The Priestly Blessing & Ecclesiastes

At the end of Numbers 6 we are told there was a characteristic blessing for the people of Israel to be pronounced by the priests.  This blessing is sometimes known as the priestly blessing or priestly benediction.  It is often used as a benediction in Christian churches so you are likely familiar with it. The blessing is as follows:

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.

For our purposes I want us to focus on the phrase, "The Lord make His face to shine."  The word for shine is the verb form of the word light.  So we can read this line as, "The Lord make His face light upon you."

There is a similarity between the construction of this phrase and Genesis 1:3, "And God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light." What God says is more literally translated, "And God said, 'Be light' and light was."   So Genesis 1:3 says, "Be Light" and the priestly benediction says, "light YHWH."  You need to remember that YHWH, the actual name of God, is a form of the to be verb (that is the reason name of God is sometimes referred to as I AM).   Although the point is a lot clearer in Hebrew, the priestly blessing by reversing "be light" to "light YHWH" is indicating the hope of a return to the original state of creation.

The Israelites receiving the priestly blessing would understand the line in the priestly blessing as the hope for a renewing of their lives taking them back to the original point of creation.  The time before the creation of light would be a time before God began to delegate His rule to the creation as we see in Genesis 1:14-16.

The blessing holds out the hope of a time when the rule of God would once more be direct, when creation would no longer be under the sun.  If you remember from our last sermon, life under the sun is the problem the Preacher sees in the world and why he finds no hope for gain for humanity's labor. What the Preacher longs for is something new.

It is this hope of a renewal of creation that led Isaiah to compose Isaiah 60 and envision a time when the direct rule of God would return.  No longer would the times and seasons be delegated to the rule of the sun.   Instead creation would again be under the direct rule of God and the sun would become redundant.  As Isaiah says in 60:19, "The sun shall be no more your light by day, nor for brightness shall the moon give you light; but YHWH will be your everlasting light and your God will be your glory."

The resurrection begins this new creation.  As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, the risen Christ is the first fruit of this new creation.  As Christians participate in Christ's death and resurrection we are part of this new creation and so Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, "Therefore if anyone is in Christ - new creation!"  The point is that the priestly blessing by expressing the hope that God's light would shine on the Israelites, is an anticipation that there would be freedom from the tyranny of life under the sun and a renewal of creation.