A Daily Dose of Good News
Friday, January 1, 2021
After 10:30am today, this devotional will be offered online at https://youtu.be/jpLecxnBGhc
A printer-friendly version of this devotion is available at DDGN 20210101
Additionally, if you’d like to talk about this Daily Dose of Good News further, or previous ones, have questions, or additional thoughts, please feel free to email me at sara.wunsch@engagedbygrace.org. I’d love to interactively engage with you about them.
Good morning! It is January 1 of 2021- hooray! I welcome you to this day, I welcome you to this new year. I thought our Scripture reading, our Daily Dose for today, was perfect. It was from Numbers 6:22-27. Numbers is one of those first five books in the Bible, part of the Hebrew Bible, part of what would be classified as the Torah for Jewish people. Numbers is about that wilderness journey and about how the group of Israelites who originally left, journeyed around, and that generation died, before the second generation made it to the promised land. So, numbers relates to the numbers of that, the census of that- the first group and the second group. So, it’s about this wilderness journey, which takes its toll. We’ve been in our own wilderness journey, this past year of 2020, and, we’re eager for the promised land.
You may recognize a portion of this passage:
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, Thus you shall bless the Israelites: You shall say to them,
The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.
So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.
Here ends the reading. You may recognize that- because we say that often at Church as part of a dismissal that we do: May the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord’s face shine upon you. May the Lord look upon you with favor and give you peace.
It’s that same prayer, given by God, to God’s beloved people. As a way for God to bless them and in that blessing, there are a bunch of verbs. So, the first set of verbs are components of what God does. So the Lord “blesses us”, the Lord “makes his face shine upon us”, the Lord “lifts up his countenance upon us”. Those are things that the Lord does. And then we receive the actions. The actions are “were kept by the Lord”, and the Lord “is gracious to us” and the Lord “gives us peace”.
So I welcome you to that in 2021! Again… the Lord bless you and keep you , the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Amen.
