“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”
Let’s pause before we go to discuss these three Christian virtues and remind ourselves of a couple of points vital to the understanding of what Jesus is teaching. We want to get facts, but facts alone do nothing but lead us into legalism if we do not understand the spirit.
What I mean by that can be explained this way. Knowledge of Biblical doctrine is fundamental. It is good and must be pursued by the student of the Holy Spirit.
But if I know about Justification and Sanctification and am satisfied with sitting back and admiring these beautiful doctrines but they exact no change in my life, then they are useless. The knowledge of them is useless.
It is good to know that God predestined us to be conformed to the image of His Son (Rom 8:29), but what good is that if I do not present my body as a living and holy sacrifice (Rom 12:1) for His use?
The knowledge that I have been declared right with God through faith in the shed blood and resurrection of Christ will become in me nothing but license to sin, unless I understand that with eternal security comes eternal accountability.
The knowledge that He has set me apart for Himself and for the process of making me like Jesus is so much pulpit fodder unless I cooperate with His Spirit in the work of sanctification.
Having said all that, what I want to refocus on for a minute or two is the need for us to really understand that Jesus is not calling for mercy and purity and peacefulness on some purely human level, but that these are virtues that will arise out of the one He has described thus far.
So we reiterate some facts.
First, let’s re-clarify the term ‘blessed’. It is a spiritual thing. It is a divine happiness; a deep satisfaction and contentment of the spirit that is borne out of being made into a spiritual man and thus becoming both recipient and channel for these spiritual characteristics. It is something the world cannot give because the world neither has it to give nor understands the nature of it.
One commentator said that the word Jesus used to this multitude was a word used in reference to the gods or to the dead who no longer suffered the pangs of physical life. Therefore opening His sermon with it would have made them sit up and take notice.
This would have been tantamount to saying, ‘the poor in spirit will experience the joy of those already in heaven’, if this man’s assessment is accurate.
So looking at the word ‘blessed’ in that light, let these beatitudes run through your mind. “The poor in spirit are happy”. “Those who mourn are happy”. “Those who are meek and gentle are happy”. And so forth.
The world will never send you that message, rather, just the opposite.
The next thing I want us to be reminded of before we go on is that Jesus has been talking about who and what the Christian is by the influence and empowering of the Holy Spirit.
Emptied of self, humble, mourning for sin the way God mourns for sin and the death it brings, obedience and quiet strength, desiring righteousness desperately to the point of a willingness to sacrifice self so that righteousness might be fulfilled.
Now, He is turning from the focus on what makes a Christian, to what comes out of a Christian toward others. And as we look at these virtues we will see that they are a result of the Spirit working in us, and also virtues that the Christian should be aware of and seeking to have developed in him as he matures.
They are things given to us that we could not have obtained or attained to, but that which we are now called and empowered to exude and impart. And the underscoring promise in it all is the experience of divine bliss.
THE MERCIFUL ARE HAPPY
I’ve always loved it when singing “America, the Beautiful”, by Katherine L. Bates, when we’ve come to the third verse and sung these words:
“O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life!”
Bates understood mercy. She wrote of the patriots who have fought and died to give birth to America and to preserve her freedom and defend the oppressed and downtrodden and she named mercy as the quality that they valued more than their very lives; the virtue that drove them into bloody conflict for a just cause.
You see, mercy is much more than feeling sorry for someone in suffering. Mercy is certainly not defined by looking the other way and pretending not to see a wrong done. Mercy is not letting someone off the hook arbitrarily so they won’t have to suffer for their misdeeds. It is not being unwilling to confront. None of those things is mercy.
Mercy sees misery and desires to relieve the misery even at the cost of being made miserable. It sees someone in distress and moves to relieve that distress even at the cost of personal sacrifice.
Mercy is demonstrated by the man standing dry and sure-footed on the bank, who dives into the freezing waters of a fast flowing river to save a woman and her child from a sinking vehicle.
Mercy is demonstrated by the one who, even though he knows a person is in a bad situation because of bad choices or wrong motives still does what he can to rescue that person, not because they necessarily deserve it, but because they can help and therefore they must.
Do you know who is merciful? Soldiers who are fighting for a just cause. Police officers, who even when in the process of making an arrest do their best to take the offender unharmed, or seek emergency medical aid for him because of his injuries.
Wronged parties seeking to give forgiveness and aid to the ones who have wronged them simply because they have the ability and the other has the need.
Being merciful is not being a sobbing blob. Mercy is not just being sympathetic.
