We can often come to the Beatitudes knowing that they are teaching, and important teaching, but without a clear sense of the context or larger theme that frames Jesus’ first recorded sermon. Before the Beatitudes, we see Jesus in Matthew 4:17 opening with a message of repentance, for “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”, and then continuing to proclaim “the good news (gospel) of the kingdom”. It is no surprise, then, that this focus on the kingdom of heaven continues into His first ‘sermon’. In the Beatitudes, we also notice the repeated phrase “theirs is the kingdom of heaven” — linking first to last Beatitude and linking the Beatitudes as a whole to Jesus’ announcement in Matthew 4! This leads us to conclude that the Beatitudes and their content are closely related to the reception of the kingdom of heaven.
But who are these words for? These people who gather around and follow Jesus are described as “the crowds” in Matthew 5:1 and Matthew 7:28, meaning the general hearers who we already meet in part in Matthew 4. Yet we see also at the end of Matthew 5:1 that it is His disciples that draw nearest to him amongst everyone else. Yes, anyone may listen in. But Jesus’ target audience is those who want to “Follow Him” – to show them what it will mean for their lives. Despite the growing crowd, His response is not to be ‘in demand’, or to ride the wave. His purpose is to make disciples, for it is those who follow Jesus – disciples – that enter the kingdom of heaven.
Perhaps you grew up reading this as a moral code, or ‘things to do so that God will like you’. We invite you to read it this way, with this kingdom-focused, discipleship-driven emphasis instead. This is Jesus describing what happens to those who enter His kingdom through lives of repentance and faith. Bible scholar D.A. Carson described the Beatitudes as establishing the ‘norms of the kingdom’: what is usual, and what a disciple of Jesus can expect. This is what the life of a follower or disciple of Jesus will look like.
(A) The Start of Discipleship: The Need Beatitudes (Matt 5:1-6)
We are grateful to Bruner’s commentary for the use of the categories of Need, Help and Hurt Beatitudes, and we will use these categories in this study.
As we begin this chapter, the first Beatitude locks in on “the poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3), which calls to mind the words of Isaiah 66:2 and Ezra 9:4-6. The “poor in spirit” are those who recognize their neediness. In Ezra, the people of God tremble at the word of God because of how clearly it reveals their faithlessness, iniquity and guilt. They are ‘blessed’ with “a sense of inability in spiritual matters.. and helplessness to please God.” (Motyer). This idea in Ezra is picked up in Isaiah 66:2, where poverty or contrition in spirit is associated with the action or response of trembling at God’s word. The first instinct when they behold God’s word is not just light unto their feet or boundless joy, but trembling. Have you ever felt that way before? This humility surfaces when you sense your inability and helplessness to please God when God’s Word reveals His perfect holiness.
The association of poverty of spirit with internal need, iniquity, is what leads us to conclude that being ‘poor’ in spirit refers to our spiritual need. The poor in spirit are those who acknowledge that they are empty spiritually (“spiritual bankruptcy” – Carson) without God’s help. It is a good thing to be associated with being poor in Spirit.
What is your posture when you come before God? Are you poor in spirit? Do you readily acknowledge your need? The First Beatitude teaches us that to acknowledge and admit our need and inability before God is the start of Discipleship. The Book of Common Prayer reminds us of this: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But You, O Lord, have mercy upon us.” To be poor in spirit is to never read Jesus’ promise of help and think: that’s for someone else. To be poor in spirit means that Jesus’ rescue never stops being something that I need.
We might tremble at the thought of trembling, but here’s the good news. Jesus calls the trembling, “blessed.” Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It is precisely the poor in spirit that Jesus brings into His kingdom and under His kingship. I wonder what you might have thought of the Beatitudes. A ladder of virtue for you to climb upwards? Know this: Jesus begins the Beatitudes with grace. Jesus is not rounding up the Doing-Wells and promoting them. He is gathering up the Have-Nots and those who say “Please Help Me” and bringing them under His rule.
This first or gateway Beatitude is something we continue in. We do well if we never graduate from an honest and humble acknowledgement of our need. How does this practically happen?
First, we learn to practice confession. At church corporately, to God, to one another in private. When we do so, we name our weaknesses and learn what it’s like to tell God and others just how needy we are. The very thing we dread and are tempted to resist turns out to be just what we need. Confession is God’s medicine for our desire to appear better than we are.
