Sermon: Blessed Are: Summary

Lessons Learned From the Beatitudes
#1680B
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 12-Nov-22; 43 minutes

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When I began my now nine-part series on Christ's Beatitudes (it is actually also eight months long because they started right before the spring holy days and here it is, already November), I began it without much in terms of introduction or overview. I had started it as kind of an extension of my final sermon on the book of Job. If you remember back that far, I did a three-part series on Job and I ended that three-part series in Matthew 5:3, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." And I believe that a central lesson that God taught Job is encapsulated in that opening beatitude of Christ's Sermon on the Mount. Because when God was finished with Job, he realized his utterly needy condition before the Sovereign Almighty God of all the universe.

Once I finished with that sermon on blessed are the poor in spirit, I just kept going. It seemed like a natural thing to do, to go on to the next one and then to the next one and the next one, and before you knew it, I had a long series. By the way, I have called this series, Blessed Are from the first two words in each of the beatitudes. And now, like I said, this is Part Nine.

So I wish to use this sermon time as a summary of the lessons that we can learn through the eight beatitudes that we went over, as well as to backfill a little bit of the more general facts and information about the Beatitudes that I skipped at the beginning thinking that I was just going to do a one-off sermon on Matthew 5:3. Because I really wanted to get into the meat of that beatitude and because I wanted to tie it to the book of Job, and then things just went as they did. So, in that way this sermon can function as a kind of both postscript and summary. I think the series needs it to be complete.

Let us go to Matthew the fifth chapter, and I want to read the first twelve verses of this so we have all these beatitudes in mind as we go through this summary.

Matthew 5:1-12 And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him. Then He opened His mouth and taught them, saying, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

I should have, way back then, explained the word that is translated here "blessed" or "blessed are." The word beatitude is an Anglicization (try to say that five times fast!), of the Latin word, beatitudo. It means "blessedness." It is easier to say the English word, is it not? Simply put, beatitudes are declarations of blessedness. Pretty simple, is it not? And this word beatitude specifically applies to the eight that begin the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, as well as the four that appear in Luke 6:20-23, which is part of what is called the Sermon on the Plain, because there are two different occasions. If you go look, one is done on a mountain, the other is done on a plain.

But did you know there are a lot more of what could be considered beatitudes in the Bible? There are 44 beatitudes in the Old Testament. And there are a total of about 40 beatitudes in the New Testament. So that would be 28 other than what we have in the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain. But I just want to show you a few of these. We will not go through a lot, but it is good to see that there are some elsewhere around the Bible. Let us go to Job the fifth chapter. This is Eliphaz's speech. But he says here,

Job 5:17 "Behold, happy is the man whom God corrects [that is the attitude]; therefore do not despise the chastening of the Almighty."

Let us go to Psalm 1. We sang this just a little bit more than an hour ago now. But the first psalm begins with a beatitude.

Psalm 1:1 Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful.

So God chose to open up His book of psalms with a beatitude, just as Jesus opened up His Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes.

Let us go to Proverbs 3 and pick up another one. We will begin to see a pattern here.

Proverbs 3:13 Happy is the man who finds wisdom, and the man who gains understanding.

Isaiah 30:18 Therefore the Lord will wait, that He may be gracious to you; and therefore He will be exalted, that He may have mercy on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him.

I knew we would get to it at some point.

Now let us look at some beatitudes in the New Testament that are not a part of the section of beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount and of the Sermon on the Plain. Let us go to John 20.

John 20:29 "Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." [which Jesus said to him after he asked to see His hands and His side]

Let us go to the book of Romans, chapter 14.

Romans 14:22 Do you have faith? Have it to yourself before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves.

Let us go on to James the first chapter. We recently had a message on this.

James 1:12 Blessed is the man who endures temptation; for when he has been approved, he will receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised to those who love Him.

And finally, Revelation 1.

Revelation 1:3 Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written in it; for the time is near.

All of these are beatitudes; and I think you could see that a beatitude is just made up of three parts. It has the words "blessed" or "happy" to begin, than it has the verb "is" or "are," and then it has a predicate nominative, whether that is a "man" or "those," meaning a lot of people or some sort of group. Blessed are the merciful, blessed are the peacemakers, that sort of thing. So it is just those three things: blessed, then is or are, and then an identification of a person or a group.

The Greek word behind "blessed are" is makarios. If you want to look it up, it is Strong's #3107, and it just simply means "blessed" or "happy" or "fortunate." It can have the connotation of being privileged (that is a word bandied about a bit these days), favored, or even it could mean something like the state in which one enjoys God's salvation. That state of blessedness, if you will, because you are in a group that God has decided to save. Or you are in a state or a condition of salvation.

