S.O.T.M. Happy are the Merciful [Matthew 5:7]

stand for the reading of the word of God [Matthew 5:7]

As we’ve been looking at the beatitudes...Our Lord is telling the truth about how you enter His kingdom and how you live while you’re in His kingdom.  Only the poor in spirit enter.  Only the mourners enter.  Only the meek enter.  Only those who hunger and thirst after righteousness enter.  And once they enter, they continue to be poor in spirit, mournful, meek, and hungering and thirsting after even more righteousness. 

And here we come to the fifth beatitude, verse 7:  “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”  It’s consistent with what we’ve seen in the previous beatitudes, a twofold thing. [MI] In order to be in God’s kingdom, you must be one who seeks mercy.  And when you are in God’s kingdom, you will be one who gives mercy to others.  In other words, mercy is necessary to be in God’s kingdom and it’s also a characteristic of those in God’s kingdom.

The first four Beatitudes were entirely inner principles.  They dealt entirely with an inner attitude.  They dealt entirely with what you see of yourself before God.  But now, as He comes to the fifth Beatitude, this, while being also an inner attitude, begins to reach out and touch others.  There is a manifestation in this that is the fruit of the other four.  Where it is true of us that we are broken as beggars in our spirit, that we are mournful and meek and hungering and thirsting after righteousness, we will find ourselves being merciful to others as a result of it. 

One writer said, “They who in their poverty of spirit acknowledge their need of mercy begin to show mercy to others.  They who mourn their sin begin while they mourn to wash their hearts clean so they are also the pure in heart.  And the meek are the ones who are always making peace.  And they who hunger and thirst for righteousness are ever willing to be persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” 

Do you see how the first four line up with the last four?  The first four are the inner attitudes and the last four are the things they manifest.  Where there is poverty of spirit and you realize you’re nothing but a beggar, you’re going to be willing to give to somebody else who’s nothing but a beggar, and so you’ll be merciful.  And where you are mourning over your sin, you will wash your heart pure with the tears of penitence, and you will be the pure in heart.  And where you are meek, you will always be a peacemaker, because meekness makes peace.  And where you are hungering and thirsting for righteousness, you will be willing to be persecuted for righteousness’ sake.  That last four flows out of the first four.

So we’ve made a transition now in this fifth beatitude.  Now we’re going to talk about the character that is manifest when that inward attitude is there in the first four Beatitudes.  When you have those first four, there are going to be four characteristics of your character that will be made manifest, and we’ll see them as we study these last four areas in this wonderful introduction.

Now let’s look at what it means to be merciful. What a searching statement this is, what a test this is for each of us, a test of our whole standing and profession of the Christian faith…in light of the mercy given us...are we merciful? Our Lord is depicting and delineating the Christian and the Christian character. He is obviously searching us and testing us, and it’s good that we should realize this. If we take the beatitudes as a whole, we can see it as a kind of general test to which we are being subject to. How are we reacting to these searching tests?

They really tell us everything about our Christian profession. And if I dislike this kind of thing, if I’m impatient with it, if I dislike this personal analysis and probing, it shows my where I truly stand according to the NT. But if I feel that though these things search me and are hard for me, nevertheless they are essential and good for me, if I feel it is good for me to be humbled, and it is good for me to see who I am in light of God’s pattern for me, then I have a right to be hopeful and glad about my position. A person who is truly a Christian never objects to being humbled by the word of God.

So let’s look at the...

Primary principles of this beatitude

All of the beatitudes tell us truths about the Christian position…i.e. what a Christian is and how a Christian should be. The Christian gospel places its primary emphasis upon being, rather than doing. We’ve seen this before in our study, the gospel puts a greater weight upon our attitude than upon our actions. The beatitudes set this up as its main stress on what you and I essentially are in Christ rather than what we do. You can fake the actions, you can’t fake the attitude. Our Lord is concerned about our disposition, later, He is going to talk about our actions…but first He emphasizes character and disposition. This is essentially the teaching throughout the NT as a whole.

A Christian is something before he does anything; i.e. we have to be Christians before we can act like Christians. This is a fundamental point, that I’ve made in our previous studies of the sermon. Being is more important than doing, attitude is more significant than action. Primarily it’s our essential character that matters. i.e. we are not called upon as Christians to try to be Christian in various respects. To be Christian is to be a certain type of person, not upon your own efforts but upon the favor of God in Christ Jesus and the work of the Spirit within. I think there is a lot of misunderstanding this simple truth. Many people think that we are to try to be Christian or try to live like Christian in certain aspects. I don’t drink, I don’t use foul language, I don’t…the list goes on. While those things may be true of the Christians character…we are not Christian because we act a certain way…no, our actions are such because we are Christians. Because Christ has given us a new nature through repentance and faith, and the Holy Spirit, who now lives in us, begins to change us more and more like the image of Christ we act a certain way.

