CRITICAL NOTES
GENERAL REMARKS ON THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
The aim and contents of the “Sermon.”—No mere sermon is this, only distinguished from others of its class by its reach and sweep and power; it stands alone as the grand charter of the commonwealth of heaven; or, to keep the simple title the Evangelist himself suggests (Matthew 4:23), it is “the gospel (or good news) of the kingdom.” To understand it aright we must keep this in mind, avoiding the easy method of treating it as a mere series of lessons on different subjects, and endeavouring to grasp the unity of thought and purpose which binds its different parts into one grand whole. It may help us to do this if we first ask ourselves what questions would naturally arise in the minds of the more thoughtful of the people, when they heard the announcement, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” It was evidently to such persons the Lord addressed Himself.… In their minds they would, in all probability, be revolving such questions as these:
1. “What is this kingdom, what advantages does it offer, and who are the people that belong to it?”
2. “What is required of those that belong to it? What are its laws and obligations?” And if these two questions were answered satisfactorily, a third would naturally follow.
3. “How may those who desire to share its privileges and assume its obligations become citizens of it?” These, accordingly, are the three great questions dealt with in succession (J. M. Gibson, D.D.).
The originality of the Sermon.—We are not careful to deny, we are eager to admit, that many even of the most admirable sayings in the Sermon on the Mount had been anticipated by heathen moralists and poets (S. Cox, D.D.). To affirm that Christ was not in the world, nor in the thoughts of men, until He took flesh and dwelt among us, is no more to honour Him than it is to affirm that, when He came into the world, He showed Himself to be no wiser than the men whose thoughts He had previously guided and inspired.… His teaching, we may be sure, will not be new in the sense of having no connection with the truths He had already taught by them; but it will be new in this sense, that it will perfect that which in them was imperfect; that it will gather up their scattered thoughts, free them from the errors with which they had blended them, and harmonise, develop, and complete them (S. Cox, D D.).
Is the Sermon on the Mount evangelical?—You have heard, as I have, that there is no “Cross” in this Sermon on the Mount; that we are at the foot of Sinai listening to Moses, and not at Calvary “beholding the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world.” Let us not be deceived. You might as well say there is no sun in a coal-pit or a geyser because you do not see his form there. Your British coalfields are as truly the-children of the sun as is the ray of light that last fell upon our eyes, and the high-pitched morality of this sermon is as really the offspring of the death and resurrection of Christ as the first pulse-beat of joy on the reception of the forgiveness of sins. Will you say that the writer of Todhunter’s Trigonometry is unfamiliar with the first four rules of arithmetic because he assumes instead of stating and proving them? No more should we conclude that salvation by the sacrifice of the Son of God for men is absent from the Sermon on the Mount, because it is not expressly stated and argued as it is in the third of the Romans. There is not a benediction that does not take us to Calvary. There is not a warning that may not urge us to Christ. There is not a mountain elevation of holiness that will not force from us the cry, “Lord, help me, or I perish.” The Sermon is full of the great principles we have to preach, and those principles are all embodied in the Speaker Himself. Teaching Him we teach the principles of this Sermon, and it is of little use teaching the ideas of this Sermon without also teaching Him (J. Clifford, D.D.). The Lord Jesus did not give the world His best wine in this cup, marvellous and precious though it be. The best thing in the Gospels is the gospel itself—that manifestation of the righteousness and love of God in the person, the life, and the death of His Son by which He wins our love and makes us righteous (S. Cox, D.D.).
The relation between the Sermon on the Mount as reported by St. Matthew and the account of it in St. Luke 6—Commentators are divided in opinion as to whether or not these are two versions of the same discourse. Augustine suggests a solution of the difficulty by saying that the two discourses are entirely distinct, though delivered on the same occasion—that reported by St. Matthew, on the mountain to the disciples; that of St. Luke, delivered on the plain just below to the multitude. Dean Vaughan concurs in this view, and says: “Men have doubted whether the discourse in St. Matthew is to be regarded as an ampler account of that which is reported by St. Luke. The general scope and purport is the same. Yet, as St. Matthew says expressly that Jesus spake ‘sitting on the mountain,’ and St. Luke says that He spake ‘standing on the plain,’ it seems not very unnatural to suppose that the one (that given by St. Matthew) was a discourse delivered, as it were, to the inner circle of His disciples, apart from the crowd outside; the other (preserved by St. Luke), a briefer and more popular rehearsal of the chief topics of the former, addressed, immediately afterwards, in descending the hill, to the promiscuous multitude.” Lange also favours this view. Carr (Cambridge Bible for Schools) states the arguments in favour of the identity of the “Sermon on the Mount” with the “Sermon on the Plain,” thus:
1. The beginning and end are identical as well as much of the intervening matter.
2. The portions omitted—a comparison between the old and the new legislation—are such as would be less adapted for St. Luke’s readers than for St. Matthew’s.
3. The “mount” and the “plain” are not necessarily distinct localities. The plain is more accurately translated “a level place,” a platform on the high land.
4. The place in the order of events differs in St. Luke, but it is probable that here as well as elsewhere St. Matthew does not observe the order of time.
Matthew 5:1. He went up into a mountain.—Perhaps for the purpose of selecting His audience. The idle and indifferent would stay down on the plain (Gibson). The mountain was probably that known at this day as the Kurn Hattin, or “Horns of Hattin.” It is an upland rather than a mountain, rising to about a thousand feet above the level of the sea, and distinctly marked out from the neighbouring eminences by the two humps, or horns, which rise some sixty feet above and crown the summit. Between these “horns” there is a wide stretch of grass, a natural amphitheatre, in which a great multitude might easily gather within hearing of a single voice (Cox). Set.—This the custom of the Jewish doctors when they taught in their schools and synagogues. Disciples.—It is evident that at that period Jesus had already made a separation between His disciples and the people (Lange).
THE BEATITUDES.—So called from the opening word “beati” (blessed) in the Vulgate. Their number.—Though eight in number, there are here but seven distinct features of character. The eighth one—the “persecuted for righteousness sake”—denotes merely the possession of the seven preceding features, on account of which it is that they are persecuted (2 Timothy 3:12). Accordingly, instead of any distinct promise to this class, we have merely a repetition of the first promise. This has been noticed by several critics, who, by the sevenfold character thus set forth, have rightly observed that a complete character is meant to be depicted, and by the sevenfold blessedness attached to it, a perfect blessedness is intended (D. Brown, D.D.). Their purpose.—This Sermon on the Mount seems to be particularly levelled against the common indispositions of heart and errors of life, which they were guilty of who looked for the kingdom of the Messiah; for in it our Saviour acquaints the people and His disciples who are the blessed persons who shall be admitted to that kingdom, namely, not the covetous and ambitious, but the poor in spirit; not the luxurious and licentious, but the serious, penitent mourners; not the fierce and haughty, but the meek and lowly; not they who gaped after, and hoped to possess themselves of, their neighbours’ estates by unjust conquest, but they who studied an exact honesty and uprightness in all their dealings; not the cruel and hard-hearted, but the merciful and charitable; not the lewd and unclean, but the pure in heart; not the fighting and contentious, but the quiet and peaceable; not the persecutors, but the persecuted for Christ’s sake and their duty. So that all the beatitudes are the setting up of so many quite contrary dispositions of mind to those they were prepossessed with, and only more particular instances of the general doctrine, that they were to repent because the kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of the Messiah, was at hand (J. Blair, M.A.).
Matthew 5:3. Blessed.—Of the two words which our translators render “blessed,” the one here used (μακάριοι) points men to what is inward, and so might be rendered “happy” in a lofty sense; while the other (εὐλογημένοι) denotes rather what comes to us from without (as Matthew 25:34). But the distinction is not always nicely carried out (Brown). Poor in spirit.—In this and in the fourth beatitude there appears at first sight to be a real difference between St. Matthew and St. Luke, beyond what can be explained by mere verbal variety with substantial argument. Dean Mansel, in the Speaker’s Commentary, suggests as the true explanation that St. Luke records these beatitudes as they were actually spoken by our Lord, while St. Matthew (one of the twelve to whom it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven) reports them in such a manner as to give their full meaning, rather than their figurative expression. The one gives the words, the other the mind of Christ.
Matthew 5:6. Righteousness.—A normal disposition or mode of action which takes the will of God as its supreme norm (Wendt).
Matthew 5:7. Obtain.—Not “merit.”
Matthew 5:12. Be exceeding glad.—Spring upward in joyful hope toward your reward in heaven (Stier).
Matthew 5:13. Salt—It is suggested by the Rev. T. H. Darlow, M.A. (Expositor, Fourth Series, VIII. 239) that it was the familiar trade of fish curing which prompted, or at least pointed, our Lord’s references to salt. Professor G. A. Smith says, “The pickled fish of Galilee were known throughout the Roman world.” We can understand in this connection why our Lord speaks of refuse salt in such a wholesale fashion, “Cast out and trodden under foot of men.” Lost his savour.—This realisable, at least, when we occupy a point of observation that is simply popular. Dr. W. M. Thomson says, “I have often seen just such salt, and the identical disposition of it that our Lord has mentioned” (see Land and Book, pp. 381, 382).
Matthew 5:14. A city that is set on an hill.—Assuming the Sermon on the Mount to have been preached from one of the hills of Galilee near the “Horns of Hattin,” our Lord may have looked or pointed at Safed, two thousand six hundred and fifty feet above the sea, commanding one of the grandest panoramic views in Palestine (Plumptre).
Matthew 5:15. A bushel, the bushel (R.V.), i.e. the common measure found in every Jewish house. Candle … candlestick, lamp … lampstand (R.V.). The lamp in a Jewish house was not set on a table, but on a tall pedestal or stand, sometimes made with a sliding shaft (Carr).
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Matthew 5:1-16
A singular benediction.—There is something of a “State” character about this “Sermon on the Mount.” Leaving the plain for the “mountain” (R.V.), He “sat down” and “opened His mouth.” Great “multitudes” (Matthew 4:23; Matthew 4:25; Matthew 5:1) had been attracted to His teaching. Some among them had already professed themselves His “disciples.” It was right that they should know—and that others with them should know—the exact character of His teaching. This, accordingly, He now proceeds, in this most deliberate manner, to give them; beginning here with the cardinal question of what those who became His disciples must look for and expect, and setting before them in that connection a gracious assurance in the first place; a faithful warning in the second place; complete re-assurance in the last.
I. A gracious assurance.—All those who followed Him might expect to be “blessed.” That is how He begins. That word “blessed” is the first word that falls from His lips. Whatever other distinctions there might be about His disciples in other respects, there would be none on this point. Some among them would have this blessing, some would have that. All would have much. Nine times over, in emphatic succession, does he assure them of this (Matthew 5:1-11). Also, afterwards, and because of this, He bids all of them to be glad (Matthew 5:12, beginning). Such is, as it were, the “dominant note” of this opening strain. Such is the thought which those who followed Him were to take in first and in full. As one of those who heard Him then, afterwards said (1 Peter 3:9), as though in remembrance of this, they were “called to inherit a blessing.” As the Saviour Himself afterwards said both to this disciple and to others as well (Matthew 16:17; Matthew 13:16), so also at this time, which is the solemn opening of all, He thus loudly proclaims, Blessed is the man that “followeth” Me!
II. A faithful warning.—Deeply true and thoroughly reliable as was this assurance, it was not one which would appear such at first in the judgment of many. In the judgment of most? This would be so, on the one hand, on account of that which would be expected by Christ from those who were His. He would expect them to be “poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3); to be men “mourning” for sin (Matthew 5:4); to be persons hungering and thirsting for “righteousness” (Matthew 5:6); and “meek” and “merciful” (Matthew 5:5; Matthew 5:7); and heart-lovers of purity (Matthew 5:8); and men not contentious for anything except for that which causes contention to end (Matthew 5:9; 1 Thessalonians 4:11, margin, R.V.). In other words, He expects from them that—and He shows that He does so most effectually by simply treating it as taken for granted—which, in the judgment of most, would not be to gain advantage but throw it away. Who ever heard before of such men as these being “blessed”? Also men would judge this, on the other hand, because of what His disciples are taught here that they must expect from the world. As the Saviour most distinctly warns them here, they must expect its resentment. They must expect to be reviled and ill-treated and persecuted. So it had always been in the past with men of this stamp. So it would be even worse in the future. How then were such men to be blessed? Men thus doubly cursed in the judgment of men? Men missing thus all that is good? Men incurring thus all that is bad? It is a most serious question; but it is not evaded by Jesus. Those who would be His disciples must face it in full! Must face it in full from the very beginning!
