Sermon: Those Who Hunger and Thirst
A Perpetual Spiritual Appetite
#1658
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 18-Jun-22; 76 minutes
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transcript:
Several years ago in an article in Eternity magazine (obviously it is a religious magazine), by Dr. E. M. Blaiklock, referred to a book by Major V. Gilbert titled, The Last Crusade. In that book, Major Gilbert detailed part of the British liberation of Palestine during World War I and he talked about a combined force of British, Australian, and New Zealander troops who were pursuing the retreating Turks northward to try to take the Holy Land from them. They had been fighting in Beersheba way down in the Sinai, and obviously, the Sinai area is very dry. It is a wilderness, it is very much a desert. And they were surging up the road toward Jerusalem over this desert.
Now the two forces were very close. They were not separated by miles, they were separated more by furlongs. The Turks were driving hard to go north and the British were right on their heels. And of course the British commander was very eager to press his advantage because he knew he had an opportunity to really obliterate the escaping Turks. However, his speed had an unintended consequence. That fast-moving British force outdistanced its water supply, which was going at the pace of a camel because actually their water supply was being transported by a camel train.
It was just within a matter of hours that their water bottles were all empty and they were still going full-tilt towards Jerusalem. Of course the sun did not go away just to help them. It was blazing pitilessly out of a brazen sky, and the vultures were circling, knowing that there would be fresh meat. Major Gilbert writes, "Our heads ached, and our eyes became bloodshot and dim in the blinding glare. Our tongues began to swell. Our lips turned a purplish-black and burst." Any soldier who dropped out of the hastening column was never seen again.
Without water, and desperate for it, the army's aim switched from pursuing the Turks and annihilating them, to making it to Sheria, a town where there was abundant wells. It on the way, and they knew that the Turks were going to get there first, but they were going to press on because they wanted that water. If they failed to capture the town by nightfall, thousands of soldiers would die of thirst. Major Gilbert writes,
We fought that day as men fight for their lives. We entered Sheria station on the heels of the retreating Turks. The first objects which met our view were the great stone cisterns of cold, clear drinking water. In the still night air the sound of water running into the tanks could be distinctly heard, maddening in its nearness. Yet not a man murmured when orders were given for the battalions to fall in two-deep facing the cisterns.
What was dismaying about that was that the officers commanded a strict priority list of those who could drink. First, the wounded were given the water, then those who were assigned guard duty, and then, only then, company by company. The British are very well known for their orderliness and this time they probably hated the fact that they were. It took the assembled army—remember they are standing two-deep around these cisterns—four hours before the last man took his drink of water. And in all that time they had been standing barely 20 feet from the low stone wall that separated them from thousands of gallons of fresh, satisfying water. Major Gilbert concludes, "I believe that we all learned our first real Bible lesson on that march from Beersheba to Sheria Wells."
In an explanation. Dr. Blaiklock comments, "If such were our thirst for God, for righteousness, for his will in our life, a consuming, all-embracing preoccupying desire, how rich in the fruit of the Spirit would we be."
If you will please turn to the book of Psalms. We are going to read just a couple verses here.
Psalm 42:1-2 As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for you, O God! My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?
Let us go to chapter 63 and we see something similar there.
Psalm 63:1 O God, You are my God; early will I seek You; my soul thirsts for You; in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water.
These psalms express a consistent theme that runs throughout the Bible. They describe an intense longing after God and the things that are godly, particularly things like His righteousness, His holiness, His lovingkindness, and various other things that God has in spades, as it were. He has all those things and more that He wishes to impart to us and for us to develop. God desires that we desire Him and His way as much as a totally dehydrated person desires a drink of water. Like those soldiers who had to fight or pursue the enemy and then stand there waiting for water. Can you imagine the thirst? Can you imagine the satisfaction?
The metaphor though is not just of a thirsty man. We get thirsty—we go out for a run or something in the heat, we come in, we want a drink of water or you know something with some electrolytes in it, and that is fine. I mean, that is normal thirst after exertion. But what is actually in this metaphor is not just the normal thirst you get after activity. It is a metaphor of one who is about to die of thirst and he must have that water to continue.
We all know the fact, it is out there. We probably heard it in health class or saw it on the Internet. But the human body is about 60% water. The average person can survive without water only about three days. And it would be inhuman to actually test this. But they know that a person at about three days is about to die if they do not get any water. All of that depends on the person's individual health, where he happens to be. So, the weather can come in and play a factor. If it is blazing hot, you are going to lose a lot of water faster. And of course, if you are active, if you are walking or running or if you are just lying, it will be a little bit different.