In classical Greek (I thought this was really interesting), makarios implied the "blessed state belonging to the gods." It was the state in which the gods were exalted above earthly suffering and the limitations of mortal life. And if Paul and others knew that this was how it was used in classical Greek, you could see how the implication of what Jesus said suggests that this state is only for those who are the children of God, that this is a very elevated state. And in fact, we could say it is a divine state, a godly state.

So we can conclude that makarios suggests no mere happiness. Happiness is probably the lowest way to translate this Greek term. It is not feeling good about oneself, that is probably even lower than happiness, or any kind of pedestrian sense of well being. That is not what Jesus means when He says that those people who have these traits are blessed or happy. Jesus is alluding to a unique kind of spiritual joy and state of goodness that God also enjoys. It is a God-plain, holy, joyous satisfaction, this blessedness. Thus, some Bibles translate makarios as "Oh, the blessedness of" the peacemakers or "Oh, the blessedness of" the merciful or "Oh, the blessedness of" the poor in spirit. It is really elevating them higher and higher toward the God-plain.

We could say that makarios, the state of blessedness, is a truly remarkable divine state of being one that is full of goodness, contentment, care, and love because it is reflecting the very attitudes of God.

Now, Jesus addresses the beatitudes in Matthew to His disciples. We saw that in verse 1. He was on the mountain, He was seated, His disciples came to Him, and He opened His mouth and taught them—His disciples. If we would go to Luke 6, we would find that in the Sermon on the Plain He speaks that shorter version of this sermon to the multitudes. So here it is specifically to those who are students of Christ, those whom He called out of this world and given this wonderful opportunity to be sons and daughters of God.

And we should see what He says here in verses 5-12, specifically 5-10, as foundational godly attitudes that His followers must cultivate if they are to live as He does, because that is what He is getting at in the Sermon on the Mount. He is giving His disciples the foundational principles that they need to live like Him, that they need to enter the Kingdom of God. If they are going to be true sons and daughters of God, they need to begin to put these principles that He is giving them in the Sermon on the Mount into practice and make them permanent fixtures in their lives. And so He begins the Sermon on the Mount with the most important ones of all—these eight stunning principles of godliness, of divine attitudes. He starts right at the core.

Let us go to Matthew 15, and we will read verses 15 through 20 here. He had just been talking about washing one's hands and washing the bowls and stuff that His enemies, the Pharisees, had accused Him of not doing. He said in verse 11, "Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man." And He tried to explain it in verses 13 and 14.

Matthew 15:15-20 Then Peter answered and said to Him, "Explain this parable to us." [We do not understand, it is not sinking in.] So Jesus said, "Are you also still without understanding? [Why did you not get this?] Do you not yet understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated? [He is talking about the alimentary tract, that what goes in, what comes out. That is how it works.] But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man."

Jesus uses this to teach them that what needs to be purified is not the outside, but the inside—the heart of a person, the core, the very nature of the man must be changed from defiled to pure. So what we can get out of this is that both good and evil things have their source within the person, in the person's heart or in the person's mind. And so Jesus begins His Sermon on the Mount with an explanation of what the Christian heart should look like. He wants us to have at the very beginning of our understanding, an idea of how a true Christian perceives things, thinks about things, and reacts to things because all of that is in the heart, all of that comes from inside, it is not something that can be applied from outside.

So if we get the heart right, if the heart is good, then out of the heart will proceed good things like are described in the fruit of the Spirit: the love, the joy, the peace, the patience, and all of those things. Those come directly out of the heart because it has been purified. It has been made right. People have worked on it, on the heart, so that they can do good things like God would do. And, of course, on the other side of the ledger are those who have not purified their heart and out of their heart proceed evil things, like the things He mentioned there in Matthew 15 or the things Paul mentioned in Galatians 5 as the works of the flesh. It is going to be one or the other.

In most cases it is the evil side that comes out, the side of sin, because our nature is carnal and it goes in that direction. And so early on, with a little bit of experience in the world, we start looking like the world and producing the sinful things of the world. And it is only when God intervenes and gives us the opportunity to change that it actually starts to change if we accept it and put in the work that is necessary.

We could say, then, trying to boil all this down, is what Jesus does in Matthew 5:3-10 is to expose His own heart. What He does is He teaches us what His heart looks like. His heart is poor in spirit, even though He is the Great God. His heart is full of mourning. His heart is meek. His heart hungers and thirsts for right things. His heart is very merciful. His heart is pure. In His heart is peace. He is trying to make peace all the time and of course He took upon Himself the ultimate in persecution and gave Himself for us. His heart was willing to go through the persecutions for our sake.

So what we see in the Beatitudes are the divine attitudes that He Himself has and wants us, as His brothers and sisters, to also have.

