biblestudy: Matthew (Part Five)
Matthew 5:5-9
John W. Ritenbaugh
Given 09-Sep-81; Sermon #BS-MA05; 75 minutes
Description: (show)
We only did get four verses accomplished in chapter 5 and I think we will probably get four or five this evening. But really, the key things there in the first Bible study we had on chapter 5 were the meanings of some words that are very important to the understanding of the beatitude. The first, of course, is that word blessed, which is the Greek makarios, which means to be happy but it means a happiness that is generated from within.
It is a happiness that is not dependent upon circumstances, not dependent upon things. It is not dependent upon whether you have a lot of money, whether you live in a palatial estate, whether the weather is always sunny, or anything of that nature, even whether you have good health. But it is dependent upon something that is being generated from within. And of course, that generation is coming from God's Spirit and the hope that we have for the future.
Then the next thing was the word or the phrase "poor in spirit." Now, remember I showed you that that word poor has nothing at all to do with a person's monetary standing. It has nothing at all to do with money. It has nothing at all to do with poverty. It has everything to do with a person's goodness.
I gave you the example of David back there in Psalm 34 where he said that, "God heard this poor man." Now this poor man was David and David was far from poor. David was one of the wealthiest men who lived. But the word poor there is being used in the same sense as an Aramaic speaking person would understand it. And it evolved over the centuries of use from where it first did mean literally, to be someone with no money. But it eventually came to mean somebody who was good but depended upon God.
So a person who is poor in spirit was a person who was good spirited, and it meant that they were not rebellious. It meant that they were humble, submissive to God, that they were good in the eyes of God.
Then the next one was the word mourn. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." And that, of course, meaning a mourning or a sadness or a sorrow that cannot be hidden. It has to do with a person's feelings about himself in relation to his sins and how a person repents. But when a person repents, it is preceded by sorrow. Godly sorrow leads to repentance is what the Bible says. And so a person who is, if I can put it this way, broken up, heartsick over the things that he has done, over the effect of his sins on others and himself to the point where he is willing to turn, that person is going to be comforted.
We also said that there was a secondary application to that having to do with a person's feelings toward the world. Remember I used that scripture back in Ezekiel 9:4, how that Ezekiel saw his vision in which a great personage, I should say an angel, was told by God to take his sword and to kill all the people in the city, but he was not to kill the people who had the mark on their forehead. And those who had the mark on their forehead were those who sighed and cried for the abominations that were done in the city.
This has a very practical application to us in that we cannot just take what is going on in society, in this world as, "Well, it would happen anyway," kind of attitude. You know, all of the starvation, malnutrition, as we heard, 10,000 to 17,000 people a day are dying from the effects of malnutrition. There are countless murders, there are revolutions, economic warfare, tremendous ignorance throughout the entire world and all of these things, of course, are things that should make us cry out for God to establish His Kingdom. So those kind of people who have this attitude of wanting to see Satan unseated because of all the terror and abominations that he has caused on this earth and are really heartsick about it, those are the kind of people that God wants in His Family. And so God says that they are going to be comforted.
Let us pick it up in verse 5, and we will get to some new material.
Matthew 5:5 "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
Today, meek is hardly an honorable word. If you think of people's characteristics, of personality, and the way the word meek is used today, you sort of think of a Caspar Milquetoast. If you know who Caspar Milquetoast was, you know he was that character in the cartoon strip who was always too meek to stand up for what he believed. And so everybody just ran over him like they were a steamroller and he got flattened out in everything that he got involved in. So meek does not have a very strong and forceful connotation to us, although it did to those who spoke Greek at this time.
Now, what does it mean? It is a very difficult word to describe because we have no one English word that will exactly describe what this word means. Now, Aristotle felt that if a person was going to have understanding, he had to understand his language. And so he apparently spent a great deal of time defining words and he defined this word that we find translated here as being the meek, that is, the middle between the extreme of constant and fierce anger. That is on the one extreme. And on the other hand, the other extreme would be extreme angerlessness, that is, somebody who could never seemingly ever get stirred up. The kind of person where there could be a riot going on around them, bombs going off, shootings here and there, and he would just be kind of strolling through it as though nothing was happening. And I am sure you probably know people who are not quite that bad, but at least somewhat along that line.
If we had a person on one extreme who would be a spendthrift, a person who just threw his money all over the place, and then on the other hand, at the other end, you would have a person who was a miser, somebody who really pinched every penny, then in the meek, you see, right in the middle, would be, let us just say, a normally generous and good steward of his money.
Meek then, according to Aristotle, this is a Greek usage of it not necessarily the biblical usage, but he then described meek as being a form of a person's disposition. It is neither mild nor is it excessively angry but is in between the two.
Now let us paraphrase verse 5 just using his definition. This is not a thus saith the Lord or anything. We are just paraphrasing it to help give us a little bit of understanding: "Blessed is the man who was always angry at the right time and never at the wrong." Is it right ever to be angry? Well, the answer to that, of course, is yes, it is on occasion right to be angry.
