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***The following is an unedited auto-generated transcript and may contain serious errors and speakers other than Dallas Willard. It is included here to assist your study. Please check the original audio for an authentic record of the event.

Dallas: I want to start out this morning by reference to a verse in the book of Daniel, the book
of Daniel in the second chapter, this very famous dream that the king had.
King dreamed of a great image.
Its brightness was excellent, the 31st verse and following of the second chapter of Daniel.
It stood in a very terrifying way before him.
Its head was made of gold, its breast and its arms were of silver, its belly and thighs
of brass, its legs of iron, its feet part of iron, part of clay.
And as Nebuchadnezzar watched this image, something strange happened.
A stone was cut out without hands.
In the 34th verse of the second chapter, a stone was cut out without hands.
Now, how do you cut out a stone without hands?
The very unusual stone, we’re going to be running into this stone all along as we study
it, it’s very unusual stone, it’s something of substance, structure, and it’s going to
do something to the kingdoms of the world, but it’s cut out without hands.
The kingdom of God is not something which people make, it isn’t devised by human contrivance
by writing a bunch of excellent laws or making a bunch of excellent social arrangements or
whatever and this is the significance of this being cut out without hands.
Now this stone which was cut out without hands smoked the image up on his feet that were
of iron and clay and break them in pieces.
And then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken into pieces,
ground into dust, and became like the chaff of the summer freshing floors and the wind
carried them away.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been involved in freshing, do you know what the wind does
to chaff?
And all of these, this gold, this silver, this iron and so on, these represent the best
of the kingdoms of the world.
And this stone which is cut out without hands is going to fall upon the best of human organization
and dissolve it and blow away in the wind.
Now what has happened in the past?
It’s been one human kingdom against the other, isn’t it?
So we have these endless wars and hassles going on with people being butchered and all
that sort of thing.
But this time it’s going to be something quite different.
A new principle is to come and in the presence of that principle the kingdoms of the world
are simply to dissolve.
This is the stone which the builders rejected when Jesus came.
You remember that he said, the builders are so wise, they have their plan of building
their little building and they reject the very thing which could be the head of the
corner, the head of the corner, the keystone that holds the whole building together.
They reject that because they’re so smart.
They have a set of human principles for devising governments and so on and so they throw away
God’s principle.
But God in time will throw his principle upon the kingdoms of the world and what will happen?
The kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ and
he shall reign forever and ever.
That’s the kingdom of God, the stone cut out without hands.
The stone that smoked the image, this is the 35th verse of the second chapter of Daniel,
the stone that smoked the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
And you remember that Habakkuk, the prophet, speaks of the time coming when the knowledge
of God shall cover the earth like the waters cover the sea.
Because this principle which comes into life and dissolves human kingdoms is nothing but
the knowledge of God, that’s all it is, it’s the knowledge of God.
Now when Jesus came, he preached the kingdom of God.
He preached the gospel of the kingdom.
He was doing nothing but simply preaching what was foreseen here some centuries early
in the book of Daniel.
He’s preaching the presence of the stone, he’s saying it’s here now.
The kingdom of God had come at a special time, a special place and as he said in reference
to John the Baptist, after John the Baptist, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and
violent men take it by force.
That statement has puzzled a lot of people.
It simply means the words violence there are too strong.
I guess we have a picture of someone with an axe beating the door down or something
like that, you know, really going at it, but it’s not talking about that kind of violence,
it’s simply saying that now people can come into the kingdom of God simply by moving along
forcefully in the will of God, whereas before they couldn’t.
Up until the coming of the stone, up until the coming of the stone, it was impossible
to live with this dissolving principle which lays aside all of the human devices for regulating,
manipulating, controlling other people, it was impossible.
But now the time was fulfilled, the preparation had been made.
And when Jesus comes, he comes preaching the gospel of the kingdom, good news that the
kingdom of heaven is at hand.
It had never been at hand before.
Now you have to watch some of your translations because they speak as, wrongly, they translate
the verses where it says the attempt to the kingdom of heaven is at hand, as if it were
to say it is about to come.
And what this has done, done something very subtle is, if you listen to many people or
read many books, they will tell you this, the kingdom of heaven was about to come.
But because the Jews rejected Jesus, it did not come.
I’m sure you’ve heard that.
