohim” to refer to God. They also report that Torah “does not in itself mean the law, but a pointing out, instruction, doctrine or teaching, and more particularly such as is divine, and therefore positive.”

Psalm 20 offers a similar text-within-a-text. A series of optative clauses are presented as parallel:

May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble;
May the name of the God of Jacob defend you;
May He send you help from the sanctuary,
And strengthen you out of Zion;
May He remember all your offerings,
And accept your burnt sacrifice.

Selah

May He grant you according to your heart’s desire,
And fulfill all your purpose.

We will rejoice in your salvation,
And in the name of our God we will set up our banners!

May the Lord fulfill all your petitions.

The pattern here is perhaps more complex than in Psalm 19. The first three clauses are parallel and synonymous: “May the Lord …” and “May the name of the God of Jacob …” and “May He …”

But the fourth iteration omits the subject, allowing the “He” from the previous line to be distributed to the next optative verb “and strengthen you …”

Here the English can be somewhat misleading. In several of these lines, the English clause has two verbs, “may” and “answer,” or “may” and “defend,” or “may” and “send.” In Hebrew, the optative is achieved with a single verb: the English “may” is a modal auxiliary which is replaced in Hebrew with a one-word verb form. The other option for a translator is equally structured: “Let the Lord answer you …” or “Let the name of the God of Jacob defend you.” Again, two English verbs, “let” and one other, replace a Hebrew structure which has only one verb.

Occasionally, English achieves a structure similar to the Hebraic one-word optative, as in the well-known song:

Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year.
And God send you a Happy New Year.

In this song, the phrase “God bless you and send you …” is a true optative, replacing the more cumbersome “Let God bless you and let Him send you …” or “May God Bless you and May He send you …”

In this text from Psalm 20, the first two lines are neatly parallel, and offer an economy of structure. The next six lines, i.e., lines three through eight of the larger subunit, offer a variation of that structure, the first, third, and fifth lines stating the grammatical nominative subject, and the second, fourth, and sixth lines distributing that subject by means of the conjunction “and” over the second clause.

The “Selah” seems oddly placed, intervening within a structure rather than marking a change of structure. It will be left as an exercise for the reader to determine the logic of this placement.

After the eighth line of the passage, i.e., of the larger subunit, the structure is temporarily abandoned altogether. A couplet appears with no optative verb, but rather with indicative verbs. Here, too, the logic of the placement of this couplet demands exploration.

A final single line, not a couplet, returns to not only the structure, but the exact wording, of the first line of the passage, i.e., “May the Lord …” and works in a summative capacity with the phrase “all your petitions.”

Again, the question must be posed, whether this analysis of the English translation applies with equal validity to the Hebrew Urtext. It has already been seen that the Hebrew one-word optative form appears in the more cumbersome English two-word forms, “May He remember …” or “Let Him remember …”

Are there other issues in the translation? Certainly there are, but are they relevant to the present discussion? Probably not.

It could be noted that, e.g., the Messianic over- and undertones are stronger in Hebrew, given that the noun “salvation” is a form of the name “Jesus.”

Generally, the Hebrew text exhibits that marvelous economy of words which Hebrew generally has in contrast to English. Often a single Hebrew word requires two, three, or even four English words to make a reasonable English translation.

Using again the principles of Hebraic poetic parallelism, the reader may deduce synonymies:

To write that God will “answer you in the day of trouble” is to write that He will “defend you.” To write that He will “send you help from the sanctuary” is to write that He will “strengthen you out of Zion,” and so on.

Franz Delitzsch and Carl Friedrich Keil explain that Psalm 20 is “closely attached” to Psalm 19. The subunit within Psalm 20 has “a synonymous parallelism of the members,” and they suggest that the placement of “Selah” within the text might be explained by the Psalm’s ritual use: if it were sung during worship, the “Selah” might indicate a pause for the actual physical placement of the sacrifice.

By extension, if the “Selah” indicates the physical performance of a sacrifice as part of the rhythm of worship, then the seemingly disruptive placement of the couplet that begins with “We will rejoice …” may be perceived as more fitting inasmuch as it functions to begin the conclusion of that particular phase of the worship service. The final optative clause could be seen as the end of that phase.

In sum, the understanding of parallelism and synonymy in these two Psalms has importance both for devotional reading and for theological reading.

What Does It Mean to “Bless” Someone?

The word “bless” is often used, and yet despite this frequent employment — or because of it? — a precise definition is often absent from the minds of those who write or say it. The lack of an exact understanding of this word can lead to misinterpretation and conceptual errors. On a practical level, it can lead to wasted time and energy, or worse, to a disappointment with God.

