Sermon: The Poor in Spirit
The Attitude of Spiritual Deficiency
#1647-PM
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 16-Apr-22; 69 minutes
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transcript:
Not long ago I was reading some tell-all experiences of flight attendants on the major airlines. You know how you go down a rabbit hole every once in a while and I did that with flight attendants and things that they were saying. It used to be that being a flight attendant was kind of a glamour job. You remember the photo displays that they have and the ads for Pan Am Airlines long ago and all the the stewardesses (as they were called back then) in their skimpy dresses and whatnot. And it seemed like it was something that people thought that they would aspire to do.
But it is really not a glamour job. That was all Hollywood. The reality is far from being anything glamorous. Flight attendants work long hours and they spend a lot of time alone waiting for their next flight at the gate or they are in a hotel room with nothing to do while they wait for the next leg of their journey. Did you know they only get paid, at least this is what I read, for the flights they work and not for the time they are waiting? So when there is a delay it affects them too. You know, if they are delayed another hour or two they do not get paid for the time they are sitting in the gate, only when that flight loads up and takes off.
And they have to deal with passengers. That is definitely the worst part of their job. If a flight goes well, that means most passengers had been kind. They had not been much trouble. Most of them were probably sitting there reading or sleeping or watching a video. That is a great flight for a flight attendant—just get to where they are going without any problems. But too often passengers are inattentive, critical, complaining, demanding, drunk, belligerent, and just generally disruptive. And the flight attendants are the ones that take the brunt of such behavior. It is a good thing that the FAA and the airline companies have given them sufficient authority to handle most situations. Otherwise it would be chaos in the skies.
They would rather not come down on someone, but they will if they must. They have been trained to do it. They have been told the best ways to do so, especially they are willing to do this if it is a matter of safety. Most things that happen up there at 30,000 feet in a cigar tube are a matter of safety.
Now, they really appreciate it, from what they said in this rabbit-hole experience I had, when passengers smile at them, when they ask them sincerely how they are doing, have they had a good day as they board or wherever, and they take their seats quickly and without much fuss. It is a kindness. But if it is sincere, it is a real relief from the jerks they know are also on that flight. They like it when people request things with "please" and say "thank you" when they receive them. It is just common courtesy. But they do this for a living and it makes their day go a little bit better. When passengers comply promptly to the commands that they are required to tell you—the instructions and stuff at the beginning are FAA mandated—they breathe a sigh of relief when we do what they ask us to do, because it reduces their stress. Some of the flight attendants say they occasionally reward passengers who do these things with a little bit of extra snack or just something to make their flight a little bit more comfortable.
Conversely, they cannot stand demanding, I-have-my-rights, I-know-what-my-rights-are, type of people, who usually treat the flight attendants like personal slaves rather than the customer service agents that they are. I will not tell you the mean things flight attendants do to get such people back. But on the minor side they will do things like fill their glass with ice all the way to the top, yet put only half a glass of the liquid in there so they only get a swallow maybe of actual liquid. Or they do their best to take care of everybody else first and then get to them with an insincere, "I'm sorry I took so long to get to you." It really is true that you get better results with honey than with vinegar.
Now, what I have described in the area of being a flight attendant is the norm in just about every part of life. While the squeaky wheel does tend to get the grease, it does itself no favors. Everyone hates having to service the selfish, demanding complainer constantly. We have much better feelings and appreciation for the silent wheels, if you will, that smoothly roll forward without complaint.
Some might characterize squeaky wheels as "needy" and I put that in quotes because they are really not needy. They just demand things that they think they need. But the thing that they need all the time is attention and they constantly make themselves the center of attention to satisfy their egos. So their neediness, if you will, is ultimately self-serving. It is a means by which their carnal natures prey on others for their own promotion, for their own aggrandizement. There is nothing humble about them. It is all about me, me, me.
Now, when we turn our gaze to the church and find this kind of attitude, it is really quite disheartening. This attitude is the absolute antithesis of what pleases God. It is not an attitude God can work with. He cannot work with that squeaky wheel complainer, demanding person who is constantly critical. But there are times when He must. And so when He must, if He wishes to work with that person who has that kind of attitude, He must first take some harsh steps to beat it down and remove it from play, because it is going to get in the way. If you think about it, many of the Bible's harshest trials happened as a result of a self-serving attitude in one person or another and it was getting in the way of God's purpose and work in the particular individual.
