Psalm 67:6

Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(6) Then shall the earth yield her increase.—It seems more in keeping with the expression of thanks to render here with the LXX. and Vulg., “The land hath yielded her increase.”

Benson Commentary

Psalm 67:6-7. Then shall the earth yield her increase — When the inhabitants of the earth shall be converted to the worship and service of the true God, he will take away his curse from the earth, and cause it to yield them abundance of all sorts of fruits. Under which one blessing all other blessings, both temporal and spiritual, are comprehended. And God, even our own God — Who is Israel’s God, in a peculiar manner, by that covenant which he hath made with us; shall bless us — Confer still further and greater blessings upon us at the coming of the Messiah, when all the ends of the earth shall fear him — Shall remember and turn unto the Lord, and worship before him, Psalm 22:27.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

67:1-7 A prayer for the enlargement of Christ's kingdom. - All our happiness comes from God's mercy; therefore the first thing prayed for is, God be merciful to us, to us sinners, and pardon our sins. Pardon is conveyed by God's blessing, and secured in that. If we, by faith, walk with God, we may hope that his face will shine on us. The psalmist passes on to a prayer for the conversion of the Gentiles, which shows that the Old Testament saints desired that their advantages might also be enjoyed by others. And many Scripture prophecies and promises are wrapped up in prayers: the answer to the prayer of the church is as sure as the performance of God's promises. The joy wished to the nations, is holy joy. Let them be glad that by his providence the Lord will overrule the affairs of kingdoms; that even the kingdoms of this world shall became the kingdom of the Lord, and of his Christ. Then is declared a joyful prospect of all good when God shall do this. The success of the gospel brings outward mercies with it; righteousness exalts a nation. The blessing of the Lord sweetens all our creature-comforts to us, and makes them comforts indeed. All the world shall be brought to worship Him. When the gospel begins to spread, it shall go forward more and more, till it reaches to the ends of the earth. It is good to cast in our lot with those that are the blessed of the Lord. If nothing had been spoken in Scripture respecting the conversion of the heathen, we might think it vain to attempt so hopeless a work. But when we see with what confidence it is declared in the Scriptures, we may engage in missionary labours, assured that God will fulfil his own word. And shall we be backward to make known to the heathen the knowledge with which we are favoured, and the salvation we profess to glory in? They cannot learn unless they are taught. Then let us go forward in the strength of the Lord, and look to him to accompany the word the Holy Ghost; then Satan's kingdom shall be destroyed, and the kingdom of our Redeemer established.

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

Then shall the earth yield her increase - The word rendered "increase" - יבול yebûl - means properly produce, or that which the earth produces when properly cultivated. It is rendered "increase," as here, in Leviticus 26:4, Leviticus 26:20; Deuteronomy 32:22; Judges 6:4; Job 20:28; Psalm 78:46; Psalm 85:12; Ezekiel 34:27; Zechariah 8:12; and fruit, in Deuteronomy 11:17; Habakkuk 3:17; Haggai 1:10. It does not elsewhere cccur. The Hebrew verb here is in the past tense - "has yielded her increase," but the connection seems to demand that it shall be rendered in the future, as the entire psalm pertains to the future - to the diffusion of the knowledge of the way of God, Psalm 67:2; to the desire that the nations might praise him, Psalm 67:3-5; and to the fact that God would bless the people, Psalm 67:6-7. Thus understood, the idea is, that the prevalence of true religion in the world would be connected with prosperity, or that it would tend greatly to increase the productions of the earth. This, it would do,

(a) as such an acknowledgment of God would tend to secure the divine favor and blessing on those who cultivate the earth, preventing the necessity, by way of judgment, of cutting off its harvests by blight, and drought, and mildew, by frost, and storm, and destructive insects, caterpillars, and locusts;

(b) as it would lead to a much more extensive and general cultivation of the soil, bringing into the field multitudes, as laborers, to occupy its waste places, who are now idle, or intemperate, or who are cut down by vice and consigned to an early grave.

If all who are now idle were made industrious - as they would be by the influence of true religion; if all who by intemperance are rendered worthless, improvident, and wasteful, were made sober and working people; if all who are withdrawn from cultivating the earth by wars - who are kept in standing armies, consumers and not producers - or who are cut down in battle, should be occupied in tilling the soil, or should become producers in any way; and if all who are now slaves, and whose labor is not worth half as much as that of freemen, should be restored to their equal rights, - the productions of the earth would at once be increased many times beyond the present amount. The prevalence of true religion in the world, arresting the cause of idleness and improvidence, and keeping alive those who are now cut off by vice, by crime, and by the ravages of war, would soon make the whole world assume a different aspect, and would accomplish the prediction of the prophet Isaiah 35:1 that the "wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad, and that the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose." The earth has never yet been half cultivated. Vast tracts of land are still wholly unsubdued and uninhabited. No part of the earth has yet been made to produce all that it could be made to yield; and no one can estimate what the teeming earth might be made to produce if it were brought under the influence of proper cultivation. As far as the true religion spreads, it will be cultivated; and in the days of the millenium, when the true religion shall be diffused over all continents and islands, the earth will be a vast fruitful field, and much of the beauty and the fertility of Eden be reproduced in every land.

