December 10 Daily Devotional

The logic of the Beatitudes

... our Lord clearly chose these Beatitudes carefully. He did not speak haphazardly. There is a definite progression in the thought; there is a logical sequence.... ‘Blessed are the merciful.’ What a searching statement that is! What a test of each one of us, of our whole standing and of our profession of the Christian faith! Those are the happy people, says Christ, those are the people to be congratulated. That is what man should be like—merciful. This is perhaps a convenient point at which to emphasize the searching character of the whole of this statement which we call the Beatitudes. Our Lord is depicting and delineating the Christian man and the Christian character. He is obviously searching us and testing us.... How are we reacting to these searching tests and probings? They really tell us everything about our Christian profession. And if I dislike this sort of thing, if I am impatient with it, if I want instead to be talking about communism, if I dislike this personal analysis and probing and testing, it simply means that my position is entirely contrary to that of the New Testament man. But if I feel, on the other hand, that though these things do search and hurt me, nevertheless they are essential and good for me, if I feel it is good for me to be humbled, and that it is a good thing for me to be held face to face with this mirror, which ... shows me what I am ... in the light of God’s pattern for the Christian man, then I have a right to be hopeful about my state and condition. A man who is truly Christian, never objects to being humbled. The first thing that is said about him [in the Beatitudes] is that he should be ‘poor in spirit’, and if he objects to being shown that there is nothing in him, then that is not true of him. So these Beatitudes taken as a whole do provide a very searching test.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, pp. 95–6