Consider Samson, one of my favorite characters in the Scripture. But I will have to tell you, in a way Samson was a narcissist. From his birth he was the "special boy." He was the result of a miracle. He was a miracle child. He was likely doted on by his parents for having this miraculous beginning and you will notice in Scripture that his parents caved to his every desire. He does not treat them very well either. He does not treat them with a great deal of respect. Like when he wanted to get married, he tells his dad, "Give me that Philistine girl as my wife!" I mean, that is not like, "Dad, you know, I'd like to go down to Timnah and see this woman. Do you think this is good? Do you think you could please arrange that for me?" No, it was, "Get me this woman!"
But God was behind the scenes working with him. But if you look through and read it with a little bit of understanding, Samson's attitude throughout most of his judgeship was quite selfish. Just think about his pursuit of his carnal desires. I mean, he pigheadedly and foolishly blundered into situations that a little wiser, maybe less sure-of-himself person would have gone into bit more cautiously. Like Delilah! Notice too, that in a lot of those situations, Samson is touchy, quick to anger, and pretty quick to knock a person on the head with the jawbone of an ass.
It is only when he volunteers, at the very end of his life, to sacrifice himself to gain a victory for Israel, after being severely humbled by blinding, slavery, and mockery of the Philistines, that he makes a real breakthrough—and he dies. That is the end of his life. Finally, God had gotten him to the point where he said, "God, if you will it, I will do what needs to be done to give Israel a victory." God says, "That's the attitude I was looking for all along. Go!"
We could also consider another great in the pantheon of Old Testament heroes of faith, King David during the Bathsheba/Uriah series of sins. You know, that thing that started with adultery and then went to conspiracy and murder. He had a selfish, callous attitude throughout that whole period and that whole period was not just, let us say, a one night stand and then a quick message to the general at the front saying, put Uriah right underneath the wall so he could die. This was at least nine months of defiance of God. God through Nathan had to intervene harshly and his and Bathsheba's son had to die before his attitude softened to the point where God could work with him. It was a really terrible period of his life.
And of course there is Job. We learned a lot about Job in the last two sermons I have given. You know, he started out with a really good attitude: "The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." Wonderful words, accepting God's sovereignty and what He had done. "Shall we accept good from God and shall we not accept adversity?" he tells his wife. Another great line, accepting what had happened.
But that is not the end of the story. That is actually only in the first two chapters. If it had been that way throughout the whole thing, we could have stopped right there and had a two-chapter Job instead of a 42 chapter Job. But his attitude did not remain there. Over time the pain and the grief of his suffering turned him inward. It became me, me, me. Why is this happening to me? Why is God punishing me? I do not deserve this at all. His sufferings made him reason that God was unfair and that he did not deserve his suffering and he desired, in the end, to take God to court over the matter, as if they were equals. As if there was someone in the world that could actually judge between God and a man. God had to crush that uppity attitude, reminding him of God's infinite superiority. Because he had to restore Job's humility and his understanding of his complete dependence on God.
Now, I ended my three-part series on Job with Matthew 5:3. This is the first of the beatitudes that Jesus made in His Sermon on the Mount. It is the one that reads, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Today I want to flesh out what it means to be poor in spirit because it is a vital fundamental attitude that a Christian must have if he or she truly desires to inherit the Kingdom of God.
This is the first day of Unleavened Bread. We heard Dr. Maas talk about the law. We know that the Days of Unleavened Bread symbolize coming out of sin or coming out of this world and putting away our sins, getting rid of the leaven that is in us. And as I look out into the audience and I know the people who are out there listening in, many of you have been in the church for decades—20, 30, 40, 50 years. So the Big Ten, the commandments, they are familiar to us. We have been working on them for a long time. We do not generally steal, do not generally lie, I hope none of you are murderers. We do still covet things. There are certain ones that are difficult for us.