Turn back to a scripture here in Ephesians the fourth chapter.
Ephesians 4:26 [Paul said] "Be angry, and do not sin": do not let the sun go down on your wrath.
Here is an anger that is righteous, yet it never goes beyond the end of the day. So it seems as though it has a time limit to it and it has a righteousness to it.
We can look around the Bible and we can find people that we know have these characteristics. And yet we also know that at times they showed what we might consider to be blazing hot anger. For instance, Jesus. Jesus certainly had these characteristics. He was a man who was meek, yet on at least two different occasions, He strode into the Temple, overturned tables, chased people out from the courtyard, and put a whip to the back side of some animals and drove them out as well, scattering money all over the place. Oh, He was undoubtedly angry. He said that, "My Father's house is a house of prayer. You shall not make it a den of iniquity," because here were all of these businessmen making money within the courtyards of the Temple. So He got angry.
Certainly you are familiar with the anger that Moses displayed from time to time. He could get very, very angry. And yet he is described in Numbers the 12th chapter as being meek above all men on earth. I think you ought to begin to see that meek has nothing to do with being mild, that meek does have something to do with a person's disposition.
Let us go on to a secondary application. This word is also used to describe a domesticated animal. Now, what is the difference between a domesticated animal and a wild animal? A wild animal will not permit itself to be brought under the control of a man. It will resist unto death, let us say. On the other hand, a domesticated animal, a cow, an ox, sheep, goats, dogs, cats will permit themselves to be controlled by an external force, that is, man. And so then, meek has the connotation of being domesticated, that is, being under the control of another. We are beginning to get closer and closer to a clear understanding of what this word means.
There is a third application. You have probably seen in dictionaries where a word will be given and beside it or included within its definition will be both synonyms and antonyms. Now, whenever meek is compared to its opposite, we begin to understand even more about what it means. The opposite of meek in the Greek is huposelocardia. It sounds like a tongue twister. Yet you are familiar with many parts of that word.
Hupo means up. And in the English language, we have the word hyper, which is a form of that word. We say that a person is hyper, we mean that they are overactive, you see, they are souped up. Hupo means up. Now cardia. Anybody ever heard of cardiac arrest? Cardia in Greek means heart. Literally that word huposelocardia means upper heart or it means lofty-hearted or it means proud.
So the opposite of proud is meek.
Now, if we put all three of those together what do you have? You have a human being who has the characteristics on the one hand of being humble, on the other hand of having an anger, but an anger that is always on the leash. It is always under control, it never gets out of bounds, and a person who allows himself to be controlled by another. I will tell you, there is a person with really excellent characteristics.
Let us just put them together with Moses. It says that Moses was meek above all men on earth. And we have this description then of what meek is. First of all, if you can just remember that situation back in Numbers of 12th chapter, here was Moses, where it says that he had married a Cushite woman. Now Moses was the leader of all the Israelites. He was God appointed, he was in a position that was higher than anybody in the land. He had done something that his brother and sister thought was against the law of God.
And so, they came, apparently in anger against God's elect, God's chosen one, and they began pointing the finger at him, accusing him of doing something that was wrong. Now, here is this man in a lofty position. Did he strike out at them in anger? No, he controlled his anger, because you do not see any kind of angry response from Moses at all, but rather the whole thing, that whole circumstance is predicated upon Moses' disposition. See, Moses did not strike out at them. He humbly listened to their accusation. He controlled himself, was open-minded. He did not reject out of hand what they said, saying, "You shouldn't be accusing me at all."
Now, when we begin to put this word into practical application, it means a person who is open-minded, who is willing to be taught, who will yield to truth, who is not too proud, regardless of his age or position, to be taught something that is new. That is quite a quality to have. Because a lot of people get into positions and they think that they are above reproach.
Turn with me back to Proverbs the 16th chapter, verse 32. Meekness has to do with the way a person controls his temper.
Proverbs 16:32 He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, . . .
Remember Moses where it said he was meek above all. He did not jump all over them, he held his temper. Why? Because he was under the control of God, you see, under the control of God's Spirit. And so he did not lash out at them. If he had done something wrong, he was willing to be corrected, he was willing to take new knowledge. He controlled his spirit.
Proverbs 16:32 . . . and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.
So meekness has to do with a person's temperament, a person who is even tempered, he has himself under control. He is capable of anger at the right time, but always it is under control. And so that kind of a person is really peaceable. He is really malleable. He is humble, he is submissive, he is domesticated. So you see, there is no way that you can put one word that would describe this word meek. We do not have any word in the English language that compares to it. I would say probably the closest would be self-control. That is just me thinking.
Let us go on to verse 6.
Matthew 5:6 "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled."
