Dennis Tuuri

# Reformation Covenant Church Sermon Transcript

The Reformation Covenant Church. If you’re visiting with us this day, you’ll need an order of service or an order of worship to be found out here on the table. The songs will not be announced as we play through them, but rather you’ll have to just know where we’re at as we go through what is rather a formal worship service. Additionally, I would point out that we are singing a couple of psalms today from the Genevan Psalter.

The responsive reading of the psalms will be from that psalter. We’ve sung that one before. However, the last song we’ll be singing today—some of us who learned many of the jigs as they’re called a couple of years ago know that song. Some of you don’t. So I’d like J to play through that once as we get to the last song before we start singing. After she plays through it once, you who are here and have learned those Genevan jigs and know Psalm One according to the Genevan Psalter’s rendering of it, please sing out loudly and carry the rest of the congregation.

Let’s stand as we come before our Creator now and our Redeemer and Sovereign in formal worship. Please stand.

“If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord honorable, and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words, then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord. And I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father. For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

As we come before our totally righteous and holy God, we recognize that we are not. Let us therefore confess our sins before Almighty God with the prayer of confession provided in your order of worship.

“And I, poor sinner, confess before God the Almighty that I have sinned grievously through the transgression of his law, that I have done much that I should not have done, and have left undone much that I should have done through unbelief deceived and distrust towards God, and that I am lacking in love toward my fellow ministers and towards my neighbors. God knoweth how great is my guilt and I repent, oh God. Be gracious unto me, a poor sinner, and be merciful, for my sins are many. Amen.”

We read in 1 Timothy 1:15: “This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.” Of whom I am chief. Again in John 3:36: “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.”

Now, as many as there be of you who despair of yourselves and your sins, and trust that your debts are completely forgiven to you through the merit of Christ alone, who resolve more and more to desist from sins and to serve the Lord in true holiness and righteousness—to those as they believe in the Son of the living God, I proclaim at God’s command that they are released in heaven from all their sins as he doth promise in his holy gospel through the perfect satisfaction of the most holy passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

But as many as there be among you who shall take pleasure in their sins and shame, or persist in sins against their conscience—to such I shall declare by the command of God that his wrath and judgment abideth upon them, all the sins being retained in heaven, and they can never be delivered from eternal damnation except they repent.

Those of us who have been brought to recreation of the Savior have been given breath that we might sing praises to him. Let us do that now.

“Give ear to my words. Hearken the voice of my cry, my King and my God. What about and voice shalt thou hear in the morning, oh Lord. For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness. The foolish shall not stand in thy sight. Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing. Lead me, oh Lord, in thy righteousness because of mine enemies. For there is no faithfulness in their mouth. Their mouth is an open sepulcher.

Destroy thou them, oh God. Cast them out in the multitude of their transgressions. But all those that put their trust in thee rejoice because thou defendest them, for thou Lord will bless the righteous.”

The sermon in scripture is found in Numbers, the 6th chapter, verses 22–27. A passage you should be very familiar with: Numbers 6:22–27.

“And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons, saying, On this wise shall you bless the children of Israel, saying unto them, The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. And they shall put my name upon the children of Israel, and I will bless them.”

Dive right into this. We have been speaking of course about the regulation of worship by God’s holy word, and we move today into our next to last part dealing with the first half of our corporate worship. Next week we’ll talk about the doxology. Following week, Richard Meyer will be doing a sermon on wisdom from above. Then following that, we’ll start into the love feast downstairs and the communion service, and a series of talks going through that.

Eventually we’ll be dealing with some auxiliary sorts of things that came up during the context of this study. One being the raising of hands in worship. Another one being the ascent of the church into heaven during worship as described in the book of Hebrews. And another one being the gift of alms and the whole idea of offerings. I want to deal with that completely separately from tithes at some point in time because we never really touched on that before. It was an important part of the Reformed service of worship that they saw regulated by the scriptures. So we’ll deal with that at some later date in the series as well.

This morning we have really far too much to deal with. What we’ve just read from God’s holy word is an incredible portion of scripture that should weekly give you great comfort and solace and encouragement and exhortation as well. We’ll get into all that, but it’s really such a distillation of so much of what the scriptures have to teach that we can’t deal with it in any kind of depth this morning. I’m sure I could spend literally a whole year on this particular portion of scripture. That would be very profitable for us, but we can’t do that.