Now it is a kind of a fluke of language that beatitude and attitude rhyme. They do not come from any kind of the same words, but they do—beatitude and attitude rhyme. And some preachers have played on this, calling them the "be attitudes," meaning this is how a Christian should be inside and out. That is fine if you want to think of it that way. That is not really what it means. As we learned, beatitude means blessedness, or blessed. But we can think of the Beatitudes as firm, baseline, Christian, mental and behavioral positions.

And I am sure you have heard of the fairly new term, emotional intelligence. There are many different kinds of intelligence out there. Emotional intelligence is one in which you react well to various situations and you are able to use this intelligence both to your advantage and to those who you are interacting with.

Well, I am maybe coining a new thing, but I believe that the Beatitudes are, like I said, firm, baseline, Christian, mental behavioral positions that are the basis of spiritual intelligence, or what we could call godly intelligence. This is where, if we have these attributes that are shown in the Beatitudes, they provide the foundation for proper interaction with God and with man, and give us the right perspective on things and help us to make the right calls—mental calls—of how we are going to act and react to whatever situation is necessary. Because these are foundational, they are set, and they are guidelines of how we should then interrelate with other people and with situations.

A commentator named James M. Houston, he is one of the writers in the Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible, said this about the Beatitudes. "These beatitudes are more concerned with the interior life of the disciple, to activate here and now the kind of life Jesus communicates in those who follow him." So these are the way you should be inside, this is your interior life expressed in these eight verses here in Matthew 5. This is how they should be, the kind of life, as he says, that Jesus communicates to those who follow Him.

So from these Beatitudes, if we have them at the core of our being, come true perception, goodness, and right doing. We could say they encapsulate the righteousness of Christ, the way He does things, the way He thinks about things.

Now Christ gives His Beatitudes in a particular format. A little different from some of the others that we saw in the Bible. But He gives a statement of blessing followed by a statement of reward. Or it could also be called a telos, that is, an end, a goal, or the potential of the one who has the named trait. So we see here the first one, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." That is a statement of blessedness or blessing. And then, "For theirs is the kingdom of heaven" shows the reward. In others, like the second one, "Blessed are those who mourn," that is the statement of blessing, "for they shall be comforted." That is the potential or the end for that person who shows that particular trait. You will receive comfort. You could go on in each one of these, they are the same.

So all the rewards also have both a present and a future fulfillment. What we could say is: An in this life fulfillment and in the next life fulfillment. Even verse 5, where it says that "the meek will inherit the earth." That has both an in this life and in the next life fulfillment because we are already heirs. We own it. We just have not received the full inheritance yet. And that is how we have to think of things like this earth. We have to think of it as our possession and that is how we treat it. When God owns something, He treats it with the greatest of care. In this case, we have to do the same because God, in the future fulfillment of this, is going to put us in charge of it and we should already be forming those same attitudes towards the earth that we will need to have in His Kingdom.

However, I just want to mention that the future aspect of the reward is primary. That is the main thing Jesus is getting to here because true life comes when we are changed into spirit at His coming. And also because circumstances in this world may not allow a complete fulfillment of some of these things depending on circumstances, you know, based on the situation in our physical life. But it is there.

Another facet of these Beatitudes that I want to mention is their paradoxical nature. The world thinks that the strong, the proud, the wealthy, the famous, the aggressive, those are the kind of people who rise to the top, they will receive the rewards, they will receive the riches and the prestige and all those things that this world heaps upon those who fight their way to get where they are.

But the paradox here is that Jesus says that humans and human nature have it all wrong. That instead, those who cultivate and use these soft virtues that are found in the Beatitudes here—the humble, the peaceful, the merciful—those are the kinds that are actually going to end up on top in the end. These aggressive people—the strong and the mighty and the wealthy and what have you—they will have their time in the sun, but it is going to end. But those who show the attitudes here in the Sermon on the Mount, they may be down now, but in the end they will be on top and they will be on top forever.

So God's way, God's mind, is 180 degrees opposite from man's. The attitudes of love and service, cooperation and compassion and longsuffering (as Bill [Onisick] was talking about), gentleness, those are the soft virtues that win in the end, that prevail for all time.

Let us go to Ephesians 4, verses 17 through 24. This whole section is about the new man and Paul kind of says what I just said, but he puts it in his own inimitable way. He says,

Ephesians 4:17-24 This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to licentiousness [or lewdness] to work all uncleanness with greediness.

But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.

This is why He begins His Sermon on the Mount the way He does. Because we have got to start at the root of the problem. The root of the problem is man's wicked heart, man's carnality. And so He tells His disciples, these are the goals that you need to have in terms of your attitudes, in terms of the way you perceive things, the way you think about things, the way you speak about things, the way you react to things, and how you treat other people. He begins where it all begins, at the source, in the interior.