Second, let Scripture search your heart. We will continue to do so as we walk through the rest of Jesus’ sermon, where righteousness upon righteousness is unveiled. As Bruner states, “When we read in coming weeks “whoever is angry” or “whoever looks at a woman in order to lust”, we should feel very poor in spirit indeed.” Every part of the Sermon, taken seriously, drives believing readers back to the First Beatitude and the blessing that it offers: help for those who admit that they cannot help themselves.
Like the first, the second Beatitude finds precedent in the Old Testament. What is being mourned here? Following on from the First Beatitude, those who are poor in spirit mourn their poverty (Matt 5:4). We see David and Isaiah mourning their sin in Psalm 51:3 and Isaiah 6:5. Their experience of sin, iniquity, and guilt is staggering. It’s visceral. It’s almost as if their bodies reel at the recognition of their transgression. While their mourning does move to recognize our common depravity, it begins by mourning personal sin. Isaiah first mourns his unclean lips before he mourns the fact that he dwells amongst a people of unclean lips.
Friends, do you see the gravity of sin? Does it lead you to lament? The second Beatitude clarifies the first. The ‘poor’ in spirit are not just poor in the sense of pitiful, but poor in the way that a prodigal is poor. Poor in the sense of defiance: when you have spent the Father’s gifts on reckless and rebellious living and you’re poor. Poor in the sense that I know the paths sin has led me down, each a dead end, and I have contributed to my own empty-handedness. The blessed person in the Second Beatitude will not excuse sin. Will not speak of sin as small. He simply and honestly mourns his sin.
Remember that the alternative is worse. The reason why these people are blessed is because God has overcome their desire to keep peace with the sin that would destroy them. Because they are brokenhearted over sin — they will not play with sin’s bait or be habitual line-steppers. It would be far worse for God to leave them in their ignorance, where they strut about all day with nary a thought for their actual condition. Practically, it means that disciples will having a growing sensitivity to sin and a hatred for it wherever it is found.
But that’s not all - the mourner’s comfort is to be cleansed from sin by God Himself. Isaiah 61 and Isaiah 57:18 speak of a God who will comfort sinners who mourn – “I have seen his iniquity and backsliding.. but I will heal him, lead him, and restore comfort to Him.” Your part and my part is to bring our sins before God. His part is that He blesses us with His cleansing. Consider today how you mourn your sin. Do you grieve at its effects only? Or do you grieve recognizing that at the heart of it, you have rebelled against God. Do you see your sin as the rebellion against God that it is, and a personal rejection of His Fatherly hand? This Beatitude calls you to say not “I’m so embarrassed” or “My parents are so upset with me”, but “against You, God, I have sinned and my heart needs cleansing”. If that is you, then God has abundant comfort for you. Consider David again in Psalm 51 – because God promises comfort for mourners, David may ask in Psalm 51 for cleansing and a pure heart, and thrice for joy. He mourns sin, while trusting that the Lord who has shown him these sins can also make him well. As a Bible scholar puts it, “The marvellous consolation of the world to come is promised not to those mildly uncomfortable with the present world who seek refuge in a dream, but to people who suffer, weep, and sigh.”
Psalm 37 is psalm that helps us to understand what meekness is and what the meek are promised. This psalm shows us the actions of the wicked, meek and the LORD.
The wicked prosper through carrying out evil (Ps 37:7) and bring down the poor, needy and upright (Ps 37:12,14).
In contrast, the meek commit their way to the LORD and trust Him to act (Ps 37:5). They also refrain from anger, forsake wrath and wait for the LORD (Ps 37:7a,8,9).
The LORD also acts and removes the wicked from the land (Ps 37:9,10,20). He also gives the meek teh land and abundant peace (Ps 37:11).
In the first two Beatitudes, we mourn our sin. In the third Beatitude, God’s people learn how they are to live in a world full of sin. The meek refrain, not simply because they are virtuous, but because they wait for the LORD. They do not act because they trust that the LORD will act. And God responds by removing evil and granting enduring blessing to His people. Such is the inheritance of the meek who wait upon the LORD, saying “Your will be done.”
But how do sinners become meek this way? Remember the first Beatitude. The one who knows the deceit and poverty of sin does not trust in himself for something as important as fixing injustice. Such a person is not eager to extract revenge. He knows that even his righteous anger is mixed with selfish, angry, bitter motive. He waits for God, even amidst His suffering. The New Testament develops this Psalm in Jesus Christ, who has a meekness that suffers so that the precise people who caused His suffering can one day join in His joy.
