Three Lenses for Understanding the Beatitudes | Matthew 5:1-12
Brian Hedges | November 16, 2025
Let me invite you to turn to Matthew 5. Matthew 5 is where we’ll be this morning, continuing in our study on the Sermon on the Mount.
I wonder if you have been through this experience that I’ve been through a number of times, where I have gone to an eye doctor and have gone through that diagnostic process where you’re looking through these tiny little holes, and the doctor’s going through a variety of lenses, maybe a combination of lenses, to try to diagnose whatever’s wrong with your eyes and then give a prescription for corrective lenses. Have you had that experience? I’ve had that dozens of times in my life; I never knew what that machine was called, but it’s called a phoropter.
What I want to do this morning is do something like a spiritual phoropter, where I want to hold up for you several sets of lenses through which to look at the beatitudes together, as we look at this passage of Scripture for one final time.
We have been in this series for about six weeks now. This is the seventh week, and I guess the fifth week in the actual beatitudes. We’ve seen a number of things about these statements, these sayings of Jesus. This is the beginning, of course, of the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus is holding out for his hearers a vision of the good life and an invitation into this life of wholeness and flourishing that is characteristic of those who are in the kingdom of God, within the context of this kingdom. We’ve seen that the values of this kingdom are really paradoxical, they’re upside-down to the way we normally think, as Jesus invites in those who are on the margins of society, the poor, the broken, the sorrowful, not the powerful but the gentle, the meek of the world.
We’ve seen that these are inside-out virtues, as Jesus calls us into a way of being in the world that is really focused on the internal state of our hearts. He wants us to be hungry and thirsty for righteousness and merciful towards others, pure in heart before the Lord. All of these things are heart qualities.
And we’ve seen that this is an already-not yet kingdom, where Jesus says that if we are citizens of the kingdom, the kingdom is ours. We’re already an heir to the kingdom of heaven, but we are still waiting for the full consummation of those blessings.
This morning I want to take one more look at this passage of Scripture, the beatitudes. As I’ve continued studying this over the past week and really throughout this series, what I see is that there’s just more and more layers to this, greater and greater depth to this. We could easily spend another eight weeks and take each one of the beatitudes one at a time. I’m not actually going to do that, but what I do want to do is just one more time look at the passage together this morning and give you several lenses to which to view it, with the hope that it will come into even greater focus and clarity as we think about what Jesus is calling us to in this passage.
So, let me begin by reading it, Matthew 5:1-12.
“Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.
“And 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 satisfied.
“’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.
“’Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“’Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’”
This is God’s word.
I want to give you three lenses through which to read the beatitudes.
First of all, the beatitudes can be understood as a summary description of the Christian life. These are epigrammatic statements of Jesus. It’s brief, and yet in the brevity of what Jesus says the whole of the Christian life is really encompassed here in this brief form, and we’ll see that here in a moment.
Secondly, the beatitudes can be used as a diagnostic tool for self-examination. So one of the things I want to call us to this morning as an application of this series is to really do some heart work, to examine our own hearts and lives in light of Jesus’ teaching here on the beatitudes.
Then thirdly, we’ll see that the beatitudes are a compelling portrait of Jesus himself.
1. A Summary Description of the Christian Life
So, I think many times people read the beatitudes as if this is a list of eight or nine disconnected virtues, and someone may have one of these virtues or two or three of these virtues, but it’s not really descriptive of their whole life, “But that’s okay. Maybe they’re poor in spirit, but they’re not really pure in heart.” Or maybe here’s someone who’s compassionate, they’re merciful towards others, but maybe they’re not characterized by being mournful over sin or whatever.
But I think that’s a misreading of the beatitudes. These are not disconnected virtues, but instead a description of a Christian, a single unified portrait of a citizen of the kingdom of heaven. I think that’s what Jesus is giving us here.
So, to just give you a simple analogy, the picture here is not so much of a handful of different precious gems—say a sapphire, an emerald, and a ruby—it’s more like one brilliant diamond that is seen from its different angles.
I think as we look at these beatitudes and how they describe the life of the Christian, we can really break it down into these three familiar words or categories. These are not really original with me; you’re familiar with these words: grace, growth, and glory. And we can really chart the whole of the Christian life along those three words, grace, growth, and glory. So just think about these three things.