III. A complete re-assurance.—The Saviour conveys this to His disciples in two different ways. He does so, first, by a reference to the nature of their hopes. The losses He has warned them of are all such as to bring about in the end a far larger proportion of gain in the exactly opposite direction. The “poor in spirit” are to be “kings.” Those who “mourn” for sin to be “comforted” doubly (see Isaiah 40:1-2). Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness to be filled indeed (Isaiah 55:1-3; John 6:35, etc.). Those who as “meek” seem to have no portion on earth, to “inherit” it all. And all those, in a word, who for Christ’s sake thus lose something for a time in this world to gain infinitely more in consequence, and that for ever, partly in this world, and still more in the next (cf. Romans 8:17-18; 2 Corinthians 4:17; Luke 18:29-30; 1 Timothy 4:8, etc.). The Saviour re-assures His disciples, next, by a reference to the nature of their calling. To be thus “persecuted” is to belong to all the “sons of God” in the past (Matthew 5:12). To be thus “peacemakers” is to be acknowledged as such (Matthew 5:9). More than that, to be as these are, is to be like God Himself is in the world; to preserve it, as “salt” does (Matthew 5:13); to instruct it, as “light” does (Matthew 5:14-15); to convert it, in short, and so to teach it to glorify God in its turn (Matthew 5:16). Nothing is better than this! Nothing is to be more dreaded than to fail in this—to “lose” this “savour”—to “quench” this “light.” Of all blessings there is none surpassing this of thus “glorifying” God before men. Happy those of whom this shall be found true at the last (2 Thessalonians 1:10). “Blessed” indeed—twice “blessed”—thrice “blessed” are such!
In all this, note—
1. The reliability of this teaching.—Evidently we have here the whole of the case. All the evil as well as all the good. There is no “reserve” here—no ex parte statement, no special pleading, no holding back. The worst is before us as well as the best. All the more precious therefore—all the surer—that best (cf. John 14:2).
2. The depth of this teaching.—Distinguishing appearance from reality, embracing the future as well as the present, seeing the “light” that is “sown for the righteous” even in the darkness which now conceals it (cf. Genesis 42:36; Psalms 97:11).
3. The sum of this teaching.—“Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever.”
HOMILIES ON THE VERSES
Matthew 5:1-2. The Sermon on the Mount.—
I. The Preacher.—Jesus Christ. The best of preachers.
1. An intelligent preacher.—He had the Spirit without measure (John 3:34), and knew how to speak a word in due season—when to humble, when to comfort.
2. A powerful preacher.—He could set men’s sins before them and show them their very hearts (John 4:29) That is the best glass, not which is most richly set with pearl, but which shows the truest face. Christ was a preacher to the conscience. What is said of Luther is more truly applicable to Christ, He spake as if He had been within a man.
3. A successful preacher (John 10:42; John 12:42).
4. A lawful preacher.—As He had His unction from His Father, so His mission (John 8:18).
II. The pulpit where Christ preached. A mountain. The law was first given on the mount; and here Christ expounds it on the mount.
III. The occasion of Christ’s ascending the mount. “Seeing the multitudes.” The people thronged to hear Christ, and He would not dismiss the congregation without a sermon. From whence observe, that Christ’s ministers according to Christ’s pattern must embrace every opportunity of doing good to souls.
IV. The sermon.—Christ doth not begin His Sermon on the Mount, as the law was delivered on the mount, with commands and threatenings, but with promises and blessings.—Thos. Watson.
Matthew 5:3-12. The beatitudes tests.—They are like a dash of cold water on the fiery, impure enthusiasms which were eager for a kingdom of gross delights and vulgar conquest. And, no doubt, Jesus intended them to act like Gideon’s tests, and to sift out those whose appetite for carnal good was uppermost.—A. Maclaren, D.D.
The beatitudes.—In one of Goethe’s tales he tells of a wonderful silver lamp, which, when placed in a fisherman’s hut, changed the hut and all within it to silver. The object of Christ’s beatitudes, when admitted to a human heart, is to change it into moral beauty, transforming its selfishness, hardness, cruelty, and inhumanity to love, gentleness, kindness, sweetness, ministry. These words of Christ are really transcripts of heaven’s laws. These are the qualities that belong to heavenly inhabitants. All life there is lowly, meek, merciful, hungry for more of God, pure-hearted.—Christian World Pulpit.
Matthew 5:3. The poor in spirit.—The Sermon on the Mount sums up the Saviour’s teaching, the beatitudes sum up the Sermon. Here we have evidently the keynote of the whole series. All the classes successively named might be included in the description “poor in spirit.” So that, if the beatitudes sum up the Sermon, this first beatitude presents us with the sum and essence of the rest.
I. Those blessed.—“The poor in spirit.” The strangest of all paradoxes! If the benediction stopped at the word “poor,” and meant only the indigent, it would have been more intelligible. For we see the perils of wealth. We can discern in the roughness of earthly discomfort an influence waking better longings and raising looks for help from heaven. But poverty in the soul is a kind of indigence which seems to have no redeeming feature, and all wise men shrink from it. Christ speaks from the consciousness of bringing infinite wealth within reach of the souls of men, and, from His point of view, those were most blessed who had most room within them for the heavenly wealth He brought. As what is glorious has no glory in the presence of a glory that excelleth, so what is rich has no preciousness if it prevents our gaining something richer still. This is most solemn as well as most comforting. For it warns us in our contentment as much as it cheers us in our despair.
II. Their blessing.—“The kingdom of heaven.” Every blessing of relationship and grace. Christ’s demand is only need. Grace, like air, fills every vacuum of the heart.—Richard Glover.
The poor in spirit.—All poverty is not blessed.
I. I shall use a four-fold distinction.
1. I distinguish between poor in estate and poor in spirit.
2. Between spiritually poor and poor in spirit.—He who is without grace is spiritually poor, but he is not poor in spirit (Revelation 3:17).
3. Between poor-spirited and poor in spirit.—They are said to be poor-spirited who have mean, base spirits.
4. Between poor in an evangelical sense and in a Romish sense.—By poor in spirit the Papists understand those who, renouncing their estates, vow a voluntary poverty, living retiredly in their monasteries. By the poor in spirit we are to understand those who are brought to the sense of their sins, and, seeing no goodness in themselves, despair in themselves and sue wholly to the mercy of God in Christ.
II. I shall propound several questions.
1. Why doth Christ here begin with poverty of spirit?—To show that poverty of spirit is the very basis and foundation of all the other graces that follow. When the heart becomes a valley, and lies low by poverty of spirit, then the springs of holy mourning run there. A man must first be sensible of want before he can hunger and thirst after righteousness.
2. What is the difference between poverty of spirit and humility?—They differ as cause and effect. He that is sensible of his own vacuity and indigence, with the violet hangs down his head in humility.
3. What is the difference between poverty of spirit and self-denial?—In some things they agree, in some things they differ. The self-denier parts with the world for Christ, the poor in spirit parts with himself for Christ, i.e. his own righteousness.
III. I shall establish a doctrine, that Christians must be poor in spirit.—
1. Till we are poor in spirit we are not capable of receiving grace.
2. Till we are poor in spirit Christ is never precious.
3. Till we are poor in spirit we cannot go to heaven. The great cable cannot go through the eye of the needle; but let it be untwisted and made into small threads, and then it may. Poverty of spirit untwists the great cable, and now an entrance shall be made unto him richly into the everlasting kingdom. How shall I know that I am poor in spirit? He that is poor in spirit
(1) is weaned from himself;
(2) is a Christ admirer;
(3) is ever complaining of his spiritual estate;
(4) is lowly in heart;
(5) is much in prayer. A poor man is ever begging;
(6) is content to take Christ upon His own terms;
(7) is an exalter of free grace.—Thos. Watson.
Matthew 5:2-3. The good news.—
I. The first words of the Lord on this occasion were “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” etc. The man who does not house self has room to be his real self—God’s eternal idea of him. How should there be in him one thought of ruling or commanding or surpassing! He can imagine no bliss, no good in being greater than someone else. He is unable to wish himself other than he is, except more what God made him for, which is indeed the highest willing of the will of God. His brother’s well-being is essential to his bliss. The thought of standing higher in the favour of God than his brother would make him miserable. He would lift every brother to the embrace of the Father. Blessed are the poor in spirit; for they are of the same spirit as God.
II. The kingdom of heaven is theirs.—G. Macdonald, LL.D.
Matthew 5:3. The heirs of the kingdom.—Long ago the philosophers warned unheeding crowds that the secret of happiness consists in what a man is rather than in what he has. Cicero has left in many an eloquent page the lesson that he who would taste bliss must cultivate virtue. Seneca, the tutor of Nero, wrote the memorable sentence, “The happy man is he to whom nothing is good and nothing evil but a good and a bad disposition, who finds true pleasure in the contempt of pleasures, to whom virtue is the only good and vice the only evil.” But neither Cicero nor Seneca could instruct men how to change the bad disposition into the good. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ solves the problem by the master-key of human faith laying hold upon divine love. Yet, as if to warn us that apart from Him real happiness has no existence, see how Christ’s conceptions of blessedness clash with the common maxims of the world.
I. The objects of this beatitude.—
1. The abrupter form in which Luke quotes the beatitude—“Blessed are ye poor”—is proof that our Saviour had in view, first of all, those who are literally poor. Did He then mean that poverty, as such—the poverty which abridges pleasures, hinders usefulness, limits generosity, multiplies cares, and exposes to temptation—is in reality a blessed state? Poor men will find it difficult to believe this, and when they remember that poverty is threatened as a divine judgment upon idleness and upon ill-chosen society, their hesitation will seem justified. Yet the condition of the poor man is, perhaps, more blessed than that of his wealthy neighbour. This view seems to be gradually developed as we advance through the Bible. In the writings of Moses poverty is regarded as constituting a claim to pity; but that conception is greatly modified in the prophets. And when we reach the Incarnation we find the Son of God selecting the condition of a poor man as that in which He, at least, could most effectively do His appointed work. The pious are not always poor, however; nor are the poor always pious.
2. While, therefore, there is reason for affirming that poverty is not without its recompense of blessing, it is obvious that some additional factor or factors remain to be considered; and here the remembrance that these beatitudes contemplate character rather than condition, directs us to Matthew’s version, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.
II. The reward of the poor in spirit.—“Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
1. In relation to gospel blessings the statement is historically true. Not only did Jesus turn from the rulers of Israel to the poor populace, but also He pointed to this very fact as evidence that He was the promised King of Righteousness (ch. Matthew 11:5).
2. Much more, we perceive a Divine blessing upon the poor in spirit (Isaiah 57:15).
III. Why the poor in spirit are rewarded.—
1. Surely that we may cease from a desire to lay up treasures upon earth.
2. Surely, also, that we may learn to mortify our members which are upon the earth, and to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world.
3. Surely, again, that we may have faith in Divine providence, confidence in Divine bounty, and contentment with Divine arrangements—the very graces which poverty exercises.
4. If any wonder that the poor in spirit should be heirs of the kingdom of heaven, let them remember that God loves humility, and that they whose self-abasement is most profound, are but imitators at a long distance of the Son of God.—W. J. Woods, B.A.
Christ and “the survival of the fittest.”—As we look back over the measureless ages, beyond the beginning of human history, beyond the first mute period of primitive man, beyond the beginning even of animal life, to the first appearance of the first blade of vegetation upon the earth, or further even still—when we look back over this to us practically infinite series, we see one broad stream of tendency continually asserting itself. There is a struggle for existence; the weakest perishes, the strongest and fittest survives. So comprehensive is this law that it seems a pardonable exaggeration to suppose that no other law existed beside it; so fixed and rooted that it extends not only to man, but to animals; not only to animals, but to vegetation, if it stops even there. We see this one constant inevitable law—so broad in its grasp upon space, so immense in its reach over time—and then we see a figure as of a simple Galilean peasant, surrounded by a number of peasants and fishermen like Himself. He opens His mouth to speak to them; and His first utterance is, as it were, to fling down defiance to this seemingly omnipotent principle, to meet it with a flat contradiction, to revoke its decision, and to pronounce a solemn blessing on the one character of all others that it had not pronounced blessed: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Surely there is a Divine audacity here!—W. Sanday, D.D.
Poverty of spirit.—Dean Plumptre, in his delicious Life of Bishop Ken, writes that he rejoiced to find that text woven into his linen and engraved on his plate:—“Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not.”
Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.—The poor in spirit, vacant of self, waiting for God, conscious of a poverty that only the Divine indwelling can change into wealth, feeling, like the wondrous beggar in Martensen’s Meister Eckhart, that they “would sooner be in hell and have God, than in heaven and not have Him,” are already citizens; theirs is the kingdom of heaven.—A. M. Fairbairn, D.D.