The key word here is hunger and thirst for the Word. Now, most of us have never experienced the kind of hunger and thirst that is being spoken of here. Most of the time, a large percentage of the time that we have ever been hungry in our lives, we have always been hungry with the knowledge that food was really not very far away. Most of the time when we have been hungry, it has been between meals, just before breakfast, or when we began to fast we knew that our fast had a limit on it of one day or two days, three days, or whatever. And we knew that when that period of time was up, that our hunger was going to be ended. We also knew that any time we wanted to, even when we were hungry, we could probably walk to the refrigerator and get something to eat or walk over to the sink and get a glass of water or whatever it was that we needed to satiate ourselves, it could be taken care of.
But the hunger that is being spoken of here is the hunger of a person who is out on a desert and a windstorm comes up and so he wraps himself (if you can just think of how Arab people who travel the desert dress), in a big sheet around his head (I think they call that the headdress the burnoose), they give themselves a little bit of an air hole there for them to breathe, and do the best they possibly can all the while the wind is blowing.
Now, even in this area, when a weather system moves through, that sometimes one front will follow right on the heels of another. And I have been here when it has rained for virtually an entire week, where one storm would follow right on the heels of the other. Well, that same thing happens out on the desert, only instead of it raining, the wind blows and maybe for 4, 5, 6, 7 days you are living in the midst of a finely-blowing silt. And even if you would take something out to eat, if you could even get it, why before you get the thing in your mouth, it would be like it would be covered with a grit. There is almost no way to get anything to drink unless maybe you have a canteen under your dress there with you.
And so there you are sitting on the desert, the wind is blowing at 20, 30, 40 miles an hour and you are in the midst of a sandstorm that might last you do not know how long. And so you sit there and you get hungrier and hungrier and thirstier and thirstier and there is apparently no end.
I knew a man, maybe some of you have experienced something like this, but during the Second World War, he unfortunately was in Japan, in Corregidor, whenever the Japanese captured it and he was taken prisoner, and he took part in that Bataan Death March. And then after the Death March was over, he was put into the hold of a ship. And it was dark, smelly, and wet down there in the heat, people were vomiting all around them, urinating all around them, defecating all around them. Every once in a while, the Japanese would open up the hatch on the hold and they would stick a fire hose or something down in there and everybody would get doused with salt water, which in the long run does not do you much good when that salt begins to dry out on you, cracking your skin. And that man knew a hunger and a fear at the same time, that he never knew when the end would come.
Finally he got into Japan and after being in a detention camp for a little while, they stuck him to work in a coal mine. And by this time, it was about 1943 or '44, and he was getting so desperate not having anywhere near enough to eat at any time. During the whole four years, he was taken captive in 1941 and now we were in the 1944 and 1945, he was beginning to look for any out that he could possibly have in order to get some kind of relief from the intense hunger that he was always in. He was just down to skin and bone and all the hard work that he had to do. And so in order to get out of the situation, he and his buddy made a deal. He said, "Look, the first chance we get, I'm going to put my legs up on one of these sawhorses." And he says, "You take a pick handle and you whack me across the shins as hard as you can and try to break my leg." And the guy did it, but his leg did not break. After he came into the church, he told me that he was sure glad that his leg did not break because most of the fellows who went into the hospital died. But that man was desperately hungry.
Now, that is the kind of hunger that you and I have never experienced. And that is the kind of hunger that is being talked about here.
Let us begin to apply this in a practical way. Just how hungry are you for righteousness? How thirsty? Are you willing to die for it like this man (he was a member of the Pittsburgh church), where he was willing to break his leg or do anything to get out of that situation in order to get his stomach full for a little bit and to feel satiated, to get a little bit of strength in him so that he did not always feel tired, or whatever, and always in pain.
Do we really feel that hungry for righteousness? I will tell you, of all of the beatitudes, this one is without a doubt, the most demanding of them all. You can look back, I believe it is in Psalm 42, where David said that he hungered and thirsted after God's Word like a deer in the desert. No wonder that man was a man after God's own heart, because he really wanted to be like God. He was not playing games. He did not play church. He was really out, if I can put it that way, to be like God.
So how much do you want to be good? How much do you want to be righteous? How intense is that drive?
With most of us, we do have a yearning to be good. We have a yearning to be righteous. But whenever we get to the point where it is going to take a little bit of sacrifice in order to be righteous, in order to be good, where we are going to come to the place where we are going to undergo a little bit of pain, because our desire to be righteous, because our desire to be good, our desire to be Godlike is not anywhere near as strong as it should be, we back off. Because our desire to be good is negligent. Really, when we examine ourselves, we really have not committed ourselves to the guidelines.
Now, I am going to show you something else. Even though this is the most demanding of all of the beatitudes, it is in its own way also the most comforting. Now, let us look at what it said. It says, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." You know, it does not say that the person actually has to do the right thing, does it? It says that the person has to hunger and thirst for it.