(1) First of all, grace. You see this especially in those initial beatitudes, what Bruner calls the “need beatitudes” of grace and faith. He really characterizes the first four beatitudes in this way.
So, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” As we’ve seen, these are the materially poor, but they’re not blessed for their poverty as such; it’s because in their poverty they depend on God, and so they are poor in spirit. These are the people who recognize that they have no resources of their own, and so they are desperate for God’s help. They know their need for God, and they depend on God.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” These are those who are sorrowful for sin and for suffering, for the consequences of the world being outside the reign of God. So they are mourning for that. “Blessed are the meek [or the humble in the world], for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
Every person who is a citizen of the kingdom of heaven really begins the Christian life in just this way. They begin with this consciousness of their need for God, with a humble dependence upon God. You can’t really be a Christian without experiencing that. To be a Christian by definition is to be someone who knows that you need Jesus, who knows that you need forgiveness, who knows that whatever you have, whether it’s your resources or your talents or your gifts or your morality or whatever, it still leaves you absolutely bankrupt in the sight of God. And it is to mourn over the condition of your heart and your life and of the world in which you live, knowing that you need a divine intervention, salvation that comes from outside of you, salvation that comes from God Himself. And it is to earnestly desire these things in your life. It is a desire for righteousness, a hunger and a thirst for righteousness.
No one is a Christian who hasn’t experienced that to some degree. The Christian life really begins with this. It is a dependence on the grace of God that we experience in our time of need.
(2) But the Christian life, while it always continues in grace, there is also a growth that happens in the Christian life. You can see this in the “help beatitudes” of service and love. Again, I’m using the language there of Bruner.
This is where you get into those beatitudes that especially focus on certain dispositions and virtues of the heart. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy,” and the pure in heart and the peacemakers and so on. This is a description of people who are growing in this inside-out kingdom. They are growing in the virtues of the kingdom of God. They are becoming more like Jesus, the King, and they are characterized by these descriptions. So the merciful and the compassionate person, not the hard-hearted, not the unforgiving, but the person who shows mercy to others, the pure in heart; this is the sincere, single-minded, holy, whole, well-integrated person whose heart has been cleansed from sin and is now devoted to God Himself. It’s singleness of heart in the pursuit of God.
Then there are peacemakers. These are people who, in the world, seek to bring God’s shalom to the world. They seek reconciliation, they seek peace as much as is possible for them. They are peacemakers rather than troublemakers.
Then this emphasis on righteousness and justice. They not only hunger and thirst to be right with God and to see God’s righteousness reign in the world, but they are willing to stand up for what is right, even to the point of being persecuted for righteousness’ sake—willingness to suffer for righteousness.
Now, all of these things are virtues or graces in the heart into which we progressively grow in the Christian life.
(3) Then the final G here is the G of glory. So glory is obviously what we are still waiting for, and you see this in the promises of the beatitudes. Though we are already citizens of the kingdom of heaven, we are still waiting for the full consummation of God’s promises. So we are still waiting for the complete fulfillment of what God has promised to us, the comfort, the mercy, the beatific vision, the sight of God, the fullness of the kingdom of heaven, where we will be fully and finally and forever identified with God in his kingdom.
So this is kind of a portrait of the Christian life. Everything from beginning to ending is right there in summary form.
In terms of application, I think this invites us to think about where we are in the Christian journey. I can think of four categories of people that we might think of as being present here this morning, four different kinds of people in the room. I want you to think about where you are along these categories.
First of all, there are the seekers, those who are seeking. These are people who would be curious, but not committed. So this is the person who has some degree of interest in God and in spirituality, maybe even in Christianity, but is not yet a committed follower of Jesus.
That may be some of you this morning. You’re here, you’re coming regularly to church, you’re learning, you’re somewhat interested; but this is not the dominant thing in your life, it’s not the main thing in your life. It’s just a category. It’s just a compartment of life. You’re still testing the waters, you’re still trying to figure out whether you’re a Christian or not, whether you even want to be a Christian or not.
