Scriptural Insight 1.pdf

Welcome to this program, scriptural insight. Let us, first of all, recollect ourselves in prayer. Lord, our God, in your wisdom and love, you surround us with the mysteries of the universe. In times long past, you sent us your prophets to teach your laws and to bear witness to your undying love. You...

Welcome to this program, scriptural insight. Let us, first of all, recollect ourselves in prayer. Lord, our God, in your wisdom and love, you surround us with the mysteries of the universe. In times long past, you sent us your prophets to teach your laws and to bear witness to your undying love. You sent us your son to teach us by word and example that the true wisdom comes from you alone. Send your spirit upon us and fill us with your wisdom and blessings. Grant that we may devote ourselves to the study of your word and share it with others. And grant this through Christ our lord. Amen. Matthew has a careful pattern in the gospel. In his story of the baptism of Jesus, he shows us Jesus realizing that the hour had struck, that the call to action come, and that Jesus must go forth on his mission. In his story of the temptations, Matthew shows us Jesus deliberately choosing the method he will use to carry out his task and deliberately rejecting methods which he knew to be against the will of God. And if a person sets his hand to a greater task, he needs his helpers' assistance and his staff. So Matthew goes on to show us Jesus selecting the people who will be his fellow workers. But if helpers and assistants are to do their work intelligently and effectively, they must first have instruction. And now in the Sermon on the Mount, contained in the gospel of Matthew in chapters 5 to 7, which we are going to comment in this program. Matthew shows us Jesus instructing his disciples in the message which was his and which they were to take to others. In Luke's account of the Sermon of the Mount, this becomes even clearer. In Luke, the Sermon on the Mount follows immediately after what we might call the official choosing of the 12. For that reason, one great scholar called the Sermon on the Mount, the ordination address to the 12. Just as as a young priest has his task set out before him when he is called to his first assignment. So the 12 received from Jesus their ordination address before they went out to their task. It is for that reason that other scholars have given other titles to the Sermon on the Mount. It has been called the compendium of Christ, the doctrine, the Magna Carta of the kingdom, or the manifesto of the king. We all agree that in the Sermon on the Mount, we have the essence of the teaching of Jesus to the inner circle of his chosen man. In actual fact, this is even truer than at first sight appears. We speak of the Sermon on the Mount as if it was one single sermon preached on one single occasion, but it is far more than that. There are good and compelling reasons for thinking that the Sermon on the Mount is in fact a kind of epitome of all the sermons that Jesus ever preached. Anyone who heard it in its present form would be exhausted long before the end. There is far too much in it for one hearing. It is one thing to sit and read it and to pause and linger as we read. It would be entirely another thing to listen to it for the first time in spoken words. We can read at our own pace and with a certain familiarity with the words, but to hear it in its present form for the first time would be to be dazzled with excess of light long before it is finished. In other words, the Sermon on the Mount is not one single sermon which Jesus preached on one definite situation. Rather, it is the summary of his consistent teaching to his disciples. It has even been suggested that after Jesus definitely chose the 12, he may have taken them away into a desolate and quiet place for a week, and that during that space, he taught them all the time, and the Sermon on the Mount is the distillation of that teaching. The Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes. If for most people, the Sermon on the Mount is the essence of the Christian faith in life, equally for most people, the beatitudes are the essence of the Sermon on the Mount. It is therefore not too much to say that the beatitudes are the essence of the essence of the Christian way of life. In this case, the findings of the New Testament scholarship have confirmed that which the ordinary person instinctively feels. The detailed study of the Sermon on the Mount confirms the conviction that is indeed the central document of the Christian faith. As we study the Sermon on the Mount, we are going to use the translation of the revised standard version, and we will try to see what the words mean to us. Let us now examine this section of the gospel of Matthew, the essence of Jesus' teaching. We open on the gospel of Matthew chapter 5 verses 12, and we read, seeing the crowds, Jesus went up on the mountain. And when he sat down, his disciples came to him, and he opened his mouth and taught them. Jesus began to teach when he sat down. Often, the Jewish rabbi would talk to his disciples when he was walking along the road with them or when he was strolling in some city square or column date. But when he was teaching, as we might put it, officially, he always sat to do so. This was the Jewish attitude of official teaching. In the synagogue, the preacher sat to deliver the sermon. We still speak of a professor's chair, which was the chair in which he set to deliver his lectures to the students. And