The Beatitudes

Today on Renewing Your Mind… I love that description of the Sermon on the Mount by Dr. Sinclair Ferguson. And as he leads us in a study of these principles, we need to keep in mind that Jesus didn't just preach this sermon, He lived it. The Bible tells us we basically have two problems.

The first is the problem of our guilt before God, and the second is the problem of our bondage, not only our bondage in sin, but our bondage to Satan. And when we read through Matthew's Gospel, he presents us with the way in which, right from the beginning of His ministry, Jesus steps forward in order to deal with both of these problems. In the River Jordan, He is in essence, in symbol, baptized into our sins. It's almost as though pictorially the waters into which people had washed away their sins symbolically, those waters are now poured over Jesus.

And He has a symbolic baptism that He will fulfill in what He called the baptism with which He was to be baptized on the cross. So Jesus has come to deal with the guilt of our sin so that we may have a relationship of children to the Heavenly Father. But Jesus has also come to deal with our bondage. And so once Jesus is baptized, Matthew tells us, the Spirit leads Him into the wilderness to be tempted. Temptation comes to us, doesn't it? But Jesus went to temptation. He went as God's Son, as the King, in order to overcome the evil one in the wilderness. You remember the special temptation that came to Jesus, if you will just bow down to Me, I will give you the kingdoms of this world.

From one point of view, you might think, that's not really much of a temptation, is it? If you bow down to Me, I will give you the kingdoms of this world. But actually, that's what Jesus had come into the world to gain. That's what Jesus did gain, we are told, through His death and resurrection. Now, Matthew 28 says, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to Me. But He refuses to be diverted from the one way in which He can recover those kingdoms, and that is the way of the cross, the cross and the resurrection through which He overcomes the evil one. So symbolically, Jesus has indicated to us that He's going to deal with our guilt.

He has begun to deal with our enemy and our bondage and has defeated Him in the wilderness. And now He is bringing in the new powers of the kingdom of God. You probably know that in Matthew's gospel, there are five teaching blocks. They punctuate the gospel, and Jesus teaches throughout the gospel about what the kingdom is, how the kingdom works, and how the kingdom will eventually come, and how the people of the kingdom live within the kingdom. And this, the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, 6, and 7 is the first of those teaching blocks. We might say that this is Christian living 101. It is Jesus teaching us the most fundamental principles of what it means to be a Christian, a child of the kingdom, a son of the heavenly Father, and a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So where does He begin? You'll notice that the Sermon on the Mount does not begin by telling us what we are to do as Christians. In a sense, it doesn't even begin with telling us what we are to be as Christians. It begins by telling us the blessedness of what we actually are as Christians. And this is such an important basic principle, isn't it? That in the Christian life, being is the foundation for doing.

It's not the other way around. And so you'll notice that the beatitudes, as we call them, that open the Sermon on the Mount are all telling us what we are. Sometimes they are read, aren't they, as though Jesus were saying, now you need to be this. But what He's actually saying to the disciples is, if you're in My kingdom, this is what you are. And I want to tell you, explain to you what a blessed life that is. And so He begins, blessed are the poor in spirit.

Why? Because theirs is the kingdom of heaven. We might put it the other way around. If you are in the kingdom of heaven, then you enjoy the blessing of the poor and so on through all of these beatitudes. Now, I want us to think first of all about some of the characteristics of this description Jesus gives of the citizens in His kingdom. The first thing to notice actually is that these descriptions Jesus gives are actually descriptions of God's people that we find in various parts of the Old Testament. So, these are not novelties that Jesus is, as it were, plucking out of the air. What Jesus is saying is, the kingdom has come, the gospel is fulfilled, and those promises that we find scattered throughout the Old Testament Scriptures are all now being brought together in the new life of the citizens of the kingdom, when for example, as we'll see in a moment, He says, blessed are the meek because they will inherit the earth. He's really just quoting from the pages of the Old Testament Scriptures.

But what He is promising is fulfillment. Remember how He puts it in John chapter 10, I have come that they might have life and that they might have that life in all its fullness. Don't you notice that these beatitudes are characterized first of all by contrasts, strange contrasts? The basic contrast is this, that in this kingdom you need to be emptied before you are filled. The gospel does not just add something to what you already have. What the gospel does is it first of all empties you of all that you are, and then it fills you with all that He is. It deconstructs you in order to reconstruct you. And the problem actually is this, paradoxically, that by nature we are too full to be filled, and we need to be emptied in order to be filled. There's a second characteristic of these beatitudes and that is, without exception, they reverse the values of the world.