When we lived in Del Norte, Colorado, there came a time when a young woman in the congregation of our church told me that although she liked me as a teacher she didn’t think she’d want me as a pastor because I didn’t show mercy.
In her thinking, being merciful was rushing to sit down next to the hurting person, put an arm over their shoulders and cry with them. Now that is not a bad thing. We are told to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn, and I know that there are those in the body whom God has gifted to be sensitive to those in emotional need and come alongside to give them encouragement and pray with them and bless them. There is an element of mercy in that.
But when Jesus saw our nakedness and our hunger and our imprisonment and our sickness He didn’t come and sit down and pat us on the shoulder and say, “Hey, hang in there, everything will come out ok”.
He came down alright; but it was to sacrifice His life and His blood in order to clothe us in His righteousness, satisfy the hunger of our souls, release us from imprisonment to sin and death, and give life to us from above to make us meet for an eternity in the presence of the Father.
That’s mercy.
I’ll come back to tie it all up, but first let’s talk about why…
THE PURE IN HEART ARE HAPPY
The very first thing we need to do in reference to this beatitude is take note of what Jesus is not saying. Please notice that He didn’t say, “Blessed are the pure in body”, or “Blessed are the pure in mind”, or “Blessed are the pure in lifestyle” or “Blessed are the pure in worship”.
One commentator noted in opening his section on the beatitudes that instead of beginning by blasting the Scribes and Pharisees, Jesus just jumped right into teaching how men could be blissfully happy. He began with the positive.
That commentator was right, of course, but we could go on to say that in teaching the positive message of the beatitudes, He contradicted and condemned just in the context of His teaching, the heresies of those religious leaders of the day and all legalists throughout the centuries.
Legalism focuses on the externals. The things Paul warned against to the Colossian church when he asked, “If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourselves to decrees, such as, ‘do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!’ (which all refer to things destined to perish with the using) – in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men?” Col 2:20-22
A simple way to say this would be, religion focuses on doing, relationship on being. Religion emphasizes externals, relationship is about the heart.
Jesus always went straight to the heart because a person can spend their entire life trying to clean up their act, do the right thing, adhere to pure practices, and die with a heart as black as coal because it was never really changed. In fact, it may only have grown worse over the years as it was filled to overflowing with pride at having kept the rules and being better than others.
Now as the term is used in scriptures the heart refers to the very center of the personality. It is the will, the emotions, the mind.
Jesus said that a man speaks from that which fills his heart (Lk 6:45), and to those pressing the Laws concerning ceremonial washings before eating He said that it’s not what goes into the man that defiles him, but that which comes out (Matt 15:11). He may have been thinking about what He said in an earlier century through Jeremiah, who said, “The heart is more deceitful than all else and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)
Now I say He was speaking through the prophet at that time and we understand that the prophets spoke as they received from God (II Pet 1:21). So when Jesus is speaking in Mark 7:21-23 we can say He is only confirming what He has already said in ages past, when He declares:
“For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man”.
I mentioned in an earlier sermon not in this series that Jesus was always telling people to go do things impossible for them to do. His point was to make them realize they needed Him.
So here He says, “Blessed are the pure in heart”, and the proper response of men would be, “How? How can I be pure in heart? I can’t do it! Just when I know to do good I don’t do it, and when I know not to do bad, that thing I do!”
This hits a little harder than the idea of being merciful, doesn’t it? I mean, we’d all like to think that when an occasion arises to show mercy we would do the right thing; but being told that we are to be pure in heart is a different matter altogether. When we hear, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’, the defenses go up and we might want to ask, ‘does that mean all the time?’
But the poor in spirit who mourns for sin and desires to be faithful and obedient and who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, when he hears ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’, comes to realize that his heart must be made pure, and any good fruit in his life will come out of that purity that is Spirit-born.
So how do we reconcile these things? Jesus said the pure in heart are happy. We know that we are not pure in heart in the sense that we struggle with things that are not pure, not holy, not Godly. So are we deceiving ourselves to think that we can be acceptable to God at all?
No, we are deceived if we think we can be acceptable to Him by an effort to make our hearts pure and keep hearts pure.
We have to understand first that doctrinally we are pure in heart. We are holy and blameless before Him by His own declaration, through Christ who has purchased with His blood our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand (Rom 5:2).
That’s why Jesus said we’re divinely blissful, because He had declared us to be pure in heart and we shall see God. That’s the promise.
The practical side is that knowing we stand before Him declared pure, we are constrained to pray with David, “Create a clean heart within me, O God; and renew a right spirit within me” (Ps 51:10). And invite the Holy Spirit to continue His cleansing (sanctifying) work in our hearts.