So, in an arid environment like those soldiers were in, like we are here in Colton, as we would be if we went out on the Mojave, a body can lose a quart to a quart and a half of water per hour—like I said, depending on health, depending on weather, depending on activity. Dehydration sets in very quickly. I mean, if you are 60% water and you start losing it by the quart, can you imagine? Severe dehydration happens at the loss of about 10% of one's body weight. That is hard to quantify because we are all different; we all have our different sizes, different weights. But a child left in a hot car or even an athlete exercising hard in hot weather, can dehydrate, overheat, and die in just a few hours. It does not take much.
But it is at the end of those few hours the metaphor kicks in, the metaphor of thirsting for God. It is the one illustration we saw there in Psalm 42 was of deer panting after the water. The deer was on his last legs, as it were, and and trying to have that drink that would revive it. That is what we are talking about here. We are not just talking ordinary thirst. We are talking just-about-to-die kind of thirst.
To put it another way then, God wants us to desire Him and the things of God as if our lives depended on it. And you know what? They do. Our eternal lives depend on having such thirst for God. It says there in (specifically) the letter to the Ephesian church in Revelation 2, they had lost their first love. Another way of putting that is that they had lost their thirst for God.
So today we are going to be looking into Jesus' fourth beatitude, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled." You find that in Matthew 5:6. We will be hanging around here a good bit and you may want to put a ribbon or some sort of marker in there at Matthew 5.
Anyway, this beatitude is a positive consequence, we could say, of the first three. The first one being poor in spirit, the second being mourning, the third being the meek. And then you have hungering and thirsting as a positive action that comes out of those three more negative attitudes. So it is an upward-looking desire: upward meaning looking to God, of one who realizes his poverty, his spiritual poverty, his grief over his sins, and the lowliness of the meek. And this person knows that the only worthwhile direction to turn after seeing these things in himself is to God and to His righteousness.
Now this beatitude seems straightforward at first, but many otherwise intelligent people have misinterpreted what Jesus says here. So to get off on the right foot so we have a proper basis of understanding, we need to start with a little grammar. Now this is not an English class, but it is something we need to understand because the Greek tells us how we are supposed to understand this. If we only knew Greek, right?
Well, the words hunger and thirst in the Greek are present tense active participles. What this implies is continuous application. I think we could probably get a better sense of the force of Jesus' thinking here by considering them as not blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, but blessed are those who are hungering and are thirsting for righteousness. So you could say, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and think that, well, they did it once or twice and they fulfill it. But when you say that they are hungering and are thirsting after righteousness, that means that they are still doing it, they are continuing to do it. They have it all the time.
Jesus wants His people to possess this attitude continuously—all the time. He never wants us to slack in our pursuit of being righteous and doing righteousness. This attitude needs to be constant and wholehearted in a Christian. It is a perpetual, healthy, hearty spiritual appetite because we need it, otherwise we are going to die. That is the idea that should be in our heads. And from God's point of view, the presence of this attitude of always hungering and always thirsting after Him and His righteousness, shows God our desire for Him, our desire to be like Him, our desire to be ourselves righteous and pure and holy as He is.
Let us just see this in I John 2. We often look at this in terms of the resurrection, but maybe that is selling what John is saying here a little bit short because he certainly gets to the here and now by I John 3:3. So notice what he says here in I John 2. We will start in verse 28. This—the way he opens up—here is certainly present tense as well.
I John 2:28-29 And now, little children, abide in Him [that word could be continue, not just "live in" but "continue in Him"], that when He appears, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming. If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone who practices righteousness is born of Him.
I John 3:1-3 Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now [now, currently] we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be [We do not know exactly in our limited human sense what our future being will be like. We have a good idea, but we do not know it for sure as we do not have the limitless mind of God at this point to really understand it.], but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. [It is great to stop here but we need to go one verse further.] And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.
Because we have this great hope in the resurrection that we are going to be like God, we do not know exactly all the parameters of what that means, but we have a conception of it as much as we can, but we see that and we say, "What should our response be?" And God provides it here for us by saying, "If you have this hope in you, then what you need to do is purify yourself," just like Christ or the Father is pure. Absolutely impossible to do in our present state. But that is the goal. We put our goals really high and we strive to reach them.