Matthew 5:4. Mourning.—
I. An assertion.—That mourners are blessed persons. There is a twofold mourning which is far from making one blessed.
1. A carnal mourning, when we lament outward losses.
2. A diabolical mourning.
(1) When a man mourns that he cannot satisfy his impure lust (2 Samuel 13:2; 1 Kings 21:4),
(2) When men are sorry for the good which they have done (Exodus 14:5). There are two objects of spiritual mourning:
1. Sin.—
(1) Our own sin. Its guilt. Its pollution. There is a five-fold mourning which is false and spurious: (a) A despairing kind of mourning, like that of Judas. (b) A hypocritical mourning, (c) A forced mourning, when tears are pumped out by God’s judgments. (d) An extrinsical mourning (Matthew 6:16). (e) A vain, fruitless mourning. What is the right gospel mourning? (a) It is spontaneous and free. (b) Mourning for sin rather than suffering, (c) It sends the soul to God. (d) Mourning for sin in particular, (e) Gospel tears must drop from the eye of faith. (f) Gospel mourning is joined with self-loathing. (g) Must be purifying. We must so weep for sin as to weep out sin. (h) Must be joined with hatred of sin. (i) In some cases is joined with restitution. (k) Must be a speedy mourning. (l) Constant.
(2) The sin of others.
2. Misery.—Including the afflictions of the church. Special seasons of mourning.
(1) When there are tokens of God’s wrath breaking forth in the nation.
(2) Before performing the solemn duties of God’s worship, as fasting or receiving the Lord’s Supper.
(3) After scandalous relapses.
II. A Reason.—“They shall be comforted.” Observe:
1. Mourning goes before comfort, as the lancing of a wound precedes the cure.
2. God keeps His best wine till last.
3. Gospel tears are not lost; they are seeds of comfort. Reason why the mourner shall be comforted. Because the mourning has this as its end and the mourner is the fittest person for comfort. The comforts two-fold:—
1. Comforts here.—The Spirit comforts mediately, by the promises; or immediately, by a more direct act presenting God to the soul as reconciled. These comforts are
(1) real,
(2) sanctifying,
(3) humbling,
(4) unmixed,
(5) sweet,
(6) satisfying,
(7) glorious, (1 Peter 1:8),
(8) infinitely transporting and ravishing,
(9) powerful (Hebrews 6:18),
(10) heart-quieting,
(11) abiding (John 14:16). God’s mourners sometimes want comfort,
(1) through mistake; they go to their tears when they should go to Christ’s blood; or they slacken the strings of duty;
(2) through discontent and peevishness;
(3) through not applying the promises;
(4) through too much earthly-mindedness;
(5) through falling asleep in security.
2. Comforts hereafter.—The greatness of these celestial comforts is most fitly in Scripture expressed by the joy of a feast (Revelation 19:9).—Thomas Watson.
The mourners blessed.—
I. What is meant by them that mourn.—In general, I take it to be something that guards us against that frolicsome, jovial, carnal mirth, of which the people expected a large share in the kingdom of the Messiah. And with this view it will take in several very considerable Christian virtues, as to which their wrong notions of Christ’s kingdom gave their minds a very bad disposition and temper. I shall name the chief of them.
1. Sobriety and temperance.—He who is endowed with these virtues is prepared for the hardest fare and the meanest entertainment he can meet with in this world. As luxury effeminates a soldier and unfits him for the laborious part of his office, so it is in the spiritual warfare; pleasure effeminates a soldier of Christ, whereas a steady preparation of mind for bearing the cross, hardens and confirms him in his duty.
2. Contrition and penitence, by which I understand not any transient act of sorrow, but such a deep repentance as leaves lasting impressions and makes us put on the habit of mourners. There are many things contribute towards the begetting and keeping up of this serious penitent temper.
(1) The consideration of past sins.
(2) A sense of unmortified corruptions.
(3) Imperfect graces.
(4) The sins of others.
(5) A sense of God’s judgments, either threatened or impending, or executed.
3. A distaste of the world and a longing for heaven.
II. Consider how blessed they are from the comforts they shall reap both here and hereafter.—This mourning or penitential sorrow is like ground well prepared, ready manured and watered, fit to receive the seeds and to bring forth the fruits of all Christian virtues, which bring in a rich harvest of comfort and felicity. If the fruits of this temper are so great in this life, what will they be in heaven?
III. Draw some inferences from the doctrine of this beatitude.—
1. The folly of those who place their happiness in an affluence of everything that may gratify their luxury.
2. That we should endeavour to be always deeply affected with a godly sorrow in regard of our past sins and follies, and a holy fear of falling into the like again.
3. The sweetness and easiness of Christ’s yoke, the hardest of whose service (i.e. repentance) is attended with so much inward peace and satisfaction.—James Blair, M.A.
Mourners comforted.—
I. The mourning which is here specified.
1. Negatively.—
(1) It is not the mourning of a melancholy disposition, that continually murmurs, whines, and rebels.
(2) It is not a sorrow that springs from afflictions, disappointments, bereavements, destitution, adversity, etc.
(3) It is not a mourning in view merely of the consequences of sin.
(4) It is not therefore an affected penitence. “I am the chief of sinners,” said the cardinal to the confessor. “It is true,” said the monk. “I have been guilty of every kind of sin,” sighed the cardinal. “It is a solemn fact, my son,” said the monk. “I have indulged in pride, ambition, malice, and revenge,” pursued his Eminence. The confessor assented without one word of pity or doubt. “Why, you fool!” at last said the exasperated cardinal, “you don’t imagine I mean all this to the letter?” “Ho! ho!” said the monk, “so you have been a liar too, have you?” Many profess to be under deep conviction, and cry aloud that they are sinners, but when it comes to the point, will not own that they have broken one of the commandments.
2. Affirmatively.—
(1) It is a sorrow for sin. “Real repentance consists in the heart being broken for sin and from sin.” The old divines used to describe it as consisting of attrition and contrition. Attrition is when a rock is broken by the springing of a mine. Contrition is when an iceberg floating southward is gradually melted by the warmth of the Gulf Stream and the sun. The first comes by the law, which reveals to us our sin; the second comes by the gospel, which discloses to us the loving mercy of God.
(2) It is sorrow on account of the sins we see around us (Jeremiah 9:18),—the sins of the world; inconsistency of the church.
(3) It is a sympathising sorrow for others’ afflictions and distresses.
II. The comfort which is here promised.—Self-love, pride, and covetousness have their tears, but God wipes away only those of humility and repentance. “Out of the saltest waters God can brew the sweetest liquor.” “The bee gathers the best honey from the bitterest herbs.” “The darkest hour is nearest the dawn.”
1. The Saviour’s promise is already realised in this life.—God is to them “the God of consolation” (Romans 15:5). “When God comforts,” says Chrysostom, “then, though sorrows come upon thee by thousands, like snowflakes, thou wilt surmount them all.”
2. The Saviour’s promise is destined to have its complete fulfilment in the life to come.—“Holy mourning,” says St. Basil, “is the seed out of which the flower of eternal joy doth grow.”—J. Harries.
Sorrow the pledge of joy.—
I. Grief, sorrow, pain of heart, mourning is no partition-wall between man and God.—The Lord congratulates them that mourn. There is no evil in sorrow. True, it is not an essential good, a good in itself, like love; but it will mingle with any good thing, and is even so allied to good that it will open the door of the heart for any good. The gladsome child runs farther a field; the wounded child turns to go home. The weeper sits down close to the gate; the Lord of life draws nigh to him from within. God loves not sorrow, yet rejoices to see a man sorrowful, for in his sorrow man leaves his heavenward door on the latch, and God can enter to help him. So good a medicine is sorrow, so powerful to slay the moths that infest and devour the human heart, that the Lord is glad to see a man weep. Grief is an ill-favoured thing, but she is Love’s own child, and her mother loves her.
II. The promise to them that mourn.—Is not the kingdom of heaven, but that their mourning shall be ended, that they shall be comforted. To mourn is not to fight with evil; it is only to miss that which is good. It is not an essential heavenward condition, like poorness of spirit or meekness. Mourning is a canker-bitten blossom on the rose-tree of love. Is there any mourning worthy the name that has not love for its root? Men mourn because they love. The Greek word here used means those that mourn for the dead. It is not in the New Testament employed exclusively in this sense, neither do I imagine it stands here for such only; there are griefs than death sorer far, and harder far to comfort—harder even for God Himself, with whom all things are possible; but it may give pleasure to know that the promise of comfort to those that mourn may specially apply to those that mourn because their loved have gone out of their sight, and beyond the reach of their cry.—Geo. Macdonald, LL.D.
Matthew 5:5. The blessedness of the meek.
I. Describe the virtue here recommended.—
1. The first and chief ingredient in this meekness is an inward calmness and tranquillity of mind.
2. This shows itself in an outward, affable, courteous, kind, and friendly behaviour to men.
3. The meek man is slow to anger.
4. He is prudent and moderate in his passion, tempering it with a spirit of calmness and moderation.
5. He lets go his anger as soon as he can in reason, at least he suffers it not to settle into a fixed hatred or lasting resentment, but is ready to embrace all overtures of reconciliation.
6. Meekness is always joined with humility, resignation, contentment, cheerfulness, courtesy, gratitude, moderation, peaceableness, kindness, patience, forgiveness of injuries, charity, and all other social and good-natured virtues. With most of these it is so connected in the Scriptures that I do not know whether they ought not to enter into the definition of it.
II. Consider the blessing annexed to the meek.—The words are a quotation from Psalms 37:11, where, no doubt, David understood it of this earth of ours, or of the land of Canaan. It is not promised that the meek shall have great affluence (see Luke 12:15). If we look into that part of the psalm from whence this quotation is brought, these three—protection, a competency, and contentment—appear plainly to have been signified by the promise (Psalms 37:9-11). The like temporal promises we have in the New Testament (1 Timothy 4:8; Matthew 6:33). It may seem strange that, supposing this to be true of good men in general, such a promise should be here annexed to the virtue of meekness, a virtue which of all others seems to expose a man the most to oppression and injuries of all sorts. But consider:
1. That our blessed Lord might choose to instance the meek for this very reason, because he is more exposed to injuries, and seemingly more naked and defenceless than others (see Psalms 12:5). I take this promise in my text to be a particular declaration that God will take the humble, meek man under His protection, and that the less he goes about either to hurt others, or to avenge himself, God will so much the more defend him.
2. Though the meek man, if we consider him as standing alone, seems to be very much overmatched by the proud and fierce oppressor; yet if we will consider him as he is commonly fenced and guarded with the countenance and protection of laws and government, and with the friendship and love of his neighbours, and the general good opinion of all men, we shall find the meek man is not so much overmatched as at first sight he would seem to be.
(1) He is so peaceable and good-conditioned, that he seldom has any quarrels or controversies with his neighbours.
(2) He is so good a subject, and so obedient to government, that he will live quietly and peaceably under it if he can; and therefore he is in less danger than other men of being engaged in factions, rebellions, and insurrections, which destroy men’s estates and peace.
(3) He is more like to have the great blessing of peace at home in his own family than other angry and ill-conditioned men; and this makes husbands and wives, children and servants, love their homes, and mind their business with pleasure and delight.
(4) He has commonly many friends, and but few enemies; and his friends are generally of the best, and his enemies of the worst sort of men.
(5) Being in his temper well disposed to be a good subject, he has generally the protection of laws, and favour of government.
(6) If such a man, who has been kind and good to all, should happen to meet with crosses and losses in the world, he will be sure to find more pity, countenance, and relief, in his adversity, than other men, who never were good themselves, nor good to their neighbours in their prosperity.
(7) Whatever portion the meek man has of the good things of this life, be it great or small, he enjoys it with a quiet, contented mind, and God’s blessing (1 Timothy 6:6).—Jas. Blair, M.A.
The meek.—In some arrangements of the Sermon on the Mount this is the second beatitude, and that order has been preferred by such expositors as Augustine and the late Archbishop Trench. Poverty of spirit, which is humility toward God, is held to pair with meekness, which is humility toward man, and the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven in the one saying is regarded as matching the inheritance of the earth in the other. If, however, we view the first three beatitudes as a group explaining the sequences of early Christian experience, the usual order must be preferred; for, so understood, “they form,” as Dr. Dykes finely says, “the trilogy of gospel humiliation—the descending steps—low, lower, lowest—by which the soul is converted.” When the light of God’s Spirit shining within a man’s conscience convicts him of sin, the first effect is to show him how bankrupt he is of all goodness; in the light of that discovery he becomes “poor in spirit.” Next, he is made to perceive how the same sin which has stripped and left him naked has been a grievous wrong done to his Father in heaven; in the shame of this perception he becomes “a mourner.” Next, the sense of his unworthiness forbids him to walk haughtily amongst his fellow-men; in cleansing fire his vanity is consumed, and “out of the ashes of self-love and on the grave of pride” springs forth the fair sweet flower of meekness—a grace the poets have forgot to praise, a virtue the world little understands, but a disposition which conquers and will conquer all the earth!