Hold your finger there and let us go back into the Old Testament and I will show you an example. But think David again, back in I Kings the eighth chapter, verse 18. Now Solomon is the one who is speaking and he is recounting something to the people and of course to us as well, that went on between David and God.
Now, we all know that David wanted to build the Temple and I am sure that he wanted to do that. He had a hunger and a thirst and a desire to do anything that he could possibly do to make a memorial for God. Something that would stand out above anything that had ever been built on the face of this earth. David felt that he owed God so much that there was no way that he could possibly pay God back, but he wanted to do something that would be to the glory of God that no other nation could say that they had built anything that was so magnificent or beautiful. But God apparently said to David, either through a prophet or to David himself in some way, "David, you're not going to do it because you've been a man of war. You've spilled an awful lot of blood and no man of war is going to build this monument to Me." But He said, "Somebody who is a man of peace is going to do it." Of course, David's son did that. And incidentally Solomon means peaceful. But notice what Solomon said here in verse 18.
I Kings 8:18 "But the Lord said to my father David, 'Whereas it was in your heart to build a temple for My name, you did well that it was in your heart.'"
I will tell you, we can be awfully thankful that we have a God who not only takes into account in judging us what we do, but He looks at our intentions as well and He gives us, you might say, a favor, a blessing, or whatever because we wanted to do the right thing, even though from time to time we fall short.
Paul said in Romans 1:16, that the Gospel is "the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes." What he meant was for the person who really understands the gospel, who believes it, and who has a vision in his mind that is very sharply etched so that like Abraham, he sees the city afar off and he directs his life to that city, the same as Jacob, the same as Isaac, the same as Noah, and others, that that person is going to be motivated to move in the right direction because they are yearning, their desire, their sense of urgency to reach out and grab on to that, if I can put it that way, is so intense, so great that it covers every portion of their life and they are always thinking about it. It is never very far from their minds, that person is going to reach his goal.
That is what God knows about this principle that we are talking about here. That if a person is really hungry to be Godlike, if he really thirsts after it, like a person who is trapped out on a desert in the midst of a storm and his throat is filled with dust and he is parched inside and out (if you can just imagine somehow what that might be like), if you really desire to be Godlike you are going to go in that direction. And so then He gives you credit in the meanwhile for the desire being there, that sense of urgency to be right. And so we are always, those of us who do have this drive within us, we are always going to be [?] it.
But a person who dreams dreams that big always is. His dreams are always going to outrun his ability to achieve them. And so what God is saying here is, "Look, shoot high, shoot for the stars in terms of righteousness, strive to be perfect, because that urgency to be perfect is within you. I'll put it on your account and I'll bless you simply because it's there even though you fall short. But keep on striving because you'll make it."
So He says, then, that those people shall be filled. We may not be filled to the Kingdom of God but we will be, and that is a promise that He gives to us.
One more thing here, just to add to it. This is something that is grammatical. That normally this would have been written in the genitive case. This kind of a verb would have been in the genitive case. Now, in the English, when we use this case, it is always followed by the word "of," which indicates possession or generation or belonging to. you. But it indicates possession or emanating from.
Now, when a Greek wrote a sentence like this and he used the genitive case, it indicated that the person wanted a portion of something, that is, a piece of bread from a whole loaf. Now, when Matthew wrote this, he actually wrote it somewhat awkwardly but it is very indicative of what he had in his mind when he wrote it. Because he did not write it in the normal genitive case. He wrote it in the direct accusative case, which turns the meaning from wanting a portion, let us say, a slice of bread out of a whole loaf. Instead, the person is saying, I want the whole loaf. I am not going to be satisfied with just a portion.
What this means, then, if we try to transpose it into English, we would actually have to paraphrase Matthew's intention. And what it means is that "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for complete righteousness, for they shall be filled." Now, are you satisfied with a portion? Are you satisfied to just go partway in obedience to God, in yielding to God? Well, the person who has this hungering and thirsting will never be satisfied with a portion. He wants to be totally like God. And so he will yield himself to accomplish that.
You can see that these beatitudes really set high standards. I will tell you, when you begin to understand what Jesus is teaching here, He is saying, "Man, I want you to reach for the stars!" They are tremendously high standards, these aspects of character.
Let us go on to the next one.
Matthew 5:7 "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy."
This is a statement of principle that runs through the entirety of both Old and New Testaments. Let us go back to the book of James, the second chapter. James goes through a whole series of ways in which we, driven by our prejudices, commit respect of persons.
James 2:10-13 For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all. For He who said, "Do not commit adultery," also said, "Do not murder." Now, if you do not commit adultery, but you do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so do as those who will be judged by the law of liberty [because we are going to be judged out of the Book] [this is the verse that I want] For judgment is without mercy to the one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
It is a very clear New Testament principle that God forgives us as we forgive others who sin (or trespass) against us. And that as we are merciful, so God is merciful to us. It is a form of the "whatever you sow that is how you reap" principle that runs throughout the Bible. Only in this case, we are talking about judgment. We are talking about whether or not we are going to receive mercy from God.