If that’s where you are, first of all, I just want you to know I’m glad that you’re here. I want you to be a seeker. To be a seeker is a good thing. But let me also just give a caution here. You can have an interest in God and spirituality and even in Christianity, but that does not mean that you’re necessarily right with God. It doesn’t mean that you’re already saved. And there are many people who dabble in Christianity who, by the end of their lives, choose darkness instead of light.
Jesus himself at the end of this sermon says, “Not everyone who says to me, ’Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” And if you are a seeker this morning, part of what I hope this message will do is invite you to cross that line into a full-fledged commitment to Jesus Christ.
That would be this next category: beginning. Here you have the three Bs for the beginning of the Christian life. Each one of them is crucial.
Born again—that means that you have received new life, a new nature, a new relationship with God.
Believing—that means you trust in Christ and you accept the basic teaching of Christianity. So for example, when we say the Apostles’ Creed together, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth—” we say those, and they’re not just words to you, but this is what you actually believe. There’s a deep resonance in your heart with those truths, and you’re committed to those truths.
But not only believing, but also baptized, because baptism is the public demonstration of our commitment to Jesus, as well as the symbolic representation of what has happened to us in Christ. It means that we’ve been buried with Christ and we’ve been raised to walk in newness of life.
Maybe that describes where you are this morning, or maybe it describes the next step for you, to actually commit yourself publicly to Jesus Christ. If you’re someone this morning who believes, “Yes, something’s happened in my life, I think I have been changed. There’s new life, there’s new impulses, there’s new desires, there’s a new hunger to know God. Yes, I believe; I can affirm everything we say in the Apostles’ Creed. But I’ve never yet been publicly identified as a follower of Christ, I’ve never been baptized.” You need to make that choice, make that decision to commit yourself to Jesus Christ, to not stay on the margins, but to actually show that you belong to Jesus and that you have committed yourself to Him.
Then the next stage is growing, and this is probably where most of us are this morning. This means that your character is in the process of changing and that you’re making progress in the Christian life. It means that you’re in the race, but you haven’t come to the finish line yet. It means that you’re in the fight, but there are still battles that need to be won. It means that you are growing, but you have not yet arrived. You can see change has happened in your life, but you’re not yet where you want to be.
In fact, the reality for all of us is that we will always be in this growing stage until we reach glory. It means that perseverance is still needed, and throughout our lives we can come back to these beatitudes, and we can see that there are aspects that Jesus holds out here of the values of the kingdom of God that we have yet to grow into more and more.
Then the final category would be finishing. Here I have in mind those senior saints who are at the end of the race. It’s not quite over yet, but you’re almost there, and heaven is in view.
I just want to say to you this morning that, while I have not been where you are, I want you to be encouraged. You are near the end, but it’s not a time for discouragement. It is a time, rather, for clear-eyed, laser focus on the finish line.
I know there are many things that can discourage us later in life. We begin to lose aspects of our health. We experience many different losses. Some of you have lost a spouse, or you’ve lost parents, or maybe you’ve even lost children. You’ve gone through deep losses. We enter into a season of life where we are less able to do what we at one time could do—we don’t have as much energy, we don’t have as much strength, we don’t have as much, maybe, mental acuity as once we had. It feels like things are fading. But this isn’t a time to grow discouraged, it’s a time to press in and to hold closely to Christ.
I want you to be like the apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 4, when he says,
“I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.”
I want you to finish well. Don’t give up. Instead, press on and continue until you’re already there. You are near the river Jordan; you just have to cross that river where you come into the Celestial City.
How do you do that? You do that by keeping the promises in view. You can see those promises right here in these beatitudes, the promise of comfort, the promise of inheriting the kingdom of God, the promise of satisfaction, the promise of God’s mercy for all of your sins, and the great promise of seeing God in the face of Jesus Christ. That moment where you wake up—the moment after you die, you wake up, and there is this compelling vision of who God is and your relationship with him that will bring you more joy than you’ve ever experienced in your life, joy that will never end.
That’s what’s on the other side for you. There’s comfort, there’s joy, there’s deep satisfaction of soul, there is reward in heaven. Every sacrifice, every act of service, every cup of cold water that you’ve ever given to a disciple in the name of Jesus will be mercifully and graciously rewarded by God. You may not remember, but he remembers. He remembers everything, every sacrifice that’s ever been made for the sake of Christ. You have every reason to be encouraged and not discouraged. Keep your eyes on the prize and finish well.
