What Are the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. We have heard them all or at least most of them, but few know what they mean or the promises they proclaim to us and others. The Beatitudes-- or simply “blessed”-- are conditions in which people are considered blessed.

“Blessed” in the New Testament never refers to finances or material possessions. In other words, the Lord does not promise those that are meek are going to get incredible wealth or those that hunger for righteousness will be given big houses. The blessings in the Sermon on the Mount are eschatological (eternal end time realities). They are promises both now and into the future.

Each blessing is not tied to feeling very blessed. While the Scripture says, “blessed are those who mourn,” it doesn’t seem like one feels blessed if you weep over loss or difficulty. If being blessed is not a physical promise but a spiritual one, then mourning is not just the loss of the physical. Rather, it is mourning over the realization of one’s spiritual poverty. Consider a test case:

Luke 18:13“But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’"

This tax collector is mourning over his sin. He is broken by his sin and mourning over his failure to live to the holy standard of God. Would this tax collector stand in his mourning forever? Isn’t he supposed to be comforted? Yes, he is…

Luke 18:14“I tell you, this man went down to his house justified…”

That means God has accepted or embraced the tax collector as righteous in standing. It is not because he was righteous, but because he mourned his sin and cried out to God for mercy. What a blessing from the Lord!

How do we know that God will gift us with mercy? How do we know that we will be rendered justified before God? How do we know that we will be granted entrance into heaven? How do we know that we will be blessed in this way? Because Jesus, in his teaching, promised that we would be blessed in our mourning of sin and request of mercy. God will invite us in.

We would do well to study deeper in the Beatitudes to better see how the Lord blesses us with eternal realities beyond just trinkets of this world. Read, study, and be blessed.

-Pastor John Richardson