Let us go back to the book of Matthew, this time in chapter 18. We will see this principle again, this time in verse 35. Now some of you who were at our YES program about a year ago can probably remember several of our people acting this particular parable out on the stage here. Remember one member was the king and he forgave this one fellow of a tremendous debt and this fellow went out and he beat the fellow who owed him a very, very tiny portion of money.
Matthew 18:32-35 "Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, 'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?' And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him. So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses."
So it is put a slightly different way than James put it. It is the opposite side of the coin. If we do not forgive, then we go to the tormentors. If we do forgive, then God will forgive us. He will have mercy.
Now, back to the Sermon on the Mount and right in what is called the Lord's Prayer in verse 12 of chapter 6.
Matthew 6:12 "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."
You see, "as we." That is a prayer that we are to make to God, a request. "God, would you please forgive me as I forgive others?" Boy, I guess if we really understand that, if we really wanted God's forgiveness, we would do an awful lot of forgiving of other people.
Matthew 6:14-15 "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."
That sets the standard. Now we know how God forgives. He forgives as we forgive others. Now, how do we reach this state where we can really relate to another person in order to make it possible for us to forgive? That is really the hard part.
Now, this word merciful is used in place of the Aramaic that was spoken. And the Aramaic word here is chesed. That word is untranslatable in the English language. I am using chesed here because it is what is used in the Old Testament and the same principle applies in the Old Testament as the New Testament. And because Jesus spoke in Aramaic. But our word merciful really does not connote what is intended here, I am sure.
Chesed does not mean merely to sympathize with. Now, if we can normally sympathize with a person and kind of halfway understand why they did something, then we can be forgiving of what they did. But this word chesed means literally, to experience by crawling inside of. You see, that is not literally possible. That is why it is untranslatable. You cannot literally crawl inside of somebody and experience something through their eyes. But yet, that is what it means.
Now in practical application, what it means is to make a conscious identification through a deliberate effort of the will. Remember, this is being done to somebody that has sinned against you and you are being called upon, let us say, to forgive them. That is a very difficult thing to do. Now, you know that if somebody offends you, if they sinned against you, your feelings are pretty strong against that person, are they not? You better believe it. And so your mind is rising against this other person and yet what God is calling upon us to do here is to bend our will to try to see the situation through the other person's eyes and to be sympathetic for it.
I will tell you, that is hard to do when your mind is racing to defend yourself and to accuse the other person. And you can think of all kinds of reasons why you should be angry at this other person because of what they have done against you. You can see that would take a great deal of mental effort, requires a great deal of concern to try to get things straightened out.
Now, if we are able to do this, it will have a tendency to help us in two practical areas. First of all, it will help us to avoid being kind at the wrong time. If you can really think of something from the other person's perspective, then it will help you to avoid being helpful, if I can put it that way, or kind at the wrong time.
Sometimes it is the wrong time to give people help. You know that as a practical fact. We have a cliché about throwing good money after bad. It is like throwing money down a sewer or flushing it down the toilet or something. What good does it do to give somebody who is a ne'er-do-well spendthrift and an alcoholic besides, money to buy a meal? What are they probably going to do?
I remember a story once that one of our ministers told how he was in Akron, right near the YMCA. And he had just come out of the YMC A where he had been in there exercising and this panhandler came by and said, "Hey, buddy, can you spare a dime. I'd like to get a cup of coffee" routine. Well, our minister looked at him and he said, "Look, I'll do better than that. I'm a member of this Y. Why don't you and I go in inside, use my membership there and we will take you in, you can shower and you can shave, you can get all cleaned up, and later on I'll take you down to the cafeteria and I'll buy you a really good meal." Well, the guy flipped out and got away. That is not what he wanted. He wanted money to get another drink. He was not worried about getting cleaned up, about getting saved, or about getting a good meal. And really what our minister was going to do here was going to send good money after bad. That is really all that it was going to amount to, even though his intentions were good.
You know, I have the opportunity from time to time to help people out of our emergency funds. And once in a while I will refuse a person. It does not happen real often. But once in a while I will, because if I can determine that this person is not really spending the money that he does have in a good way, I will not give them the money that they want because really, what would I be doing? That emergency money is money that you people have contributed to the work. I would be, in a sense, contributing good money after bad, if a guy is, let us say, in financial trouble and he has been in financial trouble for a long time and he needs some help. But if I can determine that he really is not spending the money that he does have in a right way, I probably will not loan him the money. Sometimes I will find, let us say, that a person is spending the money that he does have on booze. To me, that is not spending money in the right way. Here he wants money to buy his kids shoes, but he still has to have his booze. To me, that does not make sense. That is spending good money after bad.
