Thoughts on Psalm 33:12 -or- One of the Problems With Christian Products

I'm in the middle of reading a book at work (church) and I went in the kitchen to get some hot water for my french press.  I noticed the calendar on the wall.  Yesterday I saw that the calendar had a picture of a mustard field for the month of July and a verse:


"Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.  Psalm 33:12"

When I saw the picture yesterday I thought about how the calendar implies that any nation which turns to the Lord will be blessed.  This creates poor theology.  Americans think that if we turn back to God we will be blessed.  Truthfully, that verse was specifically in reference to Israel and the promise in it was for those people.  In New Testament times, it applies to Christians as the kingdom of God, not to organized nations.

Today, when I went back in the kitchen, I thought, "this verse must be one of the least applicable verses to us in the New Testament."  I gave it a little more thought and saw that this verse is actually incredibly important for us today.  Here's a quick look at what this verse means:

I know that the word used for blessed here (ashre) means "blessed/happy."  Ashre means that our lives are successful and pleasant when we follow God.  This type of statement is a brief foray into proverbial wisdom, in which righteousness leads to happiness and wickedness leads to being cursed.  We know the world is much more complicated than that, and the Bible accounts for this other statements all throughout it.

"The nation whose God is the LORD" refers to the nation which worships the LORD (or YHWH).  The only earthly nation which worshiped YHWH was Israel.  In ancient thought, a god and a nation went together.  In Exodus 6:7, YHWH says to the nation of Israel, "I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians."  


Ancient people believed that Ba'al was the god of the Philistines, Che'mosh was the god of the Moabites, Ra was the god of the Egyptians, and YHWH was the god of the Israelites.

So this whole statement is simply saying "Blessed/happy is Israel because their God is YHWH."

Unfortunately, the calendar in our kitchen made three crucial errors.
1. They uncapitalized LORD, which we use to denote the name of God (YHWH), and simply turned it into Lord, which more or less we use to mean "God."  So all the calendar says is "blessed is the nation whose God is God."  This is really not a very meaningful phrase.

2. They implicitly applied this verse as an invitation to all nations to make YHWH into their national deity.  The only way outsiders can choose to follow YHWH is as individuals through the blood of Christ.  When we do this, we become part of a new nation.  1 Peter 2:9 says about all Christians, "But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light."  I as a Christian am no longer primarily identified as an American or as ethnically Japanese, Chinese, Georgian, Russian, Italian (or any of my other ethnic groups).  I am part of God's holy nation.

3.  The error that allowed the misinterpretation of this verse is the way the calendar makers took this part of the verse severely out of context.  The whole verse says:

"Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people he chose for his inheritance."

The point is that God chose Israel.  Israel did not choose God.

Earlier I thought this verse was pointless for New Testament times.  The reverse is true.  This verse shows us that even if an entire nation chose YHWH as their God, it wouldn't matter.  He has to choose that nation.  The first nation God chose was Israel.  This was the first covenant (Old Testament).

In the New Testament (new covenant), God has chosen a different nation to be his inheritance.  Ephesians 1:18 says that Jesus' inheritance is "in his holy people."  This is the Church!  We as the holy nation are the people chosen by God.  

So Psalm 33:12 today means "blessed/happy is the Church."  We worship the God of Israel, and we have been chosen to be the inheritance of Christ. 

Now only if Calendar makers could fit all of that over a pretty picture.  

Incidentally, I think the picture they chose (of a mustard field) is quite fitting for a discussion about a proper theology of the Kingdom of God and how it interacts with nations.  I have briefly written before about how mustard grows within other fields, just as the Kingdom of God grows within existing nations.