Day 283 (Matthew 5-7) - Year 8

Tara-Leigh Cobble (0:01)

Hey Bible Readers, I'm Tara-Leigh Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap.

This three-chapter section is called The Sermon on the Mount, and it's the most famous sermon Jesus preached. It is meaty. I'm not going to recap every detail, I'm just going to lean into some things that might help with grasping deeper meanings or themes. Let's get to it. Jesus sits down on the rolling hillside around the Sea of Galilee, surrounded by his disciples and teaches them what life in the upside down kingdom of God looks like. The launching point of the sermon is a list of eight blessings granted to God's people, except much of what he says doesn't sound like blessing at all.

Lots of scholars believe these eight beatitudes at the start of chapter five are actually not just a list, they're cumulative, like a building he's constructing, and that this first blessing is the foundation of everything else he says in the sermon. Here's why. It all starts out with poverty of spirit. It all starts with recognizing that we're spiritually poor. We have nothing to offer God, no reason for him to choose us or love us.

And if we want to get really honest about it, we aren't just empty handed. We don't show up with zero. We're in debt. And God says that's the starting point. Can you see how this idea stands in stark contrast to the attitude of the Pharisees who think they're nailing it? Can you see why their attitude is an affront to God? They're waiting for everyone else to take note and catch up. But Jesus tells his followers that the foundation for life in the kingdom is recognizing your desperate need for God. And if these postures and blessings are in fact cumulative, here's what that might look like. When we realize our spiritual poverty, we will mourn it. And that will produce a meekness in us as we engage the world. And by the way, meekness isn't weakness. It's having the wisdom and discipline to restrain your strength while you seek the good of others.

Meekness gives way to a desire for God to increase our righteousness. Then it becomes easier for us to show mercy to others because we know what it's like to struggle. God continues to purify us as we engage with him. We will become people who don't run from conflict, but people who, like Jesus, enter into the chaos and create peace. We won't be peacekeepers. We'll be peacemakers. The life of a humble, hungry, meek, merciful, pure peacemaker won't be an easy one. Jesus knows that personally. But despite trials, it'll be the most joyful life you can imagine, especially because it doesn't end when the end comes. The best reward is still ahead.

The hard part about this sermon is it's easy to turn it into a checklist, to measure what we have and what we lack. Then suddenly we're back at the start again, needing to be reminded of our spiritual poverty. Depending on how my day or my week went, I'll feel like I'm doing really great or like I'm blowing it entirely. And neither of those places are spiritual poverty because they're still looking to me to be the one getting it right. So we always have to remember square one, spiritual poverty, to remember that on our best days and on our worst days, our only hope is the cross of Christ. It's humbling to remember we bring nothing but debt, but it grants us freedom from the tyranny of the lie of man-made righteousness.

One of the other ways this is all upside down and counterintuitive is because Jesus doesn't say, look, you're never going to be able to earn your own righteousness, so we're going to lower the bar. You can pretty much do whatever you want, and God will be okay with it because he's a god of love. Nope. Instead, he points out that God isn't just after right actions, he's after a right heart. The standard isn't just don't murder anyone. That's a great basic rule for building a functional society, but it doesn't have anything to do with what it looks like to be in the kingdom of God. If you don't murder anyone, but you hate everyone around you, that doesn't sound like freedom. That doesn't echo God and his love to a fallen world. Jesus says God's standard actually goes to the heart. If his disciples weren't feeling their spiritual poverty at the beginning of this sermon, they're definitely getting a wake up call by the end of chapter five. That's when he says, You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. That's what God requires. That's devastating. I can't do it. Neither can you. So what now?