My father
spent all of his working years as a general maintenance man at the Proctor and
Gamble manufacturing plant in Kansas City. Proctor and Gamble produces a very
diverse range of products, but they’re probably best known for making soap. In
fact, after they started to produce radio and then television shows to market
their products, those shows became known as “soap operas” because they were
sponsored by Proctor and Gamble.
The company’s
most famous brand of soap is Ivory, and for years their advertising focused on
the claim that Ivory Soap is “99 and 44/100ths percent pure.” I remember seeing
an ad about that claim on a Christmas gift box from the company that we had
around our house for years. I guess that’s a pretty high standard for purity,
but after I learned about fractions, I remember wondering what was in that
remaining 56/100ths! After all, rat poison is basically a bunch of harmless
ingredients—with just a tiny portion of stuff that’s deadly!
Obviously,
that ad campaign was meant to emphasize the purity of the soap and just how
desirable that level of purity should be. In the Beatitude we’ll be discussing
today, Jesus also praises purity, but of a very different sort—the kind of
purity that no bar of soap can provide. In Matthew 5:8, Jesus says, “Blessed
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” This statement foreshadows many
of the ideas that the Lord will discuss in this sermon. We’ll see some of those
connections as we take a closer look at this verse.
“BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART…”
The word
“pure” means to be unmixed, unalloyed—free from any contaminant that may
pollute a product or lower its value. Our English word “pure” lines up very
well with the Greek word that lies behind this translation. Researchers have
found that word in documents where it’s used to refer to wine that has not been
diluted with water, corn that has been sifted and separated from all of the
chaff, and an army that has been purged of all cowardly soldiers.
So to
paraphrase, we could say that Jesus is praising a heart that is unmixed,
undiluted, and uncontaminated. But unmixed with what, exactly? I think the
answer becomes clear in the rest of Jesus’ sermon, so let’s draw on those words
for clarification.
A PURE HEART IS FREE OF…
1. Improper standards
Here I’m
speaking of standards that judge obedience to God only by external behavior.
Jesus speaks extensively in this sermon about the proper way to gauge our
obedience to God. We cannot measure our obedience simply by looking at our
external behavior—we must also assess the attitudes of our heart. For example,
Jesus says that God’s command against murder is violated if we simply harbor
anger and hatred against someone in our heart. We don’t even have to commit the
physical act of murder in order to violate the command; the attitude of the
heart is enough to make us guilty.
So a pure
heart belongs to a person who assesses not only his external behavior, but the
attitudes of his heart as well. This person’s heart is pure because it is free
of hypocrisy; this man doesn’t pat himself on the back for merely conforming to
external standards while his heart remains rotten and filthy.
This kind
of attitude is in direct contrast to the attitude of the Pharisees, which is
why Jesus so often butted heads with them in the Gospels. On numerous
occasions, Jesus challenged them with various statements like this: “You are
like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full
of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness (Matt 23:27).” The Pharisees had
created all kinds of standards to judge whether they were following the Law
that God had revealed through Moses, but their standards could only assess
external behavior—they couldn’t judge the heart. Nevertheless, they confidently
used their standards to proclaim themselves righteous in the sight of God, which is like measuring something with a
12-inch ruler and then confidently proclaiming that its 20 feet long!
The pure in
heart remember that they must assess their heart as well. Thus, they seek to
root out hypocrisy so that their behavior is a true reflection on what’s in
their heart.
2. Improper motives
In chapter
six in particular, Jesus warns us about doing things simply to receive
acknowledgement and praise from other people. If that is our motivation, then
according to Jesus, when we receive that praise, we have received all the
reward we will ever get for that action—even if it was a religious activity
like praying!
The person who
is pure in heart seeks to keep his motives undiluted by such self-serving
goals. Rather, his motive is to love God with all of his heart, soul, mind, and
strength, and to love his neighbor the way he loves himself.
3. Improper masters
Later on in
this sermon, we will encounter the famous statement, “No one can serve two
masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be
devoted to the one and despise the other (Matt 6:24).” Perhaps you’ve worked in a job before where the people above you
weren’t on the same page. That’s not uncommon in companies where you have a
corporate headquarters somewhere with a lot of local branches scattered around.
Sometimes policies are handed down by the corporate office that the branch
manager doesn’t want to keep, so now what do you do as an employee? Two people
are asking you to do different things, and you can’t please them both!
That’s the
kind of situation that Jesus is describing. The pure in heart take their
marching orders from Jesus. They don’t follow the commands of anyone else, so
they don’t have divided loyalties. Often we’re tempted to carry out the wishes
of our sin nature, or we’re tempted to carry out someone else’s desires because
we want to impress them. But the person who is pure in heart says, “I have one master, and I only take orders from
him!”