when the pope makes an official announcement, he speaks Excathedra, seated in his papal throne. From this introduction, Matthew wants us to see that what follows is no change teaching given in the by going. It is not a pleasant discourse given in the passing, but it is the official teaching of Jesus. It is Jesus telling his disciples the very essence of what he came to say. The phrase, he opened his mouth, is more than an elaborate or poetical way of saying he said. It has certain overtones and implications. First, it is regularly used to introduce any weighty, grave, and important utterance. It is the phrase of the great occasion. The phrase, he opened his mouth, is used for instance of the utterance of an oracle which the hearer will neglect at his apparel. In the New Testament itself, this phrase, he opened his mouth, is used on 2 very significant occasions. It is used of Philip expounding the meaning of scripture to the Ethiopian royal servant. Philip was given the Ethiopian an authoritative exposition of the message of scripture regarding Jesus. It is then used over Peter when after the conversion of the Roman Centurion Cornelius, he expounded the epoch making discovery that the gospel was for the Gentiles also. The phrase he opened his mouth is regularly the preface to some pronouncement of the greatest weight and importance. It is the warning that there is something to follow which must not be lightly taken. Secondly, the expression, he opened his mouth is also used of an utterance of calculated courage. A phrase very close akin to it is used by the Greek orator, Isocrates, in the last speech he ever made. His final witness and testimony to the glory of Athens. On that occasion, he says that he is moved to use the greatest freedom of speech, whatever the consequence may be, and to remove the curb from his tongue. It is used of a speaker who will shrink from saying nothing that ought to be said and who will speak fearless of anything that people may do to him. Moreover, it is used of an utterance in which there are no reservations, in which nothing is kept back, in which the whole truth is told, and the whole heart opened. For example, in Aeschylus Prometheus, for example, when IO ask for information about the future, Prometheus answers, I will tell you plainly all that you are afraid to know, even as it is right to open the lips to friends. The whole atmosphere of the phrase, he opened his mouth, therefore, is the opening of the mind and the heart in such a way that nothing is kept back. By using this phrase of Jesus, Matthew warns us that there is to follow an utterance of the greatest weight and importance, an utterance in which no cautious or prudential motives of safety will keep the speaker from telling the truth, and utterance in which mind and heart are opened, and in which nothing is kept back? Matthew then says that Jesus taught his disciples. In Greek, there are 2 past tenses of the verb. There is the aorist, which describes one completed action in the past, and there is the imperfect thanks, which describes repeated and habitual action in past times. For example, he shut the door behind him would be expressed by the airist tanks, but it was his habit always to shut the doors behind him would be expressed by an imperfect thanks. The thanks in Matthew's introduction here of the Sermon on the Mount is the imperfect stench. Therefore, in what follows, we are to see not simply a statement made by Jesus on one occasion, but the substance of all that he habitually and repeatedly taught his disciples. We are not to see here only one sermon. We are to see the summary of the teaching which Jesus continually and consistently gave his disciples. It is, therefore, nothing more than the actual fact to say that the Sermon on the Mount is the essence of the teaching of Jesus. Therefore, we can say that all Matthew's phrases converge to show how essential to the teaching of Jesus the material that follows is. It therefore means that the study of the Sermon on the Mount and of the Beatitudes in particular is one of the most important studies to which the Christian or the person who wishes to find out the meaning of Christianity can devote himself. Let us now listen to the Beatitudes before we examine them 1 by 1. It is the gospel of Matthew chapter 5 verses 3 to 12. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. For they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad. For your reward is great in heaven. For some men persecuted the prophets who were before you. Before we start the each of the beatitudes in detail, there are 2 general elements we must note. 1st, many of our bibles print the beatitudes as statements, but in each case it prints the r, blessed r, in italic print, which is the conventional sign that there is no corresponding word in the Greek text. In the Greek, there is no verb in any of the beatitudes, which means that the beatitudes are not statements but exclamations. They reproduce in Greek a form of expression which is very common in Hebrew especially in the Psalms. For example, in Psalm number 1. And the Hebrew has an exclamatory word, which means, the bliss of. So the Psalm says, oh, the bliss of the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly. Psalm 32, or the bliss of the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity. Psalm 94, or the bliss of those whom you guide the Lord. This is the form of expression which each of the beatitudes represent. Each of them is an exclamation beginning of the bliss of. That is to