We just sang in Psalm 3—I think just the last few verses there: “the Lord, thou Lord, will freely pour a blessing from thy store upon us. Hallelujah.” And that really is sort of what we’re talking about this morning—that God brings down a torrent of blessing from himself to us in the benediction at the conclusion of our formal worship service together. As an indication of how exhaustive a treatment of this passage could be, I was reading this week in the Journal of Biblical Literature an article from March 1955 that talked about the so-called Psalms of Ascent. Those psalms being Psalms 120 through 134—15 of them. And the article in the JBL, or Journal of Biblical Literature, talked about those Psalms of Ascent as being a commentary or an exposition of the 15 words that are contained in the blessing that we’ve just read from Numbers 6.

The quintessential Aaronic or priestly blessing upon the people—of course, God’s blessing upon the people is being talked about there. And he talked about how those Psalms of Ascent very much exposit different elements of that particular benediction. This shouldn’t strike us as too unusual because remember that this benediction was used in formal worship and temple worship in the old covenant, and also the psalms were sung. The Psalms of Ascent particularly were psalms that, some have said, as the people would walk up the stairway to a particular portion of temple service, they would meditate upon these Psalms of Ascent going up these stairs. And the writer also suggests it was made 15 Psalms of Ascent to correlate with the 15 words of this Aaronic blessing.

We can’t get into that in any kind of detail, but it is a fascinating subject to look at this benediction exposited in those 15 psalms.

I might also mention that we’re dealing here with a particular portion of case law. I just gave you an example of Old Testament—the other side of the Old Testament writings apart from the case law are the prophets and the psalms expositing that particular portion that you can turn to. Then we’ll be looking later on at Jesus’s blessing of the people in the book of Luke, and then the indication of blessing also from the book of Acts and other epistles. And so you have that fourfold structure of exposition of the word of God: case law, balance of the Old Testament, gospels, and epistles, that we can go through.

But I’ve chosen this morning to use the basic formula that is laid out on your outline, which is a single sentence summing up what hopefully we’ll be able to get through most of this morning. That sentence is: “The benediction is a torrent of blessing from the triune God through his appointed representative linking his people from worship to life and preparing them for battle and for victory.”

Seven points. I deliberately made it seven points this morning because I want us to pay attention as we start here a little bit to the structure of the words used here. Now, you can get off into some pretty strange things looking at biblical numerology that we don’t necessarily endorse, but suffice it to say that the word of God is of course inspired every bit from God’s hand, and every jot and tittle, as it were, is important.

And it is worthwhile commenting here on the particular structure of these verses in the Aaronic blessing. The blessing itself consists of three lines: “The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. And the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace.” That’s the blessing. And that particular portion consists of three lines. Of course, there are three words in the first line, there are five words in the second line, and there are seven words in the third line. So you have this building from 3 to 5 to 7.

Additionally, each of these lines has two parts to it. In other words, “The Lord bless thee, keep thee”—and that consists of a two words plus one word. Three plus two, four plus three, and so on. Each side actually of the three verses here build up as we get to the end of the section. The number of syllables goes from 12 syllables to 14 to 16 in this cascading down effect as well. It’s building up as it were.

The number of consonants—which are of course the only thing in the Hebrew text here—the consonants themselves go from 15 consonants in the first line to 20 to 25. And so you have this progression of blessing. Commentators have commented on the fact that you have 15 words here. You have three of those words specifically being Yahweh, or the covenant name of God. If you take out those references to Yahweh, you’re left with 12 words—one for each of the 12 tribes that are blessed by this blessing. There is beauty in the symmetry of this passage and the cascading, or the torrential effect, of the blessing that’s poured down from God’s stores.

Gordon Wenham, in dealing in his commentary on this passage of scripture, said that as the lines of the blessings lengthen—first, second, and third lines—they lengthen. Their content becomes richer as well, producing a crescendo that culminates in the word “peace,” which is the final word of the blessing—shalom, God’s order. And so there is this cascading effect, and it is worthwhile pointing that out.

Nor in his commentary on this [indicates that] it is therefore a steadily increasing flow of blessing that is poured over the people. And so we’ve talked about the first part of our outline: that the benediction is a torrent, it is a downpouring, it is a pouring out from God. But more than that, it’s like a waterfall—it’s a torrential pouring out from God, a blessing upon his people. You see that in the very structure, the very words and consonants.