And so consequently we’re living now in this sort of parenthesis of whatever, between the
time when he will be accepted by the Jewish nation and the kingdom will come upon earth.
It is a part and parcel of this interpretation that the Sermon on the Mount which we’re studying
now is regarded as something which is not applicable to our age.
And there are many, many people tell you this, that this is an unrealizable ideal which is
impossible now and only will be possible when the kingdom of God comes bodily upon the earth
and Jesus is ruling out of Jerusalem and so on.
Well you have to, that kind of mistake, and please forgive me for just calling it a mistake,
there’s so many roots, it’s like trying to dig up what we had back in Missouri called
post oak trees.
You start to dig up or get rid of a post oak tree, you have to dig that every piece of
root that you can find out.
Or if you don’t, yeah, another week and you’ll have five trees instead of one.
And it’s this kind of error that you have here, you have to start somewhere on it.
I think one of the best ways to start it is simply with the fact that these translations
of the statement that the kingdom of heaven is at hand does not say that it is about to
come, it says it has come, it has arrived, it is here.
And this is borne out by everything Jesus said as he taught and as he lived for the
period which he was on the earth.
The kingdom of heaven is something which is in this world now and it came into the world
when the rock, the stone, Jesus himself came into the world.
By the way, if you have a good exhaustive concord, it’s worth your time to take the
words rock and stone and study them all through the Bible and see the references to Jesus
as a stone, as a rock, and how that’s interpreted in the New Testament by Paul as it rises.
It’s very worth doing.
And especially when you see the tie-in between him and the dissolving of all of the kingdoms
of the world, the absorption of all of them into the knowledge and the kingdom of God.
Now when Jesus came in Matthew, we might look at Matthew the fourth chapter now for a moment.
When Jesus came, he preached the kingdom.
And if you look at Matthew, Matthew 423, for example, you see that Jesus was presenting
simply the kingdom.
And here it doesn’t even say the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven.
By the way, don’t be confused about the variation of phraseology, kingdom of God or kingdom
of heaven.
With a lot of ingenuity, you might be able to make something out of that difference,
but it wouldn’t be worth much, believe me.
And so the best thing to do is just read it, and like in this passage, it doesn’t even
say kingdom of God or heaven, it just says the kingdom, you will see here.
And Jesus went about all Galilee teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel
of the kingdom.
Jesus really wasn’t too interested, it seems to me, in making very clear whose kingdom
he represented.
He thought that would come pretty clear as he went along and taught.
And as he represented the kingdom through his life and through his teachings, he was
actually redefining what God was and what heaven meant.
Paul says he brought life and immortality to life through the gospel.
So when Jesus came, he wasn’t concerned too much about how people thought about God.
And he explicitly told them on some occasions, forget what you think you know about it, because
no man has seen him at any time, I have come to tell you what he’s like.
So he just speaks of the kingdom sometimes.
And here the presentation is of him just as preaching the good news of the kingdom, the
good news that there is an order in which people can live and find blessedness.
And he not only preached this, but he showed it forth in his healing, all manner of sicknesses
and all manner of diseases.
Now we want to be very clear about who this is that’s presenting the kingdom.
There’s a book by J.B. Phillips called Your God is Too Small, isn’t that the name of it?
The title is really worth the money you have to pay for the book, because it gets at something
which is a constant sickness in our way of thinking, not only about God, but about Jesus.
Who was Jesus?
Was he just some person who happened to live in Galilee and Jerusalem a long time ago and
had some nice things to say?
Who was he?
If you look at your gospels, you’ll see that they’ve set out to do different things.
And that’s sensible, isn’t it?
Because after all, who would need four gospels, all of which did the same thing?
They’re different.
The gospels are different sorts of writing.
In particular, the Gospel of John stands out as the most unusual.
You may know that the other three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called synoptic
gospels.
Synoptic or synoptic gospels.
But John is not classified in that way.
Now synoptic means just sort of same view, seeing with, literally.
You know about optics.
And sin is just a preposition for with.
The sameness of view, both of them sort of set out to try to give a chronological analysis
of the life of Jesus.
I mean, all three of them, sorry, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Now the Gospel of John is written much later than the others.
The authorship questions about its composition and so on are interesting but not worth going
into here, I think.
And I’ll just sort of skate over those.
And if any of you wish to discuss them, we might do it privately.
But the important thing about the Gospel of John is that it was written after there had
been enough time to assimilate a great deal more of who this person was, this Jesus.
