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.
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