I. The disposition.—“Blessed are the meek.”
1. Meekness is not weakness.—Mr. William Cullen Bryant, describing the languor of October light, writes, in a charming poem—
Suns grow meek and the meek suns grow brief.
He evidently means that suns grow weak and the weak suns grow brief, and that confusion of mightiness with weakness is much too common.
2. The elements of a meek disposition are entire submission to God, courtesy to men, forbearance to evil-doers, and loyalty to principle.
II. The special blessing which rewards this disposition.—“They shall inherit the earth.”
1. This promises a future possession of the earth.—By many the sentence is regarded as a quotation from Psalms 37:11, where David is speaking of the land of Canaan—an acknowledged type of heaven. So understood, the promise means that the meek will be rewarded in the world to come.
2. It promises also a present possession of the earth.—Godliness has the promise of the life that now is (Mark 10:29-30). Of all men upon earth the meek have the best capacity for enjoying its blessings. Violence and ill-temper, impatience and unkindness, may snatch the sceptre for a season; but no gains of that kind carry with them ability to enjoy God’s earth.—W. J. Woods, B.A.
The unappreciated beatitude.—The meek are few; so few that we hardly understand the meaning of the name. It has come to suggest feebleness of spirit, the passive character that accepts instead of conquering fate, the apologetic existence, grateful for sufferance and void of high ambitions. As to the old Greeks, so to the modern Christian, lowliness of mind is apt to wear the aspect of infirmity. Our heathen forefathers on this island, according to the Roman historian, found a reason for insurrection in the argument that “men got nothing by meekness, but an increase of their burdens.” And that old heathen strain seems in our blood still. It is not difficult to understand this imperfect appreciation. The days of outward persecution are ended, and with them the great stage for the display of heroic meekness. Yet, we never can get into any circumstances where any Christian grace is a superfluity.
I. Those blessed.—The meekness here blessed of Christ is:
1. The lowliness of the spiritual.
2. Patience under injury.
3. The meekness of the benefactor (1 Corinthians 4:11-13).
II. Their blessing.—“They shall inherit the earth.” If Jesus had said “heaven” His word would have sounded less strange. For in their action there is much that betokens meetness for the inheritance of the saints. But when He says “they shall inherit the earth,” His word surprises us. For they seem quite unfitted to gain or keep any earthly heritage. They will not condescend to take part in the strife; they sacrifice their rights; permit themselves to be ill-used; seem to be at everybody’s mercy, and bound “to go to the wall.” Yet, in the fullest sense of the word, they do “inherit the earth.”
1. More than all other classes they enjoy whatever God sends them.
2. They possess more of the earth than others.—Fighting is not a thing that pays. Sharp men cut their own fingers. The meek prosper because their calmness gives judgment, their content gives safety, their fairness attracts confidence. All men like to deal with men they can trust. Character helps, it does not hurt, business. Besides, God is on their side, whispering wisdom, blessing their going out and coming in; and God’s favour tells, whatever men may think of it.
3. The meek are rewarded by a sovereignty that none else can reach.—They are calm advisers to whom men listen. “The man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth,” and what an empire over the souls of men he has wielded in the last three thousand years. Within four centuries of the obscure birth of the church of Jesus, she is found wielding the powers of the Roman empire. Her meekness has been the church’s might in far-off heathen lands and on our own shores as well. Wear thy crown of thorns and on a painless brow thou shalt wear many crowns.—Richard Glover.
Inheriting the earth.—
I. The meek are those that do not assert themselves, do not defend themselves, never dream of avenging themselves, or of returning aught but good for evil. They do not imagine it their business to take care of themselves. The meek man may, indeed, take much thought, but it will not be for himself. He never builds an exclusive wall, shuts any honest neighbour out. He will not always serve the wish, but always the good of his neighbour. His service must be true service. Self shall be no umpire in affair of his. His nature lies open to the Father of men, and to every good impulse is, as it were, empty.
II. In meekness only are we the inheritors of the earth.—
1. Meekness only makes the spiritual retina pure to receive God’s things as they are, mingling with them neither imperfection nor impurity of its own.
2. To inherit the earth is to grow ever more alive to the presence in it and in all its parts, of Him who is the life of men.
3. Which is more the possessor of the world—he who has a thousand houses, or he who, without one house to call his own, has ten in which his knock at the door would rouse instant jubilation? Which is the richer, the man who, his large money spent, would have no refuge; or he for whose necessity a hundred would sacrifice comfort? Which of the two possessed the earth, King Agrippa or tent-maker Paul? Which is a real possessor of a book, the man who has its original and every following edition, and shows, to many an admiring and envying visitor, now this, now that, in binding characteristic, with possessor-pride; yea, from secret shrine is able to draw forth and display the author’s manuscript, with the very shapes in which his thoughts came forth to the light of day, or the man who cherishes one little, hollow-backed, coverless, untitled, bethumbed copy, which he takes with him in his solitary walks and broods over in his silent chamber, always finding in it some beauty or excellence or aid he had not found before, which is to him in truth as a live companion?—Geo. Macdonald, LL.D.
True ownership.—How little is the man able to make his own who would ravish all! The man who, by the exclusion of others from the space he calls his, would grasp any portion of the earth as his own, befools himself in the attempt. The real owner of his demesne is that pedlar passing his gate, with a Divine soul receiving the sweetness which not all the greed of the so-counted possessor can keep within his walls; it overflows the cuplip of the coping, to give itself to the footfarer. The motions aerial, the sounds, the odours of those imprisoned spaces, are the earnest of a possession, for which is ever growing his power of possessing. In no wise will such inheritance interfere with the claim of the man who calls them his. Each possessor has them his, as much as each in his own way is capable of possessing them.—Geo. Macdonald, LL.D.
Matthew 5:6. Hungering and thirsting after righteousness.—
I. Righteousness.—It is a very great word in Scripture, having two meanings.
1. It means conformity to God’s law as opposed to sin, which is lawlessness.
2. But when we turn to the gospel we find that God justifies the ungodly who believe in Jesus. There is evidently a new view of righteousness.
II. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness.—This is a very strong expression. It is no uncommon thing to say, “Oh, I am so hungry, I am so thirsty”; how few of us know what the words really mean! This comparison of hungering and thirsting is a very severe touchstone or test of character. Now, suppose that we try to take to pieces this great idea of righteousness, what does it mean? In the ordinary details of daily life towards others, for example, it means, briefly, truthfulness, sincerity in speech and conduct, evenhanded justice, unbiassed by any thought of our self-interest; kindness, not only as a superfluous overflow of goodness, but as a part of justice, because God has made it our duty to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” It includes spotless honour, considerate thoughtfulness, courtesy, gentleness, the mind of Christ. What does it mean towards God? It means supreme, heartfelt love, unswerving, prompt obedience, absolute trust, unquestioning, invariable preference of His will, His service, His glory, to any desire or apparent interest of my own. And this does not exhaust the list, but taking it so far, no one can say that there is anything superfluous, anything exaggerated, in any of these details. Can we honestly say, “That is myself as I would be, as I would fain be, as I strive to be, and pray to be: that is myself as I ought to be: I long, nay, I hunger and thirst to be righteous as He is righteous?” Now, surely, it is not possible to have this noble ambition—what our Saviour here calls this hungering and thirsting—and this high idea of character and conduct, without having a true humbling sense of our own defects, our own want. Hunger and thirst are not only healthy appetites, which bring enjoyment and satisfaction when they are met, but they are torments, tortures, if they are not satisfied.
III. But in proportion to the keenness of the spiritual appetite is the joy of satisfaction.—None taste the joy of salvation like those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, and, therefore, here comes the blessing. How are they to be filled? When are they to be filled? He who spoke this blessing and promise is alone able to answer and to fulfil. He who believes is already delivered from condemnation, and shall be delivered from the power of sin. He is already perfectly justified. He shall be perfectly sanctified.—E. R. Conder, D.D.
Soul hunger.—The universal connection between demand and supply. “Righteousness,” a generic word for all spiritual blessings. To crave intensely after these is blessed. Because—
I. The supply begins as soon as the demand.
II. The supply continues as long as the demand.
III. The supply is in proportion to the demand.
IV. The supply is of the same nature as the demand.
V. The supply satisfies, never satiates.—The more we receive, the more we crave. Blessed hunger! Blessed thirst!—J. S. Swan.
Hunger after righteousness.—The Saviour employs “righteousness” in its old Bible sense, as meaning all that is beautiful in loving-kindness, all that is stately in holiness, all that is gracious in honour.
I. Those blessed.—The perfecting of our character is the supreme good. It is the state of our soul, not of our circumstances, that chiefly determines our bliss. This righteousness is our only safety.
II. Their blessing.—“Filled.” This is the strangest part of this strange greeting; for it promises satisfaction in a matter in which satisfaction seems impossible. Consider what hungerers after righteousness really find which fills and satisfies them.
1.They find a grace of God, assisting repentance, consecration, and every duty.
2. In the pursuit of righteousness, the soul can realise a larger growth than in any other direction.
3. What grace begins and growth develops, heaven will perfect.—Richard Glover.
Moral hunger.—Man is the centre of longings; the animal part for food, the intellectual part for knowledge and truth, the moral part for God and righteousness. As the primeval law of gravitation pierces all depths, and makes all matter bound together by an unconscious relationship, tend to the centre, even so our moral nature is obedient to one law of motion, the centre of gravity—God.
I. Man’s moral hunger.—The natural man may hunger for that which brings him gain, such as wealth, ease, and honour. The raven held a banquet amid the putrefactions of death. Raven-like, unregenerated man seeks to allay his appetites by feeding on the perishable and corrupt. But the Christian’s hunger and his deepest and intensest want is righteousness.
1. This spiritual hunger is a sign of life.
2. This spiritual hunger is the condition of refreshment.
3. This spiritual hunger is wholesome. “After righteousness.”
II. God’s gracious supply.—The blessings bestowed by God are not given in doses or in small measures. God does not give His supplies merely once and afterwards let His saints want; His supply is boundless. But let us learn here:
1. That the supply continues only as the demand is made.
2. That the supply is in proportion to our desire.
3. God’s supply is infinite, inexhaustible, and free for the asking.—J. Harries.
The blessing of the hungry.—
I. Righteousness is set forth not as something the lack of which will entail suffering and loss, but as a thing which can satisfy the cravings of the soul. Christ does not say, “Blessed are those who follow after or practice righteousness”; He is not simply proclaiming the happiness of virtuous conduct; He has done that elsewhere in other beatitudes: “Blessed are they which hear the Word of God, and keep it. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.” It is a state of heart, an attitude of soul that He is blessing here—the mood of increasing aspiration after goodness. And He takes the most familiar of physical cravings to illustrate that desire. The peculiarity of the hunger and thirst which He blesses is that they must remain hunger and thirst always. He does not say, “Blessed are they who have hungered and thirsted,” but “Blessed are they who are still hungering and thirsting.” Is there any other craving on which our Lord has uttered His benediction? I know of none. Christianity gave precedence to the pursuit of righteousness over every other ambition and desire. More than this, it did not offer to man a mere vague sentimental shadow of excellence; it gave to the world an incarnation of it. It set before them no other standard than the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. The gospel has put its veto upon stationary religion. “The measure of our desire for good,” says Archbishop Magee, “is the measure of our religious life.” But, may we not also remind ourselves that this hunger and thirst is not a selfish thing; it cannot be that, or Christ could not have blessed it. The sure token that we have the love of it in our hearts is the burning desire to see it triumphant in the hearts of others.
II. The promised reward.—“They shall be filled.” Christ cannot mean that the sacred craving shall be appeased in the sense that all aspirations shall come to an end, and the longing which is so blessed shall never be felt again. Satiety is not to be the outcome of man’s holiest endeavours: the extinction of his craving for righteousness for himself and the world would be the worst calamity that could befall him. And yet, paradoxical as Christ’s promise is, who can say that He does not fulfil it? Those who are foremost in the craving for good, find it most. The promise reaches beyond the present. Its true fulfilment belongs to the hereafter.—Canon Duckworth.
The reward of righteousness.—That men may be drawn to taste and see and understand, the Lord associates reward with righteousness. The Lord would have men love righteousness, but how are they to love it without being acquainted with it? How are they to go on loving it without a growing knowledge of it? To draw them toward it that they may begin to know it, and to encourage them when assailed by the disappointments that accompany endeavour, He tells them simply a truth concerning it—that in the doing of it there is great reward. Let no one start with dismay at the idea of a reward of righteousness, saying virtue is its own reward. Is not virtue, then, a reward? Is any other imaginable reward worth mentioning beside it? True, the man may, after this mode or that, mistake the reward promised; not the less must he have it, or perish. Who will count himself deceived by overfulfilment? Would a parent be deceiving his child in saying, “My boy, you will have a great reward if you learn Greek,” foreseeing his son’s delight in Homer and Plato—now but a valueless waste in his eyes? When his reward comes, will the youth feel aggrieved that it is Greek, and not bank notes?—Geo. Macdonald, LL.D.