say that the Beatitudes are not the promises of future happiness. They are congratulations on the present bliss. They are not statements and the prophecies of what is one day going to happen to the Christian in some other world, but they are affirmation of the bliss into which the Christian can enter even here and now. That is not to say that this bliss will not reach its perfection and its completion when someday the Christian enters into the nearer presence of his Lord. But it is to say that even here and now, the foretaste and the experience of that bliss is meant to to be part of the Christian life. Secondly, what is that bliss? The word which is translated blessed is the word Makarios, which in its older form in Greek is Makar. The characteristic of that word is that properly it describes a bliss which belongs only to the gods. Although the world lost something of its greatness and came to be used in a wider and a looser sense, the fact remains that in Greek, only the gods were truly the blessed ones. In the New Testament itself, God himself is twice described by this word. In the first letter to Timothy, we read of the glorious gospel of the blessed God. And God is called the blessed and the only powerful, the king of kings, and the lord of all. 2 further uses of this word will make its meaning clearer yet. It is used of the blessed isles, the place of perfect happiness to which the blessed go. The place where pain and sorrow and hunger and all distress are gone, and where there is a serenity and a joy which nothing can touch. Again, the Greek author Herodotus uses this word to describe an oasis in the desert. All around, there is a desert with its sand and its thirst and its agony of body and the spirit. Instead, in the oasis, there is a shade and a shelter and peace for the weary traveler. The island of Cyprus was in ancient time called a Makaria, the blessed isle. Because the climate was perfect, the soil so fertile, and the natural resources so complete that he who dwelt in Cyprus never needed to go behind it to find his perfect happiness and all his needs supplied. Here we have our answer. The promised bliss is nothing less than the blessedness of God. Through Jesus Christ, the Christian comes to share in the very life of God. The bliss of the beatitude is another expression of what John calls eternal life. Eternal life is. In Greek, there is only one person in the universe to whom the word may properly be applied, and that person is God. Eternal life is nothing less than the life of God, and it is a share in that life that Jesus Christ offers to us. If that is so, it means that the Christian bliss is independent of outward circumstances. Like the island of Cyprus, it has within itself all it needs to perfect happiness. It is independent of all the changes and changes of life. That indeed is why happiness is not a good name for it. Happiness has in in it the root hap, which means chance, and happiness is something which is dependent on the chances and alterations of this life, but the Christian bliss is the bliss of the life of God and is therefore the joy that no person can take from us. If this Christian bliss is the bliss of the blessedness of God, we will not be surprised to find that it is completely reverses the world standards or the bliss of the poor or the bliss of the sorrowful or the bliss of the hungry and thirsty or the bliss of the persecuted. These are startling contradiction of the world standards. These are sayings which no one could hear for the first time without a shock of amazement. Diceman said of the Beatitudes, they are not quiet stars, but flashes of lightnings followed by a thunder of surprise and amazement. But when we look at the Beatitudes carefully, we see that they are very closely interwoven into a threefold bliss. There is the bliss which comes when a person recognizes his deepest need and discovers where that need can be supplied. There can be 3 periods in any life. There can be the period when a person lives placidly and in a kind of drab mediocrity because he knows nothing better. There can be a period of restless dissatisfaction or even of mental agony when something makes him realize that there is an unidentified something missing in his life. And there can be the period into which there enters a new joy and a new depth into life because the individual has found where his newly discovered need can be supplied. So there is the bliss for the person who discovers his own poverty. For the one who becomes sorrowfully aware of his own sin, and for the one who hungers and thirst for a righteousness which he knows is not in him. There is the bliss of living the Christian life. There is the bliss which comes in living in mercy, in meekness, in purity of heart, and in making peace. These were the qualities of Jesus Christ himself, and he who follows in the step of Jesus Christ knows the joy of the Christian life. There is the bliss of suffering for Christ Jesus. Long ago, Plato said that the good man will always choose to suffer wrong rather than to do wrong. Here is the place of loyalty, and there is the deepest of all satisfactions in loyalty even when loyalty cost all that a person has to give, on the face of it, it might look as if the beatitude looked for bliss all in the wrong places. But when we think again, we can see that the way of the beatitudes is the only way to bliss. Let us now look closely at the content of this first beatitude. It is the gospel of Matthew chapter 5 verse 3. Blessed are the poor in the spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Jesus could hardly have produced a more startling beginning to his beatitudes. And Luke has it even more uncompromisingly. Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. There are very few people who would agree that poverty is a blessing and that there is any bliss to be found in destitution. Because poverty is a great enemy to human happiness. It certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult. Most people would speak of the curse of poverty rather than of the blessing of poverty. The more closely we examine this saying, the more startling it becomes. The word which is used in the Greek for poor is, which is the adjective to describe not one who is simply poor, but the one who is completely destitute. The Greeks connected apthokos with the word, which means to crouch or to cower, and which Omer uses to describe the cringing of a suppliant beggar. When the wretched Oedipus had lost his kingdom and everything with it, Sophocles describes him as reduced to misery, a man in exile and a beggar, and uses the word. Herodotus uses the word to describe a man who was well born and who had once been rich, and who is reduced to begging scraps of food from the soldiers to keep a body and soul together. In the code of Justinian, the corresponding noun, means poor relief. For the man who is, poor, there is nothing left in this world but the poorhouse. But Greek has two words for poor. The second is the word, which describes the man who has nothing superfluous, the man who has to work for his living, the person who has to satisfy his needs with the work of his hands. Such a person is out of diakonos, under the necessity of serving himself. Socrates frequently described himself as a panace because he had given so much time to the gods that he had no time to build up a lucrative career for himself. But Socrates was in no danger of imminent starvation, however frugal his life might be. But the word, the other word for poor, describes not the man who has nothing superfluous, but the man who has nothing at all. In the Plutus of Aristophanes, Peneia, poverty, is one of the characters, and the she herself draws a distinction between the person who is panace and the man who is subtokos, between the 2 between the one who is poor and frugal and the one who is destitute and the beggar. He says, but the life I allotted to my people is not, nor shall be so full of distresses. This a beggar alone who has not of his own, not even a penny possesses. My poor man, Penez, this true has to scrape and to save, but his work, he must never be slacking. There'll be no superfluity found in his cart, but then there will be nothing lacking. In the eyes of the Greek, there was something wretched and pitiable and even shameful in this world, theptokos. In his legislation for the ideal state, Plato banishes theptokos from the community. Plato says in his laws, there shall be no beggar,ptokos, in our state. And if anyone attempts to beg, he shall be driven across the border by the country stewards, to the end that the land may be wholly purged by such a creature. In the gospel themselves, the word of ptochos describes the wretched Lazarus, who was daily dumped to beg at the gate of the rich man. Ptochos is the widow whose total possessions amounted to 2 little coins. The vagrants who were to be brought in from the highways and the hedges to be the unexpected guest at the banquet of the King are theptokos. It is by the wordptokos that James describes the poor man who is contemptuously pushed aside to give the rich man the place of prominence and honor. In other words, the word, the ptochus, was always used in bad sense until it was ennobled by the gospel. It would be difficult to find a word which to pagan ears had more of humiliation in it than the word of ptochos. But this is only one side of the picture. Jesus did not speak in Greek. He spoke in Aramaic, and his thought and language had their source and origin in the Old Testament. Ptokos represent the Old Testament word Ani, which is generally translated poor, but which had acquired a special and distinctive meaning in the devotional literature of the Old Testament. The word Ani underwent a 4 stage of development of meaning in Hebrew. Originally, it meant poor in the literal sense of the term. A poor man is a man who has no power, no prestige, no influence to defend himself against the insult and the souls of the world. Such a man will be downtrodden and oppressed and pushed to the wall in the competitive society of this world. But such a man, in spite of everything, may retain his integrity and his devotion, and may be convinced that it's better to be humiliated with God than it is to be prosperous with the world. Hence, the word Annie came finally to describe the poor, the humble, the faithful man who has no help on earth, and who imperfect trust has wholly committed himself to God. In these sense, the word Annie becomes characteristic of the psalm. