The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): The Beatitudes are among the most well-known of Jesus' teachings, but they're also one of the most misused and misunderstood. Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically.

There is probably no other portion of our Lord's teaching that runs more counter to our natural way of thinking than the perspective found in the Beatitudes. Stay with us as Dr. Boice seeks to unveil Jesus' purpose behind and the meaning of this famous passage of God's word for those who seek to reside on a higher plane of living.

Dr. James Boice: I'm sure there is no better portion of our Lord's teaching that is better known than the section we have in Matthew 5, 6, and 7, in the midst of which our Lord gives the well-known Beatitudes. I am also certain that there is probably no portion of the word of God that has been more misunderstood and perhaps deliberately neglected than these teachings. Because these teachings strike home in a very direct and forceful way, it's impossible for us to read them without realizing acutely that while this may describe the Lord Jesus Christ, it most certainly does not describe us.

Our Lord said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and we are not poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn, and we do not mourn for the right things and not at all if we can help it. He said, "Blessed are the meek," yet all of our ethics run the other way. He said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness," and we hunger and thirst for sin, and so on. Merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. I suppose there is hardly any portion of the word of God that runs more counter to our natural way of thinking.

When we come to this, we obviously realize that we need the teaching of the Holy Spirit and the work of the Holy Spirit to invert our thinking in order that we might begin to move along the same intellectual as well as moral track of the Lord Jesus Christ. There have been great misunderstandings of what's involved in the Sermon on the Mount by Christian interpreters. I think the principal failure is to recognize that when Jesus is speaking here, he's speaking not so much in the sense of giving a new system of morality, a new list of dos and don'ts, but he's speaking primarily of the need for a new life.

What we have to do is receive his life, and then when we receive his life, we can begin to live in this way. But until we have that, all we are going to do is make a shipwreck of our own lives and our morality. There have been several major distortions of the Sermon on the Mount, some on the liberal side and some on the evangelical side. Perhaps the best known of the liberal distortions is that which came out of the social gospel movement at the beginning of this century with such men as Walter Rauschenbusch and William Gladden, who taught essentially that all that is really needed for a reformation of society and the bringing of peace on earth is a better understanding of the principles of this sermon.

If we just preach this, if we just let people know how it is they're supposed to live, if we talk about meekness and mourning and thirst after righteousness, humility, and mercy and all those things, if we just make that known widely enough, well, people will begin to see the wisdom of this way of life and they'll turn from the kind of foolish behavior that mars our culture and the kingdom of God will come. The kingdom of God did not come, and the reason it didn't come is that they failed to see that first of all, you have to have Christ's life.

You can preach the principles of the Sermon on the Mount until you're blue in the face, and it will do no more good preaching it to the unsaved individual than it would preaching it to a corpse. You can say to a corpse, "Now, the way I'd like you to behave is this: be poor in spirit and mourn for sin and be meek," and the corpse just lies there. The corpse is not going to do anything. It's the same way with the unsaved man. Paul says we're dead in trespasses and sins. If we're dead in trespasses and sins, we're obviously not going to respond to righteousness.

So you had that great distortion and I must say failure in the social gospel movement. As a result, the churches today, the large denominations especially, have turned from the preaching of righteousness to try to affect by pressure and money and politics and marches and such things what they couldn't achieve merely by moralistic preaching. What they're going to find out, of course, is you can't achieve it by the marches or by the pressure or politics or money or any of those things either.

When we talk about the distortions that the social gospel movement made, we don't want to be blind by that to the kind of distortions that many evangelicals have made. We have had a tendency, and we must confess it quite openly in this country in the evangelical world, to more or less dismiss this teaching by one subterfuge or another. Some have said this is just legalism. It's merely the Old Testament law restated. Wisely, it is true, and with a great deal of insight as we would expect from the Lord Jesus Christ, but this has no more control or demand upon us than the Old Testament law does.