Filled with righteousness.—To be filled with righteousness will be to forget even righteousness itself in the bliss of being righteous, that is, a child of God. The thought of righteousness will vanish in the fact of righteousness. When a creature is just what he is meant to be, what only he is fit to be; when, therefore, he is truly himself, he never thinks what he is. He is that thing; why think about it? It is no longer outside of him that he should contemplate or desire it.—Ibid.
Matthew 5:7. Mercifulness.—These verses, like the stairs of Solomon’s temple, cause our ascent to the Holy of holies. We are now mounting up a step higher. “Blessed are the merciful,” etc.
I. The merciful man is a blessed man.—A curse hangs over the head of the unmerciful man (Psalms 109:6-16). But the blessings of the Almighty do crown and encompass the merciful man (2 Samuel 22:26; Psalms 37:26; Psalms 41:1).
1. What is meant by mercifulness?—It is a melting disposition, whereby we lay to heart the miseries of others, and are ready on all occasions to be instrumental for their good.
(1) Love and mercy differ somewhat. Love is like a friend that visits them that are well. Mercy is like a physician that visits only them that are sick.
(2) Mercy riseth higher than nature; it proceeds from a work of grace in the heart.
2. The several kinds of mercy.—Mercy is a fountain that runs in five streams.
(1) We must be merciful to the souls of others—(a) In pitying them. “If I weep,” saith Austin, “for that body from which the soul is departed, how should I weep for that soul from which God is departed.” (b) In advising and exhorting them. (c) In reproving refractory sinners. There is a cruel mercy, when we see men go on in sin, and we let them alone; and there is a merciful cruelty when we are sharp against men’s sins, and will not let them go to hell quietly. (d) In praying for others.
(2).We must be merciful to the names of others. The ground of unmercifulness to names is: (a) Pride. It cannot endure to be out-shined. (b) Envy. Envy, consulting with the devil, lays a train and fetches fire from hell to blow up the good name of another. We may be unmerciful to the names of others (a) By misreporting them (Exodus 23:1). (b) By receiving and repeating a slander (Leviticus 19:16). (c) By diminishing from their just worth and dignity—making more of their infirmities and less of their virtues (James 4:11). Unmerciful men know how to boil a quart to a pint. (d) By refraining from vindicating them when we know them to be calumniated. (e) By bearing false witness against them.
(3) We must be merciful to the estates of others. If a man be thy debtor, and Providence hath frowned upon him, that he hath not wherewithal to pay, do not crush him when he is sinking.
(4) We must be merciful to the offences of others (Proverbs 19:11; Acts 7:60). Bishop Cranmer was of a merciful disposition; if any who had wronged him came to desire a courtesy of him he would do all that lay in his power for him, insomuch that it grew to a proverb, Do Cranmer an injury, and he will be your friend as long as he lives.
(5) We must be merciful to the wants of others. This the text chiefly intends. There should be (a) A judicious consideration (Psalms 41:1). Consider: (i.) That it might have been your own case, (ii.) How sad a condition poverty is. (iii.) That the wise God has suffered an inequality in the world because He would have mercy exercised. (iv.) How quickly the balance of poverty may turn (Ruth 1:21.) (b) A tender commiseration (Isaiah 58:10; Matthew 15:32). (c) A liberal contribution (Deuteronomy 15:8; James 2:15-16).
II. The merciful man shall be rewarded.
1. In this life.—He shall be blessed
(1) In his person (Psalms 41:1).
(2) In his name (Psalms 112:6).
(3) In his estate (Proverbs 11:25).
(4) In his posterity (Psalms 37:26).
(5) In his negotiations (Deuteronomy 15:10).
(6) With long life (Psalms 41:2).
2. In the life to come.—Remember, whatever alms you distribute
(1) You shall have good security (Proverbs 19:17; Ecclesiastes 11:1; Luke 6:38).
(2) You shall be paid with overplus. The interest comes to infinitely more than the principal.—Thomas Watson.
The merciful.—
I. The source of Christian mercy.
1. Christian mercy must be carefully distinguished from natural tenderness of heart.—We should justly deem ourselves almost inhuman if the spectacle of distress were not grievous.
2. Christian mercy is that state of heart which is created by experience of the mercy of God.—Now the mercy of God differs from mere tenderness in two respects; unlike natural sensibility, which is an unreasoning impulse, it is actuated by principle; and unlike leniency, which is often vicious, it is always just.
II. The operation of Christian mercy.—
1. Negatively, Christian mercy implies a forgiving disposition.
2. In its positive manifestions Christian mercy operates in a wide field.—
(1) “A merciful man is merciful to his beast.”
(2) Yet kindness to animals is the merest beginning of Christian mercy. To man much more than beasts its kindness extends.
III. The reward of Christian mercy.—
1. A merciful man has the joy of dispensing blessing. He dwells among his neighbours like God’s sunlight.
2. A merciful man has his supreme reward in receiving blessing. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.” They shall obtain mercy from men because they have spent themselves for others. Moreover, God blesses the merciful man.
3. In acquiring a habit of mercifulness a man gains likeness to the Holiest!—W. J. Woods, B.A.
The merciful.—The first flower that grows on the tree of a righteous life is the grace of mercy.
I. A Godlike quality.—The word mercy among the Jews signified two things, the pardon of injuries and almsgiving. The word in Latin is very expressive, misericordia, composed of two words miseria, misery, and cor, heart; meaning a heart touched and pained at the misery of another, a tender heart. There is implied, therefore:
1. An object in distress.—Distress arising from a suffering body, an anxious mind, and a guilty conscience.
2. A disposition of the heart.—The merciful enter into the miseries of their fellow-creatures.
3. A practical purpose.—It is not a mere sentimental tenderness; it is not a mere pity over the world in misery, nor merely a lively emotion at distress: but it is a practical love which energises the faculties, stirs every limb, and grasps every opportunity to serve humanity.
4. A universal duty.—“Merciful,” not to any nation, party, sect, or church, but to all, irrespective of creed or colour.
II. A reciprocal reward.—Mercy is not purchased at the price of mercy. That is, we cannot plead the exercise of mercy to others as giving us any claim upon so undeserved a blessing, but we remove out of the way an insuperable barrier to the obtaining of God’s mercy by being merciful.—J. Harries.
The merciful obtaining mercy.—Mercy cannot get in when mercy goes not out. The outgoing makes way for the incoming. God takes the part of humanity against the man. The man must treat men as he would have God treat him (Matthew 6:14; Matthew 25:40). But the demand for mercy is far from being for the sake only of the man who needs his neighbour’s mercy; it is greatly more for the sake of the man who must show the mercy. It is a small thing to a man whether or not his neighbour be merciful to him; it is life or death to him whether or not he be merciful to his neighbour. The greatest mercy that can be shown to man is to make him merciful; therefore, if he will not be merciful, the mercy of God must compel him thereto. The reward of the merciful is that by their mercy they are rendered capable of receiving the mercy of God—yea, God Himself, who is Mercy.—Geo. Macdonald, LL.D.
Matthew 5:8. Heart purity.—
I. Heart purity.
1. Its nature.—It is a sacred, refined thing, standing diametrically opposite to whatsoever defileth. We must distinguish:
(1) There is a primitive purity, which is in God originally and essentially as light in the sun.
(2) A created purity. Thus holiness is in the angels and was once in Adam.
(3) An evangelical purity. A face may be said to be fair which hath some freckles in it. Where there is a study of purity, and a loathing ourselves for our impurity, this is to be pure in heart. Civility is not purity; nor is profession. Purity consists in, (a) rectitude of mind, a prizing holiness in the judgment, (b) conformity of will, an embracing of of holiness in the affections.
2. Its subject.—The heart. Purity of heart is the main thing in religion; there can be no purity of life without it.
3. Its reasons.—
(1) It is called for in Scripture (1 Peter 1:16).
(2) We are filthy and cursed before purity is wrought in us.
(3) None but the pure in heart are interested in the covenant of grace (Ezekiel 36:25).
(4) Purity is the end of our election (Ephesians 1:4; Romans 8:29.)
(5) Purity is the end of our redemption (Titus 2:14; 1 Peter 1:18-19).
(6) If the heart be not pure we differ nothing from a pharisaical purity (Matthew 23:25).
(7) The heart is the chief seat of God’s residence (Isaiah 57:15).
(8) If the heart be holy all is holy.
4. Its signs.—
(1) A sincere heart is a pure heart.
(2) A pure heart breathes after purity.
(3) A pure heart abhors all sin.
(4) Avoids the appearance of evil.
(5) Performs holy duties in a holy manner.
(6) A pure heart will have a pure life. The clock hath not only its motion within, but the finger moves without upon the dial.
(7) A pure heart is so in love with purity that nothing can draw him off from it.
5. Its necessity.—It is necessary:
(1) In respect of ourselves. He who had the leprosy whatsoever he touched was unclean. A foul hand defiles the purest water; an impure heart defiles prayers, sacraments, etc.
(2) In respect of God. The holy God and the sinner cannot dwell together.
(3) In regard of the angels. What should unholy hearts do among those pure angelical spirits?
(4) In regard of the saints glorified.
(5) In regard of heaven.
6. Its means.—
(1) Often look into the Word of God (John 15:3; John 17:17).
(2) Go to the bath (Zechariah 13:1).
(3) Get faith (Acts 15:9).
(4) Breathe after the Spirit. “The Holy Spirit.” Compared to fire, wind, water.
(5) Take heed of familiar converse and intercourse with the wicked.
(6) Walk with them that are pure.
(7) Wait at the posts of wisdom’s doors. Reverence the Word preached.
(8) Pray for heart Purity.
II. The great incentive to heart purity.—“They shall see God.”
1. In this life, i.e. spiritually, by the eye of faith (Hebrews 11:27).
2. In the life to come. This will be the heaven of heaven; the diamond in the ring. This sight of God in glory is partly intellectual and partly corporeal, i.e.d. we shall with bodily eyes behold Jesus Christ, through whom the glory of God, His wisdom, holiness, mercy, shall shine forth to the soul. Put a back of steel to the glass, and you may see a face in it; so the human nature of Christ is, as it were, a back of steel, through which we may see the glory of God.—Thomas Watson.
Purity of heart.—Purity of heart stands in direct opposition to external affectations.
I. The quality extolled.—Purity. The word includes—
1. Absence of the corrupt.
2. The presence of the pure.
II. The seat of purity.—“In heart.” The heart here is set forth as the centre of our spiritual being; that inward part of man which comprehends the mind and soul with all their faculties, affections, motives, inclinations, and purposes; “out of it are the issues of life.” Hence, according to the nature and character of the fountain will be the character of the stream. The heart may be compared to a reservoir which supplies a large town with its hundreds of streets and thousands of houses. The water is conveyed by some thousands of pipes. If the water be pure in the reservoir it will be conveyed in its purity through the pipes to the inhabitants; but if turbid there, it will be impure at its destination. The heart is the reservoir from which life flows. The mouth, hands, feet, looks, actions, etc., are the pipes. If the heart is pure, purity will be manifested in life.
III. The great favour attendant on purity of heart.—“Shall see God.” Your best and bosom friends are not always seen by the natural eye. You see them best in their kindness, goodness, and faithfulness. Learn here:
1. That purity is the only condition of true spiritual insight.
2. That purity is the only true condition of fellowship with God.
3. Purity of heart is the only way to true happiness and to heaven.—J. Harries.
The strength of purity.—
I. Blessed are the pure in heart.—By that limitation our Lord no doubt designed to exclude from His benediction those whose purity was the miserable purity of the scribes and Pharisees. But surely He meant also to distinguish the secret purity of the soul from the outward purity of act. There is impurity of act, there is impurity of speech; and if a man be guiltless of these he escapes the censure of the strictest moralist. Yet such innocence is not enough to satisfy the rule of Christ, whose words, according to His wont, penetrate to the hidden springs of character and conduct.
