15 What is a Beatitude? (Matthew 5:1-12)

Krisan Marotta: You're listening to Wednesday in the Word, and I'm glad you are. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Today I'm gonna introduce you to the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, which begins in Matthew chapter 5. This is the 15th talk in my series on the Gospel of Matthew. You'll find lecture notes with links to everything mentioned in the talk on my website. You can click on the link below the podcast or go to wednesdayintheword.com slash Matthew 15. Your podcast feed may be limited to the last 30 or so episodes, but you can hear all previous episodes on my website, wednesdayintheword.com. I'm really glad you joined me today. We are starting the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount, and last week I gave you a general introduction to this sermon. Let me just review briefly. The first four chapters of Matthew's Gospel are basically introductory material. Matthew tells us about the genealogy of Jesus. He tells us the story of the birth of Jesus and his upbringing, mostly from Joseph's perspective. He tells us of the ministry of John the Baptist, the baptism of Jesus and his temptations in the wilderness. Matthew ends chapter four with a general summary of the ministry of Jesus. Matthew tells us Jesus made the surprising choice to base his early ministry in Galilee, not in Judea. He calls Galilean fishermen to be his disciples and ultimately his apostles. He travels throughout Galilee healing people and proclaiming the gospel, which Matthew summarized as repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. As Jesus traveled and taught, he attracted a great deal of attention. Great crowds of people heard about him and sought him out, and that brings us to chapter five and the Sermon on the Mount. As I argued last week, my personal conviction is that the Sermon on the Mount is one of the most important passages in the Bible. It is a profound and unique body of teaching from the Messiah Himself, and it is important that every believer understand it. Yet as we talked about in the last podcast throughout church history, believers have found it very difficult to agree on what this sermon means and how we should apply it to our lives. And there are a variety of approaches and a variety of ways of thinking about it. I'm giving you one approach, the one that makes the most sense to me. But as I've said before, I am no one from nowhere, and my opinions carry no authority whatsoever. I am simply one student of the Bible telling other students what I think I've learned, and I'm trying to teach you how I learned it in the process. From my perspective then, the Sermon on the Mount is a very important talk given by Jesus at a time when he was very popular. Jesus has set out to show his followers the issues that they are going to face if they want to be children of God. He's contrasting his teaching with the teaching that they have heard from the Pharisees. And Luke 6 is essentially the same sermon, just given in a shorter version. Therefore, I think we can use Luke to understand Matthew and vice versa. Now, before we look at the Beatitudes themselves, I want to talk about beatitudes in general, and I have four points to make. First, let's talk about what it means to be blessed. The Beatitudes get their name from a Latin word beatis, which means blessed or fortunate. And the beatitudes are a series of sayings about those who are blessed. Each of the Beatitudes starts out saying, Blessed are they who, and then they go on. So what does Jesus mean by blessed? What's he talking about? The one who is blessed is fortunate. He or she is in a highly desirable position. The person who is blessed is not necessarily happy. The person who is blessed is not necessarily highly religious. The idea of blessed is fortunate. You want to be that person because that person is in a really good place. I think the way to get a handle on what it means to be blessed is to look at its opposite. We have bless on one side and we have curse on the other side. We could use these words bless and curse to talk about the attitude one person has for someone else. If I bless you, I think well of you. I approve of you, I wish you well. If I curse you, I think badly of you, I don't approve of you, and I wish bad things for you. The words bless and curse can be used in just that way. What I say and what I wish for someone. It doesn't necessarily mean I've done anything at all. It's all attitude and maybe speech. If I say bad things about you and I wish bad things for about you, then I'm cursing you. If I say good things about you and wish good things for you, then I'm blessing you. And the Greek words bless and curse can be used in just the same way. What I wish and what I say about someone regardless of how I've acted. However, these words can also be used in connection with what we do and how we treat someone. If I approve of you, then I do good things for you. I bless you by doing right by you, by treating you well, and doing good things for your benefit. Likewise, if I curse you, I don't approve of you and I treat you badly or bring some sort of suffering into your life and withhold good things from you. Blessing and cursing can either talk about my wishes or my actions towards someone else. Now when God is the subject and we're talking about God blessing or cursing, these words always refer to action. They always refer to that second idea. It's not just an issue of what God thinks about me, there is an unbreakable connection between what God thinks of me and what he does for me. If he's on my side, that is, if I am in his favor, then he will do good by me or bless me. If I am in his favor, then he's going to work for my welfare. Likewise, if I'm not in his favor, then I come under his wrath, and I would expect