The whole Christian life is right here in the beatitudes: grace, growth, and glory. And these beatitudes then invite us to examine ourselves, and of course, we’ve already begun to do that. But let me push into this just a little more for point number two, a diagnostic tool for self-examination.
2. A Diagnostic Tool for Self-Examination
To defend doing this, let me remind you that Scriptures actually exhort us to examine ourselves. You have this in the writings of Paul in 2 Corinthians 13:5-6, where Paul says,
“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test! I hope you will find out that we have not failed the test.”
So, we are called to do this, to examine ourselves, to test ourselves. How do you do that? How do you do diagnosis on your spiritual condition? There are lots of places in Scripture you might go to do this. You could go to, say, the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5. But one of the best places, I think, is to go right here to these beatitudes, to look at what Jesus holds out as the norms and the values and the virtues that are characteristic of the kingdom of God, and to see whether these things are true of you. Let me give you three ways that you can do that.
(1) First of all, dispositions. The dispositions of the heart. Ask, “Is my character formed by the virtues of the kingdom of heaven?”
So, if the beatitudes are not separate virtues, unrelated to one another, but rather a unified description of the Christian, showing the character of a Christian from different angles, what I think we see is that each one of these descriptions shows a basic heart disposition that is congruent with God’s reign in Christ.
To be poor in spirit is thus to be someone who is humble and who is dependent on God, not on riches.
To be mournful is a person who has a heart that is grieved by the things that grieves God—sin and suffering, anything that results from the rejection of God’s reign and rule.
To be meek is to have this humble gentleness, to be like Jesus Himself, who is gentle and lowly in heart.
To be hungry and thirsty for righteousness, that’s the earnest, all-absorbing desire to be right with God and to see everything in the world rightly related to Him. Mercy is a disposition of compassion that matches the slow-to-anger, abounding-in-steadfast love character of God.
To be pure in heart is to have this undivided loyalty and inner purity in imitation of God’s holiness.
To be a peacemaker is to be devoted to the pursuit of wholeness and reconciliation and flourishing in the world.
And to be persecuted is not so much a disposition, but the way we respond to it is, where we respond not with vengeance, not with anger, not with self-pity, but instead we count it joy to be worthy to suffer for the name of Christ.
These are dispositions of the heart. Let me just give you one concrete illustration of this.
There’s a pastor that I know that probably none of you would know and probably have never even heard of, but he’s a pastor of a church in the Midwest, that has been something of a mentor to me from afar at different seasons of my life. And he’s an older man now; he’s in his eighties. He’s a pastor emeritus of a church where he’s been for probably sixty years or so.
He is a man who, in many ways, has just modeled this kind of character throughout his ministry. I’ve seen that in multiple ways, but one way is a story that he didn’t tell me. Somebody else told me this story about a time in his ministry, in his church, when he came under severe criticism by one particular person in the church that was really on the warpath against him; I mean, severely criticizing him. And I don’t know if it was for his teaching or for ministry decisions or what, but this critic was a great threat to his ministry.
So this pastor that I know invited this very critical fellow Christian church member into a meeting to come sit down with him, talk with him, where he could just hear every complaint he had, every criticism that he had.
And the man did that. I mean, he went through just thing after thing after thing, listing every offense, every grievance, everything he thought this pastor had done wrong, and so on. And when it was all over, this is how the pastor responded. He didn’t get angry, he did not defend himself, he did not attack back. He didn’t do any of those things. He essentially said something like this: “Brother, if you knew the sins of my heart and you could see what I’m really like, you would actually think far worse of me than you already do.” And it won the guy back! It won him back over.
That’s the heart. That’s a disposition. That’s what Jesus means when he says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
There should be something in our lives that is increasingly becoming like this. These dispositions of the heart, they’re characteristic of citizens of the kingdom.
(2) Here’s a second way to do some self-examination. Look at your desires. Ask, “Are my affections aligned with the values of the kingdom?”
It was Jonathan Edwards, in that great spiritual classic The Religious Affections, who said that true religion, in great part, consists in holy affections. And he had in mind those deep, earnest affections, desires of the heart.