They are profoundly counter-cultural in that sense. It is the poor who are blessed. It is the meek who inherit. It is those who mourn who are comforted. There is this radical reversal of the values of the world because the values of the world devalue the values of God, and so we need to be emptied in order to be filled.

And there's a third characteristic. It's this, because these are counter-cultural transformations that take place in our lives, although they transform us and begin to express something of the beauty of the Lord Jesus in our lives, they bring us into a world in which there is conflict and sometimes there is persecution. And so the beatitudes end on that note. Indeed, there is a little postscript, isn't there, to the beatitudes where Jesus emphasizes, now I do want you to understand that this new way of life is so counter-cultural, it will bring you into conflict with the world in which you live, and you are going to experience suffering as a result. I think that made a huge impact on Peter right from the very beginning because as you read about him in the gospel narratives, that was the thing he struggled with, wasn't it? That was the thing he wanted to avoid. He wanted to have a Christ without a cross and a Christian life without opposition, persecution, and pain. And yet nearer the end of his life in his first letter, he writes to other Christians who are actually either about to or really going through suffering at that very time, and he says, don't be surprised by the fiery trial that's coming upon you as though something strange were happening to you. And at last he got it that if being in the kingdom means belonging to Jesus Christ, then we should expect that Christians will experience some of the same opposition that the Lord Jesus Himself experienced.

So this is the first thing. It's a description of the citizens who are in the kingdom. Of course, this is an ongoing work. None of us is as yet complete. But in all these little details of the Beatitudes, what Jesus is doing is…well, think about who at the end of the day do they really describe? At the end of the day, they really describe Jesus, don't they? He was the one who mourned. He was the one who was poor in spirit.

He was the one who was meek. He was the one who was persecuted for righteousness' sake. And so when we see them as a whole, they're really saying, this is what it means to become like Jesus Christ.

He is the Blessed One, and in Him you will experience every spiritual blessing, even if it comes with suffering and trials and opposition. And there's a kind of flow to these Beatitudes, isn't there? We need to become poor in spirit in order to enter the kingdom, and so the poor in spirit possess the kingdom. And in that kingdom, we learn to be sorry for our sins.

We become sensitive to them. And Jesus says, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. And when we mourn, something goes out of us and our pride is demolished.

And so Jesus says, that's a blessed condition because it is the meek who inherit the earth. And once God has worked in our lives, in that way we begin to have new ambitions, new tastes, new affections. We find ourselves strange. It's not as though we make an effort to do this, but we find that we love different things.

We love different people. We love the church. I had a friend who was a minister when they welcomed a young man into their church and the elders were interviewing him. This young man who was just slightly brash and a little confident but genuinely converted said, you know, the strangest thing has happened in this church since I started coming to it. When I came, the sermons, my friend the minister would say, the sermons were kind of dull, to be quite honest, and difficult to understand. And the hymns that we were singing and the prayers were so long. And now he says everything, your sermons are, they're just totally different and we're singing the great hymns. And I don't know, I don't know what has happened to you all.

Well, of course, something had happened to him, hadn't it? He had been transformed and as a result of that he was now hungering and thirsting for righteousness, whereas before he was perfectly satisfied with himself and with his life. Isn't it interesting that we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that people who aren't Christians think they are not satisfied? The tragedy is they have become satisfied with the wrong things.

And so you see there is a kind of rhythm to this. And what happens when we long for this righteousness, does that make us metallic and angular and difficult? Alas, sometimes Christians can be like that.

No, says Jesus, the reverse is true. We become merciful. We know what it is to have received mercy, and so we express mercy and our hearts are purified.

And when our hearts are purified, we begin to love the right things and see more clearly. And he says it's those who are pure in heart, those who have their focus on the Lord, who will know what it is to see God. And when we have seen God in this sense by faith, who describes himself in Scripture as the God of peace who brought again from the dead the Lord Jesus. That is to say, he raised the Lord Jesus in order to give us peace. And when we experience that peace, we want to see that peace spread throughout God's people.

And we want those who are not yet in the fellowship of Christ, we want to see them brought into that true peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. I wonder if you experienced this at the Lord's Supper. I frequently experience this at the Lord's Supper. I don't think it's a strange Scottish Celtic emotion, but because at the Lord's Supper we have these physical expressions that through Jesus Christ we have peace with God. We have been reconciled to him.

What I would like to do at the end of the service would be just to go around the congregation hugging everybody and saying to them, let's live in this peace. If you have anything against me, pardon me. If I've had anything against you, I freely forgive you. We've tasted this peace. And so, says Jesus, we instinctively want to become peacemakers.