A close reading of Scripture shows that God blesses humans, humans bless God, and humans bless each other. That is a first clue.

Another clue is that rarely — perhaps even never — is anything besides God or a human blessed. There are misleading phrases, like “blessing a house,” which means that not the physical structure but rather the people who live in the house receive the blessing. The “house” can even refer to the family itself, like the “House of David,” which simply means a dynasty or royal family.

Likewise, one does not properly “bless a meal.” At the Last Supper, Jesus did not bless the bread (cf. Matthew 26:26, Mark 14:22, Luke 24:30). English translations can be deceptive on this point. Jesus took the bread and blessed God. This is more clear in the Greek text of the New Testament, which in turn represents a transcription of the Passover prayer which Jesus uttered in Hebrew or possibly Aramaic. Jesus spoke a common Hebrew mealtime prayer, something like this: “Blessed are You, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who brings forth bread from the field.” From this it is clear that the words, or the people who utter them, are blessing God, not the food.

Likewise, in I Samuel 9:13, the expression “to bless the sacrifice” is an elision. The words spoken at a sacrifice bless God to whom the sacrifice is made, and the person on behalf of whom the sacrifice is made.

So it stands that one does not bless inanimate objects.

As to what exactly a “blessing” is, Semitic philology offers clues. The root word is related to “knee” or the act of “kneeling.” One kneels to show respect and honor to someone. Blessing shows one’s respect or honor for another. This is easily plausible for humans blessing God, and for humans blessing each other. It can be surprising to conceptualize God as “showing respect and honor” to a human being. It seems to be an inversion of hierarchy. Yet it is so. Theologically, it points to God’s grace: the bestowal of unmerited and unearned gifts: certainly, humans do not deserve to be honored or respected by God, yet He does so. Christologically, this connects to the humiliation of Christ: that Jesus consented to be made flesh, to be born as a human being, which was a cataclysmic downgrading of His status, and at the same time an upgrading of what it means to be human.

So God blesses people: He honors and respects them.

This sense of ‘honor’ and ‘respect’ in no way limits God or makes Him subservient to humans. This is a type of honor and respect which a superior can show to his subjects: a generous king.

Instead of identifying “blessing” as showing “honor and respect,” it may be helpful to rephrase it as “unconditional positive regard,” a wording invented and popularized by Stanley Standal and Carl Rogers.

While the word ‘bless’ can be used in conjunction with the giving of a gift, a blessing is not synonymous with a gift beyond that honor, respect, and positive regard. One might say that God has “blessed a person with much money,” which means two things: God has blessed the person, and God has given much money to that person. The money is not the blessing, and the blessing is not the money. God might give because He blesses, or as a sign of His blessing, but the giving is one action, and the blessing is another. The two are distinct.

Blessing should not be confused with the giving of material gifts: “Blessed are the poor.” Jesus is and was blessed, yet suffered. Ordinary people, too, can simultaneously be blessed and suffer. One can be blessed and endure pain, poverty, rejection, loneliness, etc.

God is the source of all blessings. Blessings bestowed by God are primary. When humans bless each other, it is a secondary blessing, a regifting of God’s favor.

Blessings are often accompanied by physical symbolic acts: the laying-on of hands, a sacrifice, etc. Such acts are not blessings, but rather sensory cues to alert people that a blessing is taking place.

After the Incarnation, some formerly symbolic acts became efficacious and powerful: Bread and wine no longer merely symbolize God’s work, but rather become God’s work. The waters of baptism no longer merely symbolize the washing away of guilt, but rather actually wash away guilt.

This one vocabulary word is used often and in a wide variety of contexts. It has a large and elastic semantic field, yet a field with some precise boundaries. ‘Bless’ often overlaps with ‘thank’ (cf. Psalm 103:1-2). It can also overlap with ‘praise.’

When God bestows His blessing, He Himself is at work and is present in a non-trivial way, above and beyond His baseline omnipresence. A blessing is certainly a “giving,” yet a giving not of material benefits.

God is certainly the source and generous Giver of all physical benefits: houses and clothing and food, etc. Yet these gifts are not the primary referent of ‘blessing.’

In blessing, God perhaps gives Himself. In placing His name onto people (Numbers 6:27), He blesses them. When God blesses a person, that person receives gifts, but not material gifts. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is a blessing (Luke 11:13, Hebrews 2:4).

When humans honor and respect each other, and do so out of merely human power, the effect is salutary but limited. When God blesses, He changes the person whom He blesses. To be blessed is to receive more of the Holy Spirit. To be blessed is to be made more like Christ.

