The Great Reversal: From Harvest to Homage Text: Psalm 67:6-7
Introduction: The Logic of Blessing
We live in an age that desperately wants the fruit without the root. Our culture is like a man who wants a bountiful harvest, but who spits on the ground in contempt of the farmer who planted the seed. They want prosperity, but they mock the God of providence. They desire peace, but they despise the Prince of Peace. They want the blessings of a Christian civilization, the hospitals, the universities, the rule of law, the basic decencies, but they have declared war on the Christ who is the source of all of it. This is not just ingratitude; it is a form of profound insanity. It is sawing off the branch you are sitting on.
Psalm 67 is a missionary psalm. It is a profoundly optimistic, gospel-saturated, postmillennial psalm. It lays out the logic of God's program for the world, a logic that our modern sensibilities have inverted entirely. The psalm begins with a prayer for God's blessing upon His people, Israel: "God be merciful to us and bless us, and cause His face to shine upon us" (v. 1). But this is no insular, tribal request. The purpose of this blessing is immediately stated: "That Your way may be known on earth, Your salvation among all nations" (v. 2). The logic is this: God blesses His people so that the world might see, and know, and turn to Him.
The central hinge of the psalm is the righteous government of God over all the nations, which causes them to be glad and sing for joy. And then, at the end of the psalm, we come to our text. Here we see the result of God's blessing and the nations' praise. It is a global harvest, both physical and spiritual. The earth itself responds to the praise of the nations, and the result of this cascading blessing is the worldwide fear of God. This is the great reversal of the world's program. The world says, "Let us throw off God's shackles, and then we will be prosperous and free." God says, "Let my people be blessed, let the nations praise Me, and then the earth will yield its increase, and all the ends of the earth will fear Me." God's blessing does not terminate on itself; it is evangelistic fertilizer.
The Text
The earth has yielded its produce;
God, our God, blesses us.
God blesses us,
That all the ends of the earth may fear Him.
(Psalm 67:6-7 LSB)
The Responsive Earth (v. 6a)
We begin with the first clause of verse 6:
"The earth has yielded its produce..." (Psalm 67:6a)
The psalmist shifts from petition and exhortation to a declaration of fact. The harvest has come in. The Hebrew here is past tense, a prophetic declaration of what is certain to happen when God's people are blessed and the nations praise Him. This is not merely a statement about agricultural cycles. In the Scriptures, the productivity of the land is directly tied to the covenant faithfulness of the people. When Israel obeyed, God promised to bless their land, their crops, their livestock (Deut. 28). When they rebelled, the land itself would vomit them out, and the heavens would become bronze and the earth iron (Lev. 26). The creation is not a neutral stage on which the drama of redemption unfolds; it is an active participant. It groans under the weight of our sin (Rom. 8:22) and it rejoices in the righteousness of God's people.
So when the nations turn to God in praise, as described in the previous verses, the earth itself responds with abundance. This is the opposite of the secular, environmentalist worldview, which sees humanity as a cancer on the planet. They believe that for the earth to be fruitful, man must be suppressed. The Bible teaches the exact opposite. For the earth to be fruitful, man must be righteous. When man is rightly related to God, the creation is liberated to do what it was made to do, which is to produce, to teem, to overflow with the goodness of God.
This yielding of produce is therefore a sign of God's pleasure. It is a testimony to the fact that God's government is a government of life and abundance. Sin brings thorns and thistles. Righteousness brings forth fruit, thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold. This is true physically, and it is true spiritually. When the gospel goes forth and the nations are discipled, we should expect to see cultures of life, productivity, and abundance rise from the ashes of pagan despair.
The Source of All Blessing (v. 6b-7a)
The psalmist immediately identifies the source of this bountiful harvest.
"God, our God, blesses us. God blesses us..." (Psalm 67:6b-7a LSB)
The harvest is not an accident of good weather or skillful farming. It is a direct result of the blessing of God. The repetition here is emphatic. Lest we get distracted by the produce, the psalmist forces our eyes back to the Giver. "God blesses us. God blesses us." The first phrase, "God, our God," is covenantal. This is not some generic, distant deity. This is Yahweh, the God who has bound Himself to His people by promises. He is "our God." We belong to Him, and He has committed Himself to our good.
This blessing is the engine of the entire psalm. It is the cause of which everything else is the effect. God blesses His people. What happens? His way becomes known on earth. The nations praise Him. The earth yields its produce. And ultimately, the world fears Him. It all starts with God's gracious, initiating, sovereign blessing.
We must get this logic straight. We do not make ourselves worthy of God's blessing. We do not earn it. God, in His mercy, chooses to bless us. And the purpose of that blessing is not to make us fat and happy so we can retire to a gated community. The purpose of God's material and spiritual blessing on the church is for the sake of the world. He makes us a showcase. He makes our families, our churches, and our communities a demonstration plot of His kingdom, so that the starving nations can look over the fence and see a land of abundance and say, "What must we do to have a harvest like that?" And the answer is, "You must have a God like that."
The Goal of Global Homage (v. 7b)
The final clause of the psalm gives us the ultimate purpose, the grand telos, of God's entire program of blessing and salvation.
"That all the ends of the earth may fear Him." (Psalm 67:7b LSB)
This is the glorious, postmillennial conclusion. The blessings of God, flowing through His people to the nations, resulting in a responsive, fruitful creation, have one ultimate goal: the global fear of God. The knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea (Hab. 2:14). This is not a pious hope; it is a divine promise.
Now, we must be careful to define what "fear" means here. This is not the cowering dread of a slave before a tyrant. That is the fear that pagans have of their capricious, demonic gods. That is the fear Adam had when he was hiding in the bushes. The fear of the Lord spoken of here is filial fear. It is the respectful, awestruck, joyful reverence of a son for a good and powerful father. It is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 9:10). It is to hate evil (Prov. 8:13). It is a fountain of life (Prov. 14:27). This fear is not opposed to joy; it is the very foundation of it. The nations are called to "sing for joy" (v. 4) precisely because they will be governed by this great God whom they are to fear.
And notice the scope of this fear: "all the ends of the earth." This is not just a few converts here and there. This is not the church huddled in a bomb shelter waiting for the rapture. This is a vision of total, global victory. From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord will be great among the Gentiles (Mal. 1:11). Every knee will bow. Every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:10-11). This psalm is a prophetic roadmap of how God intends to get it done. He will do it through blessing His church so extravagantly that the world cannot help but notice.
Conclusion: The Evangelistic Harvest
So what does this mean for us? It means that our fruitfulness, both spiritual and material, is an evangelistic strategy. When God blesses your business, it is for the sake of the gospel. When God blesses your family with well-behaved children, it is a testimony to a watching world. When our churches are filled with joy, laughter, and genuine love, it is a beacon to those lost in the darkness of bitterness and isolation.
We are to be a city on a hill, and a fruitful city at that. Our lives are to be an argument for the goodness of our God. When the world sees the blessing of God on us, the harvest that our faithfulness yields, it provokes one of two reactions: envy and hatred, or a holy curiosity that leads to the fear of the Lord. Our task is to live in such a way that our abundance and our joy cannot be explained away by natural means. It must point beyond us to the God who blesses.
Therefore, let us pray as the psalmist did. "God, our God, bless us." Let us ask for a great harvest, not for our own comfort, but so that our neighbors, our city, and ultimately all the ends of the earth, might come to fear His great and glorious name. The logic of the gospel is from blessing to belief, from harvest to homage. This is God's plan for the world, and because it is His plan, it cannot fail.