In the Beatitudes, Christ teaches us the mind and attitude of the new man, which He creates in us. We do this in cooperation with Him. It is not all our work. As a matter of fact, our work in all of this is rather small compared to His. But He wants us to consider that we have to put in great effort to change our own heart and mind because it does take a great deal of effort and time. Even He admits He cannot force out the old man. He can forgive us and give us His Spirit, but there must be a cooperative effort between us to force that old man out, that hardened, anti-God, fleshly, and corrupt mindset that we have used for years and years to get our own way, that we have developed as citizens of this world under the influence of the Adversary. And it really takes a lot of diligent effort, a lot of prayer, a lot of meditation, fasting, and Bible study, and all those tools that we have to pry it out and to kick it away.

So as we close here, I want to give you each beatitude's chief lesson. I do not want to belabor these at all. I just want to maybe give you something to remember the original sermon that you heard months ago. Maybe it will spark a memory.

The chief lesson of verse 3 about the "poor in spirit" is that those who realize, acknowledge, and maintain that they have no spiritual good that they can offer God are called poor in spirit. In reality, they are entirely deficient and needy and always need His help in everything. That is how they see themselves. They believe that they will be saved only by His grace and their lives are His to command. And so they put themselves entirely in His service.

Verse 4: Blessed are those who mourn. Such people know that they are full of sin. And because they realize this, they are contrite and remorseful that they caused Jesus to suffer and that their own sins have caused grief and trouble for others. This knowledge that they have done much harm galvanizes them to pursue complete repentance and makes them profoundly grateful to God for His salvation. And so they zealously desire to please Him all along their walk to the Kingdom of God.

Verse 5: Blessed are the meek. The meek are humbly compliant and submissive to God and thus their behavior towards people is gentle, full of outgoing concern, and kindness. They are calm under trial and pressure, even serene and imperturbable because they trust God's will for them. And another reason that they are this way is because they have developed some self-control. So they are poised even under duress because they know that God is with them.

Verse 6: Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The person who puts aside sin and their selfishness, puts aside power and whatever they may have in this world in submission to Christ, expresses a great desire for righteousness, that is, those who are truly repentant, really long for righteousness and what God can give. The more one puts aside human things, the more he desires and seeks godly things. That is, God's righteousness and His Kingdom. And so a person with this mind, this attitude has an ever-present insatiable longing for the things of God and to please Him.

Verse 7: Blessed are the merciful. These people do not just feel sympathy for those who are in physical or spiritual need, but they actively seek to extend aid to relieve their burdens. There are not just a lot of kind thoughts and emotions, they are workers that express their aid and extend aid to those who need it. It is an attitude of forbearance and forgiveness in our dealings with others. For as God has shown us mercy, we feel an urgency to pass mercy onto others as we have opportunity.

Verse 8: Blessed are the pure in heart. The pure in heart seek to be unstained and undefiled at the very core of their being. You could almost say that they are not satisfied with justification, that is, the legal righteousness before God, but desire to rid themselves of all vestiges of sinfulness and to practice godly love at all times with a pure heart. So they are not satisfied with being a little bit clean. They want to be all clean and use that purity of heart in service toward others.

Verse 9: Blessed are the peacemakers. Those who cultivate and facilitate peace and harmony with others manifest a prime character trait of God. He is the peacemaker. God is in the process of reconciling all things to Himself. So those who are peacemakers in this life, in this world, work to create loving relations with others, that is, personal relationships with others, and they also work as well as they can to make peace between others so that those people can have loving relationships as well.

Verse 10: (finally) Blessed are those who are persecuted. People who suffer for righteousness' sake live God's way boldly before the world. They do not play the hypocrite. They do not appear worldly before the world, but pious when they are with church members. Instead they trust God's support, even when the world turns against them, and they gladly participate in Christ's sufferings and glorify Him for considering them worthy to do so.

Now if we manifest these attitudes and behaviors in our lives, Christ has no problems including us in what He says next. Let us go to Matthew the fifth chapter, verses 13 through 16. He says here immediately after the Beatitudes, those of you who express these attitudes are:

Matthew 5:13 "You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men."

He makes a warning here. You cannot just profess these and maybe have them a little while and then let them go. This is a lifelong thing where we have to be keeping up these attitudes and behaviors until we die, till the very end, because once these things are gone from us and we have essentially repudiated Christ, they cannot be put back. They are like salt that has lost all its flavor. But then He gets back to more positive things.

Matthew 5:14-15 "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house."

I think we should think of "the house" here as the church. Those of you who are serious about all of this and do these things and grow in these areas, you become a great light in the church of God, a great example for others. And He says,

Matthew 5:16 "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven."

So let us all commit to growing in these godly attitudes, thinking about them, frequently measuring ourselves against them, seeing if we have come into possession of some of these divine attitudes. And then let your light shine before men so they could see in you what God is and what God does, and therefore glorify the Father.

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