“The blessing of the Lord makes one rich, And He adds no sorrow with it”. Proverbs 10:22
“For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable”. Romans 11:29
“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above…” James 1:17a
God does not change. His gifts are irrevocable; they remain gifts to us. He does not take them back, and they do not change in character to become curses or burdens even when we, or our circumstances change.
If you were raised in a church-attending family, or if Bible reading was permitted in your school, you may have heard from your early years about the struggles of the children of Israel, God’s chosen people who were once slaves in Egypt.
You would then have heard of their departure from Egypt – a deliverance from their lives of servitude achieved by God in amazing supernatural manifestations of power (ten plagues), working through two brothers: Moses and Aaron.
The goal of that deliverance was to separate the people of Israel from Egypt, the country in which they had lived for over four centuries, in order to bring them to a land God had promised to their ancestor Abraham: Canaan.
The promise that the Israelites would be delivered from the bondage of slavery was given to Abraham – Israel’s patriarch – even before Isaac the father of Jacob (Israel) was born; a plan that was to be carried out after four hundred years of Israel’s slavery (Genesis 15: 13-14). After the predetermined time of four centuries, God appeared to Moses and commissioned him, as the person to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt.
After God poured out ten plagues on the land of Egypt, the Israelites were driven out of the land of Egypt by a people afraid for their lives, and what little they had left, after the plagues. The Israelites left as free men and women, and people of great wealth, for they received from Egyptians, riches they had asked for, and which they were not denied because of the favour of God upon them.
The deliverance of the people of Israel was no doubt, a great blessing, purposed, planned and executed in due time. Thus, the Israelites understood that they lived under blessing, having departed Egypt as the favoured children of a mighty God who had worked wonders none of the gods of Egypt had been able to replicate. They were blessed beyond measure, and they knew it. No wonder the Bible records that they left Egypt in battle formation, confident that with their God fighting for them, no enemy stood a chance against them.
Yet in no time, they had become so displeasing to God that He kept them from the very thing for which He had exerted such power and strength to deliver them: the promised land of Canaan.
How did this happen?
The account of their journey which took forty years was filled with high drama – from a final deliverance from the might of Egypt when they walked on dry land through the Red Sea, through the creation of an idol to which they subjected themselves, declaring it to be their source of deliverance, to an open rebellion by which they threatened to return to Egypt by their own appointed leaders. How did they get to this place where they rejected the deliverance so dearly won for them, and so completely cherished by them in the moment?
It seems to me that as soon as they had settled into their new life of liberty, free of their taskmasters, they forgot the mighty hand of God by which that liberty had been secured, and the mighty deliverance assumed ordinariness. It was then that they started focusing on their present circumstances of travelling through a wilderness, with its harshness and deprivations. From that point to nostalgia for the life of servitude in Egypt was short indeed. In that frame of mind, they began to compare their lives pre and post liberation, and missed the fare which was their portion in their settled existence, even as slaves. Thus did they mourn the lack of onions, garlic, and leeks to season their meals, as well as meat in the wilderness. In nostalgia for a settled life in Egypt, albeit in servitude, they failed to remember that the blessing of liberation towards an inheritance, was won for them through mighty exertions by God Himself – great wonders, and that the ultimate goal was their arrival, and that even the wilderness deprivations came about because of what was a blessing. Having thus lost focus, is there any wonder that they forgot the might of God, and in consequence, refused to go and fight to claim the land promised to them for fear of being slaughtered? Their punishment, was a withdrawal of the goal of their deliverance from them (although it was not withdrawn from their children).
These things I have recounted, are a summary of the journey of the people of Israel from Egypt to Canaan.
As I have said before now, if you have spent any time in church, you would have heard bits of it, if not all of it. And it is very likely that you may have judged and condemned the children of Israel for their attitude to what was clearly their highest blessing.
But will a close look at your own life perhaps reveal some similarity in your attitude to the things you once praised God for, which have now become a burden in your estimation?
How are you coping with your marriage and the family you prayed for and received; you believed that God gave them to you as His blessing. How are you handling the rough patch you may have hit?
Or that job you got after much prayer, and for which you gave God great praise; the job you have come to hate because it is asking more of you than you expected, perhaps an unreasonable superior or unkind colleagues?
What of the course of study you got admitted to, for which you praised God, but which is now fraught with problems, impossible deadlines, unreasonable professors, and so much that it has assumed the nature of a burden?
Today, my task is to remind you of this scripture:
“The blessing of the Lord makes one rich,
And He adds no sorrow with it.”
The children of Israel were a liberated people moving into their inheritance which was their blessing. That was a fact. After their deliverance achieved by a show of strength and might, they found themselves in a wilderness with little water, food, and meat; that was also a fact. They focused on the little irritations in the place they had to walk through – a wilderness with its barrenness and dangers. This in turn caused them to hanker after their lives of slavery, for which they had cried out to the Lord for deliverance, treating their blessing as the hardship they accused Moses of foisting on them.
The blessing was always what it was intended to be, its character did not change. They changed, because they concerned themselves with the circumstances its outworking involved, and became not only unthankful, but ungrateful.
In our own experience, God’s blessings are carried in a world which is broken because of sin. Because this broken world and all its people are as broken as we are, the outworking of even what we recognize to be a blessing from God, may be affected by the actions or inactions of others, or systems which belong to this world.
When that happens, having settled into the blessing, we risk watering down extraordinary blessings until they assume ordinariness. From that point, the little (and big) inconveniences and irritations assume giant proportions until we can no longer recognize the blessing.
We must be mindful of this: that our provident, loving God who is our Heavenly Father, does not give bad gifts to His children, as Jesus taught in Matthew 7:9-11. Indeed, James 1:17 describes God’s gifts to us as ‘good and perfect’.
If God’s gifts are good, and as the Psalmist declared in our foundational scripture, He adds no sorrow with it, then we must recognize that any seeming sorrow is the result of a world system which is broken and in which we must receive our blessing.
The gift; however, remains a blessing which does not change in character because circumstances and actions affect its outworking.
What must we do then, when our blessings appear to go awry? Do we pretend all is well?
May I suggest this course of action: prayer.
There is a reason God has given us the gift of His own Presence and the gift of communication with Him. If His blessings appear to take a negative turn or become fraught with difficulties, what we do is resort to prayer, in trust that He will sort it out. We are not without help.
Philippians 4:6-7 advises this course:
“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”
Hebrews 4:16 assures us of an audience: “Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
What we do NOT do when our blessing becomes beset with problems, is to sour on the blessing, complain about it, and practically throw it into the face of the Giver, or worse, declare the blessing to be a curse, rather than by our actions.
May we remember the kindnesses of God in our lives: those things which are the subject of our present praise, and retain an attitude of thankfulness even when in their outworking, problems attend them.
May we learn to present our problems to God in prayer, looking forward in eager expectation for His intervention when problems arise in our blessings.
God’s blessings are not altered by adverse circumstances we may encounter; they do not become curses, burdens, or a hardship, and He does not take them back because of our circumstances.
May we keep a proper focus, and pursue the proper course of action, which is prayer, in difficult times, as our blessings go through challenges.
These will keep our hearts thankful, hopeful, and joyful!
May we!