So we are looking at the purity or the holiness of God and say, "I want to be like Him." Father's Day weekend, "I want to be like You, Dad." That is what we have to do. We have to purify ourselves as much as we possibly can to reflect the Father and the Son. So this hunger and thirst for God and His righteousness provides the impetus to be like Him, driving us to purify ourselves in everything we do, so that we are constantly getting better and better and better—meaning more like Jesus Christ, more like the Head of the body.
Hungering and thirsting are vivid expressions of desire. But as I have already started to indicate the sense in Matthew 5:6 does not end with just desire. It does not mean that we just long for this. That is a very Protestant view of things, that we just desire it because we do not need to actually be it. But the Protestant theology basically thinks that once we have had Jesus' righteousness imputed to us, we do not need to go any further because once we are saved, we are always saved. So there is no hope, necessarily, no real desire to go on from there to perfection, if you will.
So the hungering and thirsting, the desire that is, the longing, must not lie dormant. You cannot just stop at an attitude. It cannot just be desire alone. Righteousness must be earnestly and habitually sought. Righteousness must be earnestly and habitually pursued. It is not a passive longing, not a passive desire, but active seeking that Jesus is trying to impart to us here. It is not occasional acts of righteousness, but a passionate concern to do right, and to see right done. That is, personal righteousness, and also what we would call justice for the oppressed and against the perpetrators of evil.
We should not let Protestant theology of "once saved, always saved," or "just as I am Lord," or "justification by faith alone," fool us into thinking that we just have to have this hunger and thirst as a mental condition or a mental state. Jesus' beatitude includes the practice of what is right, that is, obedience to God's standards (like Austin [Del Castillo] was talking about earlier), which are detailed throughout this whole Book (as he also mentioned). Not just the New Testament, but the Old as well.
Think about this. Really, this idea of obedience to God's standards or pursuing personal righteousness is the primary meaning of the attitude. It is not just the longing, but the doing. The longing should proceed to the doing. That is what He is getting at, primarily, here. Think of it in terms of the metaphor we have already seen with the soldiers marching across an arid landscape and being about to die. When one is starving or one is dehydrated, a person will do whatever he can to find and consume what he needs—whether it is food or water—because he needs that need, he needs that that need be satisfied or else he will die. He does not just wait for someone else to fulfill that need. I mean, it would be silly to think about a man crossing the Mojave Desert, realizes he is thirsting for water, and he just sits down and waits for the rescue to come—and who knows if it ever will.
So the beatitude emphasizes God's expectation that we live in full accord with His will, not just agree with it. It is not just an intellectual thing, it is not just an emotional thing. But the intellectual and emotional reactions should lead to a physical, practical reaction, that is, I want to be like God so I am going to pursue righteousness as my own personal task, aim, to become like Him. So a Christian's chief desire, Jesus is saying here, should be for a relationship of obedience and trust with God, a relationship that is unspoiled by disobedience.
What do we have the apostle Paul saying as we get into his epistles? "Put off the old man and put on the new man." I am saying exactly the same thing, just in different words. That the relationship with God and our desire for Him almost forces us to get rid of any evil that is in us, purify ourselves, and begin practicing the life of God in our own lives as much as we possibly can.
I have been talking a little bit about Protestant theology of this in their saying that it is really just desire alone because God will fill that need, as the beatitude goes on, with Christ's righteousness. That is as far as they take it. You do not, according to them, need to do anything more. It is just all that righteousness will be imputed to you. They put that word in there. Let us read it that way. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for God will fill them with Christ's imputed righteousness." That is how they read it.
The chief objection that we would make to the Protestant view is that the Greek word for righteousness which is dikaiosyne. It is Strong's #1343. In the book of Matthew, I am speaking right now about just the gospel of Matthew, dikaiosyne in Matthew specifically does not carry the sense of imputed righteousness. Protestant theology demands that it does, Matthew does not. As a matter of fact, that sense of dikaiosyne does not appear anywhere in Matthew's gospel. Nor does it deal with political or social justice to any great extent. We are talking personal righteousness as it comes out in conduct.
Now, according to Vine's Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, I want to quote Mr. Vine here. He says, "While dikaiosyne, righteousness, can be translated as justice, that sense is only faintly present. Of course, the poor, the grieving, the meek, the hungry and thirsty, all want God's justice to come and solve their earthly problems or redeem them from their troubles. But dikaiosyne has a different emphasis in Matthew." Then he tells us, "see 3:15," meaning see Matthew 3:15. And let us do that and read what Jesus says here. The background here is that Jesus has come to John the Baptist for baptism.