And the Gospel of John does not attempt to present a historical Jesus at all.
There is no attempt in the Gospel of John to present Jesus as any kind of connected
narrative, his life, anything of the sort.
Historical incidents are used only as illustrations.
The Gospel of John is at once both the richest and most difficult of Gospels.
And very often we give it to people who have just come into the way, and it is good that
we do so, but we need to help them understand it.
Because the Gospel of John is concerned to present the eternal Son, not just the historical
person, Jesus.
The eternal Son is something much larger than Jesus.
Jesus is the incarnate Word.
He is a restriction, a constriction upon the law guards.
He humbled himself and took upon himself the form of the servant and became obedient under
the law.
See, there was a constriction there.
He accepted that.
He took that upon himself.
But that means that if we merely see the historical Jesus, we don’t understand who it was who
came preaching the Gospel of the King.
We must understand that he also is the eternal Son.
I want us to look at some passages now that will help us keep that in mind as we read
on.
First of all just a few quick references to the first chapter of John, the Gospel of John.
In the beginning was the Word.
Now what you’re getting here is an introduction, the dramatis persona, as they sometimes call
it, of a drama.
You’re getting an introduction to the main figure of the drama.
In the beginning was the Word.
What does the first verses of the Bible say?
In the beginning God.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Now you’re going to find the same thing here, except you’re going to have a discussion
of the Word.
That creation is going to be introduced right here, isn’t it?
Now you watch how it goes.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God.
An interesting preposition crossed there.
With God.
A particular kind of closeness and a particular kind of involution between things of involvement
was with God.
The Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
See the writer is struggling with a difficult kind of distinctness and unity.
He’s trying to say things, repeat himself, sort of like stuttering.
He’s onto something extremely difficult to express.
The distinctness of the Word and yet the unity of the Word with God.
Now then we get to creation.
Okay, the first verse said, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
See the writer here is using that same structure of creation to introduce us to the Word.
How do we know the Word?
What is the Word like?
Well, all things were made by him.
All things were made by him and without him, nothing.
That’s literally what the Greek says, nothing.
Without him, nothing.
In him, in him was life.
And the light that was in him was the light of men and the light shown in darkness and
the darkness did not overwhelm it, didn’t put it out, didn’t extinguish it.
In the early verses of Genesis it says the earth was without form and void and darkness
was upon the face of the deep.
The darkness that is being talked about here is not the kind that you have when the light’s
going.
The darkness here is something much deeper.
It is a kind of disorder, a kind of chaos, and what the writer is saying is that in the
process of creation there came into this chaos the formative principle which is the Word
of God and it was strong enough that the chaos and the darkness did not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God.
Now he takes another path.
He has been attempting to identify the Word by reference to creation.
Now he has a reference to a historical incident.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John.
The same came as a witness to bear witness to the light that all men through him might
believe.
It was not that light, but he was sent to bear witness of that light that was the true
light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
He was in the world.
Jesus was in the world before he came into the world.
He was here all along, and yet he came into his incarnate form, settled down as a human
being among his own.
Here he was, the historical person, identifiable as a human being, walking around in Galilee,
Jerusalem and so on, and yet he was present in all of the order in nature, human society
and everything, present all around.
So he came unto his own.
He came where he already was, and what happened?
His own received him not.
He came into his own, and his own received him not, but as many as received him, to them
gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name, which were
born not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
These people who believe they are the children of God, why?
Because they were born of God, God created them, they came from him.
Now this is very important to understand when we hear the King coming, the incarnate King
coming to announce his kingdom, because his kingdom is his creation, and he creates his
kingdom by bringing people to birth by his power.
A word was made flesh, this word that we’ve been talking about, astounding fact, he was
made flesh and he dwelt among us.
We beheld his glory as the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and
truth.
It goes on to say that law came by Moses, that was one part of the history of Israel,
but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.
Now we’re going to see that opposition repeatedly as we study the good news of the kingdom in
these weeks to come.
Law came by Moses, grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.
We’re going to see them contrasted in many, many ways beginning with a lesson for today.
Very quickly, just a reference to Colossians, I’m going to leave it to you to read many
of the references which I’ll give on the sheets that I hand out each time, but this one is
I think worth referring to before we go on.
