Blessed Are The Pure In Heart

Blessed are the pure in heart,

for they will see God (Matthew 5:8)
    

          Like so many of the other Beatitudes, this one has a bite. In fact, it has several. The first is that the heart isn’t the emotions, the heart is the will. It’s not about whether we want to be pure, it’s about whether we will and do be pure. In a way, we’re talking about a marathon race. You don’t wake up the day of the race, weighing three hundred pounds and having not even jogged a mile in ten years and run a marathon. Those who train for marathons spend months preparing every day. Even if they aren’t out running, it’s on their minds. Their hearts are set on that race.

          The second bite is the issue of being pure in heart. I suspect most people would like to be pure, if it just weren’t so difficult. We want to be good, but then that pan of penuche beckons, or that glass of wine, or that racy novel or TV show comes on, or that person we despise shows up. We don’t want to hate anyone, but he’s just so loathsome! And, well, we’re only human. We deserve to kick back once in a while and have fun, and he deserves to be shunned. We don’t want to, but we do. We do want to, but we don’t. Being pure in heart is hard because the heart is deceitful.

          A third bite is that the pure in heart will see God. Atheists have told me they want to see God. They want Him to manifest Himself (usually in some humiliating way) after which they promise they will be pure and true in their unending belief in Him. I’m not singling them out. I suspect most people don’t really want to see God. There is a version of God they want to see, but in Scripture, when people encounter angels, the first thing the angels tend to say is, “Don’t be afraid.” When the Israelites camped around Mt. Sinai, they told Moses to go talk to God, but they didn’t want to participate any more because they were afraid they would die. I don’t think that was a polite statement of respect. I think they meant it. They were afraid. We like to think we’re better than they were, but I suspect that seeing God takes more than we suspect.

          The fourth bite is the question of purity. A baseball player who hits the ball three times out of ten is considered really good. A student who gets ninety percent of the questions on a test is doing very well. I’ve been told that some slush pile readers (the first folks at a publishing house to look at a submission) are told that if they find three grammatical or stylistic errors in the whole manuscript, to reject the manuscript. Imagine, if you forget the Oxford comma on pages 4 and 500, and put two spaces between a period and the first letter of the following sentence on page 76, it’s not good enough. Pure requires one hundred percent, no exceptions.

          Thankfully, God knows that we are but dust. He knows that we cannot be what we need to be. He gives us the purity of Christ, and He builds it into us. But make no mistake, our “purity” is not enough to earn this blessing.