The Beatitudes: Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit

The supreme blessing that we are promised in the New Testament is that when we are in heaven, we will see God face to face. We call that the beatific vision, the vision that will flood our soul with the highest degree of blessedness imaginable. Perhaps the most well-known sermon ever preached was Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and what is typically referred to as the Beatitudes.

Despite how well-known it is, it is also misunderstood by many. So over the next several weeks, R.C. Sproul will walk us through this profound and significant sermon. Welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, where each Lord's Day we feature the preaching ministry of R.C.

Sproul. This new sermon series is in Matthew chapter 5, but because Dr. Sproul preached through the entire Gospel of Matthew, he has an expositional commentary on the complete book. So if you'd like to study Matthew line by line, you can request the hardcover edition of this commentary when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Jesus declared in the Sermon on the Mount that blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God. And that's the Beatitude that we'll be considering today.

Here's Dr. Sproul. We look today at Matthew chapter 5, verses 1 through 4. And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated, His disciples came to Him. And then He opened His mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. These blessings are pronounced by Jesus, and the record of those announcements has been preserved for us by the Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth.

Please be seated. Before I look at the text itself, let me just give a little bit of introduction to it as we begin now our study of the Sermon on the Mount, which should occupy us for several weeks to come. Let me give a little bit of background on the meaning of a beatitude. They're called beatitudes, by the way, because in the Latin version of the New Testament, the opening statements by which Jesus said, Blessed are these, and blessed are those, and blessed still are these over here. The word that is translated in the Latin is the word beati, and that means simply a pronouncement of blessedness upon those who are included in the categories. And because there's a list of several of those beatitudes, they were called the beatitudes historically. Now, we see the formula blessed used over and over by Jesus in the beatitudes and in the Sermon on the Mount. In times past, I've tried to take opportunities to explain the meaning of that term blessed as we find it in the Scriptures. Some modern translators looking at the beatitudes, and you may have it in your version of the Bible, they read like this. Instead of blessed are the poor in spirit, it simply says, Happy are the poor in spirit. I'm very dissatisfied with that translation because the very word happy has been cheapened, I think, in our contemporary culture, and it fails to include a depth dimension that is intensely spiritual that is not found in the English word happy.

To be sure, happiness is an element of blessedness, but by no means exhausts it. Also in the past, I've mentioned that the prophets of the Old Testament and Jesus, who is also a prophet in the New Testament, all use a particular literary form of address that the Bible says in the Old Testament prophets that when the prophet would make an announcement, it would be the word of the Lord because God put His words in the mouth of His prophets. And the prophets would give announcements of doom and also announcements of prosperity, or we call them oracles of woe or oracles of wheel. These oracles are divine pronouncements like the Greeks believed they would get from the oracle of Delphi who would deliver a supernatural pronouncement, but the Hebrew prophets used this structure of the oracle to announce the Word of God.

The oracle of doom was introduced by the word woe. Woe unto you, Syria. Woe unto you, Damascus, as Amos thundered. And also Jesus uses that same literary form when He warns the Pharisees of their impending judgment.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. And then He goes on and blasts them, as it were, for their sinfulness. Even in the book of Revelation where the great time of judgment comes, you see the angel flying over the earth singing, woe, woe, woe.

When God announces woe in the third degree, there is no worse calamity one can ever imagine. But the good news here is that here in the Beatitudes, it's not oracles of doom that are being announced, but rather oracles of wheel or of well-being. And the literary form that the prophets used to describe this divine favoring of individuals was by the word blessed. Think of all the times you see that in sacred Scripture. The book of Psalms begins with the Beatitude. Blessed is the man who walketh not in the way of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in that law does he meditate day and night.

That is the consequences of his behavior. The consequences are not something that he merits or earns, but they are something that flow out of his devotion to the Word of God, and it is the consequence of blessedness. We think also in the New Testament when Gabriel comes to Mary and announces to her that she will be the mother of the Son of God, that when he greets her, he says to her, blessed are you among women. Later on when Mary visits Elizabeth and Elizabeth experiences the quickening of her son who would be John the Baptist in her womb, jumping for joy at the approach of Jesus who was still in the womb of Mary, Elizabeth says to Mary, again, blessed are you among women. Those of you who have been or perhaps still are Roman Catholic know that that is integral to the rosary where the recitation goes, something like this, hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

We know the song in sacred music that is so widely popular, the Ave Maria, are words taken basically from the New Testament. Ave is a simple greeting, and it is the greeting of Gabriel to this peasant girl in and where he greets her as Mary and pronounces to her that she is blessed among women. Beloved, though Protestants do not embrace the theology that attends the veneration of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church, nevertheless we certainly agree that of all of the women who have ever lived on this planet, the one who was most singularly blessed was the mother of Jesus. And so the New Testament was right when the angel and Elizabeth said to her, blessed are you. What does that mean to be blessed among women?

It means to experience a singular benefit from the grace of God. And all who receive the visitation of God the Holy Spirit into their lives experience that state of blessedness. Finally, as I've mentioned to you on more than one occasion in the past, if you really want to get a hold of what blessedness means in Scripture, you look at the classic Hebrew benediction, which is set forth in a certain poetic form, which form is called parallelism because it comes in three verses, and each verse repeats what is asserted in the first verse, only using different words. And we're familiar with the benediction, which is a beatitude.

May the Lord bless you and keep you. The second line, may the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. And finally the third line, may the Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you and give you His peace.

Do you see it in the first clause of each line? The concept of blessedness is spelled out. To the Jew to be blessed was to have God make His face shine on them, to have God lift up the light of His countenance upon him. The supreme blessing that we are promised in the New Testament is that when we is that when we are in heaven, we will see God face to face. We call that the beatific vision, the vision that will flood our soul with the highest degree of blessedness imaginable.