Colossians, the first chapter, beginning in the 15th verse referring to Jesus, who is
the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature, for by him were all things
created that are in heaven and that are in earth, this is the 16th verse of the first
chapter of Colossians, visible and invisible, whether thrones, dominions, principalities,
powers, all things were created by him and for him and he is before or prior to all things
or more fundamental than all things, more basic than all things, that’s much better
to get the sense of, because before it seems to have a temporal reference, but that’s not
the heart of it.
The heart of it is that Jesus Christ is the most basic thing in all creation.
It’s that upon which everything else rests.
And this phrase, synesthetes that it says, by him all things consist, by him all things
hang together.
He is, if we can speak this way, the glue of the universe.
He holds everything together.
We lose the sense of consist in modern English, consist, consist, stands together, sticks
together.
He is the principle of order in everything from the bird song to the instinct of the
baby, to suckle, to the processes of the body, to the ways of the sea.
When you realize who he was, it’s no longer a wonder that he can tell the ways to be still,
that he can reach out and heal a person whose eyes are blind.
The wonder would be if it didn’t happen, when you realize who he was and who he is.
But you see, a lot of our faithlessness in him comes because we don’t realize his majesty,
his magnificence, and consequently we say thank you, we just as soon run our own lives.
But he is the one in whom all things consist.
Now this is the one who is the way, the truth, and the light.
And I hope you will look at the way I have phrased this in this first, this paragraph
under Arabic 1, Jesus is the incarnation of the order present in the entire universe.
He is the way, the truth, and the light.
That of course is from John 14, 6, or 7, I forget which, 7 I believe it is.
Now what that means is wherever there is a way, wherever there is truth, wherever there
is light, the eternal sun is present lighting every man that cometh into the world.
This is the one who we find teaching in the synagogues in Galilee.
Now how does the incarnate king present his kingdom?
He presents it by his power, by speaking the creative word and it being done.
He created everything.
How does God create?
According to the story, he is created by speaking the truth, he speaks the truth, he says let
there be light, and there was light.
Now this creative work is still going on, it still goes on in us today whenever the
sun speaks in our lives.
Things are changed, but something is created which we never dreamed could be created, and
it comes to pass.
What was it in the army they call the what, 14 day wonders?
People who become soldiers through a quick course, or we’ve got something that beats
that.
Sometimes startling changes happen overnight because he speaks the creative word, but remember
who he is.
And when he came into Galilee, and he went about to the synagogues, and he saw people
who were in need of help, he spoke the creative word.
I’d like to read you what I find sometimes the most hauntingly beautiful passage.
I’ll just read it to you, you don’t need to turn, it’s in Mark the first chapter.
This is a Sabbath setting where the people in their law would not do certain things until
the sun had gone down on the Sabbath, and then they could do their work.
And this says, at even when the sun did set, they brought unto him all that were diseased
and them that were possessed, and all of the city was gathered together at the door.
And he healed many that were sick of diverse diseases and cast out many devils and suffered
them not to speak, because they knew him.
You can just see him, you have to picture him in a real live house of some sort, sitting
as a real live human being, and yet speaking the creative word, conveying the power of
God and the kingdom of God into the lives of the people who came with their needs.
Well this is one way that he brought the power of the kingdom and put it into the world,
but it’s not the main way, by giving it the truth.
Now that’s true whether you’re teaching someone algebra or history or anything.
You transform a mind by giving it the truth, and if you give it falsehood, there are severe
limits within which it can be transformed, because falsehood always confuses.
Falsehood always confuses.
You watch it and check that out and see if it isn’t true.
I think you’ll find it’s true.
Falsehood always confuses, because you’re always running into the facts for one thing.
But the truth brings a clarity and a direction both to the feelings and to the will, which
harmonizes the life, which Jesus intended to bring harmony and order into the lives
of chaotic, disorganized, dark minds, and he did so by speaking the truth.
Now this is what the Sermon on the Mount is all about.
It is a continuous discourse in which he lays out sufficient principles for anyone who wishes
to live in the blessedness of the Kingdom.
You know, I borrowed Dick’s interpreter’s Bible the other night.
I’ve never had enough money to buy one of those.
And I borrowed it and was reading it, and I found that one of the men who was writing
in there said that there is no order in the Sermon on the Mount.
That it’s obviously a collection of sayings with no principle of unity, couldn’t possibly
have been a sermon.