We pursue purity, not to be accepted so we might be blessed, but because we are accepted and from the knowledge of that comes bliss.
THE PEACEMAKERS ARE HAPPY
As we did with the merciful and the pure in heart, let’s talk first about what is not meant by the word ‘peacemaker’.
A peacemaker is not a peace keeper in the sense of being an appeaser, avoiding any conflict so as to avoid confrontations and unpleasantness.
If the ‘peace at any cost’ and ‘avoid conflict at any cost’ people had their way they would eventually suffer under the hand of oppression and despotism along with everyone else.
It is the peacemakers, who, out of mercy for the downtrodden and singleness of thought and purpose that come from pure motives of the heart, step up and take a stand in order to establish the sort of peace that is a result of righteousness being fulfilled.
Once more, our greatest example is Jesus.
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), 6 and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” Eph 2:4-7
We had no peace with God. According to Romans 5 we were enemies in arms against God. But Jesus came and made peace between us and the Father even while we were His enemies.
Did He do that by some kind of weak-backed appeasement? Did He come and just let us off because we were so cute? Did He change the rules and say, ‘Well, the wages of sin used to be death but due to inflation the wage of sin is now a slap on the hand with a ruler”?
No. Our Great Peacemaker made peace between the Father and sinful men by an act of war. He went to battle with the enemy of our souls and crushed his head by the shedding of His own blood and the carrying away of our own guilt.
“For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, 20 and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.” Col 1:19-20
“When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.” Col 2:13-14
So, we too are to be peacemakers. Who? Those who have peace with God. Those with whom peace has been made through the cross of Christ.
Who else in all the world can do that? No one!
The people of the world who have not had the beatitudes applied to their lives, and therefore do not have and cannot exercise the characteristics of the blessed, cannot have peace and certainly cannot make peace.
They are the ones who you hear say that they hope they’ll make it to heaven because they’re not such a bad sort. Or they make up a god of their own imagination and say that the god they believe in would never send anyone to Hell.
They call Him the ‘Man upstairs’ and they only pray to Him when in dire straights, and they are the ones we will have occasion to study when we get to chapter seven, who will claim a right to heaven based on their own good deeds.
But the only real hope they have in this world is if they will listen and follow the peacemakers who tell them about Christ and Him crucified.
Now why do you suppose Jesus said, “for they shall be called sons of God’?
Because a child is like his father, and a child of God will be like his Father, who is the One who made peace with us and provided our justification even while we were ungodly.
We are therefore to go to the ungodly and make peace between them and God by leading them to Christ.
What follows that? Remember that we have said that Jesus said things in order here. So what comes of being a peacemaker? What comes to the one who is called a child of God?
You only need to read Matthew 5:10 to know.
We’ll go there. For now, let’s review briefly for the sake of clarity.
We are to have and show mercy that is self-sacrificing, not to obtain mercy from Him, but because He first sacrificed Himself out of mercy for us.
We are to be pure and seek purity of heart and holiness, not in order to see God, but because He has declared us holy and promised that we will see God and therefore the anticipation of that vision should cause us to pursue purity.
We are to be peacemakers between men and God because ours is the Kingdom of heaven. We are citizens there because He first made peace between God and us (Rom 5:1), therefore we who have peace with Him are to make peace between Him and others.
So there you have it. Now that is not the end of the beatitudes. We will still see Jesus using that word, ‘blessed’ in these next two verses although both pertain to persecution.
But we have been given the full picture of the Christian. In verses three through five we are given the characteristics of the man approaching God and verse six speaks of the one now filled with the Holy Spirit and desiring what God desires.
Then verses 7-9, which we looked at today describe the virtues manifest in the one who has the Holy Spirit and his life toward God and men because of that indwelling.
Now Jesus will tell us what is to be expected from the world because we are the one described up to this point; because we are different and though we are in the world are not of the world.
I’m just going to leave you here with a question, and an encouragement.
First the question. Are these virtues we have talked about today manifest in your life in such a way that men of the world would persecute you?
II Tim 3:12
“And indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted”.
Ok, not one question, two questions; because I want you to be thinking and praying about it.
Second question.
If all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, why are we not seeing widespread persecution against the church and Christians in our society today?
Think about it, because we’re going to discuss it.
The encouragement:
The merciful are happy, the pure in heart are happy, the peacemakers are happy, for they have received mercy, they shall see God, they are called sons of God.
These things being true of you, if you are a born again believer in Christ, you can enter into the rest of this study, not as a sinner under a sledge hammer, but as a student under grace.
