22 Why Peacemakers Inherit the Kingdom (Matthew 5:9)

Krisan Marotta: Thank you for downloading Wednesday in the Word, my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. I'm Krisan Marotta. Today is the 22nd talk in our series on the Gospel of Matthew, and we'll be studying Matthew chapter 5, verse 9. The lecture notes for today's talk are on the links below the podcast, and you can also find them by going to wednesdayintheword.com slash Matthew 2. You can find all the previous episodes in this series on the Gospel of Matthew there on the website, and many others. That's wednesdayintheword.com. Thank you so much for listening today. Well, we are still in the Beatitudes section of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5, and we're looking at the penultimate beatitude today. And let me remind you how I understand these Beatitudes. Fundamentally, I believe that Jesus is describing people of faith in the Beatitudes, and that He is describing those who will inherit a place in the kingdom of God, and we know from the rest of Scripture that those who have a place in His kingdom are those who have saving faith, and that He is giving us a description of the core convictions or aspects of saving faith. I've argued that there are four features to each of the Beatitudes. First, he tells us such people are fortunate, that is, they are in a highly desirable situation, and that's what it means to be blessed. Second, each beatitude gives us a reason why such people are fortunate, and the basic reason we've seen in all the beatitudes is that they have a glorious future promised from God. It is their future destiny that makes them fortunate now. Third, the beatitudes are exclusive, only these people have this glorious future, only those who have these qualities he's describing will inherit a place in the kingdom of God, and these are the qualities that define saving faith. And then fourth, the beatitudes are surprising or there's some ironic twist to them. At first glance the qualities that gain you a place in the kingdom of heaven don't appear to be very desirable at all. In the short term, they look painful and costly, and yet the people who have them are truly fortunate and blessed. So with that in mind, we're going to look at Matthew 5 9. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. And we're going to step through each of those four aspects. As I understand it, being a peacemaker is very close to being merciful, which we talked about in a previous podcast. Much of what we said in that podcast about being merciful is also going to apply here. So first, who are the fortunate ones? The peacemakers, and we're going to talk about what it means to be a peacemaker in a minute. Why are they fortunate? They shall be called sons of God. To be a son of something means that you are like that thing, or you are part of that thing. The principal place we see this phrase is the Son of Man or Son of God, but we also see it elsewhere in the New Testament. There are phrases like sons of thunder, sons of the kingdom, sons of light, a son of the Pharisees, sons of this age, and so forth. And to be a son of something means you are like that thing. This phrase probably came about because we have this universal experience where our children tend to take on our characteristics. Children imitate their parents. They pick up their tones of voice, their phrases of speech, their habits, the way they might turn their head or the way they laugh. They pick up all their parents' phrases and mannerisms, and so forth, and so to be a child of something is to be one who imitates or is like your parent. And here we see those who make peace are like their heavenly father. I think we are essentially to understand this phrase as a synonym for children of God. When the kingdom comes and God establishes his rule through his Messiah, peacemakers will be called his children. They will be given a place in his kingdom as his heirs. And as we talked about with mercy, being merciful involves treating another person the way God has treated me. Likewise, being a peacemaker involves being reconciled to another person in the way God has been reconciled to me. So let's start out by talking about this word peacemaker. This is the only place in the New Testament where we find this particular word. However, we have one other place where we see its related verb form, and that's in Colossians chapter one verses nineteen and twenty. And in Colossians this word refers to God. Paul says this, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. That's that same root word in one twenty, that making peace. So having made peace by the blood of his cross, Paul's describing God here as a peacemaker. God made peace with us and reconciled us to himself. We were hostile to God, we were alienated from him, and God could have responded justly with wrath. He could have said, Okay, you rebelled against me, that's it, you can have your rebellion and left us in our sin. But instead, through the cross of Christ, God made a way to reconcile us to himself. He has reestablished a relationship with us, a relationship we had broken, and Paul describes that as making peace with us. So to be like him, this is how we should respond to other people who have been hostile to us. Rather than responding with the same kind of hostility, we should seek to be reconciled and make peace. That's the basic idea. Let's see if we can flesh that out a little more. I want to look a little bit more at how this