I hope you’ll kind of tuck that away and keep it in mind as you read the Sermon on the Mount
and see if it’s true.
I don’t think it’s true, but at present I’d like for you to just accept that as another
opinion about the Sermon on the Mount.
Believe me, if you read the literature that’s been evolved about the Sermon on the Mount,
you’re bound to be convinced that somebody’s confused, because so many things are said
about this Sermon.
It is not untypical of things in general where the best of things that are given are twisted
and distorted and used by the adversary to hurt people the most.
And people have been desperately hurt by the Sermon on the Mount.
Some by simply neglecting it, others by misunderstanding it.
So let’s look at this very carefully now, and I’d like for you to be extremely critical
as you read this and as you listen to me as I discuss it.
I’m going to probably be spending about four Sundays counting this one on the fifth, sixth,
and seventh chapters of Matthew.
And I’m going to be talking about some of the most difficult things for us to talk about
and deal with, but some of the most important things that we must deal with.
Just like next Sunday, I intend to talk about sex and divorce, because these are some of
the things which the Sermon on the Mount has hurt most people by misunderstanding what
it’s teaching.
But let’s begin with the Beatitudes.
And if you have your sheet there, you’ll see that the last part is mainly given over to
that.
And I have a long paragraph here which you may read.
I’ll be commenting on parts of it.
The Beatitudes are among the things which have been most puzzling to most people.
People have been very hard put to understand what he is doing here.
And this has come out in some of the translations which have been made.
I don’t know what your impression was, has been, as you’ve read these over the years.
I know that some of you have read them many times and possibly have even memorized them.
But what was Jesus doing here?
The first thing we want to get clear in our heads is he’s not telling us to do anything.
Like for example, many people say, blessed are they that mourn, so they say, well, let’s
go right out and mourn so we can be blessed.
We want to be blessed, don’t we?
Well, it says blessed are they that are reviled and persecuted, so let’s go get a little persecution
somewhere and we’ll be blessed.
Right?
No, Jesus isn’t doing that at all.
He isn’t even guaranteeing you that if you go out and get persecuted, you’ll be blessed.
He isn’t guaranteeing you that if you mourn, you’ll be blessed.
These are not little quick ways to bless it enough.
Let’s remember that.
The first beatitude has been abused most seriously in this way, because many people have thought
it meant something like have a low opinion of yourself, please, and you’ll be blessed.
And so they went right out and tried to manage that.
Low opinion of ourselves and we’ll be blessed.
It doesn’t say anything about opinions anyway, but if you interpret it as a set of commands
as to how to get blessed, you’re in trouble already.
It isn’t that at all.
What then is it?
If you will look at the way I’ve stated the theme of the sermon in the middle of your
sheet, you’ll see that I say here, Jesus is contrasting the two ways to bless it.
Blessedness, by the way, is a very strong Greek word, like Aristotle, or Nicodemus.
Macarioi is used as a contrast with eudaemia, or eudaemonia.
Eudaemonia is a kind of human fulfillment, but Macarioi is used to apply to God.
For example, in the Ethics, it is said that the philosopher has the blessedness, Macarioi
blessedness.
Why?
Well, because he thinks about the sorts of things that God thinks about, like that.
He doesn’t just have eudaemonia.
He has this really special something, because there’s an association between his thoughts
and the kind of thinking which God does.
That’s typical of the use of this term.
It is a very special and strong word, Macarioi.
Jesus says, if you want real blessedness, you have two general ways.
Eudaemonia, the blessedness of the Kingdom, becomes a gift to God, so that when you have
it, it is all praise and all glory to God, and man just gets the joy.
He gets the righteousness.
But he doesn’t get the credit.
Who needs the credit anyway?
If you’ve got the goods, who needs the credit, right?
Okay.
So, that’s one kind of blessedness, and the other kind of blessedness is the sort of blessedness
which we work up, and we say, aren’t we the greatest things around because we’ve done
this and we’ve done that, and we’ve so on and so on and so on.
Now what Jesus is doing in the Beatitudes is he is taking the righteousness, the blessedness
which comes by human attainment, and he’s just delivering a knockout blow to it.
And he is taking some things which, if you understand what they’re saying, are almost
insulting, and saying, those kinds of people are blessed too.
Now get the setting.
Look back in the fourth verse, fourth chapter, and his fame went out through all Syria.