After all, we know we're not saved by the law; we're saved by grace. We're not under law; we're under grace. Therefore, this particular statement may serve to condemn us, and rightly so, in order that we might turn from the law to Jesus Christ for salvation, but we really can't be expected to live by it. Again, there are people who have pleaded the impossibility of this kind of morality. They said you just can't live that way in a world today. This is a very imperfect world. If you're meek today, people are just going to smash you down.

You're not going to get anywhere that way. If you hunger and thirst after righteousness, you just can't make it in the world because you've just got to compromise in order to get by. So they've tried to dismiss it that way. There has even been a tendency to do this in dispensationalism. I must say, even as I mention that word, that I do it with great caution and even hesitancy because I have great respect for the early dispensationalists and their teaching has been a blessing to me in many different ways.

Some of it was codified in the old Scofield Reference Bible and preserved to some extent in the new Scofield Reference Bible, and many people learned more about the Bible through a studying of the Scofield notes than I suppose people in this country have learned about the Bible in any other way until relatively modern times. And yet, I think at this one point, at least, the dispensationalists made a serious mistake because dispensationalism divides up biblical revelation into a number of periods and it apportions different portions of the word of God to these periods.

What applies in one period doesn't necessarily apply in another. The argument went that what we have here in the Sermon on the Mount are the ethics of Christ's kingdom. Jesus is going to return one day to establish his kingdom upon the earth, and I believe that. I think he is going to do that. But the argument went, well, these are the ethics of the kingdom and in that kind of an age, this kind of an ethic can be practiced, but you just can't do it today. The only difficulty with that particular theory is that it is precisely a sinful age such as ours about which the Lord Jesus Christ is speaking.

When he talks about not striking somebody back when they strike you on one cheek, it seems to me he's not talking about the age of universal righteousness when he establishes his kingdom, but this age where this sort of thing happens. He's saying, look, it's in this age, this sinful age, this wicked age, that you have to live as I would have you live and indeed as I myself am doing. We look at that, and I think we have to just pause at that point. We have to humble ourselves before God, and we have to say we realize that this is the standard and this is what we are to be in the midst of this world.

The wonderful thing about that is that when we do approach it that way, we find the Sermon on the Mount to be precisely what the Lord Jesus Christ said it was, that is, a formula for blessedness or happiness. Because each of these expressions in the Beatitudes begin with that word: Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek, and so on. He says you want to be happy? You want to be happy even in the midst of a sinful, corrupt, miserable world such as this? Then do not do it in the world's way, because the world is not happy. The world is not blessed. If you'd be blessed, do it in my way, and this is the way I want you to walk in it.

We have a combination of ideas with that word "blessed" in English because the word blessed is derived from different kinds of words that existed in very early English. One of the words that came from is the word "blod," which means blood. Something was called blessed or bloated if it was set apart by a blood sacrifice. That was sanctified or consecrated. That, for instance, is the way we use the word when we talk about the blessed sacrament. It means the elements which are consecrated, that are set apart to the special task.

Another idea comes in entirely through the fact that this English word was used to translate the Latin word "benedicere," which is a word from which we also get our word benediction. It's to speak well of someone. That word would be used of God, for example, where we would say something good about God or praise God, and at that point, the word blessed was also used. We say, "blessed be thy name." That means we honor the name of God or we speak well of the name of God and we'd have it spoken well of everywhere.

Then there was the third use of that word which came from another early English word which was the word "bliss." So we spoke of something being blissed or blessed at that early period. Because bliss meant happy or joyous or even ecstatic, blessed came to take on that meaning as well. Now, when our Lord said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn," and so forth, it's that latter idea that's involved. Not consecration, though that's a perfectly good idea, not speaking well of somebody, though that would apply as well, but essentially happy.

Blessed is the one who does these things. Happy is the one who by the grace of God learns to live in this way. So what is it that our Lord tells us to do? I said as I have introduced these Beatitudes that we have difficulty understanding them because we approach things in the wrong way. This is also true in our interpretation of the details. When we take a word like poor in spirit or something like mourn or meek, we immediately begin to filter it through our way of thinking rather than the Lord's way of thinking, and I think we produce distortions.