I hope we are not being adulterous or fornicators. Those are the last six. We respect our parents, we keep the Sabbath, we do not take God's name in vain, or at least we try not to. We are working on that. And of course, the two commandments about idolatry at the beginning.
We know those ones pretty well and we work on them and we avoid them to a fairly good degree. I hope that is the way with you. I hope you are not just a Saturday Christian. But we are working on those and we have succeeded on those. But what about, not laws necessarily, but what about attitudes?
The Sermon on the Mount that Jesus gave is a lot less about laws, although it does expand the laws in the spirit to cover a lot more ground, but a lot of the things that He points out that the spirit of the law covers is actually the attitudes behind our breaking of those laws. He says, "For I say unto you, 'Look, it's a little bit different the way I'm going to explain it to you. It's not just that you go and knife somebody in a back alley. It's the hatred, it's the attitude of murder that started the whole thing that is the problem.'" Same thing with adultery. Same for all of them. All those sins begin with attitudes in the heart. "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked."
Jesus, through the Sermon on the Mount, is getting us to move beyond the strict keeping of the letter and saying, "Okay, where does this action come from? And how do I avoid doing this again?" The answer being, "I've got to stop the attitude from forming inside first, initially." So hopefully by this time in our conversion, after many years, we are acing the Ten Commandments in the letter and that we have moved past that to really working on changing our carnal attitudes—the heart—because that is what God is working on. Is that not what the whole the New Covenant is all about? Taking those laws from stone to put them in our heart, to write them on our flesh, as it were? Because He is working on softening our hard hearts. And that happens through His Spirit by changing our attitude.
So, how is your attitude? Is it what we see in these Beatitudes? Are you receiving the blessings of these because you have changed your heart and the attitudes that come out of it?
Let us just take one today. That is all we will do—poor in spirit. What does "poor in spirit" mean? The Greek phrase is ptochoitopneumati. Now, ptochoi suggests a person who is so poor that he has no income from his own labors but must rely on charity to survive. This is the word for poor here that Jesus used. He is so poor—no income—he has to live by charity. In essence, the ptochoi Jesus refers to has nothing, zilch. He has nothing at all, just maybe the clothes on his back, so he is totally dependent on another or others for his continued existence. It is a person we would call completely and utterly destitute.
Now, when you add the phrase ptopneumati to it, it specifies that the realm or the area in which this absolute destitution exists is not physical, but it is spiritual. The body is pneuma, the spirit.
So this distinction that Jesus makes here in Matthew 5:3, that is ptochoitopneumati means that it removes the physical and the material entirely from the discussion. He is not actually talking about a person who is on the street, a person who is homeless, or a person who is in any way poor physically, with no money. A fully employed, comfortably wealthy individual, the person who has enough money to have a residence, have food on the table, clothe themselves, maybe have a car, a few other extra things, or even a billionaire who has whatever he wants, could be poor in spirit. That is, totally devoid of spiritual resources and thus completely dependent on God for spiritual sustenance.
This is not talking about wealth or the lack thereof at all in the physical sense. It is talking only about the spiritual sense. A simple but explanatory translation or paraphrase of what Jesus says here might be this: "Blessed are those who realize their absolute need for God."
As an aside, if any of you were flipping through the Scriptures and looking at Luke's version of the Beatitudes, you would notice that in Luke 6:20 it reads, "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." It does not mention "in spirit." Now Luke uses ptochoi without the addition of topneuma, so it is just blessed are you ptochoi. But it is plain from an understanding of all Scripture there is no innate or inherent blessing on the poor. God does not glorify poverty, not physical poverty. In fact, the whole Bible urges us to work and strive to be materially self-sufficient so that we have excess to give others. If you want proof of that, just go to Ephesians 4:28. You will see it in plain Pauline language that he says there that we should have enough to give to others.
Beyond that, Jesus says that He offers us the abundant life. Now He is speaking mostly about spiritual things, but with His blessings He certainly gives us plenty of physical things to enjoy. No, poverty is blessed, if you will, only when the poor person realizes his need and dependence on God. That kind of poverty God does respect, the poverty of the Spirit, where we realize need Him for everything. We have nothing that we can give Him except our obedience.
