CHAPTER 3

BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT, FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF GOD

“Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The greatest dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.”  – Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

 

BLESSED: THE MAKARIOS LIFE

The first word Jesus said as He began to teach about How He wants us to respond to the kingdom is translated in most Bibles as either blessed or happy. Each of these short but profound statements Jesus gave began with this same word. That would make the word blessed vitally important to the gospel of the kingdom. The Greek word Jesus used is the word makarios, which has such a greater meaning than our word blessed or happy. The way Jesus used it here reveals who we humans are supposed to be. He gave us seven different attitudes that we must have in order to respond properly to the promises that are the good news of the kingdom and be able to experience the makarios life.

The Greek definition of makarios is, supremely blest, fortunate, well off. That is certainly a good start in describing what a human being is supposed to be but even that definition doesn’t completely explain what this word is all about. Historically it had grown in its meaning to be a word used of gods who were above the normal circumstances of life. The normal person had to deal with sickness, pain, sorrows, struggles, and varying degrees of trials, whereas the gods were above all these things. The historical concept of this word comes closer to what Jesus is saying, but it still does not reach the level of greatness this word has when Jesus used it to describe who we were created to be. The best way to see the fullness of what Jesus meant is to go to a couple of other verses in the Bible.

“In accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.” (1 Timothy 1:11)

“until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which He will display at the proper time – He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.” (1 Timothy 6:14,15)

In these two verses this word makarios (blessed) is used to describe God and Jesus Christ. This adds a multitude of meaning to what Jesus said a human is supposed to be. Since Jesus is God in a human body, in essence He is telling us makarios is to be like Jesus. When God first created Adam and Eve they were created in the image of God. What does the image of God look like? It looks exactly like the character of Jesus as He lived life on this planet.

To understand this, it is best we look at how God made the first humans.

“God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”  (Genesis 1:27)

“Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7) 

The Hebrew word translated being is a great word and once again full of much more meaning than that which our English translation can do justice. It is the word nephesh (pronounced neefesh) and has to do with the human spirit, soul, self, thoughts, desires, passions, appetites, emotions and the ability to reason. It is probably best expressed in Psalms 103:1 where it says, “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name.” The word soul in this passage is the Hebrew word nephesh. The Psalmist is saying that he wants everything within him; his spirit, soul, self, thoughts, desires, passions, appetites, emotions and ability to reason to, bless God. Not just his voice or his emotions, but everything that he is.

The real human is not made up of skin and organs. When God first created Adam’s fleshly body, he was not yet a living beinguntil God breathed into him the nephesh and then Adam became alive. Adam was now far greater than just flesh and bones. He was a living being–in the image of God. His spirit, soul, thoughts, desires, passions, appetites, emotions and ability to reason were all perfect, just as God’s are.

When God says He created man and woman in His image it is the nephesh that was in His image. Flesh and bones were created as a physical means of expressing the living being created in the image of God. So when Jesus uses the wordmakarios to describe what we are to be, He raises the bar to the extraordinary height of once again being in the image of God as Adam was when he was first created. I don’t imagine you have ever considered yourself to have that kind of potential but God certainly does. Jesus didn’t die and resurrect only to save us from hell. His sacrifice was to restore us back to the way we were meant to be when first created. This would mean that who God expects us to be is far, far greater than who we are satisfied being. God expects us to be like His Son Jesus. Let’s look at a couple more Bible verses that further show this.

“He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him”   (2 Corinthians 5:21)

“and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.” (Ephesians 4:23, 24) 

As you can see God very clearly wants His human creation to be restored back into the very image of God that we were first created to be. The Greek word translated righteousness is defined as, the perfect agreement between God’s nature and His acts meaning there is no disharmony between who God is and what He does. That is the standard for all human beings. Anything short of the image of God is not what Jesus meant when He described who we humans are supposed to be.

