How to Know the Blessing of God - Part Four
Hunger and Thirst After Righteousness (Matthew 5: 6)
I suspect if we took a survey of the population in general and asked them what the most well-known passage of scripture in the Bible is, they would probably say the 10 commandments I also suspect that number two in that list might ne what is often referred to as the Sermon on the Mount.
As the philosopher Immanuel Kant once said ,there are only three great questions. What can I know, what should I do, and what may I hope. Or as someone once put it another way. There are only three things you need to know.
What truth to believe in, and that is in the creeds.
What choices to make, and that is summarised in the commandments.
What to desire, and that summarises in the Sermon on the Mount.
I also suspect that most people know more about the 10 Commandments than they do the Sermon on the Mount, I still think if I asked people to name some of the commandments they could probably come up with 2 or 3 at the most. (Most people struggle to get beyond murder and steal). But ask people to tell you something about the sermon on the mount, most people have no idea what it teaches.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus constantly repeats in the introduction, the phrase, blessed is, blessed is, blessed is. Obviously, he’s trying to tell us something right at the beginning. Being that there appear to be some people who are particularly blessed by God. Well, if that’s the case, I immediately have two questions. Number one is, what do I have to do to get in on that? And secondly, what will this blessing look like?
Well, we’ve been going through the sermon on the Mount for a few days now, and last time we summarized the first three of these blessing “Jesus says there the ones who will be blessed, but how will they be blessed, he Beatitudes”, as they are often, and today I’d like for us to pick up at blessing numbers four. They’re eight blessing altogether, so over the next few days we will take time to look at all eight. I would personally say that the next two get to the heart of where the Bible is trying to get us to do. These next two blessing are two of the most important concepts in all of Scripture. So, with that in mind, would you turn with me first to Matthew, Chapter 5, verse 6.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
(Matthew 5: 6)
Let’s begin with thinking about what it means to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Isn’t that just contrary to everything we think? We think happiness is about being satisfied. When are needs are met and we are no longer hungry or thirsty isn’t that when we would normally feel most blessed. But Jesus comes along and says in essence, blessed are the hungry and thirsty the exact opposite of everything we think. Jesus says blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, but frankly that’s still a little opposite of what most people think. We don’t think of the righteous people as being the happiest people on the earth. We think of them as being the stuffed shirts. We think often think of righteous people as the people who tend to be rigid, self-righteous, and judgmental. Mark Twain once said. “Having spent considerable time with supposedly “good” people, I understand why Jesus liked to be with tax collectors and sinners. Sounds to me like Jesus is using the word righteous in a different way than we normally think of it. So, we need to probe this statement a bit further.
What I’d like to do is begin with this word righteous. What does Jesus mean when he says blessed are those who hunger and thirst after it. What is he talking about? Let me suggest. But there are three kinds of righteousness. In order to fully appreciate what Jesus is saying, we need to understand that there are three different kinds of righteousness.
There is a commentator who’s known for especially digging into the historical background of the scriptures and particularly the Greek words in the Scriptures, his name is William Barclay, and in this passage, along with other commentators he makes the interesting observation that there is something he calls instinctive righteousness that he says is a kind of desire that all people have, whether or not they are believers. The Bible tells us that men and woman are sinners. But we all know that deep inside because even in our sin we are haunted by our instinctive righteousness, and to use William Barclay’s words “Even in the mud, we can never wholly forget to look to the stars”. I think he’s made a valid point, that there is some sense in which everybody has a desire to be right living even if they often trade that righteousness for the temporary worldly pleasures. HG Wells said a man may be a bad musician yet be passionately in love with music. Robert Louis Stevenson spoke of those who had sunk to the lowest depths still keep clutching to the remnants of any virtue left within. There is a sense in which all people have some sense of what is right and wrong and even in the depths of sin they can still be a desire for what is right. Well, that’s the first kind of righteousness an instinctive kind of righteousness. But from a biblical point of view that is not the type of righteousness that Jesus is talking about. Because, from a biblical point of view, the standard is not set by our past performance. The standard is Gods, and we measure are righteousness against him. There are none righteous, Paul says in Romans. No, not one. We have all sinned and fallen short of the standard of God’s glory. So, there is an instinctive righteousness but it not an intrinsic righteousness.
