The Beatitudes

Today, on the Lord's Day edition of Renewing Your Mind. The Bible has an awful lot to say about the poor. And what the Bible says about the poor does not always agree what people say about the poor. In Luke's Gospel, we see Jesus teaching the Beatitudes, and the first words of His sermon are, blessed are you who are poor.

Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul preaches from Luke chapter 6 to help us understand what Jesus meant and to explain our responsibility to the poor. A few years ago when we looked at the longer version of the Sermon on the Mount contained in the Gospel of St. Matthew, I pointed out that the literary form in which the pronouncements of Jesus are made in what are called the Beatitudes is one that was familiar to the Jewish people. It was called the form of the oracle. In the Old Testament, God would give His Word to His prophets, and they could speak and preface their announcements by saying, Thus saith the Lord. And these pronouncements by way of oracle came in two distinct forms. There were the oracles, or what we call the oracles of will, w-e-a-l, which were good pronouncements, and then there were the oracles of woe, and those oracles of woe were the prophetic pronouncements that came from God Himself that expressed His wrath and His judgment.

In Luke's version of the Beatitudes, we have Him giving four Beatitudes and four woes, whereas in Matthew you have eight Beatitudes and several more woes. Now today we're going to look at the first portion of this, which include the oracles of will, and those oracles were good pronouncements from God, and they were usually prefaced by the word blessed. You go back to the first Psalm in the Old Testament. Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel 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 he meditates day and night, and he will be as a tree planted by rivers of living water, bringing forth their fruit in their season, and so on. You get those announcements of blessedness.

We know that Peter, who I mentioned when we looked at the disciples, gave the great confession at Caesarea Philippi, thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, at which point Jesus turned to him and said, Blessed art thou, Simon bar Jonah, flesh and blood did not reveal this unto you, but my Father who is in heaven. One of the things I like about our liturgy here at St. Andrews is that at the end of each service when Burke gives the benediction, he gives the same one week in and week out, not because he only knows one. He can recite far more than that one, but he takes us back to the classic benediction of Israel.

May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you, and may the Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you and give you His peace. And now here comes the Son of God incarnate, who is the very brightness of the Father's glory. And He looks at His disciples and pronounces these beatific destinies for them, beginning with the first one here where He says, Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. I want to look especially at this first beatitude that is found here in Luke's gospel this morning. It differs slightly from the version that we find in Matthew, and scholars look at this and say, well, according to Luke, if we read his sermon here, it would take about nine minutes to preach if that, and obviously this is an expurgated version. Or Jesus gave these same pronouncements on more than one occasion.

That may surprise you, but it doesn't surprise me because I've preached the same sermon many times in different places, and I only have so many sermons to preach, and that's common even for the Lord of glory to repeat Himself at different times because we learn from repetition. So I don't think we should be troubled by any variance that occur between Luke's understanding and Matthew's, but in Matthew's we read, Blessed are those who are poor in spirit. Now that qualification of being poor in spirit, which is a description of humility of a humble person, is not exactly the same as saying simply blessed are you poor, because in Luke's version there is no qualifier. It's simply he's looking at his disciples and he said, blessed are you poor. Now he may be referring simply to a poverty in their spirit, a humiliation that they suffer, or he may be speaking more directly to their economic circumstances and their status.

And I'm going to consider this morning the idea that he pronounces his blessing upon these disciples because of their economic status, because they are poor with respect to the riches of this world. Now briefly, the Bible has an awful lot to say about the poor, and what the Bible says about the poor does not always agree what people say about the poor. And often we hear very simplistic descriptions of poor people. You'll hear people say that, oh, the only reason anybody is ever poor is because that person is lazy. That person isn't willing to work.

That person is a moocher, and so on. Well, we can't be so simplistic because the Old Testament, for example, distinguishes among four distinct groups of people who are poor. And what God has to say about these four different groups is different. But for three out of four of these groups, the announcement of God in the Bible is one of mercy and love and kindness.

And so from the biblical consideration today, I'd like us to look briefly at these four groups beginning with the three groups that receive the favor of God. The first group of people who are described as being poor in the Old Testament are those who are poor as the result of catastrophe. That is the farmer whose crops have been wiped out by a famine in the land, by a severe drought, or some other natural catastrophe that ruined his crops, leaving him without anything to sell for his labor. Or a person who is poor because of a catastrophic incident in nature, such as a tornado or an earthquake, or more commonly a dreadful disease that has left them incapacitated and unable, incapable of engaging in productive labor. With respect to this group of the poor in the Old Testament, the heart of God, as it were, is greatly concerned that these people be cared for, and significant and distinct provisions are given by law to the people of Israel to make sure that those people who are poor because of catastrophic reasons are taken care of. And it is the responsibility of the people of God to see that these people who are in need are cared for.

Again, the orphan and the widow who receive specific care. The second group who suffer poverty in the Old Testament about what the Word of God speaks are those who are poor as a result of oppression. They have been enslaved or have had their property taken from them by the powerful. And we have a tendency to think that the powerful that are in view here are for the most part the merchant class, the businessmen, the wealthy who are squeezing the life out of the poor laborers.

But that is not the chief consideration. The principal people in view as oppressors are governments, kings like Ahab who confiscated Naboth's vineyard, and other kings who enslaved their people like Pharaoh, like third-world dictators, you know, get fabulously wealthy by squeezing all of the wealth they can possibly squeeze out of their subjects. And so the principal violator of the poor in the Old Testament are those invested with governmental power. And that's as true today in the world as it was then.

