Old Testament Blessings - Eternal - Post 1/12

Continuing my analysis of the Old Testament.  Last post I shared some of the more frequent blessings ("A Blessed Land" and "Joy").   Now I want to put them into categories.  Here's the 12 categories:

Cut me a little slack. This is totally based on my opinion of what category they fit in since often a blessing could fit in multiple categores, but I tried to split them up evenly.

For this post I'll discuss some of the eternal blessings promised - blessings that require us to have a hope for the future.  There were 85 times an eternal blessing was promised for righteousness.

There were various forms of "being saved".

Salvation (mentioned 41 times)

Psalms 85:7
Shew us thy mercy, O LORD, and grant us thy salvation.
Psalms 85:9
Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him; that glory may dwell in our land.

Isaiah 33:22
For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; he will save us.

Lifted up sounds similar to me

Psalms 28:9
Save thy people, and bless thine inheritance: feed them also, and lift them up for ever.

Although it's technically different exaltation is in the same category

Isaiah 52:13
Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high.

As is being redeemed, although sometimes authors use this to just mean "out of trouble"

Deuteronomy 15:15
And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing to day.

Isaiah 43:1
But now thus saith the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.

Justification is in the same vein

Isaiah 45:25
In the LORD shall all the seed of Israel be justified, and shall glory.

Being accepted by God can happen in this life, but to me it felt like an eternal blessing

Genesis 4:7
If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

That acceptance can go to the level that you become a child of God

1 Chronicles 22:10
He shall build an house for my name; and he shall be my son, and I will be his father; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom over Israel for ever.

And you're going to say "No! We're automatically children of God, we don't have to be righteous to earn that".  Well there are scriptures that say being a child of  God is a blessing for the righteous

Hosea 1:10
Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God.

Abide forever is interseting - it hints that it's a blessing to not have your righteousness remembered

Psalms 125:1
They that trust in the LORD shall be as mount Zion, which cannot be removed, but abideth for ever.

There is a subtle truth here - all the good that you do can be erased through unworthiness.  I certainly know what that means.  It is a blessing to have your righteouss deed endure.

Psalms 112:3
Wealth and riches shall be in his house: and his righteousness endureth for ever.
Psalms 112:6
Surely he shall not be moved for ever: the righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance.
Psalms 112:9
He hath dispersed, he hath given to the poor; his righteousness endureth for ever; his horn shall be exalted with honour.

Which I think is in the same spirit as abiding forever

Psalms 125:1
They that trust in the LORD shall be as mount Zion, which cannot be removed, but abideth for ever.

The Lord's face to shine on us makes me think of his love

Psalms 119:135
Make thy face to shine upon thy servant; and teach me thy statutes.

Ezekiel 39:29
Neither will I hide my face any more from them: for I have poured out my spirit upon the house of Israel, saith the Lord GOD.

Which reminds me of the Tree of life mentioned by Lehi

Proverbs 11:30
The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he that winneth souls is wise.

The promised land (a different blessing under the financial section) is meant to be symbolic of heaven.  Moses didn't get to go in, but he did get to see it, which I think is a type of blessing and reminds me of John 3:5.

Deuteronomy 34:4
And the LORD said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.

More stats from the Old Testament

My last post examined the use of blessings and curses in the Old Testament (with comparisons to the Book of Mormon).  There were lots of other statistics that I tracked, and I looked to find interesting things to pull from them. 

Here's a plot of commandments based on whether the commandment is to do something, or not to do something.  Interestingly the ratio is about even.  The Lord says "Thou shalt" about as often as he says "Thou shalt not". 

There's a little bit of a spike in the Mosaic law part for the "not" commandments, and a little spike before the captivity of "thou shalt" commands.  Here's the plots for what was commanded.

You should be happy, courageous, strong, but not fearful or frivilous.  A lot of emphasis on controlling emotions, which I used to think was impossible.

Here's a plot of the descriptions given about God from the Book of Mormon:

Book of Mormon

Here's the same plot from the Old Testament:

Old Testament

Kind of noticeable that ANGRY is like 25% of the descriptors from the Old Testament (counting the top 20 descriptors) but it's much less in the Book of Mormon.  This just adds to the feeling that the God of the Old Testament is an angry vengeful God.  Here's a plot of where the "angry" descriptions fit in the timeline:

Notice that there's phases where the anger is mentioned more often, and not-surprisingly it's right around the time of the captivity.  

Some other nuggets of interesting findings gleaned from the Old Testament:

I know there's two texts overlapping, but you can see a lot of things that bring hope to anyone struggling.  In fact there's a lot of scriptures specifically talking about how much the Lord seeks to bless us when we feel the weakest.

Want to know the things that aren't openly discussed?  Humbly seek and live righteously and the Lord will help you learn mysteries and secrets of the kingdom.

 

Obviously we have trials because we're wicked.  But not all trials are from wickedness.  This shows all the reasons (note the "other" that has lots of small pieces), but from Old Testament half the trials are NOT because of wickedness.

Tough times?  To me it sounds trite to say "pray!" but the scriptures strongly back that up.  Along with letting others help.

Ever felt depleted to the point of despair?  You might like to know you're in company with a lot of other prophets.  By far the most frequent difficulty prophets faced was their own feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy, or lack of hope.  Being depressed does not make you a bad person, it means you're going through a tough trial.