So Luke's beatitude is very much the same as Matthew's beatitude. There is no contradiction between them. Both are saying the same thing. Jesus pronounces a blessing on those who know they lack any good spiritual resources. Because they realize what it says there in Jeremiah 17:9, "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." The spiritual resources we have are on the other side of the ledger—the bad kind. We do not have anything of ourselves to add to the good side. That all comes from God.
Here we are in the gospels with the Sermon on the Mount. But the idea of poor in spirit does not begin in the New Testament. This is an Old Testament concept that Jesus pulled out of the Psalms, out of the Prophets, and the people who were listening to Him recognized it. I am certain the disciples did. They certainly knew the scriptures that He was referring to because the Old Testament contains several references to this idea of poor in spirit. And I think you will see that they are fairly well known scriptures to us too.
The chief one that would have come to mind is in the book of Isaiah. So we are going to go to Isaiah 66 and look at the first two verses. Isaiah was one of those books of the Old Testament that people at the time of Jesus were very familiar with because of all, obviously, the prophecies that were coming out, and they recognized that there were a lot of prophecies in the book of Isaiah that concerned the Messiah, and the Messiah was the One they were waiting for. They knew that the time was near and so these prophecies throughout at least the last half of the book of Isaiah would have been top of mind to the religious people of the day.
Now, Isaiah 66 is the last chapter in the book of Isaiah and it is generally thought of as of being part of a very long-range future context. But the context is interesting here, especially in light of what we have learned about Job over the past month or so. I will read these two verses and see if you can pick out what I am talking about.
Isaiah 66:1-2 Thus says the Lord: "Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool. Where is the house that you will build Me? And where is the place of My rest? For all those things My hand has made, and all those things exist," says the Lord. "But on this one will I look: On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at My word."
Did you catch the parallel between this and Job, especially the part at the end of the book of Job where God finally speaks? What does God say to Job to get his attention? Basically He says, "Look at Me. Look what I have done. Look what I am capable of doing. Look and see that I control behemoth. I can kill behemoth. I can take down Leviathan."
So what God does here, in parallel to Job in His speeches there, is that He shows His greatness. He shows His immense superiority over Job. He says that He is the great Ruler of the universe. The Creator God, in whom is all power, all sovereignty. That He can do anything. He owns everything. There is nothing that He cannot do.
But on the other hand, what could man do? That is what He says here. He says, "Where is the house that you will build Me?" Do you really think, He is saying here, that you could build Me a house that will contain Me? The best you could do is build a house that might symbolize Him, but it is going to be far short of what God Himself could make. All the things that we think are so splendid, so wonderful, so highly artistic, and such great masterworks are something God could do with a snap of His fingers and make it even better. Our efforts before Him are feeble.
So what can man do that would help God, that would add to His wealth? What could we do to add to His splendor, His glory? In the end, God is saying here, no work of man can truly impress Me. He is making a point here, obviously. He wants us to understand that our works are nothing compared to Him. He is the superior Being, over all. So what we do are at best faint imitations of His infinite power and creativity. Our most creative minds, our greatest engineers and intellectuals, are just ink spots compared to the the greatness of God. The things that we consider great achievements, God shrugs at.
The question is, in this context, what impresses God? If anything we make or anything we try to do is not even worthy of His acknowledgment, what can we do that will catch His eye? That will have Him look twice. Another way to put it is to what or to whom does He pay attention? Well, He gives us the answer. He says, "On this one will I look." He says He is going to look at one "who is poor and of a contrite spirit and who trembles at My word."
That is what catches God's attention. It is such a rare thing that He has to look—that there is actually a person who is poor, contrite, and who trembles at His Word. Because, believe me, it is rare, maybe one in a billion. I do not know. That is probably way too much. But if you are anything like me, you say, "Well, I haven't hit that spot yet, that sweet spot. I try, but man, do I have a lot of things in me that need changed."
So what He says here, poor, contrite, and trembles at My Word, are three expressions that describes a lowly, humble person in three states (not North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, haha). Three different conditions in which humility can be seen. We will do a little word study here just for a few minutes so that we kind of get the idea of what He is talking about.