For example, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Well, we read that phrase and we think of somebody in great material poverty. We say our Lord's saying it's better to be poor than to be rich. When we do that, I'm convinced that we really do misunderstand what our Lord is saying here. Our Lord never said anywhere that it's better to be poor than to be rich. He did have many warnings about being rich. He said it's hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of God for the obvious reason that in their unregenerate state, they have their minds set upon their riches and they would rather do anything than lose those.

Certainly, they're not willing to lay them aside in order to come to Christ, if indeed that's what his call would require. So he said it's easier for a man to go through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, and that is perfectly true. But that's not the same thing as saying that one is happier by being poor. As a matter of fact, if you read the scriptures, especially the Old Testament, you find that one of the blessings of God was material prosperity. David was blessed and Abraham was blessed and many of the other Old Testament figures. In some cases, as in the case of Solomon, it also became something that brought their spiritual life down.

But essentially, there's nothing better about being poor than about being rich. That's not what our Lord is talking about. What does it mean to be poor in spirit? What it means is the opposite of being rich in pride. That's really where the happiness of this life of Christ begins. It begins at the point, not where we stand before God and throw out our chest and say, "Look what a neat guy I am, why I'm getting along very well, I'm building my life all by myself, and I want you to take notice of that because while I'm not perfect, I'm doing pretty well."

"And, well, you might say I'm 70% of the way there, and by the end of this time next year, I'll be 73% of the way there, and if I need any help from you, it's only to make up the difference." When I get to heaven, I'll be able to look around at the people who didn't do quite so well and say, "Ha ha, I did better than you did." It's not that attitude at all. It's the attitude where we stand before God in our sin and acknowledge our need and say as the Publican did, "God be merciful to me a sinner."

The Publican was a tax collector, and generally speaking, the tax collectors were rich. And yet here was a man who, though he was rich, was poor in spirit because he recognized his poverty before God. So this is what Jesus says. If you want to be happy, begin at that point. Lay your pride aside and stand before God and say, "I am a needy man, I am a needy woman, and if I'm ever to be happy, my happiness has to come from you."

Secondly, he talks about mourning. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. What kind of mourning is this? I think there are different ways in which that could be taken. There could be a mourning that flows from one's personal experience of sorrow or tragedy, the loss of a husband or a wife or child, sickness, personal dismay, the kind of things that come into life all the time. There's a certain sense in which there's blessing in that because God provides comfort even in the midst of the loss.

If our life is entirely protected from such things, we're, I suppose you could say, inevitably poorer for the lack of suffering. There's a second way that could be taken. We could be talking here about mourning not so much for our sorrow, but for the sorrow of the world. Jesus could be saying, "Blessed is the one who is sensitive to this kind of need." A man who as he walks about in a sinful world doesn't walk a foot or two off the ground and not touching the misery around him, but a man or a woman who sees these things and really mourns for the kind of things that trouble other people.

Why, there's happiness in that because it means that we're identifying in the name of Christ. All that is true. I think, however, that while I wouldn't exclude the other things, it probably refers in its primary sense to mourning for one's own sin. I think there's a sequence in these things when they're understood spiritually, and the sequence of this second beatitude obviously follows from the first, because in the first, you see we stand before God not in our pride but in a poverty of spirit, recognizing our need.

In standing before God in that way and seeing him in his holiness, we're inevitably conscious of our own sin. Jesus says the second step to happiness, if you will, is not only to see that sin, but to mourn for it. And he gives this promise: those who mourn for their sin will be comforted as God deals with that sin through the work of Jesus Christ. The third of the Beatitudes has to do with meekness, and probably we misunderstand this one more than any other. What do you think of when you think of meekness?

Most of us think of Caspar Milquetoast or else the skinny, 98-pound weakling in the Atlas ad, the fellow who's standing on the beach and the bully goes by and kicks sand in his face. He says, "Hey, stop doing that," and the bully pushes him over and then he takes the girl. Well, we think of meekness as having to do with the 98-pound weakling. That's not what it means at all in the ancient languages. The way Aristotle defined that is interesting. Aristotle had a whole section of ethics in which he outlined what the proper virtues of a civilized man should be.