So you see then why I'm not satisfied with the word happy. To be blessed of God is to receive a spiritual benefit from Him that lasts forever. So this is what Jesus is pronouncing upon the various groups that He mentions here in the Sermon on the Mount.

Now after all of that, we're finally – God willing – going to get to the text. Seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated, remember that the rabbis in that time did not stand when they preached or when they taught. They sat down, and that was the signal that class was in session. And then the disciples would sit on the ground literally at the feet of their master. So what Matthew is describing here is a session by their rabbi as he assembles his disciples here and begins to teach them as they sit at his feet. Verse 2, then He opened His mouth and taught them.

Well, that seems like totally unnecessary. The Holy Spirit, in inspiring the Scripture, has a certain economy of language and is not prone to wasting words. So why would He bother to tell us that He opened His mouth and taught them saying, how else could He teach them without opening His mouth? But this again is kind of an alerting flag that the Hebrew person understood that when it was said of a teacher or of a rabbi or of a prophet that He opened His mouth.

That was the signal to get ready because what you were about to hear was a word from God. And so Matthew tells us that Jesus opened His mouth and began to teach them. And the first of the Beatitudes is this, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

In the first instance, we have to see that this Beatitude is clearly qualified by Matthew, where when Luke speaks of various Beatitudes, he doesn't have the qualifier. He simply says, blessed are the poor. And some have drawn from this the idea that the kingdom of God belongs essentially to poor people and that really all one has to do to enter the kingdom of God is to be poor in the material sense. And there arose in the Middle Ages a form of mysticism, mysticism which was called poverty mysticism, where poverty itself was elevated to a level of virtue that gave merit to those who were in such a state. That idea ignores the teaching of the Bible in a broader sense on poverty. In the Old Testament for example, the Old Testament Scriptures distinguish among four different types of poor people.

The first are those who are poor as a result of their sloth. They are poor because they're too lazy to sow their seed or be engaged in meaningful and productive industry, and this group of the poor comes sharply under the judgment of God. I mention that because that indicates that biblically there is no inherent virtue associated with poverty. The second group that is designated as the poor are those who are poor as a result of calamity through no fault of their own. They're not poor simply because they're lazy. They're poor because the farmer experienced a drought or some storm that destroyed his crops or a person had a serious accident that left them in such a crippled fashion that they were not able to be engaged in productive labor. There there is no judgment upon that group of the poor, but rather the mandate to the people of God to make sure that these people who experience poverty through no fault of their own would receive the ministry of the people of God to help them in their poverty. The third group that are designated as the poor in the Old Testament are those who are the poor as a result of the exploitation of the rich and powerful, which in biblical terms was hardly ever the wealthy business people, but rather the rulers who melt their people of all of their wealth in the way in which Ahab, for example, confiscated unjustly Naboth's vineyard. Now, the fourth category of the poor is those who are poor for righteousness' sake. That is, those who willingly choose a vocation that will leave them practically destitute because they are concerned about other about other things than what the market produces.

And those people are promised the kindness of God who notices their personal sacrifice. So it's very important that you understand from a biblical perspective that not everybody that's poor is poor because they're lazy. At the same time, not everybody who's poor is poor because they're virtuous. There's no inherent merit in poverty, and there's no inherent necessary sin in being poor.

The same distinction are made with the wealthy. Those who made their wealth through illegitimate means come under the judgment of God, but at the same time the Scriptures recognize that one can be wealthy and virtuous. And so it's important for us that in Matthew's statement of this particular beatitude that he qualifies this statement and said, blessed are the poor in spirit. So those who are being addressed here by Jesus are not necessarily those who are in poverty, though it may include those who are in material poverty. But what is specifically in view here is a poverty of spirit, not those who have weak spirits in the sense that they don't have the stuff it makes to exercise courage or industry. Nor is this describing somebody who is mean spirit, but rather to be poor in spirit in biblical terms means that they have a poverty of arrogance.

These people are the polar opposite of the scribes and Pharisees who boasted of their riches in virtue. They boasted of their own righteousness, and those people do not enter the kingdom of God. I can't believe how often the myth persists, even in our culture, that people get to heaven by their good works, by the righteousness that they achieve in their particular virtues. If you for one minute trust in your own righteousness to get you into the kingdom of God, you will miss the kingdom of God altogether. To enter the kingdom of God, you must understand that in light of the perfection of God, your virtue is bankrupt. You have no merit to offer no merit to offer God except for that merit earned for you by your Savior. And so Jesus is spelling out here a necessary condition for entering into His kingdom. We are to be broken of our pride. The Old Testament Psalm is this way, that a broken and contrite spirit the Lord does not despise. And as David tells us, the Lord does not require sacrifices else would I give them, but that the sacrifices of God are a broken and contrite heart before Him. Now it's not just that the poor spirit who get in the kingdom and everybody else gets some other way, being a peacemaker, being hungry or thirsty. No, no, no. Everybody has to be poor in spirit to receive this blessing, the supreme blessing of receiving the very kingdom of God.

That was R.C. Sproul, the first minister of preaching and teaching at St. Andrews Chapel in Sanford, Florida, beginning a sermon series on the Beatitudes. Thanks for joining us for this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. If you're looking for more devotional reading through the week or on a Sunday afternoon, one resource you might not be familiar with is Table Talk magazine. It's a monthly Bible study and devotional magazine, and if you live in the US or Canada, you can request a free three-month trial at tritabletalk.com.

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