the consequences of that. When God blesses someone, he approves of them and works for their benefit. When God curses someone, he disapproves of them, and they fall under his wrath. So to be blessed is the opposite of being cursed. To be blessed is to be in that position where I am in the favor of God, and because I am in his favor, good things are coming my way, and things will turn out well for me. To be blessed is to be a person for whom good things are coming because I am in God's favor and God is on my side. Now fortunate is a good translation of this word as long as we don't slip into thinking that we have these fortunate things through blind luck. It is not random fortune or luck, it is a deliberate decision of God to work on my behalf. We can understand Jesus to be saying, This one is fortunate, this one is well off as long as we recognize that we are fortunate and well off because of the activity of God. If you have an older translation of the Bible, you may see this word translated as happy, and that's not such a bad translation if we understand the older sense of the word happy. There's an old word hap, which means fortune or chance. That root word shows up in a lot of words we use mishap, happenstance, happen, hapless, haphazard, and perhaps in the old English you might see mayhap, which is like maybe, and it shows up in happy. And all of these words are related to each other through this root hap, fortune or chance or what has come your way. What happened is what came your way. I happened upon it. Someone who is hapless is unlucky or unfortunate. Perhaps means something might come my way, and so on. The word happy used to be understood not in terms of how I'm feeling at the moment or whether or not I'm currently in a good mood. Happy used to refer to my situation. If I'm in a good situation because good things have come my way, then I'm happy. What has happened to me has put me in a good place. For example, in Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennett says to Mr. Darcy, this is a happy meeting, she does not mean she feels good about it, though she might. She means it is a good thing that we met. It is a fortunate meeting, a good turn of events. So if you understand happy, not in the sense of how I feel, but that a great turn of events has come my way, then happy is actually a great translation of blessed. Things are good for the person who is poor in spirit, things are good for the person who is mourning. That makes this passage one of what we might call the Bible's greatest hits, because here Jesus is giving us his description of those who are truly fortunate. Here is his description of what you and I want to be true of us, because if this is true of us, we are truly fortunate. So Jesus is saying, if you understood the situation, you would be crazy not to want to be one of these people. These people who have these qualities are incredibly well off. Now Jesus is not the first person to utter a beatitude. We find them in the Old Testament. For example, Psalm one, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers. The man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked is in a highly desirable situation. Psalm thirty two one blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Again, if your transgression has been forgiven, you're in a very good place, you're fortunate. Proverbs three thirteen Blessed is the one who finds wisdom and the one who gets understanding. Finding wisdom is a very desirable thing. Wisdom is something you ought to want. Jesus is doing the same kind of things with these statements. These are the people who are fortunate. They are blessed. Those who are in the situation of being X are in a highly desirable situation. Well that's my first point. Second, each beatitude gives a reason why these people are in a highly desirable situation. Why would you want to be one of these people? They're in a highly desirable situation because their future is wonderful. With each quality, Jesus emphasizes if you are this way now, then something desirable will happen down the road. But if you're not this way now, then something very undesirable is going to happen in the future. You're blessed not by where you are now, but by where you're going to end up. At the risk of oversimplifying, you can generally approach the beatitudes in two main ways. If you take the popular understanding of the beatitudes, they generally take one of these two paths. And naturally, I think one path is right and one path is wrong. I'm going to start by explaining the wrong way, or at least the way I think is wrong, to understand this passage. The wrong way to understand a beatitude, to approach these, is to see them as a series of statements that tell me how my life will go better today. And there are lots of people who take them that way, and there are lots of nuances and various versions of how to understand that. One way, for example, is if I strive to adopt the attitudes that we see in these Beatitudes, then I would be happy and at peace and have psychological well-being. Some argue that the word blessed should be translated happy, and that Jesus is giving us the key to finding happiness. If you take on these attitudes, you will be happier as in you'll feel better now. And essentially, Jesus is teaching us that we need to mellow out, and when we mellow out, then we will find personal peace and contentment. Many years ago, there was a very popular book called The Be Happy Attitudes, which adopted that approach. The author's whole point was that the reason we're not happy now is because we lack these attitudes of gentle, porn spirit, mourning, and so forth. And if only we could conform our attitudes to the list, then we would be happy now. A variation on this theme is taking the Beatitudes as a recipe for changing society and for changing our