Blessed are those whose way is blameless
Who walk in the law of the LORD.
“Blessing” returns us to the earliest scenes, when God blesses what He has spoken/created; and, in contrast, after the BigDumbThing, when God curses what He has spoken/made. Hence, blessing is a big word. It is NOT owning a thin coating of piety. Nor is it a word naming a season of God’s unusual favor. And, final qualifier, it describes more than one’s psychological state. To be under the blessing is to be in the happy place of “The- Way- Things- Should- Be, as God defines that.
In the light of a fuller definition of “blessing,” we can now properly view “blameless.” To be blameless is, of course, much more than not getting caught! Rather, blamelessness is measuring up to what God intended when He created Man. Or, to follow the word’s lead and to state that negatively, blamelessness is to not come up short of God’s creation ideal.
Call that happy status by it’s more trendy nomenclature: “Fully realized.” “Human flourishing.” Or simply, “Maturity.” Whatever words are used for human development, the assumption is the same: there is a goal that we’ve yet to attain. In the way are cowardice, indiscipline, anxiety, irreverence, silliness, and a host of other uglies.
I write around the turning of the year, when we give ourselves over to discerning our shortcomings and resolving to improve. In all that introspection we should go down, down, down, and remember to ask, What is Man? What is Man For? Or spelled out: For what purpose did the Creator create Man?
Don’t ask the big questions… and the result will be small answers. And small answers produce shrunken men.
It is the Word of God that assumes the full potential of Man and shows him the way toward becoming fully and maturely human. It won’t be easy. It’s called a walk, and we’re led onto a path, and the path isn’t merely a realization or a doctrine or a mental shift or some kind of negation. Yes, the active, living Word pushes us onto a strenuous quest.
And again, the goal of the journey isn’t merely civilization or interior happiness, but nothing less than the Creator’s (break out the all-caps) BLESSING.
P.S. Did I mention in all this that there’s a Prototype of the Fully Human?
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