“Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie!” -Psalm 40:4
Many will see and fear and put their trust in the Lord, says the Psalmist in the previous verse. And the man who makes the Lord his trust is a blessed man, he asserts here. It is often said that to be blessed is to be happy. Nearly every dictionary and lexicon confirms this, so there is no argument against understanding blessedness as happiness. However, we must qualify our definition of happiness.
Most dictionaries define happiness something like “a state of being in which pleasure decidedly predominates over pain.” In vulgar usage, happiness seems to be “anything that gratifies my desires whether noble or base.”
But this not the meaning in the classical sense. To be blessed in ANE cultures meant the fruitfulness of the ground and fruitfulness of the womb (recall the curse in Genesis 3). In the Mediterranean cultures like Greece, a similar concept was called eudaimonia (Eu = good + daimon = spirit), which is also usually translated happiness in English. As a matter of fact, this is what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he said human beings have an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence.
The idea of having a good spirit (eudaimonia) is explained as having a well-ordered soul which promotes a state of good-welfare, or human-flourishing, which is also another way of saying blessed.
But blessed has one more connotation, that of human flourishing because of divine favor. One who makes the Lord their trust will flourish because he possesses the unmerited favor of God. Not so for the one who turns to the proud. Those who go astray after a lie (faux blessings) may appear to experience some temporal satisfaction, but it’s always empty and comes with a price.
“The blessing of the Lord makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it.” -Proverbs 10:22