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The Lord Bless and Keep You

Tucked away in an otherwise inconspicuous place, in Numbers chapter 6, we find one of the great poems in all the Bible. There God instructs Moses to speak to Aaron (his brother and Israel’s high priest) and his sons, saying, “Thus you shall bless the people of Israel: you shall say to them . . .” (verse 23).

Then follows what we now know as the great “Aaronic blessing,” not only one of Scripture’s best-known verses but also one of its oldest.

Many Christians today are familiar with it from songs and benedictions in corporate worship that echo it still. In fact, some of us are so familiar with the blessing that it’s easy to take its content for granted, and miss what it really means.

What would the ancient Israelites have assumed this “blessing” from God would include? This may be the single most important question we can ask about this poem. How spiritual and eternal and divine were the hopes of the people? How many would be content with merely physical, temporal, material blessings?

Perhaps no place sums up better than Leviticus 26 how multifaceted their Lord’s blessing would have been in their minds. Included would be the earthly and temporal, which God did not begrudge: rains, harvest, and produce (Leviticus 26:3–5), peace in the land and victory in battle (verses 6–8), being fruitful and multiplying through offspring (verse 9), and storehouses of resources (verse 10). However, we should be careful not to sell God’s ancient people short on the fullness of what they longed for in his blessing. The culminating blessing — that which was most important — was God’s own presence, God himself:

I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people. (Leviticus 26:11–12)

So too for us today in the church age. Temporal supplies, earthly peace, and human offspring are not unholy, irrelevant, or insignificant. They can be precious gifts, expressions of God’s fatherly favor.

But they are not the heart of the blessing. In fact, they can be taken away, not as the removal of God’s blessing but even as the very expression of it. The center and apex of God’s blessing, however, is the presence and person of God himself.

- David Mathis

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