Makarios is then the way God thinks, how He responds to life, how He feels about life, and what He desires for life. If there is one thing about Jesus that stands out loud and clear, He did not think or act as the humans around Him did because Jesus was the perfect image of God. And one thing that stands out loud and clear about this difference is He was above the trials and struggles of life. His ways and desires ran in a different direction. He was singularly focused on accomplishing His purpose in life. He was not a product of His environment, upbringing, or life experiences. He was always in control of who He was and how He responded to all situations. He was never out of control at any time. Life didn’t dictate how He felt or how He responded. In every moment of His life He completely and fully expressed the perfect image of God. That is the life ofmakarios, the blessed life that Jesus says is how we are supposed to live.

 

POOR IN SPIRIT

This is where our response to the gospel of the kingdom really gets interesting. After telling us the amazing good news that we can have the makarios life, Jesus then says we need to be poor in spirit in order to obtain it. The Greek word translatedpoor means, destitute of wealth, influence, position, or honor; helpless to accomplish an end, reduced to beggary.

What you see here is something God told the Jews in the Old Testament about Himself. He said His ways are not man’s ways. That is why the gospel of the kingdom is unlike any human way of addressing and fixing our problems. We would never say that in order to become the richest person in the world you must first become the poorest, that poverty is the way to riches. But God’s ways are not our ways. Understanding and acknowledging that we are destitute of what it takes to be a makariosperson, that we are helpless to receive the kingdom of heaven by our own methods, is God’s way. He wants us to bereduced to begging in order to become what we are supposed to be. In so doing it removes any pride and arrogance in thinking we are not as bad as other people are. God wants us to recognize how absolutely helpless we are to become what He wants us to be. This places us in a desperate state where we can only surrender to His solution.

Notice that our response to the gospel of the kingdom begins with our attitude and not our actions. There is no one who knows more about us humans than Jesus does, after all, He created us. The reason He starts with the way we think and feel about ourselves is because He knows our attitude determines who we are more than any other thing about us. But this attitude of poverty and helplessness must be specifically focused on our spirit because this is the source of everything that’s wrong with us. Jesus is not just interested in a human doing right things. He wants who we are to exactly match what we do. There must be a perfect agreement between our nature and our actions in order for a human to live the righteous life in the image of God we were meant to live.

Since it was our nephesh that was in the image of God when first created, then it must be our spirit, soul, self, thoughts, desires, passions, appetites, emotions and our ability to reason that is reborn back into the image of God. Once again, this is who we really are. Our body only expresses what our spirit thinks, desires and feels.

So what happened to our nephesh that makes us so incapable of being what we were created to be? I am going to introduce three words that definitely need to be known in order to understand how all this works. These three words are transgression, sin, and iniquity. A thourough understanding of these words and how they apply to our living being is essential to fully grasp what Jesus means by being poor in spirit.

 

TRANSGRESSION

I will start with the word transgression because this is the source of all our problems and I do mean every single one of them. The Hebrew word for transgression has to do with a violation of trust and it stems from a rebellious attitude. Adam and Eve’sattitude was created to be the expression of God’s will in everything they did. They were also to reproduce children in that same image of God, for all living things produce through a seed that genetically reproduces according to its own kind. This is how God designed reproduction to work. An elephant will produce an elephant; a bird will produce a bird; and a human will produce another human in its own image after its own kind. This is what God trusted the first two humans to do with His image.

There was another extremely important aspect of the trust God gave Adam and Eve with His image. With their spirit, soul, self, thoughts, desires, passions, appetites, emotions and reasoning ability they were meant to bring great joy to God through an intimate, honest and loving relationship with Him. This was the very reason for the creation of the seventh day or Sabbath rest day. In Exodus 31:17 God says this about the purpose of the Sabbath:

“It is a sign between Me and the sons of Israel forever; for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day He ceased from labor and was refreshed.” 

Before you start thinking God was tired after creating the entire world in six days let me explain what the Hebrew word translated refreshed means for it is such a beautiful expression of why we humans were created. What is revealed through what God says here about the purpose of the Sabbath raises our importance to God beyond measure. The word nephesh, our living being, is taken from the Hebrew word naphash (pronounced nafesh) translated in Exodus 31 as refreshed. It simply means a breathing in its most basic form.