social interactions. Those who take this approach often look beyond the first 16 verses and emphasize the mercy and the peacemaker aspects that are taught here. But again, the goal is that this is how we need to learn to interact with each other. And if we could interact that way, we would all get along better and the church would have a lot more impact in the world. Society would be a better place if we took on the attitudes described in the Beatitudes. We sometimes approach the Bible with the assumption that the writers had no other purpose in mind than to teach us how to lead happy, successful, and peaceful lives today. And so as we study, we start out by looking for ways to improve our current circumstances. What other purpose could Jesus have than to teach us how to be happy now and how to find a peaceful, enjoyable life? Now I'm sure that if we all adopted the attitudes taught here, that our lives would be impacted in a positive way, and we would all get along better, most likely, and maybe even improve society. I don't have a problem with that. If you joined a 12-step group where everyone encouraged each other to conform to the Beatitudes, I would say good luck with that. But I would argue that that point is almost totally irrelevant to the point Jesus is making in the Beatitudes. I don't think it has anything to do with his purpose for teaching here. It has nothing to do with what he's talking about. He has not set out in this sermon to show us how to be happier now or how to improve society. I just don't think that's what this is about. And I'm going to try to make that case as we go along. I would say that the right way to understand the Beatitudes is to see Jesus doing essentially this. Jesus sees two kinds of people in this world, those who stand to inherit eternal life and those who do not. Those who inherit eternal life are characterized by certain attitudes. Therefore, those who have those attitudes are blessed. They are fortunate because they and only they will enter into eternal life in the end. Rather than being a formula for finding personal peace and happiness now in this life, I think Jesus is describing fortunate ones in terms of their future eternal destiny. So to build my picture of the Beatitudes from my first two points, I would say the Beatitudes tell us those who are in the situation of being X are in a highly desirable situation because they have a glorious future from God. My third point is that these qualities described here are exclusive and they are not optional. Jesus is saying only these people, only the people in this situation have a glorious future from God. Jesus is dividing the people into two groups. I think this becomes especially clear when we compare Luke's version to Matthew, because Luke has four beatitudes in his list, and in each case he contrasts the blessed one with the person in the opposite situation, and on them he pronounces woes. There is one group to whom he says, Blessed are you, and there is one group to whom he says, Woe are you cursed. One group is in a very good situation, and the other group is in a very bad situation. Let me read them to you. This is Luke six twenty, and he lifted up his eyes on his disciples and said, Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Then in six twenty four he says, But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. In Luke six twenty one, he says, Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied. In Luke six twenty five, he says, Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. He says in six twenty one, Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh, and in six twenty five, woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. And then in Luke six twenty two, blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for behold your reward is great in heaven, for so their fathers did to the prophets. And then Luke six twenty six, woe to you when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets. So Luke is clearly presenting Jesus as teaching two options you can weep now or you can laugh now. You can be poor in spirit now or you can be rich in spirit now, and one is good and the other is bad. To be blessed in the way that Jesus is describing is not just a little extra icing on the cake. Jesus is not saying, you know, these qualities would be a nice addition to your life. In addition to all the other things you've got going on, it would be nice to add a little being poor in spirit, because if you do, you'll be a little extra blessed. You'll get a little more pizzazz. That's not the picture. Jesus is describing two entirely different roads. One is blessed and one is cursed. And there's a choice to be made. You're on one side or you're on the other. Are you going to weep now or laugh? Are you going to be rich in spirit or poor in spirit? And we'll talk about what those mean in later podcasts. There's no middle ground here. Either we are in God's favor or we are under his wrath. The one who is blessed is in God's favor. The one Jesus says woe to is under the wrath of God. This is really serious stuff. So to build our picture of the beatitudes with these three points, they are saying only those who are in the situation of being X are in a highly desirable situation because they have a glorious future from God. My fourth and last point is that each beatitude is surprising or ironic. Unlike the examples we see in the Old Testament, the beatitudes of Jesus, when you read them at first glance, it seems like you don't really want to be the person he's describing. When we look at Old Testament beatitudes, it seems obvious that the one who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked is blessed and the one whose sins have been forgiven is fortunate. But when you read Matthew's list, one thing that strikes you as you read them is that most of