You also see that in the development of God keeping his people, God being gracious to his people, and finally granting peace—the ultimate culmination of covenant blessing. And so there’s a tremendous implication here of God’s pouring his blessings out upon us.

We read in other portions of scripture that our blessings will overtake us, as the reaper overtakes the plowman—one of the references in the minor prophets. So your blessings overtake you. The enemies rather of us when we do wrong overtake us, and God’s curse overtakes us. And on the other side of that, when we’re acting in obedience, when we know God is our sovereign Lord who has commanded us to obey him, and the power of the Holy Spirit recognizes we have a mediator when we fall short of his righteous requirements. When we act in consort with him and with his covenant word, then this torrent of blessings overtakes us as a great flood comes down into a dry riverbank and overtakes people in it.

And so God’s torrent of blessing overtakes us as well. And so one of the first things you want to note about this benediction is that it is a torrential outpouring of God’s blessing upon you, upon God’s people. And there’s great assurance and comfort in all that.

Now it is a torrent of blessing. We’ve talked about this crescendo effect, and we’ll go through now the various aspects of the blessing itself. I’ve labeled the first line: God’s presence. “The Lord bless thee and keep thee”—so the Lord is there actively with us, blessing us and keeping us.

Now it’s worthwhile here, before we get into more of a discussion of the blessings of God, to think a little bit about that idea of blessing. The word there is baraka, and a comment by Wenham in his commentary is quite good here. He says that this word “bless” contains the idea that by means of a formal series of words something is actually introduced into a person’s life center, which can either hinder or promote the unfolding of life. Baraka—bless—is thus the act, rather, of imparting the baraka, the life force, in which the fullness of life springs, and which enables one to perform a wide variety of tasks.

So it’s not just words of exhortation or encouragement to you. There is with this blessing God’s assurance that he does indeed make his presence known among his people and his name is put upon them. He blesses them. He’s the source of life. Jesus said, “I came that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” And so he means to pour out life upon us. And this blessing is an indication of the point of the service at the end of our formal worship service: the first part of this blessing is poured out. God’s the source of life, and what he pours out to us in essence is this life that he is the source of, and which gives us life as we walk into the rest of the week. He is the living one who pours out the blessing of life upon us.

Calvin said that the blessing of God is the goodness of God in action, by which a supply of all good pours down to us from his favor as from its only fountain. And we would say that not just as from its only fountain—it is the only fountain of life, the throne of God. And that fountain comes down to us and cascades in a torrential series of blessings upon us with the benediction.

Again, the idea of source is very important here. The person that pronounces the blessing has no ability to impute it, because the source is God. And so God is the source of all life, and he gives that life and blessing to his people.

Lang in his commentary says that another way to paraphrase this is that God would direct upon thee all prosperity in immeasurable progression. Again, this idea of the cascading effect—God pouring the blessing of life upon us.

Now, at some point under God’s presence, I put nourishing and guarding. Now, it’s interesting if you look at the concept of blessing in the scriptures and see how it’s developed from the book of Genesis on. You find Adam being blessed by God. You find the creation before Adam being blessed—the birds and the whales and stuff that God makes. You find Adam being blessed. You find Abraham being blessed. You find Isaac being blessed. You find Jacob being blessed. And there are some similarities to all these blessings that help us to understand when we get here to the book of Numbers what this blessing means. You see, in the context of the rest of the scriptures that have gone before, and so the other portions of God’s blessing helps us to understand what the concept of blessing entails.

And under nourishing, I thought the first thing it entails is production, productivity. Now, specifically, that’s stated in terms of reproducing yourselves. And so God blesses the creation, tells the created order, tells the animals that he makes to team, to fill the world, to multiply, okay? And so this idea of multiplication or production is part of God’s blessing upon us. And then when God blesses Adam and Eve, he tells them he adds a couple of things to their particular blessing.

He adds to them the concept of subduing the earth and of exercising dominion under God over the earth. Those are added to the other forms of blessing that was given to the rest of the animals. Adam has these other two added to it, not differentiated. So he also has the blessing of being called to be productive for God.

You’ll see this whole thing we just talked about: God’s the source of life. He creates us. He gives us a power, as it were, to create life, as it were—not create it, but to recreate it after his image, to have offspring, to multiply. And that’s part of God’s blessing. This flow of life into the created order.