There’s a second kind of righteousness. We’re bankrupt, when it comes to our own righteousness, we have none. But God can provide us with righteousness and that is what is called imputed righteousness. Imputed righteousness goes like this. Paul tells us in second Corinthians.
He who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
(II Corinthians 5: 21)
The great illustration in the Bible of that kind of righteousness is Abraham. In Genesis chapter 15, where it tells us that.
Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness.
(Genesis 15: 6)
There is a righteousness credited to individual people by God in exchange for their faith. We’ve talked about two kinds of righteousness so far. Instinctive righteousness that everybody has a tendency to be aware of and then there was an imputed righteousness which comes by faith in Jesus Christ.
There is a third kind of righteousness and it’s the righteousness Jesus Christ is talking about in the sermon on the Mount. You’ll recall that as we began the exposition of the Sermon on the Mount by quoting Jesus’s summary statement of this teaching on being blessed by saying,
Unless your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees in no way will you be able to enter into the Kingdom of God.
(Matthew 5: 20)
I also said that I believed the whole sermon is about righteousness. The Pharisees had an external righteousness, they did religious things and thought they were righteous. Jesus is coming along and saying no, no, that’s not what it’s all about. There’s an internal righteousness an internal practical righteousness, and that’s the kind of righteousness he’s talking about here. If you recall the first characteristic he mentions as a prerequisite to being blessed was, I’ll quote Him. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the idea being that you have no resources of your own, and you come in dependence upon God. That’s the kind of righteousness Jesus is talking about in the sermon on the Mount. It’s this internal, not external righteousness. It’s the righteousness of being poor in spirit.
In the next verse he said blessed are those who mourn. Those who mourn over their own sin, and the sin and suffering of others. That’s again the kind of righteousness Jesus is talking about. It’s not an external righteousness of ritual and religion. It’s an internal righteousness of dependence upon God. It’s an internal righteousness of mourning our own sinful state.
Then he said, bless it or the meek. That’s also an internal attitude of humility, it’s a graciousness gentleness, it not about being weak it’s about being meek. So, my point is that in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is talking about an internal practical kind of righteousness. So, when he says here, blessing are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, it is clear that he's talking about this internal type of righteousness, which is what the whole sermon is about, and as we go through it, that will become clearer and clearer.
In chapter six, he will say seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness. I think that’s critical because there’s a sense in which we all try to be self-justifying creatures, we all like to justify ourselves and tell ourselves we are righteous. Feeling righteous in our own eyes it’s part of the human condition. But Jesus makes clear that he’s not talking about what you think, or I think is righteousness, he’s talking about what God says is righteousness. So, he’s talking about a hungering and thirsting after internal practical righteousness.
I think it’s fascinating that the book of Romans, which subject, by the way is righteousness, talks about these different kinds of biblical righteousness. It talks about justification by faith. In the first few chapters of that book, it tells us that when we trust Christ, we are declared righteous, and then when he gets to chapter six he talks about being obedient to righteousness. So, if you were just to read Romans alone it becomes apparent that there is a righteousness that comes through faith. But there is also a righteousness that comes through obedience after that salvation event has occurred in the heart of an individual. That’s this internal practical righteousness that Jesus Christ is talking about here in the Sermon on the Mount. It has been suggested by one commentator I read that the way this verse is written in the original text, it’s talking about this third type of righteousness being a complete righteousness. So, it’s the whole thing, it’s about wanting to have it all, and thirsting after both. It’s not wanting a slice of the bread; it’s wanting the whole loaf. It’s not wanting a sip of water; it’s wanting the whole jug. It’s this hunger to have all the righteousness God desires for us to have.