And then here's the paradox. You know, every Christmas at least where I live, they'll send out a young television interviewer to interview famous people and they'll say, what's your wish this Christmas? It's always the same old thing. I just want world peace. It's amazing what disintegration and disharmony lies in many people's lives who say that. They don't want peace in their family, peace with their wife, but they want this delusion, world peace. And here Jesus is saying, there is a peace that is not illusory, that is found in the kingdom of heaven. And however, the result is that there are many people who say they want world peace, who spend their lives defending themselves against God's desire that they should have peace with Him. And the result therefore of being these new people Jesus describes is a huge paradox. And so, he ends these Beatitudes by saying, blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Now, I can understand that this would be true. The big thing for us to understand is, how can we experience that and say to ourselves, amazingly, I should be such a blessed man or such a blessed woman. But that's what Jesus is teaching. Somebody opposes your Christian faith, persecutes the Christian faith. What's your instinctive response? Our natural response is to stand and attack back. And what Jesus is saying is, the first thing we should think is, I am a blessed man.

I'm a blessed woman. Remember how the disciples got this in the early church when they were persecuted? Remember when they were beaten and they went back to the other disciples and they rejoiced that they had been counted worthy to suffer for the name of the Lord Jesus Christ?

It was amazing really. They obviously made the connection. But if these fellows want to make us suffer and are persecuting us for the name of Jesus, there really must be something about us that reminds them of Jesus. And there's another sense in which we are blessed, I think.

It's this sense that we're able to experience these persecutions and opposition and quietly say to the Lord, Lord, I know this has really got almost nothing to do with me. This is really about you. So, Lord, you help me to stand. You give me poise.

You take the burden from me. Just let me spend a moment or two on one of these beatitudes in particular because I think it may just be the central one. Remember the end of the gospel? Jesus inherits the earth. The central beatitude, blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.

Now, meekness was one of those characteristics that was utterly despised in the ancient world. But Jesus places a huge premium on it. What does it mean? Well, think about where this wonderful beatitude lies in this list of beatitudes. Here I am. I've mourned for my sins. I've been increasingly emptied of myself, and a change has taken place in my life so that I find myself dealing with difficult people. But I'm emptied of irritation because when Jesus found me, I was a difficult person, and He has shown me grace. I find myself dealing with difficult and irritating circumstances.

But I understand this. Every circumstance in my life is sovereignly superintended by my heavenly Father, and therefore in every circumstance I'm able to bow to Him and know that He will work everything together for my good even through this pain. And so I can take it with a spirit of meekness, difficult people, difficult circumstances, and yet there's a sense in which my response is otherworldly, really. Isn't it striking that this is the aspect of Jesus' own character to which He drew special attention? I find this very fascinating. He rarely refers to what you would call His personal characteristics. They shine in the gospels, don't they?

But He doesn't refer to them. But when He makes His great gospel invitation, come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. My yoke is easy, and my burden is light. What is the ground on which Jesus appeals to us to come?

I am meek and lowly, and you shall find rest for your souls. Do you see what He's saying? I think one of the things He's saying here, and it's really very beautiful, is that when the beatitudes are true of us, there are characteristics wrought into our lives that other people see, and there will come times in their lives when they will say, I think I could go to Him and ask Him the way to Christ. That's the wonder of the beatitudes. In the Sermon on the Mount, we learn what it looks like to practice righteousness, even as we follow the One who fulfills all righteousness. Thank you for joining us for the Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind as we continue Dr. Sinclair Ferguson's series on the Sermon on the Mount.

We find it in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7, and it is the best-known and greatest sermon ever preached. Dr. Ferguson's series looks closely at the themes and principles that we find there. There are 12 messages in all, and we'd like to send them to you on two DVDs. Just contact us today with a donation of any amount. Our number is 800-435-4343, or you can make your request and give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org. If you've downloaded our free app to your phone or tablet, here's an opportunity to use a feature you may not have noticed. Once you complete your request for Dr. Ferguson's series, go to the My Learning Library tab.

All 12 videos will be available for you to watch at any time right away. So request Sermon on the Mount when you call us at 800-435-4343, or when you go online to renewingyourmind.org. I do hope you're enjoying and appreciating Dr. Ferguson's series on the Sermon on the Mount.

We have one more message to feature tomorrow, and here's a preview. Jesus is the one who fulfills all these Old Testament pictures that the people were given, that pointed them to how their sins would eventually be forgiven through one great sacrifice made by a high priest. That's tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind. God bless. Jesus is the one who fulfills all these Old Testament pictures that the people were given, that pointed them to how their sins would eventually be forgiven through one great sacrifice made by a high priest. That's tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind. Jesus is the one who fulfills all these Old Testament pictures that the people were given,