Again, Abraham’s blessing—the idea of productivity is there. He’s going to become a great nation. He’s going to have seed. That was a big part of his blessing. Isaac in Genesis 26 is also given the same essential blessing. God promises Isaac that he will multiply him as the stars of the heavens. The same thing he had said to Abraham. Jacob in the third blessing given to him in Genesis 35:9–12 gets the commandment again: to be fruitful, to multiply, to produce. “A nation shall come out of you,” God says. So part of God’s nourishing his people and his blessing upon his people is the idea of productivity.

Certainly in the sense of productivity in all that we do, but particularly in the sense of offspring as well. And it’s important to notice that as we pass through here and to recognize the great blessing that is sometimes—you know, I look at my children. I’m sure you’ve had this thought. I said this before. I said when we first had Lana—some of you have heard me say this—when Lana was first born, one of the first thoughts I had, I’m sure, as a twentieth century man in America, one of the first thoughts I had when Lana was born is: you can’t get this at Fred Meyer. You know, you cannot get this at a department store. This is something special that God has created here.

Well, if you look at children and our offspring, it is an incredible thing that God gives us the ability to produce children—children for him. And that’s a great blessing. And it’s a blessing that we shouldn’t overlook as we go through this.

Secondly, there’s the idea of identity. It’s interesting as you follow these blessings out again that people are given names. And so the naming of Adam, for instance, is connected in the text in the book of Genesis to Adam’s creation, but also to the blessing. God says he created Adam, he blessed him, and in that day he named him Adam. Abraham and Sarah—of course, Abram and Sarai—become Abraham and Sarah, given new names in the covenant, in context of covenant blessing. Naming has to do with our identity under God. And that naming is important in blessing.

Jacob was renamed, wasn’t he? He became Israel after wrestling with God. He asked for a blessing. He got the blessing, and his name was changed. Again, in Genesis 35:9–12, that third blessing of Jacob that we’ve talked about, God again stresses the new name of Israel given to Jacob. He’s a new person, new identity in God.

Blessing involves a sense of identity and well-being and what God has created us in the context of all that summed up together in a name that we have. We are somebody, as Jesse Jackson wants to say, but we’re somebody in the new creation and important to God.

Additionally, the idea of calling in all this is quite important. We have a calling to exercise dominion, and I’ve touched on that briefly—that those were added to Adam’s blessing. But again, the blessings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the patriarchs in various forms, the call to exercise dominion is also stressed, and that has to do with the productivity, the nourishing that God gives us, to build us up to exercise dominion under Jesus Christ. Now it’s in the covenant and in creation that these blessings come forward. And of course, the covenant gives us recreation in Jesus Christ.

And so it’s covenantal blessings we’re talking about here. As I said, the constant name of God is Yahweh, his special covenant name given to his people. And so we have covenant blessings that has the idea of God nourishing us for his throne room. That’s the blessing the priest put upon the people with uplifted hands. It’s life from God, and it’s life that leads to productivity, identity, calling, exercising dominion, and being fruitful and multiplying on the face of the earth, and extending God’s life force, as it were, into all the created order in obedience to him.

Now the second aspect of that: it says “The Lord bless thee and keep thee.” And you’re certainly in this congregation familiar with that idea of guarding and nourishing. And here we have nourishing and then guarding, and God has said to guard that productivity that he gives us and the blessing that he gives us. And so we are dependent upon him to keep us nourished and to keep us guarded as well in our productivity.

Luther commenting on the first blessing, he says that it is a blessing to bodily life and good. He says that the blessing desired for the people is: “That God would give them prosperity and every good and also guard them and preserve them.” George Bush—not the president but the commentator—in his 1858 commentary on the book of Numbers said that the leading impact of blessing when spoken of the Lord is: “Abundant increase and multiplication of good things, both temporal and spiritual.”

“The Lord bless thee and keep thee” therefore is equivalent to: “The Lord bestow upon thee plentifully the favors of his providence and his grace and kindly guard and preserve thee in the happy enjoyment of them.”

So this idea of guarding the blessings that he has given to us in productivity. And note here that this blessing is not some sort of spiritual, otherworldly blessing. It is spiritual, of course, but it’s not unrelated to this life. The blessings throughout the Old Testament—we don’t have time to look them up now—but those blessings have to do with children, prosperity, families, your productivity in the field, your house, the increase of your nation, etc. Very, very concrete blessings that God pours out upon his people. Of course, leading to the ultimate blessing of life in Jesus Christ forever and ever.