II. What is the meaning of the blessing promised to the pure in heart.—that they shall see God?—I do not take it to refer to any reward that shall be bestowed after death. It is true that those who attain to eternal life will dwell in the presence of God. They will see the invisible God, in a sense inscrutable to us, but plainly different from any sense in which a man can be said to see God now. But, so interpreted, the blessing would lose some of its peculiar appropriateness to the virtue to which it is attached; and such an interpretation will be incongruous with the other beatitudes. Let us ask, then, who are they who in this life see God? Now and then, sometimes in our reading, sometimes, thank God, in real life, we meet with men and women who are justly called saintly. Now, if you have any appreciation of the beauty of these rare natures, you cannot but recognise that such men may justly be said to see God, and to see Him, not now and then, but constantly. This is a metaphor, indeed, but a simple one. The beatific vision that comes to common men at rare intervals of spiritual exaltation is with these an abiding presence. There is only one perfect character, and the men I have tried to describe have, no doubt, faults, if you choose to look for them. But there is one sin which it is impossible to imagine in such a nature. We are certain that the imagination of such a man is never tainted by an impure thought. At the other extremity of the range of human character there are men whose lives are utterly godless. These men never see God. That such blindness is the result of sin is evident. But of what sin especially? I am not speaking at random when I declare the belief that no sin produces this state of mind so often as the sin of impurity—whether impurity of act and word, or the habit of sensual imagination. History abounds in proof of this, and especially the history of literature. By some mysterious law of our nature, impurity has a more universal effect on the soul than any other vice. It lowers the tone, it corrupts the whole tissue, of character. From this pollution arise the mists that obscure the Sun of Righteousness like a November fog.—C. A. Vince, M.A.
The vision of God.—In the middle ages, and sometimes since, men who desired earnestly to see the vision of God strove to attain it by asceticism—that is, by a sort of forced, mechanical purity. The mechanism, we believe, failed, for it was not appointed of God, but was a clumsy contrivance of men. Yet the attempt showed a recognition, however perverse, of the truth which Christ puts here so beautifully and simply. The same truth inspired the chivalrous legend of the Holy Grail. Many brave and worthy knights addressed themselves to the quest of the Sangreal, yearning to see the vision of the chalice that brimmed red with the very blood of God Incarnate, and to win the mysterious blessings which that vision brought. But to none was it given to accomplish the quest save to the pure in heart. The knight who could sing,
“My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure”—
he it was who was sanctified and consoled by the mystic vision.—Ibid.
Purity of heart.—
I. Its nature.
1. A pure heart is one that is simple.—A substance is called pure when it is without admixture, when it is one thing, and not two or more. Pure gold is gold without alloy. Purity of heart means that single eye to the glory of God which aims, whether at home or abroad, to be well-pleasing unto Him, works heartily as unto the Lord and not unto men, and craves no other recognition than the promised recompense from the Lord’s own hand.
2. A pure heart is one that is clean.—We call wine pure when it is without admixture, but water, when it is free from pollution; i.e.d. a thing may be pure in the sense of being unadulterated without being so in the sense of cleanness. In like manner a man’s devotion to God may be quite simple in its aims yet be far from blameless. In truth, when we remind ourselves that heart purity must include cleanness as well as simplicity, we are brought to a very sorry view of human nature.
II. Its attainment.—
1. Is not possible to our own unaided strength.
2. Yet the Lord Jesus Christ can give a pure heart even to the chief of sinners.
III. Its blessedness.
1. They that are pure in heart attain a holy faculty.—In Oriental language the highest felicity of a subject was to see the king’s face, and so in the court of heaven the blessedness of the pure in heart is to see God. That is a sight no impenitent man craves. Believer, you see God in all His works. You see God behind the various forms of suffering humanity, in every needy child that craves support and every piteous invalid that inspires compassion. You see God in your domestic relations, in the father keeping the household and the husband cherishing the wife. You see God in providential events. You see God in the means of grace. Above all, you see God in Jesus Christ, the revelation of the Father.
2. They that are pure in heart shall enjoy the beatific vision.—W. J. Woods, B.A.
Matthew 5:9. The peacemakers.—
I. Those blessed.—If there is need of any grace in fullest exercise, it is of the grace of peacemaking. Peace is not a single advantage, one amongst many comforts, but it is the element in which all blessings thrive. There is no waste of energies like that which takes place in discord. There is nothing that wears men like strife. Nothing chills their hearts like it. There is no trouble like its suspense. It is the nurse of anger, unfairness, outrage, of pride, revenge, injustice. Much in each one of us tends to produce discord, and much tends to augment discord between others. But there are some too saintly, too self-forgetful, to do anything but deplore this waste, and labour to prevent its increase. Blessed are:—
1. Those who do all in their power to prevent peace being broken.—There are such, not perhaps endued with the weight of character necessary to compose a quarrel, but still full of the ardent affections that are very potent in preventing quarrels arising.
2. Those who compose the strifes which disturb their fellows.
3. The statesmen who seek to maintain peace between the nations of the earth.
4. Those who labour, and labour successfully, to make peace between man and God.
II. Their blessing.—They shall be specially owned by God, as full of His own life and Spirit; as the Divinest souls on earth; as thus likest to God in heart, in feeling. They are sons of God. There is no greater proof of our sonship to God than brotherhood to man. The true children of God are all marked on the brow, and the love that maketh peace is their divine stamp. The great God is ceaselessly playing the peacemaker. And peacemakers being children of God, the promise proves that they will be owned as such. There are strange endorsements that come to gracious lives even now. Their words carry strange weight, as if oracles of God. And yet there is something more than this. In “that day” the peacemakers, more than penitents, higher than servants, shall be owned as sons, with the richest, most endeared, and delightful of all welcomes, as sons of God, heirs of God, joint-heirs with Christ, fittest of all souls for His highest heavenly work and service.—Richard Glover.
The peacemakers and their privilege.—
I. The description of the virtue itself.—As to the virtue of peacemaking, in it our Lord meets with another of the wrong dispositions of mind His hearers were prepossessed with concerning the kingdom of the Messiah; for they fancied it would be a fierce and warlike kingdom. In these words our Saviour acquaints them that it was men of quiet and peaceable principles and practices, and studious to advance the same among others, who were the fittest subjects of that heavenly kingdom. The whole duty of peacemaking is reduced to this—to consider and put in practice such methods of peacemaking as are lawful in themselves, and suited to that station which we hold in the world.
II. The meaning of being called the children of God.—
1. What is meant by being the children of God? In Scripture they are figuratively denominated the children of any person, who resemble that person in his qualities, good or bad; thus the children of Abraham are they who imitate the faith of Abraham; children of Belial are wicked men, who take after a wicked person. In this sense a child of God is one who imitates God (see Luke 6:35). Another notion of it is they who are beloved of God (Luke 20:36).
2. What is it to be called the children of God? This may denote
(1) the honourable esteem such persons meet with among good men in this world;
(2) the favourable approbation of God himself, with the rewards of grace here, and glory hereafter.
III. How this virtue entitles us to such a promise.
1. This temper makes us resemble God.—Martial men we call the sons of Mars; voluptuous men the sons of Venus; learned men the sons of Apollo; so peaceable men the sons of God. One of the titles God takes to Himself is the God of Peace; Christ is called the Prince of Peace; and therefore peacemakers are the sons of this God. Again, as one great part of God’s work is to reconcile us to Himself, so another part of it is to reconcile us to one another.
2. Peaceableness and peacemaking dispose us for the reception of those graces which are the peculiar characters of the children of God here, and for that eternal happiness which is prepared for them in heaven (see e.g. Psalms 25:9).
3. The inheritance due to God’s children is promised to the peaceable (Psalms 133:3).—Among the things which exclude from the kingdom of heaven are hatred, variance, emulations, etc. (Galatians 5:20).—Jas. Blair, M.A.
The peacemaker.—John Dickinson, Esq., of Birmingham, was often called, by way of distinction, “the peacemaker”; and such was his anxiety to keep the bonds of peace from being broken, such was his solicitude to heal the breach when made, that he would stoop to any act but that of meanness, make any sacrifice but that of principle, and endure any mode of treatment, not excepting even insult and reproach. From the high estimate in which his character was held, he was often called upon to act as umpire in cases of arbitration; and it was but rarely, if ever, that the equity of his decisions was impeached. On one occasion, two men were disputing in a public-house about the result of an arbitration, when a third said, “Had John Dickinson anything to do with it?” “Yes,” was the reply. “Then all is right, I am sure;” and in this opinion the whole party concurred, and the disputation ceased.—Biblical Museum.
Matthew 5:10-12. The persecuted.—The last crowns the series of the beatitudes. From poverty to crucifixion, the Saviour’s life unfolded, exhibiting all the graces, activities, and experiences here commended. He expects that the new life which begins in the hearts of the disciples in poverty of spirit will grow till it reaches that vigour of holiness, mercy, and usefulness which finds a cross and has power to bear it.
I. Those blessed.—A little thought will show how constant must be the antagonism of the world to sanctity, for observe:—
1. Every saint of God is a “disturber of Israel.”—He is an embodied conscience. His character is a law of God brought nigh to men. His purity reproves, his honour shames men. The gravity of his purpose and his aims seems to light up the solemnities of the unseen world.
2. Every saint of God offends the pride as well as disturbs the peace of men.—It is no small hatred that envious evil feels to goodness. “Away with Him,” etc.
3. True saintliness will always be an aggressive thing. Where it is such its activities arouse enmity.—“I came not to send peace,” etc. The Christian has to be the reformer in a world of vested interests. “This our craft is in danger.” There is but little persecution experienced by the church of God to-day. Why? Partly, no doubt, because the Saviour’s authority pervades society, and the evils which we oppose are feebler, more apologetic and less dominant than in other days. But has lukewarmness not something to do with our comfort?
4. There are those faithful ones who, in matters of philanthropy or social or civil good, plead for causes with which they deem the well-being of men is bound up, but for causes which are unpopular.
II. Their blessing.—
1. Theirs is the kingdom in actual blessed participation of its grace and comforts.—By their persecution all powers of the soul are strengthened, and faith makes sure of its ground. Solitude strengthens them to stand alone. Nothing compels men to prove all things so much as the contradiction of those around them. “Methinks they strew roses at my feet,” said one James Bainam, as the faggots were lighted beneath him. As Argyle laid his head upon the block his physician found his pulse full and calm as in his usual health. The persecuted for righteousness have habitually reached a consolation, a strength, a rapture, which showed that theirs was in very deed the kingdom of heaven.
2. This bliss is enhanced by the blessed influence they exert: they rank with the prophets when they share their fate.—The glory of the prophets was their usefulness.
3. Great is their reward in heaven.—We are children of immortality, and the main question of our life is what that immortality is going to prove. For all goodness there is reward, but for the persecuted there is “great reward.” Their large souls expand above, and for highest rulership and divinest joys find ample fitness within them.—Richard Glover.
Suffering for the truth’s sake.—
I. We cannot be servants of the truth and of righteousness—in other words, we cannot be the servants of Jesus—without suffering.—This ending of the beatitudes looks like a paradox. How does it come to pass that men of broken heart, full of meekness and forbearance, can provoke the enmity of their fellows? There is an absolute contrariety between such as are poor in spirit and all that surround them. The world proceeds on directly opposite principles. Its delight is in haughty opulence and proud self-contentment, and here we have humility and self-renouncement. If a man is raised up who fully realises this holy ideal, a man who really shows what love is, by laying down his life for his brethren, a man answering in every respect to the first beatitudes, it will be impossible to reproach and persecute him enough. Such a Man appeared, and He called Himself “the Man of sorrows.” The Son of man suffered, not only because of the sacred oracles which predicted His death, but also, and especially, because of the natural antipathy existing between the world and God, between darkness and light. You are witnesses for Christ; you must declare the divine message in season and out of season; and if, in doing this, you make men feel its urgent character, you are sure to meet, first with disdain, then with hatred, and lastly with persecution.
II. Suffering is a source of happiness.—“Happy are ye, when men,” etc.
1. It is a happiness to suffer for a noble cause.
2. The fact that suffering for truth brings with it its own reward is also a reason for real joy, as it ensures the triumph of our cause.—It is a noble and powerful evidence in favour of truth that it is loved to such a degree. If the children of darkness cast you out in their rage, the children of light, who are seeking it with a sincere heart, come to you, attracted by the strength of your convictions.
3. “Your reward is great in heaven.”—The cross leads to glory. “Our bonds,” we read in the Acts of the Martyrs, “are the jewels of our holy betrothal to Christ, and our crown blooms on the thorns which lacerate our brows. When the winter is past, and the storm is over, the flowers will appear.”
4. This triumph of truth in heaven is not enough. It must have its glorious revenge on the very theatre of its humiliations and conflicts.—The world must see how mistaken it was in rejecting it, and one day it will be forced to exclaim, “O Galilean, Thou has overcome!” The last word of history must belong to God, otherwise God would not be God.—E. De Pressensé, D.D.
Sufferers for righteousness.—
1. The eighth beatitude has a corrective function, guarding against misuse of the previous sayings. Thus Chrysostom remarks, “This follows the beatitude upon the peacemakers, lest we should imagine peace at any price to be a blessing,” and we may add, it warns us not to allow our humility to degenerate into servility, nor our meekness into sinful compliance. In a word, it requires strength as well as gentleness, and that principles be maintained in spite of persecution.
2. It has a distinct peculiarity, inasmuch as the seven preceding words were blessings upon character, whereas this affirms the blessedness of a condition in which that character is exercised.