Think for a moment about a time in your life when your world was suddenly as right as right can be. It may not have felt like that for very long but there have been moments in your life when the best expression of what you were feeling at that instant might best be described as a contented and joyful sigh. That is naphash, when all of your being thoroughly enjoys that singular moment of time. That kind of joy is what we were created to bring to God. That is God’s purpose in trusting us humans with His image so our living being can bring to Him a contented and joyful sigh from our relationship with Him.

The moment Adam and Eve decided in their nephesh that it would be a good thing to disobey God they were no longer in the perfect image of God. They had become a transgressor. They violated the trust God gave them with His perfect image. From that moment on they were no longer the pure image of God therefore they would no longer respond to life the way they were created to respond. They now had a distorted, impure nephesh and they would produce children in their distorted image rather than the perfect and pure image of God.  

 

SIN

Now let’s talk about sin for sin is an entirely different beast. Sin is an action of wrong that flows from our transgressor, distorted nephesh that is not in the image of God.

The reason everyone has problems with sin is because everyone is born a transgressor. The transgression is what led to theaction of disobedience from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Think of it this way. Take a glass and fill it with purified water. When the glass is turned over purified water will flow out. Take that same glass of purified water and mix it with dirt. Now when you turn the glass over, dirty water flows out.

For our illustration the purified water represents Adam and Eve’s nephesh created in the image of God. The dirty, unpurified water represents what the transgression did to their pure image of God. The dirty water that now flows whenever the glass is turned over represents sin. Sin is the action that flows from the transgression. Another way to describe this is any action that Jesus would not do in the same situation is sin.

Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and that sinful action sprang from the transgression that resulted from how they had wrongly reasoned in their mind. Look how this process of transgression flowing into an action of sin is described in James 1:14, 15:

“But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.”

Lust, which is a desire for something not right, began in the nephesh. That lust gave birth or turned into an action of sin. Sin then produced death. That is the process Adam and Eve went through to become a transgressor and produce an action of sin. That is exactly the same process we all go through when we sin.

God warned Adam and Eve that the moment they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they would die. You and I have grown up with a concept of dying that only has to do with the vital processes of our body ceasing. This is not the type of death to which God was referring. According to God, death is a change in the way we experience life for the worse.

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God the vital processes of their bodies did not suddenly stop. That did not happen until several hundred years later. But what did drastically and immediately change for the worse was their ability to live life as the perfect expression of God’s image. Their ability to enjoy a naphash relationship with God changed instantly and that change was for the worse. Their ability to respond to the world around them the way God designed them to also changed for the worse. Their nephesh would no longer function correctly therefore they would now have thoughts, desires, passions, appetites, emotions and the ability to reason that would produce actions of sin.

 

INIQUITY

The sum total of a person’s transgression and sin is what iniquity is all about. You can think of it this way: transgression + sin = iniquity. Iniquity is the guilt one has from being a transgressor and from the actions of sin that flow from the transgression or distorted nephesh. With the nephesh no longer pure, now Adam and Eve would lie, blame others for things they did wrong, feel insecure, hate, lust, get very angry for no good reason and do far too many other wrongs to list here. Add all that is wrong in our nephesh to all the wrong actions we do and that is iniquity because we are guilty of much wrong as the result of not being in the image of God. I don’t know about yours but the cup of my iniquity was already overflowing by the time I graduated from high school.

 

FREEWILL

Along with who God created us to be, and why He created us, is another aspect of our humanity that must be considered in order to fully understand all the issues of transgression, sin and iniquity. I am referring to our ability to make our own choices. This is called freewill and it is as much a part of God’s purpose for us humans as having a naphash moment with God is. Without our ability to make our own choices, a naphash relationship with God could never happen. The fundamental reason that allows us to have a relationship that blossoms and flourishes and gives God a joyful sigh comes from our ability to freely choose whether we want to have a relationship with God or not.

Without this ability to freely choose, our nephesh is completely stifled from responding to life the way God desires. We would not be able to express God’s righteous image in every facet of life simply because we want to. Our nephesh would be robotic, incapable of giving love or responding to love, incapable of choosing right because of our own free choice. That is not how God does things. Mankind would not be in God’s image without this freedom of choice. God created us and loves us because He wants to, not because He has to.  