The first word that He describes this person is as poor. This is the word in Hebrew aniy. Aniy suggests a needy person. That is, one who lacks resources. This is the one that corresponds most to poor in spirit that we saw in Matthew 5:3. So, as I was saying, the Jews of His day would have understood that this is what Jesus was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount. They would have come back to this particular verse, especially if He used Aramaic when He was speaking, it would have been pretty much the same word.
Let us move on to contrite. The Hebrew word behind contrite is the word nakeh. Nakeh literally means lame or crippled. We would probably use disabled in these times, but it means a lame or crippled person or actually it is the adjective that means lame or crippled. It is suggesting a person who, because of infirmity of some sort, knows what it is like to be damaged by life. It is one who shows remorse for sin in a spiritual sense because he is unable to stand up or upright before God. That is why the word crippled or lame was used because this person cannot stand upright before God, and knows it. So he shows remorse for the sin and thus is humbled because he knows that he himself did it. It was his own weakness that was the cause of his lameness.
But note that like in the beatitude it says contrite in spirit, and I think, I do not know if a Hebrew scholar would say this or not, the word "in spirit" here goes with both poor and contrite because that is what He is talking about. He is not talking about physical poverty or physical lameness. He is talking about spiritual lameness and spiritual poverty. It is poor and contrite in spirit. So poor in spirit and contrite in spirit.
Now, let us get to trembles. This is the word hared. It describes, as trembling intimates here, a fearful person, one who is in a state of severe distress, so distressed that whenever he reaches out a hand it is trembling, or he has whole-body trembling because he is in such a state of fear. This is a person who realizes the consequences of words and actions and thus fears to do wrong. Such a person is sensitive to cause and effect, therefore desires to please the one he fears. So, this one, who "trembles at My Word," is very much parallel to the concept we know as the fear of the Lord or the fear of God. In this case, it is fear of God through His Word, "trembles at My Word." If you tremble at God's Word you are obviously, by extension, trembling before God.
Now, the composite picture that we get from this description in this verse is that God watches or He watches over the person who has come to realize that he is nothing, has nothing to offer God. He has seen the terrible destruction sin has wrought on himself, on others, and the world, and he sincerely regrets to the point of grief that he has personally added a shameful share of sin to the mix. Finally, because of his realization, he has a deep reverence for God and fears doing anything that will displease Him.
Putting this all together, this is a person who puts God—or Christ—at the center of his life. He is everything to this person. This person realizes he is nothing compared to God. This is a person who puts God as his top priority in everything because he knows that he is spiritually destitute, he knows that he has been injured by the world and needs help, and by his own sins too. And he knows that this is the Great God who could squash him like a bug. But he knows that he has been given, in our case, grace, favor so that he can go forward in faith.
Let us go a few chapters back to Isaiah 57, where there is another similar expression of this poor in spirit idea. That is verse 15, which uses the similar language to Isaiah 66:2. We will read from verse 13. I want you to get the context here too. It is very helpful. God says,
Isaiah 57:13-14 "When you cry out [he is speaking to apostate Israel], let your collection of idols deliver you. But the wind will carry them all away, a breath will take them. But he who puts his trust in Me [God says] shall possess the land, and shall inherit My holy mountain." And one shall say. "Heap it up! Heap it up! [or build it up, build it up] Prepare the way, take the stumbling block out of the way of My people."
You are seeing a change here from these apostates of Israel who do not listen to God. And now God is coming. This is in the section of the Suffering Servant in chapter 53. We see the Suffering Servant taking away our sins. Well, this is the Messiah coming. This is "prepare you the way of the Lord."
Isaiah 57:15-21 For thus says the High and Lofty One [now we are getting back to where we were in chapter 66 verse 2] who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: "I dwell in the high and holy place, with him who has a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the hearts of the contrite ones. For I will not contend forever, nor will I always be angry; for the spirit would fail before Me, and the souls which I have made.
For the iniquity of his covetousness I was angry and struck him; I hid and was angry, and he went on backsliding in the way of his heart. I have seen his ways, and will heal him; I will also lead him, and restore comforts to him and to his mourners. I create the fruit of the lips: Peace, peace to him who is far off and to him who is near," says the Lord, "and I will heal him." But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. "There is no peace," says my God, "for the wicked."