Essentially, Aristotle's approach to ethics was what he called the golden mean. There were always extremes, either too much of something or too little of something, and the golden mean was the virtue, and it stood in the middle. Meekness was one of those. Meekness was partway between being too angry, which was wrath flying off the handle, and not reacting at all, that is, being passive, perhaps being the weakling who gets the sand kicked in his face on the beach.

The way Aristotle defined meekness was this: always being angry about the right things at the right time in the right way and never being angry about the wrong things at the right time in the right way. In other words, there was a certain balance to life, and the man who lived properly lived somewhere in the middle. I think there's something to that. There are times when Christians are to stand up and with all the force and strength at their disposal speak out against the sinfulness of the world, and they're not to be meek at all in the weakling sense.

And yet there are other times, perhaps times when our own sense of our dignity is besmirched by what somebody else says or our rights are intruded upon by another individual, when we're not to be arrogant or abrasive at all but we're to step back and we're to allow the Lord to be our defender. The Lord says that he was the one that will take care of such things and we're to trust him to do it. I think in that respect of the illustration of meekness that we have in the Old Testament in the case of Moses.

Moses is described in the book of Numbers, the 12th chapter, verse 3, as being the meekest man upon the face of the earth. Now, when you study meekness in the New Testament and you look in a concordance and find that Moses is described as the meekest man upon the face of the earth, you want to go back to the Old Testament and see what it is that Moses did for which he's called the meekest man. As soon as you do that, you read the 12th chapter of Numbers and you find that this is a description of him in the middle of a story.

It doesn't have to do with him standing before Pharaoh, "let my people go." It doesn't have to do with Moses on the mount before the Lord as the Lord gives his commands to him. It has to do with a very interesting story. Moses had married a girl who came from Cush. His first wife had died and he'd married a second wife. The significance of Cush is that that was the name for Ethiopia, and as we read the story, although it doesn't say so in explicit terms, I think what it's telling us is that the girl was black.

Certainly, this was what Cush stood for. Here was Moses married to this black girl and there were people naturally who didn't like it, and those who were closest to him didn't like it. In other words, they had prejudice back then just the way they do today. The person that was most offended by this was Moses' sister, Miriam. You can understand that. She was a member of the family and she was a woman and she didn't want this black girl in her family. So she got Aaron, the brother, together with her to challenge Moses and his leadership.

God did not look upon this lightly. God took it very, very seriously. He said, "Who are you to question my servant Moses, the one with whom I stood face to face and talked face to face?" And then, while Moses stood there and did nothing, God answered Miriam, and the cloud from the tabernacle overshadowed her. When the cloud moved away, everybody saw that Miriam had become a leper. Her skin was white. You see what God was saying? He's saying, "You're so proud of your color. You're brown, you think white is better? All right, have more white."

Aaron was aghast. Aaron was appalled. He said, "Oh, Moses, don't let this sin of hers be held against her." Moses turned to the Lord and prayed, and the Lord healed Miriam of her leprosy. It’s a very stirring story, but in the midst of it, in the midst of that story, we're told that Moses was the meekest man who ever lived. You see, a meek man is one who bows low before God so that he can stand up against God's enemies. Because he's bowed low for God, he doesn't have to defend himself.

Moses could stand before Pharaoh and could say, "Let my people go," doing it in the name of God without flinching, and lead the people through the wilderness all those years. When he himself was challenged, he could say, "That's of the Lord, I'm his servant, he has to deal with the problem." That's meekness. That's the kind of meekness the Lord Jesus Christ had, and I'm sure as you think over his life, you find many examples of that.

The fourth beatitude has to do with a hunger and thirst for righteousness. I said a moment ago that I think there's a sequence in these Beatitudes, and if that's the case, then obviously this fourth one stands at the center of the whole. It's the heart of the Beatitudes. Righteousness, that's what we most lack. If we would carry that over into theological terms, what we're dealing here is justification, that is, how does a man or a woman become right before God?