Good health is an aspect of that blessing. So the blessings of God that are poured out in this blessing upon his people are very concrete and not so vague ideas of blessing that we might have, but concrete blessings in terms of this guarding aspect of the guarding of these things that God pours out on us.

Psalm 121—I mentioned these Psalms of Ascent. Psalm 121, the second psalm of ascent, is a commentary simply on God’s protection, God’s guarding of his congregation. Verses 7 and 8, for instance, saying: “The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil. He shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth and even forevermore.”

Man, it would be a good thing to meditate upon Psalm 121 on a regular basis in terms of your responsibilities to guard your wife and your children. Look at how God describes his guarding potentialities and realities in Psalm 121, and be encouraged to model your guarding aspects over your particular callings and your wife and your family in line with that guarding.

So God’s presence is with us in production and in nourishing plenty, as it were. God also is guarding and keeping us safe in him.

The second line says: “The Lord make his face shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee.” The Lord make his face shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. Now God’s face here—there is this cascading effect of God’s presence as well. The Lord’s going to bless us and keep us. Now the Lord’s going to make his face shine upon us. Face to face contact, as it were, basically prohibited in the old covenant, but now we do see his face in the new covenant. And so it’s a great blessing of God’s presence drawing near to his people.

Jesus drew near to his people. And God’s face indicates—as sunlight shining upon the created order brings forth great light and blessing—so the sunlight of God’s face, as it were, the shining of his face upon us, brings forth great blessing and life to us as well.

And I’ve listed some verses there that indicate that. For instance, in Psalm 44:3, it says: “They got not the land by their own possession, by their own sword, neither did their own arm save them. But thy right hand, thine arm, and the light of thy countenance”—the sunshine effect of God’s countenance, as it were—”because thou hast a favor unto them.”

Again, in Psalm 80, thrice repeated there—verses 3, verse 7, and verse 19—we have the thrice-repeated phrase: “Turn us again, oh God, cause thy face to shine, and you shall be saved.” The implication: God’s face shining on us is what saves us.

Again in Psalm 67:1: “God be merciful unto us and bless us and cause his face to shine upon us.” See, his face shines upon us, and as a result there is great blessing.

Now, it’s interesting—if you’ve noticed those verses I’ve just read and these verses that repeat throughout the Old Testament of God’s face shining upon us—there is in each of those verses the idea of grace, isn’t there? It’s not that we did this stuff. God’s right hand, the light of his countenance, gave this to us. “Turn us, oh God, in your grace”—in other words, “Have your face shine upon us and be gracious unto us.” You see, it’s all indicating the content of this blessing, which links the shining of God’s face upon his people in life and causing life to grow in us and his favor, indicated by him looking at us. It links all that to God’s grace, God’s pardon.

Again, Bush in his commentary on this said: “The Lord blessed me with the sensible effects of his favor and visit thy soul with an influence like that of the sun upon the face of nature, cheering and enlivening it.”

And you know, here in terms of our discipline of our children—you know, if you turn your face away from your child, that can be a crushing thing to them. That’s what God does to us when we are disobedient. Though his face looking toward us and shining—yeah, that’s an indication of his blessing toward us. And that blessing is based upon his graciousness to us in Jesus Christ.

The blessing heads deeper than here. We may have a great deal of material blessing and productivity and production and it may be kept well, as it were, but without the grace of God all that turns into nothing. We may have big houses, big barns—need to build bigger barns—but without the grace of God it is a hollow and shallow blessing to us. On the other hand, with the grace of God, a crumb is enough to feed us. A crumb becomes a cake when God’s gracious activity in Jesus Christ is made the center of our lives. We understand that all that he gives us is enough to provide us with life and with understanding the grace he’s given to us in Christ.

A simple lean-to becomes a mansion when you understand God’s grace to us in providing shelter in any way or form, and God’s grace to us in providing food as well. What I’m saying is that grace is necessary to add to the first part of the blessing to understand that God’s presence is with us and his great blessing is upon us.

Now we’ve sinned. We’ve sinned. We know it if we’re honest with ourselves. We get up in the morning. We can think about the day before. We can think of probably ways that we’ve sinned, ways that other people have sinned against us. I talked to my daughter this week that, uh, I think it was Luther who said one of the great testings of our understanding of justification by faith is on our deathbed. Because when you’re about ready to die, you can see all your sins coming back to you, and the devil is shouting at you: “You’re a sinner. You’re going straight to hell. There’s no God who’s going to save you. All the blood can’t cover that mess.”