concept of peacemaker applies to God, and then we'll look at how it applies to believers. So let's start with God as peacemaker. The bad news of the gospel is that we are ruled by death because of our rebellion to God. And by death, I don't mean merely the end of existence. I mean all the things that make this world tragic divorce, alienation, war, strife, hatred, office politics, bitterness, frustration, corruption. All of that is death. All that corruption and futility that mars our existence is death, and we have death because we have sin. As long as we remain in rebellion to God, we are going to be ruled by death in all its forms, corruption, decay, futility, and so forth. Now there are two consequences to our rebellion. First, we cut ourselves off from God, who is the source of life, and that means we are stuck with death. This is the logical or the natural result of rebelling against God. So this is like the law of gravity. If you drop something, it falls to the ground. That's the law of gravity. Similarly, if you rebel against God, since He is the source of life, you are now stuck with death. The logical natural result is that we now experience death in all its forms. But there's a second consequence of our rebellion, and that is the rebellion itself is wrong and deserves punishment. Justice demands recompense. There is a judicial penalty to our rebellion. What we did was not just unfortunate or tragic, it was wrong. We now owe a debt to justice, and that debt must be paid. So if you think about it as our rebellion is to turn our backs on God, and when we do that, we now experience death and corruption and futility and decay. That's the first consequence. But the second consequence of our rebellion is that God turns his back on us. And the consequence of that is devastating. Because in that state where God has his back turned to us, metaphorically, repentance does no good. If I get fed up with sin and death and I turn back to God, he is no longer there with open arms. He is no longer available. He has decreed that he will no longer grant us life. That's the judicial penalty. So the first consequence of our rebellion is that we turned our backs on God and now we experience death, futility, and corruption. But the second consequence is that God turns his back on us and we are now under his wrath. We are now slaves to sin. We are legally, criminally guilty, and our debt to justice must be paid. And God will not turn our back around, we will not turn back to us until that debt to justice is paid. We need to be reconciled to God. In other words, we are under his wrath and we need to make peace with him, but left to ourselves, we have no way to gain that peace and reconciliation. Well, this is where we get to the good news of the gospel. God, in his loving kindness and mercy, found a way to make peace with us. He sent his Messiah, Jesus Christ, into the world to pay the penalty for our sins. So Jesus' death on the cross pays our debt to justice, and now God can turn back around and forgive us, and when we repent, he is there to receive us. So Jesus' death on the cross satisfies our debt to justice so that we can be reconciled to God. That's what we mean by the term justification. Justification is the forgiveness of our debt to justice, which qualifies us once again to receive life. To be justified is to be in a position where God's justice has been satisfied. And how do we get there? How do we gain that justification and clear our debt to justice? That's where the cross comes in and believing in Jesus Christ. So justification is based on God's mercy and it's made possible by the sacrificial death of Jesus. We are justified because God is profoundly merciful. We are not justified because we earned it, because we did anything to deserve it, or because we kept the law well enough or anything else. Jesus' death is a substitute for the death we deserve, and God is so profoundly merciful and so loving that he wanted to provide a way for us to escape his wrath, and so he sent his Messiah into the world. He wanted to find a way to make peace with us. That's what Paul was talking about in Colossians one, but he talks about it again in Romans five and the first two verses, Romans five, one and two. Up to this point in Romans, Paul has been making his case that we are justified by faith and faith alone. And then in chapter five, he starts therefore. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, and he answers the question basically, so what? What's the big deal about being justified? And this is what he says first. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. So the first thing he says after arguing that we are justified by faith and faith alone, he says we now have peace with God because of what Jesus did for us. Now peace is used two ways in the New Testament. It is often a synonym for the Hebrew word shalom, essentially meaning eternal life or well being. But here in this context, I think Paul means peace as opposed to war. We have peace with God as opposed to strife. We are reconciled to God as opposed to being under his wrath. So we now have peace as opposed to strife because of our Lord Jesus the Messiah, through whom we received this grace. So God could have responded rightly and justly with wrath. We rebelled, we were guilty, the penalty is death. But instead, through the cross of Christ, God chose to forgive our sins and reconcile us to himself. He made peace with us, he reestablished a relationship that we had