We can deal with all sorts of other problems and can find partial solutions, and we can be happy with those, but if we miss this one, if we're not right before God, we've missed it all. Jesus said, "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" You can gain all kinds of worldly happiness, you can have possessions, you can have friends, everything you can think of, reputation, what have you. If you're not right before God, you have sold your soul for a mess of earthly pottage.

Jesus said you see where all this leads is that we might hunger and thirst for that righteousness which God himself gives. I think that comes in different ways. It comes judicially through justification, as the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ is imputed to us. It also comes experientially as we who now in the power of the Holy Spirit live for Christ learn what it is to be upright, righteous, moral in the midst of an immoral world.

If I could put what Christ recommends here in the form of an outline, I'd say it has three parts. He recommends first of all that we desire righteousness. How many of us really desire righteousness? The world doesn't desire righteousness; the world desires sin. The world wants to do what's going to please the world. The world wants to live for self. Jesus says that's not the way to live. Desire righteousness. And then secondly, it should be God's righteousness and not the righteousness of which we're capable, but that which he provides.

Then thirdly, doesn't he make it clear we should hunger and thirst after this righteousness, that is, we should desire God's righteousness with great intensity? I don't think we really know what those words mean today, at least we don't know them on a deep level, to hunger. How many of us hunger? Not very often. We miss lunch once in a while. Some of us are dieting, we don't eat quite as much as we would at other times, but we don't know what hunger really means.

We have plenty to eat. Or thirst. Which of us is ever thirsty? Even when you diet, you drink. And yet our Lord was speaking to people who lived in an age and a place where they didn't always have enough food. They knew what hunger was. They knew what famine was. They lived in a country that was so hot and in an environment so inhospitable that if they didn't get water, they would die. That's what he's saying. He's saying, "I want you to hunger after righteousness like a person who is starving, and I want you to thirst after righteousness that's like someone who knows they're going to die unless they get a drink."

If we don't do that, is it any wonder that we are as miserable as we sometimes are? If indeed the way of happiness is to be found through such righteousness. In verses 7, 8, and 9 of Matthew 5, we have several attributes that characterize the Christian life. Here's the progression, you see. First of all, a humility before God and a sorrow for sin and a certain meekness that comes from contact with him, a hungering and a thirst after righteousness where justification comes in, and now that we have found new life in Christ, there come the characteristics of God expressed in the lives of his children.

Mercy, because God is merciful. Purity, because God is the Holy One. And a desire and ability to make peace, because God is the one who makes peace through Christ and his work upon the cross. One reason why there's so much trouble in the world is that Christians, the remnant, those who are capable of these things, don't exercise them very well. We talk about mercy, but how often are we merciful?

We're merciful to the people who don't really need mercy. Mercy speaks about kindness and charity to those who don't deserve it and who in fact deserve the opposite. You see, somebody who deserves nothing, well, that's charity, but somebody who's your enemy that you are nice to, that's mercy. We don't do that very often. As far as purity goes, I think probably the greatest sadness of our hearts is that we are not pure, that the sin of our lives is an offense to God and we don't even desire purity very much.

Peacemakers, we're better making war. We're glad to raise the banner and go off and fight, but it's hard for us to make peace, and that's one of the things we have to learn as we walk with Christ along the Christian way. Let me end with this last point, the one you find in verse 10: "Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness." Our Lord obviously reflected on this a great deal and considered it important because the next verses develop it a bit.

He goes on to say, "Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven." Whenever we read about persecution, those of us who live today have got to take a second breath and look at it because there's really not very much persecution for us today, at least not in an external, obvious, and certainly not a physical sense.

There are people in the world who are persecuted physically for their faith, none of that here. And yet, when we say that, I think there is persecution of a degree when we live as Christ would have us live. If we really live for righteousness, that is, if we're determined to do the right thing, to be men and women of integrity and upright character, and to be peacemakers and to live lives that are pure, all those things that are mentioned here in the midst of this world, while there might not be outright persecution, there's certainly going to be resentment.