But no, God says here that he is gracious to us. And we need to hear that every week in the proclamation of the gospel: that though we be sinners, God’s grace and the light of his countenance comes to us and enlivens us and shines upon us. We need to have that assurance of the reality of God’s grace and not simply the reality of God’s productivity in terms of our physical surroundings.

And then third, the third line of this blessing, this torrent of blessings, is the blessing of God’s peace. Verse 26: “The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace.” Now we have God looking at us, his face shining upon us. But now he lifts up his countenance upon us. To lift up the face is to regard somebody with more favor than simply looking or gazing at them. It is to smile, as it were, upon them.

You know, you’ve heard about how people smile—their whole face lights up. Well, this blessing says that God is going to smile upon us and give us peace. Peace. Peace, as we mentioned before in the church here, is not simply the sensation of absence of hostilities. That is a modern humanistic peace. Peace is God’s order. It is the totality of God’s blessing of life and having a life well-ordered under God. That is the peace—the covenant peace has been affected for us by Jesus Christ and which is worked out then as his blessing is pronounced upon his people at the end of holy worship.

Peace is the sum total of all God’s good gifts to his people.

Now, it’s interesting here if you look at these last two—we had God’s grace in the second line of the blessing, God’s peace in the third line. And I was always struck by reading Paul’s epistles, Romans 1:7 and 1 Corinthians 1:3, just two small examples. One of the first things I noticed after I became a Christian is the way that Paul wrote, and he had this phrase: “Grace to you and peace.”

“Grace and peace from God the Father and Lord Jesus Christ.” And I started using that as a way to sign off the letters that I wrote: “grace and peace” in my name, because I thought that was a good thing. And I never really realized until this last year that grace and peace—what Paul is doing here is he’s citing the two essential elements of the second half of this triune blessing of Numbers 6. You see, now that Jesus Christ has come, the fullness of God’s grace and covenant peace is affected to us.

And so Paul, when he writes letters to people, he says: “To you who are beloved of God, called to be saints, grace to you and peace from God our Father and Lord Jesus Christ.” May he add all these blessings to us. And so we have that the last two portions of the threefold blessing from God. So we have this torrent of blessings of God’s provision, vision, God’s plenty, God’s presence, God’s pardoning grace, and God’s peace upon his people.

And then the third element of the outline I’ve got there is that all these blessings come from the triune God. “He shall put my name upon the children of Israel, and I will bless them.”

Now, it’s interesting here. I said that there were three occurrences of the term Yahweh, the covenant name of God here. And it is an interesting fact that in the ancient Hebrew manuscripts, those three names are each pointed differently. Little vowel points are different over each of them. And various Hebrew commentators, writers, or rabbis have commented on this fact: that the threefold occurrence of Yahweh is pointed differently in each of its three-fold occurrences here. And they have supposed there to be hiding some great mystery—that there’s something there, some reason why God planned them differently. They don’t know what it is.

Well, we do know what it is. In 2 Corinthians 13:14, we read: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of the Father and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all. A triune blessing from God. And I think that the reason why the name Yahweh is pointed differently in each of its three occurrences is that it points towards the Trinity. And these blessings, many commentators have noticed the fact that these blessings line up well with the blessings of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

We have the love of the everlasting Father, the grace of the incarnate Son, the comfort, teaching, and communion of the holy and blessed Ghost—holy and blessed Spirit, who is the Holy Ghost—not as three gods, but as one God, Yahweh, the covenant name of God to his people, viewed under its threefold aspect.

We have the love of God the Father through which we are preserved. In that first line, we have the love of God the Son whereby we have obtained and do obtain grace and pardon from him. And we have in the third line the love of the Holy Spirit whereby we obtain peace through the communion of God’s spirit with his people. And so we have this great torrent of God’s covenant blessings to us coming from the triune God.

And that is made manifest, as I said, in 2 Corinthians 13:14: the triune blessing of the triune God upon his people—grace, love, and the communion of the Holy Ghost. The Father calls us and protects us. The Son died that we might have grace. And the Holy Spirit is given to us to enable us to live lives of peace in terms of covenant obedience.

Now, this blessing is declared from the triune God upon his people. This torrent of blessing is declared through his appointed representatives. The first two verses of this blessing say that the Lord spake unto Moses saying, speak unto Aaron and to his sons. There were specific people that were called out to bless the people.