Why does Jesus use “hunger and thirst” to describe the desire for righteousness (Matt 5:6)? Here we find perhaps the most vivid and relatable bodily description of need – hunger and thirst. Hungering and thirsting makes us desperate. Here, Jesus turns that experience of desperation towards righteousness. Since the first 3 Beatitudes set the primary context as our personal sin, we take righteousness to mean being right before God in thought, word and deed. The disciple longs for a “pattern of life in conformity to God’s will” (Carson). You want to obey God. You don’t want to live in rebellion. And if you long for this sort of a righteousness, you will be satisfied. You won’t just have a taster, you will have it in full.
Our thirsting for such righteousness in this time is also marked by a certain sense of unsatisfaction. D.A. Carson puts it this way: “There is a sense in which we continue to be unsatisfied. The person who hungers and thirsts is filled, but the righteousness with which he is filled is so wonderful that he hungers and thirsts for more of it.. the more a person pursues conformity to God’s will, the more attractive it becomes.” It gives us such a beautiful picture of sanctification in the Christian’s life. The more we have, the sweeter it tastes; the more we hunger, the more He gives. Just like being poor in spirit and mourning – we continue in these Beatitudes! These gifts from Christ grow us towards Him, to walk with Him, not away from Him.
(B) The Shape of Discipleship: The Help Beatitudes (Matt 5:7-9)
A theologian commented that “The Beatitudes are how Jesus gives [us] back to God, to ourselves, and also to our neighbours.” In the first 4: We see ourselves honestly and are returned to a true understanding of our need. We receive God’s help humbly. In the next 3, we see how God turns us outwards.
What does it mean to be merciful, as written about in Matthew 5:7? Mercy is a generous response to need. But notice the 5th Beatitude’s location – after the first 4. Why? The response called for begins with you having first received. Consider this: in the first 4 Beatitudes, disciples acknowledge their need:
Are you a poor sinner before God? Yes.
Do you grieve sin and hunger to be made right? Yes.
But the test of whether they have really understood and meant these confessions about who they are and what they’ve been given is how they then live. Before mercy is something that we do for others, it is something that God has done for us. Consider the test of mercy in Matthew 18:21-35, where a servant is forgiven a staggering debt by his master. He immediately goes out and chokes a fellow servant who owed him a tiny debt in comparison. Why are we shocked by this story? Because someone who has received This Much should not act this way.
The call to mercy does not deny our rights. The servant in the story was owed a debt by his fellow servant, however small – it was a real debt. But the parable asks: will your actions, your life, be shaped more by the small debts owed, or by the vast debt paid? And if you put your hand up to the first 4 Beatitudes and accept them as true without crossing your fingers, you’re the 1st servant in the parable. Do you primarily think of yourself, in the day to day, as one who gives or who has been given much? One who loves or who has been loved much? Do you think of how much you have done, or what has been done for you?
That leaves us with half a question still – that promise of receiving: Why does God only show Himself merciful with the merciful? We encourage you to hear this not as a challenge to us being wholly saved by grace (we are!), but as a merciful wake-up call. “Being a merciful person is not a condition for God’s grace, but it is a necessary consequence” (Bruner). If there is a pattern of unmerciful action in your life, today be warned. Mourn it. Admit your need and inability to show mercy. And turn to the one who blesses the needy.
In Matthew 5:8, Jesus speaks about being “pure in heart”. Is being ‘pure in heart’ something we are, or something we do?
Consider Psalm 24:3-6 — “He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully. … Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob.”
A similar idea is written about in 1 John 3:2-3, “Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as He is pure.”
Pure in heart is both something that a disciple saved by Jesus is, and is working towards. If you wonder: How do I know that I am the person this Beatitude describes? 1 John 3:3 provides an outward sign – I am purifying myself. I am the kind of person whose present efforts are consistent with my promised future.
How does it help us to see God? Psalm 11:7 tells us that our righteous LORD loves righteous deeds and the upright shall behold His face. Our communion with God grows as we grow in righteous deeds, as we keep our hands clean, as we keep our lips honest etc. But there remains a sense in which our purity is final, is full, only in the future. When we’re discouraged, 1 John 3 and other passages remind us vividly of that future hope. When we’re doing well, we are reminded that there’s more sweetness that lies ahead, and we press on.
As we look at the next Beatitude in Matthew 5:9, how is peace-making different from being meek? Peacemaking differs from meekness because it is active! Small steps that, added up, bring enemies together in harmony. We peacemake God and man – through proclaiming the gospel. But this Beatitude also refers to a general willingness to mediate, to lower the temperature when things are heated and to reduce tension and help good communication when people misunderstand each other.