The world doesn't like that. You know, the world hates a goody-goody. They hate somebody who thinks he's better than they are. That's the way they put it. If you try to live as Jesus Christ would have you live, that's what they're going to say of you. If you experience the happiness that he says will come from this way of life, they'll resent you even more. "What are you doing walking around with a smile on your face all the time, you hypocrite?" They just can't stand that. There's that kind of persecution.

Even if you don't have that kind of persecution, there is the kind of persecution that you're going to experience if not from men and women, at least from that great enemy of our souls, Satan, who like a roaring lion goeth about seeking whom he may devour. The more righteous you are, the more like Jesus Christ you are, the more persecution you will have from him. I think here of the example of Job in the Old Testament. He comes to mind primarily because his story is a story of a struggle against Satan's wiles and because early in the story, God commends him as a righteous man.

In that story, it's God who calls attention to Job, not Satan who calls attention to Job. When God calls attention to Job, he turns to Satan and says, "Have you considered my servant Job, how there is not a man like him in all the earth, an upright man who shuns evil and seeks my face?" In other words, you have the testimony of God that Job, who incidentally was also a well-to-do man, lived a righteous life.

Satan brought his slander against Job. It was the first form of his persecution. Satan said, "Well, he doesn't fear you for nothing. After all, you've blessed him materially. Why, who wouldn't serve you if you make him a rich man?" God said, "No, it's not that way. He doesn't love me because I provide for him; he loves me because he loves me." To prove it, I'll let you take away his possessions. Persecution began at that point. Satan struck down all of Job's possessions.

He took away his livelihood and he took away his family, so he lost his children, his sons and his daughters, all in one day. At the end of the story, Job remained righteous. It says that Job sat down and bemoaned his fate. He said, "Naked came I forth from my mother's womb, naked will I return. Blessed be the name of the Lord." You know the next stage of the story, how Satan struck Job physically. God said, "No, I won't let you take his life, but I will let you touch his body."

Here's Job who a few short days before was sitting at the top of the heap. Job who had everything revered by people far and wide, a man of influence and affluence, now reduced to sitting upon a heap of ashes, trash, covered with boils, loathsome in his own sight and in the sight of others. His friends came and they brought all their bad counsel, and yet Job did not curse God with his lips, and in all of this, Job did not sin.

You say, "I don't understand that. How can it be that we're to rejoice in a thing like that, persecuted by Satan because of our stand for righteousness?" Well, it's true, we don't understand it, but that only brings us back to the point at which I started: that we don't understand these things very much because we don't live in the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ. But if we did, we'd understand the story of Job, and we'd understand that Job was greatly honored by God by going through that kind of a tragedy.

What God was doing was bringing glory to himself, showing that a man or a woman who is touched by God and possesses the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ within, this kind of a man will serve and love God regardless of the circumstances. That's a glorious thing. That's the kind of thing that moral victories are made of. This is the kind of thing about which the struggle between good and evil, this universe of ours, this world with all its sin and redemption in Jesus Christ is all about: to show that Jesus Christ does make a difference, that God does make a difference, that the way of happiness is not the world's way, but the way that Jesus Christ himself sets before us.

If we're not happy, it's because we don't go in this way. If we do, then we experience the joy and the blessedness about which our Lord speaks. Our Father, we confess that it is much easier for us to talk about theological matters like justification by faith or the inspiration of the Bible or details of Bible study like prophecy than it is for us to come face to face with the ethical demands of Jesus Christ. We read about these aspects of character and we confess that there is at least part of our being that fights against them every step of the way.

We ask forgiveness for that. We do thank you that by your grace there is also an aspect of our being, the Holy Spirit within, the new nature, that draws us to these things and says, "Oh, Lord Jesus Christ, let me be more like this, let me be more like you, let me be more your kind of man, your kind of woman in this world." Grant, oh our Lord, that by that same power that brought us out of death into life, we might find this way of upright character and righteousness and even happiness, and so be a blessing to those around us for the sake of Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

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