22/02/2021
Matthew 5 - The Sermon on the Mount
A. Introduction to the Sermon on the Mount.
1. (1) Jesus prepares to teach His disciples.
And seeing the multitudes, He went up on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him.
a. And seeing the multitudes: The previous section mentioned that great multitudes followed Him, coming from many different regions (Matthew 4:25). In response to this, Jesus went up on a mountain.
i. It is wrong to think that Jesus went up on a mountain to remove Himself from the multitudes. It is true that Jesus gave this teaching to His disciples, but this use of the term is probably broad, including many among the great multitudes that followed Him mentioned in Matthew 4:25. By the end of the Sermon on the Mount, people in general heard His message and were amazed (Matthew 7:28).
ii. Luke says that this same basic material was, on a different occasion, spoken to a crowd of His disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem, and from the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear Him and be healed of their diseases (Luke 6:17). Yet, in the beginning of the teaching, Luke writes: Then He lifted up His eyes toward His disciples, and said (Luke 6:20). The sense of this is much the same as in Matthew; that this sermon was spoken to the disciples of Jesus, but disciples in a broad sense of those who had followed Him and heard Him; not in the narrow sense of only the Twelve.
iii. “Jesus was not monastic in spirit, and He had not two doctrines, one for the many, another for the few, like Buddha. His highest teaching…was meant for the million.” (Bruce)
iv. “A crypt or cavern would have been out of all character for a message which is to be published upon the housetops, and preached to every creature under heaven.” (Spurgeon)
b. When He was seated: This was the common posture for teaching in that culture. It was customary for the teacher to sit and the hearers to stand.
i. “Sitting was the accepted posture of synagogue or school teachers (Luke 4:20; cf. Matthew 13:2; 23:2; 24:3).” (Carson)
ii. Now in Matthew’s record Jesus will speak and teach; it is God speaking but no longer through an inspired human personality like Jeremiah or Isaiah or Samuel; now the truth of God spoke through the exact personality of God.
c. His disciples came to Him: This again probably has in mind a group much larger than the Twelve, who to this point have not been introduced as a group in this Gospel.
i. “He ascends the hill to get away from the crowds below, and the disciples, now a considerable band, gather about Him. Others may not be excluded, but the disciples are the audience proper.” (Bruce)
2. (2) Jesus begins to teach.
Then He opened His mouth and taught them, saying:
a. Then He opened His mouth: This means that Jesus used his voice in a strong way to teach this crowd. He spoke with energy, projecting His thoughts with earnestness.
i. “It is not superfluous to say that ‘he opened his mouth, and taught them,’ for he had taught them often when his mouth was closed.” (Spurgeon)
ii. “He began to speak to them with freedom, so as the multitude might hear.” (Poole) “Jesus Christ spoke like a man in earnest; he enunciated clearly, and spake loudly. He lifted up his voice like a trumpet, and published salvation far and wide, like a man who had something to say which he desired his audience to hear and feel.” (Spurgeon)
iii. “In Greek, it is used of a solemn, grave and dignified utterance. It was used, for instance, of the saying of an oracle. It is the natural preface to a most weighty saying.” (Barclay)
b. And taught them, saying: What they heard was a message that has long been recognized as the sum of Jesus’ - or anyone’s - ethical teaching. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us how to live.
i. It has been said if you took all the good advice for how to live ever uttered by any philosopher or psychiatrist or counselor, took out the foolishness and boiled it all down to the real essentials, you would be left with a poor imitation of this great message by Jesus.
ii. The Sermon on the Mount is sometimes thought of as Jesus’ “Declaration of the Kingdom.” The American Revolutionaries had their Declaration of Independence. Karl Marx had his Communist Manifesto. With this message, Jesus declared what His Kingdom is all about.
iii. It presents a radically different agenda than what the nation of Israel expected from the Messiah. It does not present the political or material blessings of the Messiah’s reign. Instead, it expresses the spiritual implications of the rule of Jesus in our lives. This great message tells us how we will live when Jesus is our Lord. “In the first century there was little agreement among Jews as to what the messianic kingdom would be like. One very popular assumption was that the Roman yoke would be shattered and there would be political peace and mounting prosperity.” (Carson)
iv. It is important to understand that the Sermon on the Mount does not deal with salvation as such, but it lays out for the disciple and the potential disciple how regarding Jesus as King translates into ethics and daily living.
v. It can’t be proved, but in my opinion, the Sermon on the Mount was Jesus’ “standard” sermon. It was the core of His itinerant message: a simple proclamation of how God expects us to live, contrasting with common Jewish misunderstandings of that life. It may be that when Jesus preached to a new audience, He often preached this sermon or used the themes from it.
vi. Yet we can also regard this as Jesus training the disciples in the message He wanted them to carry to others. It was His message, meant to be passed onto and through them. “In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew shows us Jesus instructing his disciples in the message which was his and which they were to take to men.” (Barclay) In the Gospel of Luke, the material similar to the Sermon on the Mount comes immediately after Jesus chose the Twelve.
vii. Barclay also points out that the verb translated taught is in the imperfect tense, “Therefore it describes repeated and habitual action, and the translation should be: ‘This is what he used to teach them.”
viii. It is clear that the Sermon on the Mount had a significant impact on the early church. The early Christians make constant reference to it and their lives display the glory of radical disciples.