Matthew 3:13-15 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. And John tried to prevent Him, saying, "I have need to be baptized by You, and are You coming to me?" [John is saying, "This makes no sense. You're much greater than I am. You're God. You're coming to little old me for baptism and you know it should be the other way around. I should come to you for consecration."] But Jesus answered and said to him, "Permit it to be so now, for thus it is for fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness." Then he allowed Him.
Evidently John the Baptist understood what He meant. He understood that what Jesus meant was that this "all righteousness" that He was talking about was what God required. Vine comments here, "To fulfill all righteousness clearly means to do what God deems right and proper. To do what fulfills or conforms to God's revealed will."
So what Jesus is telling John the Baptist here is that God required Him, it was God's will for Him to undergo baptism because it is right and proper for a person, even the Creator God, our High Priest and Head of the church, to make a public declaration of His decision to come under the New Covenant. God wanted this done, not that it would make Jesus any holier. That could not happen. But the Father had the Son do this as a public example. It was right and proper for Jesus Christ to show the rest of the world, and more specifically everyone who was going to come into the body as time went on, that this was the proper way to do things. It was right and fitting that each person undergo water baptism just like the Head of the church did. That is the way.
Vine shows here that in Matthew righteousness always leans toward the practice of goodness, what is right and proper in godly conduct and behaviors. It is not a spiritual state or condition. You know people today, "Are you religious?" "Oh no, no, I would never. The churches are terrible and this and that but I'm spiritual." Well Jesus says, "No way. Yeah, you could be spiritual but you better be religious too." Religion implies duties that one must perform and so this is one of the duties that must be performed. It is a responsibility of everyone coming to Christ to go through baptism, just as repentance is, just as belief is.
And so we can see from this example that righteousness is not a spiritual state or condition of the person's heart or mind or however you want to put it. Not in Matthew. In Matthew it is always having to do something practical, something physical, some sort of obedience and proper conduct.
What I want to do, I know I am leaning a lot on Vine here, but I think that he explains things quite well. I want to follow Vine's proofs of his statement that in Matthew this other kind of imputed righteousness does not appear. So I want to go through this. Vine goes it does it in A, B, C, D order of the various senses of righteousness, dikaiosyne, in Matthew.
He says dikaiosyne is found in the sayings of the Lord Jesus:
A. Of whatever is right or just in itself, that is, whatever conforms to the revealed will of God.
Now we have seen this in Matthew 5:6 in the Beatitude to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Let us go down to verse 10 and see how he uses righteousness there.
Matthew 5:10 "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Let us think about this. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. They are persecuted for their righteousness. This righteousness, if you are thinking along the same lines as me, is something that the disciples have, that is why they are persecuted for it. But if they had it and no one can see it or hear it, they would never be persecuted, would they? Somehow this righteousness has been seen or heard because they are actively doing it. So they are persecuted because of what people can see or hear from them in their godly conduct or their godly speech.
What I am saying here is that they are persecuted for righteousness because it is a recognizable behavior of some sort that people see and persecute them for. Either they are preaching it or they are speaking it in some way. They are speaking good words, uplifting things, or they are doing something that people can see that they disagree with. They are doing some act of righteousness.
There is another instance in the Sermon on the Mount in the same chapter, verse 20. Jesus says,
Matthew 5:20 "For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven."
Let us think about this one also. What do we know about the Pharisees and their righteousness? It was all outward, was it not? The Pharisees would stand and pray in the open, they would give their alms in the open, they would do all kinds of things so that people could see them. Jesus is saying here that your righteousness has to be more than what they did. He is thinking along the lines of actual, practical righteousness. You have to go beyond the Pharisees acts of righteousness, and mostly He talks about doing these things in secret, not in public but in private. But they are still acts of righteousness, they are still personal conduct that reflects what God does. So again, the righteousness here is righteousness of behavior, of conduct. Jesus wants the conduct of the disciples to be even better than that of the Pharisees.
That was all under A. Let us go on with B. Vine says that dikaiosyne means,
B. Whatever has been appointed by God to be acknowledged and obeyed by man.
These would include things like the commandments. We already went to Matthew 3:15, we saw that in terms of baptism. Let us go to chapter 21 and verse 32, we will see that here. Jesus is saying,
Matthew 21:32 "For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him; but tax collectors and harlots believed him; and when you saw it, you did not afterward relent and believe him."
