On Being Blessed

I was reading a psalm last night.
It's Psalm 128:
Blessed are those who fear the Lord.
who walk in his ways.
You will eat the fruit of your labor;
blessings and prosperity will be yours.
Your wife will be like a fruitful vine
within your hosue;
your sons will be like olive shoots
around your table.
Thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord.
May the Lord bledd you from Zion
all the days of your life;
may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem,
and may you live to see your children's children.
Peace be upon Israel. [NIV]

Think about the imagry that this psalm uses to describe a blessed person:
"Your wife wil lbe like a fruitful vine...your sons will be like olive shoots..."
no, im not referring to the agricultural imagry.
The blessed people in this psalm have prosperity. It even says so, "the prosperity of Jerusalem."
The blessed people live to be grandparents.

Job.
Everyone knows Job, even people who don't know anything about the Bible.
Job is the guy who got everything taken away, but since he had a good attitude and remained faithful to the lord, got everything back twofold.
And then he wrote it all down in prose.

Job 42:12+13 state:
"The Lord blessed the latter part of Job's life more than the first. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen (2k oxes) and a thousand donkeys. And he also had seven sons and thee daughters."

That's a lot of animals for one man.
He was blessed with tons and tons of stuff.

There's another Bible character that everyone knows about: King Solomon, the wisest king that ever lived.
Heres one of the things that he had to say about stuff:
"I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun."
[Ecclesiastes 2:10+11]

In the Old Testament times, people were blessed who had lots of stuff.
In modern society, people are also considered "blessed" or "lucky" if they have sweet stuff.
People who make a lot of money and have a cool house and a cool car and not annoying kids are the envy of everyone.
But Jesus said something rather counter-culture.
He said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."
[matthew 5:3-12]

The people in old-thymey jerusalem say riches and equated it with blessing.
But Jesus said the opposite.
He said that the people who are meek, who are mourning, who are poor in spirit, and who are persecuted and who have things said about them that are false- these people are blessed.
Normally, when you come across someone being beat up, you don't say, "hey man, you're blessed!".
No, you say, "that's not cool" and then if you're smart, you help the guy out.
Jesus and the disciples in the early church made a clear distinction in terms of blessing.
Everyone in the early church was poor- people gave up all of their money.
In fact, there's an account of a couple who died because they lied and DIDN"T give everything they could to the church.
These people weren't "blessed" as olden-time israelites might have thought it.
They had nothing on the earth.

Solomon also said, "The sleep of a laborer is sweet, whether he eats little or much, but the abundance of a rich man permits him no sleep."[5:12]

There's no reason to accumulate wealth on the earth; we're all going to die anyway, and theres no point after that.
Rather, we're supposed to put all our energy into the Great Commission- because that's what matters after we die.

I guess what im trying to say is that Jesus gave us a new outlook on "riches" and "blessing".
Before, they were based on material items, wealth, how many children you had, and how old you lived.
But now, its based on something more important and less tangible.