We are not meant to control our Christianity, our Christianity is meant to control us. This is the standpoint of the entire NT, and to live and think any other way is fallacy, for example, it’s wrong to think, “To be truly Christian I must take up and use Christian teaching and apply it.” That is not the way our Lord puts it, and that’s not the way it’s taught throughout the entire NT. The position is that my Christianity controls me; I am to be dominated by the truth because I have been made a Christian by the operation of the Holy Spirit within.

As Paul put it perfectly, “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Christ is in control of me, not I; so that I must not think of myself as a natural man who is controlling his attitude and trying to be Christian in various ways. No; His Spirit controls me at the very center of my life, He controls my very being, he controls the source of my very actions. You can’t read these beatitudes and come to any other conclusion.

The Christian faith is not something on the surface of a man’s life, it’s not some kind of coating or veneer. No it’s something that has happened and is happening at the very center of a person. That’s why the NT talks about being born again or rebirth. It’s something that happens to a man that controls all his thoughts, his outlook, his imagination, and his actions. This is why these beatitudes are so very searching. They essentially tell us, as we live our ordinary lives we are declaring all the time exactly what we are. The whole of our life is an expression and profession of what we really are…let a us truly examine ourselves.

What is mercy?

Perhaps the best way of approaching this question is by comparing mercy to grace. In the pastoral epistles Paul would say, grace, mercy, and peace to you, signifying their difference and similarity. The best definition I found came from one commentator who said… “Grace is associated with men in their sins; mercy is associated with men in their misery.” i.e. while grace looks down upon sin as a whole, mercy looks especially upon the miserable consequences of sin. So mercy really means a sense of pity plus a desire to relieve the suffering…mercy is pity plus action. Grace is getting what we don’t deserve and mercy is not getting what we do deserve. Grace and mercy are kind of two sides to the same coin.

The Christian also is supposed to be a merciful person. As having a new nature, that of Christ within us, we are suppose to be merciful as Christ is merciful to us. The Christian is to have a sense of pity upon those who are still in their misery and sin. Do you demonstrate this mercy or pity for others?

For example, when someone has wronged you and not to down play the wrong, it hurts when we’ve been attacked or wronged in some way, and it’s not right…but when we are wronged do we hold grudges? Do we seek to find ways to get back or get even in some way? Do we spend our time running the person who wronged us down ruining their reputation? Is our time and energy spent seeking our rights restored? Do you have a vindictive spirit which lacks pity? If so you are not displaying mercy.

Remember mercy is a sense of pity and a desire to relieve the suffering. A proper response to being wronged is to feel a sense of pity and sorrow for the one who wronged us. Remember what sin has done to mankind, how all of man is in bondage and entangled in sin and selfishness which results often in people hurting others. As a Christian I should understand that better than anyone, look at the cross! And by understanding that I should have pity on that person and have a sense of wanting to help them be free from that bondage that controls them.

When this is our disposition, and I know it’s not easy, it sure does make things easier..because you are not constantly being controlled by the environment around you or the people around you or the hurting around you or insulting you…no you are not being controlled by people you are being controlled by Christ who lives in you. Amen. That’s freeing brothers and sisters.

A great NT illustration of being merciful is the parable of the good Samaritan. In Luke chapter 10 Jesus tells this parable of a man on a journey who sees a poor man who has been in the hands of robbers and stops, goes across the road to where he is lying. While others have seen the man and pass by, this Samaritan does not just pass by, he pities and takes action. While the other passer-by may have felt compassion and pity for the poor man in the ditch, yet they did nothing about it. The Samaritan however is one who is merciful; he is sorry for the victim, goes across the road, dresses the wounds of the man, takes the man with him and makes provision for him to recover. That is being merciful. It does not mean only feeling pity; it means feeling pity and then doing something about it to relieve the situation.

Of course the greatest and perfect picture of this is God sending His only begotten Son into the world, and the coming of the Son of God. Why? Because there is mercy with Him. God saw our pitiable state, he saw the suffering, and in spite of the law breaking of man, He moved into action. So the Son came and dealt with our condition. Hence the necessity of the doctrine of atonement. There is no contradiction between the justice of God and the mercy of God. They have met together in Jesus Christ. The justice of God is satisfied as the penalty for sin has been poured out upon Christ, this also is the beautiful display of the mercy of God…Christ in our place…Christ taking the punishment we deserve.

