Sermon On The Mount

Blessed

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 02- 25

Genre:

Track: 02

Dictation Name: Sermon on the Mount - 02

Location/Venue:

Year: 1980

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee that Thou art on the throne and it is Thy will, Thy word, Thy law that shall prevail. Give us grace therefore to move in terms of Thy government knowing that the government is upon Christ’s shoulders who moves even now in judgment upon this godless world. Make us therefore like houses built upon a rock, the rock of Jesus Christ so that when the storms of judgment overwhelm our world we may stand in the time of storm. Grant us this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

We have gone through the Sermon on the Mount section by section and now we have started going back over it in terms of the meaning of some key words which throw additional light on the scriptures. Last week we dealt with the meaning of the Greek word which is translated as two words, little faith. This time we shall deal with the word blessed. Let us turn now to the Beatitudes. Matthew 5:1-12 where we find this word blessed repeatedly. Our subject thus is Blessed.

“And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:

2 And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,

3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”

The word here translated as blessed is a Greek word ‘makarios’. It reflects rather than the meaning of the Greek word, the Old Testament word ‘barak’, b-a-r-a-k, and another word ‘esher’, translated into English. The Old Testament meaning is carried into the New so that it is the Old Testament rather than the Greek meaning which we here are to understand. Now in Psalm 37 we have a verse which is carried over into the new, into the Beatitudes, blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. In Psalm 37:11 and 22 we read:

“But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.”

And,

“For such as be blessed of him shall inherit the earth; and they that becursed of him shall be cut off.”

Now this Old Testament word which is here translated as blessed ‘barak’ means to kneel, to submit oneself to, to surrender. It means to render our lives, our service, our substance to God so that when the Psalmist declares in Psalm 103:

“Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name.”

What the Psalmist is saying I must with all my heart, mind and being yield myself and the totality of my life to God and be governed by Him. Now when God blesses man God kneels as it were, he bows down, he bends to help us, to give us His grace. Just as when we pick up a baby that is crawling we have to bend down to pick him up so God’s blessing to us, His grace, is to bow down and to pick us up as we pick up a child. We again meet with the word blessed in the other common Old Testament word ‘esher’ in Psalm 1. The entire psalm is given over to an exposition of blessedness.

The first two verses read:

“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

2 But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.”

Here the word has the force of happy, prosperous, successful. The way of faithful obedience, the Psalmist is saying, is the way of blessedness or happiness, of prosperity and success. Now this meaning is also in the New Testament. The Greek ‘makarios’ which you have by the way in Greek to the present as a very popular name refers to material prosperity. This is also a part of the Old Testament meaning, we are told that the meek shall inherit the earth in the Psalms. In Deuteronomy 28 the first fourteen verses we have a series of pronouncements concerning the way of the blessed and what happens to them, they are blessed in the fruit of their body, in the fruit of their fields and their going out and their coming in, they are blessed in all their ways. But the Greek word has a serious problem. It is totally antinomian. The Greek word makarios was applied to the Greek gods, why were they blessed? They were blessed because they were above the problems of this world and above law, above morality. When you read the myths of the Greek gods you find that they commit adultery, they lie, they defraud, they do one thing after another with freedom. In terms of the Greek faith that is what it meant to be a god. The Greek gods, by the way, were simply deified men, Zeus or Jupiter, a number of cities boasted of the fact that he had once lived in their midst and one city boasted of being his birthplace and another of having his grave. He was a deified spirit and the fact that made him a god was that he was successfully above and beyond the law, at least in terms of the Greek faith.

On top of this the Greek view of life contrary to what we are told in history books today regarded life as misery. The gods were blessed and the dead. Now the Greek view of the dead, of the spirits was a very low one, for them the spirits of the dead were called shades, they were just barely alive. When Homer shows his hero, Ulysses, trying to get information from the dead what he has to do is to kill an animal and the ghosts come around and drink the blood of that animal which he pours into basins to get enough energy to be able to talk to him briefly and then they flicker out and they are just shades. Now that’s not a very appealing form of life and yet the Greeks called the gods and the dead blessed, makarios, because they regarded life as so miserable. The Greeks had another word by the way for blessed which the Bible never uses because it was [unknown] ,under demons, that is, under demonic spirits which made you lucky because they did not regard the demons as necessarily bad. The bible uses makarios but it ties it to the old testament meaning as set forth in Deuteronomy 28 and Psalm 1 to mean ‘he who having the grace of God walks in faithful obedience to God and His law’. Instead of being an antinomian, an anti-moral doctrine, it was thoroughly scriptural. Thus when the Bible says blessed are the poor in spirit, they that mourn, the meek, they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, they that which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, it has reference those who are faithful to the Lord.