The transgression completely changed the human nephesh and there is a very serious consequence as the result.

“So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men,” (Romans 5:18a)

Because of this one transgression by Adam and Eve every human from then on was not born in the image of God and therefore was born condemned. The condemnation means they cannot go to the kingdom prepared for us humans from the beginning of creation.

“Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.’“ (Matthew 25:34)

Jesus tells us in this verse the reason He created humans – to one day inherit the kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world. At the end of our time on the earth there will only be two places people can go. God is going to destroy our present heaven and earth and make a new one completely under His kingdom rule. The only other place will be hell that was created for the devil and his followers. That is it. That is why God wants us to become poor in spirit. We are incapable of changing our condition therefore we have no ability to inherit the kingdom waiting for us since the foundation of the world. And because we are transgressors/sinners with no ability to change that outcome, we are condemned to hell.

The restoration of a transgressor/sinner back into the image of God is what Jesus offers in the gospel of the kingdom. This restoration will cost Jesus His life. In God’s infinite wisdom He foresaw the tragedy of our transgression and sin and also prepared at creation the solution to our problem. God would become man and die bearing the full punishment of all humanity’s transgression, sin and iniquity. This is called atonement and because His atonement is so perfect it allows God to take a poor in spirit transgressor/sinner and give them the kingdom of heaven. When they receive the kingdom, a transgressor/sinner can then experience the makarios life. This is how a fallen human begins to experience peace with God. They must first become poor in spirit in order to receive the kingdom that was prepared for us at the foundation of the world.

 

KINGDOM

The word translated as kingdom throughout the Bible has nothing to do with a defined territory. It is not about a castle or magnificent mansion. It is all about the rule of a king and the ruling king referred to here, is Jesus. The rule of Christ is central to the gospel of the kingdom message and the restoration to the way we are supposed to be.

So how does someone get the makarios life by receiving the kingdom of heaven? We really need to dissect the kingdom, orsovereign, righteous rule of Jesus to see how this works.

Before and after Jesus preached the gospel of the kingdom everywhere He went He displayed an amazing healing ministry and there was nothing phony about His healing. With just His words He made people who were born blind see again. He healed people whose legs were crippled and who had never been able to walk their entire life. He made someone who had been dead for several days come back to life. He cast out real demons through nothing more than His voice. He healed so many people during His short ministry in and around Jerusalem it is possible that He completely eliminated all suffering due to disease and demons in the towns and villages through which He traveled. This was no TV charlatan. Jesus’ healings were so real and numerous that they astonished even His enemies.

The healing ministry of Jesus is extremely important to what the kingdom rule is about. Let’s look at something Jesus said about His healing and casting out demons that will shed some light on this.

“But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Matthew 12:28)

Jesus combined His healing ministry and preaching of the kingdom everywhere He went because they are so intricately connected. When He cast out a demon, His righteous rule prevailed over the wrongful will of a demon. When He healed a sickness, His righteous rule once again prevailed over the wrongness of disease. When He raised someone who had died and brought them back to life, the power of His kingdom rule prevailed over physical death.

In Matthew 25:34 Jesus again says something extremely revealing about the kingdom:

“Then the king will say to those on His right, ‘Come you who are blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.’“

The kingdom, or sovereign, righteous rule of God, was actually the focus of God’s plan from the beginning of creation, and rightfully so. It will take something with the power and authority that only God has to do away with everything wrong in this world. No matter how evil something is or how difficult it may appear to us, nothing can stand against the sovereign, righteous rule of God.          

So what is your problem? Is it that you have no ability to change your life back into the image of God as you were meant to be? Is it that you are a transgressor/sinner condemned for being so wrong and therefore will not be allowed into God’s future new heaven and earth? The kingdom rule of God can prevail against the worst of our human conditions and give us the makarios life. That’s not my promise, it is the promise of the only one who has the power and authority to rule over all things.

How then do we become the way we are supposed to be? First, by realizing how poor in spirit we humans actually are. Then the king will give us the kingdom, His sovereign, righteous rule, with all His power and authority and deliver us from our destitute condition. Now that is good news!

 

<<< previous chapter

next chapter >>>