This graph is interesting because while there's a lot of stories involving dreams, clouds, angels, visions and visitations there's also an awful lot of small singular methods.  If you're not the type to be recieving angels physically maybe there's just another way the Lord likes to talk to you in a different way.

We know scary times are ahead.  As they come keep in mind that this was prophesied, and the good news is that the end of the story will be fantastic.  The millenium is coming.

A lot of promises for when the Millenium comes.  I like the "all tears wiped away" promise.  Basically a promise that the Lord will help balance the massive injustices that currently exist in this world.

Blessings vs Curses

I'm a statistician, so of course I create statistics about the scriptures.

It started with the question of "Does God promise more blessings for righteousness or curses for wickedness?"  I studied it from the perspective of the Book of Mormon, then I did the same study for the Old Testament.   Here's a side by side comparison of their percentages.

They are surprisingly close - especially given the fact that I'm not perfect at identifying blessings and curses.  There's also variability based on the distinctive style of each prophet (remember - statistician).  It does seem like the Old Testament has a higher percentage of curses, but not enough to say it's all that different.

First off the Lord promises blessings more than curses.  Even under the Mosaic law of the Old Testament.  It's about a 2:1 ratio of blessings to curses.  This means the Lord would rather promise a blessing twice before threatening with a curse.  As a parent I've thought about the "carrot or the stick" styles of parenting.  

Clearly the Lord feels like there's appropriate times to promise blessings (carrot) or threaten punishment (stick).  But God tries the carrot twice before resorting to the stick.  I'm going to attempt to incorporate that into my parenting as well.

It's worth noting that the Book of Mormon and Old Testament are much closer in percentage than I expected.  It feels like their tones are so different.  But while the stories and prophetic styles are quite different the source is the same: The Lord.  What is quite different is which blessings or curses are mentioned.  Here's only the top ten from each book.

Old Testament

Book of Mormon

I'm showing only the top ten items in the pie chart because there's so many blessings/curses that are only mentioned once.  As you can see there is a strong emphasis on the promised land in the Old Testament, but a strong emphasis on joy in the Book of Mormon.  Here's the same thing with Curses:

Old Testament

Book of Mormon

Kind of noticable that the Old Testament is really heavy on DEATH.  The Book of Mormon focuses more on Destruction as a generic term.  I think there's two reasons for this:

1) The authors are different.

Book of Mormon was mostly written by Mormon (and his son Moroni, with a good chunk from Nephi) so the style is distinct.  The Old Testament has lots and lots of authors, so you'll see lots of different verbage, but death is sort of a uniformly understood term.

2) The audience is different

The Old Testament was written for ancient Isreal - although we can learn from it and special parts were written for us (looking at you Isaiah).  The Book of Mormon was written specifically for our time, so you'll see differences in culture.  For example "Shame" is listed as #3 in the Old Testament, but wasn't really mentioned in the Book of Mormon.  In ancient Israel shame would have been a sore curse, but in our modern world it isn't viewed as that serious.

The bottom line is this: God promises more blessings than curses, about a 2:1 ratio.  But the blessings (or curses) given are different depending on who the Lord uses to send his message and who the message goes to.

My next question was whether there were times that had more blessings/curses than other times.  The Book of Mormon didn't yeild results that were interseting, but the Old Testament has more verses. Looking through the bible in order gave this graph:

Stat bits - the height is how many times it's mentioned in that chapter.  It's in log scale so the really tall peaks don't overwhelm the graph.  The idea is to see where the blessings are mentioned more than curses (or vice versa).  This graph doesn't really have strong places where blessings are mentioned and curses not.

The Bible isn't actually in chronological order, so I mapped it across time to get this:

The problem is so much of the Bible takes place within a relatively small time frame.  So instead I left it in chronological order but spaced the chapters out evenly across the graph:

Spaced across time it looks like blessings are heavier at first, but as we get into Deuteronomy the curses are mentioned heavier.  Then blessings are a little stronger (both are mentioned a lot in the Psalms/Proverbs area), then as we get close to the time of captivity there's a strong mention of curses, then shortly after captivity it's back to lots of blessings.  Then curses again as we near the end of captivity, and it evens out with the smaller prophets.

There is another intersting find I discovered.  The top two blessings mentioned in the Old Testament were "A promised Land" and "Joy".  Mapping those out chronologically gave this graph:

Which also emphasizes that what blessings are mentioned will depend on the people the Lord is talking to.  A promised land was mentioned much less after they already had reached that land.

What lessons do we learn?  I think the Lord prepared the Isrealites to understand the blessings and curses with the teachings of Moses.  Then as they lived righteously the Lord promised blessings.  As they turned away from Him the curses were threatened.

It interests me that right after the captivity there's a surge in blessings promised.  I'm assuming it was to bring hope to those suffering.  I think we could listen to the words of the prophets to see what stage we are in.  Are things going well and the emphasis is on blessings?  That's a good sign.  Do things seem to be going well and the emphasis is on curses?  Perhaps we should look at where we can repent and return to the Lord.

If things are going badly and the emphasis is on blessings maybe we should take hope and turn to the Lord.  If it goes badly and curses are threatened, then if we are righteous that probably means things are about to get better.  Of course if we're not living righteously then watch out.  The end of the Book of Mormon was written specifically to help us understand that scenario.

Just because I like it - here's the top 20 blessings from the Old Testament