This is most obvious in the fourth beatitude, those who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness. But I think it’s implicit in all of them, as Jesus holds out these promises for the citizens of the kingdom of God.
One of the first questions to ask is, “Do I want this? Do I even want what Jesus is holding out? Do I want mercy?” There are some people who feel no need for mercy. There are some people who feel no need for forgiveness. They don’t believe they have sinned. They have no consciousness of their need for the mercy of God. But here’s a question. Do you feel that you need the mercy of God? Do you even desire the things that Jesus is promising here?
Let me read a quotation to you from Sinclair Ferguson. It’s not on screen because it’s one of the last things I added, but I think it’s very helpful. This is from Ferguson’s little exposition of the Sermon on the Mount. He said,
“A rounded spiritual experience involves stretching our emotional response to the gospel, not narrowing it. The child of the kingdom knows higher joys as well as deeper sorrows, more sensitive mourning but also more profound comfort, now that he is the Lord’s. His emotional sensitivity becomes greater, not less.”
Is that happening in your life? An expanding emotional sensitivity, so that in your heart there are corresponding desires and affections that correspond with the realities that Jesus speaks about. There should really, brothers and sisters, be no mourning that we ever experience that is greater than our personal mourning for our own sins. We should mourn for our sins. We should be sad, grieved, brokenhearted that we have sinned against God. That would be an example.
But there should be no comfort that we ever experience that is a greater comfort than the comfort that comes to us in the promise of God’s mercy and forgiveness and the pardon that we receive as believers in Jesus Christ. So test yourself on the level of desires.
There’s a great chapter in Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ exposition of the Sermon on the Mount called “The Test of Spiritual Appetite,” and that’s a great chapter. That would be a great chapter for you to read. We know that appetite is a sign of health. A sick person often has no appetite. Sometimes he’s so sick he can’t even hold food down, and you know that a person is not well if he goes a long time without eating and there’s no desire for food. The same thing is true spiritually. If we have no appetite for the things that Jesus speaks of here, it’s a sign of spiritual sickness.
Of course, a dead person has no appetite at all. And if you can hear the beatitudes and there’s nothing that registers in your heart—no desire, no interest, complete indifference, just bored, wishing this sermon would end—if that’s where you are this morning, that may be an indication of spiritual death. You don’t even have a spiritual life, and what you need is a new desire, a new heart, a new nature, the gift of new birth. So ask yourself, “Do I desire these blessings? Do I desire to live under the reign of God?”
Listen, that’s what it means to be in the kingdom! If you say, “I want the kingdom of God,” and you don’t desire to live under the reign of God, in submission to the Lord Jesus, you don’t desire the kingdom, you desire something else that you’re calling the kingdom. But a desire for the kingdom is a desire to live in submission to the reign of God. Do we desire this, and do we desire to be like Jesus the King?
Now, there’s an objection that some might make. You might say, “Well, I don’t know what I desire. I feel like I have these desires in some measure, but I don’t know if they’re strong enough.” You feel conflicted.
I want to give you some help with that, from this beautiful statement from a Puritan pastor, Thomas Watson. I was reading Thomas Watson’s book on the beatitudes this week, and Watson says,
“Some may object, ’My hunger after righteousness is so weak that I fear it is not true.’ I answer: though the pulse beats but weak, it shows there is life, and that weak desires should not be discouraged. There is a promise made to them: ’A bruised reed he will not break’ (Matthew 12:20). A reed is a weak thing, but especially when it is bruised; yet this bruised reed shall not be broken. In case of weakness, look to Christ your high priest. He is merciful, therefore will bear with your infirmities. He is mighty, therefore will help them.”
So if you feel weak desires for the Lord, don’t be discouraged; instead, take those desires to the Lord and ask him to strengthen and give grace.
(3) One more test, the test now of direction. So now we’re looking at the trajectory of our lives. Is my life oriented towards the kingdom of heaven? Am I moving towards greater dependence on God, greater humility in relationship to God and others, increased compassion versus a harder heart?
Here’s the remarkable thing. I think this would be true of any genuine Christian, that as Christians grow older, as they grow more and more acquainted with their own sins, and as they go through more difficulties and more suffering, a Christian in grace becomes softer, sweeter, and more compassionate towards other people; while at the same time becoming tougher, more enduring, and more patient with difficult circumstances in their lives.
