Day 283 (Matthew 5-7) - Year 4
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Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap.

This three-chapter section is called the Sermon on the Mount, and it's the most famous sermon Jesus preached. It is meaty. I'm not going to recap every detail. I'm just going to lean into some things that might help with grasping deeper meanings or themes. Let's get to it. Jesus sits down on the rolling hillside around the Sea of Galilee, surrounded by his disciples, and teaches them what life in the upside-down kingdom of God looks like. The launching point of the sermon is a list of eight blessings granted to God's people, except much of what he says doesn't sound like blessing at all.

Lots of scholars believe these eight Beatitudes at the start of chapter 5 are actually not just a list. They're cumulative, like a building he's constructing, and that this first blessing is the foundation of everything else he says in the sermon. Here's why. It all starts out with poverty of spirit. It all starts with recognizing that we're spiritually poor. We have nothing to offer God, no reason for him to choose us or love us.

And if we want to get really honest about it, we aren't just empty-handed. We don't show up with zero. We're in debt. And God says that's the starting point. Can you see how this idea stands in stark contrast to the attitude of the Pharisees who think they're nailing it? Can you see why their attitude is an affront to God? They're waiting for everyone else to take note and catch up. But Jesus tells his followers that the foundation for life in the kingdom is recognizing your desperate need for God. And

And if these postures and blessings are in fact cumulative, here's what that might look like. When we realize our spiritual poverty, we will mourn it. And that will produce a meekness in us as we engage the world. And by the way, meekness isn't weakness. It's having the wisdom and discipline to restrain your strength while you seek the good of others. Meekness gives way to a desire for God to increase our righteousness. Then it becomes easier for us to show mercy to others because we know what it's like to struggle.

God continues to purify us as we engage with him. We'll become people who don't run from conflict, but people who, like Jesus, enter into the chaos and create peace. We won't be peacekeepers. We'll be peacemakers. The life of a humble, hungry, meek, merciful, pure peacemaker won't be an easy one. Jesus knows that personally. But despite trials, it'll be the most joyful life you can imagine, especially because it doesn't end when the end comes. The best reward is still ahead.

The hard part about this sermon is, it's easy to turn it into a checklist, to measure what we have and what we lack. Then suddenly we're back at the start again, needing to be reminded of our spiritual poverty. Depending on how my day or my week went, I'll feel like I'm doing really great, or like I'm blowing it entirely. And neither of those places are spiritual poverty, because they're still looking to me to be the one getting it right. So we always have to remember square one, spiritual poverty.

to remember that on our best days and on our worst days, our only hope is the cross of Christ. It's humbling to remember we bring nothing but debt, but it grants us freedom from the tyranny of the lie of man-made righteousness.

One of the other ways this is all upside down and counterintuitive is because Jesus doesn't say, look, you're never going to be able to earn your own righteousness, so we're going to lower the bar. You can pretty much do whatever you want and God will be okay with it because he's a God of love. Nope. Instead, he points out that God isn't just after right actions. He's after a right heart.

The standard isn't just don't murder anyone. That's a great basic rule for building a functional society, but it doesn't have anything to do with what it looks like to be in the kingdom of God. If you don't murder anyone, but you hate everyone around you, that doesn't sound like freedom. That doesn't echo God and his love to a fallen world. Jesus says God's standard actually goes to the heart. If his disciples weren't feeling their spiritual poverty at the beginning of this sermon, they're definitely getting a wake-up call by the end of chapter 5.

That's when he says, you therefore must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. That's what God requires. That's devastating. I can't do it. Neither can you. So what now?

It's helpful to know that the word perfect here carries the idea of being complete. But regardless of whether you read it as perfect or complete, our only hope of getting perfected or completed is by receiving the righteousness Christ grants us. That's why 517 is such great news. That's where he says he hasn't come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. He is here to complete the requirements of the law through his perfect life and perfect death.

That's another reason why it's important for us to recognize that he never broke the law. Not the Sabbath, not any other law. Because if he actually did, then he couldn't be the fulfillment of the law and he couldn't be the perfect sacrifice for our sins.

Jesus.