That’s the northern part of, well, it’s north, north of the Sea of Galilee, all the way up
even into what we sometimes call Asia Minor.
His fame went out, and they brought on him all sick people, tormented, diverse diseases,
possessed with devils, lunatics.
Now that’s important, lunatics, and those which had palsy, because if you want to know
what he’s doing with the Beatitudes, you have to understand who he was talking to, who was
the group in front of him.
And it consisted of all of these people, sick, mournful, crazy, possessed people.
Because the first verses up through the sixteenth verse of the fifth chapter of Matthew is addressed
to that crowd of people.
And when he wants to convey what the blessedness of the kingdom of God is, he takes cases out
of this group, as well, you want to know who’s blessed.
Some of these kinds of people are blessed.
Some lunatics are blessed.
Some simple-minded people are blessed.
You want to know who is blessed?
Here’s a woman, broken, weeping over a child’s disease.
Some of these are blessed.
And he goes down the list.
What he’s doing is, he is just cracking into pieces man’s conception of who is well off.
Another way of reading the Beatitudes is to read the list to see who is not listed.
For example, it doesn’t say anything about the educated, does it?
It doesn’t say anything about the rich.
It doesn’t say anything about the reputable or the highly talented.
It doesn’t say anything about the powerful.
Those are interesting omissions, you know.
Now the Lukean versions of the Beatitudes are worth comparing, and I’ll read them to
you if you don’t need to turn, if you don’t want to, but the sixth chapter of Luke.
This really seems to be a different setting than the Sermon on the Mount.
I call this the Sermon on the Plain, but there’s no need in getting upset about whether they’re
the same or different or whether it was two different newspaper reports of the same event
or what, you know, because if you read the Los Angeles Herald and the Los Angeles Times
on the same event, you may get as much difference as between the sixth chapter of Luke and the
fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of Matthew.
So we don’t need to worry about that, but in any case, the setting here seems to be
Jesus came down upon a plain when these people came to him and he spoke.
Now notice how these read, blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are the hungry, for you shall be filled.
Blessed are they that weep, for they shall laugh.
Blessed are you when men shall hate you.
See, these are the very classes of people which are thought to be unblessed and unblessable.
The only thing you can do is get them out of it somehow, if they’re going to be blessed.
And then again he says, woe unto you that are rich, woe unto you that are full, woe
unto you that laugh, woe unto you when all men speak well of you, for so did their fathers
of the false prophets.
If you look down the list of the Beatitudes, you will see a list of classes of people who
were thought to be unblessed and unblessable.
Now the Beatitudes themselves have changed our minds on some points.
For example, being merciful is often thought to be a good thing now.
It certainly wasn’t in Jesus’ day.
To be pure of heart, to be a peacemaker, none of these things.
And I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t think they’re much thought of now.
And the reason I don’t think that is you don’t find many merciful people, do you, or many
peacemakers?
You don’t find people who fit into these categories, and when the priorities of life are set, they
stand pretty low, if you just look at people in general.
So this is what Jesus is doing now.
In the 13th, 14th, and 15th verses, 16th verses, he sharpens this up because he speaks to these
very same weary, beat-down people as this little line I’ve taken from Simon and Garfunkel
on your page here, blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on.
That by the way is worth more than nearly all of the commentaries you can buy on the
Sermon on the Mount, to give you insight into what Jesus is talking about, because that’s
exactly what he’s saying.
Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on.
Blessed are they, blessed.
Now he turns to the spat upon, sat upon, ratted on, and he says, you’re the salt of the earth.
The goodness that is in you by God’s grace is the only thing that keeps the world from
being more corrupted than it is.
You’re the only saving feature in, you’re the only saving feature in the earth.
You’re the salt of the earth, salt preserves, salt maintained.
You’re what keeps the corruption that is in the world from totally destroying.
Now he says, if the salt has lost its savor, what’s it good for?
Nothing, you throw it out.
Then he changes the metaphor.
You’re the light of the world.
You’re the light of the world.
The goodness which is in you as distinct from that which comes by all of these human processes
of education and evolution and the evolvement of all kinds and elevation, that’s a word
that I want, excuse me, elevation by people promoting other people and getting all the
big titles and all the big deals, they’re not the light of the world.
They’re clouds without water, clouds without rain, wells without water, that’s what they
are.
They don’t do you a bit of good.
The kind of goodness which saves is the simple goodness which is present in simple men and
women by the grace of God, that’s all.