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of his troubles. So when we bring together the Greek and the Hebrew background of this word, the poor, We see that it describes the person who has fully realized his own inadequacy, his own worthlessness, and his own destitution, and has put his all trust in God. It describes the one who has realized that by himself, life is impossible and that with God, all the things are possible. The one who has become so dependent on God that he has become independent of everything else in the universe. This beatitude has in it a whole attitude to life. It has in it the following basic truth about life. First, it means that the way to power lies through the realization of helplessness. That the way to victory lies through the admission of defeat. That the way to goodness lies through the confession and the acknowledgment of sin. Here, there is an essential truth which runs through all life. If a person is ill, the first necessity is that he should admit and recognize that he is ill, and that when he should seek for a cure in the right place. The way to knowledge begins with the admission of ignorance. The one who can never learn is the one who thinks that he knows everything already. This beatitude affirms the basic fact that the first necessity toward the attainment of fullness of life is a sense of need. The essential characteristics of material things is their insecurity. This beatitude lays it down that the man who has put his trust in that which his own skill or ingenuity can acquire has put his trust in the wrong place, and that before life ends, he will make the tragic discovery that he has done so. The third things which this Beatitude teaches is that the way to independence lies through dependence, and the way to freedom lies through surrender. If ever a person is to be independent of the chances and changes of life, that independence must come from his complete dependence on God. If ever a person is to know freedom, that freedom must come through complete surrender to God. This beatitude lays down that the way to the bliss which the world can neither give nor take away lies through the recognition of our own need and the conviction that that need can be met when we commit to God in perfect trust. Each of the Beatitudes contains not only an affirmation but also a promise. Blessed are the poor in spirit, says this beatitude, and then goes on to promise, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. What then is the meaning of this promise which is made to the pouring spirit? What is a kingdom of heaven? We must first note that the two phrases, the kingdom of heaven and kingdom of God, mean exactly the same thing. The reason for the difference in practice lies in this, such was the reference of a strict and Orthodox Jew that he would never, if he could avoid it, take the name of God upon his lips. He always, if possible, used some preferences to avoid actually uttering the name of God. It is very natural that by far the commonest preferences for God is in fact heaven. Matthew is the most Jewish of the gospel writer. Mark was not so strictly Jewish, and Luke was a gentile who was not bound at all by the Jewish conventions and customs. So it comes about that Matthew with his strong orthodox Jewish background prefers to speak of the kingdom of heaven, while Mark and Luke being less affected by Jewish tradition have no hesitation in speaking of the kingdom of God. If we wish to define the kingdom of God, we may best find the basis of our definition in the Lord's prayer. The outstanding characteristics of Jewish literary style is parallelism. The Jews tended to say everything twice. And the second form of expression is a repetition and amplification or an explanation of the first. Almost any verse of the Psalms will demonstrate this characteristic of parallelism. Almost all the verses of the Psalm have a division in the middle, and the second half of the verse repeats or amplifies the first half. Let us take the example of Psalm 46. God is our refuge and our strength. A very present help in trouble. The same thing is repeated twice. And the second part of the sentence specifies what the object of the concern is. In the Lord's Prayer, two phrases occur side by side. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Let us then apply the principle of parallelism to these two phrases. And let us assume that the second explains and interprets the first. We then arrive at the definition. The kingdom of God is a situation upon Earth in which God's will is as perfectly done as it is in heaven. Quite clearly, this personalizes the kingdom of God for such a society cannot bring to exist until each individual man and woman perfectly accepts the will of God. That is to say, whenever anyone fully accepts the will of God, that person is within the kingdom of God. No one can be a citizen of any country unless he is willing to accept the laws of that country. Citizenship and obedience to a country's law go hand in hand. Exactly in the same way, no one can be a citizen of the kingdom of God until he fully accepts the laws of God. To be a citizen of the kingdom of God, to be in the kingdom of God, to possess the kingdom of God, is to accept the will of God. If that be so, this beatitude is saying, all the bliss of the person who has realized this own utter helplessness and this own utter inadequacy. And who has put his whole trust in God. For then, he will humbly accept the will of God, and in so doing, he will become a citizen of the kingdom of God. And that is precisely the origin of the bliss for in doing his will is our peace. And let us pray. We thank you and bless you, Lord, our God. In times past, you spoke in many varied ways through the prophets. But in this, the final age, you have spoken through your son to reveal to all nations the riches of your grace. May we who have pondered the scriptures be filled with the knowledge of your will in all wisdom and the spiritual understanding. And may we bear fruit in every good work. And this we ask of you through Christ our Lord.