Blessed are the Pure in Heartby Brett Hickey, sermon #8261 of 5
Blessed are the Pure in Heart
Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount by referring to a class of people as “blessed”. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia says this word means happy or favored. Then Jesus mentions a character quality (or in one case a twin character quality – poor in spirit, mourn, meek, hunger/thirst, merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, persecuted) followed by a way in which the individual should recognize that he is favored: “For theirs is the kingdom of heaven (twice: after the first and last beatitude)…. For they shall be comforted…. For they shall inherit the earth…. For they shall be filled…. For they shall obtain mercy…. For they shall be called sons of God…. (And this week’s beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, For they shall see God.”)
What do you want to see? I am not in the least bit interested in seeing Sasquatch, Abominable Snowman, Big Foot, Yeti, or whatever else you want to call it. The prospect of seeing life from other planets does not excite me either. Neither do I share the yearning of these storm chasers to see the inner workings of a tornado. I would like to see the Cowboys win another Super Bowl, the Rangers win the World Series and the Longhorns another National Championship. I would like to see Alaska and the Holy Land.
I would love to see Abraham and Moses, Joseph and Jonah, Elijah and David. Wouldn’t it be great to see the angels in heaven? I don’t care to see Jesus’ form in a cloud, rose petals, on a candle bottle, oil-soaked cotton or in a cinnamon roll. All of that talk cheapens Jesus’ guarantee, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” How badly do you want to see God?
The Scriptures repeatedly emphasize what an exclusive blessing it is to see God. After wrestling with the Angel of the Lord (Hosea 12:4), Jacob says in Genesis 32:30, “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." Then, Jacob clarifies in Genesis 33:10, "…I have seen your face AS THOUGH though I had seen the face of God, and you were pleased with me.
The Lord told Moses inExodus 33:20-23, "’You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.’ Andthe LORD said, ‘Here is a place by Me, and you shall stand on the rock. So it shall be, while My glory passes by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and will cover you with My hand while I pass by. Then I will take away My hand, and you shall see My back; but My face shall not be seen."
The apostle John highlights this truth in the New Testament. John 1:18, “No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.” John 5:37, “And the Father Himself, who sent Me, has testified of Me. You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His form.”John 6:46 “Not that anyone has seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father.” I John 4:20, “If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” The seventh beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, For they shall see God,” after our song…
“Blessed are the pure in heart, For they shall see God.” To a certain extent this was fulfilled when Jesus walked the dusty streets of Jerusalem. Jesus said in John 14:9, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” He says the same in the negative in John 15:24, “…they have seen and also hated both Me and My Father.”
While in a literal sense no one can see God down here today, the Scriptures DO teach that there is a way in which the pure in heart can see God now. Seeing God spiritually is certainly hinted at in Psalm 63:1-2, “O God, You are my God; Early will I seek You; My soul thirsts for You; My flesh longs for You In a dry and thirsty land Where there is no water. So I have looked for You in the sanctuary, To see Your power and Your glory.” In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit tells us in 3 John 11, “Beloved, do not imitate what is evil, but what is good. He who does good is of God, but he who does evil has not seen God.” In I John 4:12, the apostle seems to contrast the inability to see God literally with the ability to see God in the eye of one’s mind: “No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us.”
Seeing God in one sense is somewhat like seeing a hidden object in a hologram. If you have looked into one before, when you first glance at the picture all you see are various lines and colors. If, however, you gaze at it at length, the image will become visible. In a similar way, those who have only a low intensity for seeing God and are distracted by many rival objectives will not see Him; those, however, who make it their primary goal in life, focus and look intently in His word to find Him will be rewarded for their efforts. As Jesus puts it in Matthew 6:22, “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” (King James Version) The purer the heart, the greater the desire to see God; Jesus says this longing WILL be satisfied.
Steven Grant tells of a trip to Ottawa, Canada, with his wife and son: “One of the places we visited was the historic Canadian mint – where money is made – and we had a tour but unfortunately no free samples. One of the things we saw, secured behind some very thick glass, was a specially-produced coin. In 2007, the Canadian mint produced 5 special gold coins, each weighing 100 kg, with a face value of $1 million dollars. That’s right, a million dollar coin.
Why? (Grant continues) It was designed as a showcase of a technological breakthrough that allowed the Canadian mint, already a world leader in the refinement of gold, to achieve a never-before level of purity – 99.999% pure. Less than 10 parts per million of other elements. The guides were quite excited to tell us about the mint’s incredible accomplishment of "five-nine" gold, and bragged about this incredible purity. There IS something appealing about purity. Whether in our gold or our drinking water, the idea of "purity" is appealing to us. Now what about our hearts?
Jesus stresses the importance of heart purity just like He does spirit poverty in the first beatitude. But what exactly does Jesus mean by “pure in heart?” Jesus does not say merely blessed are the pure, but pure in heart, though the Scriptures place a very similar emphasis on holiness (a trait very similar to purity) in Hebrews 12:14, “Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord…” Purity and holiness, of course, are not identical or synonymous. The word purity refers to cleanliness while holiness means ‘set apart.’ We can say, however, that one who is holy will be pure and one who is pure will be holy. So, we cannot see the Lord without holiness, but what was Jesus saying by specifying “pure in spirit” over those who were merely pure?
William Barclay writes that this word pure, “can be used of clothes which are clean in contrast with clothes that are soiled and dirty. It has a whole series of meanings,” Barclay continues, “which have to do with things which are without blemish, without admixture, without alloy. It is used of pure water, and of wine and milk that are not adulterated by water; of animals which are physically perfect, and have no blemish; of grain which is winnowed from all chaff, and of white bread which is made of the best of flour…of language that is pure of all colloquialisms, errors of grammar and infelicities of style….It is used of a man who is ceremonially pure, and who is ceremonially fit to enter into the temple of his god….(morally) free from pollution, free from defilement, and free from guilt. Very often it is used in epitaphs to pay tribute to one who all his or her life kept virtue unsullied and untarnished.”