The world may persecute them for that but God will bless them for it. God will reward them for their faithfulness to Him. The world may regard these things as undesirable but in the sight of God they are the desirable things. It is interesting too that in Greek thought the blessed are the gods or the dead but in our Lord’s usage here it is those who are the living and the faithful to His word, and so it is that when scripture speaks of the blessed it says they receive a reward. They obey and they are rewarded. They are those who kneel before God, who surrender their all to Him. They are those who are not self-sufficient, who do not pass themselves off in terms of Genesis 3:5 as their own gods deciding for themselves what constitutes good and evil. They feel their spiritual need and in terms of it they turn to the Lord and His word. Biblical happiness, biblical blessedness, is found thus in the negation of the world’s ideas thereof. To mourn, to be poor in spirit, these are not the world’s ideas of happiness but this is not mourning in the world’s sense but before God, in terms of Him. Knowing that we have sinned against Him and looking to Him for forgiveness. The meekness here is not a constitutional weakness, meekness but gracious. We are not meek because we are mild and mousy before men but because we are humble before God and therefore strong before men. Now there is another important fact about the beatitudes. When our Lord says gain and again blessed are they, the meek, the poor in spirit and so on, blessed are, not shall be.

It is a very serious error that some preachers fall into of postponing this blessedness to heaven. Now true, in verse twelve we are told for great is your reward in heaven but our Lord also says the meek shall inherit the earth and that they are blessed now, happy, prosperous, joyful. Therefore blessedness is something here and now, a present fact. We do not live a miserable life in anticipation of heaven, we live a life in Christ now that is blessed and the future life is glory. Moreover when He says blessed are He is not expressing an opinion or a hope or a prayer it is a decree, a decree from the throne of the universe. All these whom I so name, so describe, are blessed. The king of the universe, Jesus Christ is speaking. Why have we lost this meaning of the word blessed and why have we spiritualized it away? Its meaning is both material and spiritual, partly because of sin and partly because of the Hellenic influence, the influence of Greek philosophy which permeated the church very early. The Greek philosophers held that blessedness was knowledge and sin was ignorance and only an elite few could be blessed, only they could be the makarios because only they had the capacity to comprehend philosophy. Their view was antinomian, Socrates saw himself as one of these blessed few but he could talk about virtue as I have pointed out before while engaged in homosexuality. This antinomian view crept in to the church. A few centuries ago it was powerfully indicted in the Jesuit order by Catholic think of great ability, Hascale [sp??]. Hascale in his provincial letters cited case after case of this antinomianism.

The Jesuits developed a thoroughly lawless doctrine, they held to mental reservations and to equivocation so that you could tell a lie and perjure yourself while giving sworn testimony by having mental reservations and mentally saying I mean thus and so. They also disposed of a great deal of the bible as cultural, not legal. So that while, Paul said this in terms of certain things that applied to his day so it’s not binding upon us, so these requirements upon women apply to conditions in the Roman Empire and these requirements on men applied to certain relationships with pagans around them and they no longer are valid for us. It is interesting that the Jesuits used the term dispensations, they see us now as in another dispensation and we are living under grace and therefore we are not bound by the law, said these Jesuits. Indeed they said, they actually said it is no longer necessary to love God. Once we are saved by the blood of Jesus Christ we are free from the law so when our Lord said if you love me, keep my commandments, we no longer have to keep his commandments and we no longer have to keep the first part of that sentence, to love God. So what did the cross accomplish? It freed us from the death penalty and it freed us from the necessity of obeying God and from serving Him. If this sounds farfetched well let us remember that it is not in terms of what is openly taught today. We have alittle book that we put out, a little paper back by Aaron [unknown], The Lordship of Christ, in which he documents how this is today being taught by some very, very prominent so called evangelical pastors such as Bob Thieme of Houston, Texas.