What is happening here in this part that I have read is that there is a comparison once again taking place. First of all, there is the comparison of all the humble or the poor in spirit person to God. That is the first comparison. God and the humble person are being compared. And then as we go forward, we are getting a comparison between the person who is humble—poor in spirit—and the wicked. So the poor in spirit or the humble person is in the middle between these two extremes. There is the perfect high, lofty, and holy God on the one hand, and there is the wicked on the other.
God through Isaiah here is trying to give us a better understanding of the kind of person God is going to live with. That is what he says here, "I dwell in the high and holy place, with him who has a contrite and humble spirit." God is giving us an education on Him, His perfection, His superiority, His holiness compared to the wicked and the muck and the mire that they live in. And we are somewhere in the middle moving toward God rather than toward the wicked. How do we move toward God? Well, by being humble and lowly, having this poor in spirit attitude.
I mentioned a little bit earlier that this is talking about the coming of the Messiah, talking actually about the second coming of the Messiah, not the first. Maybe there are little bits of it in the first coming, but this is mostly aimed at the second coming because we have to see in the background here not only the work of the Suffering Servant, that is, Christ's work of redemption, but also His bringing of the New Covenant, and the continuing work that He does with His people through the Holy Spirit. So we are getting now into the time of the end, of now, of the time that is before us in the early parts of the Millennium. These are the sorts of things that are going to be happening.
And what we see here from the first half of the chapter, Israel's old wicked state that God could not work with and how He will eventually be able to work with them once He brings them into that humble, contrite attitude that they need to actually turn to Him. Because He says here in verse 16, "If I kept dealing with them in contention, like they have always dealt with Me in contention, I would wear them out and burn them out spiritually."
But He says here, "For I will not contend forever, nor will I always be angry; for the spirit would fail before Me, and the souls which I have made." They could not take it. Not that continuous, rebellious spirit and God trying to fight against that. He does not want to destroy the people, He wants to change the people so He can work with them. So He says, even though the natural inclination of the human heart is to rebel against these things, He says, "I'm going to make a change. I am going to change them so that there are no more wicked like they were, and I will heal them." And that is obviously the giving of the Holy Spirit, making them soft rather than hardhearted. He would soften their heart through the Spirit.
So it is these type of things, specifically the Spirit of God, that spells the difference between God's former work with Israel and His New Testament work with the elect and then with Israel and ultimately with the whole world. He said the way it was without the Holy Spirit in play did not work. In fact, God's contending with man and man's attitude just caused further rebellion, a further spiral in the relationship, and it ended up, as we see with Israel and with Judah, they ended up in captivity. God had to say, "I've had enough! Get out of here. I'll work with you later," because He did not want to completely destroy them.
But then He sent His Son who made it possible for things to change. Not immediately, but He would take a group—the church—to work with now and we will be ultimately the examples that these people will turn to to understand that it can be done. Because, as we read this morning, God purposely took the weak and the base and the foolish so that they would confound those mighty people who contended with God for so long and say, "Wow, if God could do it with them, well, He could do it with us."
Let us get to this comparison here. We will talk about the lowly individual, the humble person, versus the wicked. We already know about a person's comparison to God, which we fail miserably at in all points. So what about the wicked person versus the poor in spirit person? The wicked person is the spiritual opposite of the lowly person. Here in this passage, God says that He will revive and preserve and save and renew the lowly person. But with the wicked God is perpetually angry. He has to turn away because otherwise, if He did not, they would be a grease spot on the earth. It says there that He will give them no peace. That is the last thing in the whole section. There is no peace for the wicked. God is at war with them, or they are at war with Him, and God responds.
The wicked is iniquitous, full of sin, and contentious. So because that contention is always against God, God must deal with him. The wicked person is full of covetousness, it says here. That he is always grasping for more for himself and he is self-aggrandizing, he takes advantage of others, as opposed to the person who is poor in spirit who looks to God to fill his needs. Instead of turning to God for help, the wicked turns his back on Him. The word here in Isaiah 57 is that he backslides. That word actually means "turn back," he turns back to his idols. That is why I included verse 13 in there because it shows the wicked of Israel always going to their idols rather than to God.