In the majority of the one hundred fifty times this word is found in the Old Testament, as Barclay puts it, “…it describes ceremonial purity, the kinds of foods and animals which may be eaten, the purity which comes from ceremonial washings…the kind of purity which is a matter of the observance of rules and regulations and which has little or no moral content at all.” John MacArthur runs with this in the promotion of a false dilemma. He concludes in his book on the Beatitudes, “There are only two kinds of religion in the world. Only two. One is the religion of human achievement, which comes under every brand imaginable, but is all from the same base; namely, you earn your own way. The other is the religion of Divine accomplishment that says, ‘I can’t do it. God did it in Christ.”
When Jesus singled out the “pure in heart” as recipients of this blessedness, He did contrast the “pure in heart” with the Pharisees who exaggerated the importance of externals – especially in man-made laws. Consider what Jesus said in elaborating on this issue in Matthew 23:25-28, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also. "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
Jesus did not, however, eliminate the importance of externals. This is seen in a similar statement just a couple verses earlier in Matthew 23:23, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone.” Unfortunately, some take from this passage that the tithing of herbs should have been omitted and the “weightier matters” attended to. This demonstrates an imprecise reading of the text. Jesus says “you ought to have done (the) weightier matters” “without leaving the (tithing of herbs) undone.” Jesus NOT saying pick out the most important practices to live out, but rather that fulfilling one responsibility did not free you from an even greater responsibility.
Consider again MacArthur’s dilemma, “There are only two kinds of religion in the world… the religion of human achievement…(and) the religion of Divine accomplishment…Take your pick.” Instead of picking between the two, why not opt for a religion that requires human effort to take advantage of Divine generosity. The pure in heart will believe that in order to see God we must recognize God’s part (grace) and man’s part (faith). We must acknowledge that separate from the gift of God we would have no hope. Meanwhile, we must also realize that the gift of God requires a living, active, obedient faith. Paul writes in Galatians 3:26-27, “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.”
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus exposes the inadequacy of the Pharisees’ approach to godliness. One of the stark examples is found in Matthew 5:20, “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” The Jamieson, Fausset and Brown Commentary reads here, “Our righteousness, then--if it is to contrast with the outward and formal righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees--must be inward, vital, spiritual.” A more precise explanation would be, “Our righteousness needs to be ‘inward, vital, spiritual’ as well as external.” Or, as Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3:5, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water (external - BH) and the Spirit (internal – BH), he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” The Psalmist articulated it this way in Psalm 24:3-4, “Who may ascend into the hill of the LORD? Or who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands (external - BH) and a pure heart (internal – BH)…” Again in the New Testament, we find in James 4:8, “Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” Clean inside. Clean outside.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” While we must be clean inside and out if we are to see God, Jesus thrust in the seventh beatitude is on internal motivation. We find a harbinger of this beatitude in Psalm 73:1, “Truly God is good to Israel, To such as are pure in heart.” After his sin with Bathsheba, David cries out in Psalm 51:10, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, And renew a steadfast spirit within me.”
Heart purity takes such a prominent place in Jesus’ sermon because the Pharisees had become fixated on the peripheral. Austrian Jew turned Christian bible scholar, Alfred Edersheim, says that the hand-washing tradition of the elders “was so strictly enjoined, that to neglect it was like being guilty of gross carnal defilement (or impurity – BH). Its omission would lead to temporal destruction, or, at least, to poverty….Indeed, (Edersheim continues), a Rabbi who had held this command in contempt was actually buried in excommunication….In fact, although at one time it had only been one of the marks of a Pharisee, yet at a later period to wash before eating was regarded as affording the ready means of recognizing a Jew.” This was believed to be one way of demonstrating purity. Eventually, Jews were taught that washing their hands after they ate was their duty. Some even washed their hands between different parts of their meal - after they ate their steak and before eating their potato.
Listen to Edersheim describe how a thorough hand-washing ritual ensured purity. “The water was poured on both hands…. The hands were lifted up, so as to make the water run to the wrist, in order to ensure that the whole hand was washed, and that the water polluted by the hand did not again run down the fingers. Similarly, each hand was rubbed with the other (the fist), provided the hand that rubbed had been affused (poured on); otherwise, the rubbing might be done against the head, or even against a wall. But there was one point on which special stress was laid. In the ‘first affusion,’ …the water had to run down to the wrist…. If the water remained short of the wrist, the hands were not clean….” The way the Jewish system worked, you could have bitterness, lust, greed and pride dominating your heart, but if you washed your hands just right, for example, you were pure. Jesus had to address this folly up front: “Blessed are the pure IN HEART, for they shall see God.”
Friends, we have to get a hold of our heart, if we want to please God. The heart is to a man like the rudder is to a ship. The prophet warns us in Jeremiah17:9, "The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?” We can deceive ourselves if we are not truly introspective. Proverbs 4:23, “Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it spring the issues of life.” Proverbs 23:7, “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.” The problem of the tongue – that unruly evil – does not originate with the fleshly muscle in our oral cavity, but in our heart. Luke 6:45, “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” I Timothy 1:5, “Now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith…”
Henry Booth puts it eloquently, "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 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."
Revelation 1:7, “Behold, He is coming with clouds, and every eye will see Him, even they who pierced Him.” Oh yes, every eye will see Jesus, but the blessedness comes only when we see Him because we were pure in heart. Stay with us after our song for a final word and how you can get a copy of this message.