One Lord Over All (Ezekiel 28:25-26)

“The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.’” 

— Exodus 34:6-7 

“And now the LORD says… 
‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant 
to raise up the tribes of Jacob 
and to bring back the preserved of Israel; 
I will make you as a light for the nations, 
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’” 

— Isaiah 49:5-6 

Presumption of the Orphan (Genesis 31:17-55)

“St. Thomas, for instance, says: ‘That God wishes to give to someone... grace and glory proceeds from his sheer generosity.’ … [T]o someone, to some person at whom we can point. To someone, to you, to me, this very day.” — Henri de Lubac

“True faith is not only a certain knowledge, whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us in his word, but also an assured confidence... that not only to others, but to me also, remission of sin, everlasting righteousness and salvation, are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ's merits.” — Heidelberg Catechism, Question 21

“Read the words ‘me’ and ‘for me’ with great emphasis. Print this ‘me’ with capital letters in your heart, and do not ever doubt that you belong to the number of those who are meant by this ‘me.’ Christ did not only love Peter and Paul. The same love He felt for them He feels for us. If we cannot deny that we are sinners, we cannot deny that Christ died for our sins.” — Martin Luther

Fulfillment of the Promise (Revelation 7:9-17)

“Now as man could not live in society without truth, so likewise, not without joy.”

— Thomas Aquinas

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. “

— The Apostle Paul to the Galatians

What is the Blessing? (Ephesians 2:11-22)

“A people, we may say, is a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love. There can be as many different kinds of people as there are different things for them to love. … The better the things, the better the people; the worse the things, the worse their agreement to share them.”

— Augustine, The City of God XIX.24

Even in Exile the Nations are Blessed (Daniel 4:19-37)

“In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound's worth of Pride towards their fellow-men.”

—C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity