What is Abundance?
There are two sections where the Lord promises Israel abundance, and they put to shame our modern materialistic and accounting way of thinking of abundance.
And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee.
Thou shalt be blessed above all people: there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle.
And the Lord will take away from thee all sickness
And the Lord thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy land, for good:
To our modern mindset, the blessing of abundant crops seems clearly good, put that one in the asset column; the extra cattle depends on the carrying capacity of the land, otherwise that just means more extras to cull; and the extra children seems like a solid drain on resources, put that one in the debit column.
To make the accounts square, we tell ourselves that children back then were actually an economic asset and so forth. I am skeptical that this has ever been the case. If there was an economic payoff to having a kid, then as now the payoff was measured in decades.
What is really going on is these verses is that for them abundance was a concrete, tangible thing. It was fertility and vigor and growth and everything bursting out anew. It was spring and pregnancy and new hopes.
It was blessings that you didn’t deserve and hadn’t paid the costs for.
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