broken. So God showed us mercy and made a way to solve our problem with sin and reconcile us to himself, and Paul describes that in Colossians and in Romans as God made peace with us. Okay, now let's look at how being a peacemaker applies to believers. And I want to look at one other passage to help us do that. This is first Peter chapter three, verses eight through twelve, and in this passage Peter is quoting Psalm thirty four. Finally, all of you have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you are called that you may obtain a blessing. And then he quotes Psalm thirty four for whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit. Let him turn away from evil and do good, let him seek peace and pursue it, for the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil. So the Psalm tells us that if we are looking for blessing from God, we must turn away from evil and do good. We must keep our lips from evil and we must keep our tongue from evil, and we should seek peace and pursue it. So the Psalm tells us if we're looking for a blessing from God, we must be people who seek peace and pursue it. And Peter spells out what that looks like. He tells us do not return evil for evil or insult for insult, but giving a blessing instead. That gives us a picture that being a peacemaker is being someone who absorbs the blow. When someone does you wrong, you don't respond back in kind and seek to hurt them. So you don't match insult for insult or anger for anger or hurt for hurt. Instead you seek peace and reconciliation. I think that's a key part of what it means to be a peacemaker. And we saw that God did this very thing for us. We were hostile, rebellious, and sinful creatures. But God withholds his wrath and his long suffering. He takes our abuse, and then he provides a way to grant us mercy and forgiveness through the blood of Jesus Christ. We were under his wrath, but he made peace with us, he reconciled with us through the cross, and that's what we are called to do. We are called to make peace with those who hurt us or insult us or anger us in the same kind of way that God made peace with us. Okay, so what's the connection between being a peacemaker and being a child of God? Why is this a quality of those who will inherit a place in the kingdom of God? Well, like the other Beatitudes, I think this is also an implication of having saving faith. What's the connection between being a peacemaker and having faith? Basically, I think it's the same connection we talked about with being merciful. If I'm truly looking to God for blessing, and I'm not looking to the things of this world, I'm not looking to my own performance or my own achievements, and I believe that he will keep his promises in the gospel, that changes how I view others. God has dealt kindly with me. He reconciled me to himself when I was under his wrath. He found a way to grant me forgiveness for my sins. Now my place in his kingdom, my inheritance is secure, and I am free to let go of the things of this world. I don't have to demand my fair share, I don't have to take care of myself, because God has already promised me something way more valuable, an inheritance in His kingdom. I'm free to give up demanding my fair share. I'm free to let go of promoting myself and putting myself first. I'm free to let go of vengeance, and I can forgo retribution because I know my inheritance is coming. I can show others the same kind of blessing I have received. I have been called to receive the greatest blessing there is, a place in the kingdom of God. And with faith I'm secure and standing on that hope, and therefore I can resist returning evil for evil and insult for insult. I can make peace instead of causing more strife. I can bless instead. I think that's a natural implication of having a mature, saving faith. Now both Peter and the Psalmist know that we are sinners and we are incapable of making ourselves good. This is not an admonition, get your act together. This is not a command to fix your evil tongue and guard your lips and never ever respond in anger, and then maybe if you manage to do all that, God might bless you. That is not the point of the Psalm, and that's not the point of 1 Peter, and I don't think it's the point of this beatitude. Rather the point is when you begin to trust in the Lord and grow in that trust and stand more securely in it, these are the kinds of changes that you will see in your life. The reason that people who enter the kingdom of heaven will be peacemakers is because seeking reconciliation is an implication of having saving faith, and you must have saving faith if you're going to enter the kingdom of God. If I realize how deeply sinful I myself am, why should I expect holiness in everyone else? Saving faith puts you in a position of humility. When I begin to see that I am poor in spirit, that I am not the kind of person I should be, and I don't have what it takes, and when I mourn over my sin, and I hunger and thirst to be made holy, then I begin to recognize the depth of my own sinfulness and that God owes me nothing, and it makes me realize that all my fellow sinners out there, well they're in the same boat. My response to another's sin should be forgiveness, forbearance, and compassion. When someone hurts me, it shouldn't surprise me because we're both sinful. But if I'm secure in my place in the kingdom of God, then I realize I have nothing to gain by reviling and hurting back. Responding in kind with evil or insult or vengeance is just