It’s something we do for others (by definition). So we see again that in these fifth to seventh Beatitudes, those who have been helped are not helped out of the sin and mess of the world so much as they are helped right back in to where it is most messy — the places of enmity, conflict, anger and distress.
This is impossible without God’s help because what the Beatitude calls for is not peace keeping (to preserve the status quo), but peace-making: the power to actively reconcile. We find an example in Matt 5:44 — love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you. The call to peace make is active, and it is personal. We are called to peace-make even with those people who have wounded us.
The promise is that those who peace-make will be called sons of God: people who, as children of God, reflect God’s own character. What a warning this is against the divisive - those who love in-fighting and gossip. If that describes you, if you minimize or even justify such behavior, you should be rattled and deeply disturbed by this Beatitude. If that’s you, peacemaking begins by warring with your sins that grow division in the body.
These three Beatitudes – mercy, purity, peacemaking – are not possible on human might alone. But they are not optional either. Piper says. “If we don’t obtain mercy, we receive judgment. If we don’t see God, we are not in heaven. If we aren’t called the sons of God, we are outside the family.”
Given their gravity, and given that we do fail, perhaps progress is a helpful frame for us to evaluate our lives as disciples. We can ask each other: How are you walking? Does your life bear the imprint of the cross? Not perfectly, but more than it did a year ago? Do your desires tend towards these things? You are not merciful or peace-making, perhaps, but do you long to be? Are you asking for help to be - from God - and from man? From brother and sister?
When disciples find themselves doing more poorly in spirit than they thought, that should “lead them straight back to the life-giving springs of the First Beatitude” (Bruner).
(C) The Sting of Discipleship: The Hurt Beatitudes (Matt 5:10-12)
What happens when we do obey? We succeed in mercy, purity, peacemaking. What then? Well, as Bruner memorably wrote, in the Need Beatitudes we are brought to our knees. In the Help Beatitudes, we learn to walk after Jesus as disciples
But in the Hurt Beatitudes — when disciples face opposition, persecution and hit a wall — Jesus promises help too. Matthew 5:10 echoes earlier Beatitudes. We see that “kingdom of heaven” closes the loop and indicates the start of a new section shortly. We also are reminded of the earlier discussion on “righteousness” in the Fourth Beatitude (Matt 5:6). This matters because this Beatitude is not blessing any sort of persecution, but the sort that arises because you have “determined to live as Jesus lived” (Carson). 2 Timothy 3:12 states this plainly: Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. That’s the point that Matthew 5:12b makes too: This is not new. They persecuted the prophets like this. They’re going to persecute the followers of Christ too.
Matthew 5:10 introduces the idea of persecution, and in Matthew 5:11a, Jesus elaborates on what persecution involves — “revile you”, “utter all kinds of evil against you”. He is upfront about what disciples can expect.
Jesus also speaks directly and personally to His hearers — “blessed are you” (Matt 5:11a). We are reminded again that this is not generic wisdom but a personal call to discipleship.
In Matthew 5:10, Jesus speaks of persecution “for righteousness’ sake”. In Matthew 5:11b, He speaks of persecution “on my account”. Jesus is not pointing away from Himself to some higher principle, but is equating Himself and His cause with righteousness.
And He ends with a call to “rejoice and be glad” (Matt 5:12), as He invites us to respond in trust. What Jesus is saying here is that when following Jesus beats you up we can rejoice and be glad, for our reward is great in heaven. We should observe two things.
Firstly, the promise is future. The reward that will bring forth joy and gladness is great – in heaven. The fullness of the Beatitudes is future: not in this time, not in this life, not while persecutions still rage.
Secondly, what is this great reward? Whatever it is, it will mean seeing Jesus face to face, being with Him. But the question I want to leave us with instead is: Why is this great reward mine? Isn’t repentance just the right response to sin? It’s what I should do. But why am I promised comfort for my grief and satisfaction for my hunger to be made right? Why do I get God’s mercy? Why am I called a son of God? How do I get from the start, here, where I am a spiritual zero, a rebel against God, to here? The answer is that Jesus Christ, the son of God, took on my sin and my shame. And He clothed me with His righteousness so that I am the Father’s child. So while yes, we do not yet see clearly, in full, what this great reward is, we do know who it is that we have believed on. We know how He has loved us. Beyond comprehension, we rejoice. Because persecution has an expiry date. It will one day end. But His promises of help, comfort, joy, fullness will not. And His kingdom will know no end.