We fail to recognize so often the ways in which government destined people for poverty. I remember as a teenager my first job apart from having a paper route was working in a tiny shoe repair shop that was so small, pie-shaped, that the cobbler, if he had machines on both sides, if he worked on this side, his back was touching the machines on that side. If he worked on this side, his back was touching machines on the other side. And I had a shoeshine stand there in the room with my stand and the cobbler behind the counter.

There wasn't room for any more than three people. If we had four customers come at one time, one of them would have to stand outside and wait his turn. Well, he was the only shoemaker in town, so his business was brisk, and so was mine. But in addition to repairing shoes, I noticed that several people came in during the day without shoes but with money and paper. And they would give these paper and this money to the shoemaker. And it didn't take me long to realize what was going on, that my boss was working for the Mafia in the numbers racket collecting the numbers bets from the people and then delivering the payoff. People would come in and say a number and then say, box it.

And I'd say, what's that? And I was learning how it worked in Pittsburgh. Well, they don't do much of the numbers anymore because that's been taken over by the state. The state now has a lottery that's amazing. The other day one state, they won $346 million was the payoff and so on for somebody that hit the lottery. We know that state governments are collecting millions if not billions of dollars every year in lottery tickets. And the vast majority, the overwhelming people who buy lottery tickets are the people who can least afford it. But the government knows that poor people will buy these tickets day in and day out, day in and day out, knowing that they're hoping for the big hit, for the big pack, but they can't afford to invest like this.

And as I I don't know if I said it already, but the irony is that if you want to win money on the lottery, place your bets with the Mafia, you'll get far better odds than you get from the government. You know, it's a sad thing to see people who have such little disposable income throw it away on a virtually hopeless dream of getting rich. That's how we keep people poor. It's a sad thing. But in any case, God's judgment falls upon kings and governments that enslave their own people and keeping them tied to the dole, to welfare, masking what's really going on here.

It's not a good thing, and God pronounces His woe upon that sort of thing in the Old Testament. The third group who are distinguished as being poor are those who are poor for righteousness' sake. Notice that when Jesus gives this beatitude, He says, blessed are you poor, speaking to His disciples. He's talking directly to people who have voluntarily given up their quest for wealth in order to serve Christ. I've never met a missionary in my life who was motivated to go into mission work in order to become rich. If I do ever find such a missionary, I know I will be meeting a stupid one, because that has about as much hope as you have in winning the lottery. There aren't too many people who have gone into full-time ministry in order to get rich. Some have gotten rich, but it was not their expectation at the beginning, and it was certainly not their motivation, so that there are people who voluntarily, willingly set aside any hopes of great financial gain in order to be servants. And Jesus said, you, you left your nets. Matthew left his tax collecting table, his lucrative business. They gave up everything to follow Jesus, and He said, blessed are you, for yours is the kingdom of God.

You're going to receive a kingdom. And so the blessing of God is poured out on all of those who forsake riches voluntarily for the sake of the kingdom of God. So you see three out of the four groups designated as poor in the Bible receive the blessing of God.

Well, what's the fourth one? The fourth category of the poor, and the Bible has much to say about this group, particularly in the Old Testament. This has to do with people who are poor as a result of slothfulness.

They simply will not work. They are people who despise the creation mandate to be fruitful and to labor. And as Paul in the New Testament speaks so candidly on this point, he says this, if a man will not work, neither should he eat.

Wow! That sounds harsh. But Paul was also aware of the other three categories. If a man cannot work, then he must eat, and we must make sure that he eats, because we are called to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked and to shelter the homeless. But if a man is poor because he will not work, then Paul said, there's no dole for you, no free lunch for you, because you're trying to live at the expense of the labor of your neighbor. Now that situation in the United States of America, which is the wealthiest nation that has ever been on the face of the earth, is now at the epidemic level, and it is encouraged by government. As de Tocqueville learned so long ago, he said, the thing that will destroy any democratic republic is when people find out that they can vote for themselves largesse.

That is, they can vote that the government will take from one group and give it to them without their working. That is sinful. As I mentioned this a few months ago, you must never as a Christian ask the government to take from somebody else their possessions and give them to you. That's evil.

That's legal theft. That's all it is. And now we have a whole situation where we have what's called class warfare.

You can't listen to an ad. You can't read the paper in this presidential election without seeing front and center the whole debate about who's going to get the money. What God wants is righteousness. What God wants is equity, not equality. Equality is a myth of Marxism. If you come into the classroom at the college and you have 30 students and 15 of them study for the final exam and make A's and the other 15 go to a party and don't study, and they make F's, and the professor says, wait a minute, we're not equal.

I'm going to take from the A's and give to the F's, and I'm going to give everybody a C. Huh? That's equality, but it's not equity. And when we do that, we call it social justice when in fact it's social injustice. I have a new plan for social justice that we're going to apply to the National Football League. At the end of the half of every game, if one team has 14 points and the other team has 0, we're going to call the score 7-7. And at the end of the game, if it's 28 to 14, we're going to call the game the score 21-21, and every game will end in a tie.

And that will be the end of the NFL and season tickets. You'll have equality, but no equity. Now, woe unto us when we assume that anybody who's poor is poor because they're lazy, because that's just not true. There are lots of people who are poor who are not lazy at all. And woe unto us if we think that no one who is poor is poor because he's lazy.

There are people who are poor who are not lazy, and there are people who are poor because they're lazy. And we have to be able to distinguish between them if we're to be concerned with biblical ethics and biblical righteousness. That's Dr. R.C. Sproul with a look at the Beatitudes. His focus today was on the first one, Blessed Are You Who Are Poor. Next Sunday he'll explore the others, and we hope you'll join us as Dr. Sproul continues his exposition of the Gospel of Luke. Our resource offer today is a Bible study tool that I think you'll return to again and again. Contact us today and request a digital download of Dr. Sproul's commentary on this Gospel.

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