Productive Conflict: When God Uses Division to Implement His Plans — Sometimes Disagreement Is Salutary

Jesus clearly directs His people toward unity (cf. John 17), or rather, toward “oneness,” which might have a slightly different connotation than ‘unity.’ In any case, He is not directing people toward uniformity, which is a cheap substitute for unity.

Uniformity is to have an appearance of sameness. This can be achieved voluntarily or by means of manipulation or by that sinister mixture of the two which leaves one wondering. Etymologically, uniformity is to have the same form, like plastic parts stamped out by a machine in a factory.

Unity, by contrast, speaks of purposes and goals which unite people who are detectably different in any number of ways. Those differences can even lead to significant disagreement.

Any group of people who are united — not uniform — will be devoted to their common goals, and that devotion may lead them to conceptualize those purposes in different ways, even mutually exclusive ways, and to conceptualize the best means to those goals in likewise distinct and even conflicting ways. These frictions are not sinful. Rather they can be used by God to move His kingdom forward.

Note Paul’s words in his letter to the Romans:

I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them.

Paul is not instructing the Romans to “watch out for” and “avoid” divisions. Rather, he instructs them to watch out for, and avoid, “those who cause divisions.” It is not the divisions which are the problems, but rather those who foster division.

What’s the difference? What is Paul trying to communicate? What’s he getting at?

Differences can be sincere and honest attempts to seek God’s will, but those who “foster” divisions are doing so, not to serve God, but rather to aggrandize themselves. Paul continues:

People like these are not serving Christ our Lord. They are serving their own desires. By their smooth talk and flattering words they deceive unsuspecting people.

Those who amplify disagreements, or who plant disagreements where none need be, are sowing the seeds of chaos in the church. They do so because they hope for opportunities to elevate, not Jesus, but rather themselves.

Paul asks us, then, to avoid those who cause divisions. Paul simultaneously, however, affirms that there must be divisions among us, and that such divisions can be part of God’s plan to reveal His will.

In his letters to the Corinthians, Paul writes:

There must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized.

God’s method here may be vaguely similar to Hegelian dialectic. Finding textual evidence for or against the plausibility of such a comparison will be left as an exercise for the reader.

One can imagine a group of disciples — this could be a formalized organization like a congregation, or an informal gathering of believers in a home, or a large multinational network of churches — facing a decision. It could be a major interpretation of doctrine, or the setting of a goal for significant use of resources to minister to the larger world outside the church, or an insignificant choice about which color to paint the hallway.

Paul’s point is that there needs to be differing options, and argumentation in support of those various options. In this process, the views which are genuine “may be recognized.” The process of debate can be used by God to reveal His plan.

This is seen already in the book of Proverbs:

Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.

While Paul has stern words about those who “create divisions,” he does not direct similar judgment against those who take sides in those divisions. Unlike the ones who create needless divisions, and amplify divisions more than necessary, those who support one side or another in a division are operating out of a sincere desire to seek God’s will — may in fact be driven by the Holy Spirit to engage in a debate which will ultimately reveal the truth.

Without divisions, there could be no debate, and without debate, some elements of truth would remain undiscovered.

The mere mere presence of divisions does not signify a lack of unity. The military leadership of the UK and the US during WW2 were united in their goal to end National Socialist aggression. But there were certainly lively debates between Bernard Montgomery, Arthur Harris, Louis Mountbatten, and Eisenhower, MacArthur, Omar Bradley, Patton, Nimitz, Mark Clark, Halsey, and others. There were passionate disagreements, which were not always entirely resolved, and moments of chaos. But none of that indicates a lack of unity. In fact, the energy of those conflicts was driven by the strength of their unity.

On the other hand, mere uniformity can often be free of disagreement. But it is also often free of the power to move toward a goal.

Church history is full of disagreements and conflicts. It can look like 2,000 years of chaos. Sometimes, those disagreements were the needless type which Paul condemns. Other times, they were productive and were God’s way of showing the path forward.

Despite the church’s many failings and sins, the result has been 2,000 years of feeding the poor, educating children, rendering medical care, and infusing all of that with the spiritual peace which comes only from Jesus.

The workings of the church can seem messy, inefficient, and at times doomed to failure. Yet God has used precisely these workings to bestow both temporal and eternal blessings upon people.

Inseparable Unions: Semitic Semantics Reveals God’s Grand and Mysterious Ontologies

Starting with the earliest texts in the Hebrew canon, the concept of the “Word,” spreads into the entire Tanakh (Old Testament), into the New Testament, and into Christian life, theology, and spirituality in general. This rich and fertile concept has shaped the experience of faith, and the life of faith, for several thousand years.