So here again John the Baptist came, as it says here, in the way of righteousness. He is not talking about necessarily just the instruction of righteousness. When you talk about a way, you are talking about a walk, right? A walk toward the Kingdom of God, a set of behaviors, progression toward the Kingdom of God. And Jesus is saying that when John came, he came doing all of these things that people could see. Now the Pharisees did not believe that John was doing these things and that was the way of righteousness, but He says here that the tax collectors and harlots did and they followed him. They believed and they began doing the things that he was teaching and what he was doing as an example of behavior.
C. Dikaiosyne in Matthew can also mean the sum total of the requirements of God—all of them.
Let us go back to Matthew 6, verse 33, a memory scripture. This is very, very similar to the beatitude.
Matthew 6:33 "But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness."
That means all of what God considers to be righteous. All of them including thoughts and words and actions—all of them. So dikaiosyne can be an umbrella term for everything that God requires of people who come to Him.
D. Dikaiosyne also means in Matthew religious duties.
Go back to the beginning of the chapter. If you have a New King James Bible, the word "charitable deeds" here is dikaiosyne. Other Bibles translate it what it should be translated as, righteousness or righteousnesses.
Matthew 6:1 "Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds [or righteousnesses] before men, to be seen by them. Otherwise you have no reward from your Father in heaven."
Here in verse 1 of chapter 6, He is making clear that the righteousnesses are something you do. And so here these are, like I said, religious duties, like alms giving, this one He mentions here, which is man's duty to his neighbor, that you give things that they need. That is all the way from verse 2 through verse 4, and then He picks up prayer a little bit later on in verses 5-15. That is your duty to God, right? That is a righteousness that we need to be practicing all the time. And then later on in verses 16-18, you have fasting, which is something we do as a religious responsibility, religious duty to overcome yourself and your desires and your needs that are selfish and we learn self-control that way.
So, we have these four things and I will just quickly summarize. Dikaiosyne in Matthew is A, whatever is right and just in itself, whatever conforms to God's will. B, whatever has been appointed by God to be acknowledged and obeyed by man. C, the sum total of God's requirements. And D, all of our religious duties that He also requires, such as helping others, praying, fasting, that sort of thing. That is Matthew, the book of Matthew, the gospel of Matthew.
The apostle Paul does use dikaiosyne for imputed righteousness. And this is where they get the idea, mostly, from the epistles of Paul. But he only uses it this way when he is indicating God's gracious righteousness in His dealings with people whom He is bringing into a right relationship with Him. So what we see and what I just said there is that this righteousness happens at the very beginning of our conversion. This is when He is bestowing grace and forgiveness upon us, when He is drawing us close, He is giving us faith, He helps us to repent, and He is leading us into conversion.
This is the part of the salvation process that is called justification. That is when God imputes Christ's righteousness to us to cover us so that we can come before the Father, covered by His blood, as it were. So that we have the righteousness and the holiness before God to have a relationship with the Father and communicate with Him. Now, justification stays with us, and I am glad it does, because it keeps us in that relationship with God. But when Paul uses dikaiosyne in this sense, he is talking about that initial granting of righteousness that we could never come up with ourselves. It would never be part of us as people coming out of the world. So, Christ's righteousness is placed on us in a legal sense so we could be accepted before God and, like I said, have a relationship with Him, commune with Him.
Think of it this way: Once we are justified, once Christ's righteousness has been imputed to us, we no longer have to hunger and thirst for imputed righteousness. You understand my meaning here? If it has already been given, then we do not have to hunger and thirst after it. So why does Jesus tell us to hunger and thirst after it? And, future tense, it will be given. Sounds to me, logically, that He is not talking about imputed righteousness, because that is given at the beginning of the relationship, not after. Why would we have to hunger and thirst for it if we already had it? In fact, one can make the theological argument that before conversion, which a lot of the Protestant theologians think is what Jesus is talking about here, a person cannot hunger and thirst for righteousness in any true sense. Before you are converted, before you have the Holy Spirit, there is no way you can hunger and thirst after righteousness the way God wants you to. You may have a glimmer of it, that you want to have a relationship with God, but you really cannot do it because the Holy Spirit is so vital to the process.