going to escalate the violence and the retaliation and where is that going to get us? But if I respond with humility because I know I am a fellow sinner, there's a chance I can restore and reconcile the relationship. And once I realize just how deeply I'm indebted to God's grace and how clearly and thoroughly dependent I am on his mercy, the next step is realizing I have no leg to stand on to condemn someone else. I am in no position to condemn the sins of others. Seeking to hurt them as they have hurt me is just adding injury to injury. Nobody wins and there's nothing to gain. And whatever standard I'm using to judge them and say you hurt me, that was wrong, that standard condemns me. After all, what sin could anyone else commit against me that I wouldn't do myself apart from the grace of God? The same evil that lurks in that other person's heart that causes their sin, that same evil is in my heart. I have no basis on which to To judge, for I am just as guilty. Now I may not have physically expressed that sin yet, but give me half a chance and I will, at least apart from the grace of God. We have to realize there's no sliding scale of sin. We like to compare ourselves to others and say, well, you know, I may be a sinner, but thank God I'm not as bad as my neighbor. After all, I didn't do XYZ. But that's the whole point of faith. Sin is sin is sin. I may have refrained from what we consider the big things like adultery, prostitution, and murder, but pride and arrogance and selfishness are just as evil. They're just easier to hide. It's a lot easier for me to hide and mask my selfishness from you than it is to hide an affair, but it doesn't make me any less sinful. The same evil that causes my pride causes adultery and murder and selfishness and arrogance and so forth. My sins may be more socially acceptable, but I am just as guilty. I must be prepared to be judged by the same standard that I use to judge others. Recognizing the depth of my sinfulness and my need for God's grace is an integral part of saving faith. That's a subtext we've seen in the Beatitudes up to this point. Once I recognize my own wretched position, how can I turn around and say, Well, thanks God for forgiving me and reconciling me to yourself, but don't look, I'm going to revile my neighbor. That same standard that condemns my neighbor condemns me. If I'm pursuing a course of anger and vengeance and retaliation against my neighbor who has wronged me, then there's a sense in which I am not recognizing my own true position before God because I am just as guilty. I need God to make peace with me. If I haven't come face to face with my own position before God, then maybe I don't have saving faith, and if I don't have saving faith, then I'm not going to enter the kingdom of heaven. In other words, I can't really be a person who is poor in spirit and mourning over my sins and hungering for righteousness if I can look at other sinners and think, well, I'm better than they are. As faith grows and matures, as we embrace the gospel, we learn to become people who keep our tongue from speaking evil and deceit and who flee evil and pursue good and who seek peace and not vengeance in part because we become people of humility, people who realize we are sinful. The righteous person in Psalm thirty four is not a person without sin. The righteous person in the Psalm is a person whose heart is seeking God. The righteous person is justified. The person is right with God because he trusts in the work of Jesus Christ and he is fundamentally no longer rebellious toward God but is seeking him and trying to follow him. And the one who finds life and blessing is the one who is right with God because God is at work in our lives. Once we embrace those core convictions of saving faith, our entire perspective changes and vengeance and retaliation are just not so appealing. And let me review the core convictions of saving faith one more time. We've seen these in the Beatitudes. First, saving faith involves a genuine desire for holiness in and of itself. What do we want to be saved from? Those with saving faith want to be saved from our sin and made holy and worthy before God. Two, saving faith involves a genuine understanding that left to myself, I am incapable of reaching holiness or obtaining holiness. I am trapped as a slave to my sin and I need a savior. There's nothing I can do to free myself. Third, saving faith includes a genuine understanding that God owes me nothing, that I'm totally unworthy of any gift from God, I can't earn his favor, no amount of law keeping is going to justify me, and there's no divine spark inside that requires God to save me. His salvation is an act of grace and mercy. And then finally, saving faith is a firm trust that God will make me holy in his kingdom because of the blood of Jesus Christ. Coming to saving faith is a profound perspective shift. It's a profound worldview change such that we can let go of things like vengeance and retaliation. Let me see if I can explain with an analogy. Look up at the sky. Our universal experience suggests that everything revolves around us. The sun, the moon, the stars, they all appear at one horizon, they travel in this beautiful arc overhead, and then they disappear on the opposite horizon, and they never stop doing this. Everything that we can see from our perspective on Earth suggests that the Earth is the center of the universe and everything is revolving around us. But among this completely uniform motion, we see