Sometimes I have found ladies who they may have a financial need, but at the same time, the little money that they do have might go to the beautician, $20, $15 dollars or whatever for some fancy hairdo or whatever. Now, to me, that is not wise handling of the money that you do have. That person has not really learned what it is like yet to be poor. Well, sometimes it takes a little bit of time and questioning for these things to come up. And so there are times when it is not good to loan a person money. There are times when it is not good to help. It would actually be doing the wrong thing.
So if we can really, you might say, crawl inside the other person, it will help us to avoid those situations.
On the other hand, though, and maybe far more importantly is, it would make forgiveness and tolerance much easier. We would be able to tolerate the weaknesses of others, the immaturity of others, much easier if we can really bend our minds to try to think of things from their perspective and understand we may not agree with what they are doing, but that does not mean that we cannot be merciful to them. We may not agree with their weaknesses, but we can tolerate them, giving them time and opportunity to grow and to mature. And in the meantime, even though we know that from time to time they are going to do wrong things and they are going to offend us, why, we can put up with it and we can overlook it and we can forgive.
Perhaps the best example of all of this principle that is being spoken of here is what God did in Jesus Christ. Because did not God literally crawl inside of a man? He did that literally. And why did He do it? I am convinced that He did it not only in order to provide a means of paying the penalty for our sins, but I am equally convinced that He did it in order to temper His judgment concerning us. Because now we have a Judge who is familiar with what it is like to be a man. He has lived in the flesh. He has gone hungry. He has suffered pain. He has cried. He has been in agony. He has experienced overcoming and growing, in increasing in knowledge, in being tempted. And He knows what a man is like, inside and out.
Now, that is the supreme example of what it is, what God means here to crawl inside of somebody. God was willing to give up all of His majesty and power in order to understand what it is like to be a man.
So, blessed are the merciful. Those who are able to control their thinking, control their will, even toward somebody who has sinned against them so that they can see this other's point of view. If we are able to do that, you know what is going to happen? You are going to see a reflection of yourself in the other person. Think about that. You are going to see a reflection of yourself in the other person.
Now, how would you want to be treated if you were in his shoes? You may not sin or be foolish in exactly the same specifics as the other person, but you ought to be able to see yourself in principle in the actions of another person. If you cannot, brethren, you have a problem with self-righteousness that you need to confront. If you cannot see yourself in somebody else, you have a problem with self-righteousness.
Let us go on to another area here.
Matthew 5:8 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
The key word here, of course, is pure, and maybe secondarily after that the word heart. You are familiar at least somewhat with this word in the Greek, it is the word kathara. You have heard of cauterizing, you heard of catherization—medical terms. Well, that comes from this word kathara and it means "clean," as in wash. You know, somebody who has been washed has been kathara.
It is also used of grain that has been winnowed. The way they used to do it in the old days is that they would have the grain in a pile and take a shovel and throw it up in the air and the wind would blow away the chaff a little bit downwind and the heavier grain would fall back down to earth. And so whenever the grain had been winnowed, it was said to be to kathara. That is, it had been cleaned.
It also is used in the sense of an army that has been cleaned of all of its power, all of those who are faint-hearted or weak in some way and so all that is left are the soldiers who are first class soldiers. Everybody else has been weeded out.
So the basic meaning of the word kathara and thus the word pure is unalloyed, unadulterated, unmixed. You see, it is absolutely pure. It is unadulterated, unalloyed, unmixed.
If we were to paraphrase this, it would then be paraphrased, "Blessed is a man whose motives are always entirely unmixed."
Now, why did I use the word motive? Because Jesus said in Matthew 15 that it is out of the heart that proceed fornication, adulteries, murders, and on and on, that is, that they have their generation, their beginning, the sin has its beginning within the heart of man. And heart, in the Bible, in the biblical sense, is used in the sense of being the seat of the person's attitude. You see, that to which he is inclined, that way in which he leans. An attitude is a direction of mind, a leaning.
What God is saying here then is that they are happy or blessed whose leanings are unalloyed, unmixed, always pure; they are selfless, they are righteous.
Let us begin to examine this because this is a beatitude that requires a great deal of self-examination. It is very difficult to do a good thing, a good deed, without even basking in the sunshine, you know, the brilliance of our own self-approval. You know, to feel proud because we did a good thing. So we have to begin to ask ourselves, why did I do that? Did I do it to get the praise of other people? Did I do it in order to be paid? Did I do it because I wanted to feel good? Or did I really do it selflessly, just for the good of the other person?
You see, our feelings about things really are not as clean and clear cut as they need to be because always there is within us this drive for the wrong kind of approval. We can even turn Bible study and prayer into the wrong thing. Now ask yourself: Do I study God's Word, do I pray to Him because I really want to be in the company and fellowship of God? Or am I doing it in order to have superiority over other men? There is another problem with self-righteousness there. We can even study in the wrong attitude altogether. So we need to examine our approach to things.