Without the Holy Spirit, a person cannot do hungering and thirsting in the right way with any real understanding and effectiveness. It is just a desire at that point—a human desire. But once the Holy Spirit is married to our human spirit, then we start having a deeper understanding of what it means to hunger and thirst for righteousness.
So maybe as a sum up here of all of this, in Jesus' beatitude in chapter 5 verse 6, righteousness is the attitude, and it is the behavior that the covenant God requires of His people. It is both. It starts with the desire, but then it goes into practical matters. Hungering and thirsting describe, not those who have reached the goal of righteousness, but those who are on the way toward it and trying to achieve it. They are eager and desperate to practice God's way. Such people hunger and thirst to become righteous, that is, they want to do God's will from the heart as fully as possible.
Another thing that is part of the thinking is that such people who hunger and thirst for God's righteousness eagerly anticipate the establishment of God's Kingdom, a future Kingdom. Do you want to know why? I mean, obviously one of the reasons is this world is so awful that they eagerly anticipate the return of Jesus Christ because it will be so much better then. But notice what Peter says,
II Peter 3:13 Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
The Kingdom of God is the dwelling place of righteousness and those who are with the program, as it were, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, eagerly desire the coming of the Kingdom when all will be done in righteousness. This is a New Heavens and the New Earth he is talking about here. So in this way it does include the idea of justice. That the Judge would come back and He would help those who are in need and He would put down those who have been doing evil against them. That kind of justice.
But it mostly has to do with this idea of everybody in the world living in a way—God's way—that will bring peace and prosperity, which we will see in the Kingdom of God. And this is part of the attitude behind this. That our goal is far ahead of us. The return of Christ, the Millennium, Great White Throne judgment, the New Heavens and New Earth—all of this is right before us. We can see it and we know that the only way we can get there is to do what God says. And so we hunger and thirst after God's righteousness because we know that at the end of the road, as it were, we are home because that is the dwelling place of righteousness in the Kingdom of God.
Back to the beatitude. This beatitude as a whole stresses a cooperative effort between the Christian and God. Those are the two halves of the beatitude. We hunger and thirst. The other half is God's half. He will fill us with that righteousness. We supply, yes, the attitude and the effort to progress in building godly character, and God then doing His part as our covenant God—we are both part of this New Covenant, we both made the agreement to cooperate in all of this—supplies what we need to make righteousness a reality. We could never do this on our own.
What does Jesus say in John 15:5? It has become pretty much another memory scripture. Jesus says, "Without Me you can do nothing." And so we can hunger and thirst for righteousness to the nth degree, but we could never achieve it truly without what Jesus Christ Himself supplies through His Spirit, through the relationship that we have with Him. So again, this is a cooperative effort between the believer and God Himself.
We just read Matthew 6:33. What did He say there? I told you at the time when we read it, it is very similar to the beatitude. "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all of these things shall be added to you." So if we put in the effort and have the attitude that that is what we want, we want the righteousness and purity of God, then He says He is going to add whatever we need.
Now in context, He is talking about food, clothing, and that sort of thing. But the implication is that He is going to give us everything that we need to fulfill the goal of seeking righteousness and seeking God Himself. So we do not need to worry about our physical circumstances. He has got that taken care of. But He will also add to us whatever we need to fulfill the more spiritual and godly goal of becoming like Christ, of putting on the new man.
So the wording in the beatitude implies righteousness must be ever sought. It always has to be the goal that lies ahead of us. It is never in our grasp. We never have enough righteousness. We always want to be better. We always want to be more godly. And those who hunger and thirst after righteousness are blessed, as opposed to those who think they have attained it. Jesus gave us an astounding parable. Let us go to Luke 18. If we are truly hungering and thirsting after righteousness, God will do His part in giving it to us. But if we think we have already attained—watch out!
Luke 18:9-14 And He spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous [there you go], and despised others [usually, that is what happens]: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all I possess.' And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God be merciful to me a sinner!' [He knew that he had not attained.] I tell you [Jesus says], this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."
I am glad Austin [del Castillo] spoke about what he did. There are parallels galore here. I would like to go back to Psalm 119. He actually did not read 119, he mentioned it, but read instead the shorter version, the summary version in Psalm 19. But I just want to read the first twenty verses here. By the way, Protestant theologians despise Psalm 119. They hate it. And the reason is, the attitude behind Psalm 119. Listen to this. Whoever the writer was, whether it was David, whether it was Jeremiah, whether it was some other poet of Israel, you do not have to necessarily listen to the words, but listen to the attitude, if you will, of this man.