So this is a sketch of the person who is pure in heart. He
or she is free of improper standards, improper motives, and improper masters.
Jesus pronounced a blessing on this person by saying...
“…FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD.”
This
statement must have been jarring for those Jewish people who were listening to
Jesus. In fact, “seeing God” may not have sounded like a blessing at all!
Throughout the Old Testament, people who saw visions of God came to one
unanimous conclusion—“I’m toast!” Both Isaiah and Ezekiel were terrified when
they first saw their visions of the Lord. It wasn’t until the Lord calmed their
fears that they had any measure of comfort at all.
Perhaps the
story of Moses would have quickly come to mind for these people. In Exodus 33,
Moses asked the Lord, “Please show me your glory.” God told him that he would
hide him in a cave and pass by that place, but Moses would only see him after
his glory had passed by, because he said no one can see my face and live (Ex
33:18-23).
So it must
have been an astonishing thing for these people to hear that the pure in heart
would see God—and that it would actually be a blessing! This statement was a
clear declaration from Jesus that he was introducing something that was
superior to what had come through Moses. The Lord had given his commands for
the children of Israel to Moses, and as a message from God, those commands were
a good thing, but as the Apostle Peter said in Acts 15, those commands became a
heavy burden that the people could not bear because their sin nature prevented
them from living up to those standards. But now, Jesus was proclaiming
something new which would break down the walls that separated sinful mankind
from their holy God.
So what did
Jesus mean when he said that the pure in heart would “see God?” I think first
and foremost, he meant that they would come to recognize God in Jesus, and
would thus learn about what God is like in greater depth. The pure in heart
would come to recognize that they were already seeing God right in front of
them! This is why most of the Pharisees never came to understand that Jesus was
God, because they did not have this purity of heart. As I mentioned earlier,
they had their own standards which allowed them to declare themselves
acceptable to God, so when Jesus told them they did not, in fact, measure up to
God’s standards, they proclaimed that he was a deceiver. As Jesus continues in
this sermon, it would have become more and more apparent to the people that if
they wanted to see God, they could not follow the path of the Pharisees.
Instead, if they would follow Jesus, they would come to understand that God was
right there in their midst!
They would
also come to have a greater understanding of what God is like. As Jesus would
later say to the Apostle Philip, “He who has seen me has seen the Father (John
14:9).” Those who come to understand the truth about Jesus, understand the
truth about God. In that statement to Philip, Jesus used the word “see” in the
sense of understanding something. We sometimes use the word “see” in the same
way. If I ask you the question, “Do you
see what I’m saying?” I’m not asking if you see one of those cartoon word
bubbles beside my face with words in it! I’m asking if you understand my point.
I think
this idea of greater understanding is what Jesus meant to emphasize in this
Beatitude. So if I were to paraphrase Matthew 5:8, I would say it like this:
“Blessed are those with a whole-hearted devotion to God, for they shall come to
see him as he is.” This “seeing” involves a deeper understanding of God today,
and it will be a literal reality for us one day, as Revelation 22:4 says, “we
will see his face.” Do you remember? That was the very thing that Moses was
told he could not do—see God’s face. But when we are living with God in the New
Heaven and New Earth, all barriers will be removed, and we will see God’s glory
in the person of Jesus Christ.
Long after
the Apostle Paul had been converted, after he had even seen visions of God and
followed him in obedience for many years, Paul stated that his primary goal was
still “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his
sufferings, becoming like him in his death (Philippians 3:10).” Each one of us
still has the goal before us of knowing God in a deeper way.
But remember—that
greater understanding is the result
of a whole-hearted devotion to God. The commitment to God comes first, and only
then does the greater understanding come. That order is very important to
remember. As the old saying says, “The
proof of the pudding is in the eating!” If God says, “This is the proper
way for you to live,” we won’t fully understand why until we choose to live
that way! This is just another way of saying that we must follow God by faith.
We must choose to believe that his ways are true before we will gain a greater
understanding of them.
You can
think of it like an extreme sport. How do you really come to understand what
skydiving is like? By stepping out of the plane! You can read all about it and
listen to other people talk about it, but you won’t really understand what its
like until you take the plunge—and by then you’re fully committed, right?
Growing in your knowledge of God works the same way. As long as you try to
serve two masters, as long as you judge yourself by standards that are not
God’s standards, as long as you have mixed motives, you will not grow in your
knowledge of the Lord.
There’s a
verse of the old hymn “Trust and Obey” that puts it well. This verse isn’t as
well-known as the others, but it deserves to be! It goes like this:
But we never can prove
The delights of His love
Until all on the altar we lay
For the favor He shows
And the joy He bestows
Are for them who will trust and obey.
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