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Matthew 5:8:
8Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
A really sinless, pure heart is in the eyes of a child of God as the pearl of great price, for which he constantly implores God. Yet here on earth it never becomes his portion.
They who stand outside of the faith can have no mention here. We readily grant that among them also purity of heart is highly esteemed. We do not deny that among them there are strivings after it. But what they aim at is something different. To the child of God, purity of heart is the means by which to see God. To them it is rather the means by which not to fall short of high moral character. And these two can not be mentioned in one breath.
It is a saying of Jesus: "Blessed are the pure in heart." It was addressed by Jesus directly to the children of God, as Matthew (5:8) distinctly shows. For is not this "pure in heart" followed immediately by the: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." And it truly speaks for itself that the seven beatitudes together treat of the same persons. "The peacemakers," "the pure in heart," "they who hunger and thirst after righteousness," they who are "poor in spirit," and so on. Each points to those alone, who place themselves under the guardianship of Jesus, and will to enter into the kingdom of heaven that has come nigh.
Virtuous people, as the world counts virtue, moral idealists, are not considered here. Undoubtedly there is a great deal in them, that with respect to this earthly life must be highly prized. But all this is of no account here.
The reference here is to those who have been initiated into the secret of Salvation, those who have passed from the world into the kingdom of the Son of God's love. This purity of heart which leads one to see God is not conceivable otherwise than in a child of God.
With trembling this is said.
To know who is a child of God and who is not, is so extremely difficult. There are those who are children of God, and yet scarcely dare to confess it of themselves. There are others who appropriate it to themselves, yet so little exhibit the marks of it. And there are more still who obtrude themselves in a way which makes you seriously doubt whether their confessed "childship" is not stolen goods.
But apart from all this, this much is certain, that the children of God who are most devout and most truly consecrated are continually in the midst of bitter combat just because there is still so much impurity in their heart which continually sullies their life.
Sometimes this sullying goes very far, and the fifty-first Psalm is still being prayed, after David, from the sense of bitter guilt which forces the painful cry to the lips "cleanse me of my sins of impurity."
And even this does not say enough.
It must be confessed that not seldom in life two men or two women stand side by side, one of whom zealously labors for Christ and the other rejects the Christ, and that upon applying the test of purity of heart and of behavior the confessor of Jesus is shamed by the denier of the Christ.
This is grievous for the faith. It is to be mourned over with tears. And yet you may not conceal it. David did not do so, and Paul was his follower in this. "The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do" (Romans 7:19). And through all ages, this painful struggle has been carried on in Christ's church. The hypocrites, the false brethren stand outside of this. They have no part in this. No, it is among the sincere followers of God that, age upon age, this selfsame complaint has been heard. Sometimes it has even been worked out into a sinful system of the old and the new Adam, as from his viewpoint of unbelief Maeterlinck is doing now. But however experienced, interpreted or explained, the phenomenon exhibits itself again and again: confession was honestly meant, faith is of the right stamp, and yet, hand in hand with this, the hopeless struggle goes on with the impurity of one's own heart.
To be pure in heart is in such instances for the most part still misunderstood, as though it referred exclusively to purity from sensual sins.
Impure is then said to be the voluptuary, the man who drinks to excess, the epicure, the miser, the effeminate. And surely these gross sins should be the first to be denounced.
But yet, he who is free from these is, therefore, by no means yet pure in heart. Purity of heart embraces the whole life of our soul. Pride, arrogance, dishonest practice, anger, hate, falsehood and the many other vices, including ordinary vanity and satisfaction with oneself, which make the waters of the human heart muddy and unclean.
Impure your heart becomes by everything that does not belong to it. As a pond becomes unclean by everything that the passerby throws into it, so is the human heart defiled by everything that God did not create in it, and by everything that creeps into it from Satan or from the world.
And this, now, is the dreadful part of it, that already at our birth so many germs of impurity were present in it, which, until our death, will never entirely be eradicated. That we live in a world which encourages so strongly the germination of these impurities. And that we associate with people, who, inwardly as impure as ourselves, accustom us, provided it does not come to gross excess, to make light of this impurity in ourselves, and to make equally light of impurity in them.
