God Bless You

Have you ever wondered why people say the words bless you when someone near them sneezes? In my part of the world, you could be walking by a stranger in Central Park in New York City, be surrounded by rabid fan watching a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, or be jammed in a subway car full of harried commuters, but if you sneeze, strangers, fans or commuters will all respond immediately with a loud, “Bless you!” It is a nice gesture, but where did this bless you thing come from?

Nearly every culture in the world has some way of wishing sneezers well. The phrase God bless you was enshrined by an edict of Pope Gregory the Great all the way back in AD 600. An epidemic of the Bubonic Plague was spreading rampantly, and sneezing was an obvious symptom of this dreaded, often fatal, sickness. So Gregory ordered everyone within earshot of a sneeze to immediately utter a prayer asking God to save the person from the plague: God bless you.

I like the idea that when a person manifests a symptom of illness, those around them offer a prayer:

“The Lord bless you. May He deliver you from sickness and bring you health.”

Odd as it may seem, the phrase bless you captures the heart of God for people in ways both cosmically large and day-to-day detail small. The very first description in Scripture of God’s relationship with the people He made is, “God blessed them.” I imagine God standing in the Garden passionately declaring His unconditional love to them, telling them how much He valued them and swearing to do good to them and to help them do good in this world.

It strikes me that God blessed them knowing full well they were going to sneeze, they were going to fall sick and they were going to be plagued by sin. His clear desire, though, was to bless them in their innocent beginning, to bless them as much as possible after they fell sick and then to bless them completely back into the healthy and flourishing life He planned when He created them.

My new book, The Lord Bless You, is a book about how much God wants to bless the people He has made. It is about how much He wants to bless you in particular, how you can embrace His blessings in your life and how you can bless the world around you. I hope to reframe the way you see everything by helping you view the world through the lens of God’s zealous intention to bless you.

Regardless of your present circumstance, God wants to bless you. Whether you are spiritually healthy or spiritually sick, God wants to bless you. Whether you are overwhelmed with abundance or struggling in scarcity, God wants to bless you. Whether your relationships are whole or less than what they should be, God wants to bless you. Whether you are vocationally satisfied or are still trying to figure out what you really want to do, God wants to bless you. Wherever you are in your life, you need only believe in Him, trust His good intentions toward you, accept what He has done through Jesus to bring you back into His full blessing, and by His grace align your life with the way He designed life to be lived. You can absolutely experience God’s blessing in every area of your life!

Words related to blessing are used more than five hundred times in the Bible. Various scholars define the word blessing in Scripture in similar ways. They say things such as “God’s blessing on people involves His positive regard for them, the desire to see that they enjoy the truly good things in life.” Or, “Blessing has to do with being in favor with God and under his protection and care.” It also has been defined as “multidimensional flourishing . . . physically, psychologically, socially, spiritually.” These descriptions of blessing are beautiful and true.

For this book, however, I will define blessing as this:

To be blessed is to be in harmonious relationship with God who wants to do good in us, to us and through us.

We might say the whole story of Scripture is about God’s plan to redeem us from the curse and restore us to the blessing He planned in the beginning. Yes, humanity did fall ill. Yes, the world, though beautiful, is still plagued. And yes, this has an impact on our lives in ways large and small every day. God, however, has not changed His mind about what He wants for you. God wants to bless you.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Adapted from The Lord Bless You (Chosen) by Terry A. Smith. All rights reserved.