Psalm 119:1-20 Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord! Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with the whole heart! They also do no iniquity; they walk in His ways. You have commanded us to keep Your precepts diligently. Oh, that my ways were directed to keep Your statutes! Then I would not be ashamed, when I look into all Your commandments. I will praise You with uprightness of heart, when I learn Your righteous judgments. I will keep Your statutes; oh, do not forsake me utterly! How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your word.
With my whole heart I have sought You; oh, let me not wander from Your commandments! Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against You. Blessed are You, O Lord! Teach me Your statutes. With my lips I have declared all the judgments of Your mouth. I have rejoiced in the way of Your testimonies, as much as in all riches. I will meditate on Your precepts, and contemplate Your ways. I will delight myself in Your statutes; I will not forget Your word. Deal bountifully with Your servant, that I may live and keep Your word. Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things from Your law. I am a stranger in the earth; do not hide Your commandments from me. My soul breaks with longing for Your judgments at all times.
Then it goes on and on and on with his extolling God and His instruction, His law, His righteousness. Because he is filled with it. He is filled with this great desire, the hungering and thirsting after righteousness that Jesus is getting at in the beatitudes. The author here yearns for more knowledge, for more insight, for more strength to do what God wants him to do. More discernment to learn and practice God's instruction in His Word. You get the feeling, by the time you get through some of these little sections here, that the psalmist wants nothing more than to do God's will in everything. Every act, every word, every thought—all the time, in every situation.
You know, that is how Jesus lived. Let us just pick up Hebrews 10, verses 5-7. This is actually an Old Testament verse that is being quoted in the New Testament. But the author of Hebrews is applying it to Jesus Christ, to whom it chiefly applies.
Hebrews 10:5-7 Therefore, when He [meaning Jesus] came into the world, He said: "Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You have prepared for Me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You had no pleasure. Then I said, 'Behold, I have come—in the volume of the book it is written of Me—to do your will, O God.'"
That is what He came to do. God prepared a body for Him. He appeared in this world as a baby and grew up and in everything that He did, all the way through His ministry, up until His death, all He wanted to do was fulfill the will of God. He hungered and thirsted after the righteousness of God. He hungered and thirsted after God Himself.
Let us see one of these. Let us go to John 4. Now consider this, we will see this as we go through. He and the disciples had been walking all morning up to Sychar from the area of Jerusalem. He left Judea and departed to Galilee. So He has just come to Sychar.
John 4:5-8 So He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour. [The sixth hour is about noontime, the height of the sun. He was very thirsty. He had just traveled, done a lot of activity. Maybe He was starting to feel dehydrated. He was thirsty.] A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give Me a drink."
Then He had that whole conversation with her where He talked to her about the Holy Spirit, His well of living water that He was promising. And she went away understanding that He was the Messiah and she told about Him to her friends.
John 4:31 In the meantime, His disciples urged Him, saying, "Rabbi, eat." [because He had sent them into the town to get something for them to eat]
John 4:34 And Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work."
Our Elder Brother did not need physical food and water to feel satisfied. I mean, He did. His body needed those things. But in doing God's will, in doing the work, in preaching the gospel, He was energized because it had filled His main need. He hungered and thirsted after doing God's will and He did God's will and He felt alive because God filled Him, just as the beatitude says. So doing these things, doing God's will, filled Him with purpose and energy and He left us an example here of pursuing God's will to such a degree that He gave everything He had in life and in death.
Think of His prayer in the garden in Luke 22:39-44. He sweat great drops of blood because He was having this inner war with His flesh. With His mind He really wanted to do God's will but His flesh was saying, "I don't want to go through with all this that's going to happen when they arrest Me." But what did He come away saying? "Not My will, but Your will be done." And He got up and did it.
What about His suffering and His humiliation during His sham trials that we see in Matthew 26 and 27? They cursed Him. They reviled Him. They slapped Him, they punched Him, they whipped Him. They plaited a crown of thorns, which perhaps were a couple inches long, and slammed it on His head. They made Him naked. But He did not falter. He did God's will—all the way to the cross.
What about His committing Himself to God and to dying, to sacrificing Himself to redeem us from our sins, as Peter talks about in I Peter 2:21-24? He committed Himself to the One who could really help Him, the One who could save Him, the One who could resurrect Him. The One who was His real Judge. And He was willing to go through all of that to set an example for us and to accomplish the work that He had been sent to do.