But that leads me to the fact that Jesus says, blessed are the ones who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Obviously hunger and thirst are being used to describe a deep intense. A beep desire for her this internal godliness called righteousness. I do not think that most people certainly in the western world have the least concept of what it is to be really hungry. I accept that that is not the case in other parts of the world. I’m told that in the ancient world, in Jesus Day, people knew what it was to be hungry. Most people in 1st century Palestine had to eke out a living meal to meal. They probably only ate meat once a week and most of them knew what it was to have what they called a growling belly. They knew what it was to be hungry. They also knew what it was to be thirsty. There were no taps in their homes in fact there was no ready access at water. If you were on a journey or away from home, you would have almost always have been thirsty. If the wind kicked up as it often made matters worse as the sand got in your throat and you felt like you were suffocating. That’s the kind of hunger, and that’s the kind of thirst that Jesus Christ is talking about. He’s not describing some mild hunger pains that a snack will quench, or the thirst that a can of coke will satisfy. He’s describing the hunger of a man who’s actually starving for food and dying of thirst.
I remember a few years ago reading a story about an earthquake in Turkey where many people were buried under rubble, and they were digging them out with their hands. They thought they’d gotten just about everybody when they discovered a small girl. She’d been buried under the rubble for five days and when they dug her out, barely alive. She talked about praying and how the whole last couple of days she had experiences hallucinations and the intense desire for something to drink.
Picture yourself in that condition and maybe, you’ve got something of the idea of what Jesus is talking about here. Not, I’m thirsty, not I’m really thirsty, no, I’m dying because I can’t get a drink. It’s that deep, intense desire that Jesus transfers into righteousness. The ones who are blessed are those who have that deep. Intense. hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God, and they want it to be part and parcel of their everyday life.
Let me just add. I think this is a process. If you stop and think about it, the very metaphor that he used uses indicates a process. Did you ever eat such a big meal that you decided you weren’t going to eat for a few days Like our Christmas dinner in the UK when maybe you stuffed yourself with food and said I’m not going to eat food again for the rest of the holidays. Until about six hours later and all of a sudden, you’re nibbling at the Turkey again.
So, this is not describing some isolated experience you have, and then it’s over. It’s a process in which we hunger, and we thirst after righteousness continually and just when we think we are filled, we desire it again. So maybe we should add the word continuum for this concept. It’s intense and it’s continuous. Continuous internal hunger for the righteousness of God.
Jesus says there the ones who will be blessed, but how will they be blessed,
Before answering that I need to revisit something I’ve already mentioned when we looked at the first three beatitudes
Let me remind you the first three blessing where all in the future tense. They shall be, they shall be, they were prefigured with that phrase and when he gets to the end, he uses this to say the greatest rewards awaits us in heaven. That the ultimate blessing of God in this passage. Is when we stand before him, and we are rewarded by him, because we’ve been faithful to him.
Now, that is not to say that we won’t experience some blessing now but whatever we may experience now is only a partial fulfilment of what we experience later when we stand before him and he says, well done, my good and faithful servant.
So, before I go on, let me pause and ask you a question. Do you have any hunger for righteousness? I suspect that if you know Jesus Christ and you’re in tune with him at all, you have some desire to be like him.
Have some of his righteousness and that is good. So, I’m asking another question. How strong is the desire? Maybe like me, you’re working on that. I think. Most Christians have some desire, but I think the problem is the desire for the righteousness of God is in competition with our other desires.
You know, so you sit in church and listen to a message like this or some stirring music, and you walk out saying, yes, I’m going to try and live up to the message you have just heard.
That’s certainly my desire but there are other desires in there. When you get out in the real world, they just overwhelm you.
But the promise of this verse is that we will be satisfied.
I familiar with that way of thinking it happens in other spheres of my life. Like when I decide to lose a few pounds and I really have a sincere desire to do that until I walk past a fish and chip shop and the desire for fish and chips overwhelms the desire to lose a few pounds. But the promise here is we won’t suffer that way, we will be filled.
Filled with the Holy Spirit who will open off my heart towards the heart of God and that what we will get. Because,
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Alright, that’s the 4th beatitudes in the list of eight.
We will look at the fifth next time.