“The righteous flourish like the palm tree…” – Psalm 92:12
Whether we recognize it or not, each one of us has inside our hearts a desire to experience goodness in life.
The Old Testament Jews described it as a yearning for each person to be able to sit under his own vine and fig tree, and to live without fear (Micah 4:4), which calls to mind Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof dancing in his barn, belting out, “If I were a rich man…”. Our Founding Fathers imbedded this idea into the Declaration of Independence when they said that our Creator has endowed us with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Author James Smith writes, “To be human is to be animated by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as flourishing. And we want that, we crave that.” Right now if you thought about it long enough, you could write out a paragraph describing the future optimal life you would hope to enjoy.
There are at least two challenges though that conspire against this idea of flourishing in life – creation is cursed and we are fallen. Because creation is cursed by our sin, we are regularly besieged by the hardships that come with our mortality. As I recently looked through my devotional notebooks from last year (something I do each January) you could see I was wrestling with God to experience his peace as we cared for a dear sister-in-law dying in the throes of dementia while her husband was incapacitated in a care facility after an accident.
And because we are fallen, blinded by our sin, another obstacle to flourishing is that we each have vastly different ideas of what it means to thrive in life. (I’m sure Nicolás Maduro thought he was thriving until last week.) Because the pain of a cursed creation is so great, in our fallenness we look for solutions to deaden the pain which may help us “thrive” momentarily before whiplashing us with twice the misery. It’s quite the fix we’re in.
“To be human is to be animated by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as flourishing. And we want that, we crave that.” – James Smith
It might surprise you, but God himself yearns for you to flourish in your life, even in a world such as this. God repeatedly told the Hebrews coming out of Egypt that he wanted it to go well with them (Deuteronomy 4:4, 5:16, 6:3, 6:18…).
But there was a condition to this. They had to accept God’s definition of what thriving meant. Those Hebrew slaves were also told that for it to go well with them, they had to make God and his Word (his laws and will) their North Star. And that’s the same condition for us.
Psalm 92 curiously says that there is a “flourishing” that both the wicked and the righteous can experience (vss.7, 12-13). But they are vastly different things. We encourage you to have a careful reading of this psalm. See if you discern the difference. Then choose a path to walk on.