So in Him we see a living model of what it means to love God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. It is no wonder that this is the first and great commandment of the law, as it says in Matthew 22:37. He did that literally. He kept that first commandment, like the term I used before, to the nth degree, until it killed Him. And that is the underlying principle of this beatitude. To love God so much that we seek to be like Him in every way, all the time. We have this burning desire in us to be like Him. And because God is righteous we yearn to be righteous too and put on that character. Like I said before, "I want to be like You, Dad."
Now in the beatitude, Jesus promises that we will be filled. What that word filled, or be filled, means is that we will be given a full measure, or fully satisfied. We see a similar metaphor that might explain things in Luke 6, verse 38 where it is applied here to giving, which is righteous action.
Luke 6:38 "Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use it, it will be measured back to you."
This is the kind of full measure of righteousness that God promises us to fill us with. If we put in the effort, if we have that desire, and we are moving in that direction, God will fill up what we lack. He will give us the strength. He will give us more of His Spirit so that we can do what needs to be done. We just have to trust Him. Take that step, move forward.
So what God will give is not imputed righteousness, not just right standing before Him. That is legal justification. But what He is talking about here is real, personal righteousness. Character, we call it, holy righteous character, that is built in cooperation with Him. We do it together, like it says in Philippians 2:12-13. This character is honed by conducting ourselves properly minute by minute, day by day. The righteousness that He gives us comes by obedience, godly living, righteous personal character growth until it becomes our own. And that is what we call sanctification. A long process of growth in which we start as the scum of the earth, full of sin, and end up glorious, having been resurrected in the Kingdom of God.
He is never going to stop His work with us to make us more righteous. That is the goal. He wants us to be like Him, just as we should like ourselves to be like Him. He is fully invested in the process. He wants to see us shine like His Son, Jesus Christ, as part of the bride. And He will do this all the way to our dying breath, because He is with us, He is in us. And that is His goal.
Of course, the fullness of this righteousness that we seek will come only in the resurrection. We are going to be very pale imitations of what we will be, even at the end of our lives. Let me just put it in terms of the beatitude here, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, [and I am going to change the last line], for God will ultimately fill or satisfy them to the full."
Psalm 17:15 As for me, I will see Your face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake in Your likeness.
Isaiah 32:1 Behold, a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule with justice.
Isaiah 1:16-17 Then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness remain in the fruitful field. The work of righteousness will be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever.
II Peter 3:11-12 Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved [meaning the great judgments of God], what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness [What should our real reaction be that the Judge of all is going to do what He has promised to do?], looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we [the called-out ones], according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
And we will be at home there, meaning it will be good and will feel like we are home because we have been practicing the righteousness, failing often in an evil world, and once this happens we will be satisfied.
So looking back, if you have been with me as we have been going through these beatitudes, we can see that Jesus' call to hungering and thirsting after righteousness follows logically from the first three beatitudes. The first three are essentially negative, as I mentioned earlier. They are commanding attitudes of us that help us forsake evil things that hinder our walk to the Kingdom.
The first attitude Jesus says we have to have is poverty of spirit, where we acknowledge our complete and utter spiritual bankruptcy. We are nothing before God. We have no righteousness or anything in us. We cannot do anything. We are helpless. And then when we mourn, we grieve that utter sinfulness and all the evils it has spawned, our own personal evil. We can see that the way that we have acted in the past has actually worked out not very well in a lot of situations. Our sins have caused other people to suffer, and ourselves too. And then in meekness, where He says, "blessed are the meek," we learn to wrench ourselves away from self-serving to act in gentleness toward others. That is hard to do, because that means we have to be selfless and human nature does not like to be selfless. It likes to be selfish.
So these first three beatitudes are costly and painful to our human nature. Death to self, facing up to our sins, and surrendering our self-control to God's control. All very difficult to do.
But the fourth beatitude is more positive and should be a natural effect of the other three. When we put aside self and sin and our own personal power in submission to Christ, a great desire for righteousness should well up in us because we need to be filled again. If we are putting off all of these things, we need to put on something better and greater, something from God, something good. And how we do this is we start on the lifelong process of seeking righteousness, seeking God.
The more we put aside human things, the more we should desire and seek godly things. That is the way God wants it. As I mentioned before, put off the old man, put on the new man, which is Jesus Christ Himself. We need to be seeking His righteousness and His Kingdom, and God will give them to us and everything else we may need.
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