Now, this one is really interesting. Right at the end of this passage He says in verse 20, "But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. 'There is no peace,' says my God, for the wicked.'" A really interesting metaphor here. He describes the wicked as like the troubled sea, casting up mire and dirt. The wicked he describes as being in turmoil, constantly shifting, moving, not settled in one place. The wicked are restless and discontent.
This is what happens when you go to the ocean. The next time you go to Myrtle, go there and stand on the beach and see if the the ocean ever stops. The waves keep coming in, drifting back out, coming in, drifting back out. Some days you go out there in the morning and you will see all this froth and whatnot that has been left on the beach once the tide goes out. Or you will see all kinds of other stuff that has been thrown onto the beach from the waves. That is what he is describing here. Those things are only pretty from a distance. Once you get up close and see them, they are the muck and the mire that Isaiah describes here.
So what we see in the wicked is this restlessness, this turmoil of this constant discontented movement and that is the exact opposite of God's promise to His people. What does He promise us? What do we keep the Sabbath to represent? God's rest. The people of God, the poor in spirit, are content. They can rest, they can relax, because they know with their faith in God that God has their back. That if they keep on the right path, that God will help them. He is holding their hand the whole way. They do not need to be troubled.
The next verse (21) says there is no peace for the wicked. But we saw on Thursday evening that Jesus says, "My peace I leave to You." You can have peace because I have overcome the world. He shows a stark contrast between the wicked and those who are lowly and the people of God. The wicked person is never satisfied, never content, always looking over his shoulder, always in fear of losing what he has gained. It is this chaotic state that causes him to cast up mire and dirt. It is because of these activities, because of this dissatisfaction, not being content, always fearful, that he sins. Those sins come out of that attitude. The muck and the mire that he casts up are sins, the product of his endeavors because it does not come from the right place. They come out of the deceit and the blackness of their hearts. So their products, the things that they do, are sullied and rotten—the muck and the mire. They cannot produce anything that is good.
But the lowly person, the person who is humble, the person who is poor in spirit in his contentment and peace under God produces worthy fruits. Right? And why are they worthy? Because they are achieved in Christ. They are putting Him first and because He is helping them and blessing them. This is the gist of John 15:5, "Without Me you can do nothing." But you must produce fruit. So, if we produce the fruit in cooperation with Jesus Christ, we produce great and abundant fruits that please the Father.
Think of this in terms of the Millennium. Remember I said that this chapter has the time period of right around the time of the beginning of the Millennium. How are the people of God, the converted people described in the millennial setting? As opposed to being a restless sea, spewing up muck and mire. What is the thing we always hear at the Feast of Tabernacles? That each person will sit under his own vine and his own fig tree. That is the classic phrase about the state of people in the Millennium. Notice the person is not standing, he is not working under his vine and his fig tree. He is sitting. He is at rest, he is at peace, he is content.
But he also has a vine and a fig tree that is producing fruit, abundant fruit from what we get in the last chapter of Amos, I think it is, where the reapers overtake the sowers. Great fruit is being produced in an atmosphere of rest and contentment. There are no wars going on, there is no contentions happening, there is nothing roiling society. Everyone is at peace. And it is in a state of peace where the fruit of righteousness can be produced. Check out James 3, the fruit of righteousness is produced in peace by those who make peace.
So, we are seeing these differences between the wicked and those who are poor in spirit.
Let us see another one. Go back to Psalm 34, if you will. I like to think of Psalm 34 as an extended commentary on the Beatitudes. It may be, I do not know. I am just throwing something out here that Jesus based the Beatitudes on this psalm because it is full of them. It is written by his father David, who had a very similar life to Him, went through a lot of the same sorts of things, because David was an early messiah figure, if you will. David himself wrote a lot of the Messianic prophecies in the psalms. But let us read Psalm 34 and get an idea about this.
Psalm 34:1-22 I will bless the Lord at all times [Again, notice how this starts. It always starts with God]; His praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul shall make its boast in the Lord; the humble shall hear of it and be glad. [We have got the humble in there. We are getting the themes set out in these first couple verses.]
Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together. I sought the Lord, and He heard me, and delivered me from all my fears. They looked to Him and were radiant, their faces were not ashamed. This poor man cried out, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps all around those who fear Him, and delivers them.
Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who trusts in him! Oh, fear the Lord, you His saints! There is no want to those who fear Him. The young lions lack and suffer hunger; but those who seek the Lord shall not lack any good thing. Come, you children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Who is the man who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good?
Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking guile. Depart from evil and do good, seek peace and pursue it. The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth. The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles.
The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart, and save such as have a contrite spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. He guards all his bones; not one of them is broken. [that is a Messianic prophecy right there] Evil shall slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous shall be condemned. The Lord redeems the soul of His servants, and none of those who trust in him shall be condemned.
This psalm describes the attitudes of the righteous person and God's actions and reactions to him throughout a life of mingled good and evil, as is common to us all. We can say that this is the gist of it. That the righteous and God have a relationship in which both contribute. The bottom line of the human's contribution is that he knows his place before God. That is, he knows who is the inferior, he knows who is the subject. He knows who is the needy one. And he especially knows who is the master.
This psalm begins with continuous praise for God as one who should always be glorified. It sets Him up as the pinnacle of all that is good and exalted. But mingled with this fact, mingled with this relationship is the fact that the human who is involved is humble. He is lowly, he is poor, and he fears God. But that is exactly why God saves and protects him. Because of that attitude God blesses him. God hears his prayers and ultimately God grants him salvation. The attitude is right. He may make many missteps, but his attitude is such that he repents of those things and he seeks to do what is good.
Now, it is verse 18, "The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit." that is the one that is closest in essence to the attitude of being poor in spirit. He says here, "those who have a broken heart," which is actually a literal translation. It is the actual word for heart. It is the actual word for broken in Hebrew. And it is in parallel to this broken spirit. Actually, the parallel in the next clause where it says, "saves such as have a contrite spirit." The word there is actually a crushed spirit, like one has been pulverized.
So what do we have here? The broken in heart are those who have had their self-seeking, self-centered attitude severed at the root, broken at the root. Where is the root? The heart. The deceitful heart, that heart that I have been talking about from Jeremiah 17:9. The brokenhearted are those who have come to understand that their heart is not to be trusted and they have had to cut themselves off from it, if you will, that is, from the carnal nature. You cannot do it completely in this life, but a person who is brokenhearted has severed as much relationship with his own carnal nature as possible and has said to himself that he is not worth it.
They acknowledge that they are not the be-all and end-all of their existence. That there is something greater than them. As a matter of fact Dr. Maas just talked about that as Christ being the end, telos, of the law. He is the end-all and be-all of their existence at this point. They have changed loyalties, they changed loyalties from their own wicked heart to the One who is truly pure and holy—Jesus Christ. So their lives no longer revolve around their selfish human nature but around Christ. Those are the brokenhearted. Those with a crushed spirit, or as it says here in the New King James, a contrite spirit, have been so thoroughly pounded by experience, the school of hard knocks, that they realize that they have nothing whatsoever to be proud of. So they live consistently in an attitude of unworthiness combined with continuous praise for Christ, who rescued them.
Notice back in Matthew 11, verse 29. You know why this impresses God? Because it is the attitude of Jesus Christ. Let us just read verse 28 too.
Matthew 11:28-29 "Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls."
Let us conclude in I Peter 5. Some well known verses here, verses 5 and 6. Peter is speaking to the church, to all of us. He says,
I Peter 5:5-6 Likewise you younger people, submit yourself to your elders. [then he has a thought, he says] Yes, all of you be submissive to one another, and be clothed with humility, for "God resists [or opposes] the proud, but gives grace the humble." Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time.
What we have seen over the course of this sermon is that poor in spirit is a facet of humility. It is that part of humility which realizes that we have no spiritual good to offer God. We have nothing. In fact, we are entirely deficient and needy. It is an attitude that acknowledges that every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father and that in everything He gets the glory for whatever we become, whatever good we may eventually produce.
Poor in spirit is the conviction that we are saved completely through God's grace and that our lives are now His to command. People with such a wonderful lowly attitude, like Jesus Christ, as we have seen here in Matthew 11, will, as the beatitude promises, inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.
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