And God, even our own God, shall bless us - The true God; the God whom we adore. That is, He will bless us with this abundant fertility; he will bless us with every needed favor.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

6, 7. The blessings of a fruitful harvest are mentioned as types of greater and spiritual blessings, under which all nations shall fear and love God.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

When the people of the earth shall be converted to the worship and service of the true God, God will take away his curse from the earth, and cause it to yield them abundance of all sorts of fruits; under which one blessing promised under the law to them that obey God, all other blessings both temporal and spiritual are comprehended, as is very usual in the Old Testament.

Our own God; he who is Israel’s God in a peculiar manner, by that everlasting covenant which he hath made with us.

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

Then shall the earth yield her increase,.... Not literally the land of Israel, as in some copies of the Targum, and as Kimchi interprets it; see Leviticus 26:3; but mystically and spiritually the church of God in the times of the Messiah, Ezekiel 34:23; the word of God preached in the world is the seed sown in it; converts to Christ are the increase or fruit of it; and the church is God's husbandry, where it is yielded or brought forth; and this increase is of God, and is owing to the efficacy of his grace attending the ministration of the word, 1 Corinthians 3:6; it had its accomplishment in part in the first times of the Gospel, when it was preached by the apostles throughout the earth, and brought forth fruit everywhere, Colossians 1:5; and has been fulfilling more or less ever since, and will appear more abundantly in the latter day; a large increase and a plentiful harvest of souls shall be brought in, both Jews and Gentiles: or this may be understood of the fruitfulness of believers in Christ, who may be called "earth", because of their common original from the earth with the rest of mankind; because they are inhabitants of the earth; and because they have earthly as well as heavenly principles in them; but more especially because they are the good ground on whom the seed of the word falls and becomes fruitful; or are the earth which drinks in the rain of the Gospel, and of grace, and brings forth fruit meet for them, by whom it is dressed, and receives blessing of God, Matthew 13:23; these yield the fruits of the Spirit, increase in grace, and abound in the exercise of it; bring forth fruits meet for repentance, being filled with the fruits of righteousness by Christ; for the increase and fruit yielded by them are owing to the grace of God, to their grafting into Christ the vine, and to the influence of the blessed Spirit. Some of the ancients understand this of the incarnation of Christ; see Psalm 85:11; then "the earth" is the Virgin Mary, who was, as to her original, of the earth, earthly; of whose earthly substance Christ took flesh, and is called the fruit of her womb; yea, the fruit of the earth, Luke 1:42; for though he is the Lord from heaven, as to his divine nature, and came down from thence, not by change of place, but by assumption of nature; yet, as to his human nature, he was made of a woman, and is the seed of the woman, the promised seed, in whom all nations of the earth were to be blessed; and it here follows:

and God, even our own God, shall bless us; not as the God of nature and providence only; but as the God of grace, as a covenant God in Christ, in which sense he is peculiarly his people's own God, so as he is not others; and as such he blesses them with all spiritual blessings in Christ: or the repetition of the word "God", with the affix "our own", may denote the certainty of the divine blessing, the assurance had of it, and the great affection of the persons that express it: and some think, because the word is repeated three times in this verse and Psalm 68:7, respect is had to the trinity of Persons in the Godhead; God the Father blesses his people in Christ with the blessings of justification, pardon, adoption, and eternal life: the Son, who is Immanuel, God with us, God in our nature, our own God, God manifest in the flesh; he blesses with the same blessings of grace, peace, and eternal happiness; he was raised up of God as man and Mediator, and sent to bless his people, Acts 3:26.

Geneva Study Bible

Then shall {d} the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us.

(d) He shows that where God favours there will be abundance of all other things.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

6. Then shall the earth &c.] Render, The land hath yielded her increase, according to the promise of Leviticus 26:4; cp. Psalm 85:12; Psalm 65:9 ff. God, our God, is the Elohistic editor’s substitution for Jehovah our God.

shall bless us] Here and in the following verse the verbs might be taken as a prayer: may God bless us. But it is better to render doth or shall bless us. Pointing to the abundant harvest (Psalm 67:6 a), the thankful people declare that God is blessing them, and express their faith that He will continue to bless them, with the result that the remotest nations of the world will become ‘fearers of God,’ worshippers of the only true God, the God of Israel (Psalm 66:16).

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 6. - Then shall the earth yield her increase; literally, the land hath given her increase - a quotation from Leviticus 26:4, but probably in a metaphorical sense. An abundant spiritual harvest is seen by the psalmist as the result of the entrance of the Gentiles into the Church - an immense "increase" in the fruits of righteousness hitherto yielded - and this is spoken of as a result already obtained, through the perfect assurance of the writer that his prayers are granted and the result determined on in the Divine counsels. And God, even our own God, shall bless us. "Our own God" must certainly be Jehovah; but the writer, in his broad universalism, will not use the expression. Psalm 67:6

Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament

The joyous prospect of the conversion of heathen, expressed in the same words as in Psalm 67:5, here receives as its foundation a joyous event of the present time: the earth has just yielded its fruit (cf. Psalm 85:13), the fruit that had been sown and hoped for. This increase of corn and fruits is a blessing and an earnest of further blessing, by virtue of which (Jeremiah 33:9; Isaiah 60:3; cf. on the contrary Joel 2:17) it shall come to pass that all peoples unto the uttermost bounds of the earth shall reverence the God of Israel. For it is the way of God, that all the good that He manifests towards Israel shall be for the well-being of mankind.