3. Very surprising is this last of the beatitudes. On the top of the sevenfold delineation of character which has marched as to the music of blessings, down through the valleys of poverty, mourning, and meekness, and up across the highlands of right desire, and mercy, and purity, and peacemaking—this intimation that the heirs of the kingdom shall nevertheless be persecuted, reads like an anti-climax.
I. The subjects of the beatitude.—
1. The Apostles and early disciples of Jesus are first intended.—“Blessed are ye.” The change of pronoun shows the earnestness of the Speaker in affirming a difficult doctrine, marks also an additional directness of appeal, but especially indicates a particular application of the matter in hand to the persons actually addressed.
2. What was foretold of Apostles in particular is in some measure true of all the heirs of the kingdom.—If we look at the analysis of persecution which our blessed Lord gives in the passage under review, it is notable that actual brute-force persecution is neither the first nor the last item, but that these are “reproach” and “evil-speaking,” both cruelties of the tongue. To be stung to death by insects is probably worse than to be felled by the leaping tiger.
II. The conditions of the beatitude.—The persecution must be unmerited.—Certain of the early Christians denounced themselves to the heathen magistrates that they might win the crown of martyrdom; but that was suicide; not receiving the crown, but snatching it. In like manner there are foolish people to-day who obtrude their religious notions upon their neighbours with an offensive manner which may earn them persecution, but not a part in Christ’s blessing.
III. The benefits of the beatitude.—
1. In this life they who are persecuted for Christ’s sake are blessed.—The Scriptures are never ashamed to encourage righteous men with hopes of reward.
2. In the life to come “great is their reward in heaven.”—The phrase is plainly used to intimate a high degree even of celestial bliss.—W. J. Woods, B.A.
Matthew 5:10. Persecution.—
I. The condition of the godly in this life.—They are persecuted. It is a saying of Ambrose, there is no Abel but hath his Cain. Put the cross in your creed.
1. What is meant by persecution?—To vex and molest, sometimes to prosecute another, to arraign him at the bar, and to pursue him to death.
2. The several kinds of persecution.—Twofold,
(1) of the hand;
(2) of the tongue. There have been many punished for clipping of coin; of how much sorer punishment shall they be thought worthy who clip the names of God’s people to make them weigh lighter.
3. Why there must be persecutions.—
(1) In regard to God; (a) his decree (1 Thessalonians 3:3). (b) His design. (i.) Trial. Persecution is the touch-stone of sincerity. (ii.) Purity. The cross is physic, it purgeth out pride, impatience, love of the world, etc.
(2). In regard of the enemies of the church (Genesis 3:15). Vultures have an antipathy against sweet smells, so in the wicked there is an antipathy against the people of God; they hate the sweet perfumes of their graces.
4. The chief persecutions are raised against ministers (Matthew 5:12; James 5:10; Acts 9:15-16; 2 Timothy 4:6).
5. What that persecution is which makes a man blessed.—Not that
(1) when we pull a cross upon ourselves;
(2) when we suffer for our offences (1 Peter 4:15);
(3) when we suffer to keep up a faction. We are blessed in suffering persecution;
(1) when we suffer in a good cause;
(2) when we suffer with a good conscience;
(3) when we have a good call (Matthew 10:18);
(4) when we have good ends in our suffering, viz. that we may glorify God, set a seal to the truth, show our love to Christ. The primitive Christians did burn more in love than in fire;
(5) when we suffer as Christians (1 Peter 4:16).
II. Their reward after this life.—Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The cross is a golden ladder by which we climb up to heaven.—Thos. Watson.
Matthew 5:11. For Christ’s sake.—Just as when you look at any object through coloured glasses, the colour of the object seems to have changed to the colour of the glass; in the same manner any disagreeable duty, when looked at through Christ, in the light of His marvellous love to us, will have changed its hue, so that we can thereafter contemplate it with pleasure and joy.—S. Macnaughton, M.A.
Matthew 5:12. Rejoicing under persecution.—
I. A comfortable direction when we suffer for Christ or duty. “Rejoice,” etc. There is no sort of people contribute more to bring up a bad report on religion, than those uneasy, melancholy, discontented persons, who are always fretting and repining at every thing. They are like the evil spies whom Joshua sent to view the land of Canaan.
1. The nature and importance of this duty of rejoicing when we suffer for Christ.—The mirth of the world is commonly a vain, foolish, and unreasonable thing, as being either a suppression of thought, under pretence of laying aside all care, or as occasioned by some temporary felicity and success in acquiring a large share of the things of this world. But the rejoicing of the text is a much more solid and serious thing.
(1) The principal act of this rejoicing, and which is the foundation of all the rest, is a prevalent love to God, which disposes us to a conformity to His blessed will in all things, and rejoices in everything that may fit us for the enjoyment of Him be it ever so afflicting and grievous at present.
(2) Another act of this duty of rejoicing, when we are reviled and persecuted for Christ’s sake, is the great duty of self-resignation (Matthew 26:39).
(3) Patience under troubles.
(4) Contentment.
(5) A lively hope of good things to come in a future state.
(6) From all these results a permanency of joy (Psalms 112:4; Psalms 112:6-7).
(7) A sedate courage not to be conquered by all the most formidable things in nature (Romans 8:36).
2. The grounds of the duty.—
(1) It is a point of honour thus cheerfully to suffer for Christ (Acts 5:41; Acts 9:16; Philippians 1:29).
(2) It will be honoured by God with the highest honours in heaven.
(3) It is the greatest service which can be done for the church, whether for propagating the faith among infidels or for confirming true believers.
(4) It fits us to set about every duty with courage and alacrity.
(5) It is a good mark of the right way to heaven and happiness.
3. The ways and means to facilitate the practice of it.—
(1) A lively faith in Christ (John 14:1; 1 Peter 1:5).
(2) Keeping a good conscience (2 Corinthians 1:12).
(3) A faithful discharge of great and difficult duties (James 1:2; Acts 5:41; Hebrews 10:34).
(4) A confirmed sincerity or Christian perfection (2 Corinthians 13:11; Psalms 97:11).
(5) Promoting the work and service of God.
(6) A new prospect of the joys of heaven (Romans 5:2; 2 Timothy 4:8).
II. The reasons of the direction.—
1. The greatness of the reward in heaven.
2. The honourable rank which joyous suffering for Christ gives on earth, viz. the company of the prophets.—Jas. Blair, M.A.
Slander.—I am getting rather proud, for I see that my character is more and more defamed.—Luther.
The persecuted prophets.—
I. It is matter of comfort and joy to be found in the same way with good men that have gone before us, and to meet with the same treatment that they met with from the world.
II. The prophets, notwithstanding all their extraordinary qualifications, were reviled, calumniated, and persecuted in their days, for doing their duty.
III. The circumstances of the prophets and those of our Lord’s disciples were similar.—
1. The prophets had to do with the same perverse people as the Christians had to treat with.
2. The business of the prophets was much the same with that of the Christians. The prophets had an immediate commission and unction from God to go and reform that sinful people, the Jews, and prepare them for the reception of the Messiah. Christ’s disciples had the like unction and commission to prepare people to believe in the Messiah already come. The old prophets had to contend with idolatry and false prophets among the Jews. Christians had idolatry to encounter all the world over, together with the scribes and Pharisees among the Jews. The old prophets boldly reproved vice in all ranks of men. And so our Saviour’s disciples were brought before magistrates and kings for His sake, and with wonderful freedom and boldness told them their duty. The old prophets denounced God’s judgments against an impenitent people in their days, and so did our Saviour and His disciples denounce God’s heavy judgments, more particularly in the destruction of Jerusalem.
3. The obstacles the prophets met with were the very same with those of the Christians. And, therefore, it was but reasonable to conclude their treatment would be much the same. The men in power, both in church and state, were possessed with a spirit of pride and covetousness, ease and luxury, which was an utter enemy to all reformation, and to all thoughts and notions of a spiritual kingdom. This was not only a worldly, but a bloody spirit, employing the utmost carnal force to withstand the truth. They had, both of them, to do with the most inveterate prejudices and prepossessions of education, temper, and worldly interest, against the truth, backed with force, power, and authority; and they were both of them destitute of any other means to promote the truth, except the power and demonstration of the Spirit. So that it might well be expected the same attempts upon the same sort of people would have the same effects—namely, to raise a great storm of persecution against the reformers.
IV. Inferences with relation to our duty may be drawn both from the good examples of the courage and patience of the persecuted prophets, and from the bad examples of the persecuting world.—
1. Let us learn an honesty, courage, and steadfastness in doing our duty.
2. The patience of the prophets under the cross is an example well worthy of our imitation.
3. Though they were persecuted in their own time, yet all men became quickly sensible of the unjust ill-usage they had, and therefore blessed and honoured their memories.—Jas. Blair, M.A.
Matthew 5:13. The metaphor of salt.—The point of the illustration rests on the power of salt, coarse or fine, to preserve animal tissues from decay. This substance was taken by the ancients as an emblem of wit and piquant wisdom; but our Lord gave it a larger and deeper meaning. He had described in the beatitudes the features and elements of that character which should be formed by His disciples, and would make them useful to other men. If we may speak of it as of a tree, its root is in the soil of meekness and humility, watered by godly sorrow. Its strong stem is the desire of righteousness, and its fruits are mercifulness, purity of heart, and the love of peace. The Master warned His disciples that possession of such a character would not gain for them the world’s favour. On the contrary, it would provoke persecution and reproach. But such as had this salt in themselves could never be without a beneficial influence on the society around them. Wherever they might dwell, they would be the salt of the land. The Latin church, in its materialistic fashion, employs actual salt in the baptismal service. The priest puts it into the mouth of the person, adult or infant, who is baptised. It is an unauthorised ceremony; but it is a sort of traditional witness to the obligation lying on all Christians to have in themselves that which salt might symbolise. Our Lord requires that all who follow Him shall have that style of character which savours of the kingdom of heaven, and so exert a morally antiseptic influence on others. Noah, as a just man, was salt in the old world, but he was not enough to save mankind, when “all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.” Lot was as salt among the dwellers in Sodom, when, “in seeing and hearing, he vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their lawless deeds;” but it was more than he could do to stay that terrible corruption. Ten righteous men might have saved the city, but not one. The Lord Jesus, purposing to effect a vast and permanent moral change, not only in the land of Judæa, but in the corrupt Gentile world, set Himself to provide a sufficient quantity of salt. A candid view of the influence of Christianity on that wicked world into which Apostles and Evangelists pushed their way, and in which the primitive churches were planted, must lead anyone to the conclusion that a species of moral “salt” was then applied to a society otherwise hastening to decay; and it is important to remember that this influence was exerted not by the diffusion of a literature, or by the performance of prodigies, or by the hand of authority, but simply by the individual and social life of men and women—a few of high degree, but far more in humble station, and not a few of them slaves—who had some new element of wisdom and goodness in their minds and hearts—who, in fact, had salt in themselves.—D. Fraser, D.D.
Christians as salt.—To be salt of the land is to be in the highest sense useful to our fellow-men.
I. Usefulness is a duty.—It is the end which the Lord has in view in calling us to be His disciples. He teaches us that we may teach others; blesses us that we may bless others. This method may be traced through all history.
II. The great secret of usefulness is goodness.
III. The faculty for usefulness may decay.—Our Saviour warned the disciples against losing the savour of salt. Those who heard Him could be at no loss to understand the phrase. They were aware that the salt of Syria, when long exposed to sun and air and rain, became quite insipid. Various travellers have reported on this in modern times. And such spoilt salt is good for nothing. It must not be thrown on land, for it would blight its fertility. Nothing can be done with it but to lay it as a sort of rough gravel on the roads, where it is trodden under foot. So useless are those Christians who lose the savour of goodness and wisdom from on high, having a form of godliness without the power.—Ibid.
The citizens of the kingdom as salt of the earth.—It is said that “salt and sunlight” are the two great essentials which keep the world alive and pure. So spiritually, in the text, Christ sets forth His disciples as “salt,” exercising an influence for good on the world.
I. The disciples’ peculiar character. “Salt.”—There is implied:
1. A sad fact, a corrupted condition.
2. A moral antidote.
3. The efficiency of the means used. This influence is exerted:
(1) In conserving the good. Salt is antiseptic. It preserves flesh and some kind of fruit from being destroyed by corruption and decay. In the sacrifices of the Jewish law no leaven could be used and no honey, because both were liable to speedy fermentation and corruption, and could not, therefore, be fitting offerings to the God of purity and holiness. But in all the meat-offerings—as in the sacred incense—salt was used; first, to preserve the flesh offered on the altar from taint; secondly, to symbolise the enduring character of the covenant of mercy. History tells us that the disciples of Christ were the salt of the Roman Empire during the evil days of its decline, and preserved Christianity as a moral force in society. The heroes of the Reformation were the salt of England and Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and saved the churches from a moral wreck. England, Wales, and Scotland are to-day the homes of the free, champions of the slave, leaders in the van of progress, civilisation, and evangelisation, because of the noble, faithful, and heroic saints in the past.