Mercy is God looking down upon man in his pitiful condition as the result of sin and having pity upon him. The mercy of God, God pitying man in his misery and taking action to alleviate that misery, it’s God not giving man what he deserves but sending Christ to be our propitiation. And all those who repent and believe on the Son has eternal life…so you see how mercy and grace are two sides to the same coin. And they completely satisfy the justice of God. If God would have just said, oh forget about that sin and forgave it, he wouldn’t be just…punishment had to be paid for rebellion against a holy God and Christ took that punishment. This doctrine of mercy is a beautiful thing.

Now, that is more or less the definition of mercy, and it’s wonderful…the real problem is however in this beatitude when we come to the second part that misunderstanding comes in.

For they shall obtain mercy???

There is probably no beatitude more misunderstood than this one. Many interpret it like this… “if I am merciful towards others, God will be merciful towards me; if I forgive, I shall be forgiven. The condition of my being forgiven is I forgive.” And some will use passages like the Lord’s prayer “forgive us or trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” or the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18 to back their idea that God will forgive me if I extend forgiveness to others, God will show mercy on me if I show mercy on others.

Well, if we were to judge strictly on those terms, it’s almost certain that no one would be forgiven and no one would see heaven. And it amazes me that Christians would think this way, it goes against the whole doctrine of grace altogether. Remember!!!

Scripture must always be interpreted by Scripture. We must rightly divide the word of truth. Our Lord is really saying that I am only truly forgiven when I am truly repentant. To be truly repentant means that I realize I deserve nothing but punishment, and that if I am forgiven it is to be attributed entirely to the love of God and to His mercy and grace, and to nothing else at all. But I go further; it means this. If I am truly repentant and realize my position before God, and realize that I am only forgiven in that way, then of necessity I shall forgive those who trespass against me.

Let me put it like this… This beatitude flows out of the first four beatitudes. I am poor in spirit; I realize that I have no righteousness; I realize that face to face with God and His righteousness I am utterly helpless; I can do nothing. Not only that. I mourn because of the sin that is within me; I have come to see, as the result of the operation of the Holy Spirit, the blackness of my own heart. I know what it is to cry out, ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me?’ and desire to be rid of this vileness that is within me.

Not only that. I am meek, which means that now that I have experienced this true view of myself, nobody else can hurt me, nobody else can insult me, nobody can ever say anything too bad about me. I have seen myself, and my greatest enemy does not know the worst about me. I have seen myself as something truly hateful, and it is because of this that I have hungered and thirsted after righteousness. I have longed for it. I have seen that I cannot create or produce it, and that nobody else can. I have seen my desperate position in the sight of God. I have hungered and thirsted for that righteousness which will put me right with God, that will reconcile me to God, and give me a new nature and life. And I have seen it in Christ. I have been filled; I have received it all as a free gift.

Doesn’t that state then naturally change my attitude towards others? If this is true of me I no longer see people as I once did, I see people as victims of Satan and sin and to the ways of the world. I come to see men as not people I simply dislike but as people to be pitied. As Christ changes us we then naturally have changed attitudes towards others. We then feel a sense of sorrow for all who are helpless slaves of sin. That’s our attitude towards people.

Do we recognize this when people are being hateful and rude and maligning against us? We will see this later in the sermon on the mount…when people are being this way towards us, we are still to be merciful. We’ve all dealt with people who are bitter, angry, mean spirited…that way is so unlike Christ, it is so unlike God who has offered forgiveness through Jesus, as Christians we should not feel bitterness and angry back to them…we should pity them, we should feel sorrow for them as they are slaves to sin, as we once were before Christ freed us... If we have mercy, we give mercy.

If we have truly experienced what it means to be forgiven. If I know that I am a debtor to mercy alone, if I know that I am a Christian solely because of that free grace of God alone, there should be no pride left in me, there should be nothing vindictive, there should be no insisting upon my rights. Rather, as I look out upon others, if there is anything in them that is unworthy, or that is a manifestation of sin, I should have this great sorrow for them in my heart for them.

If you are merciful in this way, you have mercy! And you will have it every time you fall into sin, because when you realize what you have done you’ll come back to God again and again and say, “have mercy upon me, O God.” Then in turn you’ll give mercy much more because of the mercy showed towards you. We proclaim then whether we’ve received forgiveness or not by whether we forgive or not. If I am forgiven, I shall forgive.

What makes me merciful is the grace of God. It all comes down to this. If I am not merciful there can be only one explanation; I have not understood the grace and the mercy of God. Let us examine ourselves friends. I’m not asking whether you do this or do that…I’m simply asking…are you merciful? Are you sorry for every sinner even though that sinner offends you? Do you have pity on those still trapped in sins snare? That’s the happiness test we face today…are you merciful? Let us all cry out to God, “have mercy upon me for not displaying mercy towards others.”