In Deuteronomy 21:5, we read that one of the central functions of the priest, the sons of Levi, is to bless in the name of the Lord. Again, in Deuteronomy 10:8: “The time God separated the tribe of Levi to bear the ark of the covenant of the Lord, to stand before the Lord and minister unto, and to bless his name unto this day.” One of the three specific responsibilities of the Levites were to bless in God’s name, to bless people in God’s name.

Again, Leviticus 9:22, after Aaron’s consecration to the priesthood: Aaron lifts up his hand toward the people and he blesses them, and then come and then he comes down from the offering and the sin of the offering and the burnt offering and the peace offerings. Aaron, after his consecration, serves as God’s mediatorial representative of God to the people in blessing them.

By the way, the fact that Aaron here, after his consecration, gave that blessing is one of the reasons why in many Christian churches today, during an ordination service when a man is ordained to office—at the end of the ordination to the eldership—the man would pronounce the consecration upon the people at the end of that particular service. The newly ordained man, because here we have Aaron newly consecrated or ordained to that office, and then immediately giving the blessing to the people. Okay, so the idea is that there are priestly mediators here.

Now it’s said, oh, it’s certainly a fact that historically the Jewish priests rather have blessed in a particular way. I don’t know if you’ve ever—I’m sure you’ve seen Spock do this. You may not know that he got that from a synagogue service. And the rabbi, the priest rather, not the rabbis, the priest in the Jewish synagogue service put their—and see, I probably couldn’t do it because I don’t do it together with this right hand separating those fingers. But they would put their thumbs together and then they would separate these fingers from that finger. So you know where you see Spock doing that—it comes from the synagogue. And they would do this and form kind of a fan over the people with palms up. That’s how they would pronounce the blessing.

There’s nothing in scripture that dictates that means or matter, of course, but it was so important to the priests that on the gravestones of many Jewish priests they have that symbol of the fanning of the hands and blessing. It was such an important part of their identity as priests—to place God’s blessing upon the people. It became, and has become, almost magical in the Jewish rejection of Jesus Christ. The blessing has been seen as a way to drive out evil spirits and to turn bad dreams into good dreams and protect people from bad dreams and omens.

But the point is that it was a very essential part of the priest, and that is the way they would do it.

Now in the scriptures, of course, it is important to see that God does here have this mediatorial work of the priest, but all this points, of course, to the coming of the great high priest, Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ—the last thing that he does on earth is to bless his people. In Luke 24:50–51 we read: “And he led them out as far as to Bethany and he lifted up his hands and blessed them, and it came to pass while he blessed them he was parted from them and was carried up into heaven.” And so this great torrent of blessing, through God’s representative, pointed to the great representative—become representative of the people and of God, Jesus Christ in his humanity and his divinity—God in the form of Jesus, in the person of Jesus Christ rather, blesses the people as his last act as he ascends to the Father.

So all this pointed to that. Additionally, in Acts 3:26 we read that God has raised up Jesus Christ and sent him to bless you. That’s specifically why God sent Christ to us—to bless us. And of course the necessity of that blessing entailed the pardon that would come through his shedding his blood on the cross.

Now there is importance in this idea of a representative of God, a mouthpiece of God, speaking the blessings of God. The idea of efficacy is certainly pictured here. We read that God will certainly put his name upon the children of Israel and he will bless them. And so it’s important to realize that as the elder, pastor, whatever it is, at the end of a worship service blesses the people, he’s not doing it of his own accord. He’s doing it in obedience to God’s word here. And because it’s God’s word, it won’t return void. It will establish what it’s been sent to do. If God says something and tells us to do something, he will surely accompany the doing of it with the blessing.

Matthew Henry said that the same words that God’s mouth to his people to teach and command them are his mouth likewise to bless them, and those that receive the law shall receive the blessing. So the point of all this is that Israel might hear—and might hear in the appointed words that God has given to the representative—the voice of God himself, as it were, pronouncing his blessing upon them all according to the great act of blessing of Jesus Christ.

Now it’s interesting in this regard that one of the first occurrences—well, let’s see—two of the patriarchal occurrences of blessing that we should mention here. One, Melchizedek was blessed rather—Melchizedek gave the blessing. He was not blessed himself. He gave the blessing to Abraham. And in Abraham’s loins was the tribe of Levi, who the priests would come out of, who would give the blessing. The point is that the greater blesses the lesser. And Melchizedek is a type of Jesus Christ, blessing, as it were, the representatives of him to his people. And the same holds true today.