some erratic movement we can't explain. There's these puzzling little balls of light, which we call planets, and they seem to slowly wander back and forth among the stars. Well, why are they doing this? A man named Copernicus proposed a satisfying but somewhat counterintuitive solution. He concluded that the sun is at the center of our solar system and we are one planet circling the sun just as all the other planets do. And with this new understanding, this strange dance of the planets is explained in a simple and very satisfying way. Although our experience still suggests that the sun and the planets revolve around us, we now understand that the sun is at the center and we are just one of a number of planets circling it. The Copernican revolution is striking in that one simple change of perspective so completely changed the way we think of the relationship between the heavenly bodies and ourselves. By analogy, becoming a believer is kind of like going through a Copernican revolution. It is a simple change of perspective that completely changes the way we think about ourselves and others. By nature, we all think of ourselves as of central importance. Our interests, our needs, our desires have an obvious priority over anyone else. Other people and even God are secondary. They serve as the support team, the supporting cast that helps get me what I want. Becoming a believer is a profound shift in perspective, much like that proposed by Copernicus. I am not at the center of the universe. There is a God and I am not it. My creator is at the center of the universe, and I am just one of the planets circling him. I am one of his creatures. I am no more important than any other human being, and I am no less important than any other human being. With that perspective shift, it begins to make sense why Jesus tells us that the two greatest commandments are love God and love your neighbor as yourself. When I shift the center of the universe back to God, two truths emerge. God has priority over all his creation, and I am not more important than my fellow human beings. And that shift in perspective is central to becoming a believer in the God of the Bible. That shift is the basis for my ability to show mercy and to be a peacemaker. God has dealt kindly with me. God has made peace with me. My place in his kingdom, my inheritance is secure. When I have that inheritance, what benefit is there to retaliation? Not only is it wrong, it gains me nothing worth having. With that perspective shift, I am free to let go of the things of this world, including returning insult for insult. Now like the other beatitudes, I would argue that this beatitude is exclusive and future focused. Only those who have faith, only those who understand that they have been reconciled to God will be the kind of people who absorb the shock of an insult or a wrong. Because they are counting on the day when God grants them a place in the kingdom, they are free now to refrain from vengeance and retribution. If we're not willing to be reconciled to those who have done us wrong, then we have not really understood how much God has forgiven us and how many of our sins He overlooked to reestablish a relationship with us. We talked about how to be a son of something means to be like that something, but there's another aspect to being a son of God, and that is that sons stand to inherit from their fathers. When the kingdom comes, God will welcome them and say, You are my children, enter into your inheritance. And we can see the ironic twist here. The person who is taking the insults, the person who is absorbing the wrongs without fighting back in kind, doesn't look like the winner. In fact, that person looks to be in a really hard position. It's costing her or him to absorb the blow. Like the merciful, those who are willing to pay the cost of being a peacemaker are the ones who are truly fortunate. They're paying a short-term cost, but they have a really long-term valuable gain. Now, what's the difference between being a peacemaker and being merciful? I think peacemaker includes this idea of breaking the cycle of retaliation, of not returning evil for evil, and of seeking to restore the relationship by stopping the cycle of hostility. When we don't strike back, it creates the possibility that we can be reconciled. My intent in not striking back is to restore and reconcile the relationship. So I would paraphrase this beatitude like this As surprising as it may seem, those who do not return evil for evil, but instead seek to be reconciled to those who do evil to them are truly fortunate because they and they alone are showing themselves to be like God as children are like their parents, and they will inherit a place in their father's kingdom. Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but also shows you how to figure it out. You can hear all previous episodes in this series and many other series on my website, wednesdayintheword.com. There is no charge, no spam, and no ads. It's all free to help you improve your study skills and your understanding of scripture. If you've been blessed by this podcast, please subscribe to it and leave a positive rating or review wherever you listen. But most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. Our theme music is graciously provided by my favorite musician, Reggie Coates. You can find all of his music and CDs on heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I will see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.