B. The Beatitudes: the character of kingdom citizens.
The first portion of the Sermon on the Mount is known as the Beatitudes, which means “The Blessings” but can also be understood as giving the believer his “be - attitudes” - the attitudes he should “be.” In the Beatitudes, Jesus sets forth both the nature and the aspirations of citizens of His kingdom. They have and are learning these character traits.
All of these character traits are marks and goals of all Christians. It is not as if we can major in one to the exclusion of others, as is the case with spiritual gifts. There is no escape from our responsibility to desire every one of these spiritual attributes. If you meet someone who claims to be a Christian but displays and desires none of these traits, you may rightly wonder about their salvation, because they do not have the character of kingdom citizens. But if they claim to have mastered these attributes, you may question their honesty.
1. (3) The foundation: poverty of spirit.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
a. Blessed: Jesus promised blessing to His disciples, promising that the poor in spirit are blessed. The idea behind the ancient Greek word for blessed is “happy,” but in the truest, godly sense of the word, not in our modern sense of merely being comfortable or entertained at the moment.
i. This same word for blessed - which in some sense means “happy” - is applied to God in 1 Timothy 1:11: according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God. “Makarios then describes that joy which has its secret within itself, that joy which is serene and untouchable, and self-contained, that joy which is completely independent of all the chances and changes of life.” (Barclay)
ii. In Matthew 25:34, Jesus said that on the Day of Judgment He would say to His people, Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. On that day, He will judge between the blessed and the cursed – He both knows and explains what are the requirements for the blessed one. We can also say that no one was ever blessed more than Jesus; He knows what goes into a blessed life.
iii. “You have not failed to notice that the last word of the Old Testament is ‘curse,’ and it is suggestive that the opening sermon of our Lord’s ministry commences with the word ‘Blessed.’” (Spurgeon)
iv. “Note, also, with delight, that the blessing is in every case in the presenttense, a happiness to be now enjoyed and delighted in. It is not ‘Blessed shall be,’ but ‘Blessed are.’” (Spurgeon)
b. The poor in spirit: This is not a man’s confession that he is by nature insignificant, or personally without value, for that would be untrue. Instead, it is a confession that he is sinful and rebellious and utterly without moral virtues adequate to commend him to God.
i. The poor in spirit recognize that they have no spiritual “assets.” They know they are spiritually bankrupt. We might say that the ancient Greek had a word for the “working poor” and a word for the “truly poor.” Jesus used the word for the truly poor here. It indicates someone who must beg for whatever they have or get.
ii. Poverty of spirit cannot be artificially induced by self-hatred; the Holy Spirit and our response to His working in our hearts bring it about.
iii. This beatitude is first, because this is where we start with God. “A ladder, if it is to be of any use, must have its first step near the ground, or feeble climbers will never be able to mount. It would have been a grievous discouragement to struggling faith if the first blessing had been given to the pure in heart; to that excellence the young beginner makes no claim, while to poverty of spirit he can reach without going beyond his line.” (Spurgeon)
iv. Everyone can start here; it isn’t first blessed are the pure or the holy or the spiritual or the wonderful. Everyone can be poor in spirit. “Not what I have, but what I have not, is the first point of contact, between my soul and God.” (Spurgeon)
c. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven: Those who are poor in spirit, so poor they must beg, are rewarded. They receive the kingdom of heaven, because poverty of spirit is an absolute prerequisite for receiving the kingdom of heaven, and as long as we harbor illusions about our own spiritual resources, we will never receive from God what we absolutely need to be saved.
i. “The kingdom of heaven is not given on the basis of race, earned merits, the military zeal and prowess of Zealots, or the wealth of a Zacchaeus. It is given to the poor, the despised publicans, the prostitutes, those who are so ‘poor’ they know they can offer nothing and do not try. They cry for mercy and they alone are heard.” (Carson)
ii. “The poor in spirit are lifted from the dunghill, and set, not among hired servants in the field, but among princes in the kingdom…‘Poor in spirit;’ the words sound as if they described the owners of nothing, and yet they describe the inheritors of all things. Happy poverty! Millionaires sink into insignificance, the treasure of the Indies evaporate in smoke, while to the poor in spirit remains a boundless, endless, faultless kingdom, which renders them blessed in the esteem of him who is God over all, blessed for ever.” (Spurgeon)
iii. The call to be poor in spirit is placed first for a reason, because it puts the following commands into perspective. They cannot be fulfilled by one’s own strength, but only by a beggar’s reliance on God’s power. No one mourns until they are poor in spirit; no one is meek towards others until he has a humble view of himself. If you don’t sense your own need and poverty, you will never hunger and thirst after righteousness; and if you have too high a view of yourself, you will find it difficult to be merciful to others.
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