But so many people are exactly the opposite of that. There are so many people for whom age makes them cynical, and the older they get, the less compassionate they are towards other people and the more consumed they are, instead, with self-pity and impatience with their circumstances. I mean, you think about “grumpy old man,” the person that just has no patience with people, not kind, but hard-hearted. That’s a sign that grace is missing! But if grace is there, it makes you more compassionate.
I’ve been so helped sometimes by talking to older Christians who are older than me, who actually have more tenderness, more compassion, more mercy in their hearts towards others. And I think it’s because the older they’ve gotten, the more they have seen their own need for Christ, they’ve experienced the compassion of the Lord, and they are now growing in that themselves. So, a growing desire for God’s kingdom and the direction of our lives moving more and more towards Him.
Now, just consider for a minute the reverse of this and what it would look like, the opposite trajectory. This would be the person who is not poor in spirit, meek or humble, but is arrogant, proud, consumed with material things and with personal reputation; a person who’s not sorrowful for sin or merciful towards suffering, but instead is obstinate, hard-hearted, and unfeeling; a person who is not hungry and thirsty for righteousness but is indifferent both to God’s righteous standards and to the justice he requires in our relationships, and maybe not even indifferent, but also a perpetrator of injustice and unrighteousness; a person who’s not pure in heart, but is greedy, lustful, tarnished, and stained with forbidden desires; not holy, but unclean; not whole, not single-minded, but double-minded and divided; a person who’s not a peacemaker, but a peacebreaker, insolent, divisive, a troublemaker who sows strife in relationships; and a person who, far from being persecuted for righteousness’ sake, is actually one who persecutes, slanders, and reviles others.
Listen, friends: such people will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. They will not be comforted, they will not be satisfied, they will not receive mercy, they will not inherit the earth, and there will be no rewards in heaven for them. They will not be sons of God, and they will not see the face of God. The promises don’t belong to them, because there’s nothing in their life that corresponds to the description of a citizen of the kingdom.
Instead, to use Paul’s words, Philippians 3:19, “their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.”
Thomas Watson, one more time, in a much more frightening quote, says,
“The pure in heart only shall see God. Such as live in sin shall never come where God is. They shall have a frightful vision of God, but not a beatific vision. They shall see the flaming and the burning lake, but not the mercy seat. God in Scripture is sometimes called the consuming fire, sometimes the Father of lights. The wicked shall feel the fire, but not see the light.”
Oh how necessary it is then for us to be on the right path, to be headed the right direction, with a new heart, with new desires, new dispositions, so that we are moving heavenward and not hellward. So how do we get that?
3. A Compelling Portrait of Jesus Himself
Final point, the beatitudes also give us a compelling portrait of Jesus himself.
I’ll be brief here. I’ve got five or six minutes left. At the end of John Stott’s little commentary on the Sermon on the Mount he demonstrates from the whole sermon the authority of Jesus in the many different aspects of Jesus’ character—Jesus Christ the teacher, his authority as a teacher; as the Christ; as the Lord; as the Savior; as the Judge; as the Son of God; and as God himself. The authority of Christ.
I just want to take three of those categories quickly and show you that just in the beatitudes, the beatitudes give us this implicit portrait of Jesus. They’re telling us something about Jesus. Words reveal character, and Jesus’ words here reveal something about who he is.
(1) The beatitudes reveal, first of all, Jesus as King, because here is the one who comes on the scene proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. He is saying the kingdom of heaven is here, “repent and believe the gospel.” And then, in this first recorded teaching in the book of Matthew, Jesus begins by defining the citizens of the kingdom.
Get this! Jesus is proclaiming the kingdom of God, and Jesus defines who is in and who is out. And Jesus goes so far in these beatitudes as to say that “if you suffer for my sake, you will be blessed.” That’s an astounding claim, as Jesus equates himself with suffering for righteousness and equates suffering for himself as suffering for righteousness’ sake. Jesus himself is the authoritative standard of righteousness. This is a declaration of Jesus the King, and it’s showing us something of the authority of Christ.