Jesus is going to boil that simple goodness down to the one rule, do unto others as you
would have them do unto you.
Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel.
Now he’s coming, you see, to who lights this candle?
God lights the candle.
That’s why he winds up with that strange 16th verse.
What does the 16th verse say?
Now the 16th verse you see comes down on where the blessedness of the kingdom comes from.
That’s a strange verse because it says, let your light so shine before men that they see
your good works and glorify you.
That’s not what it says.
But if your good works, why don’t they glorify you?
Who do they glorify?
Your Father, which is in heaven.
Because we’re living in a kingdom in which God is the Father.
We’re not talking about something that any human being works up and when Jesus turns
to the people and says, you’re the light of the world, he’s not talking to them as if
they had done something more than receive a gift.
That’s all.
They just received a gift.
You’re the light of the world.
Who else was said to be the light of the world in the Bible?
Jesus.
Jesus said, I am the light of the world, isn’t he?
How about that?
And John said, in him was light and this light was the light of men, the light of men.
But Jesus doesn’t mind here saying, you’re the light of the world.
He’s not ungenerous and he’s not grudging of his goodness and his power and he wants
it to be shared by others.
He doesn’t want anyone to be hurt by grasping after glory and he knows that in the kingdom
of heaven there will be no misunderstanding about who gets the glory.
So these simple people living without benefit of degree, promotion, intelligence, all of
the things which you might say are the greatest, you know, this man there, this woman or this
boy just has all this blessed is he, baloney.
We know people who have all of those kinds of things which human beings strive for and
they are the most miserable, unhappy, vile people on the face of the earth.
The blessedness of the kingdom does not lie in that direction.
Now Jesus has enunciated here some essentially revolutionary teachings because what he has
said, among other things, is, dear hearts, we can let the religious establishment at
Jerusalem fold up and blow away and your blessedness will still be possible.
That’s revolutionary.
Jesus was killed as a revolutionary.
He died the death of a revolutionary.
He undermined a system of vested interests and disinterests and got killed for it.
But you see, Jesus knows that you can unsettle people in a harmful way, consequently it is
necessary to maintain the connexity of where you want them to go with where they are.
That is why, immediately after delivering this shocking, devastating blow, which he
never forsakes, he doesn’t back off from it, he now turns in the seventeenth verse and
says what flatly contradicts his previous statement.
He says, don’t think that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets.
Now many people as they understood the law and the prophets could not think anything
else but that he had come to destroy them, given what he had just said.
I sometimes wish there was somewhere I could pick us up and just shake us until all of
the habits and the old feelings had fallen out that we build up around things like the
Beatitudes.
You know, we put them on lovely little cards with floral designs.
We say them to ourselves, we mesmerize ourselves into some kind of spiritual condition.
But they are a revolutionary war cry.
Listen, that is the rock smashing away and the kingdoms of the world fall under it.
We have to see that the way it is.
These are revolutionary war cries and because of that Jesus has to take the people and leave
them in a way which they will not be hurt.
So now he is going to establish the connection between his teachings and the law and he is
going to present his teaching not as a denial but as a completion of the law and of the
prophets.
Now I hope you will think about the remaining matters here on this sheet, how this works
out that the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees comes out to be some inferior
brand of righteousness.
I wish especially you would think about the little preposition for, I am not sure it is
a preposition, maybe it is an adverb there in that structure, as it occurs in the twentieth
verse, for I say unto you, ask yourself why did he put that for in there, for I say unto
you, or because I say unto you, because of this I say unto you.
Think about that, lead on into the way now, he is going to tie in the blessedness of the
kingdom with the righteousness of the law and we will get into that next week.
Let us close in prayer.
Lord we are thankful indeed for your word and how it challenges us and does not leave
us stuck down all the little holes we get ourselves located in and we pray that you
will drag us on by whatever means as we come now to study anew the good news of the kingdom
of God.
Quicken our minds and set us all free, make us loving and yet critical, intelligent and
yet devoted, enthusiastic, but yet not willing to ride roughshod over the feelings of others.
Give us grace to receive your truth and to speak it in love, that we might really glorify
our Father who is in heaven, Amen.
You will note your assignment, I put your assignment down at the bottom of the thing.
Please memorize 1 John 4, 7 through 8 and study those passages.
Thank you, see you next week.