them are not immediately obvious that you would want this to be true of you. I mean poor, hungry, mournful, persecuted? Those don't sound so great. And then you look at merciful and you think, oh, so if someone hurts me, I don't get to take justice. Peacemaker, they hit me and I don't get to defend myself. It's good to be meek or gentle. How is that going to help me get to the top of the corporate ladder? At first reading, this list does not immediately inspire the comment Wow, that's what I always wanted to be. My lifelong ambition is to be poor, hungry, mournful, and persecuted. The qualities that Jesus lived. As marking a person as blessed are not highly prized by the world around us. If God didn't open our eyes and give us his understanding and viewpoint, we children of God would not look at our circumstances and immediately recognize the circumstance as blessed. We would look at the lives that Jesus is describing and say, you know, that doesn't sound like a very good idea. In fact, that sounds like a really tough life. But Jesus is saying actually you're blessed. If you study society and culture at all, it doesn't take long to realize that the human race as a whole is deeply committed to some lies about some very fundamental truths. We lie to ourselves about God. God is our all-powerful, holy, and merciful creator to whom we owe gratitude and loyalty and obedience and worship. But we tend to ignore him or trivialize him. We accuse him of all manner of terrible things, we charge him with doing bad things to us, and we deny that he exists at all. So we lie to ourselves about God, and when we evaluate ourselves, we lie. In reality, we are self-centered, selfish, rebellious people who don't respond to God as we should, and we don't treat each other as we should. Yet we always find a way to justify ourselves in our own minds and to excuse ourselves and spin reality such that we can say, you know, I'm okay. I mean, I made a mistake here and there. But really, I'm doing pretty well. Not like that other person over there who's really a mess. You know, it's just the sun was in my eyes, that's all. So we lie about God, we lie about ourselves, and when we think about the world around us, we lie. The world that we live in is broken, defiled by sin, filled with death, tragedy, frustration, and corruption. It is a difficult place to find any ultimate meaning and satisfaction. But we're always trying to convince ourselves that we can find fulfillment through something in this world. Maybe it's through money or power or beauty or fame or prestige or career success or altruism or pleasure. And we lie to ourselves that one way or another, something in this world is going to completely satisfy us and make everything all right. I would say that as a race, we tend to readily and tenaciously embrace lies about ideas that are pretty important about who God is, about who we are, and about where life is to be found. We don't want what is really true to be true, so we embrace something else or deny that truth can be found at all. Consider if we stopped lying to ourselves. What does the world look like to people who have stopped telling themselves these lies? What would it be like to live in this world with your eyes wide open, knowing and embracing the truth about who God is, who I am, and where life is to be found? When you come to terms with reality and see God as the holy righteous author and creator of the universe, you recognize that you have this very serious problem with sin and everything in this world is going to hell, literally. Well, how might your attitude change? What characteristics might now be true of you when you are given the eyes to see what is really true? Other people could convince themselves that they're going to find fulfillment in riches and power and beauty and fame, but if you've come to terms with reality, that's not gonna work for you anymore. Other people can convince themselves that God loves everyone regardless, and everyone who dies goes to heaven, and we don't have to worry about judgment or worry about God at all because hey, I'm just as good as the next guy. But the one who sees life and sin as it really is is not gonna be satisfied with that view. Think of it this way, suppose you're on a boat and you're headed down a river and everyone on the boat is making merry and having a good time. But all of a sudden, you notice that you're in fact headed for a waterfall. Well, once you have that information, you can't just go back and enjoy the party. The party doesn't look good anymore. The party doesn't seem important, and you can no longer lie to yourself about what's going on. Once our eyes have been opened to see the truth, we are no longer pleased and satisfied with ourselves. We are no longer fulfilled by what this world has to offer, and we recognize that nothing less than the solution that God Himself has offered on the cross is going to solve our real problem. In other words, I'm going to see that having an inheritance and a place in the kingdom of God is the most important thing I can ever grab hold of. So I would argue that in these beatitudes, Jesus is describing the person whose eyes have been opened to the truth. This set of qualities is typical of the person who has saving faith because that person no longer believes the lies of the world. I would argue that Jesus is describing the disposition of the heart of the person who has been saved. This is the way that person is going to view God, view themselves, and view the world around them. So to build our picture of what the beatitudes are saying from these four points, here's my full understanding. I think each beatitude follows this pattern. As strange as it may seem, those who are in the seemingly undesirable situation of being X now are actually in a highly desirable situation because they and