(2) In counteracting the evil. Christian people exercise a counteracting influence against the moral corruption of society, the world’s selfish pleasures, its degraded lust, its trickeries, and its mad revelries, and they save humanity from careless recklessness, curse, and ruin.
II. The Master’s solemn warning.—“If the salt have lost,” etc. Jesus Christ here implies:—
1. A possible false position.—He is alluding to those who are Christians and disciples in name only—the backslider, the lukewarm, and many who hold an outward profession, but have no life or power.
2. A possible deterioration.—A Christian may lose his “first love” and his relish for Divine things. Christ declares—
3. A woeful consequence.—“It is good for nothing,” etc.—J. Harries.
The salt losing its savour.—
I. A supposition—that the salt may lose its savour. There are two things here insinuated, if not foretold, by our Saviour, which deserve serious consideration.
1. That private Christians may, by negligence and abuse of their talents, lose all right sense of religion and virtue.
2. That the Christian church in general should in time be exceedingly corrupted, that that wonderful virtue it had to awaken and reform the world, should be lost, and Christianity thereby become very contemptible.—
II. The fatal consequences of this unsavouriness.—
1. To Christians themselves. “Wherewith shall it be seasoned?”
2. To the world. They are then of no manner of use, but deservedly expose themselves to the utmost contempt. “It is thenceforth good for nothing,” etc.—James Blair, M.A.
Scatter it.—Every farmer will tell you that seed-corn is of no value until it is planted, and his heap of fertilisers is of no use until it is scattered over the soil. Jesus Christ tells his disciples that they are the salt of the earth, but everything depends upon its being put into the right place. A barrel of salt set in the corner of a butcher’s stall is of no more use than a barrel of sawdust; it must be brought into contact with every inch of the meat in order to prevent decomposition. Spiritual salt is of little value to the community as long as it is barrelled up in a church, however orthodox may be the brand stamped on it. The salt must be scattered so as to touch and to season those who are tending to moral corruption. How tenderly did the Lord Jesus Christ put Himself in contact with the diseased and the depraved! The Book of the Acts of the Apostles is the narrative of unbarrelling and scattering the salt in communities infected with heathenism. The secret of the success of the Salvation Army is just this; they do not barrel up the salt; they scatter it where the stench of depravity is the worst.—T. L. Cuyler, D.D.
Matthew 5:14-16.The citizens of the kingdom as the light of the world.—
I. The interesting metaphor employed.—“Light” is a special type of the Deity. “God is light”—signifying that God is the source of purity, beauty, joy, and glory. In the strictest sense, Christ Himself is “the Light of the world.” Christ’s satellites—by whom, in virtue of their recipient relations to Him, they hold forth the Christly light—reflect it, and shed it on men. As the moon or stars reflect the light of the sun, so the followers of Christ reflect His light; teaching us:
1. That the Christian’s light is derived.
2. The Christian is a light-reflector.—The Christian life reflects the great Exemplar and Saviour of the world. Christ shines through His people.
3. The Christian is a light-diffuser.
II. The moral obligation enforced.—“Let your light,” etc. The words imply that effort is necessary to develop the proper influence of the Christian character. Either from want of moral courage, or want of fidelity to truth and profession, or spiritual indifference, we may hide our light under a bushel.
1. Shine.—That which does not shine is not light.
2. Shine brightly.—“So shine.” The light of some of the stars is not large in volume, yet very bright. It is not the largeness of our endowments we have to consider, but the transparent lustre of our life. There should be nothing in us to hinder the light. In Christian perfection or character that shines brightly there must be seven prismatic colours—all the beatitudes—which compose the pure ray of Christly light.
3. Shine conspicuously.—“A city that is set on a hill,” etc.
4. Shine constantly—Fitful Christians do very little good. It is not the blazing comet or the wandering star that guides the mariner; but the fixed star.
5. Shine usefully.—“Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel.” We do not light a candle in open day or in twilight, and then put it out when it is dark, though in religion this kind of thing is frequently done, in the presence of the world.
III. The supreme end designed.—“That they may see your good works, and glorify,” etc.
1. That the chief end of the Christian life is to glorify God.—There are some painters whose favourite works are portraits of themselves. There are many writings whose central figures are the authors. Here God, not self, is the emphatic end of all our actions.
2. That such a noble end in our life is manifested by “good works.”
3. That such good works seen in Christian people are calculated to induce others to glorify God.—J. Harries.
Matthew 5:14.Christians the light of the world.—
I. In what respect Christians are compared to the light.
1. In what respect men are said to be in darkness.—In respect of the darkness
(1) of ignorance;
(2) of error;
(3) of unbelief;
(4) of inconsideration;
(5) of vice.
2. In what way Christians ought to be instrumental in bringing men out of this darkness.—
(1) By teaching.
(2) By controversy where sufficient skill and knowledge are possessed.
(3) By testimony (Mark 5:19; John 4:29).
(4) By exhortation.
(5) By reproof (Leviticus 19:17; Galatians 6:1).
(6) There is one way more universal than any of the rest, and perhaps more directly here meant, i.e. the light of good example.
II. What is implied by this addition “of the world?”—
1. That the bounds of the church were to be enlarged, that the Gentiles were to be called in to be partakers of the glorious light of the gospel.
2. That those very persons who were now our Saviour’s auditors, should have the honour to propagate the gospel all the world over.
3. That they must be much more eminent and exemplary, to become lights of the world, than the Jews, who were only lights of that particular country of Judæa; as a great room requires a greater illumination, to enlighten it, than a smaller one.—Jas. Blair, M.A.
The analogies of light.—
I. Christian life, like the light, is active.—Light, like heat and sound, is not a substance, but a mere motion. The waves of light are very small, but their motion is inconceivably rapid. The vitality of religion is maintained by effort.
II. Christian life, like the light, is pure.—Water and fire are often used as representions of things pure and holy. Water cleanses and fire purifies. But water becomes less pure itself by washing, and fire, while it purifies one metal, contaminates other objects, by evaporating the impurities, or by making them combine with other bases at a high temperature. Water comes into contact with filth, dissolves it and carries it to a locality that was pure. Fire attacks the scene of corruption, turns all to vapour and noxious gases, which become injurious to life all around. But look at light! It comes beautiful and pure from the sun. It enters some scene of corruption, and mingles with decay and death; and then it passes on in its glorious pathway, having brightened and blessed every object in its way. It goes, however, as it came, absolutely pure. Real Christian life is not injured by contact with sin. The history of Christian enterprise shows that the holiest men are those who, for the sake of Christ, have often come in contact with most unholy scenes.
III. Christian life, like the light, is life-giving.—Plants grow towards the light. While the light fosters and feeds the growing vegetation, it only acts as an instrument in the hands of God. The Christian church is destined, instrumentally, to convert the world.
IV. Christian life, like the light, is silent in its mode of operations.—The sun rises, and without a whisper or sound, chases the darkness away. The noise of a growing forest would not destroy an infant’s sleep. Thus, God carries on His work of grace.
V. Christian life, like the light, has various forms.—Light has colours and an immense variety of shades, and yet is every shade of colour truly “light.” It is the fault of some men that they will not recognise as religion anything which does not shape itself according to the form which religion has taken in themselves.—Evan Lewis, B.A., F.R.G.S., F.E.S.
Christianity: domestic and public. I. The figure of the house-lamp suggests domestic Christianity.—Home religion! Is there anything more needed? It is a mere mockery of this to have a house full of vanity and discord, with a daily routine of family prayer.
II. The city on a hill, where it catches the strong sunshine, is seen far and wide over the plains; and this suggests the collective testimony of Christians. The church may be invisible as respects the secret of its life, power, and endurance in God; but it should be visible in its influence on society and its benevolent activities, “a city that cannot be hid.”—D. Fraser, D.D.
The city on the hill.—I. The city is the church (Psalms 87:3).
II. The mountain whereupon the city stands is Christ (Daniel 2:35).
III. The citizens of this city are the saints (Ephesians 2:19).
IV. The towers of this city were the prophets who were most eminent in the church.
V. The gates of this city were the Apostles, by whose ministry men were brought into the church.
VI. The walls of this city are the ministers of the Word, and the Apostles’ successors, who are as ramparts to defend the church against the assaults of sin, superstition and error.—Richard Ward.
Church responsibility.—Sometimes you notice on the corner of the street a fine edifice springing up. You are told it is a new church coming into being. Once a pastor was asked, as he stood unrecognised upon the walls, “When will this building be completed?” He easily gave the time. “Will the congregation be in debt?” continued the stranger. “Oh yes, awfully,” answered the thoughtful man; “sometimes it frightens me to think of it!” Then came the question, “Why did you begin when you had not the money?” Then the minister of God answered, “Oh, we have money enough; we shall have no such debt as that; but think, think how much a church like this is going to owe the community and the world! How they will look to us for man’s love and God’s grace!”—C. S. Robinson, D.D.
Matthew 5:15. The light to be seen.—The candle is not to be put under the bushel, but on a candlestick.
I. Not under the bushel of the letter merely, or of officialism, or of our limited understanding, or of our narrow sympathies, but:
II. On the candlestick of a sound confession, of ecclesiastical order, of spiritual liberty, and of a Christian life.—J. P. Lange, D.D.
Lighted lamps.—Every one of us should have a lamp, or rather be a lamp, to shine out into the darkness of the world.… Now there are four things necessary to a lamp’s giving light properly. It must be:—
I. Lighted.—Lighted by another; cannot light itself, any more than it can make itself. Only God can light us. Teachers can polish the vessel.
II. Set.—Not under a bushel; prominent place. Sheltered, or may be blown out. Set, so as to shine for useful purpose.
III. Fed.—Continually, day by day. With proper oil. In proper way. Only God has the oil of grace to keep the light burning.
IV. Trimmed.—Cutting off what would hinder the brightness of the flame. Careful trimming and constant feeding needful to bright shining.—J. Edmond, D.D.
Matthew 5:16. On doing good.—If it be true that “charity begins at home,” I am quite sure it is still more true that any kingdom of God for which we are earnestly caring will begin in our own hearts, in a practical holiness which will cost us more self-denial than the seemingly zealous efforts men put forth, as they say, to save the souls of others.
I. In seeking our own improvement or growth in holiness, it is not merely our own personal advantage that we pursue.—We are seeking that which will ensure our doing good to others; the unconscious influence of a good man’s life being wider in its scope and more certain in its results, than studied efforts directly to benefit mankind.
II. He who attains to the greatest amount of personal holiness or excellence, invariably and inevitably does the most good in the world.—We sometimes think that they are the most useful men who give away most, and who perform most seemingly generous acts; but it is a far nobler gift to the world when we subdue in ourselves some passions or vices that would corrupt mankind, and when we cultivate some Christian virtues that shed light on our human path. He who lives an unselfish life does more to banish selfishness from the world than he who proclaims all his life against it. It is one fault of our age that we make the hope of the world’s regeneration depend so much on loud talking and so little on holy living.
1. We learn this lesson from the history of the past. Who are the men who have moved the heart of the world?
2. The teachings of Christ lead us to the same conclusion. He teaches that if we are godly ourselves the kingdom of God will certainly come with power.
3. Our experience of life shows us how much more influence we may exert by our actions than by our speech. “Example is better than precept.” A fact is always mightier than an assertion. Moreover, the power of a man’s speech depends on its sincerity; and life, revealing character, is the test of sincerity.—S. Edger, B.A.
Good Works.—A good work is only that which is done:
1. By a child of God.
2. In obedience to God his Father’s command.
3. For the good of men.
4. For the glory of God.—David Dickson.
The light must shine.—A Christian mother told me once, with eyes full of bitter tears, that she had had a reproof the day before from her son, a young man for whom she had prayed and agonized during many long years, apparently in vain, which had almost broken her heart. She said, “You know, Mrs. Smith, how I have wanted to have my son and my husband converted, and how I have worked and prayed for it. Well, lately we have had some great anxieties in our family life, and I confess I was very much cast down, and did get cross over it, and go about groaning and sighing, and looking and acting as if I was miserable. Yesterday, as I was sitting at my work with the tears dropping from my eyes, and looking the picture of woe, my son said to me, ‘Mother, you have been wanting father and me to be Christians for a good many years, and have wondered why we did not yield. I will tell you why. It is because you show us in your life such an unhappy picture of Christianity that it has never looked in the least attractive to us. In this trouble, for instance, just look how much better father and I bear it than you do, and we make no professions of having a Saviour to help us. If your religion doesn’t amount to anything more than the thing you live out before us, you cannot wonder that we do not care to have that sort of religion.’ ”—Mrs. H. W. Smith.