Jesus isn't saying it's bad to be seen doing things so much as he's saying don't do these things to be seen. Praying in public as a way to point to God is beautiful. It's all throughout scripture. But praying in public to point to me is another thing altogether. That's when we know we've lost the awareness of our spiritual poverty.

The problem with trying to be spiritually rich is that it's all monopoly money anyway. It can't actually earn you anything except some tiny plastic hotels on a piece of cardboard you're about to lose anyway. So he tells them, stop trying to get more plastic hotels. Enough with the monopoly money. Fix your eyes and your time and your efforts on something that will last. In 621, he says it like this, Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Heart follows treasure.

What you invest your time and money and emotion into is what you'll really value. I'll give you an example of this from your own life, even if we've never met. I'm guessing that by spending 20 to 30 minutes of each day fixing your eyes on God's Word in your reading and fixing your mind on His kingdom through listening to this podcast, you've probably seen your love for Him increase, right? Especially if you've been with us since day one in the Old Testament.

That's a lot of investment, and he's been at work in you and all the time you've invested in this, paying big dividends in your heart.

He says if we really start to value the eternal things above all else, then our concerns about the temporary things will be displaced. Jesus is likely talking to a group of people who are legitimately poor, and he speaks to their very real concerns with reminders of who their father is. He says it's very normal for people who don't know God and don't have him as their father to be concerned about things like food and clothes. But for God's kids, Jesus says, remember how much the father loves you.

Remember how he values you above everything else he's created. That should free your heart up to focus on the things that matter instead of the things that are temporary. As long as you're focused on those fleeting things, you'll be filled with fear. And fear usurps your allegiance to God's kingdom because it never stops demanding your attention. Instead, remember who your father is. He's providing for you.

In chapter 7, we hit a section that can seem contradictory. In verses 1-5, Jesus tells us not to judge others, but then in verses 15-20, he seems to be telling us to judge others. That's the section where he basically says to be fruit inspectors, to discern whether someone is bearing healthy or diseased fruit. There are a few things that are helpful in understanding what Jesus is communicating here. First, Scripture establishes that God is the judge of all mankind.

He's the one who hands down the verdict and its very real consequences. Humans don't have that power, nor should we, because we don't know people's hearts, and God does. Second, what we often refer to as judging, the kind humans can do, is probably better defined as approving or disapproving.

That's part of the meaning this word carries in the original Greek. Jesus knows we don't have the power to condemn someone to hell, but he's saying, don't try to weigh someone's heart because you don't actually know it. Because in presuming that you can weigh a person's heart, you're presuming to be God, and that in itself is worthy of condemnation. Jesus is calling people to humility. He's not saying judgment won't happen. It's coming for all of us.

And he's not saying, hey, to each their own, lighten up. After all, he just got through giving us two chapters of things that are unacceptable to God. There is a standard.

But since God's judgment happens at a heart level and we don't have eyes to see that, it's best to direct our discernment more toward an action being right or wrong instead of a person being good or bad. When we venture into that territory, it becomes far too easy to lose sight of square one, our own spiritual poverty. Square one isn't a spot we move on from or leave behind or outgrow. It's the foundation everything else is built on.

When we hit verses 15 through 20, where he tells us to be fruit inspectors, this still holds true. We inspect fruit. We can't see the roots, and we aren't the one who chops the tree down. But we need to be discerning because we don't want to eat the fruit if it's bad. And in the big farmer's market of religious teachers and spiritual gurus, there's a lot of rotten fruit. It might look glossy on the outside, but if it doesn't measure up to scripture, it's full of worms. By the way, we'll link to a very helpful article on this in the show notes.

It shows a much broader scope of Scripture's teaching on this topic than we have time to cover. My God shot was in 516. It says, Let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Along with everything else we read today, this passage directs our eyes off of ourselves. It humbles us real good because the point of our good works is to glorify God, not us. But then we have to ask, why would God want to get glory for something he didn't do, something I'm doing? Well, because he is doing it.

His spirit at work in us is actually the one doing the good works through us. Philippians 2.13 says it like this, It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Romans 11.36 says, From him, through him, and to him are all things. He deserves the glory because he does the doing, but he doesn't leave us empty-handed. He gets the glory and we get the joy because he's where the joy is.

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