they alone have a glorious future from God. Let me say that one more time. This is the pattern I think all the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 follow, and I'm going to go through each one using this pattern. So let me repeat it one more time. As strange as it may seem, those who are in the seemingly undesirable situation of being X now are actually in a highly desirable situation because they and they alone have a glorious future from God. That's how I understand the Beatitudes. Now if I'm right about that, you can see how fundamentally important this list is. We all want to be blessed. None of us wants to be cursed. We would like the outcome of our lives to count for something and be desirable. And here, Jesus, the Messiah, is telling us these people and these alone are the ones whose lives are going to end well. God has a glorious future for them. Now you'll notice that this list then ends up sounding like the question, are you going to be saved or not? Are you going to end up experiencing the favor of God, this blessed future or not? Are you going to inherit eternal life? Then you want to be poor in spirit, mournful, meek, hungry and thirsting for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, making peace and persecuted. That's what you want to be, and that's what Jesus is telling us. Now we'll talk about what each one of those means in future podcasts. But you may have noticed I've immediately created a problem. Essentially, I'm giving a message that this is how you end up saved. This is how you end up being blessed by God. But this list doesn't sound like the gospel as we typically describe it. If you've studied, say, Romans, for example, you might be thinking of the gospel in terms of justification. Are you justified or not? That's the language that Paul uses. And I think Jesus means the same thing here. Those who are justified by faith are the ones in God's favor, and those who are not justified by faith are the ones under God's wrath. The blessed one is in God's favor, and that's what the word justification is all about. If I am in God's favor, then I am justified and no longer under his wrath. What is really striking is that Jesus doesn't use the word faith here. He doesn't talk about the cross, he doesn't talk about the need for a savior, he talks about the justified one or the blessed one in terms of this set of qualities. Well, why this set of qualities? And that's what we're going to talk about over the next few podcasts. But I'm going to argue that Jesus is giving us a picture of saving faith. And I'm going to try to make that clear as we go through each beatitude. I think Jesus is giving us a picture of what it looks like to be a person who has saving faith in contrast to the person who does not have saving faith. If you've listened to much of my teaching, you'll have heard me describe saving faith as having four aspects. Those four aspects are not spelled out in scripture in exactly the way I summarize them or spell them out. Some of you have asked me, where did I get that definition? Where does it come from? And you're finally getting the answer. My four aspects are a summary of the themes about faith that I see taught in Scripture, and one of the primary places I see those themes is here in the Beatitudes. So I have defined saving faith as having these four aspects. One, saving faith involves a genuine desire for holiness in and of itself, and we'll be talking more about each of these as we go through the Beatitudes. Two, saving faith includes a genuine understanding that left to myself, I am totally incapable of obtaining holiness. Three, saving faith includes a genuine understanding that God owes me nothing and I am totally unworthy of any gift from God. And fourth, saving faith is a firm trust that God, because of the work of Jesus Christ, both intends to and will in fact make me holy in the age to come. Jesus says that he has come to rescue us from sin and death. I recognize that I need that. Jesus says that he has come to grant us real life, the kind that truly satisfies and never fades away. I deeply want that. Jesus says I don't have to earn his favor. Those are attitudes of saving faith, and we're going to see them in the Beatitudes. So I don't think Jesus is telling us a theology of the gospel or what it means to be justified by faith, but he is confronting us with fundamental attitudes of faith in these beatitudes. So to summarize, I have made two major points about the Beatitudes, and this is how I'm going to approach them. First, each beatitude in this sermon follows a basic pattern. It tells us who is blessed, why they're blessed, that only these people are blessed, and there is something surprising or ironic about that. And I summarize that pattern as strange as it may seem, those who are in the seemingly undesirable situation of being X now are actually in a highly desirable situation because they and they alone have a glorious future from God. And second, that these beatitudes present a picture of saving faith, that Jesus is confronting us with the fundamental aspects of saving faith. You've been listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how we figure it out. Your podcast feed may be limited to the last 20 or so episodes, but you can find all previous episodes on my website. Just go to wednesdayintheword.com. It is an ad-free, spam-free website. There's only Bible study resources, and it's all free to help you improve your skills and understanding. If you want to thank me, please join the mailing list, subscribe to the podcast, and if you have a moment, please leave a positive rating or review about the podcast. It really does help others find it. But most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates. You can find his music on heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.