“God be gracious to us and bless us, and cause His face to shine upon us — Selah. That Your way may be known on the earth, Your salvation among all nations…. The land has yielded its produce; God, our God, blesses us. God blesses us, that all the ends of the earth may fear Him” (Psa 67:1-2, 6-7).
In just a few verses, Psalm 67 weaves together several of the Torah’s greatest promises into a breathtaking vision of God’s blessing for Israel and the nations. The psalm begins by invoking the Aaronic Blessing upon Israel: “The LORD bless you, and keep you; the LORD make His face shine on you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up His countenance on you, and give you peace” (Num 6:24-26). It ends with an allusion to Leviticus 26 and God’s promise to bless the land with a plentiful harvest: “Then I shall give you rains in their season, so that the land will yield its produce and the trees of the field will bear their fruit” (Lev 26:4; see also Ezek 34:26-27; Zech 8:12).
God’s blessing upon Israel was never meant to remain with Israel alone, but to overflow to the nations. Because the ultimate purpose of God’s blessing upon Israel was always the blessing of the nations, the psalmist longs to see God’s promises fulfilled according to His word to Abraham (vv. 3-5): “And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Gen 12:3).
These promises have already been partially fulfilled through the first coming of Yeshua the Messiah. Hebrew words like “Hallelujah” (“praise the LORD”) and “Amen” (“so be it”) can now be heard on the lips of peoples worshiping the God of Abraham even on the remotest islands. But if God has poured out such riches upon the nations through Israel’s stumbling, how much greater will the blessing be through Israel’s salvation and redemption (see Rom 11:11-15)?
God’s blessing upon Israel was never meant to remain with Israel alone, but to overflow to the nations.
John Piper was right to name his book on missions after this psalm: “Let the Nations Be Glad” (v. 4). Yet a genuinely biblical missiology cannot exclude Israel’s promised salvation and should move us to pray, “O God, let Israel be glad too, so that the nations will be even gladder!”