The scripture however is clear: we have to read the word blessed in the beatitudes in terms of Deuteronomy 28 and Psalm 1. It means that blessed are those who believing in God serve Him with all their heart, mind and being. They love God and they love their neighbor and love is the fulfilling of the law. They are blessed and they bless God because they kneel and that is the root meaning of kneel. When a knight knelt before a lord or before a king what that kneeling meant was that he gave himself to the service of his liege lord. That he was his lord’s man from there on, that he would serve him and would go with him wherever need be to fight in the wars of his lord. So to bless God and to be the blessed of God means that we have yielded our all to Him. We have surrendered ourselves to Him so that we are under His orders and at the same time He pronounces His blessing upon us. He kneels down to pick us up and care for us so that we may boldly say the Lord is my helper I shall not fear what man may do unto me. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we thank Thee that in Jesus Christ Thou hast blessed us. Thou hast stooped down to earth and picked us up and by the adoption of grace made us Thine own. Give us grace therefore to take hands of our lives and our problems and to cast our every care upon Thee who carest for us. Give us grace to bless Thee day by day, yielding ourselves and all that we are and have into Thy gracious and omnipotent hands. Our God we praise Thee, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

[Question] Where Christ speaks of in verse ten ‘blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness’ sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ are we to understand that, that our faith can in some way be equated with persecution, that is to say that if we‘re not suffering a measure of persecution from the world as a result of being Christians, can we equate that with a lack of faith or a lack of proper obedience to God’s way?

[Rushdoony] Not necessarily. If we are living amongst people who are godly they are not going to persecute us, also if we are conducting our work under godly standards even the ungodly are going to appreciate that. It does mean, however, that at times we are going to be persecuted when our righteousness, our justice, goes contrary to what the world requires. I heard of one man, I didn’t recall his name by the time I’d left the community, I was just introduced to him, and I was told that he had been a highly respected member of a company and they very much appreciated the integrity of his dealings, he built up no end of good will for the company. But when he insisted upon being honest in something that the company wanted to sweep under the carpet they were very angry with him and refused to promote him and transferred him.

And he was persecuted for righteousness’ sake, up until a point they liked it because it brought good will to them but when it worked against them they did not. Now these men in North Dakota and the airforce men in Louisiana are being persecuted for righteousness’ sake, so that when our righteousness runs contrary to the desires of the world we will be persecuted. But sometimes they find it an advantage. Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Romans 8:7.

“Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.”

Now do you have marginal notes in your bible? As you’ll see, it gives for the very literal reading of the carnal mind, for the minding of the flesh is enmity against God for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. What Paul is saying is a minding of the flesh and he uses flesh here in terms of our fallen human nature. If we instead of moving in faithfulness to God want to indulge the old man in us, the old Adam in us, what we have to realize it is not just a relaxation in our obedience, its enmity against God. Because the old man in us, the old Adam wants his way, not God’s way. For fallen man is not subject to the law of God neither indeed can be. Since we’re not perfectly sanctified in this life we are in a sense both the new man, Jesus Christ in us, and the old man Adam. Now the stronger, the growing force in us is the new man, the old man has been judicially condemned by the cross of Jesus Christ, he is legally dead and as we grow in faith we grow in our faithfulness, the two go hand in hand, faith means faithfulness.

But if we mind the things of the flesh, of our old human nature, we are doing more than saying well, I’m being so faithful to God’s word I’m entitled to relax now and then.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes. But God also says through His word that the law is in all of us because we are created in His image, in knowledge, righteousness, holiness and dominion. The righteousness and holiness aspect make clear the law is basic to our being. But in our heart we reject the law, with our regeneration that law is written into our hearts, into our will, into our way of life.

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The law is not sin, the law is the righteousness of God and that law, the righteousness of God makes me to know at all times that I am a sinner. So all men feel guilt, even the ungodly recognize this as Freud built his entire perspective on the fact that all men without exception have a sense of guilt. Now, he wanted to answer that problem of guilt without God and to say we can eliminate religion totally if we convert guilt into a scientific problem because he said, no proof against God will ever hold water as long as man feels guilty and he believes that the answer to that sense of guilt is God. And he said all men feel that way but we’re going to persuade them that it is really a scientific problem, that guilt is a relic of primordial man, of his ape like ancestors.

[Question Unintelligible] Back to the concept of the saints being persecuted, how would the regenerate man properly conduct himself in the company of the non-regenerate in terms of his calling in every area of life that he may be occupying where it is necessary for him to come into contact with the non-regenerate. Should he of a general course expect persecution because of the way which he is going to conduct his life or should he not necessarily expect persecution because of say God’s common grace that He has issued to all men?

[Rushdoony] When the Christian obeys God he should expect blessings. That is where the emphasis is, even here. Now sometimes because of the very fact that he is the blessed he pays the price but the basic experience is one of blessing, not persecution. Any other questions?

Well if not let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Lord and our God we thank Thee for the joy of salvation and the blessing of Thy word. Make us strong in Thy word and by Thy spirit that through Jesus Christ we may be more than conquerors. In His name we pray, Amen.