This weakens, then, our moral sense, our moral judgment, and makes us dream of a pure heart, the whiles in many points we remain impure of heart.
If, now, Jesus had meant that only they went out free who had never caught their own heart in any impure thought, inclination or sensation, then this beatitude would fill the soul with despair.
For so no one is.
Until our death we continue to struggle with the impure germs in our heart.
We make progress, but never in any other way than by the application of ever finer tests in order to begin to see impurity now in what before never so much as roused the thought of sin in us.
The more advance we make in faith, the more keen the eye of the soul becomes in the discovery of sin, and just because of this, the sense of guilt does not grow less, but rather more in the measure in which we get away from sin.
The world does not understand this when it hears a saintly soul, a very angel of love and mercy, plead touchingly for forgiveness of guilt. But by itself there is nothing strange in it. These very ones who are far advanced now discover sin in what perhaps before even seemed virtue to them.
Jesus knew this, and so this can not have been meant.
And, therefore, He does not say: Blessed are they who have a pure heart, a heart without sin, but: "Blessed are they who are pure in heart."
In your heart your ego dwells, your person acts, the child of God thinks, ponders, forms judgments and makes choices.
There is a difference, therefore, between what your self finds in your heart and your own self that rules in your heart.
And since no one of us dwells anywhere else than in a heart that is inwardly sullied, and from which all sorts of poisonous vapors arise, the question whether you are pure or impure in heart is only answered by the other question, whether your attitude toward these poisonous inclinations of your heart is one of hatred and fiery indignation, or whether you sympathize with these evil inclinations, and make concessions to them with your will and mind.
That you frequently succumb is no proof yet that you are impure in heart. It is but the question whether you have struggled against it, whether you have battled against it with all the spiritual power at your command, whether, with the invocation of the help of God and of His Christ and of His angels, you have avoided everything that prophesied your defeat, and are continuously imploring: "Lead me not into temptation, but deliver me from evil."
On this, and on this alone, it all depends. You yourself must be pure as you stand in your own heart opposed to the impurities that well up from your heart.
When this distinction between your self that believes and the evils that stir in your heart is lost, you are undone. Then you identify yourself with these impurities. Then you sink away in the evil waters of your own heart, and are drowned in your own sinful inclinations.
If, on the other hand, you are courageously and firmly determined in the inner chambers of your heart, yea, armed with bitter hatred against your own sinful inclinations, as against your mortal enemy, then your heart may remain full of impurity as long as you live, but you, your own self, are pure in heart, and by God's grace you triumph every time over the sin that waylays you in your own heart.
Then Satan can not tempt you, for God is your ally. Then this very struggle which is never given up makes you crowd yourself the closer to your God, and here you will know certain moments, even in the very heat of strife, when with the vision of the eye of your soul you, as it were, see your God.
* * * * * * *This devotional classic offers 110 meditations on a single thought from Psalm 73: "As for me, it is good to be near to God." The author states, "The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality ... it must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence."
The meditations reflect the blending of spiritual vigor with doctrinal loyalty so consistently expressed in the life of Abraham Kuyper. These are devotions with true substance, avoiding the extremes about which Kuyper adds a word of caution: "Stress in creedal confession, without drinking from the Living Fountain, runs dry in barren orthodoxy, just as truly as spiritual emotion, without clearness in confessional standards, makes one sink in the bog of sickly mysticism."
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch political leader and Calvinist theologian. Elected to parliament in 1874, he became Prime Minister in 1901 and served in that capacity until 1905. As a theologian, he revived a systematic, orthodox Calvinism. He founded the Free Reformed Church and the Free University of Amsterdam. His other works include Principles of Sacred Theology, Lectures on Calvinism, and The Work of the Holy Spirit
Further information about Abraham Kuyper's life can be seen in the translator's "Biographical Note"; further information about To Be Near Unto God can be Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.
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