Notice that Jesus said that it is going to be the pure in heart who will see God. Now we only see what we are prepared to think or, let us say, educated decision. I see people out here who are educated in areas in which I am not. Now, I could walk out into this parking lot and I could look up at the sky there with Lee Olson and I would be able to point out maybe the Big Dipper and a few other stars, but I am not all that prepared to see what he can see up there. I do not know, he may be capable of naming, identifying, and positioning for me hundreds of different stars than I could. He is prepared to see a lot more in the sky than I am.
Mr. Grau here who is a mathematician and he worked in physics and I could walk into his classroom and look at the board up there and there might be some formulas and it looks just like so much gibberish to me. But to him, it might be a formula and appear to be very simple, a formula for something to me that is nothing. But you see, he is prepared to understand it and I am not prepared. There are others, Eddie Ross out there and Mrs. Ross, they know a great deal about gardening and farming and I could walk out into the field with them and I might be able to enjoy the color of a flower or something and appreciate or name just a few things. But they can see things that years of experience and education on the farm have taught them and they are much better prepared to see things than I am. We can go on and on with this principle.
Now, do you see what I am driving at? He says here that it is going to be the pure in heart who are going to see God. That word see, I feel it could be taken at least two ways: it can be taken literally, and I am sure that that is its intention. That those who are pure in heart, who have pure motivation, whose hearts have been prepared, they are going to see God literally, face to face. But I wonder if it does not also mean that those whose hearts are being prepared by being cleaned up, whose motivations are becoming cleaner and cleaner, that they are going to be the only ones right here and now on this earth who understand God, who "see" Him, who get to understand what God is working on, who understand what God wants, what He is striving for, who grasp the purpose of life, who understand the Kingdom of God. I believe that that is exactly what He means.
What does it say back in Titus 1:15? It says that, to the pure all things are pure, but to those who are evil, nothing is pure. You know, a person who is of a pure heart he can see God in just about anything. He can see God's majesty, God's intelligence, God's power, God's wisdom, God's beauty, God's humor, God's vision, His foresight, His wisdom. So he sees positive things, beautiful things all around him. But a person who is of a filthy mind, sees filth, and he is negative. He does not get the purpose of life. He is down on everything, he is depressed, he is discouraged.
Why do you think that Paul said in Philippians 4:8 that we ought to think on certain things, things that are pure and good and beautiful and wholesome and right? You know why? Because those things are preparing your heart to see God and getting your mind away from all the negativism and all the filthiness and all the cynicism and all the sarcasm that is in this human spirit. But people who are like that, they cannot see that at all. They just do not get it.
So this is one that requires, as I said, a great deal of self-examination and ties directly into what Mr. Register was giving in his sermon last week about the battle for your mind. What is going in there is so exceedingly important.
Matthew 5:9 "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."
I think all of us know that the Aramaic and Hebrew words for peace is shalom. That is undoubtedly what Jesus spoke here—shalom. Now, what does shalom mean? Well, it literally means peace. But what it does not mean is merely the absence of trouble. Now, sometimes we tend to think of peace as being a time when there is no trouble. Certainly the definition includes that, but shalom means a great deal more.
Shalom means the enjoyment of all good. You see, if you are thinking of peace only in terms of the absence of trouble, then your approach to peace is one of passivity. The word shalom is an aggressive statement. What you are saying is, that I hope you enjoy all good. It is not just passive acceptance of a circumstance, but rather a positive overflowing and enjoyment of all good.
Now let us begin to notice here. First of all, the blessing is not on peace lovers but on peacemakers. I think everybody wants to be at peace. That is, to have a time of no trouble. But do you not know, brethren, that peacemakers generally have trouble flailing all around them. They are people who make peace where peace does not exist. Is that not right? Yes, it is. A peacemaker is somebody who makes peace and therefore he operates in an environment in which there is no peace. But he is bringing peace. And when he leaves the situation, then there is either peace or there is a lot more peace than there was before he entered in to the situation.
Sometimes because we think of peace in a passive sense, that is, merely being the absence of trouble, we end up making more trouble by avoiding whatever it would take to make peace. Now, this often happens with, mostly in this case, of ladies who are called into the church and converted without their husbands. And sometimes in order to avoid trouble in the family, they will do just about anything except the right thing in order to make peace within the house.
Let me ask you a simple question. How do you make peace? Well, the first thing that anybody has to do to make peace is to do what God said. Is it not one of God's promises throughout the Old Testament? He says, "Hey, let Me fight your battles for you. All I want you to do is to obey Me." Now, unfortunately, many of our ladies do not put their faith in God and so they kind of waffle all over the place in their obedience to God and do not really face up to the situation. In this case, the situation might be the husband.