The English word — like its parent, the German Wort — has a relatively specific and small semantic field. It refers to linguistic entities, spoken or written. The Greek logos is somewhat more expansive.

The Hebrew dbr, however, has a semantic field larger by orders of magnitude. This semitic root is capable of referring to things which have no linguistic nature at all. It is necessary therefore to work on expanding the concept of “The Word of God” into something much larger than the English “word” can ever completely circumscribe.

The Semitic root dbr can form a variety of verbs and nouns which equate roughly to “events and things” in English. Thus the “Word of God” is also the “Things of God” and the “Events of God.”

There is in such Hebraic thought no sharp distinction between word and object, in contrast to some schools of modern thought, which see such a distinction as foundational to knowledge. The philosopher Quine titled his book Word and Object, but much of modern philosophy would be more aptly characterized as dealing with “Word or Object.”

In Semitic thought and culture, it is not that dbr can mean word or event. It is that dbr means word and event — both equally and simultaneously. When a Hebrew prophet writes of the “Dbr of the Lord,” he writes of the “Word and Action” of the Lord.

The conjunction and refers here to a co-extensiveness. Where God’s Word is, there also is His action and His events. Commutatively, where God’s action and events are, there also is His word. This gives ground for a fresh consideration of those stock phrases which are used in spiritual life.

When Christians speak of a ministry of “Word and Sacrament,” these are not two separate things like “hammer and nail” or “salt and pepper.” Where the written and preached Word truly is, there also will be Sacraments, and vice-versa.

Likewise, the analysis of “Law and Gospel” does not refer to two separate doctrines, but is one doctrine in itself. The “Law” does not have meaning or existence without the “Gospel,” and the reverse is true as well. Both Law and Gospel are present, and inextricably intertwined with each other, in the very foundational text composed of the first eleven chapters of Genesis.

The Incarnation, so central to Christian thought, articulates Jesus as both God and man, being thoroughly God and thoroughly man, so much so that the post-Resurrection and post-Ascension Jesus is understood to still be fully human and fully divine. The and of the Incarnation is not the and of “ketchup and mustard.”

Because leaving one nation-state entails entering another, every immigration is also an emigration, and vice-versa. This example might shed light: the and of “immigration and emigration” is more similar to the and of “Wine and Blood,” as the communicant receives both, and they cannot be sorted out or separated one from another.

So it is that, continuously throughout the Tanakh, the dbr refers to the “Word of the Lord” and the “Events of the Lord” and the “Things of the Lord” simultaneously and co-extensively throughout. It is not a case of “either/or” but a case of “both/and.”

If the dbr of the Lord is God’s Word, and God’s Things, and God’s Events, then where the dbr is, God Himself cannot be far off. So John writes that “the Word was God.” The Incarnation, so simply phrased as “the Word became flesh,” uses an intransitive verb with two nominative subjects: “Word” and “flesh” are coextensive and simultaneous.

So it was that Semitic philology led Martin Luther to find these key insights in Scripture, as author Frank Seilhamer writes:

This concept of “speech” or “Word of God” being God himself, Luther grasped from his study of the Old Testament. Though not a critical scholar in the modern sense Luther was quite cognizant of the root meanings involved in the terms used by the writers of the Scriptures. He was, therefore, quite careful to point out the implication involved in the Hebrew word dabar used by the writer, or writers, of Genesis that referred to God’s activity in “speaking.” He noted in his commentary on this book that dabar had two meanings. Not only does it mean “Word,” but it also means “thing.”

Man being made in God’s image, there is a similar, but much weaker, connection between a man’s being and a man’s words.

If a man’s character and honor — and in some real ontological sense, his being — are inherent in his words, then how much more so is this principle true of God and His Word!

Frank Seilhamer continues:

Luther was cognizant of the fact that the term therefore implies substance and power, as well as message. When a man “speaks,” dibber, he “makes works.” But this means more than that he makes sounds that convey thoughts or ideas. In the Hebrew mind “words” are messengers that carry not only a man’s thoughts, but his honor, his pledge, his essence. In a real sense his “word” conveys his personality; they are an extension of his personality!

The insight that dbr reveals that God’s Word and God’s Actions and God’s Events are inseparable from one another, and intrinsic in one another, hints at why several key Christian doctrines are formulated as pairs: Law and Gospel, Wine and Blood, Jesus is God and Jesus is man, ministry is Word and Sacrament.