(25): And ye shall serve the LORD your God, and he shall bless thy bread, and thy water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee (King James Bible)
and he shall bless thy bread, and thy water;
Speaking to the Israelites, God here promises to bless their food, and water.
The question is: Did it matter? Does it matter that God should bless your food and water?
What if he does not, will not that food and water yet fill your belly and sooth your thirst?
However you look at it, the fundamental truth is that food is meant not just to fill your belly and sooth your thirst.
It is meant to nourish, bring you to, and keep you in good health.
And that is only made possible by God’s blessing. That is why we pray for food before eating.
Otherwise we would just about get to munching and swallowing the food, to pouring and gulping down water without praying to God to bless them.
Next God says: and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee
As in his promise to bless their food and water, by making it nourishing and healthy, God here now tells the Israelites that he will take sickness away from their midst.
For a start, majority of man’s sicknesses are directly a result of his sinful ways, and others are God’s own way of punishing and correcting man, ever so by reminding him of his frailty, and dependence on him as the healer.
In his promise here to the Israelites, God pledges to both prevent and/or remove sickness from their amidst.
This is a powerful promise that God gave to the children of Israel. And it powerfully resonates with our times today.
We live in an age of epidemical diseases, majority of which we individually attract as a result of our immoral relationship ways and sinful scientific pursuits.
The good news, of course, is that we take solace, even in the distress of our times, in God’s promises to bless our food and water, and to take sickness away from our midst.
However, and this is a very important caveat: prior to giving the Israelites the promise to bless their food, and water, and to take sickness away from their midst, God commands them:
And ye shall serve the Lord your God
What God is here saying is that He will fulfill his promise to bless our food and water and to take away sickness from the midst of Israelites, but only if they will serve him.
As it was for the Israelites, so it is for our generation, that we fall under the highest and most Nobel obligation to serve and Worship God in the manner and ways that scripture commands us to.
That is our first requirement for moving God’s hand to bless our food, and water, and take the today’s rampant sicknesses from our midst.