I was telling the people down in Augusta last night that in all the time that I have been in the ministry and all the time that I have heard ladies tell me that their husband has threatened to divorce them, leave them, beat them up, or whatever if they got involved in this church, kept the Sabbath, or whatever, that it has almost never occurred. I cannot remember one time that it ever occurred where the woman stood up for what God says to do that the husband actually carried through with his threat. Now, I do know of cases where the woman waffled all over the place. Sometimes she would obey and sometimes she would not, that the husband did end up leaving. But where she really took a stand, she said, "No, I'm going to obey God," I do not know of any time that God failed to back her up and give her favor in that man's eyes. Sometimes the most hostile men have eventually come into the church because of the outstanding witness of his wife.
Now, what I am saying here this: that evading our responsibility to God will never produce peace. Peace is made by God through people who obeyed Him. God is really the great peacemaker. It is our responsibility to yield to Him.
So this peace that is being talked about here is not a passive acceptance of circumstances at all. But rather, it is an active facing of the trouble through obedience to God. That is what makes peace.
Let us go on to another phrase here. He said that they will be called sons of God. Now, here we have another Hebraism, that is, it is a phrase that is unique to the Hebrew people. Whenever they said that a person was a son of something, it did not mean that he literally was a son even of that person. For example, in the genealogies that are given in Matthew 1 and in Luke 3, there are several cases there where it says "son of" this person, "son of" that person, and so forth, that they are not literally the son, but they may even be the grandson or great grandson of that person. It does not mean that they are literally, even in a genealogy, a son of that person. But many times it does.
However, when they are describing a person, they might use a phrase like we are going to see here in Acts the fourth chapter. Do you remember Jesus called James and John the sons of thunder? Were they literally the sons of thunder? Of course not. What did He do? He took characteristics of their personality, did He not, things that would be descriptive of their temperament, and He said, "Hey, you're sons of thunder." That is, you are like thunder, you make a lot of noise, you are a big bang. Maybe you have mercurial temper.
Back here in Acts 4, verse 36 we have another one where a man had a characteristic about him and it was so outstanding that the apostles actually gave this man a new surname.
Acts 4:36 And Joses, who was also named Barnabas by the apostles (which is translated Son of Encouragement).
Now, he was literally not the son of Barnabas. He was not literally the son of encouragement. He had an outstanding characteristic. He was able to console people, he was able to comfort people, he was able to encourage people. And this characteristic was so strong that they actually gave him the surname Barnabas, which means son of encouragement. This Hebraism means, when it appears like this, that this person is like what is being described, like the adjective or like the adverb that is a strong part of his personality.
I will give you another one. Back in Acts 13 where we see what Paul called Elymas.
Acts 13:8-10 But Elymas the sorcerer (for so his name is translated) withstood them, seeking to turn away the proconsul from the faith. Then Saul, who is also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him and said, "O full of deceit and all fraud, you son of the devil."
He was not literally Satan's son, but he had so many of his characteristics, he acted like the Devil. So Paul called him that, a son of the Devil.
Now, back here in the book of John, the eighth chapter, we have this long dialogue between Jesus and the group of Jews that were confronting Him and they claimed in verse 33 that they were Abraham's seed. And Jesus agreed that yes, they had their ancestry back to Abraham. But He said in verse 34, "Whoever commits sin is a slave of sin." And he went on in verse 37,
John 8:37 "I know that you are Abraham's descendants, but you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you."
And He went on to say that Abraham never did those things. How can you claim that you are Abraham's seed when you are not what? You are not like Abraham! That is what He is saying. He is saying you do not have any right to be called Abraham's seed because you are not like Abraham. And finally He got down to verse 44. He said, "You are of your father the devil." You are like the Devil, therefore, he is your father.
Let us put that back into Matthew 5:9. People who make peace are what? They are like God. The only way that you can be like God is to do what God does. And then if you do what God does, then you have the same characteristics as God. Then you are like God. And so if you are like God, then you are a son of God and only those who are like God are someday going to be literally His sons—and His sons make peace.
Now, what are you doing that is driving people apart? That is what Satan does. He destroys by driving people apart, whether it be in divorce, whether it be children away from families, or whatever. He can drive people apart by unifying them. Do you know that? He does that. That is what he was trying to do at the tower of Babel. He was trying to unify people. Why? Because he knew that the differences in those people, combined with human nature, were eventually going to do what? They would be at one another's throats and there would be destruction. So he can even drive people apart by unifying.
But his great aim, of course, is to drive wedges between man and God.
But at any rate, we could go to many places in the New Testament where God is called the God of peace. And really this is the subject of the Day of Atonement.
So people who make peace are people who are Godlike. But even in making peace, one may have to make a little bit of trouble. Understand that. The people who make peace may actually cause trouble at the beginning. But you have to put your faith in God that He will fight the battle and that He will resolve the issue in the way it is intended to be. But peace is made by obedience to God.
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Sermon Topics
The Gospel