It’s one reason why, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7, when the crowds hear Jesus preach and Jesus finishes, it says “they [are] astonished at his teaching, for he spoke as one who had authority, not like the scribes and the Pharisees.” So the beatitudes reveal Jesus as the King in the very way that Jesus speaks here, defining the citizens of the kingdom of heaven.
(2) Secondly, the beatitudes reveal Jesus as Savior. Jesus is portrayed as a Savior in the gospel of Matthew, the message of the angel to Joseph: “She shall bring forth a son; you will call his name Jesus, for he shall save His people from their sins.”
What does the Savior do? He delivers. He delivers from sin, and he delivers us from the reign of sin and sets our hopes on the promises of his saving reign.
To use Paul’s language, God has “delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” He breaks the power of canceled sin and sets the prisoner free. He brings the saving reign of God.
The beatitudes are showing us who the subjects of that salvation are, the ones who are delivered and who are brought into the kingdom of God. That’s what the beatitudes are showing us. And they are showing us what it looks like to live under God’s reign instead of the reign of sin and evil.
Not only that, the beatitudes show us the results of his deliverance. Sometimes we focus so much on that moment of salvation that we fail to consider the results of salvation. What is it we are saved for? What are we saved to? Well, you see it in the promises that Jesus makes.
It is for the eternal comfort, the satisfaction of the soul, the vision of God, the inheritance of new heavens and a new earth. It’s all that Jesus promises here. This is what we are saved for. We are saved for this promise of the kingdom of God, as we are included in his family and live under his eternal reign.
(3) So, the beatitudes reveal Jesus as King, as Savior, and then finally as Teacher. Jesus is the wise sage, the teacher who invites us to participate in the good life as it must be understood in light of the kingdom of God.
He is saying the good life belongs to people who are like this. And like any really good teacher, Jesus models what he says. Think about Jesus’ life. Jesus was poor in spirit, as well as poor materially. “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).
Jesus was humble. He was so humble that he did not despise the virgin’s womb, but he became a servant. He took upon himself human nature and he became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Jesus was the meekest, most humble, gentle man who ever lived, such that he invites people to come to him and to learn from him, for he is gentle and lowly in heart.
Jesus mourned, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, who wept at Bethany at the death of Lazarus, who wept at Gethsemane as he anticipated the weight of sin that he would bear when he came to the cross. Jesus knew sorrow.
Jesus was hungry and thirsty. Look at John 4; when his disciples come to him, they are astounded that he is speaking to this sinful Samaritan woman. And here Jesus is hungry and thirsty, but he says, “I have food that you know not of. My food is to do the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
No one was more merciful than Jesus. Every time—from what I could tell, every time somebody comes to Jesus in the Gospels and asks for mercy, they receive it. And even as Jesus is hanging on the cross, he prays for his tormentors and says, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Jesus was pure in heart, single-minded in his devotion to God the Father, wholehearted in every way, clean, untainted by sin, and he was the ultimate peacemaker who brings peace through the blood of his cross; the one who is persecuted to the point of death. And friends, it is through that death and that life that the blessings of the kingdom come to us.
The beatitudes give us a portrait of Jesus. So the final application this morning is simply this: Have you submitted to Jesus as your King? Have you trusted in Jesus as your Savior? And have you followed Jesus as your teacher? If you’ve not done so, I hope you will today. Let’s pray.
Father, we thank you this morning for your word and for this amazing passage of Scripture—so brief, so short, and yet compressed with so much wisdom and grace and food for our souls. And we pray this morning that you would give us ears to hear these words, hearts to understand and receive and apply, and that your Spirit would do work in us above and beyond what mere human words, what mere explanation can do; that your Spirit would work within us these dispositions and these desires that the beatitudes speak of; that your Spirit would apply the searchlight of the word of God to our hearts to expose what is dark, what is broken, to expose the parts of our lives that need to change; and that your Spirit would bring the change, the transformation that comes through faith in Jesus Christ and through belief in the gospel.
We ask you, Lord, as we come to the table this morning, that the table would be a means of grace for us as we consider what Christ has done, becoming poor for our sakes, humbling himself to the very point of death on a cross, so that we could receive the promises of your kingdom. So Lord, awaken our hearts to those realities this morning, and as we come to the table, help us to come with genuine faith in Christ and love for him. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