Now in terms of the ability of the people to confer blessing without the grace of God, it’s interesting to hold in mind here the fact that the very first occurrence of blessing being given—not from a theophany or not from a specific example of God, later in history that is apart from Melchizedek—was Isaac when he goes to bless Jacob. In other words, Adam, Abraham, Isaac, and then later Jacob were all blessed directly by God. But Isaac also conferred a blessing from his mouth to Jacob. But do you remember that story?

What happened? Isaac didn’t want to bless Jacob. He wanted to bless Esau. He wanted to bless the other son. And so we’ve got God’s mediatorial blessing here correctly going forth from Isaac, but Isaac intends it for the wrong son. But in this very first example of that mediatorial blessing, as it were, from father to son, and then later in terms of the blessing we’re talking about here, God’s ordination holds true. Jacob receives the blessing from his father, even though his father wanted to bless Esau. Jacob gets blessed.

So even in man’s first specific occurrence here of blessing in the name of God, God’s sovereignty in blessing remains. And that’s important for us to remember and to realize: that it is Jesus Christ who blesses his people, and the representative of God can do nothing apart from God’s blessing itself.

Okay. So we’ve got the blessing. The benediction is a torrent of blessing from God upon his people, from God the triune—really the triune God, the three persons of the Trinity represented in that blessing—through his covenant representative, linking his people from worship to life. Very important to recognize this. Why is this blessing going forward? Some people see this as simply a way to end the service, to tell people it’s time to go home. That is not the point here. The point here is that this is a gateway into what happens when you leave the service.

It links the sacred worship that we’ve been performing before God acceptably in Jesus Christ here Sunday morning into the rest of the week. It’s the last message from God in the dialogue that we’ve talked about back and forth in terms of holy worship. God’s last message is a benediction, a blessing. And so it points us and links us into the rest of the week and into life.

Then I’ll quote a couple of items here from a book, or from an article rather, published in Interpretation, which is a journal article called “The Blessing of God.” It was from Interpretation, the journal called Interpretation, 1975, volume 29. The author was Patrick Miller. He said this:

“The principal emphasis as seen in the Aaronic benediction are as follows: the continuing presence and help of God, the protection and care which God provides throughout all situations—that is, his never-ceasing keeping of people in the presence of trouble and foes—the grace and mercy of God in dealing with the community and its members in their weaknesses and failures and afflictions, and the wholeness, health, prosperity, and peace which all seek.”

Now, he went on to say: “In the context of worship, the blessing we know belongs very much to the closing and going out from worship. This is not unimportant, for it means that the benediction serves as a bridge from the sacral act of worship in the sanctuary to the life outside. Too often benediction means for us the end of the worship service, when in fact it is meant to connect the service to the ongoing life of the worshipping people beyond the sanctuary. The worship is a sacral activity. In benediction we are saying that the one for whom we move apart to worship is the one who goes with us as we go from the sacred gathering to guide our life and provide its context.”

He quotes also from a man named Outler who said the following:

“It is tempting, of course, to find the signs of special providence in history and its odd turns and accidents, or to look for it into gaps that dot the historian’s story. But if God is anywhere at all, it must surely be in his provision for the whole in continuity and discontinuity, in the routine and the extraordinary, in the ebb and flow of faith and life, as it were. God is to be found.”

The point is: God’s providence isn’t something that just occasionally happens in history to affect something. God’s providence is perpetual. And the sight of that is his benediction, his placing of himself and his name and his protection, his pardon, his peace upon us as we leave the place of worship and go into the rest of life.

Now, I wouldn’t normally quote Bonhoeffer, not exactly an Orthodox fellow, but nonetheless, in this article from Miller, he points out that Bonhoeffer wrote in his Letters and Papers from Prison something very interesting. He warned us about moving too quickly into the New Testament without clearly hearing the Old Testament word first. And then Miller writes: “I am confident that it was in the Old Testament that Bonhoeffer found the biblical roots for that oft-coded conviction that comes from his last days.”

And this is quoting now from Bonhoeffer:

“I should like to speak of God not on the borders of life, but at its center, not in discipline but in strength, not therefore in man’s suffering and death but in life and prosperity.” Now God is everywhere in suffering and death and in life and prosperity, but these points that Miller is making are quite important for us to see the benediction as a link or a bridge into the rest of our lives and a call to participate in life in the blessing and benediction of God the Father.